Channeling the Stories of the Local Watershed

Years ago, at a book club meeting, I found myself sitting across from the former Hood River city manager. I couldn’t help myself. I asked her, “What is it you actually do?” 

She replied, quite appropriately, with a long list of important things that help make our little city go round. Of course, that wasn’t really what I wanted to hear. I’d been hoping for a catchy nugget. Something to share later at dinner parties to inspire a civics lovefest. 

“Yeah, okay. But what is the most important thing we need to keep a city up and running?” I was sure this question would set her up to deliver the slick one-liner I was looking for.

“You want to know the most important thing?”

Here it comes, I thought.

She leaned in. I leaned in. 

“Wastewater management. That’s the thing.” 

And I thought, Well, shit. That’s gonna be a tough one to sell. 

But I kept thinking about what she’d said for days afterward. I felt like there was something here worth noting. I mean, wastewater systems impact every single person, business, and service in our communities. Right there, underneath all of our feet, is a complex web of pipes and pumps. Without it, we’d have poop all over the place, disease running rampant! The more I thought about it, the more I became convinced of this topic’s potential to demonstrate how connected we all are—and to have a good time doing it.

Over the last twenty years or so, I’ve produced stories for TV, podcasts, and live events. Being a conduit between people, helping them reach each other—that has been my guiding purpose. But over the years, it’s gotten trickier. 

Our access to information has exploded thanks to the internet, smartphones, social media, twenty-four-hour news cycles, podcasts. The upside has been a democratization of storytelling—you no longer have to work for a major news outlet to share your experience. The downside? The amount of information is overwhelming. It’s no surprise that we sort ourselves into like-minded groups—I get my info from here, you get your news from there—and then go our own ways, often in our own realities. This has affected how we communicate. We can pound the lectern, sling jargon, point fingers, and reap praise when we speak to a like-minded audience that’s fervent for more. But the intoxication of that agreement fools us into believing we have moved the needle more than we have. And with each perceived click of change, we grow further divided. For me, witnessing that disconnect widen, watching our loneliness grow—that’s been crushing. 

And motivating.

I now run the Sense of Place program in the Columbia River Gorge. Its flagship speaker series began nearly fifteen years ago, partly in response to community forums that seemed to go nowhere. As our founder, Amanda Lawrence, recalls, “We’d brought people together for panel discussions when something difficult was facing the community and asked, ‘How many of you know how you feel about this topic and don’t think that’s going to change by the time you leave tonight?’ And everybody raised their hand.” 

Amanda realized that for change to happen, there needed to be a way to bring people together outside of conflict or crisis. And that became Sense of Place. Instead of beginning with our differences, the program began with common ground, quite literally, by featuring speakers who had unique knowledge of the natural and cultural heritage of the Columbia River Gorge. Scientists, historians, authors, farmers, tribal members—their stories shifted the focus from division to collective curiosity.

When I took over running the program in its tenth season, it was because I believed wholeheartedly in its mission. Since then, Sense of Place has grown and evolved, and as our fifteenth anniversary approached, I wanted to celebrate our history and the continued relevance of our mission. At the same time, I’d spent the past several years ruminating on new ways to share information. How could I help our speakers cut through the noise of information overload? What about topics like wastewater management that appeared boring but had the potential to tell a shared story? Were there ways to pry open our sociocultural silos by changing the format of an event? And what about having some fun? 

Music has been a recurring element in recent seasons of Sense of Place: a rap song about lamprey, a violin-playing volcanologist, a beaver sing-along. The success of this interdisciplinary approach inspired the idea of a rock opera—the challenge was finding a way to weave multiple perspectives on the Gorge into one cohesive musical performance. 

Of course, answers often come when you’d rather be sleeping, and I discovered mine late one night, lying next to me in bed! My husband, a watershed hydrologist, makes an annual pilgrimage with his friends from the top of Mount Adams all the way down to the Columbia River, following the natural topography of the watershed. Ski, glissade, run, kayak, bike—the only rule is that it has to be human-powered. Wide awake, I started to picture the group of them standing on the mountain’s summit, looking at the landscape below, and then I saw the watershed in my mind: the way in which a snowflake, falling onto the high-alpine slopes, eventually melts and runs down through valley orchards, then into our cities and out to the river, carrying with it the signature of everything it’s touched along the way. With that image, the rock opera began to take shape.

Our story would begin in the atmosphere, where the watershed originates. We’d hear from a member of a Columbia River treaty tribe as she shared her people’s creation story and the importance of water in that history. This would be the first movement. From there, we’d drop to the summit of a mountain and meet a feisty biologist studying rare carnivores in the snowy high-alpine terrain—this would be the second movement. Next, we’d run downhill and meet a fourth-generation orchardist, who would take us through the seasons of growing a pear. Then it’s into a city’s wastewater system, where an unexpected wastewater wizard would leave you awed by every flush of your toilet. Finally, we’d arrive at the Columbia River—the pinnacle of this place in so many ways, and to so many people.

The watershed was the through line I’d been looking for, and so The Watershed Rock Opera was born. It would do more than talk about water; it would celebrate our connections to each other and to this place. 

For many months now, the project has been taking shape. Each of the opera’s five movements includes some combination of original music composed and performed by local musicians, recorded audio interviews, video, theatrical performance, chamber choir, and narrative storytelling. Sticklers may take issue with this being called a rock opera, but we’re okay with that.

Last night I got a text message from our composer, Erik Kaneda. He’s been deep in the third movement, a percussion piece that reflects the natural rhythms of the orchards. But when I opened his text, I discovered a voice memo about the fourth movement: wastewater management. I pushed play, and after a brief rustling the message went silent. All I could hear was the hiss of technology recording dead air. Then he began to sing. To belt it out, really. With pounding piano chords and the passion of an aria, he sang about a simple toilet flush that eventually becomes part of a mighty river and the wastewater magic that happens in between. And in that moment, while I laughed at his lyrics, I felt the joy of what we are attempting to create and the wonder we hope to share with others.    

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