Many thanks.

“The home builders have a long history of trying to avoid any Clean Water Act regulation, so it’s not surprising that they would do this. As evidenced by the condition of our rivers in Arizona, it’s never been easy to protect them. And a big reason for that is the efforts of the home builders to avoid regulation.” Sandy Bahr of the Sierra Club’s Grand Canyon Chapter.

WHEREAS, dear Santa Cruz River, test case for national policy on river protection:
A. because navigable rivers are covered under section 404 of the Clean Water Act but you’re an “ephemeral” river- & streams flow only during intense rainfall, into deep ravines and arroyos,
B. so you’ve been tricked, you’ve been a token in this scheme because they want you to be someone you’re not, &
C. it’s a different river, the wrong river, a river far from this one, &
D. on & on that river flowed, now golden like the aisle to God’s distant altar; and

WHEREAS, the EPA declared two portions of the Santa Cruz River —one stretching from Tubac to Continental Road and the other from the Roger Road sewage- treatment plant to the county line — navigable in December, after taking on the river as a “special case”; and

WHEREAS, henceforth, agency officials removed the designations without explanation: “This document has been temporality removed pending further policy review”; and

WHEREAS, that constitutes crime scene evidence like lying in wait &
A. you need to research the story you are being told,
B. & see who benefits from your deception; and

WHEREAS, only humans & seals have salty tears; and

WHEREAS, the National Mining Association, American Farm Bureau Federation, The National Cattlemen’s Beef Association, The Public Lands Council, American Forest and Paper Association, American Public Power Association, Edison Electric Institute, National Association of Home Builders, National Association of Realtors and the National Association of Counties are now called “grass roots” are now turning the waters to blood & the bleed effect, cracked across the river, & it’s a river to nowhere; and

WHEREAS, aforementioned big business are no match for Ducks Unlimited, the National Wildlife Federation, the Theodore Roosevelt Conservation Partnership, Trout Unlimited, & the Clean Water Network (CWN), a coalition of more than 1,200 public interest organizations across the country representing more than 5 million people; and

WHEREAS, more than 80% of species in Arizona depend on riparian habitat at some point in their life cycle &
A. the American Bird Conservatory lists southwestern riparian habitat as the fifth-most threatened habitat in the U.S. &
B. freshwater animals are disappearing five times faster than land animals &
C. that means this one & all dark-shadowed rivers, ones was then wasn’t then was; and

WHEREAS, what happens to the microcosm happens to the macrocosm &
A. this fact has never changed; and

WHEREAS, will never change; and

WHEREAS, the Rapanos disaster tried to change surface water quality protections implemented in Arizona & on every American river since 1972 as if a wetland is isolated from the surrounding ecosystems- a series of events seemingly unrelated- not a galaxy striking the edge of another galaxy and

WHEREAS, most rivers begin accidently &
A. they all glow a certain way &
B. there are colors to each of them, their watersheds &
C. a drainage basin is a distinct longitudinal zone,
D. a water of the United States; which includes, but is not limited to:
E. a sandy bottom wash, small wash, lake, tributary, a two foot wide wash, storm water retention basin, bays, beaches, runoffs, kills, runs, reaches, brooks, riffles, natural pools, storm water retention ponds, natural ponds, farm ponds, standing waters, backwaters, anabranches, channels, wastewater treatment systems, streams, headwater streams, intermittent streams, peripheral streams, streambeds, stream terraces, streets and gutters, gulches, gullies, irrigation canals, endorheic basins, swamps, inland swamps, backswamps, backwaters, bayous, cypress swamps, cypress domes, springs, flooded grasslands, glades, wet meadows, adjacent wetlands, small wetlands intermixed with uplands, remote wetlands, small discontinuous wetlands, “isolated” wetlands, “isolated” intrastate pools, puddles of rainwater, marshes, coastal marshes, fringing marshes, estuaries, tidal bores, northern bogs, southern riverine bottomlands, yazoos, oases, floods, flooded river valleys, meanders, rincons, lagoons, sandflats, swales, watersheds, creeks, cricks, small rivers, rills, mudflats, fjords, rias, terraces, river birfurcations, a streetwash, cutoff, eddy, floodplain, rivulet, prairie pothole, playa lake, wet meadow, sloughs, oxbows, drainage basins, irrigation ditches, desert washes, damp places, deltas, discharges, draws, depressions filled with water on an intermittent basis, distributaries, & thousands of fluvial landform water bodies which flow into other streams which, in turn,
F. combine to form larger streams then
G. these larger streams unite to form rivers &
H. a stream is smaller than a river,
I. a creek is smaller than a stream,
J. but larger than a brook;
K. stream, brook, creek, and rivulet are applied interchangeably to any small river &
L. a truly comprehensive list of water collections- or the point between two rivers- could not be contained on this page alone &
M. in fact, I don’t believe that it could be contained at all; and

Whereas, about 60 percent of the nation’s streams are nonpermanent, according to the National Hydrology Dataset, &
A. between 80 and 95 percent of streams in arid western states like Arizona, Utah and New Mexico do not flow year-round; and

WHEREAS, the 1972 Clean Water Act was intended to “restore and maintain the chemical, physical, and biological integrity of the nation’s waters” and were that violated, it would result in the removal of 96% of the state of Arizona’s surface waters from Clean Water Act protections which means they couldn’t prohibit wastewater discharges into the cleanest rivers like Sabino Creek and the Little Colorado River & all aforementioned 97 names in Section Nine; and

WHEREAS, to the Kogi Indians of Columbia the three entities at the beginning of life are
A. mother,
B. night, &
C. water; and

WHEREAS, where a season crosses over, lines in the river crack like a weed in the ground- you can’t even recognize her face anymore- & they may even say it is worthless & therefore doesn’t exist- try & pretend that something is not when it is- but you can’t replace something that “is” with something that “is not” because
A. “what is” & “what is not” are two completely different configurations &
B. you do not change one into the other & it doesn’t have to have a name,
C. it is “water” & that is enough & it goes into the underworld &,
D. returning, brought & brings & will bring life &
E. 96% of the streams in Arizona are non-perennial & subterranean water- 1,680,000 cubic miles of it- is groundwater; and

WHEREAS, the hardest situation for humans to understand is that they cannot understand it all but that
A. where there is no water, there is no life; and

WHEREAS, that is the one situation true & in all instances & therefore the
A. one sole phenomenon- humans understand; and

WHEREAS, 10-16% percent of the earth is true desert & evaporation of the seas goes on all the time,
A. enough to drain all oceans completely every 3 thousand years; and

WHEREAS, evaporation is a distinct, regular, normal part of the hydrologic cycle, and

WHEREAS, “In Arizona alone, according to the experts at the EPA, we stand to lose protection of approximately 95 percent of our streams and rivers under current federal agency interpretations, which would allow pollution to greatly increase,” — Grijalva, chairman of the House National Parks, Forests, and Public Lands Subcommittee; and

WHEREAS, that would be absurd; and

WHEREAS, water created 3 billion years ago is still in existence & large rivers flow faster than small ones- that’s clear- & as water moves, it slows down or speeds up, becomes shallower or deeper, & deep water is dark, &
A. human babies learn to swim before we ever walk or sit upright, &
B. know not to try to breathe under water, know to come to the surface naturally, &
C. we kept the hair on our heads to give babies something to cling to as we swam &
D. adults are 65-70% H2O, same as elephants &
E. all parties in Section Six say with a straight face they “haven’t seen any elephants”; and

WHEREAS, the Pima County Waste Water Department already quotes themselves: “The water in the Santa Cruz river is clean, but we advise against drinking, or playing in it”; and

WHEREAS, the Santa Cruz decision will set a precedent for how all other rivers, streams and wetlands will be evaluated in the United States & if the Santa Cruz is a navigable river, it gains Traditional Navigable Waters (TNW), the most restrictive designation in the Clean Water Act; and

WHEREAS, precedents have a way of setting precedents adfinfinitum; and

WHEREAS, “A controversial 2006 Supreme Court decision in the Rapanos case reinterpreted the 1972 Clean Water Act. The Rapanos decision potentially excluded from the Clean Water Act waterways that are either non-navigable or don’t have a “significant nexus” to a navigable waterway. Suddenly, Justice Anthony Kennedy caused every potential streambed in the country to be analyzed to see if it was connected to another that could or have or has had watercraft on it before it could be protected from pollution or disruption, creating legal chaos for some arid Western states, including Arizona. From 1975 until this decision, such a connection was not needed in streambeds that were “ephemeral” or often dry” & apparently the Supremes
A. expected God to be a creature, have a face & be singular in 3D,
B. just like themselves &
C. God must be under the water they said; and

WHEREAS, if God is underwater or there is no water whatsoever it is because she is drowning in elusive legal standards, jurisdictional uncertainty, & the lowering of priority of enforcement action due to uncertainty whether the waters remained within the scope of the Clean Water Act, therefore allowing
A. polluters in enforcement actions to raise the lack of Clean Water Act jurisdiction as defense &
B. because the Clean Water Act enforcement docket has been so adversely affected she cannot lift herself up out of the sewage &
C. subsequently is a violation if God invented people so the water could walk place to place, and

WHEREAS, it is water, is it not, thus must be clean to continue to keep all us alive; and

WHEREAS, water molecules cling tightly to one another & hydrogen atoms & their bonds & 2 hydrogen atoms are angled 104.5 degrees from each other at all times with & billions of tiny bonds- &
A. no one has ever seen a water molecule &
B. all we know is atoms are laced together &
C. they look like rivers under a microscope or on an X-ray &
D. comparable to branching patterns of trees, or blood vessels in animal tissue, & other natural networks, &
E. two hydrogens & one oxygen atom cling & need heated up to 2,900 degrees to pull them apart; and

WHEREAS, water molecules cling tightly to one another; and

WHEREAS, as many as 50,000 midge larvae occupy a single square yard on a river’s bottom &
A. we started out as blue-green algae, the slimy coating on rocks &
B. 7% of all humans are born with webbed feet & we still have rudimentary webs between our fingers & thumbs & Parties to Section Six thought it was less, didn’t they &
C. when we’re 8 months old, we’re still 81% water &
D. every cell has a fluid interior with hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, carbon, magnesium, iron, phosphorous, sulphur, silica, calcium iodine, fluorine, chlorine, bromine, silver, cobalt, vanadium, gold & 60,000 miles of arteries & veins on each of us; and

WHEREAS, they cling tightly; and

WHEREAS, over 85% of the fish fauna in Arizona are threatened & all three ecoregions have a conservation status of either critical or endangered with a high likelihood of future threats and

