In Kinship With Tamarisk

   On a commercial trip a couple of years ago, one of the guides was fishing in a lazy eddy somewhere in the Muav Gorge. It didn’t take long before his line was taut with a particularly combative fish splashing and thrashing at the other end. I was paying close attention, as were some of the passengers, as he landed the fish. “AACK! a striped bass,” he exclaimed with disgust, as he smacked it against the nearest rock to break its neck and threw it back in the water. “They’re taking over,” he responded to what must’ve been a look of shock on my face and the faces of the others watching, “they’re junk fish anyway.”

   The tamarisk is another much maligned species, as it has often been said to me, “Tie your boat off to a tammy; if it breaks or uproots, no big deal, it’s just a tammy.” Maybe it’s because striped bass and tamarisk are introduced species allowed to survive in the canyon only through the artifice of Glen Canyon Dam that they are relegated to a place of scorn and ridicule. The dam provides a narrower range of flows and clear cool water, and the resultant changes will persist as long as the dam persists.

   Shocking though the thought may be, the river running industry in the Grand Canyon owes much of its expansion, success, and stability to Glen Canyon Dam. The number of visitors increased manifold during the 1960’s. There were more known travellers through the Grand Canyon in 1972 alone than in its entire history prior to 1965. As Roderick Nash observes in his book, New Courses for the Colorado River: Major Issues for the Next Century, “It was no accident that the rise of visitation [of the canyon lands] coincided with a flood of information about the values of Grand Canyon and the tragedy of the lost Glen Canyon.” Glen Canyon, then, may be said to be the sacrificial lamb for a feast we all share— all of us river runners as well as the tamarisk and the striped bass.

   I am certainly not an advocate of the dam, but I temper my disdain with an understanding of my kinship with the tamarisk. We are both introduced species vying for a place in what will become the new balance of biota in a changed Grand Canyon ecosystem. The tamarisk has its place. It stabilizes the remaining ancient beaches, preventing them as much as it earnestly can from slumping into the abyss. It gives shade and shelter to chats and grackles, birds as new to the river corridor as all but a few river concessionaires. Because the dam is there, tammies are there, and because tammies are there countless varieties of plant and animal life are allowed to make their home in a place they may, at the most, have only visited.

   Somehow the human presence will fit into the balance, but smashing striped bass against a rock or uprooting tammies— is this part of the new order? Passengers clue in to the actions of their guides as a meter on how to interpret what for the overwhelming majority of them is an altogether new experience. To this extent the commercial crew has the opportunity to plant its seed in the minds of its guests; to determine the nature of at least some of the memories he or she will take home. What could these memories be? What should these memories be? Is there an overall message that should be communicated?

   Is the mission of a river trip mostly “look how much fun we can have in this playground of nature?” I have accompanied trips that have offered no deeper a theme than just that. In retrospect, I can see more similarities than differences between the wild river water park experience of such a trip in the Grand Canyon and the Wild Rivers Water Park experience in Irvine, California. Both experiences left satisfied customers, renewed and refreshed. Both experiences brought handsome profits to their respective industries. Both experiences were made possible by “gifts” from the Colorado River.

   The river-running industry is growing and evolving like the post-dam river corridor itself. Whether it will become another money making exploit of an already overexploited river, or an enterprise committed to ecological awareness and education depends largely on the attitudes the river companies wish to promote in their guides.

   But on the other extreme to an attitude that slams bass against rocks and uproots tammies exists the assumption that a passenger has a certain political bent and environmental understanding akin to our own. The appeal of a Grand Canyon river trip is unique in the eco-tourism industry. Many— perhaps most— who book a trip through the Grand Canyon have an interest in the ecology of the place, and may to some measure expect their guide to be a naturalist of sorts, able and willing to point out this plant or that rock and tell all the whats and hows and whys that come with them. Others may want to just drink beer and howl in the rapids.

