|
It’s been a tough
summer in the Durango self-image department. In a matter
of weeks, the town went from darling of the tourist trade
to poster child for natural disasters - fires, drought,
mud flows, rock slides, fish die-offs and floods. And
now, just when we thought it was safe to go back to watching
or reading the national media, we are bestowed with the
dubious distinction of conspicuous water consumers.
In case you haven’t heard, the colossus of the publishing
world, Time Magazine, recently took Durango to task for
its flagrant waste of water in the midst of what are possibly
the worst drought conditions in the United States.
“Local farmers are suffering through the worst drought
in memory, so why is the golf course green?” asks
the article’s author, Terry McCarthy. Specifically,
McCarthy mentions El Patio, which uses outdoor misters
to cool “diners” and the golf course (presumably
Hillcrest) that has fairways greener than “fresh
limes.”
He goes on to say that, in the name of preserving our
“oasis environment,” we use 6 million gallons
of water a day - water that would otherwise “feed
the Colorado River” (not to mention millions of
starving swimming pools in Las Vegas and L.A., as City
Manager Bob Ledger points out.)
McCarthy pours salt in the wound by comparing the town
to Aspen and Telluride, a home for wealthy retirees but
with a crappier economy riddled by restaurant lay-offs.
And since the summer’s fires have apparently put
an end to most hiking, as he asserts, there is little
else to do but drive our pickups out onto the dry bed
of Lemon Reservoir to “make doughnut shapes with
our tires” and, of course, dream up new ways to
expend all that water just flowing on by.
It’s not a pretty picture: an enclave of heathens,
who, when not whipping shitties at the local reservoir,
shamelessly watering their lawns, preferably at high noon,
sporting muscle-Ts to show off beer guts cultivated during
a summer of drinking margs under the misters at El Patio
and downing beers on the emerald turf of the Hillcrest
back nine.
With such a portrayal going out across the country, it’s
easy to get a little defensive. For starters, some would
make a case for misters, saying they beat energy-guzzling
air conditioners while helping to keep summertime bodily
odors at bay. Others would argue there’s nothing
wrong with fresh limes on the golf course, and in fact,
they go great with cold beers on a hot day.
However, McCarthy’s depiction is particularly painful
to those of us who spent countless hours meticulously
connecting and burying low-flow, soaker hoses, shoveling
water-preserving mulch, saving gray water for the garden,
seeking out xeric plants and rising at the crack of dawn
to water what little of our yards we had left. I will
even admit, at the risk of being publicly ostracized,
that for a while I was so scared of a water shortage that
I adopted an every-three-days-or-so showering regimen
(which isn’t as bad as it sounds given the modern
miracle of deodorant). My car hasn’t been washed
in so long I forgot what color it is, and I’m sure
I’ve earned the moniker “watering nazi”
from more than one neighbor who’s been a recipient
of my water-conservation sermon.
Of course, none of this erases the two biggest problems
facing us: 1) we live in a desert and 2) rampant growth
is threatening to gobble up all the water, leaving farmers
high and dry. Have we not learned one damn thing, McCarthy
asks, from our ill-fated forebearers, the Ancestral Puebloans,
who met an untimely and merciless demise, mostly as a
result of their own unbridled growth?
True, living in the West can be construed as ludicrous.
And if that is the case, may I ask, where then is a sane
place to live? Texas and Oklahoma, which are plagued by
summertime tornadoes? The Gulf Coast, which receives regular
batterings from hurricanes? Or perhaps the frigid north,
where temperatures send people scurrying indoors to their
heated homes for the greater part of the winter? Perhaps
we should all move east, where water is usually plentiful
but every available piece of land has been privatized,
subdivided and parceled out. We could abandon the West,
chalk it up to failed experiences, and unmanifest our
destiny.
But that’s not very likely, is it?
And what McCarthy fails to expand upon (and what those
unfamiliar with water issues in the West won’t realize
reading his article) is that Durango is not an isolated
pocket of hedonism, wantonly scheming up new ways to hoard
water from others. Rather, the history of water in the
West runs deep and wide, starting on the West Coast (San
Francisco included) and winding its way east, through
Reno, Vegas, St. George, Boise, Flagstaff, Phoenix, Tucson,
Salt Lake, Moab, Denver and Albuquerque, to name a few.
Of course, encapsulating all of this into a short story
on Durango, its one municipal golf course, a struggling
farmer and a restaurant that mists patrons with water
is so much easier. But McCarthy should be forewarned:
He is treading not only in precious but deep, tumultuous
waters. And summing up the West’s messy water woes
in one neat package is unfair, not only to Durango but
millions of unenlightened readers who are left with an
extremely truncated view of the issue.
-
Missy Votel
|
