Prologue:

We have tipped the balance scales of our homeland. We've infected the skies that now drench to the bone. Topple bridges. Blanket farmlands. Turn streets into rivers. Turn rivers to 20' walls of water whose pictures hang crooked and upside down. Whose people are missing. Lost together on islands that used to be cities. Whose propane tanks explode while floating downstream. Fire one year. Flood the next. Colorado caught in the tumbler of a weatherworld never yet seen, the hundred year floods on the fast track to ten. Damage random. Safety random. The choruses drastic--Come gather 'round people wherever you roam. Admit that the waters around us have grown. Time for--simplify, localize, tenderly care for the land and skies—changing.

Story:

A crustacean, a little lobster with orange speckled pincers, nearly walked under my bike tires yesterday, disoriented on the sidewalk. I stopped the bike—my first tour of the world after three days of pounding rains—and called to Jeff up ahead. The tiny red creature turned toward my voice, lumbering toward the curb and road just inches away. Jeff stopped only long enough to pick it up—as I cried, "You can't pick them up, they'll pinch you!"—just behind the head. He mounted his bike with the little shelled clacking crawdaddy held delicately under his right handlebar. Off they went for a nearby ditch. But the ditch was a phony, lined with black plastic and ugly pipes, so Jeff kept sailing. Past the drowned gopher town, past the sluicing horse pasture with an awe-filled flying crustacean.

I called encouragement as they picked up speed. "Not the lakes!" Jeff said over his shoulder, "Too close to the street." The silty man-made Rec Center lakes fell behind as he headed for South Boulder Creek. A quarter mile that mudbug flew. Earthbound, waterbound no more. We left both bikes at the police tape and sawhorses--Danger! Trails Closed. No more danger than this flying crawfish had endured. What forces had dropped it in our concrete cultured cut-off world?

We squished through the mud-covered concrete path to the wild-flowing creek, dropped down the wet embankment and Jeff set the dull red complexly segmented waggling kid down feet first in a shallow puddle. Bug became silt. The mudbug back to earth. And water. Hidden and harbored by home. 


Come gather round people, gather and admit and accept it, that soon you'll be drenched to the bone.

Epilogue:

18.22" of rain fell on my house in 2 days. 20" of rain is the annual average here. Until now. Now is the time for all good people to come to the aid of their country. My country is underwater. More rain moves into our skies today. Heaven help the cattle and horses and farmers and ranchers east of us. 4 people dead. 218 are missing. 10,000 refugees. Rivers roaring at us—CHANGE.

America, meet Wilma the worm. And Baby, a velvet blue jumpsuit-clad plastic doll with a strangely bendable head. And dust fairy sequins. And John T Price, who knows how to bend a sentence like Baby bends that head—"completely backward, allowing him to stare at you upside down with his glassy eyes." Which is to say, the ordinary ups and downs of Iowa family life will amaze and sometimes smite you with joy in this loving memoir called Daddy Long Legs: The Natural Education of a Father.

You will also meet Steph, John's tolerant, positive wife and the mother of his two rambunctious nature-loving boys. You will never meet the novel John is never working on, due to teaching creative writing, repairing an old house with too many levels of decay, resisting doctor's visits (who needs the bad news?), and wondering why he feels so cut off from life (AKA exhausted) when daily his boys deliver muddy earthworms to his bed, shout at him to save every praying mantis in every Walgreens parking lot, declare a no-kill zone around their entire neighborhood (mosquitoes included?) and radiate so much joie de vivre in their buck naked red rubber boot clad explorations of John's back yard you want to lie down with him for a good long nap.

But no, the next chapter brings new pleasures. New views on family life that make you say "oh, yeah, that's it!" Price's memoir is realism that redeems. And we could use some redemption, these days, help pulling our heads out of our own sorrows. If you've never had kids, there is the added bonus of gaining access to the adorable and maddening and crazy-great things toddlers say and do. I loved sharing the insider's view. (And not cleaning up any messes!)

I met John Price at a literary conference in Kansas, and then heard him read in Denver. That's where I met Baby. And Pengy, his nemesis. And Gramma K. and her grouchy chihuahua. Do yourself and your dad and your best friends a favor—read this charming book and pass it along. Reading Daddy Long Legs felt like a huge nudge to pay attention to wonder and kindness and the release of self-interest. To join the family.

