Beyond Dead Pool

Report

A trip down the Colorado

A hideous accounting trick is destroying America’s rivers

Lake Powell is the American Pompei, preserved under oozing tonnages of mud

Cash-register dams prop up a forsaken nineteenth-century fantasy

When we got to the North Wash boat ramp, we pulled up, four of us in a truck towing an inflatable rib boat on a trailer, but there was no ramp. Instead, we were confronted by a steep dirt bank, almost a cliff, crumbling into the fast current ten feet below. It was May, 2005, and the water of Lake Powell, the second-largest reservoir in the United States, was at its lowest level since May, 1969. We’d come to put a boat on the water in order to find out what we didn’t know, and what no one seemed to know: What was happening now that the Colorado River, after being smothered for 42 years, had begun pushing back? This ramp of sorts is not where North Wash empties into the Colorado River — that is a mile and a half downstream — but is nevertheless called the North Wash boat ramp. I mention this because it is a pattern in this story, that things are officially called one thing in spite of in reality being quite another. Five hours from Salt Lake City and about 40 miles from the nearest …

Remedies

Bieler's Broth

A diet of mostly alkaline foods, especially green ones, can make you feel heroic: clear, calm, solid, steady, focused.

Cindy Crawford emerges sylphlike from a treatment room.

Being immoderate, I stayed on the thin green gruel longer than I was supposed to.

By Amanda Fortini

There’s a chapter of my life during my late 20s and early 30s that I refer to as “the Hollywood years.” I was living with my ex, an exacting man who badgered me constantly, in an unfurnished bungalow tucked away in the Hollywood Hills, high above the teeming, seedy parts of the city. He’d written a bestselling book and went off on the lecture circuit for a year; meanwhile, my own writing career had begun to take flight, and I had magazine assignments that stretched as far into the future as I could see. I spent many nights alone in that spooky house, which the actor Rudolph Valentino had supposedly bought for his mistress, listening to it sigh and creak and groan. I frequently stayed up all night to meet my deadlines, haunting around our near-empty house, fueled by mug after mug of strong black tea. My diet involved a lot of toaster waffles and frozen chicken sausages. As my relationship disintegrated and my work piled up, I drank Diet Coke and smoked cigarettes, often for breakfast. …

Beyond Dead Pool

American Glossary

Bieler's Broth