Colorado Environmental Writers
New Anthology Celebrates the Poudre River
By Jenny Shank, 12-06-06
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Pulse of the River: Colorado Writers Speak for the Endangered Cache la Poudre is a new collection of essays, poetry, and fiction about Colorado's Cache la Poudre river. In their introduction, editors Gary Wockner and Laura Pritchett, who had previously worked together on the anthology Comeback Wolves, write about how they found the river "bone dry" one day as they hiked together. "Three large dam-and-reservoir projects are in the works," they write, "that will take ever more of the Poudre's flow and divert it out of the main channel toward the unquenchable thirst of its users." The writers whose work is collected in Pulse of the River are passionate advocates of the Poudre's preservation, and many describe through poetry and prose how the river has sustained and healed them, physically and emotionally.
In Wockner's essay, "Against the Current," he describes how a move to Fort Collins to a home near the Poudre's banks helped him shrug off a malaise and regain physical fitness. He also provides a sketch of the difficulty of increasing the Poudre's flow, given Colorado's complex water rights laws. "Water in Colorado, and throughout much of the West," he writes, is a legally a commodity--not a public resource like forests, open space, and wildlife--and every drop of water is more-or-less owned by some entity that has a full legal right to use it." Among other conservation methods, Wockner proposes the creation of "'river health funds' that buy rights to water at market prices and keep water in the river for the greater good."
In her essay "Godzilla at the River," Laura Pritchett writes about how she was struck with a mysterious, debilitating condition that left her in too much pain to write or even play with her children. While she underwent many treatments and evaluations, she visited the Poudre for solace, and found signs that others had used the river for their ceremonies. "On one sandy beach, I frequently find this: Yellow cornmeal sprinkled in a circle with deep-red rose petals scattered on the inside. Footprints all around--someone has been dancing!"
The other essays in the anthology include Todd Simmons graphic account about how he found a "dead and decaying black bear," near the Poudre River, loaded it into a sack, carried it to the riverbank, and started dismembering it and feeding it piece by piece into the water. "…I toss body parts and handfuls of maggots and other pieces of bear into the river. I've never heard of a ritual like this, but I'm sure I'm not the first to imagine a dead black bear can add some sort of hoodoo-voodoo protection against confused progress."
The Poudre has also served as the muse for a number of northern Colorado poets, including CSU professor John Calderazzo, whose "Herons" is a tribute to the waterfowl he observed above the river. "They might have flown in/ from China or the Cretaceous,/ they look so odd,/ great blue herons wheeling/ in twos and threes over the red rock wall/ carved by the hissing river."
On the books website, Wockner explains that he hopes the collection will "help galvanize public sentiment about the beauty and necessity of the Poudre." Proceeds will be donated to Colorado Water Trust. Pulse of the River is available now online and in bookstores.
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