WHEREAS, they cling; and

WHEREAS, not long ago, scientists believed water came directly from the center of the earth; 1580 Bernard Palissy said water in rivers & springs came from rainfall, Halley later figured out the amount falling equaled the amount in the rivers, & water traveled thru the atmosphere; evaporation then, not from the center of the earth but clouds- storm clouds- return water to land & sea as rain, oceans, land, air, making perennial streams flow year around & intermittent streams flow only during the wet season or after heavy rain or are dry riverbeds; and

WHEREAS, the ongoing depletion of the aquifer is the reason the Santa Cruz dried out except after storms; and

WHEREAS, common sense like this, for some reason, needs stated in this SENATE JOINT MEMORIAL; and

WHEREAS, water is not uniformly available in all various areas of the United States; and

WHEREAS, they cling tightly for dear life; and

WHEREAS, water molecules cling tightly to one another because they know degradation & protection of any potential watershed always begins at its 9th order tributaries; and

WHEREAS, it bears repeating that degradation & protection of any potential watershed always begins at its 9th order tributaries; and;

WHEREAS, they cling for safety because
A. there is safety in numbers &
B. moving targets remain whole; and

WHEREAS, just because the southwest has 9th order ephemeral streams with no monstrous berths the Queen Mary III can cruise down doesn’t call for them to be degraded & destroyed, making local residents ingest toxins like there’s nothing wrong with this at all, as if it’s something they understand better than we do; and

WHEREAS, riparian areas- riverbeds & streambeds- are aquifer restorers & riparian zones are land adjacent to streams- containing wildlife & wildlands- which contain finned critters, furred friends, winged things which,
A. if polluted & destroyed, as will ground water aquifers be polluted & destroyed,
B. & plants & animals living in & around it,
C. the nutrients dissolving in its water,
D. & rock & soil carried by its flow,
E. the ecosystem; and

WHEREAS, they continue to cling tightly to one another; and

WHEREAS, 70 inches in one day fell on the island of Reunion in the Indian Ocean, which set a record, but
A. this is not Reunion Island in the Indian Ocean; and

WHEREAS, the larger the body count, the worst for the State,
A. the country,
B. this world &
C. in other dimensional worlds; and

WHEREAS, water molecules don’t let go no matter who comes for them; and

WHEREAS, Home-builder organizations fought hard against treating streams with intermittent flows- like the Santa Cruz- as navigable waters & the Southern Arizona Home Builders Association, the Home Builders Association of Central Arizona & the National Association of Home Builders filed a lawsuit in U.S. District Court in D.C. seeking injunction against the Environmental Protection Agency & the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers; and

WHEREAS, these molecules are stronger than the Section Six, which shall henceforth be called Section Eight, humans; and

WHEREAS, “…Memos came to light that some Pima County officials had urged the Corps and the Environmental Protection Agency to favor policies that would, in effect, eliminate CWA enforcement on Tucson waterways. Some viewed the memos as another example of the public works and transportation departments working at cross purposes with county planners over conservation issues”; & referred to the Clean Water Act as “this troublesome regulatory constraint” and

WHEREAS, we may say that: Some Pima County Officials suffer from a profound thought disorder &
A. remain dumb as a load of gravel &
B. prefer toxic chemicals,
C. raw sewage,
D. & oil to
E. clean water; and

WHEREAS, someone is going to get caught &
A. they did; and

WHEREAS, someone smart said, “This was really good news to have back the protections that we lost when the Corps rescinded the designation. I see this as an important interim step while they study whether the rest of the river should have this protection. I’m very hopeful for the whole river to get the traditional navigable waterway, but with this, all the tributaries should be protected because they all eventually touch these two portions”; and

WHEREAS, quantum physicists determined decades ago everything touches everything anyway, no matter what the Corps puts in their studies; and

WHEREAS, the average stay of a water molecule in the air is ten days; and

WHEREAS, it will eventually come down again, we swear before the Court to tell the whole truth & nothing but the truth so help us God; and

WHEREAS, “The Environmental Protection Agency has deemed two portions of the Santa Cruz River navigable, which means the usually dry “waterway” deserves full protection under the federal Clean Water Act. The designation – based on flows created by sewage treatment plants in Tucson and Nogales and the historic use of the river for recreation – means stepped up restrictions on building along the river and its tributaries, and more required permits for private and government construction”; and

WHEREAS, “stepped up restrictions” shall make the water happier to let go & fall upon our heads; and

WHEREAS, the proposed legislation- Baucus-Klobuchar Compromise for Clean Water, & amended Clean Water Restoration Act- replaces the term “navigable waters” with “waters of the United States” because someone caught on that federal protections apply to all waters, (& that someone was not the Section Eight Party) as Congress intended in 1972 to protect all of America’s waters from pollution, not just those that are navigable & it’s past time to restore the act’s original intentions; and

NOW, THEREFORE, BE IT RESOLVED BY THE LEGISLATURE OF THE STATE OF ARIZONA that those days draw near when the waters rise, about to break through, &
A. water molecules cling tightly to one another &
B. this is how it moves, this is the law &
C. the river’s beginning- it is not far now-; and

BE IT FURTHER RESOLVED that:

I was born by a river
that was paved with cement
I was born by a river
that was paved with cement
Still I’d stand out in that river
and dream that I was soaking wet

Someday it’s gonna rain
Someday it’s gonna pour
Someday that old dry river
Won’t be dry anymore

James McMurtry

NOTE:
• “June 2006: The U.S. Supreme Court limits the scope of Clean Water Act protection for isolated rivers, streams and wetlands. Justice Anthony Kennedy writes that they must have a significant connection to “a navigable waterway, in the traditional sense,” to be legally entitled to federal protection.

• May 2008: The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers decides that 54 miles of the Santa Cruz River north and south of Tucson deserve classification as a traditional navigable waterway, and, thus, regulation under the Clean Water Act.

• July 2008: The Corps suspends the river’s navigable determination for at least 60 days as part of a broader, national review of navigability.

• July 2008: The Pima County Board of Supervisors votes to conduct an audit of its own staff because memos show some staffers opposed the navigability status without telling the board.

• August 2008: Two U.S. House committee chairmen vote to investigate the Corps’ handling of the Santa Cruz decision, at the request of Rep. Raúl Grijalva of Tucson.

• August 2008: The Board of Supervisors supports navigability for a much longer stretch of the Santa Cruz, from the Mexican border to the Pinal County line. The Environmental Protection Agency moves to take over handling of the navigability issue from the Corps.”

The sky is dark & the castle behind is ominous. This might be a good point to look more carefully at just what we understand by ‘the end of the world’. SCALE VARIES.  80% of all sickness in developing worlds is linked to polluted water. Killers may contact the victims’ family. Perspective of entitlement: “I want to do it, so I will.” In Detroit, 42,000 families got their water cut off. Like a car that was found locked & the kill switch had been set. Even a foot of moving water can be enough to carry away a car. Even a sip can save a life. Water, sanitation, hygiene. Every day more children die of more waterborne disease than aids, traffic accidents, malaria & war put together. Why. The forked stick, or divining rod, is usually shaped like the letter Y. By 2025, 2/3rds of the population will live without adequate access to clean water. Give me a reason why. Water is traded on the NYSE, several dozen indexes. Smirking legal pads & one full turn of the flag. The small eyes of a pocket gopher. Sloshing water from the bags in their haste. The world’s most powerful bird of prey is the 10-20 pound harpy eagle. Cue cards are on the ceiling, trinkets dropped from the sky. A series of short, sharp, cheeping whistles, cheep, cheep; sounds annoyed. Giant plastic beheaded eagle. Winds can blow dust from the Sahara desert to the southeastern U.S. Dust devils a thousand feet high cut across the desert floor. Desert sands buried the cities like how blood circulates left to right. It’s the direction it has to go. Have to, have got to, it is not possible, not mind, would like, can & will are linguistic aspects of any grammar list. Ability, possibility, probability, willingness, invitation, request, permission. Somewhere inside, wondering how any of this could be real. But, I suppose you know. You have always known. Symbolic thought allows us to think abstractly, analyze the past, anticipate the future. To ensure fertility, induce fruitful harvest, or to placate the village gods. Natural phenomena require natural explanation. Something refractive you can understand. The Pacific no longer mixes with west-moving Atlantic waters in the tropics, for instance, that bees are dying in record numbers everywhere, that birds are falling dead all over this planet. NBC (nuclear, biological, chemical). A thousand years from today. Or today. Date not marked.

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Water is a liquid crystal with a pliable lattice matrix that is capable of adopting many structural forms. It’s how the world began. It’s how the world will end. Was the middle Atlantic ridge- formerly above water- the site of Atlantis which, according to Plato’s story, sank nearly 12,000 years ago? “With great earthquakes and inundations, in a single day and one fatal night.” The water in the world’s oceans is held down by gravity which pulls everything toward the middle of Earth. Always there was a group seated around the table directly interested in the sale. Then there was the second group of people who stood in a circle just looking on. In ancient Greek the word parasitos means one who eats at the table of another. Something that’s always been here but covered over. Like deepwater or benthic animals who subsist on one another and on leftovers. Buying it from a water vendor a jar at a time. Shoot-it-out-with-the-looters. Leave them for dead. Exit wound. Black napkin, soiled. Which of our genes makes us human? 1.5% difference in the chromosomes isn’t much. Neanderthals survived the arrival of modern humans in some spots of earth. We have found charcoal from their torch. Since Celts saw no real break between life & death, a debt could be carried over into the otherworld. Not counting delivery, treatments & purification costs, one calculation cost of Nasa’s moon water is $1,029,690, 515,640 per acre foot. It’s the scratch- off of all scratch-offs. Paper is usually made from chipped wood, softened into a wet mush and formed into a thin sheet. The lines between the lines holding the letters up. Nothing is off the record, yet the words fit too closely, inclined at an angle with another surface, as if to cease use of key items like fact, fiction. “It’s the orders you disobey that make you famous,” MacArthur once said. Even a stone tossed into the water will be tossed out again. The deeper an object lies buried the older it is. Mass of an infant. Specimen. Security watermark. Water cartel. Sometimes sailors beat drums & gongs to scare away sea monsters by making them believe land was near: the booming of surf on reefs or rocks. Winds only drive ocean currents, but they kick up waves. In Hawaii, sirens warn people of giant waves. The water itself seems to be moving, but only the wave form really moves. So there it is. Sea level is only a “mean” or average, but sea level really does vary.  All the great reefs will be dead & gone within 50 years, obliterated by warmer seas. Born on Yaku Shima, Japan, to gorge on pelagic red crabs when they reach Baja, then back to Japan, a loggerhead turtle- all 300 pounds of it- will cross the Pacific along a line between cool water rich in plankton (green in the satellite image below) & warmer water low in plankton. It’s a long way to Tiparari. But in the end it all comes down to something you can’t quite explain. You use “something” in expressions such as ‘or something’ & ‘or something like that’ to indicate that you are referring to something similar to what you have just mentioned but you are not being exact. A question that has been bothering me: “What does it mean to be alive?” Do you know how long it takes to replace a turtle this size? You wouldn’t live long enough to see it.

