This past weekend was a fantastic one… better yet, the best one I’ve ever had at Elephant Butte. The wind was strong, the waves wild, the company American, and the feels just out-of-this-world good. But! Above all, what usually makes or breaks a good time out at The Butte isn’t the whole cache of company and entertainment, it's the water level.
This weekend was the highest the water level has been in 15 years; well, that’s according to locals, at least, but the organization Water Data for Texas will tell you that the lake was a whopping 26 percent full on Saturday, 10th of June, 2017, which compared to one year ago, was only 16.6 percent full. That’s a pretty big difference in digits, if you ask me, but the telling factor here isn’t necessarily the numbers, it's the huge difference in the overall experience and physical state of the lake that one recognizes immediately upon arrival and especially if that person has been going to The Butte every summer and regularly for, now, two years. Yep, that’s me.
Furthermore, Elephant Butte is one of those precious New Mexico jewels that aids in the state's summer greatness (with weather frying us all at 91 plus degrees Fahrenheit), but which also and unfortunately aids in the perpetual demise of our beautiful State. What I mean is that, New Mexico is the third wheel of a great American romance; she’s that friend who runs to help the Cowboy (Colorado) save the damsel in distress (Texas), and does most of the work, but still gets the short end of the stick, because she’s not as rich or beautiful or bountiful or 'statused' or whatever have you. That whole analogy seems screwed up with a little hint of Brokeback Mountain in there, but you get what I’m saying and if not, here’s some context:
Elephant Butte is a governed southern New Mexico body of water under the Rio Grande Compact, which was a signed in 1938 between Colorado, New Mexico and Texas. The Compact apportions the Rio Grande (America’s fourth longest river and flowing from Colorado to the Gulf of Mexico) among all three states. From the very second the river rushes into the New Mexico territory from its Northern channel in Colorado, it no longer belongs to anyone; that’s the mess of water rights, or lack there of, that exists in New Mexico and which furthermore, reflects the history of it forever and ever being a territory and embodiment of the Wild West.
But the Rio Grande, like many rivers, is fed by other rivers and thats when the issue of ownership gets really messy. According to state law, water rights are put to use by those who were here first: agricultural users or farmers or whatever I can call it that doesn’t entirely elude to these people being Anglos who made conquest of the territory, but rather explains the Indians and indigenous folks who resided and still reside here... maybe I should have just said it that way in the first place. Yes, I’m awkward as hell when it comes to sensitive stuff.
Anyway, New Mexico has been practicing agriculture since the settlement cultures of the Anasazi, Mogollon and Hohokam, and also by the Spanish settlers of 1598 clear to today. Although agriculture only contributes to less than 2 percent of our state’s gross domestic product, present-day state law guarantees that those who practice agriculture will forever have use of New Mexico’s precious and depleting water. But what’s more is that according to the Aamodt Adjudication, the first complex and ongoing case regarding who is considered “first” in New Mexico and thus obtains priority rights of water, the fight doesn’t end here; it begins all over again, in fact, and with the argument that Indians should have first rights over non-Indians because they were, indeed, here first. Which also becomes an argument of semantics and time, which makes things really uncomfortable.
But rather than anyone getting anything, because that’s an ongoing case and the Wild West never died here, the state of New Mexico, although being the central channel of the passing of this historical body of water - the Rio Grande -in sum gets more or less nothing in comparison to what Colorado and Texas get. Thus, we face increasing drought and the fear that our precious Elephant Butte, the largest lake and reservoir in the state of New Mexico, may not be the massive 57.03 square miles of invaluable coolness in a shriveling land of dirt devils and record breaking heat that we currently know and love it to be. That’s sad.
But on another note!
Okay, give me a break, how does one transition from that anyway?
On this trip, I also learned that Elephant Butte is home to some of the world’s largest catfish… supposedly. Stories claim they are the size of VW slug bugs and are said to live right at the bottom of the dam and grow to their, claimed, massive size because they’re trash eaters.
I also couldn’t help but ponder about what else one might find at the bottom of that lake, especially with its history of the Toy-Box Killer, which you can read about in my exclusive interview with a crime scene processor on the case.
But in sum, its weekends like these that make you question the judgment of those more powerful and how they may very well impact the memories made at such a shining blue place set between rolling brown hills in a New Mexico that I think isn’t living to its greatest potential. And it's also weekends like these that make you cheer to boats, beer bellies, shitty country music, campfires, nipple rings (yes, you read that right...) and laughing your ass off at fart jokes and everything else unclassy because we are who we are #merica.
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