Ken Salazar and ALP

by Ken Wright

In Colorado, Ken Salazar has been an outspoken, lifelong supporter of ALP, the project American Rivers saw as threatening a river.  He supported it while Colorado Governor Roy Romer's chief legal advisor and head of the Department of Natural Resources, then as Colorado Attorney General, then as U.S. Senator, and now as head of Interior.  He even used ALP to help propel himself into the senate seat through the spectacle of publicly kissing the ring of the lawyer who was the project godfather, of course with an adoring and uncritical press in tow.  On that occasion he declared with great humility that everything he knew about western water law he learned at the knee of the godfather.  I'm not kidding.

As for ALP, it is a shocker of a water project, even by western pork barrel standards.  It has no uses, just some laughable nonbinding scenarios for uses published in the project's final EIS, of which 5 were written as due diligence smoke screens for this monument to mindless federal pork.  The construction costs of the project are over $600 million already, with hundreds of million more needed to move even a small portion of the water to any conceivable point of use since, at present, only a reservoir perched on a hillside exists with a complement of energy guzzling pumps needed to lift the water 500 feet from the river to the reservoir.  Billions more in interest payments will ultimately be added to the fiscal insanity since the public pays for all but a sliver of the costs.

The reservoir is fittingly named for Salazar's predecessor in the senate, Ben Nighthorse Campbell.  He resigned from the senate while under felony investigation for influence peddling, thus opening the way for Salazar's relentless climb.

*****

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Learn more about Ken Wright at monkeywrenchdad.com.

Yucca season

by Ken Wright
A walk up the mesa-side above our house shows that even the yucca are grooving on the long-awaited Spring sunshine ...

*****

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Learn more about Ken Wright at monkeywrenchdad.com.

Pulling out the river gear ...

by Ken Wright

At last.

Got on the river a couple of times this past weekend, finally moving the Summer (in the broad, six-month-long season sense) from the getting-the-gear-out stage to the getting-out-with-gear phase. At last!

(Read about my affection for that Spring ritual of pulling out gear in "Getting in Gear," this month's "San Juandering" column, in the June Inside Outside. )

On Saturday some friends and I took my niece and her husband on a rollicking paddle run through town. The river had peaked that morning, at 5,100 cfs. It was a wet, fast, and rockin' ride -- and my niece's husband's first-ever river trip. A good one, fer sher.

And on Monday, a slice of our river-trip tribe gathered for a duckie trip down a little-run section of our home river, paddling the Animas from Baker's Bridge to Trimble Lane. This lovely, riffly, meandering stretch features big cottonwoods, sweeping views of the redrocked upper Animas Valley and upstream toward Engineer Mountain and surrounding still-snowfielded peaks. We also passed the confluence of Hermosa Creek and the Animas.

Let Summer roll!

Read "Getting in Gear" here.

Check out some pics of the Baker's Bridge to Trimble Lane run on the Animas River here.

*****

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Learn more about Ken Wright at monkeywrenchdad.com.

Losing Lost

by Ken Wright

Well, it's over.

In one sense, my response is thank God! I can finally quit being lost in Lost! There's always a sense of relief when any long-term project ends. And keep up on Lost is nothing if not a project one must be devoted to in order to make it through all six seasons of the show's many -- very many -- convoluted and often confusing plot trajectories.

In another sense, though, I'm sad. Because the end of Lost also means the end of one more family ritual for our slowly aging and not-so-slowly growing-up family.

For the past few years (we came into Lost via DVD, after the show had already aired for three seasons), Lost has been our family campfire. Once or twice a week, we would meet together in front of the TV at a predetermined time for another wild chapter in this epic tale we were sharing in.

While most any television show could serve this gathering-around function, Lost was a particularly good family campfire. It managed to engage and entertain us adults as well as our two teens, with deep, effective characters wrapped in an engrossing, if warped, ongoing and ever-unfolding adventure-tale. And it was a literary tale that spoke to its audience in a uniquely compelling way: by unfolding on a human scale -- years, just like real life does -- that few, if any, other forms of literature can claim. So this allowed us, for the past few years of our lives together, to get wrapped up in the same narrative. And it was a narrative that in turn provided more than just the actual "campfire" time together.

Lost also offered ample fuel for the fires of conversation, too. Because Lost -- as this week's series finale drove home -- was all about allegories for the various questions and challenges of life and living -- from parenting/child relations, to love, to honor, to religion, and ... well every Lost fan could come up with their own list of the many things they read between the show's scripted lines.

From my own fully-biased point of view, a major theme of Lost was tribalism: How we function as intertwined individuals. How we become or select leaders. What our personal boundaries are. Responsibility, cooperation, and self reliance. And, as individuals, how we accept, swallow, and move on from our own pasts -- and how those in our lives do the same for us, and for themselves.

And, ultimately, as the last episode drove home in all its trademark bizarre beauty, Lost was about one question: How do we do those things well? How and why should be we be our best in the face of the often convoluted, sometimes confusing, and always ultimately inexplicable mystery that we we're all -- and all together --always surrounded by and engaged in, even if we don't crash on a weird island.

And these are things adults and parents have been discussing -- prompted by strange tales and metaphoric legends -- around campfires for a million years.

*****

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Learn more about Ken Wright at monkeywrenchdad.com.

The callings of Spring

by Ken Wright

Spring has finally, in big brilliant blast of sunshine, blessed us, and the earth is burst forth.

Or somesuch. In our neighborhood, that basically means that families like ours spend a lot time working around the yard in the sunshine. The wives among us tend to be digging with little bitty shovels and patting the earth with gloved hands. And doing a lot of pointing with those gloved hands, directing us husbands -- who brandish real shovels -- and the teen-aged draftees into this yardscaping enterprise, on what to move where and where to dig with those real shovels.

Oftentimes, while my wife is not looking, hunched over, working the ground and murmoring encouragement to some bedrazzled scrub, I find myself leaning against my shovel and staring ... out there, at the greater -- in both size and grandeur -- landscape around us. Up and away toward Perins Peak, or the La Platas, or some distant butte in Utah that I can see in my traveler's mind's eye beyond the curvature of the earth.

I often see my son when it's his shift in the Boda Garden, as we call my wife's yardly handwork, also staring off, perhaps kicking some skateboard trick in his mind.

Seems the gene doesn't fall very far from the double-helix.

Because this, I have found from a very unscientific, but usually very festive, survey, seems to be the norm among my married middle-aged male counterparts: Women work the yard, and men help. But they're really faking their enjoyment. (One good turn deserves another, eh?) What were really thinking about is ... going, out there, somewhere.

And we're thinking: God already made a garden, darlin'! Let us let Him tend to it with His all-powerful ways! And let us go forth and folic in his Creation! 

But my wife ain't buying it.

Anyway, while I may not always be the most exuberant of employees, I much do appreciate the fruits of this forced labor. And I enjoy seeing my wife's creativity and sense of beauty made manifest.

And given those gender differences in how we might prefer to spend sunny spring afternoons, I particularly appreciate my wife's long-running rock-garden project, because I think it represents the beset of us merged:

Sarah has lined the gardens around our yard with rocks gathered and carried from literally all over the world -- from the San Juan River to Alaska, from Mount Sneffels to Kauai, from the Upper Penninsula of Michigan to Norway to the Pacific Ocean off the Oregon Coast.

I know, because I, Webb and Anna carried them from where ever Sarah found them.

And I love it. This is, when I look at it now, a true coming together of  both our traveling and our homemaking. And that truly is making our home more beautiful.

*****

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Learn more about Ken Wright at monkeywrenchdad.com.