by Timothy Egan
As engineering practitioners, the architects of Hoover Dam deserve their place in the pantheon of pyramid builders and skyscraper creators. In the canyon, as you stand atop the dam, the impression is overpowering. To get under way, high-scalers dangled from cables while drilling holes for dynamite. Heat in the canyon killed dozens of men; others died when cables snapped or they fell into fast-setting World’s Biggest Dam. A day’s wages averaged four dollars. The cement started flowing one day and it did not end for two years, until the dam was nearly eight hundred feet high. The river was lifted out of its channel, diverted, then moved back to its old course when the dam was in place, giving birth to Lake Mead. Just over 3.2 million cubic yards of concrete, weighing 6.9 million tons, was poured to create a sixty-story-high plug in the second biggest river in the West. In the course of a single person’s lifetime, the Colorado had gone from mystery to machine.
Once the river was put to use, there was no end to what could be done to it. Parker Dam, built 150 miles downstream, followed Hoover in the mid-19305, creating Lake Havasu. But it nearly caused the state of Arizona to go to war with California. The governor organized a makeshift navy, the Arizona militia, and had machine guns mounted on two boats to ensure that California would not get its way with the dam. Since the water was destined for Southern California, Arizona saw it as a resource-grab that would be to their ultimate loss in the first-in-line scramble for the Colorado. The Arizona side of the river was declared to be under martial law; no construction crew could set foot on it. But the Arizona navy, more like McHale’s than MacArthur’s, fell apart when the rudders of the two militia boats got tangled in weeds and cable. They had to be towed to shore by boats from the enemy—California. Parker Dam was built. Lake Havasu was created. Having nearly gone to war to stop the lake, Arizona had no use for it.
LONDON BRIDGE was falling down, and by the early 1960s, it was clear that no amount of shoring up would keep the granite span from sagging into the Thames. Gravity had presented Robert McCulloch with the centerpiece of his planned town. He couldn’t build a cathedral or a casino, but perhaps he could transport the bridge, piece by piece, to the American West. He submitted a bid of $2,460,000; after authenticating the check, the British government said the bridge was his. It cost McCulloch another $500,000 to ship it, each stone marked with numbers indicating span, row, and position. The granite was sent eight thousand miles to the Mojave Desert at Lake Havasu, where McCulloch had been buying up most of the nearby property. He laid out a town—the main street being McCulloch Boulevard, leading up to and crossing the bridge. He then paid another $8 million to reassemble the bridge, hiring a civil engineer from Nottingham, England, to oversee the reconstruction. To give it the right gloss of empire and nobility, McCulloch had the then-Lord Mayor of London, Sir Gilbert Inglefield, lay the cornerstone.
The heat was intense. One day at Lake Havasu the temperature reached 128 degrees—the highest ever recorded in Arizona. Engineers worried that the Scottish granite would swell beyond their calculations; they knew that it would absorb a considerable amount of heat, so they had to build the bridge with eighteen inches of expansion. The hardest thing for Norman Bear was to imagine the bridge as anything but a span to nowhere, a laughingstock in the desert. The work crew mounded up and sealed sand, forming a mold over which the arches would go. But again, there was no water beneath it; they were building a bridge over nothing but real estate speculation. McCulloch flew planeloads of people to his imagined desert town, trying to convince them to take up residence in the next big Sun Belt retirement center.
“We called them lollipop flights,” says Bear. “Full of suckers.”
IN HIS last years in Congress, Senator Carl Hayden was a shrunken, balding, big-eared man peering out from oversized black glasses. As long as he had a pulse, his influence grew with every passing day. By the 1960s, he was chairman of the most powerful money-spending committee in Congress—Appropriations. Arizona boosters ran a two-pronged campaign for most of the twentieth century. One was to convince the world that the Sonoran Desert was paradise, a land of perpetual sunshine, with air that is the very elixir of life and a landscape that holds the most wonderful shapings of creation, from the Grand Canyon to the red rock dream world of Sedona to the saguaro cacti forests, with their long arms and spring flowers. In that respect they were right; Arizona in its birthday suit may be the most spectacular rectangle of land in all of North America. The other prong was a campaign of fear and pity designed to convince people that the cities of Arizona were on the verge of collapse if they did not get a massive diversion of the Colorado River. The state was portrayed as a man crawling across the desert, a day or two away from dying of thirst. Air conditioning had made Arizona livable year-round; now all it needed was enough water to make it look like everything that a desert is not.
