Irrigation — the Stuff of Life

Heat brings desert conflagration
Cool is river irrigation
There's a line of demarcation
'Tween the green and brown.

If you fly into Grand Junction during the summer, you see a verdant valley rimmed crisply and abruptly in brown. This is the line between dry desert and irrigated desert. Life abounds in both areas, but it clusters in the green. Happy Valley. Pleasant Valley. Grand Valley.

The Grand River runs through it. That grand river is now known as the mighty Colorado. Canals off the river carry water to land that without it would be as brown as the surrounding public land, which isn't irrigated.

We moved here from Austin, Texas. Hot. Huge. Humid. Green. We'd never seen swamp coolers, or seemingly infinite amounts of public land, or ditch irrigation.

Irrigation is a miracle. A life saver; a life giver. Nothing new to most people, but to us, with a little ditch running through our property, it was a revelation.

I arrived April 13, 2001, and it was already running. A tiny but enduring moat that cut our main yard off from the front parking lot (it's big) and the pastures. I instantly became a Ditch Bitch. I loved it then; I love it still.

It runs from April to November, every year, all the time, a constant flow of Colorado river in our front yard. A miracle of human engineering as old as the desert itself. You expect a river to flow and flow, but a ditch? In your front yard? Water you can use tor seven months to make your little homestead a productive, living thing of beaury and bounty? For $100??!!!

Yikes. We have 5 acres, no small amount of land to keep from turning back to brown desert. And keeping it green through a hot and dry summer is no small feat to accomplish without pipe, knowledge, time, and perseverance.

But even if the land around it does go back to desert, the mere fact of two feet of water streaming endlessly through a tiny ditch is incredibly amazing. We can tell when it rains in the mountains above Aspen. The ditch runs red and muddy, colorado in Spanish. Then we have to clear the filter so our sprinkler system works.

No matter. It's all just wonderful. At night during the full moon, you can stand and look at your very own Moon River...and it seems as grand as the river that feeds it. I love it.