In the ordinary course of events, the Atchafalaya would have kept widening and deepening until, eventually, it captured the lower Mississippi entirely. This would have left New Orleans low and dry and rendered the industries that had grown up along the river—the refineries, the grain elevators, the container ports, and the petrochemical plants—essentially worthless. Such an eventuality was thought to be unthinkable, and so, in the 1950s, the Corps stepped in. It dammed the former meander, known as Old River, and dug two huge gated channels. The river’s choice would now be dictated for it, its flow maintained as if it were forever the Eisenhower era.
Long before I caught sight of the Auxiliary Structure, I’d read about it in John McPhee’s classic piece “Atchafalaya,” a morality tale of a darkly comic cast. In McPhee’s telling, the Corps throws its heart—and millions of tons of concrete—into forestalling the Mississippi’s avulsion and believes it has succeeded.
“The Corps of Engineers can make the Mississippi River go anywhere the Corps directs it to go,” one general avers, after a narrow brush with disaster, in 1973, when control of Old River Control was nearly lost. McPhee writes admiringly of the Corps’ grit, determination, even genius, but running through the essay is a strong countercurrent. Is the Corps just kidding itself? Are we all?
“Atchafalaya,” McPhee writes. “The word will now come to mind more or less in echo of any struggle against natural forces—heroic or venal, rash or well advised—when human beings conscript themselves to fight against the earth, to take what is not given, to rout the destroying enemy, to surround the base of Mt. Olympus demanding and expecting the surrender of the gods.”
I showed up at Old River Control on a lovely Sunday afternoon in late winter. The Corps’ office, tucked behind a formidable iron fence, looked empty. But when I pressed a buzzer by the driveway, the intercom crackled to life and a resource specialist named Joe Harvey came to the gate. He was dressed as if he was about to go fishing, with his pants tucked into green rubber boots. Harvey led me out to a gazebo overlooking the Auxiliary Structure and its outflow channel.
As the water in the channel swirled by, we chatted about fluvial history. “In 1900, about ten percent of the Red River and the Mississippi put together was going down the Atchafalaya,” Harvey explained. “In 1930, you had about twenty percent. By 1950, you had thirty percent.” This was the trend line that had prompted the Corps to step in.
“We still do the seventy–thirty division,” Harvey said. Every day, engineers measure the flow on the Red and the Mississippi and adjust the gates accordingly. On this particular Sunday, they were allowing through some forty thousand cubic feet per second.
“From here down to the mouth of the Mississippi is about three hundred and fifteen miles,” he went on. “And from here to the mouth of Atchafalaya is about a hundred and forty miles. So it’s about half the distance. So the river wants to go this way. But if that happens…” His voice trailed off.
Two people were fishing the outflow channel from a little motorboat, and I asked Harvey what they might catch. “Oh, we have everything that’s in the Mississippi,” he said. “Of course, now there’s a whole lot of carp, and that’s not so good.
“They’re still trying to keep them out of the Great Lakes,” he added. “Here they’re just everywhere.”
McPhee included “Atchafalaya” in his book The Control of Nature, published in 1989. Since then, a lot has happened to complicate the meaning of “control,” not to mention “nature.” The Louisiana delta is now often referred to by hydrologists as a “coupled human and natural system,” or, for short, a CHANS. It’s an ugly term—another nomenclatural hairball—but there’s no simple way to talk about the tangle we’ve created. A Mississippi that’s been harnessed, straightened, regularized, and shackled can still exert a godlike force; it’s no longer exactly a river, though. It’s hard to say who occupies Mount Olympus these days, if anyone.
1
A couple of weeks before the Christmas of 1849, William Lewis Manly climbed to a mountain pass and beheld “the most wonderful picture of grand desolation one could ever see.” Manly was standing in what’s now southwestern Nevada, not far from Mount Stirling. He imagined his parents, back home in Michigan, with a “bounteous stock of bread and beans” gracing the table, and contrasted this with his own situation—“an empty stomach and a dry and parched throat.” The sun was setting as he descended, and his thoughts grew ever gloomier. He began to weep, for, as he would later recall, “I believed I could see the future and the results were bitter to contemplate.”
