Durango (11 page)

Yet, Smithson thought, who else? When you looked at all the players, positions had been taken and sides had hardened. There was virtually no one left who both understood the conflict and possessed the wisdom to intervene. Beyond wisdom, Smithson said to himself, Sheridan has a kind of moral authority on his side. Smithson could not help but smile at the idea. After fifteen years, was he the only one in this whole corner of the state who thought Daniel Sheridan had moral authority? Better not use that phrase with anyone else he talked to. Most of them would think he was crazy.

No, he had no illusions. If Dan Sheridan could be persuaded to find a way to bring the Indians into the equation, it presented a chance to resolve the matter once and for all. But it would have to be done quietly, without notice or fanfare. Sheridan wouldn't have it any other way in any case.

The most powerful instrument Sheridan possessed was the trust the Southern Utes had in him. Smithson knew this from his study of early and more recent Ute history. The Sheridan family had been among the first to quietly embrace the tribe and build friendships with its members. Sheridan's father and grandfather between them had known every tribal chairman reaching back well over half a century. The stories of money lent, houses built, classes taught, and medicine provided by the Sheridans would never completely be told. And Daniel Sheridan would be the first to discourage its telling. But that history represented a priceless storehouse of trust no one else in the region possessed.

Sheridan was the man to bring the Utes into the project on a full-partner basis and heal the wounds in Durango. It is his duty, the professor thought. It is his burden. But it might also be his destiny. The professor's mind was calibrated to think in those grand terms. His search of human history was intensely focused on the pivotal figure, the actor whose decisions redirected the course of human events. Such figures, in Smithson's mind, were men and women of destiny.

But Duane Smithson was not the man to persuade Daniel Sheridan. Someone else would have to play that role. Ruminating in his cramped office on the Fort Lewis College campus, he suddenly had a bold—beyond bold, shocking—thought. Patrick Carroll, whose idea this was, surely had a role to play. His father, the congressman, had been among the first to seek funding for the Bureau of Reclamation to study a major water storage project on the Animas River. Among those who had held out hope of the project as representing the future of La Plata County and southwestern Colorado, Congressman Carroll was an icon, a godfather of sorts. So his heir must be his successor. But that heir must have the guidance of a more senior figure, a major presence in the drama. It might even be someone who had competed with and even antagonized Sheridan in the bad days.

At first, the professor resisted the idea forming in his mind. It was too far out. It was too illogical. But now he remembered a conversation he had had with Walter Hurley some months ago, quite by accident. Smithson had completed his annual talk to the Durango Rotary Club on strange incidents in Colorado history and old man Hurley had approached him afterward.

Professor, he had said, that was a great talk. Great talk as always. I can't tell you how much I look forward to hearing you every year. Something new and amazing every time. I can't imagine where you unearth those long-ago incidents. But they are truly wonderful.

Smithson said, Thank you very much, Mayor. Walter Hurley was known as Mayor to one and all, though his two terms had ended years ago. He maintained himself as a kind of mayor emeritus.

The mayor had then said a strange and provocative thing. He said, I've been thinking about your old friend Dan Sheridan recently. How's he doing?

The professor was tongue-tied. Mayor Walter Hurley had been the first visible public figure to call for Sheridan to step down from the county commission during the vivid controversy years before. In doing so, he had legitimized the opposition to Sheridan and became its unofficial spokesman. Hurley had intended to quiet the controversy. Instead he fanned it into a raging fire. He had never been known for finesse or cleverness. He was notoriously a blunt instrument. From the public's perspective, he was the first to throw Daniel Sheridan overboard and to send him into his decade-and-a-half exile.

A few days after running into the retired mayor, Professor Smithson called him to ask if he could drop by his home for a few minutes.

Mayor, he said when they met, I have an idea I'd like for you to consider. He then outlined his plan to have the mayor and the son of his old friend Congressman Carroll approach Dan Sheridan and ask him to employ the powerful instrument of his goodwill with the Southern Utes to resolve the Animas–La Plata water project and restore peace to southwestern Colorado.

