Table of Contents Views and Mechanics Publisher's Note Editor's Note Review of African Psycho Review of The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid Film Review of "Judith Butler: Philosophical Encounters of the Third Kind" Writing Contest Results Creative Nonfiction Back Pain...Who Cares? By Michael D. Burg Knit Two Together By Jo L. Gerrard Skin Odyssey By Holly Leigh Jacobson Leaves in the Wind By Molly Molloy Hydroglyphics By Phaedra Greenwood Poetry Indiana Poem By Michael Lee Johnson Inspire Me, Ms. Muse By Tony Zurlo A Poem Forgot By Gabrielle Rabinowitz Yours By Sheila McLaughlin Sikorski Confetti By Alan Girling Correction: Drive Me Home Again By Anne Cammon Fiction Scaffold By Joseph Bathanti For the Taking By Anne Leigh Parrish The Artistic Impulse By Johanna Lipford Justifiable Brew Aside By Barbara Anton Stopping at the DQ By Susan White Cover Art Bright Red By Dee Rimbaud About the Contributors © 2007, River Walk Journal and respective authors and artists. All rights reserved. Do not use or reproduce without permission. River Walk Journal, Inc. Board of Directors Chairman - Elizabeth Ross Vice Chairman - Joseph Koch Secretary/Treasurer - Geri Stock-Ross Editorial Director - Patti Kurtz, DA Literacy Director - Vacant Policy Director - PA State Rep. Jess Stairs Advisory Board Chairman - Patti Kurtz, DA Asst. Chairman - Dan Lachenman, PhD Samuel Hazo Christopher Leland Edwin Yoder Joseph Bathanti Journal Staff Publisher - Elizabeth Ross Editor-In-Chief - Joseph Koch Senior Editor - Patti Kurtz Senior Editor - Neeldhara Misra Copyeditor - Kathy Skaggs Blog Contributing Editor - Maggie Koster Education Blog Contributing Editor - Jordan Wirfs-Brock Publicity Director (PA) - Geri Stock-Ross For information about submissions, visit http://www.riverwalkjournal.org/subs.html. Questions about promotions, subscribers' services, and advertising should be sent to publisher@riverwalkjournal.org. River Walk Journal, Inc. is a non-profit corporation run entirely by volunteers. For information about volunteer opportunities and internships, visit VolunteerMatch.

Hydroglyphics By Phaedra Greenwood 3rd Place Essay I live in the high mountain desert of Taos, New Mexico, where everything is dry and prickly. But if I step out the front door of my adobe casa I can see a silver stream sparkling through the cottonwood trees. My life is intimately connected to this river. Twenty-five years ago, when I first began to watch the Rio Hondo, I sensed that it had some secret to impart. I spent hours crawling under bridges, examining the stones and sand, trying to decipher the hydroglyphics of water. All living things are shaped by the flow of water and air: the whorls and spirals in bones and clouds, deltas of arteries and branching veins in lungs and riverbeds. In his book Sensitive Chaos: The Creation of Flowing Forms in Water and Air, Theodor Schwenk show how many cultures express their relationship to the creative forces of the universe. At Newgrange in Ireland the guardian of the initiation chamber is a mighty threshold stone engraved with archetypal spirals. A painting of the seven sacred Toltec caves in Mexico illustrates a legend of the original home of the race. Vortex trains and spirals of speech flow back and forth between two figures within the cave. In the afternoon I call the dog and climb up the hill behind my house, following an old wagon road to a lookout point. Many tribes consider lookout points sacred features of the landscape. Panting, I struggle up to a jutting rock, stand and let the breeze cool my face as I gaze out over the Hondo Valley. The “ancient ones” must have climbed up here just as I have, to contemplate the vast circle of land and sky or watch for raiding tribes. Where the village baseball diamond is now, the indigenous people cleared the sagebrush to plant corn. To water their crops they channeled run-off from the arroyos; these were the first acequias. They had leisure time to create clusters of petroglyphs on south-facing rocks, usually overlooking water. Perhaps the petroglyphs honored specific places or a certain event that happened there. And maybe some of it is just doodling. On the face of a boulder beside me is an unusual figure: large double spiral, executed by a steady hand, one spiral above and one below. Archeologists believe that the spiral is a symbol of emergence. An emergence of what? Consciousness? From this point I an see a hundred miles across the San Luis Basin. Circled by a ring of dark mountains, the basin looks like an archipelago washed by an ocean of sagebrush and sand. Until the late Mesozoic Era, the Southwest was alternately land and then sea, as the shoreline advanced and retreated over a low landscape. During the Pennsylvanian Era, eighty percent of New Mexico was