Spokane River has a lot to say, so let’s listen

How fortunate we are to have a river like the Spokane running right through our city. Can you imagine Phoenix or Chicago or any other city in the world with a river as big as this that creates three waterfalls within earshot of City Hall? But our river is in crisis.

So my message is: Go listen to the river.

And when you listen you will find it speaks in tones so plain and childlike it will be hard to tell if the sounds are sung or spoken. The cataracts are calling out that it wants to run clean and free.

The river is saying: Clean the poisons from my life-giving water. Water, which is life itself. The river is saying: I am the life stream that gives vitality to this city and the land I flow through.

I am no one’s river and I am everyone’s river. I belong to no one person or one faction. No one owns me and can treat me as property and claim me as their own because I am held in common by all the people. It is they who must protect me and restore me.

Because the water from below Mother Earth comes up to meet and mix with me, the poisons must be cleansed from my system so that every living thing may survive and prosper. I nurture the water that flows where it can’t be seen.

Listen to the river. It’s saying:

For over a hundred years people have put poisons in my system. Before that the eagle and the elk took my water without fear. No swans died from feeding in my marshes. The tall trees shaded my currents and my banks. I ran clear and cold, and the water creatures loved me. For eons I lived like this, and the natural world lived with me and by me and because of me. The fish and I lived in harmony and they came many miles, even into the veins and arteries of my headwaters. They came from the mighty ocean like voices from far off in the sunset.

Listen to the river. It’s asking:

Who would despoil this spiritual scene? Who set in motion this destruction that will take forever to bring me close to what once was?

Surely those and their descendants should pay any price and assume any burden to try to make it right for the pollution they put in me. They can’t be excused. How can a price be placed on what it would take to restore what has been lost?

In the mists that rise from my currents where they crash upon the rocks, I whisper, “How could you? How can you still let it happen?”

“How can you continue to cut the tall trees from the hillsides above my channels and my beaches so that I swell beyond all tradition and carry too much of the contaminated hillsides down my flow? How can you reduce my flow to a trickle? Have you no respect for God and nature?”

Listen to the river.

And I say: Those of you who love the haunts of nature and the shadows of the forest and the wind among the branches and the rain showers and the snow storms and the rushing of great rivers must listen and protest the poisoning of this natural world. We must listen to the river. Some good has been done but just enough to engender hope and, yet, heartbreak. Is not the river entitled to compassion and pathos?

So go and kneel down by its shores and take the time to pause and listen, listen to the river.