At last in 1968, the year that McCulloch started shipping the London Bridge to the Mojave and Senator Hayden’s final year in office, Congress approved funding for the Central Arizona Project. It was envisioned to cost no more than $1 billion. The government would pay the costs up front, on the condition that Arizona water users would repay the Treasury. The plan was to create an aqueduct that would siphon Colorado River water and send it across the Mojave Desert to the Sonoran Desert, where it would be channeled into a network of canals for delivery to Phoenix and Tucson. It would originate at Lake Havasu—a great bonus for McCulloch, for now his imagined city would have another reason to exist. Not only would Lake Havasu City be home to London Bridge, it would also be the start of the artery that would allow the biggest metropolitan areas of Arizona to expand without limit. Workers were needed to create the canal, and they would live in trailers and houses on twenty-six square miles of land that McCulloch had purchased and laid out as a private city.
Phoenix would have more canals than Venice once the Central Arizona Project was finally completed. And the city would be as green as Seattle. Mesquite and paloverde were scraped away, and golf course sod was tacked in place to the desert edges of the city. New subdivisions were created overnight. The model was Del Webb’s Sun City, and later Leisure World (called “Seizure World” in a memorable gaffe by Senator John McCain). These were controlled-environment retirement cities, banning anyone under age fifty-five. They proved to be tremendously popular. McCulloch built his own planned community in Phoenix, using a gusher of subsidized water as the main attraction. He created the Phoenix subdivision of Fountain Hills, centered around what he called the world’s tallest fountain. Soon, Phoenix was consuming the Sonoran Desert at the rate of an acre an hour. By the end of the twentieth century, its metropolitan area took up more land than Los Angeles; it was bigger, at two thousand square miles, than the state of Delaware.
Lake Havasu had its London Bridge in place by 1971; a few years later, the city had a population of fifteen thousand. Once the four thousand individual stones of the bridge were mortared to each other, the sand molds were removed from the arches. The ground was dredged, and then Lake Havasu spilled underneath the span. At last, it was a bridge to somewhere, even if it was just to the other side of an invented city. In 1978, one year after McCulloch died, the city was incorporated. The original, official purpose for backing up the Colorado and extending the lake was to create farmland for 160-acre plots. As it turns out, all eight thousand acres of arable land in the area are under water, at the bottom of Lake Havasu.
Up and down the Colorado, water dreams came true for the members of the engineer/speculator complex—the water kleptocracy, as the author Marc Reisner called it. It was clear, early on, that water users themselves could never pay for the enormous network of canals and diversions. So it was decided to build more dams on the Colorado River to generate electricity, which would then be sold all over the West as a way to help pay for the original water diversions. The biggest of these planned cash generators was Glen Canyon, a gorge of rainbow colors and old Anasazi sites just upriver from the Grand Canyon. It was buried under two hundred miles of water and
named for John Wesley Powell—one of many ironies. The dam actually causes more water to disappear than it delivers to people; about 750,000 acre-feet of Lake Powell, baking in the desert sun, is lost each year through evaporation. That’s enough water to supply all of San Francisco, which has been rationing water for much of the last twenty years. Lake Powell is “the most tragic act of federal vandalism to befall the American West,” said the writer Bruce Berger. It also changed the character of the Grand Canyon, blocking the spring runoffs that once brought sediment loads downstream. Instead of red, warm water in the summer, what courses through the Grand Canyon now is sterile and ice-cold, piped from the bottom of Lake Powell.
