A vein of romance runs through every form of human endeavor.
– C.J. Blanchard

Negotiations among the Magnificent Seven representing the seven states of the Colorado River region begin to resemble the ongoing negotiations between the military and diplomatic representatives for North and South Korea, where negotiations for something beyond an armistice have been going on for more than sixty years. Here, as there, the negotiations have reached a stalemate, and both sides are now engaged in an information war. Between the two Koreas, this war takes the form of everything from huge arrays of speakers blasting pop music across the demilitarized zone to smuggled USB drives with movies and TV shows. Here, it is mostly just propaganda bombs tossed over our ‘DMZ,’ the Grand Canyons, about each side’s virtue and the other side’s obstinacy, depending on their regional media’s love of conflict and tendency to support the home team. The missed November deadline has been seamlessly replaced – as we all suspected it would be – by a February deadline. But otherwise – nothing new on that front. We can just hope it doesn’t go on for another fortysome years.

So I’m going to take advantage of the stalemate to ask the reader to think about a bigger picture that may be more interesting. It stems from a comment from my partner Maryo, from whom I learn too much to dismiss anything she says. ‘Why are you “romancing the river”?’ she asked the other day. ‘Romance is such a cheapened concept today – bodice-ripping stories of ridiculous antagonistic love. You’re undermining the value of your work, calling it a “romance.”’

‘Well,’ I said – figuring that if she feels that way, maybe my readers raise the same question – ‘maybe one of the things a writer ought to try to do is restore the value of words and the concepts they once represented that have become devalued through misuse.’ Spoken like a true Don Quixote, another old man who took arms, sort of, against abuse of the concept of ‘romance.’

I do think that one of the things that ‘civilization’ does in civilizing us is to simplify things for us, including words whose complexity and depth embrace concepts, ideas and feelings that can be inconvenient to an orderly civilized society. A  ‘romance,’ from the medieval era on into the early 20th century, was a story of an adventure in pursuit of something mysterious, exciting, challenging, something beyond everyday life. That could be the pursuit of a love relationship that was life-changing (and maybe life-endangering) for its participants – Tristan and Isolde, Launcelot and Guinevere, Romeo and Juliet, Bonnie and Clyde.

But on a much larger scale, the romantic adventure can be establishing a relationship with anything outside of ourselves that intrigues or challenges us. The relationship can emerge with a place, a house, a horse, a car, a continent, a river, an idea, as well as another person, anything that intrigues us, wakes up our imagination – arational or prerational relationships that make the civilizing forces nervous. The relationship can run the quick dynamic spectrum from arational love to its flip side arational hate, through all the intermediary love-hate variations. It can also have a mythically selective or even creative attitude toward the gray-zone relationship between ‘truth’ and fact. Which leads those trying to develop an orderly civilization to dismiss anything (ad)venturing into the mythic as a lie. It just seems simpler that way.

The first comprehensive study of the Colorado River region was uncivilized enough to state upfront its romantic origins: Frederick Dellenbaugh’s Romance of the Colorado River. Dellenbaugh’s book (available online for a pittance) delved as deeply as was possible at that time into both the First People prehistory in the region and the early history of the Euro-American invasion, from the Spanish trying to work their way up the river from its contentious confluence with the Gulf of California (‘Sea of Cortez’ to them) to the trappers imposing the first major Euro-American change on the river, stripping its tributaries of their beavers which increased the size and violence of the river’s annual spring-summer runoff of snowmelt. But the heart of the book is John Wesley Powell’s explorations to link the upper river and the lower river through its canyons.

Dellenbaugh, as a seventeen-year-old, accompanied Powell on his second Colorado River expedition, a ‘baptism under water’ (often literally) that shaped his ‘romantic’ vision. In his ‘Introduction,’ after observing that most of the great rivers that humans encountered in exploration and settlement gradually became like foster parents to those who settled along them, carrying goods for them and generally watering and growing their settlements, he says of the Colorado:

Then, by contrast, it is all the more remarkable to meet with one great river which is none of these helpful things, but which, on the contrary, is a veritable dragon, loud in its dangerous lair, defiant, fierce, opposing utility everywhere, refusing absolutely to be bridled by Commerce, perpetuating a wilderness, prohibiting mankind’s encroachments, and in its immediate tide presenting a formidable host of snarling waters whose angry roar, reverberating wildly league after league between giant rock-walls carved through the bowels of the earth, heralds the impossibility of human conquest and smothers hope.

Dellenbaugh’s Romance was published in 1903. That same year, another great southwestern writer, Mary Hunter Austin came out with her Land of Little Rain, a fascinating collection of her explorations in the deserts of the lower Colorado River region. In that book she offered what might be a cautionary note about ‘romancing the river,’ in an observation about a small Arizona tributary of the Colorado River, ‘the fabled Hassayampa… of whose waters, if any drink, they can no more see fact as naked fact, but all radiant with the color of romance.’

I will now indulge my tendency to take a ‘tectonic’ look at history – looking for large chunks colliding or grating together or subducting under each other. I see the history of our engagement with the Colorado River dividing into three ‘tectonic romances’:  first, the Romance of Exploration, which is chronicled in a couple different ways by those two explorers, Dellenbaugh and Austin; their 1903 publications summarize that age and put a semi-colon at the end of the period, as it were.

