I've stood on the Hoover Dam on the Fourth of July. Looking
down at the rushing Colorado River flowing through the
canyon, and back at placid Lake Mead behind the concrete
barrier, is a sight my husband and I will never forget. So
a book focusing on the Colorado River basin caught my
attention. The full title is MYTHICAL RIVER: Chasing the
Mirage of New Water in the American Southwest.
Author Melissa L. Sevigny, a Southwest native, provides a
map and describes the discovery of a major river named
Buenaventura by the Spanish, which flowed through redrock
canyons and astonishingly arid deserts, through stunning
scenery with many tributaries, from the Rockies to the sea.
Humans are abstracting water from this river at every
stage, through seven states, by claims, laws and rights;
the continent is drying out. A myth pervades the land she
says, that if there is not enough water for people, more
must and will be found. Water from wells, boreholes and
springs supplements that from rain, lakes and rivers. She
asks how much water there really is, and why nature seems
to have no claim on it.
I especially enjoyed reading about the women river
scientists, like Jackie King, freshwater ecologist from
South Africa, who questioned how much water would be
allowed to flow down a dammed river. Nobody seemed to know
but an amount was let go to sustain fish. Later this
provided an area of study. No less than in South Africa,
American water politics became about livelihoods and
nature. Mining competed with cities and nature reserves,
while rainfall was rushed away in concreted channels full
of trash. Aquifers became depleted. Melissa Sevigny recalls
her upbringing on the banks of the Bill Williams River,
watching toads, experimenting with soil samples, a wildlife
scientist in the making. Her half-amused, half-wistful
tales evoke the arroyos and open desert, the clear skies
and song of cicadas.
When I visited the O'odham monument Casa Grande, this huge
grain store stood empty in a desert sprinkled with cacti,
sage and dying trees. Arizona coal was mined to pump water
uphill, says Melissa, in order to provide burgeoning cities
with the utility they demanded. Navaho workers were
employed but the stripmined coal removed water from the
land under their feet. Simultaneously crops like cotton,
alfalfa and iceberg lettuce carry the water away to other
states and countries. Climate change has provided lengthy
droughts so aquifers cannot be replenished. Melissa now
sees resettled people from the destruction of Hurricane
Katrina, sent over to add to the water burden of safer
states. She asks what policy makers are doing to ensure a
future without thirst and with respect for the nature which
depends upon each river's seasonal flow. She also welcomes
the return of the beaver, a keystone species whose dams she
sees as forming stores of water that seep back into the
ground, while providing good riparian habitat for plants,
birds, amphibians, predators and fish.
Complimenting photos make MYTHICAL RIVER easy to understand
even for non-natives like me, whether the sides of an
arroyo or the classic lines of the Mission at San Xavier
del Bac. In a time when seeding clouds, trucking in water,
desalinating seawater and other costly and problematic
options are being considered, Melissa L. Sevigny has
provided us with a route map to understanding water in
today's Southwest, and how the situation developed. What
becomes of the matter is up to the people.
In a lyrical mix of natural science, history, and memoir,
Melissa L. Sevigny ponders what it means to make a home in
the American Southwest at a time when its most essential
resource, water, is overexploited and undervalued. Mythical
River takes the reader on a historical sojourn into the
story of the Buenaventura, an imaginary river that led
eighteenth- and nineteenth-century explorers, fur trappers,
and emigrants astray for seventy-five years. This mythical
river becomes a metaphor for our modern-day attempts to
supply water to a growing population in the Colorado River
Basin. Readers encounter a landscape literally remapped by
the search for “new” water, where rivers flow uphill, dams
and deep wells reshape geography, trees become intolerable
competitors for water, and new technologies tap into clouds
and oceans.
In contrast to this fantasy of abundance, Sevigny explores
acts of restoration. From a dismantled dam in Arizona to an
accidental wetland in Mexico, she examines how ecologists,
engineers, politicians, and citizens have attempted to
secure water for desert ecosystems. In a place scarred by
conflict, she shows how recognizing the rights of rivers is
a path toward water security. Ultimately, Sevigny writes a
new map for the future of the American Southwest, a vision
of a society that accepts the desert’s limits in exchange
for an intimate relationship with the natural world.
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