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The Rio Grande is seen in 2000 near the Paseo del Norte bridge in Albuquerque. (journal file)
Journal environment reporter John Fleck’s article about the Rio Grande becoming a human plumbing system spoke to my heart. I have lived in Albuquerque all of my life, and have watched the great river’s natural flow and seasonal cycles dwindle under the care of those wise engineers who have altered it.
I grew up in the South Valley in the Mountain View community. My great-grandparents were early settlers there, establishing a dairy that later converted to a cattle ranch.
I rode a horse in the valley before I knew how to ride a bicycle. Riding down to the end of Shirk Lane (then Peachtree Road) and through the river bosque was a favorite activity.
During summer months, that stretch of the river often went dry.
Friends and I could ride our horses out on some of the sand bars in the middle of the riverbed, always watchful for quicksand.
We (kids) also knew that water could come running if it rained somewhere in the distant mountains. But the dry warm sand, and patches of clay with its patterns of cracks, were a natural part of the river’s cycle.
We were always amazed that tadpoles and the silvery minnows would return as soon as water was again on the surface. Frogs and toads, and minnows, would always a part of the bosque, in spite of the expected dry spells.
When the rains came, the river filled. Every year, it “overflowed” its bed inner and flooded the trees in the bosque, stopping at the outer dykes.
The trails through the trees would be too muddy to ride on for perhaps a week. Then we could wind around the muddy patches and navigate our usual routes.
This bosque flooding happened at least once every summer, sometimes several times. We knew this was what irrigated the bosque, what started the new cottonwood saplings growing.
The trees were thick in the bosque then, the old ones shading and protecting the young ones. A beautiful circle of life.
I was at the river’s edge for a magical moment in my life.
I and a friend had ridden through the bosque on a known trail just as the sun was setting on the horizon. The trail ended where the cottonwoods ended, at the drop-off of the then dry riverbed.
As we sat and watched, water came from upstream, slowly and gently winding and spreading over the dry riverbed.
The sunset’s reflection turned the water into a flow of pure gold. We sat in awe, watching until the sun was gone and the river water was flowing gently past as though it had never been gone.
Those days of watching the wet and dry spells of the river are gone.
I still ride or walk the bosque, but all of the trees are now only the old ones. The wise Corps of Engineers stopped the natural flooding and reseeding of the bosque bed years ago.
I think the little minnow, like the tadpole, will survive as it always has, going under the surface during dry spells. The trees will not.
The bosque is getting dangerously sparse. It breaks my heart to watch it happen.
