See a river through a child’s eyes

I live in Colorado near a
river called the Cache La Poudre, French for powder cache. During
the last school year, I was thrilled to take part in several field
trips with my daughter’s fourth-grade class. Each time the
children learned more and more about this local river. Twelve times
during the school year we visited the Poudre, from its headwaters
high in Rocky Mountain National Park, to where it dribbles into the
South Platte River, southeast of Greeley.

At each place
we took water-quality measurements, netted and inspected insects,
and logged the results for inclusion in a book the class created at
the end of the year. The kids called it “Flowing With the Cache La
Poudre River.” The pictures in their book speak volumes: children
knee-deep in crystal-clear water, their faces upturned and smiling,
the Colorado sun shining brightly in the background.

But
I remember one day when the smiles disappeared. We stepped out of
the school bus near the mouth of Poudre Canyon and found that the
river was dry. Bone dry. Dead. No bugs, no dip-nets. Nothing.

The river had been drained dry by relentless pumps and
ditches and dams. Instream flow rights, which keep water in the
river, vary greatly as the Poudre makes its way down canyon. In
some sections, it’s still legal to suck the riverbed dry and
then divert the used water back into it downstream.

I
stared at the faces of the children on the riverbank and saw jaws
dropped and eyes sagging. River rocks lay before us, brown and
dusty, voiceless; the children, too.

Here along the
northern Front Range of Colorado, as in much of the
drought-stricken West, a new school year has brought a predictable
set of worried stories about never-enough water. One word defines
these stories: Dams. Dams on the Poudre, dams on its tributaries,
dams upstream, dams downstream.

It’s amazing how
carefully all these stories are worded. Supporters of new dams
delicately say they will “only capture runoff” or they are “merely
advocating enlarging existing reservoirs.” But dams and reservoirs
only do one thing to a living river: They kill it.

What
can be done to avert this yearning to once again throw up dams
across the West?

In our local watershed, we have an
advocacy organization, “Friends of the Poudre,” which fights for a
free-flowing river. Look for, or create, a similar organization in
your neck of the woods.

Nominate yourself to be on the
boards and commissions that regulate your local watershed. When you
get on these boards or visit their meetings, work for change and
ask hard questions such as, “Why, when it’s cheaper to
conserve water than impound it, do we still talk about building
dams?”

Learn about and support organizations that buy and
guarantee a river’s instream flow rights. In Colorado, the
Colorado Water Trust and other local organizations do just that.

We could also learn to love our Western American desert.
Love its native plants and flowers; love its beautiful brown color.
When you see the color brown, think of living, free-flowing Western
rivers.

Finally, recall the words of Utah writer Terry
Tempest Williams: “If you know wilderness in the way that you know
love, you would be unwilling to let it go.”

And so for
your nearby river, do this: Walk down to the river, take off your
shoes and step in. Bend down and wave your hands around in the
cool, clear water. Splash a little on your face. Sit on the bank.
Watch. Listen.

Right in the heart of downtown Fort
Collins, the Poudre smells and tastes like freshly melted snow. The
sound of its water splashing over rocks is nature’s finest
music. A plethora of insects, birds and wildlife swarm its banks
— trout, great blue herons, beavers, bullfrogs, foxes and
deer.

We do have a choice. Do we want our children to be
flowing with the Cache La Poudre River? Or do we want them to stand
beside its dry bed, dismayed and voiceless?