Lasso the Wind: Away to the New West

by Timothy Egan

  English Village is built around the bridge. It’s very green and Tudorish, with little establishments selling meat pies, savagely overcooked vegetables, and number 55 sunscreen. Away from the tourist center, the town—incorporated in 1978—has a half-finished, not-going-to-live-very-long, tax-revolt kind of feel to it. It seems childless and parkless and why-the-hell-not. I check into the Best Western Motel, a historic landmark without so much as crows feet at the doors yet, the oldest establishment in town. At twilight, the sky turns a rose color and then turquoise, draped against the Chemehuevis. I order kung pao chicken and chop suey from London Bridge Chinese Food, opting for cultural dissonance as a way to blend in. Afterward, I light a cigar and stroll across the big span, five arches over a sluggish branch of the Colorado, my Nikes covering the same rock kings and commoners covered. The ritual for visitors is to touch the granite, to make a connection with something old and permanent from an ordered society on a damp island in the Atlantic, eight thousand miles away.

  At Lake Havasu City, water seems cheap and abundant. Most important, it is transformative. It keeps houseboats afloat and provides a slick carpet for Jet Skis. It laps against the beach on land where only tarantulas and sidewinders once dared to crawl. It flows one way, to the west, in a canal that pumps excessive expectations into Southern California. And it goes the other way, east, in one of the biggest plumbing projects ever assembled, a 336-mile aqueduct that climbs more than a thousand vertical feet across the desert to Phoenix. In Europe, people scorn the “Chunnel” as a folly of debt and engineering overreach, trying to connect England to France underwater. In the West, it costs American taxpayers $5 billion to ship much of the Colorado River inland to a place without reliable water, and now— surprise—nobody wants it. Too alkaline, they say in Sun City and Leisure World. Too expensive, they say on the remaining cotton farms outside Mesa and Glenwood. The big canal scraped away Sonoran mesquite and saguaro cacti on land where Frank Lloyd Wright was going to show the world how people could weave into the desert ecology. Lake Havasupians shrug when I bring up the $5-billion canal—called CAP, for Central Arizona Project. So CAP didn’t work out. But how about that London Bridge?

  “Most people just like to touch it,” says Norman Bear, who was the mason foreman when the bridge was reconstructed at Lake Havasu. Norman is American. His wife, Kathy, is from England. The message machine at their home answers with the clipped British accent of Mrs. Bear: “Hi, you’ve reached the Bears. We’re not in our den at this time.”

  When Norman Bear came to the desert looking for work on the bridge project in 1969, he laughed at the astonishing incongruity of what Robert P. McCulloch had in mind. McCulloch was an industrialist and developer. One day he was flying low over the desert where the Colorado is plugged by Parker Dam, looking for a site to build an industrial park. McCulloch wanted a place where land was nearly free, water abundant, and electricity cheap. Lake Havasu, the reservoir created by Parker Dam, fit the bill. Pilots used to fly over this stretch of desert during World War II, training for bombing runs. And just to the south, on a nearly deserted Indian reservation, an internment camp housed Japanese-Americans for three years; most were American citizens. In other words, the desert here was disposable, contemptible, punishment land—the American Australia, in the eyes of the government. Like many Westerners who view their native ground as unfinished and imperfect, McCulloch thought his site needed something dramatic and regal; it needed a complete face-lift. It wasn’t enough that the Colorado River does more on its own than any army of architects could sketch in a thousand years. McCulloch expanded on his vision in many a press interview, at which point people usually laughed and walked away. Norman Bear did not believe it himself until the mirage started to arrive at a place known as Site 6—a jumble of sun-blasted trailers tormented by an oven-breathed wind from the south. The containers were full of granite originally quarried in Dartmoor, about four thousand stones in all, each of them numbered. Norman Bear thought to himself: He’s serious! In temperatures reaching 120 degrees, Bear and his men set out to reconstruct a European bridge of stone over sand in a place where nobody lived; there wasn’t any water at the site either. After the bridge was in place, according to plan, would come a channel of freshwater, and then—presto—a city. The Pioneer West, circa 1970.

