< PREVIOUS ] [ 2005 Index ] [ Ed Quillen HOME ] [ SEARCH ] [ NEXT >
As soon Christo and Jeanne Claude Javacheff finish
picking up after their Gates
exhibition, which
closed Sunday in New York City's Central Park, they're
coming to Colorado to start on Over the River.
So
says the Associated Press, although back in 1997, we heard
that Over the River
(henceforth OTR) was supposed to
happen in the late summer of 2001.
OTR involves translucent fabric panels suspended over seven miles of the Arkansas River around Spikebuck between Salida and Cañon City. They would be up for about two weeks in July or August of some summer.
Just which summer is conjecture. The BLM field manager
in Cañon City said last week that OTR couldn't be
built until 2008 if Christo came in tomorrow.
In the years since Christo and Jeanne Claude came to Salida and explained their project, local reaction has taken several forms:
1) OTR is major cool and will put us on the Official Map of the World Art Scene.
2) This is art? What a collosal waste of resources that could feed the hungry, heal the sick, finance campaigns against Republicans and otherwise improve the lot of humanity.
3) Why worry? It won't last more than a day or two anyway. Remember Christo's Rifle Gap Curtain in 1972, that lasted all of 28 hours before the wind got it? They're clueless about our varied and vicious weather.
4) Whether it's art or not, I should be able to rent my house to some rich New York art connoisseurs for $5,000 a week and go camping for the duration.
5) OTR will destroy the environment. Delicate parts of the fragile riparian ecosystem will not get quite as much sunshine as they might otherwise receive. And did you know, they're actually going to drill holes in some of our precious rocks? And what about the wildlife?
The last response is more than a century too late. The valley of the Upper Arkansas is about as pristine as Detroit. It has held the main line of a railroad (now out of service, alas). It has a transcontinental highway, and it is lined with old mines, mills, prospect holes and quarries, some of them in operation until quite recently.
About a dozen years ago, I ran into Virginia McConnell
Simmons, who has written good histories of South Park and
the San Luis Valley. I had just read her book about this
area, Upper Arkansas: A Mountain River Valley,
and I
complimented her on it.
She thanked me, then said Actually, I could write the
history of your valley with just one word:
Exploitation.
She was right, but this valley still has trout, deer, elk, skunks, bighorn sheep and vistas of snow-capped peaks. The Arkansas is a tough river that has handled nearly 150 years of industrial use and abuse, and it still became the most popular white-water rafting stream in the world. A fortnight of diminished sunshine and a few rock bolts aren't going to hurt it enough to matter, and the Christo crew, by all accounts, is fastidious about cleaning up afterward.
The main problem is one that hardly anybody talks about. This area might want more tourists, but not that many more. One estimate from 1997 put OTR's draw at 75,000 people a day, which is more than the combined population of Chaffee and Frémont counties. (The Gates at Central Park averaged about 200,000 visitors a day, in a city of 8 million.)
From Salida to Cañon, there might be 6,000 total motel rooms. Restaurants, campgrounds, restrooms, emergency services, law-enforcement -- they'd all be stretched well past capacity.
U.S. 50 along the river is mostly two-lane, and there are few places to pull over for a better look. OTR will provide gridlock without a grid.
In search of a solution, I pondered the railroad. The Cañon City & Royal Gorge scenic route has passenger equipment in just the right place -- they'd just have to run from Cañon up to Cotopaxi instead of returning from Parkdale, assuming they could get permission from the Union Pacific.
But it's not the solution to highway congestion. Figure a three-hour round-trip, which allows five sunlit trains in a summer day. A train holds about 300 people. So that's only 1,500 passengers a day, and even if you could somehow quadruple that, it wouldn't put much of a dent in the daily visitation of 75,000.
Sure, I'd like to see OTR. I don't know if I'd like it or not. I know that afterward, I'd see something familiar in a new and interesting way, and that's one thing that art is supposed to do.
But myriads of other people feel much the same way -- and in this case, that's the problem.
< PREVIOUS ] [ 2005 Index ] [ Ed Quillen HOME ] [ SEARCH ] [ NEXT >