Carried Away

I miss my Pine.

Los Pinos (Spanish, "The Pines") River is a tributary of the San Juan River in southern Colorado and northern New Mexico. The stream flows from a source near Weminuche Pass (named for the Weminuche Indians) in the San Juan Mountains through private lands and the Southern Ute Indian Reservation to a confluence with the San Juan River at Navajo Lake in San Juan County, just past the state border.

The river is impounded by the Vallecito Dam.

I grew up just 10 miles downstream and south of Vallecito Reservoir, where much of my young life was spent camping, swimming, fishing, hiking, working summer jobs, and howling at the moon with lifelong buddies.

My hometown of just a few thousand, Bayfield, sits 18 miles east of Durango. You can head south for four hours to Albuquerque or north for six to Denver. You can be in four states at once just an hour and a half away at the Four Corners Monument & Navajo Tribal Park, and if you can stand the (sorry!) rotten-egg smell of steaming water gurgling up from deep within Mama Earth, you can head west to Pagosa Springs and be soaking in the hot springs in under an hour. And what will always be Trimble Hot Springs to me is even closer on your way to Purgatory Ski Resort, Silverton, Ouray, Telluride...

What an enormous playground smack dab in the high altitude of the Rocky Mountains.

But the best part?

The Pine.

It ran cold and fast just a few yards behind our trailer home, my bedroom window looking directly out to our backyard and the water beyond.

In the summertime, my windows wide and screens thin, I fell asleep to its easy running sound. In the wintertime, I loved to listen to it belch under our weight and the impact of boulders dropped in an attempt to break through.

It was more than a river. It was a presence, an old friend, a witness to my childhood.

It carried my thoughts when they were too heavy, whispered in its own language when I needed something beyond words. I tested my body against its strength, lost my footing and fell into its cold arms, felt first-hand the miracle of physical and emotional weightlessness as I let it take my legs and small body miles downstream...

...and crawled out soaking wet in love.

With the river as our backdrop and companion, my little brother and I, along with other neighborhood kids and new friends who came and went like the seasons, explored up and down, in and around Los Pinos. Jumping in from an overpass or bridge many miles upstream to float on tubes for hours on a summer day was an easy YES! All you needed was a ride and a makeshift raft.

When I was just 10 or 11, my father borrowed a backhoe from work and drove it straight up US Highway 160B, off the road and into the river, traveling fifty yards upstream to the water behind our modest little home.

He had spent weeks, months likely, rearranging the water in his mind.

No permission asked, he took to it with an enormous machine as his scalpel. He cleared much of the brush overhang from the far banks to expose pools to sunlight and birds and bugs so more Rainbow and Brown Trout might congregate and mate. Then he turned his captain's chair and carefully carved a bend—not just for the fish, but for his family, neighbors, and friends.

With this new curve in the river's journey in place, he could stand out on a point midway across the water and reach the lively pools with even more accuracy, pulling dinner from the water with the ease of a man who knew it intimately.

And for his kids? He had shaped a sandy bank, perfect for sunbathing, splashing, and smiling with friends in bikini tops, cut-off shorts, and jelly shoes.

One of our favorite holidays in town, the 4th of July, would find hundreds of people and animals enjoying the gift of the cool, clear, clean, loving water—many of them ending up in our backyard. They came for the bonfire and storytelling before the fireworks were let loose just across the road. That day and night, and many days throughout hot summers, the river was known to belong to everyone, its usual solitude replaced by voices and shrills, the kind that fills you up and stays with you long after the embers die out.

Los Pinos taught me a rhythm of seasons.

Spring was wild and restless, swollen with snowmelt, churning brown and feisty as it carved its way forward—its energy made me feel both exhilarated and small.

Summer was its most generous self, alive with movement, echoing with laughter, carrying stories downstream, a maker of memories for miles.

Autumn came with the slow wisdom of an aria, its current easing as aspen and cottonwoods blazed gold, red, and orange along its edges, watching over the harvest in the fields it had nourished.

Winter held its breath, its shallows locked under ice, reflecting bright white sunshine and cold so sharp it might be mistaken as angry, its loving voice softened but never silenced.

I don’t know if I will ever live near my Pine again. But I carry it in me—its temperature, its sound, its sass, its unwavering movement around obstacles toward something bigger than itself. When I close my eyes at night, sometimes I can still hear it, still feel the pull.

I will not forget what it is to belong to a river.

Though the banks of Los Pinos have changed from the ones I knew, the last time I stood at that bend my father built was the first time I didn’t cry with grief.

The visit before, I had asked the river to take it all—the sadness of my father’s lifelong broken heart, the tragedy of his quiet suicide at its edge, the weight of his death that crushed my little family—to reshape every bit of it into something else.

And it did. Los Pinos did so willingly, and I wept in gratitude, the cement-hard, rocky, sandy beach cutting into my knees.

But some things are not for the river to take.

Some things settle into the riverbed, become part of its story, its memory.

And these somethings? Others will feel when they visit but won’t be able to put into words like I do.

Because I was there, the luckiest girl alive.

That sacred stretch of water—where my father, in partnership with his God, shaped a place for us to wade, to bask, to belong—was the same place he returned to years later, not to shape it, but to let it carry him away.

Los Pinos will always run through me. It lives in the in-between spaces of my days, in the hush before sleep, in the way moving water moves my pulse.

No matter what it carries, no matter what it takes, it keeps moving.

It carries on being beautiful anyway.

I have been wondering for years how to get my memoir out of my head, thinking it needed to be bound by two covers sitting perfectly on the shelf at Barnes & Noble before I'd be ready for prime time with my story. I went on a sunshine-soaked, quick walk yesterday, and I felt a random but every-so-often pang. That was followed by a bold, spoken, "Fuck that." And I sat down this morning to write and hit 'Publish' and share more of my soul.