Greg Hobbs was a lot like the Colorado rivers and lakes he loved: Deep, cool and a little bit of a lot of things.
I still haven’t gotten my mind or heart around the fact he’s gone, even through he died Nov. 30 of a pulmonary embolism, two weeks short of his 77th birthday, surrounded by people who loved him. We should all be so lucky.
Greg, of course, is the former Colorado Supreme Court justice, appointed by Gov. Roy Romer in 1996 and he served 15 years on the high court bench. When it came to water law, or anything related to the natural resources, Greg was the go-to source, for me and for state law.
Greg was my first official well-placed source in Colorado’s water community when I landed here from the Deep South in 2002. He seemed pleased I called him out of the blue and asked to buy him a meal. We met the first of several times at the old Racine’s near Union Station.
“Back where I come from the problem with water is having too much of it,” I remember telling him at one of the tables next to the big windows, where the morning sun tumbled in. “If you dig a ditch and put water on somebody else’s property, you might get killed. If a fish can swim it, it’s a navigable waterway down there.”
Greg laughed and said he was going to steal that line.
He taught me a lot more.
Prior appropriation, back then, was Archimedean to my shallow brain.
“First in time, first in right,” Greg said, about the water law. I blinked twice slowly the way a chicken does.
“Use it or lose it,” he expounded.
Greg was one of those people who never had to puff his chest out to prove he was somebody, because he just was, the same way a river doesn’t have to prove it’s wet.
My phone rang early on a March morning in 2015 at the state Capitol.
At the time, liberal Democrats were trying to legalize rain barrels, so people could catch the runoff from their downspout to water their garden, presumably.
A fight arose from a flank of rural Republicans sick and tired of city folks, the granola eaters, buying up water rights before farms got a chance.
Unless you have a water right, went the GOP logic, you can’t store it, even if you eventually put it back in the same plot of ground it would have wound up in anyway, but a few feet away.
It was a big partisan thing that the Democrats eventually won.
Greg was sympathetic to the water law purist, as you might expect. Water law was embedded in Colorado’s original constitution, he liked to remind me.
“Your rain barrel is the next guy’s retention pond,” he theorized about the legal upshot.
“Democrats are trying to legalize something that’s not illegal, and Republicans say they’re breaking a law they can never prove,” he said.
Putting rainwater on your garden, “if that’s truly your intention,” would be like catching it in your hat and flinging across the yard. “That’s slicing the onion pretty thin” to say that’s illegal, Greg said.
The idea of it, he guessed, was a publicity stunt to attract attention to conserving water, which he supported, in spirit.
On the other hand, to prove rain barrels harmed somebody else’s prior appropriation water right, a lawyer for the rights holder would have to prove how many raindrops were captured and account for every rain barrel in a watershed, then approve the amount of culpability for each person with a rain barrel, so they can reimburse the water right holder. “Bill for those hours proving that,” the former justice said.
We laughed like school boys.
Greg wanted to keep his name out of it, because he’s a non-political person and a judge needed to stay out of a mud fight. He had to tell somebody: Both sides were silly.
The statehouse runs in circles sometimes, he said, just trying to get over on one another.
Greg's family plans to have a memorial later on, when it’s a safer from COVID-19, to celebrate his storied life. I’ll apologize to them now. I won't be there. I'm an emotional person, and I’ll blubber and cause a scene, because I come from a long line of wailers.
I expect people will tell stories about his legal opinions enshrined in state law. They'll quote from the books the poetry he wrote. They will tell of the nonprofits he started and the magazine articles he wrote to tell Colorado’s story, a drop at a time.
I will tell you he was as good a person as I ever knew. He was more than mentor, a father figure, really, to many of us in the water community. I'll never stop missing him.
Two Christmases ago I had a devastating heart attack, flat-lined and made a short stop on the other side, before doctors snapped me back to this mortal coil.
The morning after I was moved out of the ICU, I got a text from Greg. I had never gotten a text from Greg. He was a caller.
“Don’t let the bastards get you down,” he wrote, dredging up a British quote from World War II about chilling out, which he probably knew I would recognize.
I laughed out loud.
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