In high school, the lake was our kingdom. Freshman year, after classes ended for the summer, we spent every Monday afternoon at its shores. I remember the feeling of lying like lizards on the sunbaked dock, the taste of watermelon juice dripping down sunburnt cheeks tightened with laughter. Summer was in reach wherever our fingers could touch, from the warm round skipping stones we collected at the beach to the patches of light reflected in the surface of the water. When the sun would eventually set, we would pack into the truck beds with the familiar farewell call of: “Same time next week?”
My adolescence was tied to this reservoir, Emigrant Lake. It didn’t matter that it wasn’t a natural body of water; it was still water, and in those parched western summers we took what we could get. The lake – which takes its name from Emigrant Creek, supposedly christened when a group of emigrants stopped at the stream – lies a few miles southeast of Ashland, a sleepy Southern Oregon town turned seasonal tourist hub due to its summer theatre scene. The city itself, my home since my family moved there when I was a year old, is nestled in the foothills near the convergence of the Siskiyou and Cascade mountain ranges; following this hill-country south out of town, a driver could catch a final glimpse of the Ashland slopes before crossing the California border in a matter of minutes.
My best friend in high school, Liv, lived two minutes away from the parking lot of the dock, and during those four years our group of friends spent countless weekends and summer days exploring the corners of the lake. I watched sunrises at the campground, curled up with the back seats down as the clouds pinkened through the open trunk of my parent’s car. Sunsets, too, were admired over the water, where in summer the final rays were satisfyingly swallowed up into a cleft between the mountains at the far end of the valley. One night in July, Liv and I drove to the hill above the dock to watch a thunderstorm hurl lightning bolts onto the dark surface of the lake. We sat on the car roof as Simple Minds’ 1985 album Once Upon a Time – our shared favorite – exploded from the maxed-out speaker, rivaling the thunderclaps. We sped home as the storm system gave chase, bursts like cosmic camera flashes erupting in the rearview.
The lake was a rural Disneyland. Just past the RV park on the northern side, three waterslides emerged out of a hillside, tangling like Hydra heads before depositing children into a pool near the beach. Kayaks moseyed and ski boats slashed through the water from dawn to dusk. At the southern tip of the reservoir’s horseshoe outline, Elephant Rock towered over a bay that, depending on the winter and spring rains, was just deep enough to catch our fall when we catapulted our seemingly unbreakable bodies off the edge. I used to brave the handholds in the cliff that some previous generation had bestowed upon future adventurers and leap back into the depths. Beyond the eastern edge of the lake, the land ascended gradually into the foothills of the Cascade Mountains, replete with derelict fence lines and private property signs accompanying quiet, empty expanses of ranchland. The western side, too, was a blank slate, holding little more in my early imagination than a few austere farmhouses and an old cemetery.
One year in high school, though, my friends and I came across a place on that western shoreline that we aptly began to refer to as “The Cliffs.” Here, heavy rains had filled in another small bay that lay below more sandstone bluffs rising some forty feet above the turbid surface. We flung ourselves from the heights while onlookers held their breath on the nearby beach. We would swim and jump and climb around this perfect playground until the very end of summer, when the heat and the sun would eventually start to sap the lake of its contents. The shore seemed to compel the depths deeper with each passing day, and the mud revealed by this recession saturated the water until the lake assumed a dependable oily brown sheen that complemented the fading, dry hills. Before we knew it, the lake we had known during the first fresh months of summer had disappeared completely as if sucked into some giant sponge, leaving only the thin shadow of Emigrant Creek to resume some memory of its antediluvian wanderings. School came as it did each fall, and we’d wait patiently for the renewal that would come with next spring’s rain.
Some years after we first discovered the cliffs, I remember returning in the winter to take a walk. The grass was setting out on its journey through the seasons, eager and green along the path that traced the upper edge of the bluffs above the reservoir. I peered over the edge into the basin to find that the water had disappeared completely. At the bottom of it, among the tufts of reeds and carelessly discarded beer bottles, a rusty shopping cart lay on its side. I stared for a while as new items began to populate this mucky vision: animal bones, shoes, plastic bags, all fixed in orbit around the cart. I gazed out over what had once been our beloved bay, now just a series of meager mounds and parched streambeds, toward the center of where the lake used to be. The ground was grey and cracked. Heavy clouds teased the valley, and Tom Spring Mountain glared disapprovingly down from high above the eastern rim.
