Encounters with the Archdruid

by John McPhee

  On a shelf behind Dominy’s desk, in the sort of central and eye-catching position that might be reserved for a shining trophy, was a scale model of a bulldozer. Facing each other from opposite walls were portraits of Richard M. Nixon and Hoover Dam. Nixon’s jowls, in this milieu, seemed even more trapeziform than they usually do. They looked as if they, too, could stop a river. Seeing that my attention had been caught by these pictures, Dominy got up, crossed the room, and stood with reverence and devotion before the picture of Hoover Dam. He said, “When we built that, we—Americans—were the only people who had ever tried to put a high dam in a big river.” He said he remembered as if it were his birthday the exact date when he had first seen—as it was then called—Boulder Dam. He had taken a vacation from Campbell County, Wyoming, and driven, with his wife, into the Southwest, and on January 2, 1937, reached the Arizona-Nevada border and got his first view of the dam as he rounded a curve in the road descending toward the gorge of the Colorado. “There she was,” he said, looking at the picture in his office. “The first major river plug in the world. Joseph of Egypt learned to store food against famine. So we in the West had learned to store water.” He went on to say that he felt sure that—subconsciously, at least—the outline of his career had been formed at that moment. He had begun by building dams seven feet high, and he would one day build dams seven hundred feet high.

  The rancher Fred Oedekoven, on whose place Dominy built his first dam, is nearly eighty years old. A tall man, bent slightly forward, he lives in a peeled-log house on the land he homesteaded when he was twenty. I met him once, when I was in the county, and talked with him in the sitting room of his house. Two pictures hung on the walls. One was of Jesus Christ. The other was the familiar calendar scene of the beautiful lake in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, with the Grand Tetons rising in the background. Jackson Lake, as it is called, was built by the Bureau of Reclamation. “When Dominy come here, he took aholt,” Oedekoven said. “I hated to see him go. They wanted him to go to Washington, D.C., to go on this water-facilities program, and I advised him to do it, for the advancement. He really clumb up in life.”

  Dominy had stayed up there as well, becoming the longest-running commissioner in the Department of the Interior. Appointed by Eisenhower, he adapted so well to the indoor range that he was able to keep his position—always “at the pleasure of the President, without term of office”—through two Democratic Administrations, and now he was, in his words, “carrying the Nixon hod.” He winked, sat down on the edge of his desk, and pronounced his absorbing code: “Never once have I made a decision against my will if it was mine to make.” He had learned to plant creative ideas in senators’ and congressmen’s minds (“Based on your record, sir, we assume …”), when to be a possum, and when to spring like a panther (“‘You get out of my office,’ I said. The average bureaucrat would have been shaking, but I wasn’t the least bit scared. No member of Congress is going to make me jump through hoops. I’ve never lost my cool in government work unless I thought it was to my advantage”). He had given crucial testimony against the proposed Rampart Dam, on the Yukon River, arguing that it was too much for Alaska’s foreseeable needs; Rampart Dam would have flooded an area the size of Lake Erie, and Dominy’s testimony defeated it. He had argued for federal—as opposed to private—power lines leading away from his big dams, thus irritating the special interests of senators and congressmen from several states. “I have been a controversial bastard for many years,” he explained, lighting another cigar. Dominy knew his business, though, and he could run a budget of two hundred and forty-five million dollars as if he were driving a fast bus. He had cut down the Bureau’s personnel from seventeen thousand to ten thousand. And he had built his stupendous dams. On the wall of his office there was also a picture of Dominy—a bold sketch depicting his head inside a mighty drop of water. It seemed more than coincidence that in an age of acronyms his very initials were FED.

  Dominy switched on a projector and screened the rough cut of a movie he had had prepared as an antidote to the Sierra Club’s filmed elegy to the inundated canyons under Lake Powell. Dominy’s film was called “Lake Powell, Jewel of the Colorado,” and over an aerial shot of its blue fjords reaching into the red desert a narrator said, “Through rock and sand, canyon and cliff, through the towering formations of the sun-drenched desert, the waters of the Colorado River pause on their way to the sea.” Water skiers cut wakes across the water.

  “Too many people think of environment simply as untrammelled nature,” Dominy commented. “Preservation groups claim we destroyed this area because we made it accessible to man. Six hundred thousand people a year use that lake now.”

  The film showed a Navajo on horseback in a blazing-red silk shirt. “Into his land came Lake Powell, which he has woven into his ancient ways,” said the narrator.

