Encounters with the Archdruid

by John McPhee

  Maynard Munger, realtor. Lafayette, California. No outdoor specialty. Campaigned for the board of directors with a photograph of himself in a kayak. Feels that the Sierra Club enhances his image as a realtor. Anti-Brower.

  Ansel Adams, the other great wilderness photographer in the world. Carmel, California. Met Brower on a knapsack trip in the High Sierra in 1933. Strong personal and professional relationship with Brower over the years. Anti-Brower.

  Adams, a burly, black-bearded man, knew a detail of which only one other person in the room was in all likelihood aware. Under the big tree, beside the Pierce-Arrow, in the Ansel Adams photograph that was on the front page of that day’s Chronicle stood David Brower—indistinguishable, unidentified, but present, in a picture that was captioned “A Fallen Giant.”

  Luna Leopold, hydrologist. Washington, D.C. Sharp mind, sharp tongue. Expert on the Colorado. Expert on river sedimentation. Snowshoe hunter. Son of Aldo Leopold, who wrote A Sand County Almanac and Round River, literary touchstones of modern conservation-ecology. Pro-Brower.

  The event of the day occurred in less time than it would take to tack a notice to a wall. President Wayburn recognized Siri, and Siri said that David Brower was “the greatest spiritual conservation leader of this century.” He added, “However, two giants are in conflict—the body of the Sierra Club and the embodiment of David Brower. I move that his resignation be accepted.”

  Richard Leonard seconded the motion and was hissed as he did so.

  Perhaps incredibly, Brower, standing in the back of the room, still felt hopeful. There could be a change of heart.

  All in favor? Ten. Opposed? Five. Carried.

  In a soft, emotional voice, Brower read a farewell speech that contained no pumice. From its tone, he might have been reading a story to children around a campfire. Then he left the room.

  “Expansion cracking” was his term for what had happened. A small, local organization had grown into a major national and international force in the conservation movement, and at each stage there had been people who had wanted to stop. Brower had come to see conservation as inescapably a global and supranational matter, with pollution control and population control its first concerns, sine qua non to the preservation of wilderness. The best of his opposition, not necessarily disagreeing, felt that the Sierra Club should have more limited objectives if it was to reach any objectives at all, but Brower, meanwhile, was reaching into the endangered stratosphere and beyond it for the sun and the stars. The money would come from somewhere. It always had.

  In the months that followed the meeting at the Sir Francis Drake, Brower went off whenever he could into wilderness areas where, in his words, he put himself back in touch with his purposes. On one of these trips, an aimless wandering through the Sierra Nevada, he found himself drawn, perhaps not so aimlessly, to the grove in the southern Yosemite where the giant sequoia had fallen.

  The crash had been sudden and cataclysmic, the impact so great that the enormous tree had broken into pieces as if it were made of crockery. In several places, at intervals of about fifty feet, the trunk had broken clean through. The wood inside looked like red brick. Upper limbs had been driven deep into the ground. Sequoia cones were everywhere, and Brower picked some up. “I am forced to say it was a rough winter on both of us,” Brower said to the tree. He climbed the side of the fallen trunk and stood on it, three stories off the ground. He shook a seed out of one of the cones. The cone was no larger than a walnut, and the tiny seed, encased in a winglike fibre, was nothing but a sliver, three-sixteenths of an inch long. “This seed can grow fifty thousand cubic feet of wood that can live for thirty-five hundred years,” Brower said, speaking down from the trunk. “This seed knows how to shape an arrowhead canopy, how to design a root system to combat siltation, how to pump water three hundred feet up. This seed has worked for ninety million years and has not been to forestry school.” He looked around to see, if he could, why the big tree had fallen. The tunnel in its base had been cut through a burn scar in 1881, and was wide enough for horse-drawn carriages and, until the middle of the twentieth century, for automobiles. But automobiles in recent years had grown too wide, so another roadway had been paved around the tree for cars that could not go through it, and this additional roadway was on the side away from the fall—on the side where the roots had broken. “Too much encroachment on the vitality of a living thing,” Brower concluded. “It must have been a hell of a noise, a gorgeous crash. Detroit wins again.”