It wasn’t until I came home from college for eighteen months during the pandemic and started to research the history of my hometown that I began to take issue with the way people called it a “lake.” It was really a reservoir, manufactured to inhibit the natural flow of Neil Creek and Emigrant Creek as they descended from the Siskiyous and the Cascades, and I was reminded of this fact every time I laid eyes on the colossal gravel dam at the northern end.
After the earliest settlers of Ashland and the greater Rogue Valley unleashed successful genocide upon the indigenous Takelma and Shasta people, they set about building a town. A post office was erected, as were schools and lumber and woolen mills, and a railroad was built in the late nineteenth century to connect the nearest cities of Portland and San Francisco. Then the Ashlanders turned their attention towards subjugating the land. The first dam at Emigrant Creek went up in 1924 in the name of irrigation. Then, in 1960, the city built another blockade, and the current outline of Emigrant Lake assumed its shape. By the time I came home from college in 2020, the west was experiencing some of the harshest drought conditions in recent memory; that summer, there was hardly any lake to swim in, and the Almeda Fire, which devastated several communities in our valley that fall, opened my eyes to the consequences of human impact on our environment.
It was around this time that Ashland was mourning the recent loss of a beloved community member, a Takelma elder named Grandma Agnes Baker Pilgrim. The news of her death reminded me of a time some years before when my family had gone to hear her speak. I can’t remember most of what she said, but I recall clearly that her message was about the importance of water; she spoke about its holiness and the crucial need to protect it, about its indelible connection to the lives of every human, plant, and animal. Remembering her message and thinking about the drought-stricken reservoir and the wildfire, high school days spent lakeside felt farther away than ever. I began to take less interest in what Emigrant Lake had meant to me back then; instead, whenever I visited the reservoir to hike the hills nearby, I saw vague visions of how the streams might have meandered in this landscape before the dams had been built.
It was during this prolonged reconnection with my hometown, too, that my dad discovered what was lying at the bottom of the reservoir. I can’t remember exactly when the inspiration struck, but sometime during my childhood he developed a deep passion for springs. This stemmed partly from our family’s Sufi traditions and the importance of sacred springs throughout Islamic history; the most famous is the Zamzam Well in Mecca, the holiest city in Islam, but there are also Muslim tombs and sacred places throughout the world where a spring or a fountain is often present. Closer to home, however, my father’s interest was also brought about by his love for the naturally carbonated mineral water that bubbled up in drinking fountains right in downtown Ashland. Known as “Lithia Water” for its high concentration of lithium and piped into town from a few miles away, this spring was one of the things that allowed the early city of Ashland to prosper as a spa town.
In fact, the Lithia Spring is one of dozens of springs that were known around the valley, many of which were reputed to have healing properties. There are historical accounts of early Ashlanders encountering indigenous people soaking in and drinking from the springs just north of the present town, so it is entirely likely that the springs in the Rogue Valley were utilized for hundreds if not thousands of years. In the early twentieth century, the locals wanted to market Ashland as a spa town modeled after European examples like Carlsbad, Evian, and Bath. These entrepreneurs constructed elaborate pavilions, fountains, and wells to display the springs that they had been introduced to. When the Great Depression reached Southern Oregon, the mineral water business began to atrophy into extravagant memory. Some of these structures can still be found in wooded creek valleys on the outskirts of Ashland - defunct resorts with faded signs and gazebos with rusted pipes returning to the soil. Some complexes still operate. Besides the Lithia Water fountain in Ashland’s central plaza, mocked by tourists and locals for its sulfurous odor, any trace of these springs in the heart of the town has long disappeared.
What my father’s interest meant is that we would search for vestiges of these forgotten springs around the valley, and up in the Cascades, too, finding them in creek channels or at the bases of sylvan hillsides. Once, my brother and I drove with him an hour into the hill-country to locate one he’d seen referenced in our local university’s archives. We eventually discovered its concrete catch basin cracked, upturned, and half-submerged in mud at the edge of a river, but signs of life still animated the mire; bubbles gasped for the surface near a particularly orange patch of dirt where minerals had accumulated - a relatively sure sign that we had learned to recognize as marking a mineral spring. We spent the afternoon there, hoping to right the concrete tub and dig out the mud. My dad did most of the work, sleeves rolled up and hands caked in sludge as he diligently lifted handful after handful of debris out of the swamp. Before long a bright, clean trickle of water began to breathe more easily on its way to meet the river.