Second, the Romance of Reclamation: 1903 also marks the year the U.S. Reclamation Service came into being, an organization created almost specifically for settling the Colorado River deserts. Civilized people on both sides of the question would deny that there was any ‘romance’ to reclamation, but one early Bureau engineer would publicly disagree, writing in 1918 about ‘the romance of reclamation’:

A vein of romance runs through every form of human endeavor…. In the desert romance finds its chief essentials in adventure, courage, daring and self-sacrifice. For more than half a century man has been writing a romance of compelling interest upon the face of the dusty earth. Irrigation, with Midas’ touch, has changed the desert’s frown to smiling vistas of verdure.

C.J. Blanchard of the U.S. Reclamation Service authored that steaming verdure. The Service at that time was under the U.S. Geological Survey, a scientific organization disciplined to the ‘look before you leap’ methods of science, discerning the reality of a situation and adapting to that; but the Reclamation Service, frustrated by the seasonal flood-to-trickle flows of the Colorado, thought that changing that reality (through storage and redistribution) was a more promising route than adapting to it, and so was on its way to becoming independent of the USGS when Blanchard wrote his ‘romance of irrigation’ for an educational journal called The Mentor (thanks, Dave Primus, for calling it to my attention).

The best-known document of the Romance of Reclamation was of course the Colorado River Compact – a document in which the romance of reclamation overrode any relationship to ‘naked fact’ about the river and its flows, a situation that is now biting our collective ass. Yet an Arizona water maven said recently that any Bureau of Reclamation solution to the seven-state impasse would have to cleave closely to the Compact…. The history of the Romance of Reclamation has been written in the gaggle of Congressional acts, court decisions, treaties, regulations and directives that make up the ‘Law of the River’ (recitations of which never seem to include the 1908 Winters Doctrine allocating assumed water to federal reservations, including to the First Peoples).

The end of the Romance of Reclamation would be in the 1960s, pick your date: publication of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring in 1962, passage of the Wilderness Act in 1964, passage of the Environmental Policy Act in 1969 – a decade in which the general American perception of the West underwent a sea change, from seeing it as a workplace for producing the resources to feed the American people and industries, to seeing it as a great natural playground to which America’s predominantly urban population could go to recharge, with a resulting desire to protect it from the very industrial consumption that supported the American ‘lifestyle.’.

This was the dawn of the third romantic epoch in our relationship with the river (and the continent in general) – the Romance of Restoration and Revision, driven by a belief that we have sinned against capital-N Nature – with many naked facts as evidence – and can only expiate our sins by preserving what remains of the nonhuman environment, restoring what we can of the damage we’ve done, and revising our own systems for consuming nature (e.g., renewable energy).

Aesthetics are at the root of our romance with capital-N Nature, aesthetics best served by the (increasingly rare) opportunity to be alone with and ‘silent on a peak in Darien,’ as Keats put it. We have a large (and growing) number of excellent writer who work to elaborate on that aesthetic – Ed Abbey first, Craig Childs, Heather Hansman, Kevin Fedarko, to name a few.

But the aesthetic yearning to ultimately ‘put it back the way it was’ does not extend to other equally naked facts, like the dependence of the outdoor recreation industries on the creation of big mountain-highway traffic jams pumping big quantities of carbon and nitrogen gases into the already overladen atmosphere, as we all load up our cars with expensive gear to go off to commune with Nature. Or the naked fact that maintaining civilization-as-we-know-it for 300 million people involves a lot of nonrewable extraction from Nature that it will be very difficult to move away from entirely – unless we figure out how to control our breeding.

Just as significant achievements were achieved under the Romance of Reclamation, so significant achievements have been achieved under the Romance of Restoration and Revision – the setting aside of millions of acres of still-sort-of-wild land, instream flow laws, increasingly responsible forest management, et cetera. But we are clearly still in the early transition – half a century later – to a more realistic romance with restoring and revising to a kinder gentler relationship with the nonhuman systems of nature. And right now, we  are experiencing a major counter-attack from the societal forces whose aesthetics still imagine a ‘working landscape’ of derricks, mines and other industrial-scale harvests, all suffused with the ‘smell of money,’ societal forces that believe the best of times were before we woke up to the increasingly fragile finitude of our planet under the burden of us. Let’s all go back and make America great again!

I cannot now imagine when and how this third epoch of our romance with the river will end. I think this aesthetic romance might peak with the ‘breaching’ of Glen Canyon Dam, an action that has taken on a somewhat mythic quality for today’s river romantics. I don’t think we will tear it down – let it stand as a monument to…something. But I suspect that even the Bureau of Reclamation is exploring some way of tunneling around it at river level, as we continue to flirt with the disaster of dead pool behind the dam. It will not be easy, due to the silt already piled up at the dam – but really, nothing is going to be easy anymore; that blessed civilization is now in the rear-view mirror.

I’m going to take advantage of the lull in the short-term news about the river’s management for maybe the next decade, to take a look at each of these three epochs of ‘romancing the river’ and their relationship to the ‘naked facts’ of the river – mostly see if there might be something there we’ve overlooked that might help us move forward in our ever-emerging relationship of this ‘First River of the Anthropocene.’ Onward and outward.