Manly found himself wandering the desert owing to a series of unfortunate decisions. Three months earlier, he and some five hundred other argonauts had assembled in Salt Lake City, planning to journey together to gold country, in northern California. They’d arrived in Salt Lake too late in the season to take the most direct route, over the Sierras, and so, to avoid getting snowed in, they’d jogged to the south, along a pack trail, toward Los Angeles. A few weeks into the trip, they’d encountered another contingent of forty-niners, led by a fast-talking New Yorker named Orson K. Smith. Smith carried a crude map, which, he claimed, showed a different, faster path west. Most of the members of Manly’s group decided to follow Smith, only to reverse course a few days later, when they found their way barred by a canyon so deep it couldn’t be crossed by wagon. (Smith himself turned around shortly thereafter.) But Manly and a few dozen others forged ahead, along the illusive shortcut.
The canyon, they soon discovered, was the least of their problems. A detour around it led into some of the most inhospitable terrain on the continent—a rock-strewn waste that probably no white man had ever straggled through before. (A century later, much of the area would be given over to nuclear testing.) Water was scarce and what could be found often was too salty to drink. There was little forage for the oxen, who grew sluggish and emaciated. When one was killed for food, its bones, Manly noted, were filled not with marrow but with a bloody liquid “resembling corruption.”
Manly was traveling with a friend who had a wife and three small children. He served as a sort of scout, hiking ahead of the wagons to reconnoiter. The reports he delivered back to camp were so disheartening that after a while his friend asked him please to shut up; his wife couldn’t take it anymore. As the party approached Death Valley—at that point an uncharted expanse of desert—the mood grew particularly grim. Sitting around the campfire a few nights after Manly had broken down in tears, one man described the region as the “Creator’s dumping place,” where he “left the worthless dregs after making a world.” Another said it must be “the very place where Lot’s wife was turned into a pillar of salt,” only the pillar had been “broken up and spread around the country.”
Just at the edge of Death Valley, spirits briefly lifted. On a stony ledge, the party chanced upon a cavern that contained a pool of warm, clear water. A few of the men plunged in; one recorded in his diary that he had “enjoyed an extremely refreshing bath.” Manly peered into the water and noticed something strange. The pool was surrounded by rock and sand. It was miles from any other water body. Yet it was dancing with fish. Decades later he would remember these tiny “minnows,” each “not much more than an inch long.”
* * *
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The cavern the forty-niners chanced upon is now known as Devils Hole and the “minnows” as Devils Hole pupfish, or, scientifically speaking, Cyprinodon diabolis. Devils Hole pupfish are, as Manly described them, about an inch long. They are sapphire blue, with intense black eyes and heads that are large for their body size. They’re most easily distinguished by an absence; they’re missing the pelvic fins that other pupfish possess.
How Devils Hole got its pupfish is, as one ecologist has put it, a “beautiful enigma.” The cavern is a geological oddity—a portal to a vast, maze-like aquifer that runs far beneath the ground and holds water left over from the Pleistocene. It seems un
likely that the fish’s ancestors could have traveled through the aquifer; the best guess of ichthyologists is that they were washed into Devils Hole at a time when the whole area was wetter. The pool, which is about sixty feet long and eight feet wide, constitutes Cyprinodon diabolis’s entire habitat. This, it’s believed, is the smallest range of any vertebrate.
I first learned about Devils Hole thanks to a crime that took place there. On a warm evening in the spring of 2016, three men, all apparently drunk, scaled the chain-link fence that surrounds the cavern. One shot out a security camera, doffed his clothes, went for a dip, and left his underwear floating in the pool. Another vomited. The following day, a single pupfish was found dead, and a necropsy was performed on it. This led to felony charges. The police eventually released surveillance footage, which I watched and watched again. There were jerky shots of the men driving up to the fence in an ATV. Then, from an underwater camera, there were fuzzy shots of two feet walking along a ledge of rock, kicking up bubbles.
