Everyone in Utah is keeping an eye on the rivers.
The Logan River is bursting at the seams.The Colorado is churning up more froth than A&W.
The other day, I played golf in the mountains and watched my friend drop his ball away from a row of sandbags.
We got trouble, right here in "River City."
Wallace Stegner said, "The history of the West is the history of water." I say the history of water is almost always a history of rivers. Like fire, rivers captivate us with their power, beauty and motion. We can watch them for hours. They have the capacity to both save and destroy.
The Irish writer James Joyce loved them so much he once linked the names of the rivers of the world into one long poem that flowed and twisted and bucked along like, well, like a river of words.
In his classy little novel "Aspen Marooney," Ogden's Levi Peterson often gathers at the river. At one point, a middle-age couple recalls their honeymoon. Says the wife:
"All I remember is we had a picnic at the Green River, which was brown and muddy."
He said, "People expect too much from honeymoons. For example, they expect the Green River to be green."
Some regional rivers, however, do live up to their names. The Bear River, where I grew up, is brown and slow and meandering - like a grizzly. And I remember an old salt from St. George telling me, "We call our river the Virgin River because no one's seen her bottom or slept in her bed."
The Snake River coils and spits.
Years ago, I worked with a Japanese journalist named Yumi Kajikura who'd come to Utah to write about the Ute Tribe. While here, she was treated to a Wild West ride on the Colorado. When people asked if she'd toured at all, however, she'd always say, "I've been to Denver."
"Why do you tell them you've been to Denver," I asked, "when you've been on a Colorado river trip?"
She looked a little embarrassed.
"Because I can say Denver," she said. "I can't say Colorado river trip."
It makes me think of my own river trip down Lodore Canyon. I threw in with a group of poets and writers for the run - probably the mildest bunch in the history of the river-running company. Our guide, a strapping kid from Samoa, didn't know what to do with us. We didn't hike or play volleyball. We just sat around and wrote.
We also sang songs.
One night, a children's writer decided we'd all sing our favorite song for the rest of the group. The river guide began to fidget. When it came his turn, he begged off.
"No," the woman said, "everyone has to do it."
He looked down at his hands. He'd been in Iron Man competitions where he biked, swam and ran for a hundred miles. He could bench-press a million pounds. He wasn't afraid of man, beast or wilderness. Now he was terrified.
We sat in silence for the longest time. Then, almost inaudibly, he began:
"Our house," he squeaked, "is a very, very, very fine house . . . ."
One of the most famous lines ever written by William Stafford - the late poet and guru from Oregon - is, "What the river says, that is what I say."
It became the title of his video biography.
Right now, our Utah rivers are saying, "Be wary of us. Don't take us for granted. Know we're alive." But over the years, they've said much, much more.
This column is just a snippet of my conversations with them.