The Whitewater Park

Raymond stood on the Sierra Street bridge in the middle of May and watched the town spend a million and a half dollars putting the bends back into a river it had spent his own working life taking them out of.

They were calling it a park. That was the word on the banner strung over Wingfield Park for the festival, the first one they had thrown down here, tents and a stage and vendors and a crowd bigger than he had expected, everyone come to see the new whitewater course threading around the island in two channels. Men had trucked in thousands of tons of rock and set it into the streambed to make drops, eleven of them, little engineered rapids with pools below, so that a person in a plastic kayak could come down through the heart of downtown Reno bouncing over water made rough on purpose. There was a kid in the north channel now, upside down, and then right side up again, spray coming off his paddle, and the crowd on the bank made the sound a crowd makes for that. Raymond watched him and did not know whether to laugh.

He was near sixty. He had built the freeway. In the middle sixties, a young man with a strong back, he had gone onto the crews that cut Interstate 80 across the north edge of downtown, and part of that work, though not the part they gave speeches about, had been the river, the Truckee straightened and deepened and walled by the Corps of Engineers in the years after the big floods, the bends taken out and the islands scraped away so the water would run fast and low and stay in one place and stop climbing into the streets every wet winter. He had hauled the rock that armored those banks. He had helped make the river do what it was told. That had been the whole idea then, a river that behaved, a river that went where the engineers drew it, and now here was the same town, forty years on, paying good money to break some of that up and set rock back into the channel to rough the water again, because it turned out a river that behaved was a river nobody wanted to sit beside.

His grandmother’s people had watched the first of it, a hundred years back and more. He thought about that standing on the bridge. Willa had been a young woman when the senator’s project put the dam in downstream and turned a third of the Truckee off toward the farms, and she had stood on the bank and watched the water go down and the fish that had always come up the river stop coming, and she had understood, the way the family understood it ever after, that the newcomers treated water the way they treated everything, as a thing to be moved and sold and made to work, never a thing to be lived beside on its own terms. The Wašiw had lived beside it on its own terms for longer than anyone could count, up in the high country around the big lake mostly, Da ow, the summers at the water and the falls in the ranges and the winters down in the valleys, the whole valley including this meadow where the town now stood, ground the people had shared and moved across and known by heart before it was anybody’s downtown. Then the railroad, then the farms, then the dams, then the concrete, then the freeway Raymond himself had poured. And now, at the far end of all of it, a festival, and a banner, and a kid doing tricks in a made rapid.

He should have found it bitter. Some of it was. But Raymond had lived long enough to hold two things at once, and the second thing was that the river was full of people looking at it, which he had not seen in his lifetime down here. For most of the years he could remember, the downtown Truckee had been a ditch you crossed to get from one casino to another, a low green channel nobody looked at twice, walled and forgotten and used for nothing but carrying water away. Now there were families on the banks with their shoes off and their feet in it, and children on the rocks, and the young man coming down through the drops with his face lit up, and the whole crowd turned toward the water instead of away from it, and Raymond thought that his grandmother might have had something dry to say about the town needing forty years and a million and a half dollars to relearn the simplest thing, which was that you sit by the river because the river is worth sitting by.

His daughter would know how to say all of it. Sophie was up at the university finishing the long paper that would make her a doctor of the history of her own people’s ground, and she would have the words for what he was only feeling on the bridge, the whole shape of it, the taking and the selling and the concrete and now this careful expensive undoing that was not really an undoing at all but one more thing the town did to the water because the town wanted something from it. She would put it in the paper and it would be true. Raymond was proud of her in a way he did not have language for, the way you are proud of a child who can carry something you have only been able to hold.

The kid in the kayak washed out at the bottom of the last drop and paddled into the eddy below the island and pumped his fist, and a couple of other boaters slapped their paddles flat on the water for him, a sound like applause, and Raymond found that he had lifted his own hand off the rail an inch, almost a wave, before he put it back down. He was not going to stand up here on the bridge all afternoon being the old man who remembered. He knew the way down to the water. He had built half the rock they were standing on, one way or another, going back the length of his life and his grandmother’s before it.

He went to find the stairs to the bank, to stand at the edge where the people were, and put his hand in the cold water coming down off the mountains, the same water, whatever they did to the shape of it, always the same water, on its way to where it had always been going.

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