by John McPhee
At their consoles, turning knobs, flicking switches, the men in the control room continually create the river below the dam. At that moment, they were releasing something like fourteen hundred tons of water every ten seconds—or, in their terminology, one acre-foot.
“We have eight generating units,” Dominy went on. “When we want to make peaking power, we turn them up full and send a wall of water downstream. The rubber rafts operate with licenses, and the guides know the schedule of releases.”
Dominy then took us all the way down—down in another elevator, down concrete and spiral stairways, along everdeeper passageways and down more stairways—until we were under the original bed of the Colorado and at the absolute bottom of the dam, seven hundred and ten feet below the crest. “I don’t want Dave Brower to be able to say he didn’t see everything,” Dominy said—and I could not help admiring him for it, because the milieu he had taken us into could easily be misunderstood. Water was everywhere. Water poured down the spiral staircases. It streamed through the passageways. It fell from the ceilings. It ran from the walls. In some places, sheets of polyethylene had been taped to the concrete. At the bottom, Glen Canyon Dam is three hundred feet thick, but nearly two hundred miles of reservoir was pressing against it, and it had cracked. The Colorado was pouring through. “We may have to get some Dutch boys in here with their thumbs,” Dominy said. “The dam is still curing. It hasn’t matured yet. So we aren’t doing much of anything about this now. We will soon. We have a re-injectionable grouting system; it’s an idea I picked up in Switzerland. The crack water is declining anyway. The crack may be sealing itself. It’s not serious. You just cannot completely stop the Colorado River.”
Brower seemed unable to decide whether he should be shocked by the crack in the dam or impressed by the unvanquishable river. Stalactites had formed on the ceilings of the passageways. I reached up and broke one off. “Don’t let Dave Brower see you do that,” Dominy said. “You’re interrupting nature.” Obviously in love with his dam, he scrambled all over it. “When a dam is being built, the concrete is placed, not poured,” he said, rubbing a hand over a smooth interior wall. “The concrete is barely wet—too dry for pouring. It’s put in place with vibrators. We regularly take core samples and send them to Denver for testing—to see if the contractor is meeting specifications. Dave, just to cement our friendship, I’m going to have a pair of bookends made from some of those old core samples for you. Nothing could support a set of Sierra Club books better than a couple of pieces of Glen Canyon Dam. Would you accept that?”
“I’ll accept the bookends,” Brower said. “Thank you very much, Floyd.”
Under the generator room, Dominy led us onto a steel platform inches away from a huge, shining steel generator shaft. The shaft was spinning at who knows how many revolutions per minute, yet the platform around it was scarcely trembling. “Balance,” he said proudly. “The secret is balance. In Russia, these platforms vibrate so much they practically knock you down. I know. I’ve stood on them there.” He pointed out sections of giant pipe—penstocks—that contained the Colorado in its passage from reservoir to riverbed. The mighty rapids of the Grand Canyon were now inside that pipe.
Dominy opened a door that led to a strange exterior space—a wide, flat area at the base of the main wall of the dam. Six hundred feet of acutely angled concrete—white and dazzling in the sun—soared up from this level, where Dominy, for purely aesthetic reasons, had somehow imported tons of soil and had planted a smooth and elegant lawn. He called it “the football field,” and it was more than large enough to hold one. When visitors peer over the crest of the dam, they look far down its white face to this incongruous lawn, unique in the cosmetics of high dams. From the lawn itself, the thought of the great wall of water on the other side of the dam is unnerving, but no more so than the ten acres of concave concrete up which the eye is led to fragments of red cliff where power-line towers claw at offplumb angles into a blue swatch of sky. “You don’t really appreciate this dam unless you’re down on the transformer deck looking up,” Dominy said. “Looking down is no way to look at life. You’ve got to be looking up. Suicides come down that wall sometimes. They don’t realize how unvertical it is. When they’re found at the bottom, there isn’t a God-damned bit of flesh left on them.”
Brower said, “My advice to suicides is ‘If you’ve got to go, take Glen Canyon Dam with you.’”
“Read Desert Solitaire,” Dominy said. “Page 165. The guy who wrote it is way ahead of you.”
