Molly here. Although “The Water Cycle” is only recently making its public debut, this idea has been in the works for quite some time. Here’s where this tale begins, well my version anyway…
“No way!” I shouted. My dad and aunt were the unexpecting first receivers of my excitement that this project might actually take off. In a fit of mumbles, I jumped up from my seat and paced around the empty restaurant, reading my email in a frenzy, before eventually running outside.
“I’m at work but I’ll call you later,” Kate answered her phone. She was clearly in the middle of something, probably a group of middle schoolers who were secretly loving their environmental education field trip but would never let it show. We got the grant! We got the grant? Wait, we got… the grant! I couldn’t believe it. I eventually regrouped and over lunch explained what was going on to my dismayed family members.
During the summer of 2018, I received a letter from Kate with a last-line solicitation looking for adventure buddies for a bike trip along the Colorado River “from source to mouth… as a way to develop a sense of place.” We had met that same summer in Haines, Alaska at the state fair through friends of friends. We’d casually talked that day but solidified our connection when we each, independently, wandered off to the same open field to soak up the light of the full moon only to find a moon-bathing buddy in one other. We ended up talking on the roof of a baseball dugout for hours, eventually agreeing to be pen pals and sneaking a ride on the fair’s rent-a-slide. For the next year, we wrote. It was mostly Kate at first, sending me hand drawn letters and homemade granola. There were notes written with inspirational poems, on pieces of tree bark, and even a mix cd featuring female frontwomen, “a soundtrack to being a woman in all its forms.” I knew I liked this girl.
We eventually met up in Colorado, my home state, where Kate was attending graduate school. The idea of this bike trip grew over the next year, adding components and riders along the way. The idea was to follow the river, offering watershed education programs in schools and community groups and collecting stories of local connections to the river in each town we passed. While many people have rafted the river, we thought biking would offer us a more human connection (large portions of the river itself are in wilderness areas, far away from human development) while still maintaining a low carbon footprint. We would travel slowly and on roads, where the people are, spending time in communities and getting to those who intimately with the river.
Along the way, Kate found Deirdre, a writer, advocate and conservationist with past experience studying and tracing the Colorado. Somehow, despite them both working full time and Deirdre going abroad, these badass ladies turned this idea into a fully-fledged project and started submitting grant proposals. And that brings us to this February, where I rather rudely interrupted lunch upon receiving news that we had received the National Geographic Early Careers Grant. All of a sudden, this silly idea we had was very real. We now had money and the backing of Nat Geo. We could really make this happen.
Since that fateful day a few months ago, I’ve come to realize that this project has the potential to connect people and landscape in a way I, and I think all three of us, have always dreamed of doing. I’ve always had a special connection to the idea of “place,” whether it was the community park I explored as a child, my family's backyard pond or the vast wilderness of southeast Alaska. The landscape around me has always been essential to my understanding of the world, my own identity, and how they relate to each other. In working with the public, however, I was dismayed to find this is typically NOT the case. And then I spent 3 summers studying and falling in love with a glacial landscape… only to realize and watch every day as that place fell apart at the ignorant hands of humans. I like people- it's why I first became a park ranger. I also wholeheartedly believe we really are all doing the best we can. And so, I had to understand how the goodhearted park visitors/cruise ship passengers I was interacting with could rattle through excuse after excuse sipping cocktails at 8 am. So few of these people understood how their overpriced AM happy hour was impacting this place that they oooh’d and awww’d over, claiming to “love.” How could I convince people to consider “place” in their everyday decisions if they had no concept of their connection to that place? Bridge the gap, plant the seed of connection. Show them how they impact the land and vise versa. Show them how they impact each other.
And so, I came home to my first place and am excited to build bridges and plant little seeds all along the river- to teach the science, share the stories, and explore what true connection can really do.
Stay tuned, more to come from The Water Cycle crew! Want to support this project? Check out our Support page and contact waterbicycle@gmail.com for more information.
Letters from Kate <3