Restore the Future

Restore the Future
or
The Dam Be Damned

By Naturalists Robert R. Burch and Alma L.L.M. Gemini
A Work of Non-Fiction Fiction

John Muir called it a grand landscape garden, a twin cathedral to Yosemite Valley where the Tuolumne River wound through pristine meadows beneath towering granite formations. But the growing city by the bay needed water, and political will proved stronger than wilderness. By 1923, the concrete gates slammed shut, the river was choked, and Muir’s paradise was buried under three hundred feet of reservoir. And a monstrosity called O’Shaughnessy’s Dam overran Muir’s Cathedral.

Today, Hetch Hetchy is a beautiful tomb. Visitors look out over a pristine, artificial lake, mostly unaware of the drowned valley floor hidden beneath the wake that is the reservoir. For a century, it has functioned as a massive civic plumbing fixture, while on the surface, a stubborn, generational debate quietly simmers: Do we leave it trapped, or do we break the dam and let the valley resurrect?

A century of water pressure couldn't make the granite lose its wondrous shape. When they finally breached the concrete, the river didn't have to learn how to bend; it just retreated back into the old S-curve it spent millennia carving into the valley floor. The pioneering scrub on the banks looks sparse and messy. They are but nature's first, unpolished draft of a new wilderness. Humans spent billions to trap the water, but the river only needed gravity to reclaim its valley.

Afterword: The cover art is an AI re-imaging of what a drained Hetch Hetchy valley could look like after two years in the open air. The coda image is an AI reimagining of a photo that Robert took at a reservoir not far from his Baltimore home. The dam water is everywhere.

When Robert lived in California back in the late 70s and early 80s, Hetch Hetchy was in the local news seemingly endlessly with debates raging daily, unlike today’s simmer.

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