  “Right,” said Dominy. “Now people can fish, swim, water-ski, sun-bathe. Can’t you imagine going in there with your family for a weekend, getting away from everybody? But Mr. Brower says we destroyed it.”

  “The canyon lay isolated, remote, and almost unknown to the outside world,” said the narrator, “until”—and at that moment a shot of the red walls of Glen Canyon came on the screen, and suddenly there was a great blast and the walls crumbled in nimbuses of dust. Ike had pressed a button. Bulldozers followed, and new roads, and fifty thousand trucks. Cut to dedication of dam, ten years later. “I am proud to dedicate such a significant and beautiful man-made resource,” said Lady Bird Johnson. “I am proud that man is here.”

  Dominy blew smoke into the scene as Lady Bird dissolved. “The need for films of this kind, for public information, is great, because of those who would have all forests and rivers remain pristine,” he said. “People ignore facts and play on emotions.”

  There were more scenes of the blue, still water, lapping at high sandstone cliffs—panoramic vistas of the reservoir. An airplane now appeared over the lake—twin-engine, cargo. “Watch this,” Dominy said. “Just watch this.” What appeared to be a contrail paid out behind the plane—a long, cloudy sleeve that widened in the air. “Trout!” Dominy said. “Trout! Those are fingerling trout. That’s how we put them in the lake.”

  Montages of shots showed the half-filled lateral canyons —Forgotten Canyon, Cascade Canyon, Reflection Canyon, Mystery Canyon—with people swimming in them, camping beside them, and singing around fires. “In this land, each man must find his own meanings,” said the narrator. “Lake Powell, Jewel of the Colorado, offers the opportunity.” “Reclamation is the father of putting water to work for man—irrigation, hydropower, flood control, recreation,” Dominy said as he turned on the lights. “Let’s use our environment. Nature changes the environment every day of our lives—why shouldn’t we change it? We’re part of nature. Just to give you a for-instance, we’re cloud-seeding the Rockies to increase the snowpack. We’ve built a tunnel under the Continental Divide to send water toward the Pacific that would have gone to the Atlantic. The challenge to man is to do and save what is good but to permit man to progress in civilization. Hydroelectric power doesn’t pollute water and it doesn’t pollute air. You don’t get any pollution out of my dams. The unregulated Colorado was a son of a bitch. It wasn’t any good. It was either in flood or in trickle. In addition to creating economic benefits with our dams, we regulate the river, and we have created the sort of river Dave Brower dreams about. Who are the best conservationists—doers or preservationists? I can’t talk to preservationists. I can’t talk to Brower, because he’s so God-damned ridiculous. I can’t even reason with the man. I once debated with him in Chicago, and he was shaking with fear. Once, after a hearing on the Hill, I accused him of garbling facts, and he said, ‘Anything is fair in love and war.’ For Christ’s sake. After another hearing one time, I told him he didn’t know what he was talking about, and said I wished I could show him, I wished he would come with me to the Grand Canyon someday, and he said, ‘Well, save some of it, and maybe I will.’ I had a steer out on
my farm in the Shenandoah reminded me of Dave Brower. Two years running, we couldn’t get him into the truck to go to market. He was an independent bastard that nobody could corral. That son of a bitch got into that truck, busted that chute, and away he went. So I just fattened him up and butchered him right there on the farm. I shot him right in the head and butchered him myself. That’s the only way I could get rid of the bastard.”

  “Commissioner,” I said, “if Dave Brower gets into a rubber raft going down the Colorado River, will you get in it, too?”

  “Hell, yes,” he said. “Hell, yes.”

  Mile 130. The water is smooth here, and will be smooth for three hundred yards, and then we are going through another rapid. The temperature is a little over ninety, and the air is so dry that the rapid will feel good. Dominy and Brower are drinking beer. They have settled into a kind of routine: once a day they tear each other in half and the rest of the time they are pals.

  Dominy is wearing a blue yachting cap with gold braid, and above its visor in gold letters are the words “LAKE POWELL.” His skin is rouge brown. His nose is peeling. He wears moccasins, and a frayed cotton shirt in dark, indeterminate tartan, and long trousers secured by half a pound of silver buckle. He has with him a couple of small bags and a big leather briefcase on which is painted the great seal of the Bureau of Reclamation—snow-capped mountains, a reservoir, a dam, and irrigated fields, all within the framing shape of a big drop of water. Dominy has been discoursing on the multiple advantages of hydroelectric power, its immediacy (“When you want it, you just throw a switch”) and its innocence of pollution.

