Glen Canyon Dam and the Colorado River, Arizona. Nearly 40 million people rely on the Colorado River Basin for municipal use, and the river basin is used to irrigate nearly 5.5 million acres of land.

There is a place deep in Utah’s canyon country that will tell you a story if you’re patient. The spot in question lies in a gorge in the southeastern corner of Utah, flanked by sandstone cliffs 2,000 feet high. For eons, the Colorado River flowed through this canyon, its pounding rapids carving the landscape. In 1963, though, the government—determined to tame the river and feed the Southwest’s unrelenting appetite for water—built Glen Canyon Dam. Slowly, year by year, the giant reservoir it created backed upstream, drowning 18 rapids whole and transforming 186 miles of what had been a rushing river into a wide, still, man-made pool. After that, it was eerily quiet, the river current slackening as it submitted to the lake. 

But if you visit this place now, you’ll hear a rumble. And there, right in front of you, you’ll see it: white water flashing in the sun. A standing wave big enough to flip a boat. Water moving and moving fast. A rapid, drowned for 60 years, is emerging from the depths.

To understand this story, we’ll need to time travel.

If you had come to this place a century ago, you’d have found one of the wildest, least restricted rivers in the Lower 48. Around you would be a Martian scene: towering red sandstone cliffs, contorted spires, a heaving mass of burnished red rock frozen at impossible angles. Here, the names live up to the scenery. You are below the Doll House next to the Maze in the Land of Standing Rocks. You are in the middle of a desert on a river so furious it’s known for smashing boats to splinters, in a section of rapids so wild they have come to be called the Graveyard of the Colorado. In 1869, a white explorer named John Wesley Powell took wooden boats down these treacherous cascades and named them accordingly: Cataract Canyon. Once he made it out alive, he had a grim message for would-be Western pioneers. There was water in this desert, but not enough for wholesale settlement. 

Everyone ignored him. 

Fast forward to the 1920s. The people who ignored him are building cities, clamoring for water. So the white men meet in an airy adobe lodge outside of Santa Fe, New Mexico and, with the stroke of a pen, divvy up the Colorado River. Every year, Utah, Wyoming, Colorado and New Mexico must deliver 7.5 million acre-feet of water—enough water to flood a football field one foot deep—to California, Arizona, and Nevada so that industries, farms and cities can grow. 

But there’s a problem. The men’s optimism is as big as their hubris. They are negotiating in a wet year, and they assume it will always be so. And so they overallocate the river, giving more water to white people than exists, and to the 30 tribes on the river, none.

This is the first mistake.

Jump again to 1963. The river is in the first stages of drowning. Glen Canyon Dam is now the second biggest dam in America, and it’s busy growing the country’s second biggest reservoir. The reservoir pushes upstream for miles, hungry for space. It drowns Navajo sacred sites: Petroglyphs and cliff dwellings and graves go underwater. It drowns the glens that gave the canyon its name. It fills canyons that look like cathedrals. It drowns 80-year-old cottonwoods and all manner of animals. As the waters rise, scorpions and snakes gather on the highest ground like a biblical omen, their skin glinting in the desert sun. Pushing, pushing, the reservoir swallows Cataract Canyon, eating the rapids that used to eat boats. Where rapids once were, slack water reigns. And the unimaginable haul of sediment that river used to carry falls to the riverbed, building mud canyons in the depth and the dark. 

This is the second mistake. 

There are people who love Glen Canyon and the cataracts above it. These people fight hard to save it, but they are river rats, leathery misfits who float the canyon in grocery store rafts. They do not know the bigwigs in Washington, and so the dam goes up. Undeterred, they start a sabotage campaign so fierce it is captured in one of the West’s most iconic novels, Edward Abbey’s The Monkey Wrench Gang, a madcap cowboy escapade filled with face-offs between the cops and eco-cowboys, who go by names like Seldom Seen. These vigilantes advocate blowing up the dam. No one ever does in real life, but the idea simmers in the far fringes of the wilderness. 