submerged beneath shallow, equatorial seas. In the long afternoon wind I can still feel the ebb and undulation of the ocean. For the first five years that I lived in Arroyo Hondo, we had no running water. Jim and I took turns climbing up to the acequia behind the house or trudging down the steep hill to the river with a couple of buckets. I learned how to recycle the water two or three times: the soapy dishwater went to mop the floors; the rinse water nurtured the plants. Back in the seventies we didn’t worry about the river running dry; we enjoyed predictable rainfall patterns. The winter snowpack was usually deep. Spring was dry and windy. Around Fourth of July, when the snow had melted off the peaks, the “monsoons” began. When you hear the word “monsoons” you probably think of torrential rains in India. Around here it means afternoon thunderstorms, precious moisture driven up from the Gulf of Mexico. Jim and I used to watch the thunderheads building over Wheeler Peak to the east while the sky darkened on the western horizon a hundred miles away. As the first big drops made miniature craters in the soft dust of our driveway, I ran to get the laundry off the line. A blaze of lightning, a boom of thunder, and the torrents let loose. A ten-minute deluge refreshed the garden, tamped down the dust and left the air cool and pungent with the scent of ozone and sage. Now, with global warming, everything has changed. No one knows if or when the monsoons will come. Like man other areas of the world, in the past decade we have suffered through record-breaking heat, severe drought and explosive forest fires. Last year Taos Valley was dry almost all winter. It only snowed up on the mountain, and not very much. If the gods hadn’t decided to drench us over the summer, we would have fried. Last August, after an hour of torrential rain, a wall of muddy water roared down the canyon carrying away fallen trees and brush, rushing over the bridge, flooding the road. It left tons of pine needles in the acequia behind our house and wiped out our head gate so no one on the Atalaya ditch could irrigate for the rest of the summer. It also left behind dead trout and a layer of silt on the bottom of the river that provided rich nutrients for a sexy coat of slime. But the raccoons had a nice trout feast. After a week, the Rio Hondo cleared and the trout that had survived being washed away started leaping upstream at the confluence of the Rio Hondo with the muddy Rio Grande. When I first moved to Hondo I was afraid that the pollution in Taos Ski Valley was going to kill the Rio Hondo with an overdose of nitrates and phosphates. Because I was hauling water in a bucket, I began to notice the gradual deterioration of the river. When a stream is healthy, you can see the colors of the stones: beige, pale orange, black and gray, pink and green. But as the number of skiers at Taos Ski Valley increased, the rocks all turned the same sludgy gray. A number of families who lived along the rio depended on the river for domestic water. We formed the Committee to Save the Rio Hondo. For five years we fought Taos Ski Valley and then worked with them on various committees until we agreed on a sewage treatment plant that would o the job. It was a bitter fight, one that divided the whole community, but the battle united the Taos Valley acequia associations, and the environmentalist with the Spanish-speaking ranchers and farmers who had been making a living from this land for generations. And, for awhile, the river was cleaner. One summer morning my friend Lisa and I followed the Rio Hondo back to its source at Williams Lake ten thousand feet up the mountain. She showed me a hole in the face of a cliff where an underground stream emerged in a vibrant waterfall. Magical! I saw how the braided streams converge in Taos Ski Valley to rush down the mountain, leaping over boulders, sliding under fallen spruce trees, hurrying between high crags for two thousand feet beside the paved highway. The Hondo grows placid as it glides through the valley of Valdez, murmuring between big cottonwoods. Over succeeding generations the land has been divided into narrow ribbons so that each family can have access to water. At the end of Valdez the water returns from the acequias to the Rio Hondo, which cuts through the high cliffs of Cañoncito. In the heart of the canyon the stream is again diverted into ditches that will flank both sides of the Hondo valley. Deprived of water diverted into the ditches but sustained by underground streams, the river trickles through the fields of upper Hondo and glides through a culvert under the highway to lower Hondo. It runs through the lower village, past the old elementary school and the Vigil’s pastures where they keep a couple of glossy horses and small