“Half empty/half full… who cares.
It matters how much water is in your glass.

Because everything changes when there is not.”
– Craig Childs

For three days of spring, the Steam Plant in Salida
filled with patrons and presenters for the 2010
Colorado Art Ranch Artposium: Wade in the Water.

As a poet and part time fly-fishing guide,
this particular artposium gave me the
opportunity to not only spend half of the weekend
“hack-camping,” which consists of sleeping in the back
of a pick-up in a tilted gulch on National Forest land
(generally such situations ensue only after you’ve forgotten your tent and you’ve
spent all your lodging money on gas), but to spend the other half of the weekend
ruminating on water in the West.

Intended to promote conversations on the intersections between art and science,
land management and social issues, the Colorado Art Ranch is a nomadic
organization that takes up residence for a few days at a time in various towns
around the state. Its events are a chance for visual and literary artists to connect
with scientists and policy makers.

On the second morning of the event, I popped into the artposium to hear Colorado
Supreme Court Justice Greg Hobbes weave together a unique presentation of
history, law and poetry. I was fresh from fishing for an hour on the Arkansas
River, and I found the river in the judge’s words:

“I call the green-backed cutthroat trout, / I call the nymph and hellgrammite, / I
call the hatch to catch a wind, / I call upon the mountain track; / I call the scarlet
to the jaw,” he read from his poem “Colorado Mother of Rivers,” which he had
written in celebration of the 30th anniversary of Colorado’s in-stream flow law.
Not long later, it was time for lunch.

How often do you get to sit and eat with a Colorado Supreme Court justice?
Navigating through the crowd, most of which had wandered outside to eat in the
sunshine, I plopped down across the table from Justice Hobbs.

Not 200 yards away, the Arkansas, the fourth longest river in the United States,
was rushing through the town’s white water park. Kayakers were paddling, dogs
were chasing sticks and a single raft was floating by with fly fishermen pressed
against lean bars, very seriously casting dry flies among the chaos.

What trout would stick around long enough, let alone rise for the floating elk hair
caddis through the murk of run-off, is no trout I’ve ever known. But then again
I’ve seen trout do some strange things.

In a moment of possibility, I began to feel, well, saucy.

“Justice Hobbs?” I asked.

“Hmm,” he said over his ham sandwich.

Like most questions I have been pondering for a very long time, it came out in
broken pieces, gasps and thrusts – poorly articulated. But in the end, it revolved
around the ongoing legislative fight over whether recreational river users can
walk, wander and/or float through private land.

Justice Hobbs smiled and put it together.

“Some things involve trespass,” he pondered.
“As Martin Luther King proved, sometimes you have to go to jail.
… Something may not be just, but it bends towards justice.”

I would like to imagine that at that moment the table fell silent. That across the
state from the wide open sage-filled ranches to the bustling metropolises of the
Front Range, Coloradans understood what Montanans already know: River access
should be public up to the high water mark.

But instead, someone came around with a tray of cookies and the topic shifted to
roof water catchment systems and xeriscaping.

And that was the artposium, a mix of the physical and the metaphyscial. Not 48
hours prior, the first night’s presenter, Craig Childs, author of “The Secret
Knowledge of Water,” and “House of Rain,” had just gotten back from Chile’s
Atacama Desert.

Childs’ meditations on water and where it can be found in a desert environment,
and his very open and real account of existing as a human water bag crossing the
driest place on earth reverberated through the packed audience.

“We don’t go into the desert to seek the desert, we go into the desert to find water ….” said Childs.

The Disappeared

The sun beats down on you
because you are all that’s there
walking the salt floor. The sun

explodes, pours through cracks.
The sun pushes you off course,
silver mirages fill the landscape.

The sun is all there is, and yet,
you go to the driest place on earth
to find water. Everywhere you

can see the absence of water:
meaning it was there. Nests
of dried kangaroo rats, solitary

side winder skins. The sun saturates
you the color of sand dunes. Your mind
stretches back to where the sand
came from.

You are walking on mountains.
Rivers of wind. Echoes of rivers.
Everywhere you look, dendritic
patterns,

a hydrology of shapes, water maps.
Who are you? You try to find your way,
but always have the feeling

you are disappearing. Then suddenly:
on the outer edges, a dragonfly
comes at you, startling as a comet.

http://www.soprissun.com/Home/june-3-2010/tailgate