Hippies and old-timers and boatmen all dream the same dream: Someday, this dam will go down. Then, Glen Canyon will return, with its rocks and seeps and spires. As the reservoir drops, the river will go free, flowing once again to its former delta in the Gulf of California. Thousands of ancient ruins will emerge, along with more recent homesteads where Navajo families used to grow gardens and run sheep. This remote expanse—what environmental nonprofit the Glen Canyon Institute calls “the biological heart of the Colorado River”—might see the prodigal return of some 79 kinds of plants, 189 types of birds, and 34 species of mammals that used to call this region home, from shrubs of towering mule fat to the industrious beaver.

And that’s not all. When the reservoir drops, something else will happen, something so surprising and scrappy it will have the quality of a myth or a miracle. As the man-made lake recedes, the river that it drowned will reappear. And its rapids—drowned for decades, suffocated by mud—will start to return. Gypsum, a once-buried rapid at the southern end of Cataract Canyon, will push upward through the dark until it reaches the surface, panting in the sun.

The people who love the reservoir call it Lake Powell. They call it the Jewel of the Colorado, its water so blue and mudless, it makes your teeth ache. They come to it in their houseboats and their fishing rigs; they come to party and to waterski. They bring sunscreen and IPAs and floaties shaped like swans. And they bring money, as much as $540 million dollars that flows into the coffers of the government each year—like Cataract Canyon once flowed into Glen Canyon, Glen Canyon into the Grand, and the Grand—before Hoover Dam was built and created Lake Mead—flowed straight on to the ocean.

The people who hate the dam call it by what it used to be. They don’t recognize Lake Powell as a legitimate body of water. For them, the real thing is what’s underneath the reservoir. The river might be drowned, but it’s still there, its rapids rolling under leagues of water, its holy canyons still holy under the depths. 

And now we come to the present. You’re at the bottom of Narrow Canyon, at a beach that was inundated as recently as two years ago. The beach is boggy—a leftover from 200 feet of vertical mud the river dropped here as it became a lake. But still, it is a beach, where there once was only murky water. Stand in the mud until it swallows your shoes, or pick your way across a field of boulders and stand on a rock at the edge of the water. 

Either way, here are the facts. The river you are looking at is drying up. Already overallocated, climate change has since joined the party and reduced the Colorado’s flow by 20% since 2000, compared to average 20th–century flows. Lake Powell, once filled to bursting with water, has hit record lows in recent years. In 2023, the water dropped below 3,520 feet in elevation—just 30 feet above the turbines that generate electricity. Had it kept dropping, the reservoir would soon have reached what engineers call dead pool—where water could only flow through the outlet tunnels at the bottom of the dam by gravity. If that happened, millions of acre-feet of water would be trapped behind the dam, with no way to get it to thirsty users downstream. That water would stagnate, warm and fill with sediment, killing fish and leaving behind a moonscape. Less water would flow down the Grand Canyon than any time since 1963, causing its sister reservoir, Lake Mead—itself critically low—to hit dead pool, too. 

The water boosters who signed the Colorado Compact in 1922 created a massive system of public water works to spur settlement and juice growth. Now, 40 million people, untold plants and animals, and 5.5 million acres of the country’s most critical farmland rely on these overtaxed waters. If both Glen and Hoover dams were to fail—well, it’s hard to find the proper words for that. 

John Weisheit has words for it, though. “A train wreck,” he told me when I asked him. “Imagine a train wreck.” 

