#catchment

Atlantis of the Pampa.

Once upon a time, there was a tourist resort called Epequen sitting by a salt lake without an outlet river in the Argentina's Provincia de Buenos Aires. It was victim of a long term multi decade variation in rainfall patterns that was not understood when the town was built. the resort was developed in the 1920's to cater for those bathing in the lake's waters, back in the days when a spa cure was the height of fashion. The town catered partly to Jewish émigrés nostalgic for similar salty water spas still popular by the Dead Sea.

During the 1970's a sustained increase in rainfall in the catchment area that fed it resulted in the town being flooded. The event happened after a 8 day rainstorm in 1985 during which the lake level rose by 8 metres and broke through a dyke, eventually being buried in 10 metres of water. The town was successfully evacuated and abandoned.

In the early noughties, the rainfall pattern switched back into a generally drier mode, slowly uncovering the dead resort, now all covered in a fine white layer of lake salt. In 2013 mostly emerged from the waters for the first time in a quarter century, and its eerie white ruins can now be visited. One of the original inhabitants who returned is now Epequen's sole inhabitant.

Loz

Image credit: Juan Mabromata/AFP/Getty Images.

Examining the dross of a quarry, (the coarse and fine sizes), we may grasp what it is that has reduced things to this:

the panorama sliced away in cross section, exposing the roots in their bed of rock: or in the deeper layers, the mechanism driving the rust of ironface, feeding the surface’s scrub, slipped buttresses, cliff faces…                   the risk of overextension threatening the pristine catchment: the quarry top seeking to cover the wounds.

In a catchment zone the keepers must clean houses, sweeping soot from the roots, scouring granite outcrops regularly.

The catchment’s focus— a saline pool, comfortable in its illusion of deep, clear water— sheds itself in the stub of severed trees hedging the waterline.

Sloughs of mosquitoes squeezing in and out of sluices in a hillside cast barely a collective shadow over the catchment.

At the foot of the spillway, past seasons wallow in brackish puddles, raft insects eke out sketchy existences                    thin lines of pines cling to retainer walls.

From the summit— the barrier neither moulded nor bound by roots, but soldered to the squared shoulders of valley— we look to the liquid centre: wind slicks flattening the ripples, ironing them out, wiping the corrugated glass clean, darning patches on the wider waters.

We scale the wall, rising up over filaments of pumping station— pipes, straitjacketed, annelids splitting and regenerating in and out of the slinking earth, skirting the valley, entwining the undergrowth               the valves feeding from their concrete outriggers (weir-houses inhabited by pressure gauges, clacks, and screws), their task reason enough for existence, thoughts on source and destination not one of their strong points.

Yes. It was once considered expedient to get excess water channeled and out to sea as quickly as possible, but current (and ancient) wisdom knows that it is far better to keep water contained and on the land for as long as possible.