But watch out for Baby—that blue velvet schemer has Pengy in his sights!   

I'm taking a summer break from blogging, but I just listened to a superb radio interview and had to pass this on. Author and Utah homegirl Jana Richman educates, informs and enlivens the debate about pumping water out of Utah's west desert. If you love the West, our big blue skies and vast open spaces, give a listen. You'll know more than you did about living in and really loving the West than you did when you woke up this morning.

Leave a comment. 
Tell your friends. 
Post the interview link on Facebook. 
Get folks talking about Utah's magnificent "big empty desert full of life."

http://www.utahpublicradio.org/post/snake-valley-water-thursdays-access-utah

The proposed Las Vegas Pipeline will drain the valleys of western Utah and eastern Nevada, creating a dust bowl the size of the state of Vermont.

Utah's Salt Lake Valley already has some of the worst air quality in the nation.

Utah's Governor Herbert will likely sign his OK to this pipeline project on April 1.

CALL GOVERNOR HERBERT'S OFFICE TODAY, AND EVERY DAY THIS WEEK, TO SAY "NO PIPELINE—PLEASE SAVE UTAH AND NEVADA FROM THIS DESTRUCTION AND SAVE OUR LUNGS FROM EPIC DUST STORMS." Please do not let this happen to the state I love.

It's easy and takes just thirty seconds: 801-538-1000. Thousands of folks are MAKING THE CALL! Please share this blog with anyone concerned about water in the West.

For more information, try reading Dr. Brian Moench's fantastic op ed piece in the Salt Lake Tribune. Or this press release from local citizens concerned about the future of breathing in Utah and Nevada:

Who needs this water more: new Las Vegas suburbs which do not even yet exist, or the residents and plants and animals of the most arid parts of Utah and Nevada who have lived there for centuries?

Water will continue to be mined and sold if we don't protest. Keep Utah's water in Utah, and the gorgeous arid desert strong and free.

My dear friend Ed Kanze, naturalist and writer extraordinaire, just wrote a column so informative I have to share it.

We think we are such hotshots. Without bats, where would we be? Lunch as we know it would be greatly diminished. Tequila would vanish. And domestic ease would shortly follow it, if I had to live without chocolate.

Here is Ed's latest All Things Natural article: BANANAS FOR BATS

Sink your teeth into a banana. Savor the sweet, soft flesh. Now is a good time to think about bats. Together, bats and tall leafy plants worked in concert over a vast stretch of time to invent the long yellow fruits we enjoy.

Yes, we'd have no bananas without bats, or at least banana plants. Bats pollinated the original wild ones, but  commercially grown bananas require no such services. Without bats, other food plants might not exist, too, or exist in such diminished quantity that market forces would push up their costs. We are all beholden to bats, whose wings are really their hands.

There would be no Tequila Sunrises in a world without bats. Bats are chief pollinators of the agave plants whose fermented floral parts give rise to the alcoholic drink.

In the original draft of this story, I explained that bats have much to do with the production of mangoes, avocados, dates, coconuts, peppercorns, cloves, vanilla, and chocolate. I gleaned my information from internet sources one would be inclined to trust: websites maintained by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and Bat Conservation International, for example, and ones not quite so reliable but still often excellent, such as Wikipedia. Yet a tropical biologist friend who read the early draft passed it along to Neotropical bat biologist friends, and egad! They tell me that nearly all the claims I relayed from my sources were wrong.

While the bats in our part of North America specialize in catching bugs, it's those bats of warmers parts of the world that serve plants as pollinators and seed-dispersers. In addition, their droppings, or guano, are sometimes used to enrich soil, and more remarkably, to produce saltpeter, an essential ingredient of gunpowder.

Some of the bats of the tropics and subtropics that contribute to our cuisine are known as flying foxes and fruit bats. Some are as large as red-tailed hawks. The best-looking, which are exceedingly handsome indeed, look like well-bred, well-groomed Chihuahuas in black capes, perhaps out for a night at the opera.

If you're a plant and you want to attract flying animals as big as miniature dogs to pollinate your flowers and to carry away your fruit, it's in your best interests to be sturdy and large. A great many plants that have such relationships with bats are trees or tree-like, and their flowers tend to be big, too. Flowers pollinated by hummingbirds are brightly colored and trumpet-shaped, at least for the most part. Flowers pollinated by flying foxes are often white or blandly colored and shaped like bells or dinner plates. They tend to radiate a strong sweet or musky smell suggestive of overripe fruit.