Weisheit has the distinction of being the Colorado Riverkeeper—a man tasked with defending the future of what environmental writer Marc Reisner called the most legislated, most debated, and most litigated river in the world. Weisheit also has the distinction—self-assigned but generally conceded—of being one of the most ardent and reviled critics of one the most ardently loved and reviled dams on the planet. In his capacity as riverkeeper and co-founder of the environmental nonprofit Living Rivers, Weisheit has sued the pants, shirts, and blazers off of just about every CEO and federal official who has tried to lay claim on the Colorado. On Lake Powell one day, sheltering from the wind and waves in a red rock inlet barely wider than our boat, Weisheit listed them off for me: a tar sands company. A uranium corporation. Refineries. As he spoke, he held up his phone, trying to get service to learn the results of his early-days suit against a lithium operation.

I’m on this boat with Weisheit as part of a quixotic project of my own. Along with my friend Abigail Keel, I’ve decided to raft all 1,500 miles of the Colorado River to understand the water crisis and what, if anything, we can do about it. For the last six days, we’ve paddled and careened and otherwise barrelled down Cataract Canyon, riding rapids that in spring runoff can stand up 40-foot waves and snap the aluminum frames of boats like kindling. Our trip happened in October—low water—but that didn’t keep my stomach from twisting all the way through what are known as the Big Drops: a triplet of toothy, boulder-strewn rapids that would just as soon eat you as let you out alive. Until recently, the river ended just below Big Drop 3, its muscular current dying as it hit Lake Powell. After we made it through the drops on this trip, though, Weisheit told us to keep our life jackets on. A few bends later, we saw why. First we heard the sound—a rush of water on rock. Then we saw it: a rapid bigger than any we’d seen so far, its froth braiding impossible-seeming channels beneath giant boulders.

Weisheit has rowed this river hundreds of times. He could, he claimed, row its rapids in his sleep. But he’d never seen this rapid at this size before. For decades, it’s been submerged beneath the reservoir, its dangers a matter of lore and reminiscence. 

“This is Gypsum Rapid,” Weisheit said giddily. “And we’re gonna row it.” Weisheit hopped from the boat and picked his way across a mud plain. He stood on a large rock that jutted out from the shore to scout our run. We followed. The mud sucked our legs as we examined the rapid—a strange new hybrid: half old, half new. 

If I’m honest, I was scared. In his 30 years on the river, Weisheit had never done Gypsum at this level. Looking at it, he admitted he didn’t know how to read it yet. Nevertheless, he was ecstatic. “If you told me in 1985 that someday I would ride nine new rapids in Cataract I have never ridden before, I would’ve told you you were crazy,” he said. He retrieved his phone from a box where it’d been tucked away all trip. He snapped a picture. Twenty years ago, this place was a lake. Ten years ago, a mud pit. Today, a boggy beach and a living rapid.

And then we were back on the boats. The water sucked our yellow raft into the current, pulling us toward something inevitable. Then it was a whir, all sound and froth. Weisheit missed a stroke and we headed toward a giant hole in the water. I braced to flip, but we snuck through, alive and shouting. I pumped my fist. “Now that was Gypsum,” Weisheit said—and we stared at each other like idiots, smiling.

An hour later we hit the reservoir. A storm chased us all the way to the Marina, pouring down water. Later, we learned that this storm drenched the mud cliffs on lower Cataract. A Costco building-sized chunk of mud fell into the river overnight, dropping the water level 10 inches and creating a massive, Class IV rapid upstream.

A day later, we hit the flat water of the reservoir. After hours of storms and harsh waves, we took refuge in a small finger of water between two cliffs. Spooning hummus onto wheat bread, we waited out the wind by talking about crises. Weisheit agreed that there was a crisis on the river, one he’s been fighting for three decades. But the more he observes the river, he told us, the more he must admit: Something is happening that he never expected. Something that gives this man prone to bleak prognoses and jeremiads a strange sense of hope. And it has everything to do with the rapid we had just rowed.

As a kid, Weisheit grew up paddling on the Colorado with his parents. He didn’t see Glen Canyon before it drowned, but he can remember the exact moment he realized it had to be restored. On a family trip to Lake Powell in 1972—when he was 18—the lake was low enough that a stand of 80-foot cottonwood trees had come out of the water, dappling the sandy beach beneath them and turning it a languid green. 

