I'm John Harrington from my retirement location in southwest Washington state for High Plains Public Radio, Radio Readers Book Club.
Elizabeth Kolbert begins her latest book, Under a White Sky, The Nature of the Future, with a chapter: “Down the River”
On the first page one can read that, “Rivers make good metaphors – too good, perhaps.
They can stand for time, for change, and for life itself. Bight and clear or murky and charged with meaning rivers can signify destiny, or a coming into knowledge, or coming upon that which one would rather not know.”
I was a geography faculty member at K-State from 1994 – 2018. Research funding for looking at how human impacts driven by global change were playing out led me to southwestern part of Kansas. Those years of study, in the area and in the library, helped me get a better feel for one of the major rivers of the Great Plains.
When I first learned of Max McCoy’s book, Elevations, I was reminded of those among us who set challenging goals for themselves and work toward accomplishment. Climbing all the 14ers in Colorado, finding your way to each state high point, like Mt Sunflower. My dad was very proud that he taken photographs of all 50 US state capital buildings. We gather material for future story telling as we work toward these personal goals.
I was raised in upstate New York, so I learned one pronunciation for the Arkansas River and got to know it’s called the Arkansas when I moved to the Great Plains. My view of seeing water always flowing in a river changed - with flood flows driven by spring thunderstorms shifting to a river course with seemingly no water in the late summer and fall.
There are locally important rivers in the area where I now live on the west side of the Cascade Mountain range that transport a lot more water than the Arkansas but you will not find them on a list of important rivers.
Engineers measure flow in cubic feet per second or discharge – numbers allowing scientific comparison). Factors other than river length and flow are also important - rivers are connectors – they help us get from here to there. Important trails along river courses used by natives and Euro-American explorers became the location for railroad lines and later highways, like US highway 50, helping with the movement of people, goods, and ideas. Technology has enabled this movement to be quite rapid today.
I had a professor who talked about the need to slow down and really get to know a location. Get out of the car; ride a bicycle; or walk. Let the local environment help you decide where to wander so that you develop a sense of place.
Max McCoy sure has developed and shares his sense of the river – and that sense includes the people and their struggles.
My own sense of the Arkansas comes in part from those research trips to the southwestern part of Kansas. I’ve looked at the cottonwoods and the salt cedar along the riverbanks and the all-terrain vehicle tracks in the river channel at Garden City.
I’ve been in the dunes and seen the sand sage prairie on the southside of the river on my way to visit a cattle feed yard and to photograph the Holcomb Station after learning the strange politics of a coal-fired power plant sitting on top of a large natural gas field.
I’ve also learned perhaps a bit more than I wanted about lawyers and water rights, John Martin reservoir and irrigation return flows, and the not-so-great quality of the water crossing the state line near Syracuse. Once you get to know a bit about a place or a river, not only do you want to share what you’ve learned with others, you are likely drawn back again to refresh your memories and build new ones.
I'm John Harrington for HPPR's Radio Reader's Book Club.