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This is what it’s all about: Earliest known anatomically correct image of a human heart in art is a 4.5-inch-high ceramic figure holding a human heart from about 1000 B.C. It depicts the aorta, the pulmonary artery, & both ventricles. Not until the 16^th century did artists achieve such detail. What’s left on the inside is dead stone on exhibition at Princeton University. Water is being bought, owned, & controlled by corporations making decisions about who gets to have water & who doesn’t. Which is why so many are dying from a lack of water. Don’t you know this already? Death due to dehydration can happen within hours of diarrheal onset. Everything that sinks in the sea sinks all the way to the bottom, contrary to the old belief that ships, dead bodies, & other things “find their level” of various depths & remain suspended there. In the US 1700’s, people suspected water dowsers of being witches. There is now, & there is all other time in both directions. Comparing differences in the genes & blood proteins of humans, chimps, & gorillas, molecular biologists estimate that the hominid line split off from other African apes between five & seven million years ago, a time poorly known in the African fossil record. A digital clock shows am & pm with a little glow light when it gets dark. There’s settings & an owner manual. If the light dims, the numbers angle down into darkness. Each year 443 million school days are lost due to diarrhea & water-related illnesses. The distance from the top of a school chair to the ground is about one yard. Spell things how they sound. Laying flat on a page, walking on a flat earth, walking with heart beating and then wiped out. Until recently there was fear of the power of curses, of second sight, of changelings- that fairies would substitute a sickly, wizened child of their own for yours unless you protect the cradle with fire tongs. Half the nation’s drinking-water wells contain nitrates unleashed mostly by agricultural fertilizers; excessive nitrates can deplete oxygen in the bloodstreams of infants & result in a kind of slow suffocation known as blue-baby syndrome. The day you die is just like any other day, only shorter. Libation \ly-BAY-shun\, noun:1. The act of pouring a liquid or liquor, usually wine, either on the ground or on a victim in sacrifice, in honor of some deity; also, the wine or liquid thus poured out. The color of imperfectly oxygenated blood. Decant. Recant. The history of evil: In 19^th century England, human evil got blamed on vampires & werewolves- they were capable, blamed- not humans. Groping for a definition of what it is that distinguishes. “Sometimes I feel like a vampire.” – Ted Bundy. In the past 50 years there have been 1831 water-related altercations between countries. Blood is 90%. The bigger the drop, the farther it will travel. When the drop hits the surface, it goes through 4 actions: contact, dispersion, displacement, & collapse. When blood contacts a surface, it flattens out.  A drop will not break apart unless acted upon by an outside force, or when it ultimately hits a surface. Ted Bundy – “You feel the last bit of breath leaving their body. You’re looking into their eyes. A person in that situation is God!” Game over. But it was the sport that counted. “Wild animals never kill for sport. Man is the only one to whom the torture & death of his fellow creatures is amusing in itself.” The brain is 85% water. Cheyney’s FBI interview: “I don’t remember” 72 times. With Alzheimer’s, the water lessens. The water leaves. The water can’t stand it. The witnesses quoted did not understand the significance of what they had seen. Paper bill, finger marks all over it. Security threads change color when ultraviolet light passes through an image of a commercial vessel printed on currency. Winds may pile up water several feet higher in one place than another. A 60-mile wind raises waves about 30 feet in height from trough to crest. This piled-up water has to go somewhere. Should Greenland’s ice sheet melt fully, virtually all the world’s major coastal cities will find themselves under water. Drinking untreated seawater is fatal because it contains a higher percentage of salt than the human body can handle. To help get rid of it more water is drawn from the tissues & the body becomes dehydrated. To “Salt” something is also to add fraudulent value. You can smell the charge, the smell of things both living & dead, the drifting lump of ice. A kind of former star quality washed out by the flash of the camera. They travel on traceless paths. Massive ice floes on the constant move, grinding & crashing like continental plates, continents where the borders keep shifting and changing- surround sounds, nothing sounds- throwing up jagged blinding glow like primal embers. Several thermophilic species of bacteria & archae can grow only in water hot enough to burn a human. The Boy Scout manual says when it’s hot it’s good to drink something hot. A manual for it. Flood, storm, drought- in 2000 1 in 30 of the planet’s population were affected by natural disaster. A manual. A petroglyph in a desert marking water. Where: it’s a fundamental interrogative. When. Why. How. Help. At any given moment, all the world’s rivers contain a total of about 300 cubic miles of water- enough on average to sustain their flow for only about 2 weeks, & perhaps only a few hours in arid regions. A river like the appearance of fire, shiny.

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If you start collecting all the prophecies you will find that every day and at almost every hour there is something being prophesied for that day and time. Celts measured time not in days but in nights, divided months into a bright half and a dark half. It’s as if you are experiencing yourself from two different dimensions, between the light and shade. The waters of dreams are rated most significant of any dream a human can have. 1/3 of life is spent in a dream state, yet we wake up and don’t know what the dreams mean. You can’t take it in too much when you are awake, so you take it in when you are asleep. Mass hypnosis. What can be said when it’s been said already, except for the most important things; one page, one paragraph that would say it all, a line, a word. Something. The heart’s continued beating is an involuntary muscle movement. It’s all we know.

We are already in the times that have been prophesied. Enter light, exit light, & vanish like Atlantis. Animalia, Chordata, Mammalia, Primates, Hominidae, Homo, H. sapiens, & you are here: a time in-between, something already in the blood, acute intestinal pain, & still having trouble hearing a pronunciation: Extinction. The word goes on to mean having no qualified claimant, <an extinct title>, & no longer burning. For thousands of years, rites assured that the sun on the shortest day would not disappear forever. The weight of a human head far lighter than you’d think. 47,000 products the average supermarket has. Giving birth to all sorts of strange offspring. A way to distract the masses. Effective crime-scene staging. In the beginning, before everything was set in motion, effigy mounds were in the form of birds, animals, serpents. Figurines in the form of crouching human figures were typical. Carrying spears & shields. Things double-back. There are now 2x as many slot machines as there are ATM’s in America. You don’t think of the strange light falling. The light backs up. We’ll notice things: rare seabirds being spotted in California. Missed Approach. Wake up in the middle of the night screaming, say. Centrifugal force.

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Some people will indeed keep denying that burning 80+ million barrels of oil, countess millions of tons of coal, natural gas, etc. every single day can’t possibly be having an impact up to the very moment when it becomes impossible to deny, until metaphorically up to their necks in evidence. Did you know pigs can’t ever look at the sky? Their neck muscles don’t allow it. Everyone is welcome to their own opinion but no one has a right to their own facts. What is written down is what counts. We all have the same 26 letters to go by. The front, as it has been understood in other wars, is where you’re facing at the moment. This is a kind of war that does not recognize noncombatants, where the high water mark even exists or will ever be again. Royal Dutch Shell, Exxon Mobil, Wal-Mart, BP, Chevron, Total, PetroChina, GE, Gazprom, Microsoft, Toyota, Nestle. ™. Frightening legitimacy. They usually hunt in groups because the chance of returning with game is better. Oscar Wilde: “The true mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible.” Facts take us only so far, like an empty waterhole where animals & humans once drank. There are facts & then there are facts. Mise-en-page. Diplomatic assurances are worthless. We know exactly what you’re talking about. Demons don’t like paper’s hissing noise, a Shinto priest says. Paper forms when atoms in the fibers bond with those in the water molecules & voila: Kill Order. Between the capital letter & the period, a comma slides down like a fang until it contracts to a question mark, human rights on a meat hook hanging upside down. It rounds a corner, becomes drained & then it’s someone else; a statement, a statistic. The first is a question of what happened. The second is a question of how. It is illegal to chase or use a machine to assist in the taking of any game animal. So what? Well, what we owe to biodiversity is literally everything. The air we breathe. The food we eat. The materials of our homes, clothes, books, computers, medicines. Goods & services that we can’t even imagine we’ll need someday will come from species we have yet to identify. Seven in ten biologists believe the extinction juggernaut to be a colossal threat to humanity, one far more dire than even its contributor, global warming. Unknown fingerprints, hoof prints left in the mud, circling still. “Photonic camouflage” to help eliminate their shadows. Like a faint silhouette that a fish throws to predators beneath it in the water column. Float on top. There are some parts of earth that remain hardly explored; never farmed on, built on, or reshaped by humans: the thickest, remotest jungles, polar regions, cave systems far underground, & deep oceans, 6.8 miles down. The monkey swings upward & lands, feet first, on another branch. This is what its come to: A chilled tank, a frozen zoo, 20^th CENTURY ARK stored at 315°F below zero, living skin cells representing about 275 species, the sperm samples from 2,000 animals equal to 156 species. “We maintain the viability of cells & sperm indefinitely.” Like shining little pieces of glass. Time comes and goes. A jaguar once used to hold the hearts of victims sacrificed to the Aztec gods. Statistically, each year begins with the same 1% chance that a 100-year event will occur. Pe=1-[1-(1/T)]n. Except it keeps upping to 100%. Every year. Upping. Massive movements of earth, air, fire, & water. When the sun comes up, most animals awaken and begin their day. Age of the sun: 12.345-12.365 billion years. Said 100,000 times too bright to view with the naked eye. No one has ever gone blind from looking at the sun. Darkness can always be improved upon.

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The current rate of extinction is at least 100 times above normal & Harvard biologist Edward O. Wilson estimates it to be 1,000 to 10,000 times greater- meaning somewhere between 2.7 & 270 species are wiped out every single day. Unless we dramatically change course, Wilson predicts half of all plants & animals will be extinct by 2100. Easily picked them off 1 by 1. Looked at us with as much inquisitiveness as we looked at them. More. Worth more dead. What counts is outside the normally counted. The words no one can find. We don’t think in words we don’t know the meaning of. It held no meaning beyond what it was not. And we don’t like trick answers. Is it a plant or an animal? There’s a clown with a trick mule whose tail pulls off. Bray! Braybraybrayaway. Little animals are funny… you gotta love ‘em! Japanese scientists create goldfish with invisible scales. Scientists, gotta love ‘em! The trouble is there aren’t enough words. Or is it the isolation of individual words? Bigger than a bread box? From last year’s profit alone, Exxon Mobil could give every person on earth $6.75, or $45 worth of Christmas gifts to each child alive, or every person who has ever lived 1 quarter, 1 dime, 1 nickel, 2 pennies. This is what most people look at as forms of possession. All major religions share a means for casting out demons: One inhabited by a demon a) speaks or understands unknown languages, B) knows things they shouldn’t, C) can predict the future, D) intense hatred for holy things, E) exhibits beyond mortal strength. It’s an open water kind of possession. The problem is not the supply of water- everyone knows Earth has the same amount today it did when dinosaurs roamed, that 4 trillion gallons fall daily in the form of precipitation. Anything elevated in space will fall. Ross Ice Shelf is melting to a small ice floe not large enough to stand on. Like a mass of letters stripped of their original meaning. A feeling in the bloodstream as it goes, that taste of salt at the back of your mouth. The top of the world, the bottom of the world, the whole shebang as seen in a time exposure. Eerie underglows coming from all the monitors. It’s eerie like seeing the charred remains of prehistoric campfires. The fire burned lower, the fire burned not at all. The sinkholes are forming. Look out there. There is a verisimilitude that we can understand that is happening. Thanks for Playing! Endgame of the universe. Monkeys shrieking in the canopy.