  “Come on now, Dave, be honest,” he said. “From a conservationist’s point of view, what is the best source of electric power?”

  “Flashlight batteries,” Brower said.

  Brower is also wearing an old tartan shirt, basically orange, and faded. He wears shorts and sneakers. The skin of his legs and face is bright red. Working indoors and all but around the clock, he has been too long away from the sun. He protects his head with a handkerchief knotted at the corners and soaked in the river, but his King Lear billowing white hair is probably protection enough. He travels light. A miniature duffelbag, eight inches in diameter and a foot long—standard gear for the river—contains all that he has with him, most notably his Sierra Club cup, without which he would be incomplete.

  Dominy and Brower are both showing off a little. These organized expeditions carry about a dozen people per raft, and by now the others are thoroughly aware of the biases of the conservationist and the Commissioner. The people are mainly from Arizona and Nevada—schoolteachers, a few students, others from the U.S. Public Health Service. On the whole, I would say that Dominy so far has the edge with them. Brower is shy and quiet. Dominy is full of Irish pub chatter and has a grin as wide as the river.

  Cans of beer are known as sandwiches in this red, dry, wilderness world. No one questions this, or asks the reason. They just call out “Sandwich, please!” and a can of Coors comes flying through the air. They catch the beer and drink it, and they put the aluminum tongues inside the cans. I threw a tongue in the river and was booed by everyone. No detritus whatever is left in the canyon. Used cans, bottles—all such things—are put in sacks and go with the raft all the way. The beer hangs in the water in a burlap bag from the rear of the raft, with Cokes and Frescas. The bag is hauled onto the raft before a heavy rapid but rides through the lighter ones.

  The raft consists of, among other things, two neoprene bananas ten yards long. These pontoons, lashed to a central rubber barge, give the over-all rig both lateral and longitudinal flexibility. The river sometimes leaps straight up through the raft, but that is a mark of stability rather than imminent disaster. The raft is informal and extremely plastic. Its lack of rigidity makes it safe.

  This is isolation wilderness: two or three trails in two hundred miles, otherwise no way out but down the river with the raft. Having seen the canyon from this perspective, I would not much want to experience it another way. Once in a rare while, we glimpse the rims. They are a mile above us and, in places, twelve miles apart. All the flat shelves of color beneath them return the eye by steps to the earliest beginnings of the world—from the high white limestones and maroon Hermit Shales of Permian time to the red sandstones that formed when the first reptiles lived and the vermillion cliffs that stood contemporary with the earliest trees. This Redwall Limestone, five hundred feet thick, is so vul nerable to the infiltrations of groundwater that it has been shaped, in the seas of air between the canyon rims, into red towers and red buttes, pillars, caverns, arches, and caves. The groundwater runs for hundreds of miles between the layers of that apparently bone-dry desert rock and bursts out into the canyon in stepped cascades or ribbon falls. We are looking at such a waterfall right now, veiling away from the Redwall, high above us. There is green limestone behind the waterfall, and pink limestone that was pressed into being by the crushing weight of the ocean at the exact time the ocean itself was first giving up life—amphibious life—to dry land. Beneath the pink and green limestones are green-gray shales and dark-brown sandstones—Bright Angel Shale, Tapeats Sandstone—that formed under the fathoms that held the first general abundance of marine life. Tapeats Sea was the sea that compressed the rock that was cut by the river to create the canyon. The Tapeats Sandstone is the earliest rock from the Paleozoic Era, and beneath it the mind is drawn back to the center of things, the center of the canyon, the cutting plane, the Colorado. Flanked by its Bass Limestones, its Hotauta Conglomerates, its Vishnu Schists and Zoroaster Granites, it races in white water through a pre-Cambrian here and now. The river has worked its way down into the stillness of original time.

  Brower braces his legs and grips one of the safety ropes that run along the pontoons. He says, “How good it is to hear a living river! You can almost hear it cutting.”

  Dominy pulls his Lake Powell hat down firmly around his ears. He has heard this sort of thing before. Brower is suggesting that the Colorado is even now making an ever deeper and grander Grand Canyon, and what sacrilege it would be to dam the river and stop that hallowed process. Dominy says, “I think most people agree, Dave, that it wasn’t a river of this magnitude that cut the Grand Canyon.”