The aging politician was stunned. Professor, there's nothing I'd rather do than get this water controversy behind us. Lord knows, it's been a cross I've carried almost my whole adult life. And believe me, I'm as concerned as anyone around here about the uproar going on in this town and this county. I've lived here all my life and I've never seen anything like it.

He shook his head and continued. But you and I both know that Mr. Sheridan and I have had our differences all these years. And I don't think there's a chance in the world he's going to let me darken his doorstep, let alone persuade him to get back into this battle.

Smithson said, Do you accept the fact that the Southern Utes are the key to this maze?

Of course they are, Hurley said. If you've thought about this as much as I have, you can't come to any other conclusion.

Smithson said, Do you dispute the fact that Dan Sheridan has a particular, even unique, relationship with Leonard Cloud and the tribe?

Hurley thought awhile and then said, No, as a matter of fact I don't dispute that. I hadn't thought about it, but now that I do I believe you are exactly right. But having accepted all that doesn't lead me to believe that I'm the one who's going to convince him to rejoin the fight. 'Specially after all that history.

How bad do you want to resolve this dispute, Mayor? Smithson asked.

It'd be the best thing I ever did for this community, the old man said. Of course I want it more than anything else. Pat Carroll Senior and I put our whole life into it. Now he's not around to get it finished.

But his son is, the professor said, and you are. And between the two of you I think you can bring Mr. Sheridan back and get him to convince the Indians to accept a position that will end this war.

Mayor Hurley silently considered this at length. You know what you're asking me to do, don't you? he presently said. You're asking me to go hat in hand to Mr. Sheridan and apologize for what I did back then. After a moment, he said, I'm not sure I can do that.

How do you feel about all that business now? Smithson asked.

I feel pretty bad about it. In fact, I feel goddamn bad about it. He didn't understand what I was trying to do, and everybody else thought I had come down on him and driven him out. I just thought he would be a distraction at a critical time to the project and would confuse things even further.

And…, the professor asked.

And…I screwed up. I was wrong. I've always been kinda tone deaf where human feelings are concerned. Just ask the late Mrs. Hurley…if you could. She would have been the first to tell you. No, I played into the hands of the yahoos and sent a good man—a very good man—off into the wilderness, almost literally. I'm damned ashamed of it.

Well, Professor Smithson said, I think it's come time to go back where we started and fix things up.

21.

Tribal chairman Leonard Cloud and two of his trusted tribal council members routinely toured the area up and down the Animas River as it transited the reservation on its way south to New Mexico. Occasionally, they would do the same thing with the Florida and other streams, many dry as dust by the end of summer, after the spring melts and runoffs from the high country. It was a ritual that was born of practicality, checking stream flows and considering how augmented river capacity might be used to fulfill their plans for their people. But it was also a means of connecting and reconnecting with the lifeblood of maternal earth from whom all other natural blessings flowed.

Long before the early immigrant Americans, and even earlier than the Spanish before them, these roaming people of the West had a spiritual connection to water. Of necessity, their encampments were always on or near rivers and streams or the occasional natural pond backed up behind a beaver dam. What had been a matter of practicality for more generations than any Ute could remember had naturally become a matter of religious conviction. Without water there was no life. Water was a gift. Water was life. Water and existence could not be separated. Water itself had a spirit.

When the immigrants came west and settled and built their sod houses, then their outposts, then their villages, then their towns, they depended on water just as much for their livelihood. But they treated it as a commodity, something to be acquired, a subject of capture, then of ownership, trading, and manipulation. They fought over it and more than a few times killed each other over it. This behavior gave rise to the saying known to all ranchers in the West: “Whiskey is for drinkin'; water is for fightin'.”

The indigenous people were amazed by this. In the days before the immigrants, no tribe sought to own the water. It was a gift from the Spirit to all humankind. Tribes might fight over herds of buffalo or grazing space or dominion of one kind or another. But rarely over water. Before the machines and the cities came, there was more than enough water for all.