I eventually bought a copy of Desert Solitaire, and found that on page 165 its angry author—Edward Abbeyimagines “the loveliest explosion ever seen by man, reducing the great dam to a heap of rubble in the path of the river. The splendid new rapids thus created we will name Floyd E. Dominy Falls … .”
On an overlook not far from the dam, Lake Powell was dedicated by men, white and red, who addressed much of what they said to an unseen enemy, assuming that he was a thousand miles away; he happened to be standing right there. “The Sierra Club to the contrary, I like dams,” said Governor John Williams of Arizona. When the dam was begun, Williams was a radio announcer, and it was he who broadcast the play-by-play of the original blasting ceremony.
“The Sierra Club notwithstanding, this is a beautiful lake,” said Governor Calvin Rampton of Utah, sweeping an arm toward the reservoir. Red cliff walls met the dark-blue water, big buttes stood high in the background, and above it all—immense and alone in the distance—was sacred Navajo Mountain. Far below the overlook, boats wove patterns on the water. Skiers cut crescent wakes. Bunting hung from the speakers’ platform in symbolic blue and brown—blue for Lake Powell and brown for the old Colorado.
“A conservationist is one who is content to stand still forever,” said Raymond Nakai, of Window Rock, the head of the Navajo Tribal Council. “Major Powell would have approved of this lake. May it ever be brimmin’ full.” Brower remained silent, but was having difficulty doing so. It was not hard to guess his thoughts. Major Powell—explorer, surveyor, geographer—was not alive to say how he might feel, in English or Navajo.
Then Dominy spoke. “Dave Brower is here today,” he said, and the entire ceremony almost fell into the reservoir. “Brower is not here in an official capacity but as my guest,” Dominy went on. “We’re going to spend several days on Lake Powell, so I can convert him a little. Then we’re going down the river, so he can convert me.”
Seven years earlier, we could have flown north through Glen Canyon at an altitude of four hundred feet over the riverbed, and that, in a way, is what we did now. We got into a nineteen-foot gray boat—its hull molded for speed, a Buick V-6 engine packed away somewhere, a two-way radio, and the black-lettered words United States Government across the stern—and up the lake we went at twenty knots, for three days spraying arches of clear water toward red-and-black-streaked tapestry walls, pinnacle spires, and monument buttes. The Utah canyonland had been severed halfway up by a blue geometric plane, creating a waterscape of interrupted shapes, spectacularly unnatural, spectacularly beautiful. If we stopped for lunch, nudging up to a cool shadowing wall, we were in fact four hundred feet up the sheer side of what had been an immense cliff above the river, and was still an immense cliff—Wingate, Kayenta, Navajo Sandstones—above the lake. The boat sped on among hemispherical islands that had once been mountainous domes. It wheeled into Caprian bays. Arched overhangs formed grottoes in what had once been the lofty ceilings of natural amphitheatres.
Above the sound of the engine, Dominy shouted, “Who but Dominy would build a lake in the desert? Look at the country around here! No vegetation. No precipitation. It’s just not the setting for a lake under any natural circumstances. Yet it is the most beautiful lake in the world.”
“A thousand people a year times ten thousand years times ten thousand years will never see what was there,” Brower said. He pointed straight down into the water. Then he opened a can of beer. The beer was in a big container full of ice. The ice had
been made from water of the reservoir—reclaimed pellets of the Colorado. The container held dozens of cans of beer and soft drinks, enough for ten men anywhere else, but even on the lake the air was as dry as paper and the sun was a desert sun, and we held those cans in the air like plasma, one after another, all day long. Brower, the aesthetician, likes beer cans. Not for him are the simple biases of his throng. He really appreciates the cans themselves—their cylindrical simplicity, their beautifully crafted lithography. Brower’s love of beauty is so powerful it leaps. It sometimes lands in unexpected places. Looking out over the lake at canyon walls flashing in reflected light, he slowly turned his Budweiser in his hand, sipped a little, and then said, “Lake Powell does not exist. I have never seen anything like it before. It’s an incredibly beautiful reservoir. It must be the most beautiful reservoir in the world. I just wish you could hold the water level where it is now, Floyd.”
