by Timothy Egan
“Wilderness is waste,” said Pinchot, a wrestling companion of Roosevelt s. The same thing was said about the undammed Colorado River. And the same thing is said, today, about the roadless heart of central Idaho. Muir the mystic had gone much further than any of the founders of modern conservation; humans needed the wild, yes, but as something to keep the soul alive—especially amidst the clutter of twentieth-century America. “Thousands of nerve-shaken, over-civilized people are beginning to find out that going to the mountains is going home,” said Muir, “that wilderness is a necessity, and that mountain parks and reservations are useful not only as fountains of timber and irrigating rivers, but as fountains of life.”
He urged people to look beyond the postcard scenery of the West, to feel the brunt of a “big, bossy well-charged thunderstorm” in Montana, to experience a snow dump in the Wasatch range of Utah, to linger at a mountain-top in Yellowstone just beyond sunset “to get one more baptism of light.”
The president and the immigrant emerged after four days in Yosemite, sunburned and smelling of smoke. Not long after the camping trip, Roosevelt issued an executive order adding more than a million acres to the fledgling national park and forest reserve system. It took a self-taught naturalist from Scotland and a blueblood from Long Island to save much of the West from Westerners. Muir’s comment about the needs of nerve-jangled urbanites has proven prophetic; the number of people going to Yosemite has risen to a point where one year’s worth of visitors equals the population of Los Angeles.
The California that gave such a charge to Muir had started to fade in the last decade of his life. During the infatuation stage of his love affair, he had written that “the whole state of California, from the Siskiyous to San Diego, is one block of beauty.” But by the time Muir was in his seventies, the state had commenced on a binge of transformation, looting It’s national wealth, and he had stopped speaking in exclamations. Hetch Hetchy, in the temple of Yosemite, was buried by a dam to provide water and power to San Francisco. The entire Central Valley, nearly five hundred miles long and fifty miles wide, was made into an agricultural factory, flooded with subsidized water drained from the Sierra, filled with chemicals to produce ever more uniform fruits and vegetables, drained of anything wild. What had been “level and flowery, like a lake of pure sunshine,” was now “ploughed and pasteurized out of existence, gone forever.” To the north, the country of redwoods and Douglas fir forests, “once divinely beautiful, are desolate and repulsive, like a face ravaged by disease,” he wrote.
California’s transition from garden to garrison was somewhat premeditated. Many people knew they were trashing the place. Nowhere on earth was blessed with a greater wealth of natural resources than the Golden State, wrote the states leading educator, Edward Hyatt. “And nowhere is it being squandered with such a careless hand.” His book on conservation was widely read in the schools in 1913. Not that it had much effect. That same year, water that Los Angeles had taken by stealth and fraud from the Owens Valley to the north, came pouring into the San Fernando Valley. Los Angeles, with 300,000 people, did not really need the water. But six private investors who had purchased sixteen thousand acres in the arid ranch land of the San Fernando Valley, just over the Hollywood Hills, saw it as their own motherlode. With water, the dusty valley would accept the spill of a half-million new people, and anyone who owned the land could become unspeakably rich. Among those who had a big piece of the valley were the publisher of the Los Angeles Times, General Harrison Gray Otis, and his son-in-law, Harry Chandler. Young Chandler, suffering from a lung ailment, had come to Los Angeles for his health.
The artery that remade California took six years to build. On November 5, 1913, men in suits and women in full dresses lined the last sluiceway of the project, just above the empty, treeless basin of the San Fernando Valley. There were speeches under the hot sun, a heralding of the great metropolis that would grow just below. At last it came time for the water czar, William Mulholland, to turn the valves, opening the faucet that would remake a national forest into a skeletal grove in the eastern Sierra, dry up peach and apple orchards, and allow the biggest city of the West to feel free of the restraints of nature. “There it is!” said Mulholland. “Take it!”
John Muir died on Christmas Eve, 1914; he had spent his last days walking in the Mojave Desert. California eventually created the worlds most elaborate hydraulic system, a total of 465 dams in all, plugging every river of the Sierra but one. Most of the water drained from the Sierra, about 85 percent, goes to agriculture, and feed for livestock is the greatest single crop by acreage. Large parts of the Golden State were replumbed for cattle—in tune with the cow-centric West.