  Mile 141. We are in a long, placid reach of the river. The Upset Rapid is eight miles downstream, but its name, all morning, has been a refrain on the raft. People say it as if they were being wheeled toward it on a hospital cart. We have other rapids to go through first—the Kanab Rapid, the Matkatamiba Rapid—but everyone has been thinking beyond them to Upset.

  “According to the River Guide, there hasn’t been a death in the Upset Rapid for a little over two years,” someone joked.

  “The map says Upset is very bad when the water is low.”

  “How is the water, Jerry?”

  “Low.”

  “Under today’s controlled river, we’re riding at the moment on last Sunday’s releases,” Dominy explained. “This is as low as the river will get under controlled conditions. Tomorrow, Monday’s conditions will catch up with us, so things will improve.”

  “Thank you very much, Commissioner, but what good will Monday’s releases do us today?”

  “Let’s camp here,” someone put in.

  “It’s ten-thirty in the morning.”

  “I don’t care.”

  “The river has its hands tied, but it’s still running,” said Brower. “If the Commissioner gets very wet today, it’s his own fault.”

  Jerry Sanderson has cut the engine—a small, cocky outboard that gives the raft a little more speed than the river and is supposed to add some control in rapids. We drift silently.

  Brower notices a driftwood log, bleached and dry, on a ledge forty feet above us. “See where the river was before you turned it off, Floyd?”

  “I didn’t turn it off, God damn it, I turned it on. Ten months of the year, there wasn’t enough water in here to boil an egg. My dam put this river in business.”

  Dominy begins to talk dams. To him, the world is a tessellation of watersheds. When he looks at a globe, he does not see nations so much as he sees rivers, and his imagination runs down the rivers building dams. Of all the rivers in the world, the one that makes him salivate most is the Mekong. There are chances in the Mekong for freshwater Mediterraneans—huge bowls of topography that are pinched off by gunsight passages just crying to be plugged. “Fantastic. Fantastic river,” he says, and he contrasts it with the Murrumbidgee River, in New South Wales, where the Australians have spent twenty-two years developing something called the Snowy Mountains Hydroelectric Scheme—“a whole lot of effort for a cup of water.” Brower reminds Dominy that dams can break, and mentions the disaster that occurred in Italy in 1963. “That dam didn’t break,” Dominy tells him. “That dam did not break. It was nine hundred feet high. Above it was a granite mountain with crud on top. The crud fell into the reservoir, and water splashed four hundred feet over the top of the dam and rushed down the river and killed two thousand people. The dam is still there. It held. Four hundred feet of water over it and it held. Of course, it’s useless now. The reservoir is full of crud.”

  “Just as all your reservoirs will be. Just as Lake Powell will be full of silt.”

  “Oh, for Christ’s sake, Dave, be rational.”

  “Oh, for Christ’s sake, Floyd, you be rational.”

  “Have you ever been for a dam, Dave? Once? Ever?”

  “Yes. I testified in favor of Knowles Dam, on the Clark Fork River, in Montana. I saw it as a way to save Glacier National Park from an even greater threat. Tell me this, Floyd. Have you ever built a dam that didn’t work?”

  “Yes, if you want to know the truth. I’m not afraid to tell you the truth, Dave. On Owl Cr
eek, near Thermopolis, Wyoming. Geologic tests were done at one point in the creek and they were O.K., and then the dam was built some distance upstream. We learned a lesson. Never build a dam except exactly where tests are conducted. Cavities developed under the dam, also under the reservoir. Every time we plug one hole, two more show up. Plugs keep coming out. The reservoir just won’t fill. Someday I’ll tell you another story, Dave. I’ll tell you about the day one of our men opened the wrong valve and flooded the inside of Grand Coulee Dam.”

  “I’ve heard enough.”

  Dominy and Brower call for sandwiches, open them, and dutifully drop the tongues inside. Brower now attacks Dominy because a dam project near Ventura, California, is threatening the existence of thirty-nine of the forty-five remaining condors in North America. “We’ve got to get upset about the condor,” Brower tells him. “No one likes to see something get extinct.”

