Chapter 8
There’s good water and there’s bad water. Clean sweet water is the lifeblood of humankind. And nowhere is that truth more pronounced than in desert country. While New Mexico has several permanent rivers within its borders, such as the Rio Grande, the Pecos, the Gila, and the San Juan, it also has a large number of ephemeral streams as evidenced by the numerous dry creek beds or arroyos. The arts of irrigation were invented here by an ancient people. This is the bastion of the flash flood. The law practice of ‘water rights’ is a valid specialty here as interstate compacts abound. Even today, the City of Albuquerque draws drinking water from the distant Colorado River watershed. Maintaining the adequacy and purity of our most precious resource is a never-ending battle.
These waterways, wet or dry, have been the stuff of timeless legends, books, and newspaper articles. Who has not heard of Francisco Coronado, Don Juan de Oñate, Cochise, Judge Roy Bean, Charles Goodnight, Colonel John Wesley Powell, Zebulon Pike, Kit Carson, Josiah Gregg, or even today’s plight of the silvery minnow?
All of New Mexico’s perennial streams rise in mountain country from the melt of the winter snowpack. Good snow begets good water. The streams have always been the avenues for exploration and commerce. The famed king’s highway from Mexico City to Santa Fe, the ‘Camino Real’, followed the Rio Grande north from El Paso. The Mexicans refer to the famed river as the ‘Rio Bravo del Norte’. The Rio Grande or ‘great river’ is listed as the sixth longest river in North America. It rises west of Creede in southern Colorado and runs for 1885 miles before emptying into the Gulf of Mexico near Port Isabel, Texas.
The Rio Grande has numerous tributaries that also add to its water supply, but these tributaries normally collect their waters from sporadic rainstorms during the summer ‘monsoon’ season when a high-pressure area, the Bermuda high, draws moisture up over the state from the Gulf of Mexico. Sometimes the storms are false alarms. The falling rain evaporates before reaching the surface of the earth. This phenomenon is called virga. Sometimes on a lazy summer afternoon, you can watch small wispy clouds disappear before your eyes. Other times, huge thunderheads or anvil clouds billow high into the atmosphere over nearby mountains. New Mexicans can actually smell pending rain – it’s accompanied by a broad smile. The deluge begins. And because of steep terrain, non-permeable soils, and sparse vegetation, the run-off gathers quickly, rushing down arroyos, and catching the unwary oftentimes in great peril.
Obviously, these flash floods are the means that vast amounts of silt are transported from one locale to the next. The middle Rio Grande has several such sources – the Galisteo, the Jemez, the Puerco, and the Salado being major among them. Since the Rio Grande sports one of the world’s principal dams near the town of Truth or Consequences (yes, there really is such a town), the question looms – how long will that dam be viable before all the money spent constructing it will have been wasted because it has silted over?
It is into this mystery that Clark has propelled himself with his part-time school year and full-time summer job with the United States Geological Survey, Water Resources Bureau, Quality of Water Branch. He had now been with them for one year and thought himself quite fortunate to have been accepted. He liked the work. The office had responsibility for that section of the Rio that extended from Cochiti Dam on the north to Elephant Butte on the south. While Elephant Butte lays claim to being one of the world’s principal dams, Cochiti claims the distinction of being the world’s tenth largest earthen dam. ‘A dance for rain you’ll never see until you see them dance at Cochiti’ is a line from a famous New Mexican poet, Fray Angelico Chavez. It rather dramatizes the zeal with which this area pleads with Father Sky for precipitation.