But a year later, a heavy snowfall upstream caused the water to rise 90 feet. When Weisheit came back to the reservoir the next year, the cottonwoods had been drowned. Looking out from his houseboat, Weisheit could see the tips of their branches peeking out of the water. No one else seemed to notice—but he was devastated. “It was like someone had turned on the bright lights,” he said. “It was a clarion call for me.”

After that trip, Weisheit was a man on a mission. He visited his local library and read every book on Lake Powell that he could find. Using a bag of quarters, he copied out the specs for the dam and realized there was a problem: It was built to fail. Sometime in the not-so-distant future, either the water would run out, or the reservoir would fill with mud. 

At any point between now and then, a once-in-many-centuries storm could also hit the region. Weisheit took time out of his sandwich-making to describe it to me. Any day, really, an atmospheric river might run over the Colorado Basin, unloading a century’s worth of water in no time at all. The river could surge into Lake Powell at the rate of 500,000 cubic feet per second—the equivalent of two million basketballs passing a person on shore every second. When it hit Glen Canyon Dam, it could break the dam, flinging it open like a door. After that, it would hurl down the Grand Canyon in a 400-foot wave, forever altering one of the world’s natural wonders before hitting Lake Mead. When it hit Lake Mead a mere 16 hours later, all bets would be off. A column of water 75 feet thick would crest the lip of Hoover Dam, sweeping an entire region out to sea along with millions of houses, refrigerators, pets, and automobiles.

To Weisheit, the crisis was clear, but it wasn’t accidental. “This is a human-made problem,” he told me. For decades, bureaucrats and boosters “have been making decisions based on fantasy,” he said. “And they’ve been doing it willfully.” And now, he admitted, we were in a pickle. We needed to balance the West’s water budget—or face the consequences. “But if we couldn’t do it then, before the infrastructure was built,” he said, “how can we do it now?” 

In his book Sapiens, the writer Yuval Noel Harari boils human history down to a simple maxim. Comforts become necessities. After that, we can’t imagine living without them. Weisheit knows what needs to be done to save the Colorado River and bring back Glen Canyon. We need to drain the reservoir, decommission the dam, and create a water policy that works with nature and not against it. 

But he admitted that this was unlikely to happen. No one wants to give up the water they’ve gotten used to in fat times, even if doing so would save their lives. Instead, angry and stuck, they persist in their ways, inviting their own downfall.

It’s something that Weisheit, surprisingly, can understand. All those years ago at the library, he knew the dam was wrong. But he couldn’t bring himself to do anything about it. Instead, his anger poisoned him. At first he drank a little. Then, he drank a lot. He became impossible to work with, his anger explosive. His boss fired him from his job as a river guide, but, in an act of grace, floated him one year of health insurance to use for recovery. 

When Weisheit went to the hospital, he was in despair and near death. When he met with the doctor, she said something that would alter the course of his life. Weisheit told me the story around the campfire one night. “She told me, I think you’re drinking because you’re angry. So what are you angry about? And I go, I don’t like the world. I don’t like the system. And she just looks at me and says, Then fight back.”

That’s exactly what Weisheit did. It took 30 days at a treatment center for him to get sober, but after that, he became as single-minded as a person could be. He signed on as a boatman for scientists, joining them on their journeys to document the ecological situation on the Colorado. He rowed Cataract Canyon, and then he rowed it again. (By the time he took us down the river, he’d rowed it more than 400 times.) He became the riverkeeper and started suing the businessmen and bureaucrats that he used to feel powerless against. He founded Living Rivers and funded it with an activist ice cream shop, naming his flavors after the renegades and saboteurs who’d devoted their lives to saving the river. He wanted to know what was happening to the river and how quickly, so he began to take photos of the same spots on the river each year, comparing them to each other and noting down the changes in a notebook. He was doing everything he could to fight for the river. But he couldn’t shake the sense that he’d come too late.

