The River That Kept Coming Back

Coming down into Clifton now — and I want you to look at how this town is built, jammed into a canyon with the river right up against the buildings, and then I will tell you what that river has done to these people.

Clifton had no choice about where it sat. The copper was here, so the town was here, and there was no flat ground. So they built in the only place there was: the canyon floor, between the cliff and the water. Everybody knew what that meant. Every single person who drove a nail in this canyon knew. They built there anyway, because that is what a mining town does — it goes where the ore is and argues with the consequences later.

And the San Francisco River came for them. Again, and again, and again.

You have to understand the shape of what we drove through today to see why. All that high country — the meadows around Alpine, the spruce forest, the whole nine-thousand-foot roof of this range — drains into this one slot. When a storm parks over those mountains, every drop of it comes down here. And there is nowhere for it to spread out. So it does not rise gently the way a river does on a floodplain. It arrives as a wall.

It has taken out the bridges. It has taken the main street. It has put water through the SECOND STOREY of buildings you are driving past right now. It has picked houses up off their foundations and carried them down the canyon whole.

The worst of them came in the nineteen eighties, and it essentially destroyed the business district. People stood up on those cliffs — the only high ground there is — and watched their town go past underneath them in the brown water. Shops. Cars. Somebody's roof. There is film of it, and the thing that gets me watching it is how quiet the people are.

And every single time, they came back down off that cliff and rebuilt it. In the same canyon. Between the same rock and the same river. Not because they were fools — because the work was here, and their people were here, and where else does a man go.

You can see the answer they finally arrived at, if you look: the flood walls, the channel work, the levees, the river shoved over and armoured with rock. It is not pretty. It was not meant to be. It was meant to keep the water out of the second storey.

And you can still find the high-water marks on the buildings, if you know to look up. Not at eye level. Above your head.

I have spent this whole drive telling you about country with nobody in it — wilderness, wolves, ninety miles without a gas station. So let me finish with the opposite. This is a town of people who chose the worst possible spot on the entire road because that is where the work was, got wiped out by the water more than once, buried what they lost, and are still standing here.

Drive slow through it. Look up at those marks on the walls. That is what stubborn looks like when it has been carved into a building by a river.