Dominy smiled. The lake would become more and more beautiful as it continued to fill, he said. It would go up another hundred and twenty feet, revising vistas as it rose, and the last thirty-five feet would be the most dramatic, because the water at that elevation would reach far into the canyonland.
“You can’t duplicate this experience—this lake—anywhere else,” Brower said. “But neither can you enjoy the original experience. That’s the trouble. I camped under here once. It was a beautiful campsite. The river was one unending campsite. The ibis, the egrets, the wild blue herons are gone. Their habitat is gone—the mudbanks along the river.”
“We’ve covered up a lot of nice stuff, there’s no question about that, but you’ve got to admit that as far as views are concerned we’ve opened up a lot. Look. You can see mountains.”
“The Henry Mountains,” Brower said. “They were the last mountain range discovered in the lower forty-eight.”
For my part, I kept waiting to see the lake. “Lake,” as I sensed the word, called to mind a fairly compact waterfilled depression in high terrain, with bends and bays perhaps obscuring some parts from others, but with a discernible center, a middle, a place that was farther from shore than any other, and from which a sweeping view of shoreline could be had in all directions. This was a provincialism, based on a Saranac, a Sunapee, a Mooselookmeguntic, and it had left me unprepared for Lake Powell, a map of which looks like a diagram of the human nervous system. The deep spinal channel of Glen Canyon, which was once the path of the Colorado, is now the least interesting part of Lake Powell. The long, narrow bays that reach far into hundreds of tributary canyons are the absorbing places to enter—the boat rounding bends between ever-narrowing walls among reflections of extraordinary beauty on wind-slickened rock. These were the places—these unimaginably deep clefts in the sandstone—that most stirred and most saddened Brower, who remembered wading through clear pools under cottonwood trees four hundred feet below the arbitrary level on which we floated.
In Face Canyon, the boat idled slowly and moved almost silently through still water along bending corridors of rock. “There used to be pools and trees in this little canyon,” Brower said. “Cottonwoods, willows.”
“Poison ivy, jimsonweed,” Dominy said.
“Little parks with grasses. Water always running,” Brower went on.
The rock, dark with the oxidation known as desert varnish, appeared to be a rich blue. Desert varnish somehow picks up color from the sky. The notes of a canyon wren descended the pentatonic scale. “That’s the music here—the best there is,” Brower said. “There used to be paper shells of surface mud on the floor of this canyon, cracking, peeling. Damn it, that was handsome.”
“On balance, I can’t lament what’s been covered up,” Dominy said.
In Cascade Canyon, on a ledge that had once been hundreds of feet high, grew a colony of mosses and ferns. “Now there’s a hanging garden that’s going to get water beyond its wildest dreams,” Dominy said. “But unfortunately, like welfare, the water is going to drown it.”
In Brower’s memory, the most beautiful place in all the region of Glen Canyon was a cavernous space, under vaulting rock walls, that had been named the Cathedral in the Desert. The great walls arched toward one another, forming high and almost symmetrical overlapping parabolas. They enclosed about an acre of ground, in which had grown willows, grasses, columbine, and maidenhair fern. The center of this scene was a slim waterfall, no more than a foot in diameter, that fell sixty feet into a deep and foaming pool. From it a clear stream had flowed through the nave and out to the Colorado. The government boat now entered the Cathedral. Dominy switched off the engine. Water was half way to the ceiling, and the waterfall was about ten feet high. It was cool in there, and truly beautiful—the vaulted ceiling, the sound of the falling water, the dancing and prismatic reflections, the echo of whispers. It had been beautiful in there before the reservoir came, and it would continue to be so, in successive stages, until water closed the room altogether.
A cabin cruiser came into the Cathedral. In it were a middle-aged couple and an older man. They asked what branch of the government we represented.
“I’m the Commissioner of Reclamation,” Dominy said.
“Holy mackerel!” said the younger man.
“This lake is beautiful,” the woman said.
“Thank you,” Dominy said.
Back in the sunlight, Dominy worried about Brower’s lobstering skin. “It would be a terrible thing to get this wildlife enthusiast out here and burn him up,” he said.
