Read Online Jemez Spring by Rudolfo Anaya - Free Book Online

their summers along the river, fishing, roaming, swimming. The time of childhood was magical because the spirit entering the river was a presence they could feel. Sometimes it dazzled in the glory of bird wings, the color of the roiling water, the brilliant green of the alamos. Other times it was the cry of La Llorona, the wailing woman. She held a dagger in her gnarled hands, and she chased the boys home when dusk fell.
    Every river is ruled by a god, the ancients believed.
    The Spaniards called the Rio Grande el Rio Bravo, as brave as a thundering bull. Perhaps it was a bull, or an ancient Sumerian god delivering its life-giving waters, providing a home for the almost extinct silvery minnow. The toro sacrificing its life-giving blood so man might turn the water into his fields and grow his crops. And man the acolyte of the river.
    Before the Cochiti dam was built the floods of spring arrived like a herd of brave bulls, a thundering whoosh of hooves roaring down the streambed to fertilize the cities with life-giving waters.
    A presence imbued the river, an essence that was the spirit of the stream. When the dying day delivered its life to the shadows a change came over the bosque. The air grew cool and still. Night hawks, evening’s graceful minions, swooped low along the water, their starred wings signaling the end of day. Then the shadows tumbled down the arms of the towering cottonwoods, and the smell of the earth rose from the rotting compost. The spirit of the river spoke, filled the dark paths, touched the shoulder of the wary.
    Without the river the cities on its banks would wither away, so man built dams to control the flow, to take the water as his own. Men had come to believe that nature was not complete unto herself, that she should not be left alone.
    The Rio Grande Conservancy controlled the flow of water, not the ancient god Enki. They had opened the gates at the Cochiti Dam, and for a few weeks the river would look as it did in the old days, before the dam was built, when the snow melted on the high peaks of Colorado and on the Sangre de Cristos of Taos and Santa Fe. Then the spring runoff came roaring down the valley, the rushing water cleaning out winter’s stagnation, like an angioplasty opening clogged arteries, washing the winter plaque away.
    The river was the alchemist of the valley. The water was the gold rush that swept away the compost, dissolved the leaden weight of winter, invigorated the natives with fresh oxygen and ozone, delivered nitrogen to the alamos, filled the acequias, irrigated fields and orchards. All the elements of spring met in the river, impregnating the slumbering earth. The river rocked and rolled in its emotional life, and the dance brought joy to the hearts of its sons and daughters.
    Somnambulant man saw only the surface of the river. But beneath the skin of water lay the web of veins and arteries that fed the river, the underground water that could be felt but not seen. That was the secret of the desert rivers. The Rio Grande stretched its arms up into the Sangre de Cristo Mountains and drew down the hidden waters, tapped each small spring, every rivulet of melting snow, summer rains, morning dew, night mists, gathering every drop, creating the fingers and hands of mountain streams, strong arms that came tumbling down the arroyos and canyons into the basin, forming the shoulders and body of the great river.
    Now the river was dying. Too many cities siphoning off the water. Too many needs for too little water. By the time it reached south Texas it was a dead river. The creatures of the river were also dying. Pollutants were clogging the heart and soul of the river. The dance was ending.
    Sonny crossed the bridge and drove up the incline past Jackalope and the Coronado Monument, the place where Coronado had spent the winter of 1540. From here the adventurer and his scraggly crew had looked down on the frozen river and on thin columns of smoke rising from a thousand Pueblo