‘As if cuffed by the ear, the Colorado river pulled me onward.’ The current that seized Kate Middleton can be felt throughout Ephemeral Waters, as she takes us from the headwaters of the Colorado, through the Grand Canyon, over the Hoover Dam, until the great river, all its water plundered along the way, expires a hundred miles from the sea. The fate that the ‘mighty Murray’ has barely avoided is accepted for the Colorado, with a few crocodile tears, because all the water stays in the United States, while the dried up ex-river is in Mexico.