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More than a billion people lack access to potable water and 12 million die each year due to unsanitary water. With their hands tied behind them & stripped of all ornamentation, they were beheaded & thrown in a heap. Libation is from Latin libatio, from libare, to take a little from anything, to taste, to pour out as an offering. 1 in 8 people lack access to safe water supplies. Illegible water the color of a freshly dug grave. Black granite. The heart of dryness. All the little birds were badly scorched. Some were burned black all over. With wings folded inward like lower tips of a star. (When a star wobbles, astronomers only know an unseen planet could be causing the motion.) Known as the idiot’s defense, “This can’t be true, because if it was, there’d be investigations & arrests.” Dahmer’s neighbors smelled dead bodies & heard powersaw buzzing in the dead of night. Darwin: “I have found one skeleton- sufficiently mutilated- of an animal, which I do not think there exists at present on the globe any relation.” Her hands were in front of her body. What’s The Time, Mister Wolf? In this game you are always moving. A herd taking flight for no apparent reason, a mass of scattered animals simultaneously raising ears and freezing in their tracks. Water, any type. Both lethal & less than lethal. Millions of women & girls spend several hours per day collecting water like an insufferable terminal French film. In the hot vertical charred noon, the reed-choked trickle river and the eight-foot grass. The ones reduced to sand, ash, thirst, carrying on downstream from nothing going nowhere. You have to keep paying for being born a woman. Elephants coming to a water hole often arrive at a dead run, not because anything scary is behind them, but simply because water is, at last, in front. Bursts of automatic rifle fire, very close. Tints the water a brilliant red. Pay dirt. Suddenly the animals bunch & bolt; others gait as a lope, exhausted, communicate with one another by means of calls too low-pitched for human beings to hear. They reclined never to rise again- forepaws outstretched & heads lifted high. Spread-jawed in horror. It was going to die & it knew it. Then he is gone, absorbed by the night. And that was that for that species. “Say goodbye for us.” Asian Elephant, elephas maximus. Cheetah, acinonyx jubatus. Great Indian Rhinoceros, rhinoceros unicornis. Black Rhinoceros, diceros bicornis. Leopard, panthera pardus. Bactrian Camel, camelus bactrianus. Asian small-clawed otter, aonyx cinerea. Atlantic Green Turtle, chelonia mydas mydas. Giant Panda, ailuropoda melanoleuca. Asiatic Black Bear, selenarctos thibetanus. Grizzly Bear, ursus arctos horribilis. West Indian Manatee, trichechus manatus. Hamadryas Baboon, papio hamadryas. Cheetah, acinonyx jubatus. Florida Panther, felis concolor coryi. Don’t forget that under the McNaughton Rule, a killer who has made an effort to cover up his crime is deemed to be sane & cognizant of the difference between right & wrong. A thousand frantic silhouettes. Thousands and thousands and thousands of them- like a big cloud. “Place of the invisible beings.” If you do not know the names of things, the knowledge of them is lost too, so says the Philosophia Botanica. After the false-color images, counted seedlings on hands & knees in a wind-scoured starkness, crawled along the edge of the world, along any great circle, in the light the world appeared in. A darker light bulb. Any mummy crumbles at each touch until it soon breaks at the neck.

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Flat light hard light sidelight calling all high rollers. Coins hitting the tray is Universal Studios’ sound chip #0822, but there is another, lower-pitched sound for larger wins. Lesser sounds resemble a glass shattering somewhere in the distance. Like dice shaken in a cup. Thanks For Playing! 125-5 of California State Penal Code: Murder in the 2^nd Degree: A person who through depraved indifference recklessly causes the death of another human being. This case is an abomination of human behavior, shouldn’t someone say? The Mafia code of silence is called “omerta.” Like the dark of someone’s mouth. It’s the blackest magic. Un-paraphrasable. Begins to shine real sweat, biting their tongues behind a fixed smile, all in a row, white pillar teeth. Do the vestigial teeth come from the same place as the tail? Prehensile tail. The parents gave sharp cries, answered with increasing urgency by the cub. All three craned their necks, trying to locate each other. The attitude of the skeletons suggested that individuals had been dropped into a prepared grave soon after death. Just wide enough for a family to curl up together. A final dark defile. To describe it using any word seems a pitiful understatement. Words used as words are italicized. Example: What is the meaning of the word impeach? At right, parts of the town have caved in. Houses painted with the blood of a lamb. The huge marks going down the wall. Red on red. Open into what was once a ballroom; white of the gown, dark of the cast shadow. Flashy rhinestone detailing! Planned obsolescence. The first major superstructures, antedating even tombs, were all for storing water. Next: the Wild Card Round! A wall calendar frozen at November 4. Parchment paper made from animal skin. Death note. The sound of the animal breathing within an inch of its life. Something of its anguish lingered, a –, an –, a –. Whatever it is, we’ve come to it, the world at the edge of light. At any given time ½ the world’s hospital beds are occupied by patients suffering from a water-related disease. Sharp intake of breath. Take in the moment, the components of things before they congeal. Again from heard been has never. Ex-post. Suspicion of solicitation to commit murder: 7 years, usually. But what do we say to the dead? Sometimes we get the water & it’s outside us & there’s no way to get it in us. Lividity is a purplish-red striation pattern formed in newly deceased bodies. When the heart stops pumping, blood no longer circulates & sinks to the lowest level of the body, where it eventually etches a series of permanent bright stripes- unless it is moved before lividity is set. Once lividity is complete, the body can be moved without any change in the pink to purplish markings. So colorful, so sayonara. Forget about anybody’s smile but your own. Check-point-friendly smiles as if they were the one losing blood. Hold that. We get knocked out because the brain collides with the skull because the water in the casing sloshes when the brain collides with the skull because brain moves out of its casing & that force causes a person to lose all consciousness. Because, because, because has an infinite regression of causes. It’s the water that does it. Hexagonal crystal structure with a bent molecular shape. How it moves. A case based on circumstantial theory rather than fact only stands up if no other theory makes sense. The only way to show a better theory is to present it. 99% of all chemical reactions in the body require water. Verse 30 from the Koran: or Qur’an – “We made from water every living thing.” There should be another word for water. It’s the most abundant molecule on Earth’s surface.

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Killers often try to insert themselves into the police investigations of their homicides like a blood that has been diluted. Cast-off patterns of blood or drained veins. Everyone can see them. Situational awareness. Children who drink unsafe water often carry 1,000 parasitic worms in their bodies at any given time. Like dolls in various states of dress & dismemberment. Sticking in pin after pin.  Ailuropoda melanoleuca: Their skin is pink & almost naked & their eyes are sealed until they are more than a month old. Newborns are 6 inches long & weigh 3 to 4 ounces- 1/900^th of its mother. Killers often return to the scene of their crimes. The collection of victims & the taking of trophies. Souvenirs, mementos of their victims when they were inflicting pain & suffering & they use these to reminisce about the good times later on. Color of hydrogen peroxide on skin. Each human fetus passes through a stage with gill-like ridges & a tail. No one remembers what the original plan was but the procession continues anyway. Odds that where there is a will, there is a way. Odds that where there is a way anything will actually be done about it. However, you can certainly stop yourself from standing there. Call Sign, position, & standby generator. Over my dead body is a real term now. 8 degrees is roughly the width of your fist held at arms length. A stream-width away. This is a whale’s ear. They can hear a thousand miles. Blacking out at the peak moment of a homicide is a ploy that rarely convinces detectives, jurors, or judges. First the names. Start out with the names. The players. The–. “Cu e surdu, orbu e taci, campa cent’anni ‘impaci: He who is deaf, blind, and silent will live a hundred years in peace.” Then there’s: Exculpatory: clears a defendant from guilt. Epilogue to the epilogue to the epilogue: whichever edition:

And I’d like to thank my funders: the University of Iowa, the National Endowment For The Arts, the Iowa Art Museum, and DIAGRAM for taking the piece on the Santa Cruz River.

Recognition and cold, hard cash makes such a difference in every writer’s life. God bless you.

–Cheyenne

We were born in a house of paper. Explosions of paper streamers, comet-like streamers. On the earliest known map- a plate of Babylonia carved into a four-thousand-year-old clay tablet- the Euphrates is the most obvious detail. It takes 250 pounds of water to make a pound of paper. Sand dollar white. Careful alignment of simple words for effects dictate the cause and effect in the lives of so many. Pressed one after another against our chests.

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People came out into the streets, faces openmouthed under the sky. There were long lines to buy tickets, long lines to enter the cave… Archaeologists scraped the last layers of earth from the floor to reveal scenes of carnage. What has gone before & what will come. The guide’s flashlight lit the walls: suddenly all around was a cavalcade of animals, bones, tools, weapons, ornaments, cave art. Mortar red. Lay in wait. Like candy hearts with the messages. They range from realistic to abstract, even to grotesque, sometimes in the same excavation. Like some errant stagehands had mixed the metaphors. A permanent kind of drought, a kind of global fire. The noises of breaking ice, greatly magnified. Their creaking creates a kind of music. Sang out phrases. Words against words. The water evaporates, but the salts are left. As if water has been pressed down to a purer form. A wind blowing up from the south. Picking up across a slope.

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Geologists everywhere find evidence of catastrophe & sudden inundation; some, but not all of it, caused by great melt at the end of the last ice age. Almost an occult force. Nothing you know of comes close to that. The heaving & thrusting of the earth’s crust over geologic time can force edges & fragments of even deeply buried structures to the surface, stick figures, one with an open mouth that appeared to be screaming or sobbing. They’re lean, they’re hungry, & they grab. Grab, shake, bite, gouge, puncture, split, punch. Find followed find. Any discovery of human remains has to be filed with the state. Virtually all living organisms emit extremely weak light, weaker than 1/1000 naked-eye sensitivity.  And the path of light is a ray with an endpoint at the flashlight. Walking in one large circle. What is left after that? Earth’s sixth mass extinction. Ape, Hominid, or something in between? The astonishing brightness of their blood. There’s a big gap where we really don’t know anything about what’s going on in the fossil record. Sloping foreheads, vast necropolis, the red-hot piece of metal; pitted, eroding ice sheet. Snow cones a dollar. One fish parasite destroys the tongue of its victims, then settles itself in the tongue’s place. A lie told well is just as good as the truth. Even if you don’t suspect that you’re being trailed, break your trail from time to time if you can. Like glyphs understood individually but their combined meanings have yet to be deciphered in detail. The great seal of the U.S.A. on the reverse side of the $1 bill. First used publicly in 1782. The distinctive appearance of the words fit perfectly together in a rectangular grid. Arranged like the backs of grazing dinosaurs. Paper forms when atoms in the fibers bond with those in the water molecules. They’re just words. Everyone’s words. Why do these words not work.

