It’s about rivers and dams. This morning my partner Donna and I had a couple of dear friends over who invited us to go next year on a houseboat on Powell Reservoir, known by its fans as “Lake Powell” and its enemies as “Lake Foul.” It’s the lake that drowned Glen Canyon on the Colorado River above the GC National Park, Glen Canyon, “the Place that No One Knew.” John Wesley Powell, the first person to float the entire length of the Colorado River, wrote, “Past these towering monuments, past these mounded billows of orange sandstone, past these oak-set glens, past these fern-decked alcoves, past these mural curves, we glide hour after hour, stopping now and then, and our attention is arrested by some new wonder.” Lost to the dam and its “lake” were ancient artifacts and sacred places, geological wonders, and a canyon and its tributaries that were known to those who rafted it as the most amazing and beautiful part of the Colorado. What replaced Glen Canyon was a lake that, during low water, has a nasty bathtub ring and leaves visible the trash of vacationers who throw everything from dead generators to old oil to human shit into the lake. Nonetheless, I have seen pictures of the lake when it is full, and it is beautiful. I am almost tempted to take this trip with our friends to view the incredible red rocks, to hike in places I can otherwise never reach, to sleep on the boat under the infinite stars at night. Amost, but not quite. My trip would be one of mourning. Having rafted the River below Glen Canyon Dam, I know the River’s intensity, its beauty. I also know the consequences of living downriver from the Dam–water that is dangerously cold because it comes from the darkened, frigid bottom of the dam, a damaged ecosystem, native species of fish almost extinct, beaches gone or colonized by the beautiful but insatiable tamarisk. Running some of the most massive rapids in North America is fraught with its own kind of danger: if you flip, you have only minutes to get back into the boat or on shore before you are hypothermic. The Colorado below Glen Canyon is a stunning jade green, nothing like the mud that gave Rio Colorado (Red River) its name.

No, I will not take that houseboat adventure on a man-made lake that drowned the Canyon I could have loved, not even to see the beauty that remains, not even to mourn what was lost.

“Remember these things lost.
The native wildlife; the chance to float quietly down a calm river,
to let the current carry you past a thousand years of history,
through a living canyon of incredible, haunting beauty.
Here the Colorado had created a display that rivaled any in the world.
The side canyons simply had no rivals.
We lost wholeness, integrity in a place, one that might always
have let [humans] experience a magnificent gesture of the natural world.
No [human], in all the generations to be born of [humans], will ever be free
to discover for [him/herself] one of the greatest places of all.
This we inherited, and have denied to all others–
the place no one knew well enough.” –Eliot Porter

Glen Canyon Dam will not be forever–either it will erode the sandstone cliffs into which it is anchored, or it will be come filled with silt. “We can pollute the air, despoil the water, denude the land. Nature won’t care, but we will. It’s our frail allotment of time that we wreck, not nature’s” — Ruth Kirk. I hope within my own frail allotment of time I will see Glen Canyon Dam brought down and that I will be able to witness the first healing moments of Glen Canyon as I row through it.