“I’m red-faced not from the sun but from anger,” Brower said.
“Red-faced with anger at my destructive tactics,” said Dominy. “See that buoy? That’s the Colorado River under water. The buoy is exactly over the original riverbed. Fabulous. Fabulous.” The buoy floated on fifty or sixty fathoms of water.
The boat’s radio crackled with heavy static as Park Service rangers made contact with one another. One ranger commented on “the unusual companionship” that was loose on the lake.
Dominy gave his cowboy yell, and said, “Hell, if those rangers could see us now! Dave, in spite of your bad judgment, you’re a hell of a nice guy.”
“I have nothing but bias,” Brower said.
Skiers whipped by, going south. “Some of these bastards come up here and ski for fifty miles,” Dominy said.
We cruised into the vicinity of a large natural rock span called Gregory Arch, which was now thirty-five feet beneath us. “If I could swim, I would want to go down and lay a wreath on Gregory Arch, because we’ve covered it up,” Dominy said. “Dave, now that we’ve cemented our friendship, let me ask you: Why didn’t you make a fuss about Gregory Arch?”
“We didn’t know about it.”
“No one else did, either. No one could have helped you.”
“The public’s evaluation of a place they may not have ever seen is what will save a place—it is what saved Grand Canyon. It’s what might have saved Glen Canyon.”
“Saved? For every person who could ever have gotten in here when this place was in its natural state, God damn it, there will be hundreds of thousands who will get in here, into all these side canyons—on the water highways. It’s your few against the hundreds. Kids can see this place. Eighty-year-olds. People who can’t walk.”
“Ninety-nine per cent of the population can walk.”
“Before I built this lake, not six hundred people had been in here in recorded history.”
“By building this lake,” Brower said, “mankind has preëmpted a hundred and eighty-six thousand acres of habitat for its own exclusive use.”
“I’m a fair man,” said Dominy. “Just to show you how fair I am, I’ll say this: When we destroyed Glen Canyon, we destroyed something really beautiful. But we brought in something else.”
“Water.”
“You can lament all you want what we covered up. What we got is beautiful, and it’s accessible.”
The boat, in Labyrinth Canyon, drifted in a film of tamarisk needles, driftwood, bits of Styrofoam, bobbing beer c
ans, plastic lids. “We conservationists call this Dominy soup,” Brower said.
On ledges above the soup were dozens of potholes, some of them very large, and Brower silently drew circles in the air to indicate how, over centuries, these enormous holes in the sandstone had been made by small rocks in swirling water. He and Dominy climbed out of the boat onto a ledge and lowered themselves into a pothole that was eleven feet in diameter and fifteen feet deep. There they began to argue about evaporation—through which, inevitably, a percentage of water in storage will be lost. Six hundred thousand acre-feet of water would annually evaporate from the surface of Lake Powell when full, Brower asserted, and Dominy did not like being baited on his own ground. Something spiralled in his mind like the stones that had cut the hole he was standing in, and eventually he burst out, “Don’t give me that evaporation crap! If we didn’t store the water, it wouldn’t be here.”
Brower danced away, came back, and jabbed lightly. “The water is stored only to produce kilowatts anyway,” he said.
“We don’t release one God-damned acre-foot of water from Lake Powell just to produce kilowatts,” Dominy said.
Brower nodded solemnly in disbelief. He moved in again, shifting his grounds of complaint, and mentioned the huge aeolian sand deposits—millions of tons of fine sand clinging to hollows in the cliffsides—that regularly plop into Lake Powell as the rising water gets to them. Conservationists had suggested that Lake Powell was all but filling with these sands and that the very shores of the lake were crumbling into the water.
“The stuff melts on contact!” Dominy shouted. “You know you’re exaggerating! Stretch the truth, that’s all you conservationists do. When water hits it, that stuff melts like powder. The unstable material goes, but the walls of Jericho won’t come down. The cliffs aren’t coming down.” He climbed out of the pothole.
Brower pointed to strange striations in jagged shapes on the opposite canyon wall. “That is hieroglyphic, written centuries ago by God Himself,” he said.