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Tides surge in. Corrosively salty seafloor spreading, & the swarms of biblical-plague proportions. Street signs, their names obliterated. Astral fallout. So far, we have only a series of dates. Patches of some unknown dark red material held traces of skin adhering to the insides of eggs, or shells, or your mother’s womb. Like the mark of the beast, or the continuation of a holy bloodline. Like wound interpretation. Time beyond count passed since the waters failed & the animals died here. Like washed up jokes. Nonillions of years, vigintillions of years. Solstice, equinox, zenith. How do you get great floods from so little water? Chemically, water is hydrogen protoxide & all its physical constants are abnormal. Roughly following the 41^st parallel, you have the top half of the world on a map. People have gone so high up, now they’re reaching back for the ground. At the mathematically precise true South Pole- where there is no point south of the South Pole- acid from ink eats through cheap paper to the sound of rising wind. Crumpling paper alarms almost all small mammals. Rustling as soft as moth wings. Or a seawind too long upon the land. Then, one morning it stops, the line snaps & you walk out the front door & fall down. “Like brightness.” Crumbling buildings, smashed windows, & broken wires dangling from utility poles. The unmuffled roar. By then the sky will be red. Skin so close to sky. Rays emitting all around resemble a giant’s eyelashes. Our skin- two yards of it on the average human body- & the cartoon man crawling across the desert crying, ‘Water! Water!” With no exact change. The sun has a surface temperature of 6000K. This makes it golden yellow. Sulfuric yellow. Whenever a water drop falls through a ray of the sun, it explodes in a tiny flare. There’s then nothingness.

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The triangle atop the pyramid represents the immortality of the soul & the unfinished Temple, the structure that began with King Solomon & was destroyed, only to be replaced by another temple that was destroyed. Blue blood, old blood. Annuit Coeptis above the eye- the All Seeing Eye on the dollar bill- means “He has given approval to our undertaking.” Rows of dots, a common motif 32,000 years ago. Clatter of hooves on the pebbles. The slow-motion catastrophe continues to unfold. Biologists estimate there are now between 4 million & 10 million species on Earth. Only 8º north of the Equator, the soil temperature can hit 130º. B15, Antarctica’s iceburg, was so massive it plunged 1,000 feet below surface. It could have run the flow of the Nile for 75 years. The Jordan, 1,000. Could have. Massive ice floes constantly grind apart; the world is using its ice faster than anyone thought possible. The Mesopotamians used asphalt as a building material 5,000 years ago. Street trees & nature strips. Bits of glittering fool’s gold.

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All becomes clear when we consider Shackleton’s silent film shot in 1917: expedition recreation. That it can be given no ordinary description. A kind of amber to catch the traces of time. He saunters past paper Mache icebergs, then for the camera points out the route to the North Pole- to you, to me, to the bulk of everything; however, were he headed the correct direction he’d turn left in the film, not right… Now we aren’t sure what’s real & what’s not, victims of a geomagnetic shift or lowlight trick. We were confused early. The outtakes prove it. And waved till we were out of sight. Distal transverse crease: the crease above the proximal transverse crease of the palm, also known as the heart line. Which looks something like a chicken wishbone. Clean as a hounds tooth. Boring into the earth at low angles. Used motor oil. Make a wish on it. And so another crack opens up even closer than the last one. A time exposure of white vehicle lights. “The earth, O Lord, is full of thy mercy….” And they learned how to shield themselves from falling objects. Everyone already knows the planet does a very good job of erasing the marks of humanity. What is true is sunk. Soil floating away from roots. It has been churned up, mulched, ground under, washed away and lost forever. No one knows, or will say, how many. There are stories past counting. And if you have no interest in these things, perhaps you would be content to just sit and have your feet washed? Perhaps. Even the worst jokes were laughed at. Witness intimidation. The way it dislocates reality, disintegrates expectation. Not being able to tell where we are in relation to where we have been. What do you walk upon? The axial lean of the earth. However, we can never see the whole of earth at any one time on a globe; not sinusoidal, nor azimuthal, or briesmeister. The beginning of the world, the end of the world: which is the older story? A tiny creature that lives inside everything. Holds its wings over its back when at rest, eyes rolled back, stares at the sky like an empty eye socket.

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Druids predicted the future by studying the convulsions of the body and the squirting of blood. It should help to know the difference between: a dark, salty river & plasma. Water moves just like blood, you know. And when spilled will evaporate. In some places whole generations pass without a rain. 18,000 years ago, ice sheets- in places 10,000 feet thick- extended south nearly to London. Like enormous fangs. The story pauses, regroups, then moves ahead: Malaria-carrying mosquitoes peregrinate north as far as the UK, Canada, the Netherlands. Inverness. Korea, Papua New Guinea highlands. Other places previously not warm enough for them. 18 new species recognized in Europe. Heat halation. Frozen tundra. Heat halation. Thesis-evidence-evidence-evidence-conclusion. The never-ending straight path that extends in both directions. It doesn’t matter where you begin. Fire generally spreads in both directions from where it was set. When the dark was never light enough at the back of the cave. You are the character you started out with in the pilot, but you are in completely different situations.

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Subterranean passage: Below ground at the North Pole- a sole sturgeon has been placed there as proof by scientists we were here for the next civilization- after the fever breaks. For the way that turns in the action create a framework for the narrative. Is propped up in a setback ice shelf. Is exhausted, thin. ‘Say good-bye for us.’ Ghost galleon. Last Call: Atop this shelf cut into an ice block into an ice wall in an ice room. Held there in a way the earth keeps for itself deep in its hollow. A garland of frozen popcorn around its neck. Like short vertebrae. It lies in wait. Yes, it sits, it stays. Sleeps with its back arched through the centuries. If they had known what they had known. There is no marker at the true North Pole, that the magnetic North Pole creeps five kilometers a year. Presently moving in a north to northwesterly direction. This is where a compass no longer works properly. We’re all on our own. When the palm of the hand is turned upward, the other bone to which the hand is attached rolls upon the first. When the palm of the hand is turned upward. To evaporate, leaving salt behind. Something risen after itself.

1. The Niobrara River (pronounced /ˌnaɪ.əˈbrærə/, from the Ponca Ní Ubthátha kʰe pr onounced [ˈnĩ uˈbɫᶞaɫᶞa ˈkʰe], means “water spread-out horizontal-the”.

2. On the Niobrara area: “Sep 7, 1804 – The [prairie dog's] toe nails [are] long, they have fine fur and the longer hairs is gray, it is Said that a kind of Lizard also a Snake reside with these animals. From earliest times, it has been known that prairie dogs do not live alone in their towns but, rather, serve as compliant hosts to many uninvited species.”

3. Many. Uninvited. Species.

4.“Niobrara was founded on June 7, 1856 at the confluence of the Niobrara and Missouri Rivers by a group of men headed by Dr. Benneville Yeakel Shelly. They marked their claim by building a log garrison on the banks of the Missouri.”

5. WHAT?

6. Please, say it again more distinctly. Who “founded”?

7. “Niobrara’s beginning can be traced back to the year of 1856, when a group of men headed by a Dr. Benneville Yeakel Shelly marked their claim to an area on the banks of the Missouri.”

8. This story, every time it’s made itself known in history, has been nothing close to real.

9. Darker elements.

10. To such a simple statement, every telling.

11. Far darker elements.

12. 30% of the native freshwater fish species in North America are threatened, endangered, or of special concern.

13. Threatened natives.

14. Every serial killer has an AKA:

15. A paint- by- numbers picture John Wayne Gacy painted of himself as a clown he sold on EBAY for $3,000.

16. The person most likely to have committed the crime is the person no one mentions.

17. America the Beautiful.

18. “This picture, The Trail of Tears, was painted by Robert Lindneux in 1942. It commemorates the suffering of the Cherokee people under forced removal. If any depictions of the “Trail of Tears” were created at the time of the march, they have not survived. Image Credit: The Granger Collection, New York.”

19. They have not survived. “The public version of the news or whatever event is never really what happened.” –Hunter S. Thompson.

20. Dramatization from the NET Television production of “The Trial of Standing Bear.” To order a copy of this program from NET Television, click here.

21. It is not visible. Unlike burning forests or invading sand dunes, falling water tables cannot be readily photographed. They are often discovered only when wells go dry. But more than half the world’s people live in countries where water tables are falling.

22. They have not survived, the depictions of “Trail of Tears”. Whoever’s left standing tends to get the last word in edgewise, that’s the word “history”.

23. And so, the generation of stories of what happened are fictions built on tradition built on fictions built on tradition. Horse thieves.

24. The predatory king of the Niobraran Sea was this fellow, Tylosaurus, a mosasaurid that reached lengths of up to 50 feet. It’s a giant, air-breathing reptile, and is probably most comparable to a killer whale.

25. “I was not born in America, I was born on my land.”

26. The number of freshwater species has decreased faster than the decline of species on land or in the sea.

27. Taps.

28. Omaha Herald:  “Sunday, Morning. May 15, 1879.”

“STANDING BEAR.”

_____

Hayt Will Use the Whole Power

of the Government to Hold Him.

_____

He Orders An Appeal to be Taken

From Judge Dundy’s Decision.

_____

WASHINGTON, May 14.–The decision of

Judge Dundy at Omaha in the Standing Bear

habeas corpus case in which he virtually

declares Indians citizens with the right to

go where they please, regardless of treaty

stipulations is regarded by the government

as a heavy blow to the present Indian sys-

tem, that if sustained will prove extreme-

ly dangerous alike to whites and Indians.

If the power of the government to hold

Indians upon their reservations and to re-

turn them when they escape is denied, the

Indians will become a body of tramps

moving without restraint wherever they

please and exposed to attacks of frontier-

men without redress from the government.

The district attorney at Omaha has been

instructed to take the necessary steps to

carry the decision to higher courts.

Secretary Mc Crary, in conformity with

habeas corpus case, has directed that those

Indians be released.