   A step relation of mine has expressed an interest booking a trip. He’s an outdoorsman all right, hunting every chance he can get, an active member of the NRA and a proud veteran of World War II, it’s all we can do to convince him not to throw his aluminum cans and glass bottles into the campfire. I wonder how he’d react to a bearded, perhaps pony-tailed guide espousing the virtues of the Sierra Club and denouncing the sins of the Bureau of Reclamation. Perhaps the only pearl of wisdom he can glean from two weeks in the canyon is that cigarette butts and candy wrappers don’t go away when you throw them in the sand. But isn’t that something? As long as he’s not alienated by esoteric eco-talk, maybe he can learn this and other tidbits about the world around .

   That’s the nice thing about having the same passengers for several days: there’s time to assess the capacity of each individual to absorb the many stories and lessons the trip provides. As for addressing the group as a whole, I find many opportunities to communicate an environmental message without proselytizing. One of my favorite hikes is Nautiloid Canyon. There in the deep recess of ancient Mississippian slime lie the cephalopods for all to see. It’s a nice cool place to tell a story and to introduce the folks to geologic history as recorded in fossil record. I tell them about the Muav at river level, about the shallow Cordilleran seas that covered the area during the Cambrian, and about the trilobites that reigned supreme, accounting for some 60% of all life on the planet and consisting of at least a thousand different species. What’s missing from the space where the trail levels out is the Ordovician, Silurian, and Devonian Periods representing about 175 million years of geologic record (with only a few spots in the entire canyon giving us a glimpse of the Devonian).

   As a bit of a digression, I go on to explain what partitions geologic time into eras, periods, and epochs. Dramatic changes in fossil record, which usually coincide with dramatic changes in the global environment, allow us to differentiate distinct periods in the Earth’s history. The sudden appearance of a new type of organism, the expansion in variety and population of an already existing type of organism, or the mass extinction of one or many types of organism seem to have occurred in Earth’s history at intervals distinct enough to quantify. Somewhere between the little climb at the beginning of the hike and where we can walk atop nautiloid fossils, the trilobite reign as rulers supreme came to an end. Hundreds of species vanished, and the only types that survived, like Teratapsis, Dipleura, and Calymene had bony armor which either had spines or allowed the critter to roll up like a pill bug. Hitherto trilobites had no known predators. Then came the nautiloids and their mollusk cousins, whose sharp beaks crushed soft trilobite bodies. This was the Ordovician. By the time the Kaibab Limestone was formed there were no more trilobites at all. To me the rocks of the canyon tell the story of the rise and fall of dominant species. The story repeats itself with different players every time, layer upon layer, formation after formation. Precambrian and Paleozoic rocks form the raw stuff of the canyon, Mesozoic rocks tinge its waters red and have given Colorado its name, and the canyon itself was brought to life in the Cenezoic. Today, with global deforestation, accumulated toxic emissions, and the ultimate change in world climate through the greenhouse effect, thousands of species have vanished as a result of human tamperings. This mass extinction marks the end of the Cenezoic Era, and whether humans will emerge in the era to come remains to be seen.

   Glen Canyon Dam can be seen as a metaphor for human intervention worldwide in how it has affected the microcosm of the river corridor below. The change was sudden, sending into chaos a regime that had lasted for at least 8,000 years. As we travel downstream we have the opportunity to witness the new regime-in-the-making. Tamarisk and rainbow trout came onto the scene relatively early on, as bald eagles and striped bass are newcomers finding their niche in the emerging state of stability.

   No measure of bass-beating or “tammicide” will halt these forces of change and evolution’s relentless effort to reach a balance. It seems to me that such actions serve only to display the forceful hand of human intervention— the same mentality that dams rivers and “creates Eden from a wasteland.” I believe that there is a more auspicious side of human nature, and that the best action for us to take is to watch closely and to learn. As we witness this process of change while we float down the river, let us consider our role not only in having caused the change, but what our place may be within the change. The lessons of the canyon are there to read like a book and we are writing its next chapter. So have fun on your trips but please bear in mind that the pen may be in your hand.

Eben Rose