I have been along a large part of the river. I have walked and biked every inch of the Manhattan side and walked the Jersey side from Hoboken up to Storm King Mountain. I have ridden in my brother-in-law Henry's boat from Spuyten Duyvil Creek up to Newburgh. I have hiked the trails of the Hudson Highlands. I have paddled the class V rapids of the Hudson River Gorge from Indian River to North Creek. And I have waded in the brook that is the headwaters of the Hudson in the Adirondacks as it comes out of Henderson Lake.
The Hudson conforms to my idea of a river… or perhaps I should say I get my idea of a river from the Hudson. It flows from the mountains to the sea. Here, near my house, it has four-foot tide fluctuations, even though we are eleven miles from the Battery, and it is salty, drowned by the nearby Atlantic. It is navigable for 130 miles, up to Troy. North of there are the falls and rapids of the Adirondacks. When I first learned about the water cycle, I imagined a rainstorm up on Mt. Marcy and a raindrop falling back into the ocean off Sandy Hook.
So the lakes and rivers of "Turning Water Into Gold" captured my imagination most of all for their difference. The water of Lake Tahoe, up in the Sierra Nevada Mountains between California and Nevada, flows 140 miles down the Truckee River, past Reno, and into Pyramid Lake, where it begins evaporating. Basins like this are not unique to the American West. The Caspian Sea is one. So is the Dead Sea. Lake Turkana in Kenya is another. I just have to get past the idea that somehow there must be an outlet to the ocean, because -- of course -- that outlet is evaporation and a rainstorm at sea.
In my travels out West I heard from time to time about prehistoric Lake Lahontan. One 115 degree day I walked out to Devil's Hole, a geothermal spring. (Seriously. Can you imagine volcanic-heated water in Death Valley?) And there, sure enough, were the promised pupfish. You have to wonder how a distinct fish species could arise in a tiny spring in the middle of this sun blasted landscape. How? It was once a part of Lake Lahontan. And so was Pyramid Lake.
That the Kuyui Paiute of "Turning Water Into Gold" found a way to thrive in this environment is pretty remarkable. What would be at least as remarkable would be for us to begin to understand the world view this survival entailed. Even my idea of a river is challenged. Every other idea must be different, too.
The story describes a change in lifestyle from seasonal migration around the basin to follow seasonal foods to migration to follow wages. Western Anglo settlers elsewhere demanded that the Native Americans be kept on their reservations. The Anglos of Nevada demanded that the Paiute be encouraged to travel. Who else would do their work? They even used to arrest "vagrant" Paiute to get them working as hands on their farms.
However the worldview of the Paiute may have changed in the last two hundred years it is evident that they retain a different view of water than ours. They tried in the 1950's to use their allotment of acre-feet from the Truckee River for a fish hatchery. The federal courts insisted the purpose of water is agriculture, even after decades of lawsuits about the failed promised of farming from diverting the Truckee into the desert. With the help of treaty law and endangered species law and environmental law the Pyramid Lake Paiute have gained control of the lake and its fish. The lake, which fell 80 feet from the time the diversion project began has recovered somewhat. The cui-ui suckerfish are coming back in significant numbers. Even the Lahontan cutthroat trout, which was thought extinct in 1940, is back and increasing in numbers. It is a different view of water than ours still.
No comments:
Post a Comment