  “Of course I thought they were nuts,” says Norman Bear. “The London Bridge—here? It was crazy, crazy, crazy. Who would think of such a thing?”

  THE Chemehuevi Indians were just starting to develop some familiarity with the mischief of the Colorado River when King Athelred the Unready, leader of the Saxons, sailed up the Thames in 1014. The premature royal was determined to take London back from the Danes; the key was the bridge. Under cover of darkness, the attackers sneaked under the wooden span over the river and pulled the pilings down, dragging London Bridge into the drink. Athelred thus set in motion a set of events that would ripple, ultimately, to a curious town created in America. A much stronger bridge, built of stone, was started in 1176 and took thirty-three years to construct. It lasted six hundred years and served at times as a place at which to impale the heads of people who had fallen out of favor with the British Crown. Over the centuries, freezes and fires took their toll on the span, but its celebrated sagginess gave rise to a nursery rhyme that every American schoolchild could sing. So the bridge had a link to the hearts of the former colony. By the 1820s, stone was laid for a new London Bridge, the one that would end up in the Arizona desert.

  SOUTHERN ARIZONA, said Kit Carson, was “so desolate, deserted and God-forsaken that a wolf could not make a living upon it.” Wolves, in fact, made a living, chasing jackrabbits, deer, and javelinas, the wild boars of the Southwest. A number of tribes, particularly the Hohokams, who lived in the valley where the Salt and Gila Rivers came together in wet years, did rather well for a time. When the water dried up, the Hohokams vanished. Later, dozens of smaller tribes took up residence, never living more than a few days’ travel from the Colorado River. During the Civil War, a Union outpost was set up at Yuma, where the Gila joins the Colorado. The fear was that Confederate steamers might chug up the Colorado, establishing a base from which to go into California. Thirty years after the war, a town took shape in the Valley of the Sun, where scars of the old Honokaa canals were still visible. To live in Phoenix in summer required imagination. People draped wet bedsheets over themselves at night, or simply put themselves in a narcotic stupor in order to sleep.

  “If our city wishes to keep pace with other towns on the coast,” the Gazette of Phoenix editorialized in 1881, “then ordinances must be passed prohibiting the smoking of opium and making it a misdemeanor for any person to bathe in a ditch within the city limits.”

  To the rest of the country, the Southwest was a freakish land, populated by aliens. The Anglos living in Arizona weren’t quite sure how to adjust to the place either. For a while, camels were imported. The color of the land was odd. The sky was a baked bowl. The people talked funny, looked a bit too colorful, acted different. Then, as now, there were more Indians in Arizona than in any other state. Utah was full of Mormons, long-bearded, polygamous, communal. New Mexico was seen as Old Mexico, a mistake some people still make, as when a Santa Fe resident called the headquarters for the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta to request tickets and was told she would have to go through the office of her own nation. As conditions of entry to the Union, the last states to join the rest of mainland United States had to change. Utah was forced to renounce polygamy. New Mexico promised to encourage more Anglo settlement. Arizona increased copper production and tried, also, to lure more of the kind of Americans who might be at home in old Kentucky.

  Arizona, the forty-eighth state, entered the Union in 1912, and promptly sent Carl Hayden to Washington. He would stay in Congress, first as a representative then as senator, until 1968. One of his enduring obsessions was water. Arizona had plenty of it; one-fourth of all the freshwater in the West flows through the Colorado River. But it was in the wrong plac
es, running through the big ditch up north and draining away to the Gulf of California in the southwest. To the east, the Salt River squeezed out of Apache hideouts in the Superstition Mountains but dried up by the time it reached Phoenix. In the year before statehood, Roosevelt Dam, then the largest ever built in America, was stapled to bedrock on the Salt River. It set a precedent: it cost $5.4 million, a true extravagance at the time, and benefited only about two thousand landowners, most of whom were supposed to pay for it but never did. It helped the cotton and alfalfa growers in the valley; but Phoenix wanted much more. It wanted to be green, to be wet, to be cool, to be watered year-round. And so Hayden made diversion of the Colorado River—the so-called Central Arizona Project—his life mission, spending five decades in Congress trying to reengineer his home state. Bruce Babbitt, the two-term Arizona governor and Interior Secretary under President Clinton, said political reporters in Phoenix used to have a single, all-important task.