  “The condor was alive in the days of the mastodons,” Dominy says. “He is left over from prehistoric times. He can’t fly without dropping off something first. He is so huge a kid with a BB gun can hit him. He’s in trouble, dam or no dam. If you give him forty thousand acres, he’s still in trouble. He is in trouble. His chances of survival are slim. I think it would be nice if he survived, but I don’t think this God-damned project would have any real bearing on it.”

  Dominy draws deeply on his beer. He takes off his Lake Powell hat, smooths his hair back, and replaces the hat. I wonder if he is thinking of the scale-model bulldozer in his office in Washington. The bulldozer happens to have a condor in it—a rubber scale-model condor, sitting in the operator’s seat.

  Dominy’s thoughts have been elsewhere, though. “Who was that old man who tried to read poetry at Kennedy’s Inaugural? With the white hair blowing all over the place.”

  “Robert Frost.”

  “Right. He and I went to Russia together. I was going to visit Russian dams, and he was on some cultural exchange, and we sat beside each other on the plane all the way to Moscow. He talked and talked, and I smoked cigars. He said eventually, ‘So you’re the dam man. You’re the creator of the great concrete monoliths—turbines, generators, stored water.’ And then he started to talk poetically about me, right there in the plane. He said, ‘Turning, turning, turning … creating, creating … creating energy for the people … for the people … .’

  “Most of the day, Frost reminisced about his childhood, and he asked about mine, and I told him I’d been born in a town so small that the entrance and exit signs were on the same post. Land as dry and rough as a cob. You’ll never see any land better than that for irrigating. God damn, she lays pretty. And he asked about my own family, and I told him about our farm in Virginia, and how my son and I put up nine hundred and sixty feet of fence in one day. I told my son, ‘I’ll teach you how to work. You teach yourself how to play.’”

  We have been through the Kanab Rapid—standing waves six feet high, lots of splash—and we are still wet. It is cold in the canyon. A cloud—a phenomenon in this sky—covers the sun. We are shivering. The temperature plunges if the sun is obscured. The oven is off. Clothes do not quickly dry. Fortunately, the cloud seems to be alone up there.

  Mile 144.8. “Here we are,” Brower says. He has the map in his hand. Nothing in the Muav Limestone walls around us suggests that we are anywhere in particular, except in the middle of the Grand Canyon. “We are entering the reservoir,” Brower announces. “We are now floating on Lake Dominy.”

  “Jesus,” mutters Dominy.

  “What reservoir?” someone asks. Brower explains. A dam that Dominy would like to build, ninety-three miles downstream, would back still water to this exact point in the river.

  “Is that right, Commissioner?”

  “That’s right.”

  The cloud has left the sun, and almost at once we feel warm again. The other passengers are silent, absorbed by what Brower has told them.

  “Do you mean the reservoir would cover the Upset Rapid? Havasu Creek? Lava Falls? All the places we are coming to?” one man asks Dominy.

  Dominy reaches for the visor of his Lake Powell hat and pulls it down more firmly on his head. “Yes,” he says.

  “I’d have to think about that.”

  “So would I.”

  “I would, too.”

  Our fellow-passengers have become a somewhat bewildered—perhaps a somewhat divided—chorus. Dominy assures them that the lake would be beautiful, like Powell, and, moreover, that the Hualapai Indians, whose reservation is beside the damsite, would have a million-dollar windfall, comparable to the good deal that has come to the Navajos of Glen Canyon. The new dam would be called Hualapai Dam, and the reservoir—Brower’s humor notwithstanding—would be called Hualapai Lake.

  “I’m prepared to say, here and now, that we should touch nothing more in the lower forty-eight,” Brower comments. “Whether it’s an island, a river, a mountain wilderness—nothing more. What has been left alone until now should be left alone permanently. It’s an extreme statement, but it should be said.”

  “That, my friend, is debatable.”