flock of sheep. Old-timers say there was a swamp at the end of the valley so wet that a cow could get stuck up to its belly. Before the rio drops into the canyon the ditches return about sixty percent of the water. The canyon walls grow steep as the stream slices through volcanic basalt on its final descent to the Rio Grande. Frothy waterfalls fill trout pools and burble past rock climbers as the rappel won the steep cliffs on their nylon ropes. By the time the Rio Hondo joins the shallow waters of the Rio Grande at the John Dunn Bridge, this high mountain stream has traveled seventeen miles, through fifteen acequias, and watered the livestock, gardens, orchards and fields in both valleys. At least once a week throughout the summer I climb the embankment behind the house and fight my way through the brush to make sure the ditch is running. A glassy ribbon of water five feet wide flows silent and serene through a tunnel of willows. The Atalaya is about four miles long from the diversion in the canyon to the lower end of Hondo. More than ninety percent of riparian areas in the West have been eliminated by flood control and irrigation projects; the vegetation along the ditches provides breeding habitat for over sixty percent of tropical migratory birds; eighty percent of local wild animals use the acequias during some portion of their lives. In the spring doctors and former Wall Street executives work shoulder-to-shoulder with Spanish-speaking locals to maintain the acequias. Ditch cleaning day dawns cold and clear. Single again, responsible for the land, I slide into my grungy jeans and search through the cupboard for my gardening gloves. I load my shovel in the back of the car and drive up to the highway. Battered pickups are parked nose-to-nose beside the road. The men sit on the hoods of their trucks or gather in small groups, talking quietly, grinning as if they’ve come to party. Our work crew sets out for the lower end of the ditch. I throw myself into it, as usual, shoveling out stones and clumps of clay. Trailing behind the middle-aged men come a couple of wiry, Spanish-speaking elder and three teen-aged boys who are already hooked into their Walkmans. Emilio follows close behind me all day, ogling my ass. He is a rakish fellow with a bulging beer belly, red-eyed from a Friday-night bender. When I drop behind him, he steps aside to “let the young lady pass.” I snort. “I’m an old bag.” “You’re in pretty good shape.” “A compliment!” Around ten o’clock we take our first break. Freddie, a tall, slouching Anglo in “airborne” fatigues, sits cleaning his shovel. Emilio says, “Is that how you cleaned your gun in ‘Nam?” He frowns and stares at his boots. “We never called it a gun. A rifle. Or a piece. Or sometimes even a deer.” Over the next hour he tells us, in a quiet ironic tone, about his stint in Vietnam, the senseless brutality, the chose and despair. We quit for lunch and come back at one. As the afternoon drags on and sweat pours down our cheeks we pause more often to gulp the lukewarm water from our canteens. The last hour is the worst. Our throats are dry as dust; weeds itch under our collars and down our shirts. With one eye on our watches, we stumble and falter. We have forgotten the why of it. “It’s like purgatory,” Freddie says. “You mean hell?” Emilio laughs. “No, purgatory. It’s never gonna end.” On Sunday I offer my young friend Karen six bucks an hour to clean the ditch with me. She falls for it. She is tall and lanky and looks as strong as some of the men. I say she might enjoy the novelty of working in community. I offer her a hat, but she refuses. I am better prepared than I was on Saturday. I’m carrying a bottle of water, have changed my billed cap to a straw hat and traded my shovel for a rake and clippers. We start at the top of the ditch and work our way down to the highway. It feels good to have help as we clean the section that crosses my land. I show them the muskrat holes and they stuff them with sandbags. Together we pitch into the beaver dam that blocks the ditch and clear it in five minutes. “These damn willows,” Armando says. “We’ll never get rid of them. We’re supposed to be able to walk the tope of the ditch.” “It never used to be this way,” Emilio says. “People let their goats eat the willow down. But nobody keeps goats anymore.” It’s a perfect day for photos – the fields greening up, an azure sky like a Hollywood backdrop behind snowy peaks. I tuck my camera in my fanny pack and shoot two rolls from early morning when we are still going strong, until late afternoon when we are beaten to our knees, dazed by heat and fatigue. I try to capture the tanned and wrinkled faces of the old men, the shy young boys working steadily whispering to each other, the patient, determined women. But there