My hair smells faintly of my childhood today. I have been swimming in the river again –the river that is a lake and laps the edges of a sometimes sandy beach. Back then, in my childhood, it was just a ditch, an ordinary, concrete slip-ditch used to irrigate farm and orchard. But it originated in the same mountains as the Lake I swam in today.
High up at the Continental Divide, snow melt crashes over boulders with white-water intensity, descending through granite canyons until – as the Colorado River – it reaches a bend in Debeque Canyon where some of it is shunted off into an irrigation canal and finally a ditch. There are two dams to assist in the division of water for irrigation; one is a simple check dam and the other is the more innovative Roller Dam.
Despite the creep of the city limits, despite the city people who know nothing about the care and maintenance of irrigation pumps and the origin of the priceless water that keeps their lawns green, despite the total lack of experience of the city folk to understand siphoning and flooding techniques once used to keep the vanishing orchards productive, the irrigation system exists to this day.
Another thing the new city folks in all the planned developments and subdivisions don’t know is where the water goes after it passes their property. They know little of the small lake half mile away – which now appears as nothing more than a landscape artifact for a community of apartments – and nothing of the lore concocted in my creative childhood mind as I played in that ditch with my five-year-old brother.
On muddy days, after a thunderstorm upriver, that water was chocolate milk; a treat to be released by my brother and me to the children downstream – but only if they had been good. Other days the slip ditch flowed so clear you could see the little minnows. Better yet, you could see to the bottom of the ditch where the rich sediment built up – sometimes four inches deep with dark, mildly stinky, mud.
From this mud, using my hand like the clawed bucket of a backhoe, I excavated batter for my mud pies. Pressed into a discarded tuna can and left to bake in the sun, these cakes could be unmolded the next day and then frosted with additional mud, which made for artisan quality triple-layer chocolate cakes. I remember begging Daddy not to be so particular about cleaning the ditch, not to liquidate my culinary commodities.
My hair was long then, as a child – almost to my waist. My hair is long now, as a senior citizen. Yesterday I swam in the huge lake a couple hundred miles downstream of that childhood ditch – a lake made possible by a 710-foot concrete dam.
It is June. The lake is rising at a foot to 18-inches per day. We’ve been good children downstream and those Colorado folks are releasing all the frothy snowmelt. I swam in the water of the Colorado River – much bigger and broader than the irrigation slip ditch of youth, nevertheless, my hair came out smelling distinctly of my childhood.
