Remember the Water

I've just learned that Lake Powell is an artificial lake. This is a jolt, as my last name is Powell. Thoughts of inauthenticity flood in. I begin to question the pure-water associations floating the mind for nearly half a century.

I rode around that lake at age eighteen on a Kawasaki, and swam nude for the first time in a deep blue cove where the waters slapped hard on barren cliffs. Though I was feeling extraordinarily free as adolescent on a motorcycle trip, I couldn't escape the parameters of identity as manifested between the name of this paradise and myself. Powell on the road signs, the name of the waters, and there on my driver's license. 

Lake Powell's coastline was warped by massive undulations just like my adolescence. It was longer than the West Coast of the U.S.A, or something unbelievable like that.

Come to find out it wasn't born until the 1960s. Just like me. An electric and recreational project like so many postwar marriages. Glen Canyon would be filled up, yet it would lay there underneath for decades, under the heaviness of water.

It's taken twenty years of drought to reduce its levels to a kind of desert oasis, says the clickbait. Some want the levels back, for boating, the beauty, for the economy. Farmers, merchants, indians, the tax base, they're all fighting hard. And of course the others; the natural order of things.

The Colorado River now moves slowly on its level plains swamped in muddy waters, becoming a verdant hub of plant and animal life. You find things here that haven't thrived since the early sixties, says a biologist.

When you are depleted, your levels lower than decades, consider Lake Powell. Consider the birds on their new limbs, and their meals crawling up trunks. Yet listen to the indian drums echoing off re-emergent cliffs, a farmer snuffing a dirt clod between his thumb and index finger, or a cash register in silent remembrance of higher levels.

But mostly, remember the water, how unbelievably wet and vigorous against the body after a long ride in, lapping, lapping.