The year of Muir’s death, Model T automobiles were being produced at the rate of one every three minutes, and nowhere were they more popular than in California. By 1940, the first freeway was built in Southern California. The region had developed the worlds largest electric transit system, trolleys linking over fifty communities in four counties. But from the time constructions crews started pouring concrete for a culture on wheels, the trolley days were numbered. The Big Red cars of the Pacific Electric were dumped in the 1950s, the transit system torn down. Smog settled in, a signature sight. Greater Los Angeles grew into the biggest city in the world, in physical size. Later, it was surpassed by another irrigation creation, Phoenix. By the end of the century, the average Californian was spending more than 450 hours a year inside a car, and 40 percent of the land of Los Angeles was given over to the storage and movement of automobiles. The California Dream—a dream of all the West, at that, a desire to live close to nature— was dying, said most Californians in a statewide poll. “We have lost our sense of who we are as Californians,” the states preeminent historian, Kevin Starr, would declare in the 1990s. “Its almost scary.”
Even the architects turned on their creations. One of the chief financiers of mindless sprawl, the Bank of America, issued a report that said California was killing itself with cancerous growth. Sprawl had “shifted from an engine of California growth to a force that now threatens to inhibit growth and degrade quality of life,” the bank reported. Mark Twain said people had to leave the state in order to die; now they were leaving in order to live. One of those who fled in the 1990s, heading to Oregon for cleaner air and open space, was Otis Chandler, the former publisher of the Los Angeles Times. He bought a ranch in the juniper tree country east of the Cascade Mountains, a place that looked not unlike the Owens Valley before his grandparents in Los Angeles helped to turn it into a land choked by dust clouds.
WE FLOAT until we can go no further. The American River Canyon narrows ever-deeper in the Sierra foothills, but the water pools up, and we bump into cables, concrete, wires, and warning signs. We are left at the edge of a deep gouge in the bedrock. Here, just outside the town of Auburn, the political powers of the Sacramento Valley have deigned to build what would be the last big dam of the West. The promise of the dam, say It’s promoters, is that it would allow nearly a million people down in the Sacramento Valley to be out of harm’s way for good. A guarantee, in other words. The floods that buried so much of the valley in the past would be no more. And just upriver, farmland rich with silt would be carved into new gated communities where random encounters would be outlawed. Slackwater from the dam would bury every stretch of the river we had just floated, and much more: the Indian stone milling sites, the tropical bird nesting areas, the deep pools and frothy rapids, and all the Gold Rush locales— forty miles of canyon in the cradle of California history. Most of it would be under more than a hundred feet of water. A small price? Perhaps. But people without history, as the Lakota saying goes, are like wind on the buffalo grass.
They started blasting away river rock down to the core, pouring cement, and rechanneling some of the water in the 1970s, as the big dam got underway. But then came a sudden squawk from the California that the Portolá Expedition met in 1769. Nature bats last! An earthquake measuring 5.7 on the Richter scale rumbled throu
gh the Sierra foothills; It’s epicenter was forty-five miles from the dam site. A previously unknown fault ran just beneath the American River Canyon. Building a 508-foot dam that would hold more than 50 billion gallons of water on a cracked chip of earth might, indeed, save residents of the Sacramento Valley from winter flooding; it might also kill them in an earthquake. Construction was halted, after $225 million had been spent. It has never been resumed. But the project is alive again, thanks to Western congressmen in control of natural resource decisions, people who see only one view of the land—the Unfinished West.
DOWN IN the valley, out of the river canyon and into the brain-swelling heat, I walk along the top of a levee that keeps the river from spilling onto Sacramento. In the middle of the day, temperatures are well above 100 degrees. I am with Butch Hodgkins and some of his fellow engineers at the flood control authority. Butch has a graying crew cut, leathery face; he looks like a Californian bookmarked by the early Beach Boys period, now stuck in middle age. Walking atop the earthen barriers between the river and city, Butch and his boys press their case. All this part of California wants, he says, is one last dam. One last time to hold nature at bay, one last time to let new houses rise in a valley prone to epic floods, one last chance for California to start anew. His tone is desperate. In the state Wallace Stegner called home at the time of his death, how did some people become so afraid of the native ground of hope?
