Maybe you can’t bring yourself to read any more election analysis, but what if I told you to click on this great story to unwind by reading about lakes and fish? I’d have pulled a fast one, because this excellent and empathetic J.B. MacKinnon story about dam removals on the Klamath River is about so much more than dams: it’s about how we live together when we’re all working from different sets of facts, how we decide what’s factual at all, and how to trust our neighbors.
Resistance to dam removal on the Klamath is emblematic of the profound mistrust of official narratives that increasingly leads to such upside-down outcomes as survivors of climate disasters denying climate change, or rural communities accusing the wildfire fighters who protect their homes of deliberately setting the fires. Reservoir Reach is a place where, if KRRC is using helicopters to prep for dam removal, it must make sure the public knows that the choppers aren’t carrying out black ops against American sovereignty on behalf of the United Nations.
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Now John C. Boyle Dam is no longer holding water; no longer, really, a dam. The dam keepers have, in a sense, just sailed their own vessel to the shipbreaker’s boneyard. Sukraw’s face seems to say, It is what it is. The expressions of the other PacifiCorp workers range from choked up to darkly angry, and I find myself holding two realities in mind that seem hardly able, these days, to share the same space. The first is that the dams have amounted to an ongoing assault on Indigenous communities and rights, and on the many fish that move between fresh water and the sea; removing the barriers will right historical wrongs. The second is that the identities of many people here—their memories, ways of life, worldviews, sense of purpose, idea of home—are bound up in the dammed landscape and even the dams themselves.
Might this be an important challenge of our times? To hold in mind this kind of dissonance, not only here but everywhere that the oil field, the coal mine, the mill turning ancient trees into lumber—the systems that made the world as we know it—are giving way to shifting values and necessities? Can we still move at the speed of trust, or does the urgency of our crises condemn us to ignore it?
It’s also got Warren Buffet, beautiful photography, adorable owls, and the guy who invented Fruit Roll-ups — an wonderfully written and important story that speaks to the moment in a different way from the endless political hand-wringing.