  Brower is too interested in the coming rapid to respond. In this corridor of calm, we can hear the rapid ahead. Rapids and waterfalls ordinarily take shape when rivers cut against resistant rock and then come to a kind of rock that gives way more easily. This is not the case in the Grand Canyon, where rapids occur beside the mouths of tributary creeks. Although these little streams may be dry much of the year, they are so steep that when they run they are able to fling considerable debris into the Colorado—sand, gravel, stones, rocks, boulders. The debris forms dams, and water rises upstream. The river is unusually quiet there—a lakelike quiet—and then it flows over the debris, falling suddenly, pounding and crashing through the boulders. These are the rapids of the Grand Canyon, and there are a hundred and sixty-one of them. Some have appeared quite suddenly. In 1966, an extraordinarily heavy rain fell in a small area of the north rim, and a flash flood went down Crystal Creek, dumping hundreds of tons of rock into the river at Mile 99. This instantly created the Crystal Rapids, one of the major drops in the Colorado. In rare instances—such as the rapid we are now approaching—the river has exposed resistant pre-Cambrian rock that contributes something to the precipitousness of the flow of white water. The roar is quite close now. The standing waves look like blocks of cement. Dominy emits a cowboy’s yell. My notes go into a rubber bag that is tied with a string. This is the Bedrock Rapid.

  We went through it with a slow dive and climb and a lot of splattering water. We undulated. The raft assumed the form of the rapid. We got very wet. And now, five minutes later, we are as dry and warm as if we were wearing fresh clothes straight out of a dryer. And we are drinking sandwiches.

  We have a map that is seven inches high and fifty feet long. It is rolled in a scroll and is a meticulously
hand-done contemporary and historical portrait of the Colorado River in the Grand Canyon. River miles are measured from the point, just south of the Utah line, where the Paria River flows into the Colorado—the place geologists regard as the beginning of the Grand Canyon. As the map rolls by, it records who died where. “Peter Hansbrough, one of two men drowned, Mile 24, Tanner Wash Rapids, 1889 … . Bert Loper upset, not seen again, Mile 24, 1949 … . Scout found and buried in talus, Mile 43, 1951 … . Roemer drowned in Mile 89, 1948.” The first known run of the river was in 1869, and the second shortly thereafter—both the expeditions of Major John Wesley Powell—and even by 1946 only about a hundred people had ever been through the canyon by river. With the introduction of neoprene rafts—surplus from the Second World War—the figure expanded. Five hundred a year were going through by the middle nineteen-sixties, and the number is now in the low thousands.

  “As long as people keep on taking out everything that they bring in, they’re not going to hurt the Grand Canyon,” Brower says. “Rule No. 1 is ‘Leave nothing—not even a dam.’”

  Dominy does not hear that. He is busy telling a pretty young gym teacher from Phoenix that he played sixty minutes a game as captain of the ice-hockey team at the University of Wyoming. “I liked the speed. I liked the body contact. I developed shots the defense couldn’t fathom.”

  Dominy is in his sixtieth year and is planning an early retirement, but he looks fifty, and it is not at all difficult to imagine him on a solo dash down the ice, slamming the Denver Maroons into pulp against the boards and breaking free to slap the winning shot into the nets. He once did exactly that. He has the guts he says he has, and I think he is proving it now, here on the Colorado. He may be an athlete, but he can’t swim. He can’t swim one stroke. He couldn’t swim across a goldfish pond. And at this moment it is time for us to put things away and pull ourselves together, because although we are scarcely dry from the Bedrock Rapid, the crescendoing noise we hear is Deubendorff, an officially designated “heavy rapid,” one of the thirteen roughest in the canyon. Brower goes quiet before a rapid, and he is silent now. He says he is not much of a swimmer, either. We all have life vests on, but they feel as if they would be about as effective against these rapids as they would be against bullets. That is not true, though. Once in a great while, these rafts turn over, and when they do the people all end up bobbing in the calmer water at the foot of the rapid like a hatful of spilled corks. Riding a rigid boat, Seymour Deubendorff was claimed by this rapid on the Galloway-Stone expedition, in 1909. This we learn from our map. Looking ahead, we see two steep grooves, a hundred and fifty yards apart, that have been cut into the south wall of the river gorge. They are called Galloway Canyon and Stone Canyon, and the streams in them are not running now, but each has thrown enough debris into the river to make a major rapid, and together they have produced Deubendorff. Directly in front of us, a mile ahead and high against the sky, is a broad and beautiful Redwall mesa. The river disappears around a corner to the left of it. Meanwhile, the big, uncompromising mesa seems to suggest a full and absolute stop, as if we were about to crash into it in flight, for spread below it in the immediate foreground is a prairie of white water.