Not all bat-pollinated plants provide humans with food. South American balsa trees, the source of the buoyant trunks explorer Thor Heyerdahl used to build his raft Kon Tiki, are pollinated at least partly by bats. Bats also play Cupid to the flowers of kapok trees, whose fruits yield fibers used to stuff bedding, pillows, and life jackets. Africa's baobab trees, which bear great aggregations of stamens likely adapted for dusting bats with pollen, are also bat pollinated. So are saguaro and organpipe cactuses.

Bats are widely credited on bat-related websites with the pollination or distribution of the seeds of chocolate, almonds, cashews, figs, and allspice. But the bat scientists who wrote me say this isn't true. This serves as a reminder that that facts can be slippery, and we must be careful where we get them. It also goes to show that while scientists are doing an extraordinary job of learning about bats, they're keeping most of the information to themselves and not sharing it effectively with we who pay their salaries.

Remember when Ronald Reagan cried, "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!" I say, Tear down the barriers of arcane and thorny language that separate science from the rest of us, and let's have a free and democratic exchange of learning  and ideas.

Ed has so many talents they're hard to list. His wildlife photography rivals and sometimes accompanies the books he has published on the Adirondacks, Australia and New Zealand. I deeply love his photo-biography The World of John Burroughs. Burroughs, not John Muir, was THE naturalist writer of his time. Makes me want to build my own log house and chronicle its wildlife and seasons.

P.S. I am both glad and sad to report that Ed's richly illustrated hardcover The World of John Burroughs, while out of print, can be purchased for .33 cents on Amazon. To quote Ed regarding Nobel Prize winner Patrick White's forgotten books—"the fate of great literature these days."

I’m going to let Jana Richman’s characters speak for themselves. All women. All different. All stubborn and flawed and as real as your elbow wrinkles. There’s a 300-mile-long pipeline about to drain the aquifer from under eastern Nevada. That’s not fiction. That’s headline news. The Jorgensen clan inherits this problem, and it’s none too simple addressing it, as they are already torn apart by old family schisms. What Kate and Ona and Nell and Cassie Jorgensen say about that pipeline and their lives in the Schell Creek Mountains of Nevada—that’s the draw of The Ordinary Truth.

Kate—the Las Vegas Water Manager

"I’ll be sitting in my corner office—like I’m doing now— tinted glass from floor to ceiling, watching the sun drop behind the boxy horizon of Las Vegas skyscrapers and anticipating the neon dawn of evening, when for no good reason an image of my father will appear. A cloud, a shadow, a reflection, and there he is relaxed forward in the saddle atop Moots, his palomino gelding, arms crossed over the horn, looking amused to find himself surrounded by glass and steel. Moots stands lazily, his long-lashed lids drooping over soft brown eyes, one back leg bent so my father tilts slightly to the right. Dad holds an easy smile and seems as if he has something to tell me. On a good day, I’ll lean back with a cup of tea gone cold, kick my heels off to prop my feet on the garbage can, and exhort him to speak. And he does. Soft and soothing, like he’s speaking to a ten-year-old. 'How you doing, Katydid?' he says to me. I smile and tell him I’m doing fine, and for a moment we both believe it."


Ona—Kate’s quiet ranching aunt

"Sometimes, when a spring day turns unexpectedly warm and the house feels like an unrinsed plastic milk jug lying in the sun, I set a lawn chair in the fine dirt under the budding cottonwoods on the west side a the working pens and ponder the perplexities a life. From here, I can watch the goings on a Nate, Nell, and Skinny. Today they’re preg testing cows. I don’t spend much a my time this way, mind you, I have work a my own to get done. But every so often I sit here just to chew on things awhile."

Nell—Kate’s cranky ranching mother

"If an old woman pushing up against the far end a life has any sense at all, she won’t spend too many a her few remaining days trying to figure out how things ended up the way they did. Apparently I ain’t got that kinda sense. Course it don’t help that all the folks in Omer Springs are asking me, “What’s going on with Katie?” as if that’s a question can be answered with some degree a certainty like the current price a hay. When I shrug in response, folks get downright snippety. “She’s your daughter, Nell!” they proclaim as if that’s something mighta slipped my mind."

