Rio Sierra Riverhouse, Three Rivers, CA

The traffic from LA was pretty thick so it took us close to 4 hours to reach Three Rivers, a tiny spit of a town a few miles short of the entrance to Sequoia National Park. Our B&B, the Rio Sierra Riverhouse, is a charming, sky blue ramshackle number that overlooks a section of the formidable Kaweah River. Mars (short for Margaret), the owner and operator, met us as we entered the gate, then showed us straight away to our room where she had us sign a waver forfeiting our right to sue if we were injured or drowned in the river. She then even went so far as to walk us out to the water's edge to show us where it was and wasn't safe to swim. In the section that wasn't safe a couple of tatt'd up, earlobe pierced local kids were throwing themselves off one of the giant boulders into the rapids. They would completely disappear from sight below the white water and rocks and then, a few long moments later, pop up down stream to the cheers of their drunk friends on shore. Mars, who is a thin, high-voltage cable of a woman with stylishly cut silver hair and expensive looking, clear-framed glasses, watched in helpless agony. "Promise me you won't do that," she said.

Lu and I dropped our bags, suited up and then made our way over and between the boulders towards the little swatch of beach near the safe part of the river. We said hello to the locals. Most ignored us but a couple nodded or half-raised their chrome plated cans of Coor's Light in our direction. The kids were fine. Upon seeing me approach the water, one guy wandered over and pointed out where to jump off the boulder so the rapids would shoot me between the rocks instead of into them. "You don't want that to happen," he said.

I told the kid thanks but that I wasn't going to jump from any rocks. He shrugged and walked away. I felt like a total old lady.

I waded out and dove in. The water was shockingly cold but fresh and clear and exactly what I needed. The current was faster than I expected but was easy enough to swim against so I floated on my back and let it sweep me in a slow circle out towards the middle.

Later that evening, while looking for a knife for some cheese we'd bought in town, I found Mars in her little office off the kitchen and we got to talking. She used to be a producer on, "America's Most Wanted," and then had a show of her own called, "Strange Universe."

"It was one of those, you know... paranormal, reality...really awful TV shows," she said.

Eventually, tired of serving "the fickle masters" of the entertainment industry, Mars cashed out and moved to Three Rivers. At first she had a house that was more inland but sold it when her friend, "the queen of real estate up here," told her about the riverhouse and that it had just come on the market and that she, Mars, needed to buy it.

"I really had no idea what I was doing," said Mars. "Seriously, I very nearly crashed the plane. I really did. The whole mortgage crisis thing with people being in houses they couldn't afford? I was the poster child for that. But then when I saw this place, and my friend said that it was zoned for commercial use and something like 1.2 million people drive this very road every year on their way to the park, I figured I had to do it and what I didn't know I'd learn." She shook her head in disbelief. "It took me 3 years before I could even open this place. To say that it was a shambles doesn't even begin to describe it. You have no idea."

Rio Sierra Riverhouse opened in 2008, but Mars said that this was the first year she felt like she really had a handle on things. A big part of that had been that she'd hired, Thomas, a totally low-key twenty-something guy with long hair to the middle of his back and dark, straight-seeing eyes. "He grew up here," said Mars, "and he's a real river rat. The guy knows everything there is to know about that river out there, the people in town and how things around here really get done."


As Mars talked about the river I came to understand that, much like the ocean, it was a living entity with a mind and temperament all it’s own. The first year that she was living here, a friend called one morning and told her to look out her window. "The river was up to here," she said, pointing to the retaining wall at the base of the house, some seventy to eighty feet from where the water was now. "All of my beach furniture, picnic tables, umbrellas, everything was just gone. The water was this brown monster. There were giant waves breaking out there. It was the most terrifying thing I had ever seen. But, of course, me being me, if my friend hadn't called I would have slept through the entire thing!"

The sudden river swell hadn't been caused by snow melt but by a freak micro-storm in the upper Sequoias. "Things like that happen with no warning," said Mars. "I still don't fully understand it."

She then said that the water level on the river was down for the second year in a row. Typically, people don't swim in the river until mid-July because the run-off from the mountains makes it impossible. The water is too cold and moves too fast.

"This is the steepest river in the United States!" said Mars. Then she laughed. "Actually, I don't even know if that's true. Someone just told me that and, you know, how do I know they know anything, right?" Then she held up a finger. "I do know, however, that when the water really gets going out there it becomes a Class 5 rapid!" Again she paused. "See? Even that I say like I know what I'm talking about. I don't. Not really. All I know is that the whole river-rating system only goes to Class 6 and that's like Niagara Falls or something, I mean you'd have to be insane to go anywhere near those waters. So, this river, can be pretty serious when it wants to be."