Everything about the crime—the piscine necropsy, the county jail’s worth of security, the little fish marooned in the middle of the Mojave—intrigued me. I started reading around and happened upon Manly’s memoir, Death Valley in ’49. I learned that desert fish are a rich and diverse group. Every year, the Desert Fishes Council holds a meeting somewhere in northern Mexico or the western United States; typically, the program for the meeting runs to forty pages. Pupfish are so named because males, wrangling over territory, look a bit like puppies tussling. In the Death Valley area alone, there were at one time eleven species and subspecies of pupfish. One is now extinct, another is believed to be extinct, and the rest are all threatened. The Devils Hole pupfish may well be the rarest fish in the world. In an effort to preserve it, a kind of fishy Westworld has been constructed—an exact replica of the actual pool, down to the ledge where the skinny-dipper’s feet were caught on tape. Meanwhile, a plume of radioactive water is creeping its way toward the cavern from the Nevada Test Site. The more I read, the more I thought, I really ought to visit Devils Hole.
* * *
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Pupfish counts are conducted four times a year at Devils Hole. The counts are made by a team of biologists from the National Park Service, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, and the Nevada Department of Wildlife—agencies that cooperate (and sometimes squabble) over the fish’s future. It took me a while to arrange a trip; by then it was time for the summer census and about 105° Fahrenheit.
I met up with the team in the town nearest the cavern—Pahrump, Nevada. Pahrump has one main road, which is lined with fireworks shops, big-box stores, and casinos. From there it’s a forty-five-minute drive to Devils Hole, through a mix of desert scrub and emptiness.
In Manly’s day, the cavern would have been hard to spot until you practically toppled into it. Today, it’s impossible to miss owing to the ten-foot-tall fence, which is topped with barbed wire. One of the biologists had a key that unlocked a gate. This led to a steep, slippery path. Despite the ferocious sun, the bottom of the cavern was in shadow. Even in midsummer, the pool receives only a few hours of direct sunlight each day.
Some of the biologists were lugging pieces of metal scaffolding, which they assembled into a catwalk. Others were toting scuba tanks. Overseeing the whole operation was a Park Service ecologist named Kevin Wilson. Wilson has spent most of his adult life working with Cyprinodon diabolis and is regarded as sort of the dean of Devils Hole. (Though Devils Hole is not in Death Valley—it’s across the Funeral Mountains, in the Amargosa Valley—for administrative purposes, it’s considered part of Death Valley National Park.) Just before I arrived, Wilson had been featured in an article in the High Country News about the aftermath of the break-in. Thanks in good measure to his efforts, the skinny-dipper had ended up in prison. (The vomiter was sentenced to probation.) The reporter had made Wilson out to be a hero—a dogged desert Columbo—but, in the process, she had described him as potbellied and stern. Wilson was still brooding over the description. At one point he turned to the side so I could get a profile view of his stomach.
“Is this a potbelly?” he asked. I suggested it might better be described as a “paunch.” Normally Wilson would have been among those preparing to dive, but he’d recently failed some kind of fitness test. This became the subject of more joking.
When all the gear had been transported and assembled, another Park Service biologist, Jeff Goldstein, delivered a safety lecture. Anyone who was injured would have to be helicoptered out, and it could take forty-five minutes or more for a chopper to arrive. “So be careful,” he said. Then he took a poll: How many pupfish would turn up?
“I’m thinking a hundred and forty-eight,” Wilson guessed. Ambre Chaudoin, also with the Park Service, offered one hundred and forty. Olin Feuerbacher and Jenny Gumm, from Fish and Wildlife, offered, respectively, one hundred and sixty and one hundred and seventy-seven. Brandon Senger, with the state of Nevada, went with one fifty-five. Chaudoin and Feuerbacher, I learned, were married. Feuerbacher told me that he had popped the question at Devils Hole. Wilson made a barfing gesture.