Cassie—Kate’s college-age daughter

"There’s something about a Nevada whorehouse can make a girl weepy around the edges. Near the third pass of Waylon Jennings’ Honky Tonk Heroes, I can barely talk myself into sticking with the plan. I do have a plan—a long-range plan. . . .

To be honest, and I almost always am, my long-range plan is short on details. It basically consists of sitting on a barstool in a Carson City brothel until Mama and Grandma Nell start speaking to each other. How long that might take is anyone’s guess. But this idea that they can use me as a conduit to communicate—if you want to call it that—instead of speaking directly is beginning to piss me off. In fact, both of them as good as drove me here themselves. And if I’ve inherited anything from them at all, it’s their obstinacy. I don’t know what happens when three stubborn women each take up ground waiting for the others to move, but I aim to find out.

Everybody pretends this is all about water rights and Mama’s job with the Nevada Water Authority, but I know damn well there’s more to it. Not that water isn’t enough to tear families apart in this state. I’ve seen grown men beat each other bloody over a diverted irrigation ditch. But I’ve been watching Mama and Grandma Nell all my life, and over the span of those twenty-one years, their conversations have been steadily dwindling like a spring creek at the end of a long, hot summer. It seems the two of them have simply exhausted themselves, run underground. So I have to ask myself: what is it between them that takes so much effort? I don’t know the answer to that yet, but I intend to find out. Hence, my radical—and possibly impulsive—plan. I know of only one thing that will undoubtedly force them to the surface. Me. More specifically, my safekeeping. What better threat to an innocent girl’s welfare, I figure, than a Carson City whorehouse?" 

I hope you’ll read this novel. And read this article to learn about the pipeline. And visit the Goshute’s website to meet the people this pipeline will harm. We need to raise a ruckus. 

There’s a dustbowl waiting behind our indifference. Jana Richman spent years caring with all her heart.

539 members of the Goshute tribe in western Utah are all that stand between the Southern Nevada Water Authority and a proposed multi-billion-dollar pipeline that would “pump billions of gallons of groundwater” from the Goshutes’ home in Spring Valley “to parched Las Vegas,” in a 92" wide pipe that would run for 300 miles. 

But how parched is Las Vegas—with its velvety golf courses, casino swimming pools and glittering public fountains—compared to the Deep Creek Valley Goshute Reservation, which receives the lowest annual rainfall in the state of Utah?

A cover article in Salt Lake's City Weekly alerted me to this disaster in the making. The Goshutes, who are on the leading edge of the SNWA water fight, have a different approach to water—one we would all do well to study. They revere it.  

“In the Goshute language . . . water is referred to as a human being, a living entity. It is in the water that the spirits of their ancestors reside. If the water goes to Las Vegas’ fountains and man-made Venetian canals, the spirits will go there, too.” So says Rupert Steele, former chairman of the council of the Confederated Tribes of the Goshute Reservation. 



According to the BLM’s Environmental Impact Statement, groundwater pumping in these rural valleys would damage 300 springs and 120 miles of streams.

From the Goshute Tribe website: “SNWA’s groundwater development application is the biggest threat to the Goshute way of life since European settlers first arrived on Goshute lands more than 150 years ago.” The Goshutes request our help in acknowledging their rights and addressing their concerns. 

Please support the Goshutes and local ranchers who are about to have their water pumped out from under them. The BLM’s environmental review comes out this July for public comment, with a final decision about the pipeline in September. We need to draw national attention to the SNWA’s proposed water grab now. 

Water—the very lifeblood of the entire nation of Goshutes, and of the local ranchers already living at the edge of survival—can't be harvested like wheat or mined like coal.

Not with a citizenry who says NO.

Imagine a 92" pipeline running through your back yard. Then do something:

Forward this blog link and/or talk to friends interested in sustainability and water equity. Get them to spread the message and links afar.

Contact local writers and any powerful journalists you know, to help generate national attention. Writing letters to local newspapers would also be great.

Volunteer for and contribute to the Great Basin Water Network—the volunteer environmental group dedicated to terminating the pipeline.

Attend the Snake Valley Festival, a fun fundraising weekend to support GBWN, June 15-17.