One day, helping two scientists document plant numbers from the river floor to the canyon rim, Weisheit’s old sense of despair flared up like the pain from a rotting tooth. For every mature tree he counted, there were three that were dead from thirst and heat. He turned to his friends and said what he feared. “We’re fucked, aren’t we?” he said. They nodded. Yes, we were fucked.

Weisheit believed they were doomed. But the river had saved his life, he said, and so he couldn’t stop trying to return the favor. He kept rowing the river and suing CEOs and talking to scientists. And he kept taking photos, too. And that’s when he noticed something strange. In 2012, a few miles past the bottom of Big Drop 3, something was happening. The reservoir was shrinking, leaving behind a moonscape of goo. But in the center of the river, in the middle of that wasteland, there was a wave. Gypsum Rapid, buried for decades beneath Lake Powell, was cresting.

It took 20 years for the river to scour out the mud that had been left by the reservoir. And Weisheit documented the whole thing. In 2018, he was approached by a man named Mike DeHoff who was keenly interested in his photos. 

DeHoff had grown up tooling around on the Colorado River, guiding boat trips and teaching kids leave no trace ethics on wilderness trips. When he rowed Cataract Canyon in his early 20s, he saw what everyone saw and thought what most people thought. In Narrow Canyon, below the Big Drops, slack reservoir water stretched from canyon wall to canyon wall. When the water levels dipped, they exposed 200-foot mud walls that had formed under the river, a sort of canyon-within-a-canyon that reeked of rot. The ecosystem here had been destroyed. The rapids were forever drowned.

But in 2013, on a trip down Cataract Canyon with his wife, Meg Flynn, the water had dropped so far that a beach appeared. DeHoff and Flynn camped on that beach, facing the water. “We knew something was happening,” he told me. “Something was very different on that trip.” 

In DeHoff’s day job as a welder, he met boatmen who confirmed his hunch. As he fixed their aluminum frames, they’d tell him about the section below the drops—the part that used to be the reservoir. A flume of headward erosion was moving steadily up the canyon, eating through the sediment as it went. “And I’d say to them, Where is that crazy thing? And they’d say, Oh, it’s coming up around Mill Crag. It’s almost to the top of Mill Crag. Definitely put your life jackets on. Or they’d say, Have you seen that big rock that just came out just above Waterhole Canyon? And I’d say No, I haven’t. And then you’d go down there, and you would be swearing, like, Where did this thing come from?”

After their 2013 trip, he and Flynn bought a pre-reservoir guidebook, trying to understand what the river and canyons had looked like before the dam. Armed with nothing but a camera and some historic photos, they started taking trips with friends down the river, taking photos at the same sights again and again and entering the results into an ad-hoc spreadsheet when they got back to the front country. 

What they found shocked them. The pictures they’d inherited from John Weisheit showed a changing river. But that change wasn’t pretty to look at. It was a wasteland, DeHoff says, the canyon encased in cliffs of towering sludge left over from the sediment trapped beneath the reservoir. At first, DeHoff assumed that Weisheit’s photos would hold for the future—a sort of archive of damage done. But their research was showing something totally new. 

Mike told me to think of Lake Powell “like a  bathtub, and Cataract Canyon as the steep part that you would lay your back against.” In this metaphor, the Colorado River runs down the steep part of the bathtub. Before the dam, it carried on into Glen Canyon and then into the Grand Canyon further south. But then the reservoir came along, filling the bathtub and forcing the water up the bathtub, drowning both river and rapids. But now the reservoir was shrinking, lowering the levels in the bathtub dramatically. This made space for the river—fed by snowmelt upstream—to take back its old terrain, turning a once placid, wide body of water back into a coursing river, narrower than the lake had been and moving much faster along its old track. 