29. Nervous like someone who goes to a great deal of trouble to explain an inconsequential event.

30. Specimenlike.

31. A touch of the devil, I don’t know what it was.

32. A miner’s pan with low-sloping sides.

33. Etcetera.

34. Since 1900, half the world’s wetlands have disappeared: “D-E-V-I-L-S. WHAT’S THAT SPELL? DEVILS! WHAT’S THAT SPELL? DEVILS!”

35. “The core of each DNA double helix is a column of water clusters. Copious amounts of water are organized in multiple layers at the surface of intracellular structural proteins and membranes.”

36. Detergents interfere with the bonds that form between water molecules at the surface.

37. Arms straight out to the sides, palms facing forward. Bring your arms together in front of you until your palms touch. Pray.

38. Trials:

Cherokee Nation v. Georgia · Worcester v. Georgia · Standing Bear v. Crook · Hodel v. Irving · Cobell v. Salazar · Talton v. Mayes · Lone Wolf v. Hitchcock.

39. Acts:

Indian Civil Rights Act · Civilization Act · Pueblo Lands Act · Native American Technical Corrections Act · American Indian Religious Freedom Act · Burke Act · Dawes Act · Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act · Indian Child Welfare Act · Indian Citizenship Act of 1924 · Indian Gaming Regulatory Act · Indian Intercourse Act · Indian Removal Act · Indian Reorganization Act · Oklahoma Indian Welfare Act  · Indian Arts and Crafts Act of 1990 · Public Law 280 · National Indian Gaming Commission · Native American gambling enterprises · Dawes Rolls · Bureau of Indian Affairs · Eagle feather law · Declaration of Indian Purpose.

40. The speed at which water moves is the current velocity. The Niobrara is challenging- its water flowing 2 to 3 miles an hour- and is at times an exciting canoe experience.

41. Nothing the Great Mystery placed in the land of the Indian pleased the white man, and nothing escaped his transforming hand. Wherever forests have not been mowed down, wherever the animal is recessed in their quiet protection, wherever the earth is not bereft of four-footed life – that to him is an “unbroken wilderness”. –Standing Bear

42. No matter how much I explain, you people aren’t going to understand. A voice so far back hearing it is a haunting, and explanatory.

43. Like water, something better than what it moves through.

44. “Between 1790 and 1830 the population of Georgia increased six-fold. The western push of the settlers created a problem. Georgians continued to take Native American lands and force them into the frontier. By 1825 the Lower Creek had been completely removed from the state under provisions of the Treaty of Indian Springs. By 1827 the Creek were gone.” You do not travel in the open.

45. Take Us To Your Water.

46. According to the Global Corruption Report 2008, in some countries corruption siphons off as much as 30% of the budget. By diverting funds from investment or operation and maintenance, corruption reduces access to water. According to estimates corruption can raise the investment costs of achieving water-and-sanitation-related MDG targets by almost $50 billion.

47. The stretch limousine bursts into flames.

48. o Native American Legends A-C

o Native American Legends D-H

o Native American Legends I-L

o Native American Legends M-O

o Native American Legends P-S

o Native American Legends T-U

o Native American Legends V-Z

49. “Cherokee had long called western Georgia home. The Cherokee Nation continued in their enchanted land until 1828. It was then that the rumored gold, for which De Soto had relentlessly searched, was discovered in the North Georgia mountains.”

50. She-Wolf. And when they howl, do you howl with them?

51. The Story of the Ponca: Broken Promises in Treaties.

52. Water is called the universal solvent, because it will eventually dissolve anything given enough time.

53. “The Fort Laramie Treaty of 1868 established the boundaries of the Great Sioux Reservation which included the 96,000 acres of land that was the Ponca Reservation. The Ponca became trespassers in their own aboriginal homeland.  On June 5, 1880 the Supreme Court of the United States dismissed the case, leaving Standing Bear and his followers free, but they had no home to return to.”  Giant cicada husk.

54. This Land is Your Land.

55. Be on your way now, shoo.

56. National Geographic lists a Niobrara trip among its top 100 adventures.

57. Deer, bison, elk, beaver, mink, herons and kingfishers.

58. Say Hello To Hollywood.

59. “How could this happen? Most likely because the Fort Laramie Treaty commissioners (Generals Sherman, Harney, Terry, etc.) had forgotten about the provisions of the 1865 treaty with the Ponca. Thus, two different tribes were granted the same land.”

60. You can see how this happened.

61. They forgot!

62. But the Poncas got that DVD, so it evens out.

63. Remember that, because it’s important.

64. What’s random and what’s calculated?

65. Oh, say can you see? By the dawn’s early light?

66. “Congressman Henry Dawes of Massachusetts sponsored a landmark piece of legislation, the General Allotment Act (The Dawes Severalty Act) in 1887. It was designed to encourage the breakup of the tribes and promote the assimilation of Indians into American Society. It will be the major Indian policy until the 1930s. Dawes’ goal was to create independent farmers out of Indians — give them land and the tools for citizenship.” As long as you draw breath and gunpowder burns, Mister Man Dawes.

67. 2000 Census, Dawes County, Nebraska: Population 9,060,  93.34% White, 2.88% Native American. Dust devils.

68. To create independent farmers, encourage the breakup of the tribes, promote the assimilation.

69. No, don’t repeat it. Got it the first time. And the second (century), & the third, and the (      )…

70. “Civilization” has been thrust upon me since the days of the reservations, and it has not added one whit to my sense of justice, to my reverence for the rights of life, to my love for truth, honesty, and generosity, or to my faith in Wakan Tanka, God of the Lakotas. –Standing Bear

71. Three billion people—nearly one-half the world’s population—have no access to tap water in their home or village.

72. We have done so much better!

73. Shush, now. Don’t be a bad sport!

74. “U.S. attorney G.M. Lambertson argued that an Indian was neither a person nor a citizen and therefore, they could not bring a lawsuit against the government.”

75. The games of karma have begun.

76. In 2005 a new elementary school in the Omaha Public School System was named Standing Bear Elementary in honor of the Ponca Chief.

77. Crossbeams.

78. That snap together like legos. Tumbledown walls.

79. Paleontologists have found mammals such as camels, horses, mastodons and rhinos. Click “More” to visit the Niobrara National Scenic River “Fossils” page.

80. He’s here, and no one knows he’s here.

81. Fifteen sites in the area are of world class (international) significance, 46 are of national significance, and 106 of regional significance.

82. See all around a thing then down the center. At its center lay darkness.

83. Erosion, transport, deposition.

84. “Much of the history of the American West passed through Niobrara: the Ponca Indian village first marked on a map in 1739 by explorers Pierre & Paul Mallet.” Faded lettering on an abandoned building, and though you can’t make it out, this is what it says:

85. “They made us many promises, more than I can remember. But they kept but one- they promised to take our land- and they took it.” –Red Cloud.

86. Cut off from the river.

87. “March 28, 1881, an ice gorge broke, producing one of the largest Missouri River floods on record. After the danger of flooding Mother nature and the mighty Missouri again invaded Niobrara in April of 1952 and much of the town and the surrounding area was flooded.”

88. By 2025, 1.8 million people will be living in regions with absolute water scarcity, according to the U.N., and by 2030 2 out of 3 people in the world will be living in conditions of high water stress.

89. Get used to this.

90. “It’s Your Misfortune and None of My Own”: A New History of the American West. Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press. White, Richard, ISBN 0806125675 (1991).

91. The origins of water on earth are less certain, but most geologists agree that water on the planet is of cosmic origins from around the time when the planet itself was formed.

92. In April of 1988, Nebraska passed Legislative Resolution #128, giving state recognition to the Ponca Tribe and their members. Bodies slowly collapsing with the effort at imitating a past life.

93. Remember that DVD.

94. God Bless America.

95. One of the finest directors of farce around.

96. “In 1838 and 1839, as part of Andrew Jackson’s Indian removal policy, the Cherokee nation was forced to give up its lands east of the Mississippi River and to migrate to an area in present-day Oklahoma. The Cherokee people called this journey the “Trail of Tears,” because of its devastating effects. The migrants faced hunger, disease, and exhaustion on the forced march. Over 4,000 out of 15,000 of the Cherokees died.”

97. “Christianization” of the “Heathens.” ‘Shall we Gather by the River’ & ‘Wade in the Water.’ And take it right out from under them.

98. Baby get off the cross, we need the wood.

99. The Trial: Standing Bear, seated third from right. Watching the DVD.

100. But, because for the Lakota there was no wilderness, because nature was not dangerous but hospitable, not forbidding but friendly, Lakota philosophy was healthy – free from fear and dogmatism. And here I find the great distinction between the faith of the Indian and the white man. Indian faith sought the harmony of man with his surroundings; the other sought the dominance of surroundings. –Standing Bear

101. The Indian may now become a free man; free from the thralldom of the tribe; freed from the domination of the reservation system; free to enter into the body of our citizens. This bill may therefore be considered as the Magna Carta of the Indians of our country.  –Alice Fletcher. Yes, thousands of years they were waiting on that Magna Carta!

102. Tour the Satan Embassy at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW, Washington, D.C., 20500, Mon.-Sat., 9am-6pm. Prohibited items include, but are not limited to, handbags, bookbags, backpacks, purses, food & beverages of any kind, strollers, cameras, video recorders or any type of recording device, tobacco products, personal grooming items (make-up, hair brush or comb, lip or hand lotions, etc.), any pointed objects (pens, knitting needles, etc.), aerosol containers, guns, ammunition, fireworks, electric stun guns, mace, martial arts weapons/devices, or knives of any size. The U.S. Secret Service reserves the right to prohibit any other personal items. Umbrellas, wallets, cell phones and car keys are permitted.

103. “A Nez Perce Indian expressed a quite different reaction: “We do not want our land cut up in little pieces… A groan of assent ran along the dark line of Sphinxes.’”

104. Miscellaneous: * A new site to remember past American Indians, Remembering First People. * Educational Resources * Shopping Resources * First People Guestbook * Cedar Flutes and more.

105. Margin Notes:

* Silence is the mother of truth

* The Lakota – a true naturalist

* Actions speak louder than words

* Watching Nature

* Enriched Lakota existence

* The Great Mystery

* The animals had rights

* Indian faith

* Forever one man directed his Mystery to change the world

* Attempted transformation of the Indian by the white man

* The white man does not understand America

* The American Indian is of the soil

106. Still, while water itself is renewable, many uses of water will degrade its quality to such an extent that this theoretically “available” water is practically useless.

107. Like a resort recycling its ‘show’ water.

108. Flat-line.

109. “Webster describes a person as “a living soul; a self-conscious being: a moral agent; especially a living human being; a man, woman or child; an individual of the human race.” This is comprehensive enough, it would seem, to include even an Indian.” You knew this was truth, even from the beginning.