is no way to capture the musical Spanish phrases that flow between the men as they chat and tease. “Mucho calor,” very hot, Esteven says, wiping his forehead. “Soy cansado,” I’m tired, Ramon says, plopping his butt on the bank. He is tall with shoulder-length black hair. He offers his canteen. “Aqui – agua.” Esteven takes a swig. “How come you’re here? You don’t own land.” “I’m a peón,” Ramon says. “I’m working for the Zamoras. Mucho trabajo, poco dinero.” Much work, little money. They both chuckled. Esteven turns his sharp, brown face to me. “You were the first woman to start working with the crew. You had a big butcher knife. The guys said, ‘Stay away from her. That woman is crazy.’” I slap my glove against my knee. “¡Cuidado!” Watch out. At noon Karen and I trudge back to the house. I take a shower and change my underwear. Karen and I eat salad at the outside table. Her face is bright read. “I don’t know how you can stand it,” she says. “That’s it for me. I think I have heat stroke.” “You’d better go in and lie down.” I heft the rake over my shoulder and hike a mile back down the ditch to join the crew. In the afternoon Anna and I work in tandem, one raking, the other picking up the piles and tossing them onto the bank. Anna is lean with long black hair tied at the neck. Her hands are callused from digging in her garden, messing with horses, building fences. They have forty acres in the lower end of the valley. She and I have been friends and neighbors for thirty years. Contenta, our crew chief, whips us along all day. In the old tradition, she marks out with an ads twelve-foot sections, las tareras, for each of us to work individually. No one pays much attention to that – it’s more productive to work side-by-side – but we need more clippers and rakes. Now and then I climb to the top of the ditch to see where we are. “My God, this ditch is long!” It wanders back and forth following the contours of the hillside and actually seems to run uphill before it crosses the highway. As the sun fries our faces and necks, we take more frequent breaks, cowering in the shade of the bank. Ramon gulps a swig of his water and offers me some. “What happened to Karen?” I shrug. “She thought she was going to faint.” He laughs. I rub my sore back. “You know how these Anglos are – they want to do this communal, close-to-the-earth stuff. They think it’s romantic. And it is – for the first two hours.” Another burst of laughter. Freddie says, “After that it’s just outright abuse.” We’re almost done. I pause to look up at Contenta who stands astride on the bank, hands on her hips. I gesture up and down the acequia. “Has our ditch ever been cleaned so thoroughly in the past ten years?” She gives me a wilted smile. “No.” “Here they come!” Freddie shouts. Eloy and his brother Marty are walking backward as fast as they can, tossing out tangled branches and debris with their shovels, barely keeping ahead of the churning tongue of water. The crew scrambles up the steep bank as the muddy current floods the culvert and gurgles out the other side, washing away everything foul and unwholesome. Nobody speaks, but the same exultant smile lights each face as the living water glides by us, a mirror to the sky, swelling every crevice with moisture and possibility. Hard-edged winter is here again. I walk down to the bridge to look at the Rio Hondo. It’s freezing over, with a dark channel snaking down the middle. The only sound is a musical gurgling under the ice. The river has many voices. I’ve heard it mock the human world, laughing and cursing and screaming. Begging for mercy and singing. I used to worry that the pollution or the drought or the runoff would kill the river. And my heart would die with it. But at last I understand what the Rio Hondo had been trying to tell me all these years. The rio is as resilient as life itself. Where does it end? And where does it begin? In the clouds? In the sea? At the top of the mountain? The river is timeless; so am I. I’m a young woman lying on the grassy bank with Jim, watching a yellow star through the branches of the cottonwood tree. Now I’m wading up the stream hand-in-hand with my half-naked toddler. Now I’m holding the swing for Sara to climb on. Showing Zander how to free his fishing line from the bushes. That’s me by the light of the hunter’s moon, arcing out over the water on the swing. And that’s me too, my flashlight burned out, stumbling over a tree root, my anklebone snapping. Now I’m a creaky old woman standing on the bridge watching the water passing. Changing and changing and changing. Forever staying the same. At last I see why the Taos Pueblo Indians believe that all life come from the mountain, that all the rivers are sacred. Now I understand why my neighbors say, “No agua, no vida.” No water, no life.