As the river reemerged from the reservoir, it was carving through hundreds of feet of sediment and washing it downstream. Whole canyons were coming out of the water like mud-caked ghosts. In a matter of a few years, these canyons were restoring themselves. As the river scoured away the gunk, it created the conditions for native ecosystems to take root. Beavers and cottonwoods were returning, as well as river otters and herons and coyotes. And there, beneath the Big Drops, Gypsum Rapid was churning, frothing. Reborn. 

For decades, politicians have refused to take real action to protect the Colorado River and repair the damage done by the Glen Canyon Dam. Their mistakes have created a crisis, but the crisis, ironically, has created the conditions for a surprising ecological renaissance. While politicians dithered and delayed—refusing to make adequate cuts to water use or drain the reservoir—Lake Powell kept dropping. And as it dropped, the river emerged. Growling and determined, it went about its traditional geologic business. But this time, it did in decades what had formerly taken eons. It cut a path down to the bedrock. It moved sediment downstream. It gave the rapids and canyons a clean slate and a chance, and—hungry—they took it. The crazy part, DeHoff told me, is that “it didn’t do it out of conscious management by any agency or anybody. It did it because it had the opportunity.” 

If Weisheit had archived the wasteland period, DeHoff and Flynn were documentarians of a comeback. They called their fledgling project Returning Rapids. But the rapids were just a corner of the bigger picture. A rapid like Gypsum was beautiful in its own right. But returning rapids are also a way to map rates of change—indicators of the health of the entire ecosystem. As the river returns, it flushes out the canyons, allowing plants and animals to return to their erstwhile homes, and recreates the eddies and fast water essential for native fish. “It’s a basic way of showing people things can move in a positive direction, that things are able to restore.”

As word spread, DeHoff’s trips went from ad hoc friend affairs to fully equipped scientific endeavors. Sedimentologists studied how quickly the river was clearing sediment from Cataract Canyons. Ecologists counted plants and trees. Hydrologists measured river flow and salinity. And each one of them said the same thing. “We also had all these incredibly smart folks,” DeHoff said. “And they were like, I’ve studied this stuff my whole life and I’ve never seen things change so much. I’m seeing it happen before my eyes and I cannot believe it.”

But for DeHoff, the story doesn’t stop there. Because the story isn’t about rapids or canyons or even the Colorado River itself. For him, it’s an opportunity to radically rethink our relationship with water, the planet, and the future. “These days,” DeHoff said, “we are realizing that the only way through climate change is to reckon and deal with the byproducts of how we’ve engineered the world.”  If DeHoff gets anxious about the future, he goes to one of his study sites and reminds himself that the river and canyons are regenerating faster than anyone, including himself, could have ever imagined. All we have to do, DeHoff said, is “change our ways and give some of these forces a chance, or encourage them on.”

But that’s the hard part. Because many people don’t want to change. “It’s easy to think, Oh, Glen Canyon is dammed. It’s forever destroyed. It’s lost,” DeHoff said. “But when we show people how much things can return, it complicates things for them quite a bit.” DeHoff knows what needs to be done to safeguard the river and the water supply for the millions of people, plants, and animals that depend on it. He wants the government to drill bypass tunnels at the base of the Glen Canyon Dam, sending the water down the Grand Canyon and onto Lake Mead, where it can be used by the people who need it. In return, DeHoff wants a river. A beautiful, braiding Colorado, brimming with red mud in a canyon filled with glens. “Nature is doing it,” DeHoff stressed. “So we can, too.”

A month after I spoke with him, water managers gathered in Nevada for their annual meeting. Tasked with making massive cuts to save the river and everyone who depends on it, the seven states refused to even meet in the same room. Tribal leaders with senior water rights were not allowed at the negotiating table. In the end, the bureaucrats kicked the can. The mistake has been made, they figured. The dam is already there. Easier, sometimes, to double down on a crisis than to change your assumptions.

