paper, rock, scissors

thoughts on boundary lines

feather, rock, beach. photo by Mackenzie Rivers

There’s a thought-line that says just before things get very dark we are often sparked into getting done whatever it is we’ve been avoiding. You know, do or die. I’ve been editing what I pray to the river goddesses is my final and complete manuscript of Girl Meets Boat, and by this I mean pawing through 30 years of writing, some of it river journals with pages glued together that I’m certain (since I can’t see it) contain my best writing ever! pages of rescued and transferred files from Macs old enough to be in some Apple musuem, and my god, every single version of every single essay I’ve ever written, because I (evidently) have a problem with the word delete.

I’m also keenly aware of just how many times I did nearly drown, and how, for all practical purposes, should have drowned. That I have an aptitude for jumping into the deep no matter the form it takes, and by this I also mean however unprepared. And that lo and behold, it wasn’t falling into the river or the ensuing life that was scary. That what’s truly terrifying is the here and now of coming back from a journey and trying to write about it so that it speaks outside of our own head, and heart.

We have two choices. Put it into the world, and by this I mean, set it down on a rock and walk away and maybe someone will come along, sit down to eat their turkey pastrami on rye and pick it up; after that, it may go into the trash bin with the crust. Maybe become a squirrel’s nest swathing. Maybe folded into an airplane and sent who-knows-where.

Or we keep it to ourselves.

Spoiler alert. Here’s the message I’m bringing back from the underworld of a very long chapter in a very deep place: there’s no rowing back upriver once we’re on the entry wave, and no matter how hard we try to row back upstream or hold ourself in one place, eventually the river is going to suck us onto that glassy precipice.

What you have to bring back is something that the world lacks—which is why you went to get it—and lacking it, the world does not know that it needs it. And so, on the return, when you come with your boon for the world and there is no reception, what are you going to do?

~~Joseph Campbell

From the Girl Meets Boat archives, in a written conversation back in 2007 with my (then, new) friend Ben Shedd, I give voice to an idea we’d talked about for a followup to his (and the first) NOVA documentary, Where Did the Colorado Go? which is to say, I wrote about rocks and paper, and cultural scissors. Looking back at it what I see is where we are, right now.

Hi Ben,

In addition to the water issues considered in that piece, there has been a long underlying, overlapping issue involving the Department of the Interior, the National Park Service, and Native American tribes (namely the Hopi, Navajo and Hualapai tribes) concerning the true boundary lines of the canyon, and the tribal, state, and federal rights that might flow from a determination of these lines.

During the summer of my first year at law school, the Park Archeologist at Grand Canyon, as an externship with the Department of the Interior, asked me to research and compile a detailed analysis of the development and establishment of the boundaries of Grand Canyon National Park. The development of the boundary was as multi-layered as the walls of Grand Canyon itself: on the surface involving a series of state law, Presidential Proclamations, the Law of the River, old English law pertaining to stream navigability at time of statehood, stream migration law by which a waterway can meander through property therefore altering boundary lines with no right of compensation, and men gallivanting through the sage on horseback; yet when it all came down to it, it was a basic question of where the historical high water line existed, and what laws would be used to determine “historical”.

The staking out of a territory is part and parcel of our cultural inheritance. In much the way that a sculpture can define an empty space, we use empty space to define our culture. Then of course the coexisting claims come in, interests with more heft wielding the greatest impact, broader pen strokes, more say. Our cultural inheritance, though, has been built upon the shifting sands of a system of justice, a system of property rights and rights as inalienable as having fresh water and air to breathe. And so, Where Did the Colorado Go? might be asked now as Where is the Grand Canyon?

As if we could lose such a thing, such a thing of immense greatness. And I am not referencing only size here, but the notion of wilderness, immense expanses of place we have decided to protect and maintain as they are, hopefully as they once were, because of their inherent, historical, cultural importance and the immensity of all that. Call it a State of the Union address, as it were: the condition existing between a culture and a place, an overlapping and shifting union built upon a foundation of? and for what reason? Well, those are the questions, and Where is the Grand Canyon? may help point us to an answer.

As part of my research for the externship I visited an attorney in Seattle who specialized in the confluence between water and Indian law; his credentials included winning the only tribal case, ergo, case of a sovereign nation (at that time, which was 1996) against the federal government pertaining to water rights (for the Zuni tribe of NM), as well as various tribal fishing rights cases in WA. Like something out of Erin Brockovich he unlocked a file cabinet and gave me documents constructed by the Office of the Solicitor (official Solicitor’s Opinions) pertaining to assertions made by several tribes as to reservation boundary issues alongside the river; these documents revealed the solicitor thought the tribes did have further claim to the boundaries. My research was to be used by the Interior in the government’s claim that the tribal boundaries did not in fact extend to the middle of the river. My research, besides the documents, did not show that, however.