I thought of something Alvin Josephy, the chronicler of the Nez Perce, had said back in Jackson Hole, when we had gathered to consider what the West of the next hundred years would be like. In the 1950s, Josephy had gone up in a plane with Bureau of Reclamation officials. They swooped low over spectacular canyons, wild and untouched. Caught up in the mission of the bureaucrats who remade the West, Josephy shouted above the propeller noise and pointed down: “Here’s another great place to build a dam!”
It has been an awful decade for California, perhaps It’s worst. Ralph Waldo Emerson’s line—“California has better days and more of them than any other country”—seems to apply to the other extreme as well. But every Westerner should look at California’s story; as it turns out, it is their own history and the fount of most of their follies, a mirror across the Sierra. Radically altering the land, living on phony myths, ignoring the best features or trying to kill them. And it is Western glory in It’s own fine way: a new society, with a tolerance of fledgling souls, embracing the possible. What is different is that California has done it all faster, with more excess and greater consequence than any other Western state. To believe that California is dead, then, is to believe that the West is dead, or soon will be. I cannot.
When Josephy told that story about looking for dams in Cod’s country, everyone in the audience laughed. In one generations time, a noble mission has been transformed into utter absurdity. And so now across the West, the corrective is underway, the compass pointing back to a land closer to the authentic. Water is being diverted from forced farms in the arid lands and returned to nature. Indian tribes, erased from much of the map a hundred years ago, have not just survived, they dream anew, and not the dreams of a ghost dance. A new Western ethic may be taking hold—the idea of letting this land be itself. We could not agree on much that November night in the Tetons, except this: subduing the wild is the one sure way to kill the West. Seattle clings to desperation salmon runs, Reno celebrates the horses that run loose just outside the city limits, and Albuquerque looks to three-dimensional petroglyphs for life beyond the banal. Why? Heritage.
IN THE American River, I could only see just ahead of me, never around the next bend. The water from the Sierra that we rode through a slice of old California flows until there is no more land, until the West comes to an end. At the edge of the continent, a small redwood forest named for Muir lives nonetheless, hugging the Pacific fifteen minutes from five million people. To the south, some of the ground that rattled the Portolá Expedition is a five-acre park, Pershing Square, in the oldest part of Los Angeles. Office buildings are stuffed with lawyers within sight of neighborhoods where not a word of English is spoken. Running through the square, in It’s latest upgrade, is a zigzagging earthquake crack; fake, of course. Custom and culture: Los Angeles, true to the West, is not afraid to laugh at itself. And those trees of heaven, brought to this world by the Chinese, grow in cracks of the cement in parts of California. They tolerate smog. Yes, the West ends here. But the frontier begins.
Acknowledgments
East to West, this book had many helpers. In Italy, for perspective, company and Chianti, I am indebted to the Sunday afternoon gang at Bryan and Marinas. In New York, transplanted Westerner Katie Roberts pushed and inspired, for more than five years; there is no better trail guide at the New York Times. Joseph Lelyveld gave the gift of time. Carol Mann did her usual matchmaking job. Sonny Mehta, Ash Green, Melvin Rosenthal, and others at Knopf are owed much gratitude for the alchemy of putting ideas between covers. In New Mexico, Frank Zoretich and Katherine Robbins were invaluable. Jim Wilson put up with all my side tours in Nevada, California, and Utah; I don’t think he minded. In Seattle, Joni Baiter, Sophie Egan, Matt Rudolf, and Skip Berger reminded me of the important stuff. In Wyoming, the Snake River Institute brought together some of the best minds of the West, and gave me a starting point. In Oregon, Fishtrap did the same thing. In Idaho, my brothers Kelly and Danny kept me in the river long enough to get it.
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