So the Utes watched as the immigrant people, the Americans, settled and were forced to enact laws to parcel out the water of the Animas and other rivers. Commodities had to be regulated and rules were required to determine who got what. You couldn't move around in this new civilization without first establishing a complex body of laws, if for no other reason than to prevent competing claims from being resolved with the Colt and the Winchester. So the lifeblood of the natives, at the spiritual center of their existence, became a commercial commodity to their successors on the land.

The Utes might be confined for their homes and their livelihood to the arbitrary boundaries of a reservation. But that did not also require them to adopt the transformation of an object of reverence into a matter of business and politics.

Leonard Cloud and his brothers parked their trucks near a juniper grove on the Animas and sat in the shade of the trees near the flowing stream. Now, well into the summer, the flow was substantially diminished. The spring snowmelt up in the San Juan Mountains had come and gone. But residential and commercial demands on the river, from Durango and above, continued throughout the year. The Utes got whatever happened to be left.

They picked this place to consider their situation, both because it was familiar and had been used for this purpose before and because they knew also who might be there.

Brother Two Hawks, Cloud said to the older man resting against the juniper trunk, will you be disturbed if we spend a minute or two here?

The old man shook his head. This river is not mine, he said.

Well, then, one of the councilmen said, help us think what we should do about this. Up in Durango they're making big decisions. One way or the other, it comes down on us. They're either going to keep things as they are, which means more people using less water, or they're going to put a dam across the river and store up more water and find more uses for it. If things stay as they are, he said, pointing at the diminished river, here's what we've got. If they build a big reservoir up there, there could be more for us.

Two Hawks had been looking steadily downstream. Those folks, he said presently, are going to do what they are going to do. There is little we can do about it.

The younger council member spoke up. But Father, that's the old way of thinking. We now have this energy here on the res. We finally got the government to recognize that it belongs to us. It changes everything. It means we have power. And when you have power, people have to pay attention. In the old days, we let them run our lives. No more.

Well, I hope you're right, the aged man said. But the power you talk about can work in all kinds of different ways. That snake over there—they stared across the stream and could barely make out the sunning rattler the old man saw clearly—he will not bother you until you try to have power over him.

Leonard Cloud said, Up in Durango, there are a few crazy people who are putting rifles in the gun racks in their pickups. There are all kinds of splits opening up about this water project. And whichever way it goes—this water war—the Ute people, our people, are going to be affected. We're trying to decide whether we ought to stay well out of it, or whether we ought to get involved to try to settle it.

Two Hawks studied him, then looked downstream again. It is pretty funny, isn't it, when you think about our situation? Who would have thought even a few years ago that anybody up there cared about us one way or the other?

One of the councilmen said, They're even paying attention back there in Washington. The “Great Father”—his tone was derisive—remembered all of a sudden that there were some Indians sitting downstream who might have something to say about all this. What a wonder.

A wonder indeed, Two Hawks said with a smile. I guess our time had to come sooner or later.

Well, it still leaves the question about what we ought to do, Leonard Cloud sighed. Let us know if you have notions to help us. Whatever we do, even if we do nothing, it's going to affect us pretty powerfully. We can't let our people be hurt by this business.

Two Hawks said, Our people have been hurt by much. Yet we survive. We go on. It is in our nature. We were not put here for nothing. I cannot speak for the others, he said, gesturing north toward Durango, but I believe and the old holy men a long time ago believed we didn't just happen to be here. Time goes on and the people up there—again to Durango with a wave—have their own purposes. They will determine their own destiny. We must determine ours. He paused for reflection, then he continued. Though I don't have the TV and all that, I have been following this thing. I listen to what people say. Sometimes I even go up to the town and sit on one of those benches on the street. He laughed. Those tourist people take my picture. It is my service to those people up there. But I also listen to what people say.