Where the Rivers Change Direction, Across the Great Divide

More interesting Gunnison info: the land that Gunnison sits on is technically high desert land. Thanks to the ancient Romans, though, it is a veritable garden spot of the old west.
As I was walking to the local WalMart (OK, so there is a downside to Gunnison) I noticed that there seemed to be streams of water running down the sides of the streets, narrow but natural looking straight lines of water. I also noticed that many if not all of the houses had tiny little pumps running from the streams of water with garden hoses attached. I was fascinated by the sight of it, and even more amused that some of the homeowners had built little tiny pump houses over their pumps, and some of them had made the effort to make the pump houses look like their own houses. Very charming indeed. But what did it all mean?
That is when I ran into Eric. Eric is a handyman type character who was working on a small house on Iowa Street, I recall the name was. He was wearing coveralls and looked like a very decent guy, and we started a conversation when he approached me and introduced himself. After a few “How great is Colorado” type sentences (he loves it here as much as I do, and might well move into the place he is fixing ) I asked him about the water running down the street.
“It’s from the Gunnison River,” he said. The land here is high desert, but someone figured out that if trenches were dug at a slight downhill angle from the river it would make the place like this,” indicating to me the lush green grass all around. He also told me that a similar trench system kept all the farmland watered as well. I have noted winding streams that almost look manmade, winding beautifully through the farm lands that I have passed. Im not sure if those are the trenches to which he was referring, but it is easy to see how that very basic and ancient form of irrigation, invented by the Romans, has helped make Gunnison not only a viable place, but a beautiful one as well.
A funny thing—I was listening to a Kate Wolfe song called Across the Great Divide the other day, and a couple of lines are, “Where the rivers change direction, across the great divide”---and I realized as I was walking that the reference was to the CONTINENTAL divide, which I was standing basically on top of, and which did indeed mark where the rivers began to run the other direction. Just sayin’…..
Another thing that I have noticed, and it is something that adds to the beauty of Gunnison---the fact of the college. I was talking to a man from a cell phone store, and as we were talking several twenty-something year old girls walked by in shorts. Being “not dead yet” I, and the man for that matter, looked at them admiringly as they sashayed away. We then looked at each other, and he laughed and said, ”It’s a college town. I see it all the time. You gotta love it”
Indeed.