The Navajo wanted more grazing rights; the Hualapai, the potential for developing a casino beside the river. (Indeed, the Hualpai in 2006 allowed a developer from Las Vegas to construct a glass see-through view platform that extends into the airspace over the river).

The questions that arise point to some timely issues: the ever unfurling water rights. These include tribal rights, needs, and claims; historical significance of tribes within our tourist culture (in one interesting exchange I witnessed, elders of the Hopi tribe informed the park archeologist that river trips and their passengers tromped through sacred sites every day. When the park archeologist asked Walter Hamana, the elder leading the discussion, “What is a sacred site?” he informed her she was, at that moment, standing on top of one); the impact of national parks and wilderness on an evolving culture; the management and protection of wilderness.

It asks the question What are Boundaries? Namely, of water, a thing that by its nature moves, creates, carves, destroys and rebuilds, whittles away? Of wilderness that can be contained within designated parameters, yet whose occupants have no sense or recognition of those delineations? Thinking here of wolves meandering across park boundaries. Then there’s the cultural significance of traveling to sacred places, both to native peoples and modern-day armchair adventurers, the Teva-clad masses who want to experience wilderness and the preservationists of nearly-vanished cultures?

There are the issues of scenic helicopter and airplane overflights, noisily shuttling tourists to gape above the vistas, yet within the solitude sought by hikers and rafters down below. Issues of access to wilderness, and the rights of access: can the Hopi be allowed to cross the boundaries of the Navajo reservation in order to collect hematite from within the National Park, essentially to revisit the sacred land of their ancestors because the Hopis need it for an important ritual, but the Hualapai “own” the collection permit issued by the Park Service, while the Hualapai sell the Hematite on the street in Flagstaff where it is bought by Navajo who then sell it at an inflated price to the Hopi?

Should the Hualapai tribe be allowed to build a casino on the banks of the river, within a National Park if their reservation does in fact extend to the middle of the river, not just to the old high water line? And can a scatter ring of driftwood, like the scum ring in a bathtub, be used in court to determine historical and therefore a legally recognized high water line? What if that year, as determined by carbon dating method, fell with a once-in-a-thousand-year flood cycle? Or a drought cycle? Is it just that a relatively young government such as the United States (the village at Old Oraibi on the Hopi Mesas has been inhabited continuosly for over 2500 years) has a greater say over boundary matters than tribal elders whose ancestors left written signs attesting to their occupation of Grand Canyon? Especially since the Presidential Proclamations establishing boundary lines were repealed and rewritten by corporate needs, such as the need for the railroad barons to cut a swath through the western sage?

Is it a good idea for cattle to be allowed to graze within a national park, Navajo cattle or anybody else’s, when those cattle have little sense of riparian watershed protection or the cultural significance and fragility of archeological sites?

In an interesting study as part of the EIS, ornithologists and wildlife biologists studying the endangered willow flycatcher determined that willow flycatchers choose non-native tamarisk trees in which to build its nest. Right beside native willows. What boundary exists that can impart to a species, flora and fauna, no, you go there, not here? And what of the unseen boundaries, the sacred places known to some only by story and by the passing down of information, these stories of place functioning as both significant tribal cultural ritual as well as intangible artifacts?

And so it would begin with a question, in the way that all scientific and imaginative inquiry begins. Where is the Grand Canyon?

But that is the bottom line, isn’t it? A boundary, despite a fence, hedgerow, wall, a chasm of stone with a green-brown muscle of a river cleaving soil and earth, the airspace through which a vessel can fly, a peregrine might sail, is intangible.

It is an intangible artifact of our creation, significant to us, but simply a line drawn into sand to someone else. Perhaps boundaries should be elasticized, sansabelted by an expansion of cultural needs, the ever-widening girth of change bulging at its imaginary seams. Can they be set in stone? Stone that can be eroded, chiseled and carried away over by a flood of time for which there is no boundary, save the hourglass of our immortality?

I think this would make an excellent documentary, but of course, I am not a filmmaker; that’s you. I’m a writer with a love for big questiona. I also have a penchant for idea, which did lead to a brief sojourn in L.A. working with a producer, but that is a story for another time. I am still not entirely clear how I envisioned a biographical film about Lillian Smith (blacklisted writer from Georgia, civil rights champion and friend of Martin Luther King, who wrote in the 1940s her novel Strange Fruit about an interracial love affair) but ended up reading scripts and picking up the dry cleaning of the producer of Bed of Roses. Don’t ask, I’ve never seen the movie.

I have been working as a writer since leaving my career as a river guide, that is, since Finn and motherhood. A collection of non fiction essays I wrote was sent the rounds of the big publishing houses by my agent, Jay Poyner, was well-received by the editors but axed by the marketing guys. My writing was given good feedback though, and so I have been forging ahead, re-working that collection into what has evolved as a natural history of people and place. Namely, how one girl met a boat, fell in love, and was swept away.

Talk to you soon,

Mackenzie

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