From the Salmon

When you move to Berkeley, I think you’re required to get a Sierra Club membership. Perhaps I’m misremembering, but I’m pretty sure that our checklist read something like “1. Activate electricity/gas/phone, 2. Register car, 3. Sign up for Sierra Club.” Anyhow, the most recent Sierra Club mailer had a story that I found particularly interesting regarding some developments in Yosemite National Park.

Yosemite is one of my favorite places on earth, particularly this time of year. It can be overcrowded in the summer, but crowds are lighter now and the spring snow melt has the waterfalls raging. Late last summer, we made the trip to camp for a weekend with some friends. Our friends needed to leave before we did, and my wife and I looked for a short hike in the park that we could enjoy before we left to return home.

We decided to check out Hetch Hetchy Reservoir, which is maybe 20 or 30 miles northwest of Yosemite Valley but requires you to leave and reenter the park to access it. Hetch Hetchy is a reservoir created by a dam on the Tuolomne River, one of the main rivers that flows through Yosemite. The water in the reservoir is largely used by San Francisco as drinking water, but it also provides hydroelectric power and some irrigation as it flows on its way to the Bay Area. Despite the fact that it’s a man-made reservoir, Hetch Hetchy is extraordinarily beautiful. We chose a relatively light trail that led us for a few miles along the north side of the reservoir, meandering through wildflower-filled meadows to the base of Wapama Falls, which tumbled directly into the reservoir and which easily rivaled any of the falls in the main Yosemite Valley. Needless to say, it’s a place that conjures up for us remarkable mental images of a glorious day.

The Sierra Club newsletter informed me of an effort underway to explore the possibility of decommissioning the dam, draining the reservoir, and beginning to restore the Hetch Hetchy Valley to what it was before the river was dammed in the early twentieth century.

I’ll admit that, at first glance, I wasn’t so sure about this. Artificial or not, the reservoir is quite beautiful. And my memory of that afternoon we spent on the way to Wapama Falls was so idyllic, that it almost seemed like a shame to change it by draining the reservoir. There was even something romantic about drinking water that came from such a remarkable location.

But as I looked around the web and discovered more about how this dam came about and how little of the Bay Area water supply the reservoir actually provides, I began to change my mind. Hetch Hetchy Valley once rivaled Yosemite Valley in its features and beauty. John Muir, the founder of the Sierra Club and the godfather of Yosemite and the National Park System, declared it “one of nature’s rarest and most precious mountain temples.” And I can only imagine the outrage I would feel were Yosemite Valley to be dammed and flooded.

It may take a generation or more for the valley to recover from being submerged, but from what I’ve read, it seems well worth starting the process.

A World Submerged

As I’ve written in recent posts, I’ve been thinking and reading about about the present transformational work of the Kingdom of God. If I were to list the wounds of this world that God must want to restore, many of them would be obvious and ugly: war, famine, plague, hatred, torture, oppression, racism, and on and on. The ugliness is easy to see.

But as I’ve considered the restoration of Hetch Hetchy, I’ve begun to wonder how much of our own brokenness and the brokenness of the world around us actually seems beautiful in our eyes. Do we resist the healing presence of God because of some misplaced sentimental attachment to our own wounds? Is our true nature so submerged that it’s hard for us even to imagine what it would be like to be restored? Maybe this is what Paul had in mind when he wrote of seeing “through a glass, darkly.” Or C.S. Lewis when he talks about this world as the “Shadowlands.”

Here’s an artist’s rendering of a restored Hetch Hetchy Valley from hetchhetchy.org:

Seems pretty stunning to me. It makes me wonder what I’d look like. Or you.