Grand Canyon itself was considered for two dams. It was a waste, the Bureau of Reclamation Commissioner and chief dam builder Floyd Dominy felt, to have all that water going through that deep slit in the earth, without any of it being captured. Grand Canyon was a natural reservoir, needing only a few big plugs of concrete to complete its destiny, Dominy said in the 1960s, Many Westerners were appalled. Full-page ads ran in major newspapers showing the Sistine Chapel under the threat of a flood. What country, the opponents asked, would ever try to bury its greatest treasures? But that was precisely the point of those who brought London Bridge to Lake Havasu and smothered Glen Canyon under two hundred miles of muck and tacked a rug of bluegrass the size of an eastern state in the Sonoran Desert city of Phoenix: the arid West, its caves, chasms, and gorges, its mesas, sandstone walls, and slickrock frescoes, was in itself somehow unworthy without the veneer of old Europe or a plumbing system that tried to transplant a watershed to the driest part of the United States. The projects were driven by an Olympian inferiority complex over one of the best qualities of the native West.
IN THE shadows of the evening, a din of rhythmic sound bounces along the backed-up river. I walk along the shore of Lake Havasu and hear a song from the Artist Formerly Known as Prince. “And Tonight We’re Going to Party Like Its 1999 …” Then a round of cheers. Its spring break at its beery and pot-smoking apex. Officially, Lake Havasu may be trying to become an outpost of Olde England. But in one respect, the society created in these arid lands by government water is little more than keggers on the Colorado. Every spring, with the eyes of MTV trained on the sunburned masses, thousands of students descend on Lake Havasu to eat fish-and-chips and flop around half-drunk in some of the most heavily subsidized water in the world. This emergence of spring-break Lake Havasu has not pleased Norman Bear or any of the other seniors who ultimately settled in the fake town built around the fake lake that laps under the imported bridge.
“That bridge will last a thousand years,” says Norman Bear. “But we’ve got to do something about the partiers.”
Water under the bridge is now a major concern of the state. The heat and all those human bodies have combined to make the channel under the London Bridge a cesspool of coliform bacteria. The governor has declared several public health emergencies. For a while, all the beaches were closed. As for the water leaving here for the big cities, the Central Arizona Project, it has proven to be a bust. It carries $5 billion worth of debt and enough water to take care of five cities the size of Cleveland. But it is far too expensive for most homeowners to use. Much of it is lost through evaporation on the way to the Valley of the Sun. So Phoenix went looking for cheaper water, and found it on the Indian reservations around the city. When the government divided up the river in 1922 among the seven states that signed the Colorado River Compact, they left out the Indian nations, which have both sovereign status and treaty rights to water. Now the Central Arizona Project funnels water to the tribes, out of obligation, and they sell it to Phoenix developers, happily consuming the Sonoran Desert at the rate of an acre an hour. Tucson has learned to live in the desert without the massive water diversions. Cacti, brittlebush, aloe, and other native plants were used for landscaping, and the city slowed down, looked at what it was doing to the desert and mountains on which its glow of life depended.
BRUCE BABBITT, descendant of an Arizona merchant family that first came to Flagstaff in the 1880s, stood atop the Glen Canyon dam not long ago, looking like a lucky lotto winner. A student of Western history, Babbitt has long revered the one-armed Civil War veteran who first floated the Grand Canyon. Growing up, he roamed the Colorado Plateau, his backyard playground, and then read Powell’s journals. Now, as he straddled the last big dam ever to be constructed on the river, the dam built to provide electricity to pay for water that nobody wants or can afford, Babbitt was trying to re-create spring runoff on the Colorado. He would open the dams floodgates to mimic something like a big seasonal flush. Water would carry sediment for beaches and sandbars of the kind favored by the thousands of people who float down the Colorado trying to feel a bit of what John Wesley Powell felt.
Babbitt proclaimed that the era of big dam building in the West was over. At the same time, the government announced a plan to spend $70 million to tear down a salmon-killing dam on the Olympic Peninsula, in the far northwest corner of the West. A little bit of character should be put back in the rivers, Babbitt said, somewhat meekly; the land should be given credit for what it is. What was this backpedaling and policy-shifting all about? Had the engineering wonders of the world, the technical triumphs that inspired song, led newsreel highlights, drew politicians to oratorical flourish, been a mistake?
