by Ed Quillen
Granted, I can be quite the nit-picker sometimes, especially when I’m reading a book that rubs me the wrong way. Such was the case with Running Dry: A Journey from Source to Sea Down the Colorado River, written by Jonathan Waterman and published in 2010 by National Geographic.
No writer gets everything perfectly. That’s why we need editors, preferably several of them. I expected better from an organization as prestigious as the National Geographic Society.
The book is exactly what its subtitle implies – a first-person account of a trip down the Colorado River, starting at its source in Rocky Mountain National Park above Grand Lake and continuing, by water where possible, to the Sea of Cortez in Mexico.
That’s a grand adventure, a true National Geographic variety expedition. It starts in Colorado’s Grand County, where Martha and I lived for four years before moving to Salida in 1978. It’s called Grand County because it once sat along the Grand River, although Colorado’s water diverters (primarily the Denver Water Board and the Colorado-Big Thompson project) have been quite active in that area, they didn’t make the Grand River go away. The stream was originally named by French trappers, a northern cognate to the Spanish Rio Grande.
In days of yore, the Grand River flowed through Colorado into Utah, where it joined the Green River from Wyoming. The Colorado River started there. In 1921, the Colorado legislature changed the Grand to the Colorado (Utah eventually went along), but the old place names remain: A Grand County in both states, and in Colorado, Grand Lake, Grand County, Grand Valley, and Grand Junction where the Grand joined its biggest tributary, the Gunnison.
Since I used to live in Grand County, I paid close attention to the start of the writer’s epic trip. At the start, he complains about the Grand Ditch, which diverts water from the Western Slope to farmers on the east side. He says the water in the ditch is “pumped at a one percent grade over the Continental Divide.”
Think for a minute about how impossible it would be to pump water up an open ditch, as opposed to a closed pipe. The water isn’t pumped. It flows by gravity. The collection system on the west side is higher than La Poudre Pass, where it crosses the Divide. If you want to see something similar but smaller around here, check out the Larkspur Ditch at the top of Marshall Pass. You won’t find any pumps.
Moving downstream, he’s camped just below Lake Granby and observes that “in 1977, David Emmert was arrested here for trespassing after floating through the private premises of a rancher.” Emmert was arrested about 20 miles downstream from “here,” on Con Ritschard’s ranch near Parshall.
And in the ensuing litigation, Waterman says “the case went to the local court, which couldn’t interpret the law.” No, Emmert was convicted of trespassing in the local court. The author tells us that “The rancher eventually appealed his case to the Colorado Supreme Court,” when in fact it was Emmert who did the appealing. Why would the rancher appeal in a criminal case? Con Ritschard wasn’t charged with or convicted of any crime.
Then we learn that “Under federal law, if a landowner obstructs a stream, they’re obligated to provide a portage or a chute bypassing the fences. But complaining to a law enforcement official won’t do any good. Around here, the sheriffs all drink coffee with the ranchers.”
Where to start on this, poor Jonathan Waterman beset by a conspiracy of river-obstructing rednecks? His inability to make a pronoun and its antecedent agree in number?
There aren’t “sheriffs.” A Colorado county has only one sheriff. He means “deputy sheriffs,” and whom are they supposed to coffee with besides the local residents they’re sworn to serve and protect? Are deputies supposed to go out of their way to find itinerant kayakers for morning coffee?
And since when do local deputies enforce federal laws? Especially a federal law that covers only navigable streams, and the courts have ruled that the Colorado is not a navigable river under the federal Daniel Ball rule.
Perhaps Waterman should argue that the Colorado is navigable – those boats down the Grand Canyon certainly qualify as a form of water-borne commerce, and steamboats once plied the Colorado as far up as Yuma, Ariz. But he doesn’t even try to make that case.
Waterman gets to the junction with the Fraser River, and complains that it is diminished partly on account of Williams Fork Reservoir. Guess what? That reservoir is on the Williams Fork River, not the Fraser.
