[Another older review salvaged from Faultline. The book is still in print, still compelling, and still about the Truckee River, which I still haven’t been to this year.]
A Doubtful River
Robert Dawson, Peter Goin, Mary Webb
(Reno, University of Nevada Press, 2000).
The Truckee River watershed has been called one of the most intensely regulated in North America. This may be hyperbole. Take the Missouri for example, so hemmed in by dams and levees that it resembles a chain of aquatic link sausages more than it does a living river. Or the Mississippi, which for a century has been kept from leaving New Orleans dry (if not exactly high) and flowing to its inevitable outlet in the Atchafalaya Basin, by the Army Corps of Engineers. Or the Colorado, or the Snake, whose fisheries face extinction due to poorly-planned dams.
But if you’re looking for a typical western river, it’s hard to think of a better candidate than the Truckee. Flowing from alpine wilderness in the Sierra Nevada to saline Pyramid Lake north of Reno, the Truckee rolls past a physical litany of western river issues. This steep, swift river encounters non-point-source pollution from vacation home sprawl, runoff from logging and fire, illegal dumping, diversions for drinking water and agriculture, and the thousand daily violations done to any river that flows through a major urban area; in the Truckee’s case, the burgeoning metropolis of Reno and Sparks. From the main stem’s source in Tahoe City, you can head downstream past homeless encampments, major freeways and leaking mines to the Derby Dam, linchpin of the century-old Newlands project. Derby diverts as much as 95 percent of instream flow for irrigation in Fallon, the garden (and leukemia capital) of the Great Basin.
After emerging from sprinklers in Fallon alfalfa fields, Truckee wastewater ends up in the Lahontan basin’s Stillwater National Wildlife Refuge, which rivals the notorious Kesterson for toxic concentrations of selenium and salts. The Derby Dam did in another Truckee Basin wildlife refuge: In the 1930s, the Fish and Wildlife Service decommissioned their refuge at Winnemucca Lake. The saline lake was once a crucial stopover on the Pacific Flyway, its salty waters recharged in each wet year. It is now a flat expanse of salt, never more than slightly moist. Its water now dumps selenium at Stillwater.
Just upstream, Pyramid Lake — now the Truckee’s final sump — rises and falls like a daytrader’s bank balance. In dry years, only the barest amount of water enters the lake at Nixon, the minimum legally allotted to the Pyramid Lake Paiutes after Fallon farmers, Reno lawns and casino fountains take their cut. The lake’s endemic Lahontan cutthroat trout, whose flesh explorer John Frémont called "superior, in fact, to that of any fish I have ever known," went extinct in mid-century after declining lake levels made inaccessible the cutthroat’s spawning grounds in the river delta.
A Doubtful River
A photographic collaboration between photographers Robert Dawson and Peter Goin with lucid accompanying prose by Mary Webb, this is not an escapist paean to the fragments of wilderness still to be found along the Truckee.
This won’t surprise those who’ve seen Dawson’s earlier work, such as Farewell, Promised Land, his collaboration with historian Gray Brechin, in which Dawson chronicles the sad remnants of ill-fated development throughout the state. At times, Dawson’s work in A Doubtful River approaches the starkness of Richard Misrach’s soul-searing desert photography. But Dawson’s Truckee River is peopled in a way that Misrach’s work is only rarely. Throughout the book, Dawson’s images show the river as it interacts with the people around it, though sometimes they’re present only as the authors of the landscape changes at river’s edge: an idle bulldozer at the Tahoe City outlet gates; the flumes downhill toward Reno; the arc of freeway and railroad grade in the Truckee River Canyon near Wadsworth.
Collaborator Peter Goin, probably best known for his work rephotographing historic shots of Lake Tahoe, provides what seem the bulk of the images in the book. This may be because he lives in Reno, where he teaches photography and video at the University of Nevada. While both artists contribute first-rate work, some of the most arresting images are Goin’s, Johnny On The Spot for Paiute tribal gatherings, charity rubber duckie regattas, and the disastrous Reno flood of January 1997 during which Pyramid Lake’s level rose by eleven feet. It is alleged that sodden gamblers in hipwaders stayed dutifully by their one-armed bandits throughout the flood.
Mary Webb’s accompanying text is a treat. A resident of Reno for two decades, where she teaches writing at UNR, Webb seems to have talked to just about everybody in the watershed, from the River Master whose job it is to allocate every drop, to her elderly neighbor who defiantly waters her lawn in the heart of summer. Lawns loom large in Webb’s text. It seems a die-hard core of long-term Renoans feel that conserving their hard-won Truckee water would only free up more for Californian developers. It’s a hard point to dispute: the hills west and north of Reno are increasingly encumbered with identical stucco and terra-cotta boxes.
The book is stronger in its treatment of Nevada than of upstream in California. This is understandable, and not just due to the location of the publisher. The watershed’s most dramatic damage has been done east of Boomtown, where the river and I-80 cross the state line. Still, it’s a bit jarring to treat the river as if it begins at Fanny Bridge in Tahoe City, rather than in the headwaters of the Tahoe Rim beyond. Tahoe is an enormous and deep subject worthy of an entire library full of books, most of which have already been written. The authors can’t be blamed for sidestepping that particular 800-pound gorilla of a subject. But A Doubtful River is without a single mention of the Upper Truckee, which flows twenty miles from its cow-burnt source just north of Carson Pass to Tahoe Keys. Neither does it mention any of the river’s tributaries above the lake, and some of them, Eagle Creek in particular, can rival the main stem in flow. Describing a watershed without its upper half seems contrary to the stated goal of most watershed activists: treating the system as more than the sum of its parts. One wishes Dawson, Webb and Goin would have mentioned the uplands, if only to put them aside for another day.
That quibble aside, this is one hell of a book, and a valuable addition to the ranks of what seems to be a burgeoning genre: the western coffee table book with solid writing inside. Any book that shines a spotlight on beautiful, threatened Pyramid Lake — long the stepchild just outside of western environmentalists’ field of vision — is worth the asking price.
