Cadillac Desert_ The American West and Its Disappearing Water - Marc Reisner [139]
CHAPTER SEVEN
Dominy
When Emma Dominy, writhing and shrieking, finally evicted her son Floyd, the doctors dumped him on a scale and whistled. Floyd Elgin Dominy, ten pounds, four ounces, at birth. Floyd Elgin Dominy, larger than life. All of Floyd’s siblings were born huge. His brother Ralph weighed twelve pounds. Emma’s six giant babies were a cross she was to bear through the rest of her life. Her uterus became distended, causing her horrid pain. She developed a nervous condition. Her temper became explosive, her outbursts hysterical. Strong-willed, French-Irish, and beautiful, Emma May Dominy was a handful anyway. Charles Dominy and his wife fought day and night. They had what is referred to as a “difficult” marriage, cemented precariously by children, religion, and a pious wheatbelt condemnation of divorce. Life, remembers Floyd, was like living on an earthquake fault. There was never any peace. “They fussed and fumed from morning to night. We’d lie awake at night and listen to them tearing into each other.” He is seventy when he says this, but his childhood is still a bad memory; you can read it in the turned-down corners of his mouth. “I remember what a relief it was to get away from home. It bugged me right through college. When everyone else was having nightmares about missing exams, I was having nightmares that my parents were murdering each other.”
Hastings, Nebraska, is a long way from paradise: Libya in the summer, Siberia in the winter; too wet for the Bureau of Reclamation, too arid for trees. Hard up against the hundredth meridian, Hastings occupies America’s agricultural DMZ. Neither God nor government has taken it under its wing. Disaster is Hastings’s stock-in-trade—that and dullness. “The capriciousness of nature is the one thing that livens that place up,” says Dominy. “When they aren’t talking crop prices or tattling on their neighbors, all anyone talks about is the weather.” Hastings is tornado country (one of the few double-funneled tornadoes ever seen was photographed near there), baseball-size-hail country, banshee blizzard country, drought-without-end country. The region’s whole economy can be drained by a summer’s drought, dashed by an afternoon’s hailstorm. The anarchy of nature may be one reason why most of Hastings’s residents—Republican or Democrat, dry farmer or irrigation farmer, city dweller or country dweller—devoutly believe that man should exercise as much dominion over the earth as he can. Hastings, Nebraska: birthplace of Floyd Dominy, future Commissioner of Reclamation.
Floyd was headstrong and impulsive—“an independent cuss from the beginning.” He was an above-average but somewhat uninterested student, and his intelligence was more obvious than evident in his grades. His distinguishing characteristic was self-reliance. Floyd had great confidence in himself. At the age of eleven, he could manhandle a neighbor’s two-thousand-pound Belgian draft horses as if they were a pair of pygmy ponies. He fixed things, ran things, organized things. Other children respected and feared him. To most children, the home is a refuge from a dangerous world; in Floyd’s case, it was the other way around. Compared to home, shadowed by gloom and rumbling with thunder, the world was a sunlit place.
“I always felt there was a contradiction between my parents’ fussing and fuming and their Christian piety,” he says. “It seemed inconsistent to me. As a boy, I was very moral. I was president of my Sunday school class. I thought money was the root of evil. If someone had offered me a job paying $300 a year for life, I would have taken it. When I first married Alice, I made her take off her lipstick if we went out for the evening.
“I’m an enigma, even to myself.”
At seventeen, Floyd fell in love. Her name was Alice Criswell. She was sweet, demure, and very pretty, a little heroine