110. “In 1878 they moved 150 miles west to the Salt Fork of the Arkansas River, south of present-day Ponca City, Oklahoma, and by spring nearly a third of the tribe had perished to starvation, malaria and related causes.”

111. The Star Spangled Banner.

112. Some say earth had a proto-atmosphere and large bodies of water as far back as 4.45 billion years ago and later, comets, meteors, and asteroids brought water. Water.

113. In sharing, in loving all and everything, one people naturally found a due portion of the thing they sought, while, in fearing, the other found the need of conquest. –Standing Bear

114. “It was important to the Nebraska Lewis and Clark Bicentennial Commission, as part of the Nebraska Lewis and Clark Bicenetnnial, to facilitate a pilgrimage by representatives from the Otoe-Missouria Tribe back to their former homeland in Nebraska. The Commission presented the tribe with a DVD of the “Ink and Elkskin” dramatization and complete video recordings of the entire Signature Event. In a reciprocal gesture, the Otoe-Missouria presented an impressive gift to the Commission- a maquette bust of Chief Standing Bear. This sculpture of the famous Nebraska figure and Ponca chief currently resides at the Fort Atkinson State Historical Park Visitor Center.” And they’re going around in the same direction.

115. It was important to the Lewis and Clark Commission.

116. It was important.

117. Back to their former “homeland”.

118. A DVD.

119. When Johnny Comes Marching Home Again.

120. As if you can wind the river back, coil it to its beginning.

121. Something like this should never happen to someone like that.

122. Antoine Lavoisier, who named the constituents of water-  hydrogen and oxygen- was guillotined during the Revolution. His tombstone says two H’s and one O. Like a sign saying This Area Of The Mall Closed.

124. Head the Hell Out.

125. “In 1830, Congress passed the “Indian Removal Act.” Although many Americans were against the act, most notably Tennessee Congressman Davy Crockett, it passed anyway. President Jackson quickly signed the bill into law.” The extreme point at which a thing turns into its opposite.

126. Trail of Tears

Painting by Robert Lindneux

Woolaroc Museum

127. Perma-shit-grin. On a clown. The graves were shallow, just a few inches deep.

128. The attempted transformation of the Indian by the white man and the chaos that has resulted are but the fruits of the white man’s disobedience of a fundamental and spiritual law. — Standing Bear

129. “U.S. Senate 1869 Summary of Information Regarding Hostile Indians, Semi-Weekly Report”.

130. A muddle of glowering looks and shadows.

131. Now hear this!

132. There’s not enough words in the English language to describe the way you are… But there’s one in Siouan. There has to be.

133. Water is the only substance necessary to all life; many organisms can live without oxygen, but none can live without water.

134. Why can’t you understand?

135. I would sooner be honestly damned than hypocritically immortalized. –Davy Crockett.

136. In the summer of 1843, the Niobrara’s upper reaches simply vanished, causing the historian Benjamin Foster to go mad. “In late June 1844, after Foster had begun to despair of ever understanding either the fact or the meaning of the disappearance of the river… began throwing his manuscripts into the river. According to a Pawnee called Wolf Finger… Foster would go down naked in the afternoon, wade out into the Niobrara and hurl a fistful of pages into the water, or from the shore he would skip a journal across the surface like a stone. Eventually he threw everything he’d ever written down into the Niobrara River. I imagine Foster, a brilliant man much troubled by the destruction of native cultures, simply fell prey to a final madness. –Barry Lopez

137. “The Ponca planned to give up hunting for an agricultural economy. However, they faced a variety of problems that included: failure of the government to live up to its promises, droughts, locusts, and conflicts with the Sioux. Yet, the Ponca kept their promises and never stole from nor attacked the white man.”

138. Amazing Grace.

139. “January of 1863 Conner and his California Volunteers marched north to the Bear River. There, Conner’s men brutally killed 400 Shoshoni men, women and children. More Native Americans died at Bear River than any other battle in western history.” As opposed to not brutally killed.

140. “By 1835 the Cherokee were divided and despondent.” Vanished council fires.

141. We have about 10 gallons of water in us held in by trillions of cells.

142. 75% of Americans are chronically dehydrated.

143. “Before the Dawes Act, some 150 million acres remained in Indian hands. Within twenty years, two-thirds of their land was gone. The reservation system was nearly destroyed.” The earth still smoking.

144. Geologists have documented over 230 waterfalls within the Niobrara River Valley.

145. Just a 2% drop of water can affect short-term memory, trouble with basic math, difficulty focusing.

146. “It would not be until 1924 that Congress adopts the Citizenship Act, which confers citizenship on all Indians.”

147. The tallest known falls is Smith Falls, which cascades 63 feet over a sandstone cliff.

148. Standing Bear rose, extending his hand toward the judge’s bench: “That hand is not the color of yours, but if I pierce it, I shall feel pain. If you pierce your hand, you also feel pain. The blood that will flow from mine will be the same color as yours. I am a man. God made us both.” Guess which man ventured forth at night at his own risk in the ruined ground.

149. General Crook asked Standing Bear why he had left the Indian Territory, and Standing Bear replied, “At last I had only one son left; then he sickened. When he was dying he asked me to promise him one thing. He begged me to take him, when he was dead, back to our old burying ground by the Swift running Waters, the Niobrara. I promised. When he died, I and those with me put his body into a box and then in a wagon, and we started North.” After Standing Bear had spoken, Crook expressed his sympathy with the Ponca, but stated that he had a direct order and would have to obey it. “It is . . . a very disagreeable duty.’” To fall inward toward your reflection.

150. “Standing Bear, however, later claimed that there was a misunderstanding, as the Ponca language had no separate word for land in the Indian Territory. He further stated he reasonably thought he was agreeing to move to the Omaha Reservation.”

151. My Country ‘tis of Thee.

152. Boat Launch Fee (per person): $1.00 – Day for wrist band. Camping: $4/person/night (11 years old and under are free). Entrance Fee: $4/day/car; annual $20.

153. We can’t help being thirsty, moving toward the voice of water. –Rumi

154. “As the Commissioner for Indian Affairs explained in his 1858 Report, the objective was to “colonize and domesticate” the Poncas.”

155. God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen.

156. Give it a Rest Ye Genocidal Gentlemen.

157. “The government failed to provide the mills, personnel, schools and protection promised by the 1858 treaty, and although Ponca enrollment increased as relatives sought annuity payments, loss of life and resources to sickness, starvation and raids was frequent.” The dead animal’s hand was held to the flame.

158. In 1978 Standing Bear was inducted into the Nebraska Hall of Fame.

159. Put pressure on the wound.

160. “Much of the water provided by dams is lost, mainly due to inefficient agriculture irrigation- which globally wastes up to 1,500 trillion litres of water annually. This is equivalent to 10 times the annual water consumption of the entire African continent.”

161. “Composer Larry McTaggert wrote Niobrara River Sketches, which captures the beauty of the Niobrara River flowing through Nebraska; split into three movements: Tubing on the River, Sunset in Cherry County, and Hoedown in Niobrara.”

162. Hoedown in Niobrara. You smell like the evidence.

163. Whether or not the US or any other country ‘agrees’ doesn’t mean such a right doesn’t exist. It only means no efforts are going to be taken to protect and ensure such rights, which is a global travesty. –Peter Gleik

164. “The Trail of Tears” is a direct translation from Cherokee, “The Trail Where They Cried” (“Nunna daul Tsuny”).” “The mothers of the Cherokee grieved so much that the chiefs prayed for a sign to lift the mother’s spirits and give them strength to care for their children. From that day forward, a beautiful new flower, a rose, grew wherever a mother’s tear fell to the ground. The rose is white, for the mother’s tears. It has a gold center, for the gold taken from the Cherokee lands, and seven leaves on each stem that represent the seven Cherokee clans that made the journey. To this day, the Cherokee Rose prospers along the route of the Trail of Tears.” Official flower of Georgia is now Cherokee Rose. That makes up for all that walking… and walking… and. Land?

165. “On their journey westward in 1804, Lewis and Clark learned about the Ponca, a small tribe living on the west bank of the Missouri River and along what are now the lower Niobrara River and Ponca Creek in northeast Nebraska. The two did not meet as the tribe was on a hunting trip to the west.” Phew. Thank Christ they weren’t headed east, as “restrooms and public telephones are not available” at the White House.

166. In 2030, more than 5 billion people- 67% of the world’s population- may still not be connected to a public sewerage system. Because it’s just not that important when you can get a DVD, instead.

167. .Ponca Reduction. Smallpox whittled 800 down to 200. At the time of Lewis and Clark’s expedition. Reduction Ponca.

168. One way or another.

169. Battle Hymn of the Republic.

170. “Did You Know? Blacknose shiners are extremely rare in Nebraska, and the last known sighting of this species occurred in the Niobrara drainage. East of Valentine, the Niobrara has cut a valley 200 to 300 feet deep and between one-half to two miles wide.”

171. Yankee Doodle.

172. More than 80% of sewage in developing countries is discharged untreated, polluting rivers, lakes and coastal areas.

173. Human settlement lights. Light-tricked.

174. Souped-up strips. Asphalt ridges leading nowhere. Many modern thoroughfares started as narrow Indian trails about a foot wide.

175. You’re a Grand Old Flag.

176. “Unfortunately for Standing Bear and the Ponca, Kemble was already back, and he had new orders from Washington — the Ponca were to be moved, using force if necessary, to Indian Territory. An agent for the Otoe Reservation in Gage County remarked that the Ponca leaders left bloody footprints in the snow. After a strenuous journey, the Ponca leaders arrived at the Ponca Reservation on April 2, 1877.”

177. The Stars and Stripes Forever.

178. Red, white, and blue. They got the “red” part. Its remnants still visible to people who know what to look for. That blood still in the ground.

179. The Niobrara River drains over 12,000 square miles of the Sandhills, one of the largest stabilized dunefields in the world.

180. Ponca Chief, Standing Bear, after whom the Missouri River Bridge was named, is now called Chief Standing Bear Memorial Bridge, and was dedicated in 1998.

181. A dust devil forms when a column of air begins spinning above sun-heated ground. The mini-tornado picks up dust as it moves, exposing the darker surface underneath.

182. “My people took scalps only to prove their stories that they had met the enemy and overpowered him,” he said. “It is no different than the doughboys in the World war bringing back German helmets and other souvenirs.” In such cases, separate the figure into shapes you know.

183. “Custer’s last stand was not the inhuman massacre of a band of whites by savage Indians as it has been pictured, but was an act of self-defense by the Sioux Indians following invasions of their lands and attacks on their people by the United States Army.” Blue notches radiating out from each eye.

184. “David Zhang, a geographer at the University of Hong Kong, produced a study published in the US National Academy of Sciences journal that analyzed 8,000 wars over 500 years and concluded that water shortage had played a far greater role as a catalyst than previously supposed.”