The day I ran the Big Drops with Weisheit, we bumped into a Returning Rapids crew right behind us. DeHoff was at the back of the flotilla, so we never saw him, but it felt like a baton-passing moment. An old codger who photographed the hard years—the years when the reservoir first started to fall and the reemerging river threaded its way through a mudscape—passing his photos and his fight to his protégé, a man who is showing what miraculous transformation can happen in a canyon most had given up for dead.

For his part, Weisheit has been having his own change of heart. He still thinks we’re fucked—and he won’t let you forget it. But for the last decade, he’s been seeing something surprising on the river banks and sand bars: Goodding’s willow, a native tree that once thrived on the riverbanks of the Colorado but had dropped precipitously in the intervening years. For years, he said, “I used to be able to count the numbers of Goodding’s willow on two hands,” he told me. “But now there’s 10,000 of them.” I ask him what he takes from that. “Nature’s making the transformation,” he said. “And now we need to.” 

But what about the pickle? I say. What about all the people who depend on this mistake? Can we really go back in time? Can we actually start over? I ask this not as a journalist but as a person, as someone whose own life depends on his answer, someone raised in Utah—a state that depends on Colorado River water—and whose family and future depends on snowmelt in a dry desert getting dryer by the year.

If you want to talk about recovery, Weisheit told me, that’s a topic he can speak to. As an alcoholic, he said, he is supposed to be dead. This river, too, was supposed to die, drowning in its own sort of drink. But he didn’t die, and neither has the river. And why didn’t he die? I asked. “Because the river changed me,” he said. “And I surrendered.” The boat is quiet for a while, only the waves lapping. “That’s it,” he said. “Oh, that’s perfect. That’s the message for today. People need to surrender.”

In grief and in recovery, there are lost years: The years we spend yearning for the love object, the years we spend remaking ourselves. There are years when a reservoir floods a canyon and all seems lost, when bureaucrats pursue a politics of death that threatens worlds both small and large: rapids and river, river and planet. There are the years of slow return, years where we document what we think is a wasteland. And then, unexpectedly, things change.

Climate writing labors under a mandate to supply hope. Devastated but unable to look at the devastation, we want people who will assure us that things will be fine. Hope, we hope, will let us off the hook. After talking to DeHoff and Weisheit, though, I wonder if hope could look like something else. 

Imagine you love a river. Imagine that the river starts dying—and then imagine that you stay. Imagine not looking away, imagine noticing. Imagine staying in the lean times, in the hard times, in the times where you think all is lost. Now imagine the cottonwood shoots, the first beaver dam. Imagine a rapid heaving up from the depths, foam in the air. 

The truth is we are always on the hook. In fact, more times than not, we are in love. We love places that change us, that change. We let them down; they break our hearts. And when that happens, we want to leave. But if we stay—if we look—sometimes the dead return. 

(And what does that feel like, I asked DeHoff in his shop one day, rain pounding on the corrugated roof. What does it feel like to watch a rapid return? Think of a relative you’ve loved and lost, DeHoff said. Now think of them showing up for dinner.)

These places are changing because they have to. And by god, they seem to be doing their best. But this doesn’t let us off the hook, either. As Weisheit and DeHoff remind us, we’ll have to change, too, sloughing off old myths, scouring our consciences, eating through our muddy thinking until we hit bedrock. In other words, we have to start over, but we have to start over with what we’ve got. And that’s the hardest part. Restoration, grief; action, hope—it’s all the same process. What you must endure, DeHoff said, is the first part of the change, after the damage has been done but not fully undone yet, when all you’ve got to unmake something is the bed you already made. What you must endure is the wasteland.

I told you this was a time travel story. 

We might not be able to go back in time and fix things or go back to what was. But like a river meander, we can go backward to go forward, decide what to toss and what to carry with us.

This story first appeared in Atmos Volume 11 with the headline, “A River’s Return.”

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