I asked Mars if there was much talk about global warming. She sort of winced and said, "Some. There's some." The politics up here are very conservative and a lot of families, especially the farming families, have been here for generations. For them, the issue begins and ends with water. "They've seen dry seasons before. They've seen droughts. So, to them, global warming is... I mean, I think they get it and they understand it, but... It's complicated and I think, like anyone, they resent it when people in Washington make decisions about their water usage when none of those people have ever even been here." I asked for an example and Mars told of a recent law that diverted water from an entire farm community to a newly constructed housing development. "That was just... You know... It was wrong."

The next morning while it was still cool Lu and I drove inside the park to the Potwisha campground (renamed by Lu, "Pot’a-wash’a") and then hiked towards Marble Falls.  A dirt road followed the river and the concrete aquifer next to it. We turned off on a single track that lead up into the hillside and snaked through the beautiful and silent woods. After a half an hour we returned and tried to follow closer to the river but the dirt road came quickly to a dead end, a wall of formidable boulders preventing us from going any further. At the road's end a man was clearing one of the aquifer’s grates with a rake. We said good morning and I asked if he was with the Park's Department.  The man said he wasn't, he was with the Electric Company, part of a crew who maintained the aquifers.

The aquifers, he told us, were built over a hundred years ago. "This one here goes to a generator down stream that makes electricity," he said. "Others go for irrigation." He gestured into the distance. "They're all over these mountains, all the way down to Los Angeles.” He laughed dryly. “No way they'd let you build them today though."

"Do you ever see bears?" asked Lu.

"Bears? Oh yeah. All the time."

"And what do you do? Are they dangerous?"

The guy scratched his head. "Well, I mostly try not to find out. Generally speaking bears don't want too much to do with you. Get between a mother and her cubs though and you're gonna have problems. Or if they smell food on you." He shook his head and laughed. "A couple months ago a kid came up here with sandwiches in his back pack, said he brought one for himself and one he wanted to give to a bear. Well, bears don't really share too good if you know what I mean."

Lu laughed. "Did it take both of the sandwiches?"

"Took the whole pack! Kid was lucky his arms weren't still in it."

The guy told us about a nearby hike that was just across the street and down a short dirt road. “Don’t go too far beyond the bridge though,” he said. “Gets pretty snakey back there.”

We followed his directions and I pulled in next to a massive pick up out of which several very hungover men dressed in camouflage stumbled out and began arguing over whose fishing rod was whose.

The trail followed the river and soon came to an area of flat boulders that had small round holes carved into them. The electrician had told us they were bowls used by native Americans to grind acorns. On one of the rocks overhead was a pictograph of a woman sitting at work over one of the bowls. It was kind of eery. The Indians felt very present, like they had just been there moments before.

I wondered about the bowls and if the Indians were glad they didn't have to carry them to and from camp every day or did they bum out because they had to work in exactly the same spot all the time? What if you didn't like the person at the bowl next to yours? Were you stuck there or could you switch with someone? Maybe the bowls were first come first serve and the Indians would race each other to the riverside so that the last person to arrive would have to sit next to foul-smelling Martha. I imagined that was how the drawing got made. One day an Indian woman who looked strikingly like my sister Julie overslept and got to the river way behind everyone else. When she arrived, the others snickered and joked while Martha patted the rock next to her and the waiting pile of acorns and empty bowl and said, "Come on. We have work to do."




The Indian woman who looked so much like my sister Julie that it was weird said, "No way. This lousy tribe can starve for all I care. I'm not grinding acorns next to Martha unless she jumps in the river first and really scrubs."

Martha didn’t budge and the other Indians got pissed and told the woman to get to work, that enough was enough. No push over herself, the woman who looked like my sister climbed the rock and used her pestle to make the drawing. The other Indians gave her a really hard time the whole time she was at work on it, but when she was done they were impressed by how good it was and got off her back.     

I don't think I was drinking enough water.

                                                                           

                                                                                 It was still early morning when we got back to the inn but it was already nearing a hundred degrees so we headed straight to the river. Just as we arrived, three big inflatable rafts came down and got hung up on the rocks. At first I thought it was poor boatmanship but then realized the guides had done it intentionally so that they could walk the rocks with their passengers and show them the line they wanted to take through the next section of rapids.

One guy in a life vest and helmet split off from the group, ran straight into the woods and threw up. His friends all laughed. I looked to one of them to find out what was up. All he said was, "Bachelor party."

I spoke to one of the river guides who said the river was 4,000 cubic meters below it's normal level for this time of year. This was the second year in a row that it has been this low. The cause, he said, was insufficient snow fall in the mountains. And was that because of global warming, I asked. The guy grimaced and looked away. "I don't know about global warming," he said. "But either way, if we have another year as bad as this one, it's gonna be a very serious thing for the farmers and families that live around here."

Eventually, everyone piled back into their boats, cleared the next section of rapids and disappeared down stream. The river to ourselves again, Lu and I took turns jumping off the boulder into the cold, clear water.

Later, after dinner, we sat by the fire and counted the stars as they appeared, one by one, over the mountains. Some time after that, Lu shook me awake and said it was time we went inside.