Down on the Ground Loving What I Shouldn’t

by George Sibley

Our Colorado Central stablemaster, Mike Rosso, suggested that this month we might try to write about love – any kind of love – in honor of the St. Valentine’s festival. Because his email arrived just after I’d read an online article from The Los Angeles Times about Christo’s awning project over the Arkansas River, I thought, great: I’ll write about my love of things I love that make me wonder about myself. About my sanity, or morals, or something equally ambiguous. These are things that, on the surface, seem totally foolish, or unnecessary, or extravagant, or environmentally irresponsible, or any combination of those qualities – but I love them, which means rationality somehow got short-circuited out of the consideration.

So – start with Christo. I know all the arguments against his Arkansas River project – a lot of additional traffic (in a valley economically dependent on a lot of traffic), potential environmental impacts (in a canyon that already has a creosoted railroad grade and a multi-lane U.S. highway), the ridiculous waste of money (which those who can afford to subsidize the art would otherwise be spending on more mansions and extravagant vacations) – et cetera. I know that he is taking up the time and energies of a lot of governmental agencies from whom he needs permits, and diverting resources and materials that could otherwise be used in something useful, and tormenting a lot of environmentalists with one more thing to oppose for the very best of reasons.

So how can I love these weird things Christo does, that have all these seemingly negative impacts?

A few years ago I heard Christo himself, and his flamboyant sidekick Jeanne-Claude, discuss the Arkansas River project. That was – of all places – at the Colorado Water Congress convention in Denver. CWC Director Doug Kemper took a gamble and finished up a long day of serious presentations on serious water issues with Christo and Jeanne-Claude. Kemper must have considered it something of a risk, bringing that project in front of four or five hundred people who take rivers and water very seriously. Former Governor Dick Lamm coined the moniker “water buffalo” for them – us, I should say, being one of them myself these days: large animals who splash around in the water and bellow a lot.

But the fact was, practically everyone seemed to be fascinated by Christo. A Q&A session went on and on. Occasionally, a slightly aggressive question, but for the most part, everyone there seemed to be genuinely interested in trying to understand either the concept and the exhaustive review and permitting process he was going through (lawyer buffaloes), or the technology and construction plans (engineer buffaloes), or both.

I found myself recalling the documentary the Mayles Brothers made about Christo’s earlier Colorado project, the “Valley Curtain” north of Rifle, back in the early 1970s – a huge orange curtain across the Rifle Gap. Among other things, the documentary showed that the project represented a “micro-boom” for the Rifle area – nothing compared to the oil shale rush that followed a few years later, but all of a sudden here was this strange guy with an accent putting people to work on the biggest project since the Bureau of Reclamation’s water project near Silt, Colorado. The workers on the Valley Curtain project were not “artsy” types, but they really got into the project, took it as seriously as though it were a real thing for which they were pouring concrete, setting bolts, stringing cable. It was the same thing at the water convention: people got into it, considered and discussed it like it was really something real. I got the sense that Christo loved just “selling” the project, getting people engaged in it, pro or con, as much as he enjoyed the “art” itself. I mean, he could have gone off and found a remote piece of river somewhere if all he wanted to was put shades over it. He is not like Robinson Jeffers, the mad artist out in the desert valley carving rocks for his own satisfaction.

Interestingly, Christo’s water buffalo presentation followed directly after a presentation by developer Aaron Million, describing a multi-billion-dollar pipedream to bring water to Colorado’s Front Range megalopolis all the way across Wyoming from the Flaming Gorge Reservoir on the Green River in Utah. But despite the fact that Million’s project attempts to address a serious problem of water shortage, at a huge cost to most of the people there, not a single question was put to him about the project, compared to the dozens of questions put to Christo and Jeanne-Claude, who were only solving a problem that didn’t even exist until they dreamed it up.

Another difference, big enough to me, is that I find myself loving Christo’s project, and don’t love Million’s, and that’s where we get down to the mysteries of love. I don’t even like Million’s project, for some solid, if stuffy, reasons involving environment, economy, fairness, and the Colorado River. But some of those same rationales apply to Christo’s project too, and I have to acknowledge (as would anyone who has ever “fallen” in love) that just liking something has little to do with whether or not you love it.

I think this has something to do with what Emerson called “Nature” and “Art.” He used the terms a little differently than we do. “Nature,” he said, in his essay of the same name, “refers to essences unchanged by man; space, the air, the river, the leaf. Art is applied to the mixture of his will with the same things, as in a house, a canal, a statue, a picture.” Love of “essences unchanged by man” is what first brought me to central Colorado – the mountains, the rivers and their canyons, the big open valleys, the aspens, et cetera. Although, it is increasingly difficult to view most of these things as “unchanged by man.” I might have said in my early years here – probably did – that I wanted Nature and Art kept separate, the remaining essences unchanged by humankind protected from any further mixture with the human will. And I like the fact that we have set aside some places I love to remain “Nature” in Emerson’s sense.

But I eventually began to acknowledge that what really lit my lamp was certain places where Nature and Art seemed mixed in such a way that both were somehow enhanced by the mixing. Irrigated hay meadows in the valley bottoms is an example. Moving water out of the streams to grow hay probably doesn’t strike even the rancher who does it as “making art,” but the effect is beautiful, the smooth bright green fields against the rugged dustier green hills rising around them, one of the things I love most about central Colorado.

Another very different example for me is Morrow Point Dam, down in the canyons on the far western edge of central Colorado. I don’t like Blue Mesa Dam up at the head of the Gunnison’s canyons. But Morrow Point Dam is just lovely – not so much from the base of it looking up, as from up on the Black Mesa Road looking down on it – a fragile fingernail wedged into the canyon holding back all that mass of water. It is beautiful as “minimalist” art. A thin-arch double-curvature dam, it designed to translate the force of the water pushing against out it into the rocky cliffs – an act of faith in the abstractions of engineering (“this ought to work”). But aesthetically, the juxtaposition of smooth lines and surfaces against the jumbled, dark, rocky chaos of Black Canyon granite is a contrast that enhances both. I don’t like all the things a dam does to a river (although most rivers been changed and have changed themselves so much through forces of “Nature” that a dam is just something else to overcome in time). In balance, I may not like the dam for very rational reasons, but I can’t help but love it.

There are pieces of highways that I love, despite having a prissy dislike for what the automobile has done to America. But – for example – the drive down Trout Creek Canyon on U.S. 285, east of Buena Vista, I love. You can set your speed at somewhere between 55 and 60 and never have to brake or accelerate all the way down. It is such a beautifully engineered piece of road in such a beautiful canyon that one imagines that its design and building was a kind of an act of love by engineers who might usually think themselves above such foolishness.

And then there’s Christo, and why I look forward to seeing “Over the River.” I’m not sure he always succeeds, but I do think he goes into his projects with that same kind of hope, wanting to mix a little Art and Nature in a way that might make the essence previously unchanged (sort of) by humankind something just a little more than it was.

And then he takes it down. The ultimate act of love: don’t risk wearing it out.