A view of Devils Hole looking from the water up
Much like a municipal swimming pool, the pool at Devils Hole has a shallow end and a deep end. The pool’s deep end is very deep indeed. According to the Park Service, it descends “over five hundred feet.” How much over is a matter of conjecture, since no one has ever touched bottom and lived to tell about it. In 1965, two young divers went exploring and never resurfaced. Their bodies are assumed still to be down there, somewhere. At the shallow end is a sloping ledge of limestone, known as “the shelf,” which sits about a foot below the surface of the water. It’s on the shelf that the fish tend to spawn and also where they find the most food.
Goldstein and Senger, wearing masks, oxygen tanks, shorts, and T-shirts, plunged in. Within a few seconds, they’d vanished into the dark. Meanwhile, Chaudoin, Feuerbacher, and Gumm got down on all fours on the catwalk to count the fish on the shelf. As they called out numbers, Wilson recorded them on a special form.
Once the shelf census was complete, everyone retreated into the shadows to wait for the divers to resurface. Some owlets hidden in a crevice screeched. The sun crept down the western face of the cavern. “Stay hydrated,” Wilson admonished. I noticed a bathtub-type ring around the pool and asked Chaudoin about it. She explained it was a function of the pull of the moon; the aquifer beneath us was so massive that it experiences tides.
Though the pupfish inhabit only the pool’s upper reaches—they’re rarely seen below seventy-five feet—the vastness of the aquifer has nonetheless shaped them. In the desert, the temperature varies dramatically between night and day, winter and summer. The water in the cavern, heated geothermally, maintains a constant year-round temperature of 93°F and a consistent, albeit very low, concentration of dissolved oxygen. The conditions of high temperature and low oxygen should be fatal. Devils Hole pupfish have evolved—somehow—to cope with these conditions and, just as important, only with them. It’s believed that the stressfulness of the environment is what caused the fish to lose their pelvic fins; producing the extra appendages just wasn’t worth the energy.
Eventually flashes from the divers’ headlamps appeared, streaking through the pool like search beams. Goldstein and Senger heaved themselves out of the water. Senger was carrying a dive slate covered with columns of numbers.
A cross-section view of Devils Hole, showing the canyon in the upper left corner
“That slate holds the key to the universe,” Wilson declared.
Everyone climbed back up the rocky path, through the opening in the fence, and out to the parking lot. Senger read off the numbers on the slate. Wilson put these together with the count from the shelf to produce the grand total: one hundred and ninety-five. This was sixty more pupfish than had been counted in the previous census, and higher than anyone had dared gue
ss. High-fives were offered all around. Goldstein did what he called “a little happy dance.”
“If there’s a lot of fish, we all win,” he observed.
Later, I did a calculation. Altogether, the pupfish at Devils Hole weighed in at about a hundred grams. This is slightly less than the weight of a McDonald’s Filet-O-Fish sandwich.
* * *
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When the argonauts set off for the gold fields, the expectation was that a man with steady aim would never starve. Manly had been handed his first rifle when he was fourteen; it was, his father solemnly told him, “suitable for either ball or shot.” He’d soon become adept at killing, and the pigeons, turkeys, and deer he bagged were welcome additions to the family’s diet. In his early twenties, Manly hunted his way to Wisconsin. In one three-day period, he killed four bears. He ate so much bear meat he spent the next day vomiting. “So long as I had my gun and ammunition I could kill game enough to live on,” he would later write. In 1849, he and his companions shot their way to Salt Lake City. An elk Manly brought down weighed more than five hundred pounds and made “the finest kind of food, fit for an epicure.”
No larder can be drawn upon indefinitely, and even as Manly was eating his way across the continent, he was helping to make that practice infeasible. In the 1850s, Thoreau lamented the extirpation from New England of moose, cougar, beavers, and wolverines: “Is it not a maimed and imperfect nature that I am conversant with?” Woods that were once thick with wild turkeys were, by the 1860s, all but empty of them. Eastern elk, once plentiful from the Atlantic to the Mississippi, were gone by the 1870s. Passenger pigeons, which formed such immense flocks they blocked the sun, were eliminated around the same time; the last great nesting event—which was also the last great slaughter—took place in 1882.
Under a White Sky Page 6
