Rio Grande Voices: Revering old man river

New Mexico Wildlife Federation plans a new recreation area that could inspire more Santa Feans to reconnect with a ‘gnarly’ waterway

Staci Matlock | The New Mexican

12/2/2007 -

Picture this: The wide Mississippi, the big Snake and the deep Columbia rivers are sitting at a bar. In walks the Rio Grande.

How would you describe him?

Psychologist Alan Hamilton and an alliance of river advocates asked several diverse groups of New Mexicans that very question as part of a study conducted by the Alliance of the Rio Grande Heritage in 2003. The organization wanted to understand how New Mexicans perceived the Rio Grande.

They were a little stunned by the answers.

"People most often described the Rio Grande as old, an outsider, dressed kind of like a street person," says Hamilton, conservation director for the New Mexico Wildlife Federation. "That persona is not a way to connect people to the river enough that they will fight for its survival."

Hamilton describes the study as he dodges mucky ponds near the Rio Grande.

He's walking along the river where the Buckman Direct Diversion Project will one da'y draw water from the Rio Grande and pipe it to Santa Fe. It is a lush bosque of cottonwoods, salt cedar and Russian olive trees about 15 miles west of the city, by way of the bone-rattling dirt Buckman Road. Here, the chocolate brown Great River rolls smoothly past the rocky black crags of Diablo Canyon.

To some degree, Hamilton understands the disaffection some people seem to harbor for the Rio Grande. "It's a gnarly old river, not a pristine, smooth one like people think of big rivers," he says.

Trashed treasure

Up north where the ancient river begins near Colorado's San Luis Valley, the river is wide, rolling and often clear. By the time it reaches the 600-foot-deep Rio Grande Gorge, the river crashes wildly through rocks. A hundred miles later, at Buckman, the river has calmed again to a meandering stroll.

Few places along its length allow people to get up close and personal with the Rio Grande. For Santa Feans, the Buckman site is the closest point to toss out a fishing line or put in a raft. "Not enough people have a real experiential connection to the river," Hamilton says. "This is Santa Fe's access point to the river. But not too many hikers and mountain bikers use it."

The river's banks — a half-mile in either direction from Buckman — are littered with shotgun shells, beer cans, cassette tapes and fast-food bags. There's little to mark the place where the historic Chile Line train once passed through, bringing people from Pojoaque to the remnants of the old town of Buckman.

"It's sad," Hamilton says, looking at a mound of trash in one spot.

It's the same problem the Denver native saw along the Pecos River when he first moved to New Mexico 25 years ago and lived in a century-old cabin. "It was amazing living on the river. It was also hard. People were always trashing it up," he says.

Helping out

A group of youths and adults unload rafts at the river. Their arrival excites Hamilton — it's the kind of connection he would like to see more people making with the river.

"People who've grown up here have an experience with the river on a lot of levels — culturally, socially and historically," he says. "New people and people living in cities have less of a connection. They almost seem embarrassed by the river. It's not the Columbia. But it has its own particular charm. If you get to know it, it's like no other river in the world."

Hamilton and the New Mexico Wildlife Federation would like to work with Santa Fe youth and other volunteers to clean up the area. They would like to make it friendlier to hikers, rafters, mountain bikers and horseback riders so they could enjoy a meandering, clean trail near the river. They also hope the Buckman diversion board will let them create a recreation trail along the planned route of the pipeline that will deliver water to the city.

Hamilton isn't advocating a haven for only rafters and recreationists on the river. He believes local agriculture needs to be supported as part of protecting the Rio Grande.

To do both, he started a nonprofit called Rio Grande Return. Working with local farmers along the Rio Grande, he's selling gift baskets that include local honey, salsa and jams as well as beauty products. The price for each basket includes a donation of $15 or more that Hamilton passes on to various conservation groups working on Rio Grande such as Amigos Bravos, Rio Grande Restoration and the Rio Grande Agriculture Land Trust.

"There are so many good organizations out there doing good work on the river. They are underfunded and understaffed," Hamilton says.

"This is a way for people to give back to a river that gives us so much," he says.

Loss of place

Hamilton sees the human detritus along this stretch of the Rio Grande not only as a sign of people's aloofness toward the river but as a symbol of a deeper issue.

"I really feel that environmental degradation is an external manifestation of our own internal degradation as a culture," he says. "It's a symbol of the sickness in the dominant culture, our lack of connection to place. In our culture, we sell our resources for short-term gain."

As we squander our natural resources, our landscapes become less healthy, and so do we, Hamilton says, noting the "epidemic of depression" affecting 20 million Americans.

"We are in the midst of a catastrophic environmental crisis and simultaneously we are suffering a epidemic mental-health crisis," Hamilton wrote in a recent lecture at the Strategic Leadership Institute. "Our mental health is so interrelated with environmental health that healing and restoration are ultimately dependent upon each other. We can't do one without the other."

In a recent e-mail, Hamilton writes about the contrast with places he has visited in West Africa, where "survival depends on (the) ability to live in harmony with the earth, and the rains ... I think there is joy in this connection, in the feeling of belonging to a place and in turn being sustained by it. I think we (as a culture) have forgotten how to belong and be committed to a place. Instead of learning how to belong, we compensate by trying to own."

Rivers like the Rio Grande are generous, Hamilton says. "It goes where we direct it and (along it) we grow cows. Grow fields. Grow cities. Grow Rio Rancho. But at what point do we start to diminish what attracts us all to such a unique place?" he asks. "If we lost the Rio Grande, we would all suffer on levels we can't imagine."

Contact Staci Matlock at 470-9843 or smatlock@sfnewmexican.com.

EDITOR'S NOTE: Rio Grande Voices is an occasional feature about people who live within the Rio Grande basin and whose work involves the river.

FIND OUT MORE ABOUT RIO GRANDE RETURN

Rio Grande Return s a Santa Fe-based nonprofit supporting local farmers and raising money for conservation groups working to protect the river. For a list of products and prices, visit www.riograndereturn.com or call 505-466-1767.