Dry River: Stories of Life, Death, and Redemption on the Santa Cruz by Ken Lamberton (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Dry River: Stories of Life, Death, and Redemption on the Santa Cruz by Ken Lamberton Hal Crimmel Ken Lamberton, Dry River: Stories of Life, Death, and Redemption on the Santa Cruz. Tucson: U of Arizona P, 2011. 269pp. Paper, $24.95. There are desert rivers, such as the mighty Green or Colorado, with rugged, remote canyons and world-class whitewater. And there are desert rivers in the truest sense—more about searing heat, rock, and sand than the steady flow of cool water. The Santa Cruz River near Tucson is one such, and Ken Lamberton’s Dry River: Stories of Life, Death, and Redemption on the Santa Cruz will upend readers’ notions of what it means to be a river. Lamberton doesn’t paddle or float the river—that would seldom be possible, thanks to drought, irrigation diversions, geology, and the essence of a Sonoran Desert river. Rather, he hikes its length, some two hundred miles from its headwaters to its brushy confluence with the Gila River. Like the river itself, which he notes “is slow to reveal its nature, that part of it that inhabits the space between the extremes” (2), the book resists classification. It is a mix of nature writing, history, environmental history, personal narrative, and, with its twelve maps and thirty-five photographs, cartography and photography. Dry River’s strengths include careful attention to the particulars of Sonoran Desert flora and fauna, compelling storytelling, and particularly in the first half, extensive and carefully researched accounts of the human history of the Santa Cruz River corridor and surrounding lands in southern Arizona and northern Mexico. Each of the nine chapters focuses on a particular stretch of river, covering an abundance of topics. As its subtitle suggests, the book is in some ways a narrative ranging across plants, birds, animals; the Tohono O’odham Nation; treaties and Spanish land grants; presidios and Catholic missions; ambitious nineteenth-century ranchers; committed conservationists and restoration ecologists working on behalf of the river; and Lamberton’s accomplished family, especially his three daughters. Occasionally, individual chapters cover such a diversity of topics that a focal point may be hard to locate, but in some ways that’s the nature of a river narrative: experiences are intertwined, and the rich sense of history pervading the book would make it seem artificial, perhaps, to separate or privilege one narrative strand from another. An author floating, say, fifty miles of free-flowing river [End Page 90] will find the steady current offering an organic unity to the experience. But an author who explores a river that is one minute dusty wash and the next raging with a flash flood–induced debris flow, or diverted and dry in one reach yet in another resurrected by a steady discharge of treated wastewater from a sewage effluent plant—that author will sense a different sort of unity, one more elusive, perhaps like the desert itself and the creatures living there. Lamberton spent eight years researching and carefully crafting Dry River, which provides a wealth of historical and ecological information. Readers interested in how an arid region with a deep human history—Native American, Spanish, and Anglo—can be restored and preserved despite a past of environmental abuse and ongoing demands on its water resources will find a hopeful outlook in the book—indeed, the possibility for redemption. At the same time, the book should make us all think about what our rivers would be like without water, a somber notion increasingly serious for those living west of the hundredth meridian—and, with climate change, perhaps for those living to the east as well. Readers invested in ecological restoration will find much to like in Dry River, as will those interested in the diverse human and environmental history of arid regions. Hal Crimmel Weber State University Copyright © 2015 Western Literature Association