Description
Rivers etch and mark the land; abundance may bring floods, too little drought, and desertification. Water means survival, it sustains the earth, plants and animals, it is our life blood and without it we cannot endure. Editor Laura Paskus has assembled about twenty selections, most in essay forms that describe the writer’s association with water and responses to it. One can look at the topography of Albuquerque as rivers have carved their impressions in it. Or perhaps visit an Indian ceremonial rite honoring water, water as life. Without water there are no fish, no food, the desert prevails with the prickly pear, the cholla, and cottonwoods. In attempts to harness water, dams were built, but some failed. Occasionally, there can be an excess of water, such as when a deluge comes in the form of an atmospheric river or is locked in a glacier that is now leaking and receding. There may be water, water everywhere, and ne’er a drop to drink as in the industrially chemically tainted waters that eliminated fish or the groundwater tainted by fertilizers and pesticides and reduced from overuse. Read the different impressions water has left on these individual writers, each in its own writing style.