Dry River (essay)

The Gila river runs from east to west, just south of Phoenix. At one time in history the river ran water into the Colorado river, on its way to the Sea of Cortez. However, it was mostly seasonal, and rarely has water in the river for the past 100 years. During WW2 in the early 1940s there was a large POW camp just south of Phoenix. There were several thousand German and Italian prisoners being kept at this camp. A few of the prisoners got their hands on a map of Arizona, and saw that just south of them was something called the Gila River. The assumed where there is a river there are boats, so they came up with a scheme to escape the camp, make it to the river and steal a boat where they could go west on the Gila River and meet up with the Colorado and navigate to the Sea of Cortez. About 6 of them escaped and they made it to the river, of course only to find that they were at a dry sandy ditch. The prisoners were rather quickly apprehended and returned to the camp.

Each year all Fulbright scholars who are coming to the US come to the Univ. of AZ in August for an orientation. This is run by the Center for English as a Second Lanuage. They aks for volunteers to help out with social events for the scholars, so that on weekends they can have some non academic experiences. These scholars are from all over the world, south america, europe, asia. One year on a Sunday I volunteered to go with the group to the farmer's market at St. Phillips which is right on the Rillito river. This was right at a time when we were having a big monsoon season, the Rillito was running bank to bank with water. Those of us who live in Tucson were freaking out at how much water was in the river. The scholars from all over the world thought we were nuts, they couldn't understand why it was a big deal to have water in a river.