In any event, the emperor of the outdoors was now trying to use a dam to heal a river. And it seemed possible that the government would spend the next hundred years in the West undoing what it had done in the previous century. Enough Westerners were comfortable with the new narrative: wild land, even dry and unwatered, was just as acceptable as the back nine of Olde England Heights in the Mojave. Actually, it was an old narrative, from Powell, who fought and lost the policy war in Washington. His words finally found an audience in the executive branch, a century later.
“We have only one Grand Canyon,” said Babbitt. “This is a symbol of a new way to manage our rivers.” He gave a signal, and then a big cheer went up, a boomerang echo of the hurrahs from dam-opening ceremonies from the previous sixty years. The first blast of a years worth of stored water came roaring out of tubal prisons at the base of Glen Canyon dam, forty-five thousand cubic feet per second—about six times the controlled flow. Broadcast live on the “Today” show, it was, on one level, just a bit of river doing what it does, no more interesting than a tree growing. But some called it the hydraulic event of the century. The Colorado was big and red again. At the least, it provided the kind of youthful rush that the old landscape-carving river had not been through in more than a quarter-century. The initial burst was like fireworks, loud and dramatic, and then it tumbled away in a froth, pouring down the Grand Canyon, knocking boulders out of place, carrying snowmelt through walls older than most any other exposed rock on the continent, bringing life to long-dormant cubbies of soil, and down, draining away through Hoover Dam and then further, into Lake Havasu, under the glowing Chemehuevis to a city where people may one day feel they no longer need to be England, foreign and green in their grand beige setting.
CHAPTER 4
A Colorado River Town II
Supai, Arizona
The People of the Blue Green Water have lived inside the Grand Canyon for at least 800 years, and they still get their mail by mule train. It takes longer for a rumor to reach the hamlet of Supai than it does to fly between three continents. Before there was Phoenix, Flagstaff, Denver, or Albuquerque, there was the town at the western end of the canyon. Yet, it is not on many maps of the West and cannot be seen from most air flights over the area. Nor are there any roads to the village. Sheltered by flanks of stone higher than anything ever built, Supai sits in a pocket of selective ignorance, neighbor to the Seventh Natural Wonder of the World.
On a weekday when the wind is cold and out of the north, and the sky still black, I am threading my way north up the Colorado River drainage, picking up Old Route 66 and a Navajo-language radio station at the same tim
e. From Kingman, I angle through Hackberry, Valentine, Truxton, and Peach Springs, none of them taking more than a few seconds of road time to pass through, and then I’m in Indian Country, the Hualapai Reservation. I cannot make out much from the Navajo broadcast—a language the Japanese could never decipher during World War II—except that the Mariners beat Cleveland last night, 6 to 4; already, the Colorado Plateau seems a little brighter and a little warmer. The news goes on for fifteen minutes, and then comes an old George Jones song. “I work like a slave in the open-pit mine,” is the refrain, the perfect pairing of music with landscape, the bluesy crooning, the lonely sky. Turning to the northeast, the last road to the canyon is a straight line, Indian Route 18, over ground that would be twenty-foot rolling swells if you were on a sailboat. I sometimes get a little too much lift off the rises, landing hard.
In the first light, I see livestock roaming over open pasture, clusters of pinyon-juniper, raptors at work overhead. Once, I stop the car to shoo away cattle blocking the road. I never see another soul, and there is no hint that anyone lives nearby. After sixty miles, the road ends somewhat suddenly at the lip of a high cliff, treeless and exposed to the wind. Horse trailers and rusted cars are parked at the edge. Low-angled morning sunlight reveals color in the canyon, purples and mauves, some limestone, in a wide crack in the earth. I walk to the edge, where there is a trailhead for a narrow spiral path deep into the chasm, dropping several thousand vertical feet to where the village of Supai is supposed to be, in a side canyon above the Colorado River. I am mostly curious about one basic thing: how have these people been able to live along the river for nearly a millenium without importing the London Bridge or requiring a nation to pay for a $5-billion water diversion system?