  The others look from Brower to Dominy without apparent decision. For the most part, their reactions do not seem to be automatic, either way. This might seem surprising among people who would be attracted, in the first place, to going down this river on a raft, but nearly all of them live in communities whose power and water come from the Colorado. They are, like everyone, caught in the middle, and so they say they’ll have to think about it. At home, in New Jersey, I go to my children’s schoolrooms and ask, for example, a group of fourth graders to consider a large color photograph of a pristine beach in Georgia. “Do you think there should be houses by this beach, or that it should be left as it is?” Hands go up, waving madly. “Houses,” some of the schoolchildren say. Others vote against the houses. The breakdown is fifty-fifty. “How about this? Here is a picture of a glorious mountain in a deep wilderness in the State of Washington. There is copper under the mountain.” I list the uses of copper. The vote is close. A black child, who was for houses on the beach, says, “Take the copper.” I hold up the Sierra Club’s Exhibit-Format book Time and the River Flowing and show them pictures of the Colorado River in the Grand Canyon. Someone wants to build a dam in this river. A dam gives electricity and water—light and food. The vote is roughly fifty-fifty.

  After Brower ran his ad about the flooding of the Sistine Chapel, Dominy counterattacked by flying down the Colorado in a helicopter, hanging by a strap from an open door with a camera in his hand. He had the pilot set the helicopter down on a sandbar at Mile 144.8, and he took a picture straight down the river. The elevation of the sandbar was eighteen hundred and seventy-five feet above sea level. Taking pictures all the way, Dominy had the pilot fly at that exact altitude down the river from the sandbar to the site of Hualapai Dam. (“That pilot had the God-damned props churning right around the edge of that inner-gorge wall, and he was noivous, but I made him stay there.”) At the damsite, the helicopter was six hundred feet in the air. Dominy took his collection of pictures to Congress. “Brower says we want to ruin the canyon. Let’s see whether we’re going to ruin it,” he said, and he demonstrated that Hualapai Lake, for all its length, would be a slender puddle hidden away in a segment of the Grand Canyon that was seven miles wide and four thousand feet deep. No part of the lake would be visible from any public observation point in Grand Canyon National Park, he told the congressmen. “Hell, I know more about this river than the Park Service, the Sierra Club, and everyone else,” he says, finishing the story. “I took my pictures to Congress because I thought that this would put the ball in their court, and if they wanted to field it, all right, and if they wanted to drop it, that was all right, too.”

  We have gone through Matkatamiba and around a bend. Jerry Sanderson has cut the motor again, and we are resting in the long corridor of flat water that ends in the Upset Rapid. There is a lot of talk about “the last mile,” the low water, “the end of the rainbow,�
� and so on, but this is just fear chatter, dramatization of the unseen.

  “Oh, come on, now. One of these rafts could go over Niagara Falls.”

  “Yes. With no survivors.”

  Brower hands Dominy a beer. “Here’s your last beer,” he says. It is 11 A.M., and cool in the canyon. Another cloud is over the sun, and the temperature is seventy-seven degrees. The cloud will be gone in moments, and the temperature will go back into the nineties.

  “Here’s to Upset,” Brower says, lifting his beer. “May the best man win.”

  The dropoff is so precipitous where Upset begins that all we can see of it, from two hundred yards upstream, is what appears to be an agglomeration of snapping jaws—the leaping peaks of white water. Jerry cannot get the motor started. “It won’t run on this gas,” he explains. “I’ve tried river water, and it won’t run on that, either.” As we drift downstream, he works on the motor. A hundred and fifty yards. He pulls the cord. No sound. There is no sound in the raft, either, except for the psss of a can being opened. Dominy is having one more beer. A hundred yards. Jerry starts the motor. He directs the raft to shore. Upset, by rule, must be inspected before the running.

  We all got off the raft and walked to the edge of the rapid with Sanderson. What we saw there tended to erase the thought that men in shirtsleeves were controlling the Colorado inside a dam that was a hundred and sixty-five river miles away. They were there, and this rapid was here, thundering. The problem was elemental. On the near right was an enormous hole, fifteen feet deep and many yards wide, into which poured a scaled-down Canadian Niagara —tons upon tons of water per second. On the far left, just beyond the hole, a very large boulder was fixed in the white torrent. High water would clearly fill up the hole and reduce the boulder, but that was not the situation today.