  “Once a year, somebody was sent from Arizona back to Washington, D.C.,” Babbitt says. “Their job was to make sure that Senator Hayden— and the Central Arizona Project—were still alive. And so, once a year, there would be a banner in the paper: ‘Hayden, Water Project on Track.’”

  By temperament, the Colorado was sometimes a mustang in an open field, bucking, sprinting, unpredictable. Old-timers compared it to an Indian, calling it red and wild. From snowmelt in Rocky Mountain National Park to a saline marsh in the Gulf of California, the river scoots down the western slope of the continent, running fourteen hundred miles, usually in a hurry. It is vodka-clear, cold, and sweet in the mountains of Colorado; by the time it reaches Mexico, it is saltier than the sea it empties into. The river drops nearly thirteen thousand feet, coloring and carving parts of seven states in a basin that receives, on average, about four inches of rain a year. The river was red because it always carried sediment from one geologic era to another, building beaches, creating new wonders with hydraulic sandpaper. And in the Grand Canyon, a mile deep and ten miles wide, the river has exposed rocks dating to a time when the Earth was not yet fully formed. The Colorado Plateau, in essence, is a solid block of sandstone and shale, two miles thick; the river follows the demands of gravity through an easily carved crust. The key to the visual drama of the Colorado Plateau is simple: over several million years, water has sought the path of least resistance. The Colorado River has pushed a quadrillion tons of rock downriver in the last fifteen million years alone.

  By the late 1860s, most of the blank spots on the map of America had been filled in, except in the Southwest and in Idaho. The Colorado, particularly from Glen Canyon through Grand Canyon, was a source of rumors, extravagant tales, and fear. In 1869, a one-armed, remarkably even-tempered Civil War veteran named John Wesley Powell mounted an expedition down the length of the river, attempting to clear away centuries of ignorance. Acting as nothing more official than the secretary of the Illinois Natural History Society, Powell descended Grand Canyon rapids in a wooden dory, strapped into an oaken armchair. When he launched his adventure, it was if he and his band of nine men had just stepped off the planet; most newspapers speculated that he would never be seen again. Throughout the journey, it was variously reported that Major Powell had plunged to his death over the steepest of waterfalls or been swallowed by white water.

  Powell plodded on, never seeming to panic, even as some of his men deserted him. At times he turned poetic. In southeastern Utah, he wrote: “Wherever we look there is but a wilderness of rocks; deep gorges, where the rivers are lost below cliffs and towers and pinnacles; and ten thousand strangely carved forms in every direction; and beyond them, mountains blending with the clouds.” Just before entering the mile-deep hole in the Colorado Plateau, he remained intensely curious. “We have an unknown distance yet to run, an unknown river yet to explore. What falls there are, we know not; what rocks beset the channel, we know not; what walls rise over the river, we know not. Ah, well! We may conjecture many things.” When he scooted out the other end, the West was smaller, less fearsome, but ultimately more fantastic. There really was a mile-deep slit in the Earth, where sunlight, water, wind, and rock combined to form geologic art that no pen or brush would ever come close to duplicating. The West of discovery, the West of surprise, of awe, was gradually starting to replace the West of fear. At the same time, the wonders of Yellowstone were just being fully explored and explained.