Another time, in an adjacent valley to our own, my dad and I ducked under a no-trespassing-sign-ridden fence and followed a creek canyon hoping to locate another spring he’d read about. We found the source when we saw the geyser, laughing out loud at the miraculous display of subterranean pressure jetting water several feet into the air. Whenever I go back home, I make a point of greeting another spring that still flows near a waterfall hidden away in the hills above Ashland, where decomposing boards and crumbling concrete stairs offer fading reminders of a century’s passing. When my dad found a reference to the well that had been drowned by the creation of Emigrant Lake – Kingsbury Soda Spring – we had little hope of ever seeing it.
The first time we went out looking, October had spread its flaxen blanket over the hills and the water had receded from the lakeshore to reveal long, fissured plains of mud. My dad’s terse conjecture of the spring’s supposed whereabouts went like this:
“It’s somewhere in the lake.” The research was unhelpful at best. There were very few sources about Kingsbury; a brief mention here or there in old newspaper clippings, an unelucidated entry in a list of springs of the Rogue Valley. In short, we had next to nothing to go on.
We spent hours that day combing the lake bottom at a point that my dad thought could be promising because of its position near the creek, searching for any signs of a spring. Every now and then we’d spot the telltale ruddy deposits that often came along with iron-rich mineral springs, but we were disappointed to find instead a rusty can or simply an oddly colored patch of mud. The channel of Emigrant Creek cut its way through the deep sediment that had accumulated over the last century, carving ravines that sometimes snaked along ten feet below the cracked surface where we walked. Where the sediment wasn’t as thick, small fountains of water sometimes emerged a few feet from the main channel, leading to excited queries and unsatisfactory resolutions. It was painstakingly slow-going, and our boots accrued so much caked mud that we had to pause every few feet to shake ourselves out of the stodgy quicksand. The search that first day yielded nothing.
Days passed in Ashland during that period without much thought given to Kingsbury. In retrospect, I don’t understand why I didn’t devote every waking minute to this treasure hunt, this forgotten piece of the history of my home. The time came though, one day, when my dad approached me with new information.
“It was near a place called Klamath Junction,” he revealed. It was a town I’d never heard of – some lost crossroads that supposedly took people coming from California or the Klamath Basin into Ashland. “Apparently there used to be some buildings there.” There were even old pictures he had dug up from a newspaper; washed out black and white structures that displayed big signs saying “Gas” or “Services.” Our task became more exciting: find this crossroads, the place where the old paths down from the mountains would have met before taking travelers the final few miles to Ashland, and we’d be closer to finding Kingsbury. We returned to the lake more often with renewed hope.
It was still fall, and the rains hadn’t come to fill the lake yet. A lingering haze from the Almeda Fire still plagued the air with steady smoke. The lakebed reflected the general sentiment of the valley - brown, parched, in need of a deluge. Dark, stagnant pools dotted the now familiar mud flats. We parked near the shore at a point where, when the water was high, a crumbling concrete road descended straight into the depths. This was our lead. We followed its faint outline straight to the center of the basin, and just above the stream channel, sure enough, our ghost road intersected another line running a perpendicular course. We’d found the crossroads.
The sides of the derelict roads hovered above the arid earth. Any signs of life had long succumbed to the seasonal cycle of drought and flood, but surely this was the crossroads that once held the service station at Klamath Junction. I surveyed the scene for a moment, finding it hard to imagine anything existing in this mud-flooded desert. In the silence of this rumination, I heard the faint babble of running water.
There, below our feet near the concrete corner where the roads met, was a spring. It was choked and inundated with mud, and there were no signs of pipes or catch basins or anything to suggest it had once been drunk from. But it was too far from the creek to be an offshoot, and the red tint to the mud made us believe that it was indeed a mineral spring. It was barely flowing, and we couldn’t even see a discernable source. I thought about how many years this spring had been drowned and clogged with sediment, chemicals, and garbage from the summer boats. Who knew how far it stood from its original headwaters or just how mangled and altered its composition was? Yet it remained. It kept bubbling, alive even through repeated efforts to drown it, as if to say:
Look at me. I am still here, despite all you have done to prevent that. It was an oasis, some remnant of a long-forgotten past. I felt the wind wallow through the basin as I looked at the spectral thoroughfares, these paths that had once carried seekers here from over the mountains in search of healing waters. Waters like this sick spring. I knelt and cupped my hands into the ailing trickle. Maybe it could cure forgetfulness.