ALL MY RIVERS ARE GONE: THE PROLOGUE

Every morning I stand with my hands pressed flat against the wall, one on each side of the photograph, my nose only inches away from the glass. At first all I see is a vibrant, green blur, but when I press from the wall, pull one leg up behind me and focus, the blur takes the shape of a giant old cottonwood tree, a shimmering pool (which is also gulping the green of the tree), and behind it the massive streaked pink-and-buff walls of a narrow, twisting canyon. By the second or third press, I'm no longer doing exercises in my room. The photograph takes me in; I'm walking in the stream. Cool water tickles my ankles. Bare feet hug the sand, caressing it with toes curling into that pure, clean, untouched place, trying to root there beside the grand, green cottonwood. Forever. Sunlight beams down on my back, not hot, but alive against my skin. When I bend over to look into the shallow pool, the sun glares up at me. Iridescent light-butterflies ripple by my face. I move into the curve of the sandstone wall under the overhang where the stream is shaded and watch it meander into stiff glittering stalks of grass, lighter even than the EDITOR'S NOTE: Writer Terry Tempest Williams describes Katie Lee as a "joyful raconteur, a woman with grit, grace and humor. She is not afraid to laugh and tease, cajole and flirt, cuss, rant, howl, sing and cry. Katie Lee is the desert's lover, her voice is a torch in the wilderness." If you're a longtime reader of this magazine, you know of Katie Lee - we've been publishing her beautiful and powerful words since 1960. What you're about to read is the prologue to Ms. Lee's 1998 book All My Rivers Are Gone. It's a book about Glen Canyon, a place that, essentially, disappeared with the creation of Lake Powell. Whether you're a fan of the lake or a sworn enemy, it's important to understand the significance of the world that existed there before the dam was built in 1963. Ms. Lee's prologue helps evoke that understanding.

tree's greenery, alive and dancing with the motion of the water. Other grasses are waving beneath the surface with sensuous grace in rhythm to the flow. I stoop to feel their hairlike softness with my hands - they spread, buckle, twist and move away! Alive! I move my hand under one and hold it up to the sun on one finger, almost 10 inches long it curls up at both ends. I can't tell head from tail as it wiggles for the water first from one end then the other.

I'll be damned - little grass snakes!

Stooped beneath the overhang, I hear an intermittent sound overlying the stream's trickle. Sucked up on the morning breeze from probably a quarter-mile away, the garble of the river at the mouth of Forgotten Canyon mutters amid the rocks. It calls, it fades. The trickle answers.

I've probably done only five or six presses against the wall while this scene with all its sensations moves behind eyes still fastened on my photograph. Some mornings I wander upstream around the bend to the first deep pool, which makes me swim if I want to go on to the ruins. My Mexican hat, bathing shorts and top are left on the bank; on my head, tennies, socks and camera swim to the other side. I need the shoes, I want the camera, but the clothes have always been superfluous here. I speed up a bit now, because I know when Tad and Frank have finished taking pictures or walking up the short fork, they won't want to wait around while I explore beyond their reach. Like bloody hell! Damn sissies can come up here if they want to they can swim - it's not that cold. Anyway, the ruin is in the sun.

Hand over hand I climb the little chipped-out notches Moki steps to the house. Whoever she was, her fingerprints from a thousand years ago are still in the clay of the mortared walls that rise to the slant of a rose-colored overhang. Yes, she; women plastered and chinked while men toted the rock to this high, safe place for their cliff dwelling. So say the educated guessers. Roof beams are still in place, pictographs and petroglyphs detail the smooth stone beside the house. A metate, her grinding stone, mortared in place, rests beside the entrance. Centuries have passed here in Forgotten Canyon since an Anasazi family built this strong, beautiful house we now call a ruin. Along with no one knows how many hundreds or thousands, they left - disappeared - leaving no clues as to where they went, or why a river paradise no longer served their needs. What brings and holds me to this place is that very mystery. My imagination spins with sights and sounds of what was or might have been here, and as I run my hands over the metate or place my fingers in the indentations she left, or trace the visions they drew along the wall, I know we are connected by invisible threads through time and space, sharing the spirit of this canyon. I feel their presence, though now all is quiet, clean, sandblasted and wind-smoothed, wild-smelling of [animal scat].

A shadow crosses the dark upper corner of the photograph wherein I've strayed. I stand back to find a superimposed reflection of my face staring back at me from the canyon. Stretches must be over. I'm back in my bedroom, up against the wall.

There are mornings when the vibrant green blur does not clear, when I cannot move in under the cottonwood, the overhang, or wade the stream. The blur stays, the tears well and spill. Such mornings portend a very bad day, a day when I'll be oversensitive to everything and everyone. My anger will resurface, tension in my neck and shoulders will badger me into a short-temperedness no one around me deserves, least of all myself. Because only this photograph - this photograph and my indelible sense memory - remain.

Everything else is dead. Buried. Drowned. AH