Bear River--The Long Trajectory
Bear River—The Long Trajectory
"We forget that the water cycle and the life cycle are one." —Jacques Cousteau
I owe my life to the Bear River. Every one of my ancestors relied on its waters for survival. The Gosiutes and Shoshones also relied on the Bear. The long-term residents of what the Mormon settlers came to call Logan and Brigham City taught the fair-skinned Richardsons and the Christensens and the McMasters how to keep from starving there. So my gratitude for the Bear River goes back over a thousand years and extends to all the generations of people, bobcats, coyotes, deer, seagulls, cranes, gophers, lizards, sagebrush, and sego lilies that kept the Bear River region strong and healthy.
As strong and healthy as it now stands.
We have to pass the river on intact.
*
I am not only grateful to the Bear, I am in awe of its vigor. This three-state, wandering waterway is the Great Salt Lake's largest tributary, and North America's largest river that does not reach the sea. Though tapped for agriculture, the Bear River still has free-flowing sections and the river's course moves with a river's own intelligence. Just look at it on a map. The Bear flows 350 miles—a bit like the trajectory of an arrow shot skyward—from the Uintas in central Utah up through a corner of Wyoming to Idaho's Soda Springs, then courses back south to Utah with its curves and oxbows and meanders slowing erosion and creating the soil of the living valleys that we plant, enjoy, and cherish. As a sideline, rivers create dirt, no charge. The Bear River's waters end their trip at the wild marshes that embrace the eastern shores of the Great Salt Lake, near Brigham City, home to a national flyway for more birds than anyone can count. Of course people do try. They've tallied tundra swans, cinnamon teals, black-necked stilts, snowy plovers, avocets, marbled godwits, curlews, phalaropes, to name a few, and an array of wheeling gulls.
Want to see the beauty of a river's intelligence firsthand? Go to the Bear River Migratory Bird Refuge. Go and be deliciously small in the grand, wide world. Drive its 13 miles of gravel roads and marvel at vast beauty while the curve-billed ibises whomp past and a crew of white pelicans floats together like parked VW bugs in the distance. Laugh. Be with god—it is a godly place, so filled with life and in so many forms you'd swear the light was holy, light made just to warm the Wasatch peaks and draw the flocks and drape the fields in green and tawny gold.
We need to to pass the river on intact.
*
Enter the proposal to damn the Bear River. To provide water for a flood of human inhabitants who haven't arrived yet.
This short-sighted, well-meaning proposal tries to make the best use of Utah's limited water by damming the Bear with reservoirs for future agricultural and home use. But the plan ignores the long-term realities of a river system that already gives and supports life generously in our arid land. We live in a desert. A mountaintop desert that has strict limits. Ranchers know this. Farmers know this. Wise desert dwellers learn to live within the desert's water limits, or they don't last long.
For 170 years, Utah's new inhabitants, my ancestors among them, have thought of the Great Salt Lake, if they thought of it at all, as a waste place. A salty anomaly. A dead sea where civilization ends. But the Great Salt Lake is not dead thanks largely to the end-waters of the Bear River which contribute 65% of the fresh water entering its shores. And the Salt Lake Valley is livable thanks to this. An old river keeping an ancient trust.
Damming the Bear River is as smart as putting a tourniquet around Utah's neck. Two million people and the animals, plants, and insects who are their neighbors in Utah's most populous region, will suffer if the Bear no longer pours into the lake. And the lake dries up. And the dirt, dust, salt and heavy metals held deep in the lake's body become the newest arrivals. The new settlers. And settle they will. Over the Salt Lake Valley in the layers of a new Dust Bowl. With four million people wondering how it all went wrong.
No. That is only one possible future.
We can and will pass this river on intact.
*
The Bear River's health and strength still shine and feed and build and sustain along its 350 mile course, but especially where it empties into the Great Salt Lake. There, it welcomes avian and human visitors from across the continent, erasing the need for the infringements of technology, balancing the salinity of the lake with fresh water, moistening the desert with its well-travelled breath.
Strong and healthy, even after such a long trajectory.
Thank you, Bear River. I cannot imagine northern Utah without your gifts. I question the logic that allows twice the number of people to settle here in this desert. After all, this is the place. The place and the time for farmers, ranchers, birdwatchers and waterfowlers, families in subdivisions, and lone campers out in the Utah wilds to pass this river on intact so that it can scatter into marshes, empty all its riches, and demonstrate the power of letting go at journey's end.
An essay written for Friends of Great Salt Lake
