Away We Go: Mapping the Waterway

The distance a water drop travels from snowmelt to ocean is almost as inconceivable as the number of those molecules that make the journey.

Water is at the forefront of the minds of anyone who lives or loves the American West. As often happens when something will imminently be lacking. As when something that has been a normal part of the background becomes precious in its graduating absence.

River maps are no longer accurate. The blue fingers of creeks and streams on the car's navigation system yield perhaps an arroyo when I glance out the window. A trace of a wash. If water exists it is choked with cottonwood and willow making their last stand; they know this is desperate. Plant wisdom sussed that out some time before we did.

What is not on those maps is where the rivers end now. Where something used to consistently flow from mountaintop to ocean now halts somewhere in between. What lies at that end?

Like the world's southernmost tree, it is hard to determine where the river gives a sigh and absorbs the last of itself into the hard packed dirt. The same earth that sat at the bottom of that same river. It used to be flowed over and carried down grain by grain.

Endings are imprinted with finality in things like books. It's the careful wording of the last sentence of articles and the final shot of a movie. There's a satisfaction to the finish: ok, this is over, now on to the next. But maybe that's why we wrap up our art and our entertainment in a bow. Because we really don’t know when the end is here, whether it be a vocation, a relationship, the last time you change a diaper or the last words before death. As if nothing that came before is as important or weighty. That the last has to embody the entirety of the past and has to say something about the span of time it has existed.

How do we know when the end is here? There have been so many times when, upon looking back, it flew by without notice. The end occurred and I watched it speed by in the left lane. It would have been easier to take the exit and find another route. But to my detriment I kept on put-putting along.

Better to let go. To fizzle out in the middle of the desert. To acknowledge that the ocean is no longer a feasible destination.

Things are different now. It is both sad and the truth. We move forward with what is.

This story inspired by events on the Salmon River in Stanley, Idaho and (what’s left of) Lake Powell, Arizona.