Contribute time and money to the Goshute Nation.

Contribute to Center for Biological Diversity, who have lobbied tirelessly on this issue, and have raised awareness about the Las Vegas water grab. Thank them for their work. 

Leave comments on the BLM’s draft environmental impact statement. Comments may be mailed: Penny Woods, BLM Project Manager, PO Box 12000, Reno, NV 89520, faxed: 775-861-6689, or emailed: nvgwprojects@blm.gov.

Help raise a ruckus! You will be glad you did. And the Goshutes, ranchers, foxes, snakes, gophers, and countless flocks of resident birds who nestle in the swamp cedars of beautiful Spring Valley, Utah, will thank you, too. Let’s keep the spring in Spring Valley.    

Many thanks to the Goshute Tribe website and the City Weekly article for photos and quotes.

Last week I learned three unforgettable things:

30 Tibetans have self-immolated this year, lighting themselves on fire to bring attention to their treatment by the Chinese, their lost homeland. One Tibetan said, “We will not hurt other sentient beings, so what else can we do?” Newsweek magazine has a full-page photograph of a young man running down a street on fire. That image will not exit my memory.

On Ellen, a man who freed a whale from a drag net said that if we continue deep sea trawling--dragging massive nets over the oceans’ floors--our oceans will be dead in fifty years. No coral, no fish. Dead. Ellen no longer eats fish.

There’s a plastic garbage dump in the Pacific Ocean, collected there by vast currents, that some scientists estimate is as large as two United States of Americas. Because the plastic can’t be seen from outer space or even really from the surface of the ocean--it is sub-surface--we can ignore it, but it floats in my mind’s ocean now, just as it floats in the sea. This sad new continent is known as The Great Pacific Garbage Patch.

This week I received three unforgettable things:

Lisa Jones, the author of Broken: A Love Story, sent me an endorsement for my novel Tributary. 

"I've been hungering for a book like this since I finished Lonesome Dove  -- a tale of the old west big enough to crawl into completely, full of magnetic characters, unspeakable dangers, and beautiful language, but not the slightest bit cliché. Tributary is the story of a ragtag group of frontier survivors. There is an exiled Mormon prophet who lives in a cave and a truth-telling black man married to a Shoshone medicine woman. They are constellated around Clair, whose disappeared parents and independent heart lead her from a joyless Mormon childhood to New Orleans and back to Utah's sheepherding outback. Sensitive (by nature) and salty (by necessity), Clair ekes a living out of a valley of dirt, scares the hell out of those who try to mess with her small tribe, has her heart broken in all the usual ways and opened again by the magic of nature, spirit, and friendship.
It's a big hot fudge sundae of a book -- you wolf it down, and then you regret it's gone. I loved it."

I held a one-week-old baby on my chest, a baby who has never had a bath and smelled exquisite, a baby perfectly happy to do nothing but eat and rest skin to skin on other human beings. And occasionally smile for some deep reason. Welcome, Madalyn.

A drive to the Bear River Bird Refuge, in northern Utah, where everything human fell away and the sky and watery fields shouted bird hallelujahs. Some places are more inside us than without us. The dark dirt fields west of Brigham City half-flooded by the silty Bear River, guarded by white pelicans, cormorants, ibises, herons, egrets, blackbirds, squadrons of ducks, geese, gulls and the white snowy peaks of the Wasatch—just throw me in a puddle there and call it my final resting place.

How to hold these differences? The failing oceans, the friends with cancer, the state-run refuge for wild birds that makes you want to pay more taxes, the unfailing love of a great partner whose 18-year-old daughter still loves to dye Easter eggs? And who has never--until the extra dyes called to her and her father’s ‘60s girlfriend--tie-dyed a T-shirt. It seemed such a waste, to throw the colors out, and we were having such fun, and I remembered the power of rubber bands. 

My great-great-grandfather invented the rubber band. You have to be elastic and tough to hold all the world offers you, these days. Stretchy and strong. We all have to be.

Good and bad. Happy and sad. When you can’t forget, stretch.






P.S. You never know who you’ll meet at the Bear River Bird Refuge. This grandpa takes a lucky grandkid and his cammo-clad chihuahua for an open-air jaunt around the flooded fields on weekends. The dog rides in his jacket, head into the wind!

It’s a beautiful world . . .