  As gripping as Powell’s adventure had been, his more lasting service was in trying to shape a “dryland democracy,” as his biographer, Wallace Stegner, put it. After running the canyons of the Colorado, Powell spent the next thirty years trying to convince Congress that America should try a different model for growing a civilization in the West, something more in keeping with the nature of the arid lands, the terra beyond the 100th meridian. A popular idea, accepted by most policymakers at the time, was that rain followed the plow. All that was needed to make the desert bloom, it was felt, was to dig up the earth and plant something of agricultural value; that in itself would form clouds, and bring rain. So a series of late-nineteenth-century homestead acts was passed, fostering the cruel notion that a sod-buster only needed a strong back and a year or two of patience before he could transform his personal 160 acres into a field of prosperity. Powell said it was nonsense. A quarter-section was one thing in Iowa, virtually worthless in most of the West. His idea was to encourage the growth of communities, even whole counties, united by a single watershed, working within the contours of the land and the limits of the sky to bring American life to the open space. It included dams and irrigation, but nothing like what later developed, Soviet-style, in the most Republican states of the Union. The prairie halves of Montana, Wyoming, Colorado, and New Mexico, depopulating for the last seventy years, are still paying for the crucial misconception by those who refused to listen to Powell.

  In the early twentieth century, Powell’s ideas faded away, and there was less official promotion of the notion that rain followed the plow as well. A Western water tradition known as “first in time, first in line” came about, a hydro-extension of gold-fever grubstaking. It means that whoever gets to the water first can use as much of it as they want, no matter what happens downstream. This philosophy, upheld in the 1920s by Supreme Court rulings, is not just the opposite of Powell’s vision of shared water communities but it encourages developers, speculators, emerging cities, and entire states to grab as much water as they can, even if they might never use it. Once it is yours, nobody can take it away.

  By law, reclamation was for small farmers and burgeoning communities or those threatened by killer floods; otherwise, there was no legitimate reason for the majority of American taxpayers to finance some of the biggest public works projects of all time. A farm taking water from federal irrigation was limited to 160 acres in size. In reality, water movement was about power, not Jeffersonian democracy, and the small acreage limit was no more followed than any treaty ever signed with American Indians. The axiom that water flows uphill to money became the guiding principle of the West. Big landowners wanted it but were not willing to pay for it, so they promoted a handful of senators who could tie up the upper chamber of Congress to bring it to them. In that sense, little has changed. A knot of Western senators recently held up the entire federal budget in a filibuster over the notion that reforming grazing laws on federal land might reduce first-inline water for some well-connected landowners.

  The first grand scheme of the water lords was to divert the Colorado near its end in order to enrich the Imperial Valley of California. At the turn of the century, a sixty-mile-long canal was built. But then the river reverted to character; it swelled with runoff and jumped around, seeking a faster way downhill. Eroding the canal, the Colorado broke through, then spilled onto hard ground in the most barren part of California, creating the Salton Sea, before it could be shoved back into its normal path. The hydro-engineers decided that the only way to gain control of the Colorado was to choke it higher up, after it flows out of the
Grand Canyon. Calvin Coolidge signed the bill creating the first many a tax-and-spend-phobic citizen, was the ultimate promoter of the biggest government project of its time. Hoover Dam backed up the Colorado River, powered the lights of Los Angeles, gave the Imperial Valley the predictable water flow it wanted, and convinced generations of politicians that there was nothing like a dam to keep them in office. Los Angeles, invigorated by Colorado River water and runoff taken by fraud from the Owens Valley to the north, went from a city of barely half a million people to a megalopolis with a population greater than half of Canada.

  So was born the urban West—an “oasis civilization,” in the words of historian Walter Prescott Webb. The swiftest rivers were shackled, and water was sent to places where cities could grow. The West was tamed, ultimately, by government—specifically, the Bureau of Reclamation, a jackhammer brigade known to some as the Bureau of Wreck. The Rio Grande, the Platte, the Missouri, the Sacramento, the Willamette, the Clark, the Snake, the Columbia—every major river in the West except the Yellowstone was dammed. At the start of the twentieth century, three-fourths of the people in the West lived in rural areas. By the end of the century, the West was the most urban area in the country. Utah is now more urban than New York State. It all came about because water was brought to a select group of landowners and speculators.