A Reflection on the Delta

    Emily Haworth

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            It begins in the form of ice crystals and late spring showers on the slopes of the Rockies in Colorado. Drips off Ponderosas, Limber Pines, Blue Spruces, and Douglas-Firs, ripples past the hooved residents and furry visitors of Rocky Mountain National Park, and meanders through and past the soggy meadow in La Poudre Pass. The icy waters rush into Little Yellowstone Canyon, west to Utah, and surges through valleys and plains, racing to catch up with passing-by trains on the Union Pacific tracks. It serves as Arches National Park’s southern border, carves into Moab, and is joined by the Green River, its largest tributary, carrying the history of ancient tribes and red sediment with its vicious velocity. Through Cataract Canyon, hissing rapids cut through sediment walls until Dirty Devil greets the widening river, where they carry each other until Lake Powell. The true epitome of a desert rat’s oasis: houseboats, jet skis, and artificially stocked trout. Glenn Canyon Dam plugs Lake Powell and spews out shoots of icy water from hydro-power turbines. Wraps around Horseshoe Bend, enters Grand Canyon National, and crawls deep into the bottom of the canyon. Past Black Canyon, it darts south. Its confidence and vigor dwindles as it sits on the hips of the California and Arizona divide. The waters, nearly crystal-clear, slowly follows its programmed route to Mexicali.

            The Colorado River is a compilation of 1,450 miles, and eighty-six tributaries that are undermined by fifteen dams and 30 million thirsty people. Unfaithful monsoons can help to elevate the river’s flow, but the estuary that once was has evaporated into oblivion. The rich sediment that used to flow freely, dyeing the ice melt into a rusty, ruddy, thick cocktail of history and geology, is stripped of its purity through each dam it is choked into. By the time the water exhales into Glen Canyon, it is crystal clear, a not-so-suitable habitat for the creatures that have evolved for centuries in the Colorado’s muddy rapids.

            The River Delta is a lost Atlantis. Sediment, seeds, and species carried in this lifeline from deserts, plains, canyons, and high forests gravitate toward their final destination: The Sea of Cortez. A refuge for jaguars, tidal pools and exotic fish, Leopold recorded what once was, prior to the Bellagio, spinach fields in Yuma, and swimming pools in Phoenix. It is now a cracked scab on the face of the southwest.

Too many canals, culverts, drainages, diversions, ducts, spillways. Too much desire for California fresh strawberries, alfalfa fields and all American factory-feed beef. Water-control engineering excused our civilization for townhomes in the Sonoran and golf course retreats in Utah, but did we ever think about what would happen when we dictated each drop’s destiny? A baked moonscape of unmerciful dryness, sprinkled with weeds.

            Drive past the make-shift dentist offices, carnicerias, panaderías, keep driving south west until you reach a dirt road you’re unsure your car can physically drive on. Make a left, pray for your oil pan. The road stops being nauseatingly tremorous after about four miles of brain rattling. Keep driving alongside the cement-lined water canal filled with the backwash that seeps out of the Morales Dam. Past the houses, adorned with tires as erosion blocks, tin roofs and bougainvillea-crowned front yards. Past the acres of pristine rows of lettuce, greens, and cabbage. Stop driving when the smell of sickly sweet, damp, honey mesquites and wet earth overpowers the scent of dust, when you’re suddenly in an endless maze of hand-nurtured, individually planted, wetland giants.

            One hand propped on his left hip, the other on a splintered shovel, a man who’s name I never learned, looks out on the rows of carefully planted mesquites and cottonwoods. There were about twenty of us out in Miguel Aleman that day, not including the dogs seeking shade under the work trucks. I know he’s visualizing the trees a year from now, or maybe he’s wondering why seven white-girls from northern Arizona cared to journey to Mexico for the weekend to help with manual labor. Native desert vegetation is resilient by nature. Give a cottonwood a bucket of water and a two-foot deep bed in loam, it will grow ten feet by next season. Give this girl a shovel, and she’ll plant every seedling in sight.

            When I am here, I can see the ghost of the green lagoons. I can feel the breath of what once was. Hawks circling overhead, swallows and starlings rest in the trees tops, the coolness drifting off the carefully calculated canals is intoxicating. Willows, cottonwoods, and mesquites all graciously offer their shade as we wander through the lush thicket. The smell is something I know too well. A scent that wraps itself in nostalgia and summers spent in the Sonoran Desert.

            Like a late spring snow, the fiber of the cottonwood seeds float overhead and catch on branches and river reeds. The wind picks up every now and then, and sends them spinning in a frenzy; a light desert frost in early March.  They coat the decay of winter in a soft blanket of spring and brush past my skin. The sun is settling into her 3pm siesta, sending her beams through the leaves of the trees, casting spotlights on each tuff of silken seedlings. Before the dam, the seeds would find their way into the river to be carried downstream, nestle themselves along the bank, and wait for the monsoons to give life to their roots and nourish their leaves.

            They walk in slow motion through the marshes, like ballerinas with overly self-conscientious precaution. Their thin legs resemble the twigs that float down the river. I worry they could snap with any step.  Their feathers are smoother than a fresh gardenia petal, whiter than cotton, and as vibrant as the snow that falls onto the spine of the Rockies that feds their home. Great Egrets are iconic to wetlands, yet they never fail to look significantly out of place. Their slender necks curve like a smooth, snow crested hill, and attaches to it’s large, almond shaped body. They’re quiet birds. Loners, really. They perch in the dark green canopies of cotton woods and willows for hours at a time, occasionally moving their neck slowly, in time with a deep sigh. I think they’re listening to the river.

            It begins as a delicate spring shower and ends as backwash in a few cement-lined drainage ditches, mixed with trash, shoved to the agricultural fields, to be the spoiled lettuce in your garbage. It sputters to a stop somewhere in the desert sand, somewhere north of the Sea of Cortez, somewhere seeping into the parched, naked ground.