185. National Anthropological Archives, Smithsonian Institution:

Standing Bear in his formal attire.

186. “My ancestors occupied these lands for thousands of years before they became known as the United States & Canada.”

187. “In 1858, the Ponca ceded a large section of land to the U.S. Government, but they did reserve a much smaller area for the tribe to occupy. They agreed to move to the reserved area within one year after ratification of the treaty. The new area would become their permanent home. In return for making the land cession, they were to receive the following from the U.S. Government: 1) Annuities — that is, cash payments — for 30 years, 2) Educational institutions for ten years, 3) A mill to grind grain and one to saw timber, 4) An interpreter, a miller, a mill engineer, and a farmer.” They ‘forgot’ these, too. But hey, there was that DVD.

188. 85% of the world’s population resides in the drier half of the earth. More than 1 billion people living in arid or semi-arid parts of the world have access to little or no renewable water resources.

189. Ballad of the Green Beret.

190. “That piece of red, white and blue cloth stands for a system and a country that does not honor it’s own word…If it stood for honor and truth, it would remember our treaties and give them the appropriate place under international law. But it doesn’t. It dishonors its own word and violates its treaties…” Because this wasn’t how it was supposed to end.

191. Standing Bear Returns and is Arrested.

192. .99 cent Mondays at Mister Movie, Your Choice: Bury My Heart At Wounded Knee or Flow: The World Water Crisis.

193. The white man does not understand America. He is far removed from its formative processes. The roots of the tree of his life have not yet grasped the rock and the soil. –Standing Bear

194. “The Niobrara National Scenic River is not only Nebraska’s most popular canoeing river, but is also among the top 10 canoeing rivers in the U.S., according to Backpacker magazine. Depending on your ambitions, trips can last from an hour to several days.”

195. Or centuries, if your ambition is to take over “water spread-out horizontal-the”.

196. No, it’s not on the tour.

197. Take Us To Your Water Because You Don’t Count, Only Us. That’s the tour.

198. A twenty-two foot statue of Standing Bear stands just south of Ponca City in Northern Oklahoma. Stuck. Like turning a figure around a fixed point.

199. In the morning I became confused on farm roads and was unable to find my way back to the river. In desperation I stopped at a place I recognized having been at the day before and proceeded from there on foot toward the river, until I became lost in the fields themselves. I met a man on a tractor who told me the river had never come over in that direction. Ever. And to get away. I have not been back in that country since. –Barry Lopez

200. The Niobrara River Valley straddles the 100th Meridian, the boundary between wet and dry America.

Here is the first river I even knew. Los Angeles River Watershed. The Los Angeles River Master Plan. Mapmakers draw a vibrant blue line from Canoga Park to the Long Beach mouth. No record of what it was called before ‘someone got there.’ The record says it’s the first to achieve “Trash Impaired” status. Rivers are made of water mostly. While another river might be piles of silt and fish bones, this one was made up, people getting water to do what they want. Lined with more concrete than any other river in the U.S. Amphetamine-addled with drawn-on highbrows and hot pink lipstick, Bingo! You are now something you aren’t. The rest of its body was blacked out on purpose so I couldn’t see it, but its eye was dark. Dry season, about 80% of the water in the river consists of tertiary recycled sewage water. Fish or fantasy? They were all under contract and played the roles you gave them. They insist you be a certain way then get upset when you are. It’s a quality stars have. Major tributaries, in order of appearance (take a bow) are Brown’s Canyon Wash, Aliso Canyon Wash, the Tujunga Wash, the Western Burbank Channel, the Verdugo Wash, the Arroyo Seco, the Rio Hondo, and Compton Creek. They are ordered from the beginning of the river to its end. 24 miles of Sunset Boulevard, after Brentwood and Pacific Palisades, ends at a parking lot like a reel that suddenly broke. Most comedies aren’t funny. A fiction whose only power is that we believe in it… We have to take what we can get. Films, video games, and television programs feature various sites along the Los Angeles River, many of which involve the river as a sinister plot location. The 50 foot letters in the night glisten a cold midnight blue. They spell Hollywood and once, an actress leaped to death off the H- as if a variation in gravity displaced her footing… or the effect of thirst. Water dripped and trickled down. Low frequency current. That is not in this world at all. There’s close to no electro magnetic field: the only portions of the river not completely paved over are near Van Nuys, a stretch east of Griffith Park, and along its last few miles in Long Beach. It starts at a command post, camera-stunned. Coded one-way messages. Like a base camp. Dream up a world you’d want to live in. This polish has glitter so big it reflects the whole world, White specks floating are all trash. This goes on 3-5 hours after a rainfall. Foreign white, not whitecaps. It left traces of itself everywhere. Its orbit outlined by a light- the flash goes off, making it seem as if a stage of light opened a split-second so this river burns considerably brighter than the others, as if flashes of light arrive from all over the universe to here, where the world gets created… Best cameras available and all the film they needed. Take another bow. Water drops further than the Mississippi. If you have something you don’t want, water will take it away; thirty tons of trash each spring lifted out. They went from town to town, river to river; everything gets picked up, being turned and shaped, like a kind of bad blood, platelets. The water is real warm, but shallow. It looks like a bloodbath for sure. Baby goat carcass with the head gone and shoved downstream as the water slides over the cement on its way to where the rivers sink into. It’s in the spotlight somewhere apart from us; we had the reputation for never finding anything. But the fire and heat, the predesigned frames of reference, the ones too easily reduced to their anatomical parts, synthetic words, the tinted land and everything recorded. Some things have found us. Dark-shadowed river. Just sitting still leaves you covered in black. 51 miles of//. Any questions? Good Luck and remember, don’t drink the water! A healthy human will die in less than a week without fresh water. Its body plunging into the river. It filled all the way up and took thousands of couches to Long Beach. Urban legend or bargain hunting opportunity? You swallow hard. The farthest one can get is twelve time zones away. All you want is a river with no one on it, the farthest away river, not the smell of burned rubber, sticking pins into it, like the moment in the story when–. This is the time for which we have been waiting. Look through the viewfinder in the same direction a lens would; we all live downstream. The film you are about to see is based upon real events. We don’t even blame. Shake things in the sky we don’t know.

And we begin here, the Big Bang and every black-eyed

star that has not turned on yet, before planets spin

off into space and go their separate ways- then ours- the

earth hanging in the sky- 3,963.19 miles of us (“It’s a

brilliant surface in that sunlight. The horizon seems quite

close to you because the curvature is so much more

pronounced than here on earth. It’s an

interesting place to be. I recommend it.”  Neil Armstrong),

langoring along the curve, the

radius a nearly continuous blue beetle rug of water- then

moving through the central American jungles, trackless

jungles, the wilderness of all the world, the remotest

places on Earth, the 6.5 billion of us elsewhere- where we

wade in water, drink from taps, sewers, swallow from

pipes running across shanty towns, shacks- the more than

800 million acre-feet of water raining onto the earth each day we

save in rain buckets, tinfoil baking sheets, bowls

gingerly set below gutters because nearly all the Earth’s

water is in oceans (97%) where it does no good to

drink; continuing past every last river great and

small- the Amazon, Zaire, Congo, Orinoco, the King River-

the most polluted river in all of Australia- if there were a

way to split the skull to release the spirit- its acid rain, the

mining that continues to be highly toxic to marine life, a

great many fish were left on the banks- though the river is

forced to stay within its banks, trapped, don’t make eye

contact when you back away slowly, to the Yangtze,

construction of 3 Gorges Dam- largest on Earth, throwing the

Earth’s axis off by an inch- (Think of the millions of silenced

people who cannot express their sadness and speak

against the project. Think of the lost cultural history, art and

destruction of the natural river. Dai Qing), inadequate sewage,

industrial pollution, rapid population growth- of which over 360 miles

of 3,860 are so polluted it’s been described as irreversible, a

story that comes to a full stop, you call this here a river?- -

to the Sarno, turning back or in on itself, the most

polluted river in Italy and possibly all of Europe- like ebola

out for a night on the town- to the Yumana River where

3.5 billion litres of sewage pass through daily (making it over

100,000 times higher than limits safe for

bathing), where no fish or plants can live for

high contamination levels, and holy leaders threaten

not to return, a town named after the lord to the 65 mile long

Riachuela River- hot and dense as the center of a

star- absorbing over 325,000 tons of sewage each day, called

the largest open pit toilet in the world, creating an

artificial horizon between water you can and can’t

live on, and no way exists to purify before drinking, is a

life-or-death skill, two kinds of liquid hinged together like a

mixed blood, cholera, dysentery and other diarrheal

diseases-roulette, bottle to mouth and a high-pitched

prayer tipped up toward sky, mesmerizing pitch- a

cacophony- to the 3,400 mile-long Yellow River, body bag,

contaminated by chemical spills, diversions and

damming, causing it to run dry and even turn red, look like

someone set it afire, a 1/3 of the river unusable, a

strewnfield of hair, boney fish pieces, scorched winds

pulling carcasses away from final resting places; some skulls

still wear blindfolds tied on before execution yet one

can see eye sockets now free down by the river, from before we

ever got here- in the Yellow’s glare hundreds of

thousands of bones and skulls eroding out of the

sand like red scars, once-alive beings whose eyes were

at the same level as the river, rheumy eyes, to the 200-mile

long Citarum, perhaps the single most polluted river on Earth, a

handful of nothing: chunks of discarded Styrofoam and

plastic trash bob a death rhythm on the waves, with

500 factories along its banks the water’s oily reflected

phosphoresce like holes in Earth’s magnetic field- skeins of

silver could straighten right up and walk out- but not the

birds because when oil gets on feathers they

lose their insulation capability and can’t adjust body

temperature so die, and painfully, and slowly, quite

slowly,

then on into America, over 250,000 rivers- that’s

3.5 million miles worth- of which 40% are too

polluted for fishing and swimming, including streams and

all names for water bodies and other

places the water fell and its nonspectral light, and all the

bodies of water that won’t fit into the confines of a

story; the shiny sinks of them reflecting the hatred we have

for ourselves, something no longer living and not yet

passed over, past the Rio Grande- absolutely black sauce-

and the Mississippi- something too large for what it is-

with mortality rates in counties along the river higher

than in the rest of the nation, the Gulf’s hypoxic coastal

dead zone the size of Massachusetts, past

beginnings of the northern part of the

Colorado which date back 25 million years, the

southern part that had no hope all along, like a

failed creation myth, there is-

dimly visible near the upper left corner

of the state of Oregon-

connecting to Devil’s Lake,

the D River:

shortest path between two points on the

surface of the curve, the

tiniest river in the world-

an almost nominee river,

so named in a contest,

running 440 feet like hell

to disembogue directly

into the Pacific.

Reaching its destination,

the ocean, in exactly

440 feet.

Every river’s wet dream.