Embracing the Weirdness of Waterless Waterways

The impression modern peoples have of waterways as if they were drawn on a map and their path approved by a bureaucrat like a modern paved roadway is all kinds of wrong.

The Salton Sea was created when the Colorado River diverged from its path one year. It is in a place where local native populations have stories from their ancestors of previous lakes. The Salton Sea was expected to dry up and go away, but run off from farms and other sources has kept it alive and it is expected to stay for the foreseeable future.

The Colorado River was named that because it ran red with heavy silt. These days, it runs blue. We have tamed it, and thereby in some sense killed it. It no longer carries the life-giving fertility it once carried. It also no longer meanders. We have confined it to a particular path. This is not the natural state of any waterway. The natural state is to meander.

During the California Gold Rush, the Colorado River overflowed its banks and made a series of pools out in the desert of the South West. This provided fresh water and fresh grazing for pack animals that was life giving for some of the people heading to California in search of gold. This overflow and the bounty of the land it caused was not something that happened every year, but it happened often enough that taking advantage of the extra food it provided was part of local native culture.

In the High Desert of California, there are many dry lakes. If it rains hard enough, the lakes flood for some weeks. In some of them, shrimp hatch out.

The concept so many of us have of waterways is fundamentally broken. Water is a universal solvent and, barring human intervention, it flows where it will and not in accordance with some designated pathway.

The Colorado River empties into the Gulf of California in Mexico. Or, well, it did. These days, it rarely makes it there (once since the late 90s).

>People who drive into or out of the town of San Luis Río Colorado, in the Mexican state of Sonora, sometimes complain about having to pay a six-peso toll to cross a bridge that spans only sand.

Story in the New Yorker: http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/05/25/the-disappearin...