Around Kremmling, he mentions a nearby tourist-attracting reservoir called Blue Lake. It wasn’t there when I lived there. Since then they’ve built a big new reservoir on Muddy Creek, but that 1996 facility is known as Wolford Mountain Reservoir. This Blue Lake is apparently a fabrication of the author and the Kremmling Chamber of Commerce to make the town “burgeon as a tourist destination.”
Past Kremmling is Gore Canyon, proposed as a dam site early in the 20th century. President Theodore Roosevelt quashed the dam and “permitted the Denver and Rio Grande Western Railroad a right of way through Gore Canyon instead.” No, the route went to the Denver, Northwestern & Pacific Railroad, which aimed to compete against the Rio Grande.
That’s about as far as my intimate knowledge of the Colorado River goes, but if Waterman got this much wrong in the first 47 pages, I must wonder about the rest of the book. Nobody knows everything, but an editor should have caught things like misspelling the Grand County seat of Hot Sulphur Springs as Hot Sulfur Springs, or “right of ways” near Fruita instead of “rights of way.” And how does he write about that area, or the lore of the Colorado River in general, without ever mentioning Wayne Aspinall?
There is a big and important story to be told of the Colorado, a desert river in a time of climate change that serves an ever-growing population. And to be fair, Waterman often gets to that story.
But what put me in such a nit-picky mood when I read the book? It wasn’t the many passages about tackling whitewater. I couldn’t read a rapid if my life depended on it, but the detailed descriptions of chutes and holes are part of the story, and floaters may find the book quite engaging on that account.
Part of my indisposition is because the book is so personal in many places. Waterman’s mother died shortly before his trip, and he’s trying to come to grips with that loss. But does he need to tell the reader about it? I’m not his psychiatrist and I don’t care about how he got along with his mother; the book is supposed to be about the river.
So those frequent therapeutic passages annoyed me, but as the book progressed, I realized my real problem with it. Call it the Phyllis Schafly Syndrome or the Al Gore Ailment.
For those of you who don’t remember, in the 1970s Phyllis Schafly was a major opponent of the Equal Rights Amendment. She was dedicated. She flew around the country telling women they should stay home.
The Gore version first caught my attention with Roderick Nash, author of a fine book, Wilderness and the American Mind. He spoke at Headwaters in Gunnison years ago, telling us to consume less and be respectful of our planet. He also talked about his yacht and his vacation home at Crested Butte. I started wondering: Why are we supposed to take advice from this Mr. Conspicuous Consumption about how to tread lightly on the earth?
Al Gore jets around the world so he can tell us to reduce our carbon footprints. And Jonathan Waterman makes it clear throughout the book that he’s concerned about our resource consumption and its effects on the Colorado River and the environment in general and how he wants this overworked river to be there for future generations.
And yet, it’s not as though he started floating above Grand Lake one day and didn’t stop paddling until he reached the Sea of Cortez. He takes breaks to drive or fly back home to his 20 acres near Carbondale to see his wife and two children. They travel out to meet him along the way, too. He once charters an airplane. There are car shuttles too numerous to mention.
In other words, this expedition had an immense carbon footprint. Beyond that, there’s a fair amount of condescension from this Prius-driving author. Ranchers who fence across the river aren’t trying to protect their livelihoods, but are instead infringing on his right to float where he will. The Colorado Doctrine of Prior Appropriation is not an effort to allocate a scarce resource, but something deeply flawed in his eyes, though he doesn’t propose an alternative way to allocate water. Cattle aren’t livestock; they’re “range locusts.” Anyone who offers him meat or beer out of hospitality seems to be trying to poison his pure system.
Maybe I’m being unfair, and I’m certainly picking nits, but it really bothers me that, thanks to the National Geographic imprimatur, some people will take this sloppy epic as serious truth.
In part, it’s a pretty good adventure tale, and it will doubtless appeal to those folks who know they’re better than we are – and that’s got to be a fair-sized market. Maybe I should learn to write that way, so I could make some real money at this game. I could live high on the hog if I could only learn to chastise others for wanting cheeseburgers while gorging on them myself.
Ed Quillen finds survival as a free-lance writer in Salida sufficiently adventurous and thus does not run rivers.