Cadillac Desert_ The American West and Its Disappearing Water - Marc Reisner [142]
For Floyd and Alice, the first two and a half years in Campbell County meant a life-style a cut above that of his ancestors when they arrived in Nebraska in 1873. They lived in a stone dugout built into a hillside; they had a gasoline lantern and a coal-burning stove, but no windows. “The place had been abandoned for thirty years. It was vandalized. The house had a leaning chimney and big holes in the floor. I was being paid $130 a month, plus five cents a mile for the car. The guy who owned the hovel was named Mr. Bartles. He was as bald as a billiard ball. I said, ‘What’s the rent?’ He said, ‘You’re crazy wanting to live there in the first place. I’m not going to let you live there and charge you rent.’ ”
Dominy didn’t quite achieve his goal of staying five years in Campbell County; he finally succumbed to an offer from the Agricultural Adjustment Administration to help administer the nation’s increasingly complex farm program, working as a field agent for the western states. In 1942, he transferred to the Inter-American Affairs Bureau, working under Nelson Rockefeller. The war effort demanded immense quantities of bauxite, rubber, and cinchona, most of it coming out of the Caribbean and South America. Tens of thousands of miners and loggers were dumped in the middle of the jungle without enough to eat. Instant farms became Dominy’s specialty. He set them up in nine Central and South American countries, and, later, on the islands of Saipan, Tinian, Iwo Jima, and Peleliu as they were recaptured from the Japanese.
In March of 1946, Dominy was back from the Pacific. Reviewing his career on a homebound ship, he decided that nothing had been as satisfying as building all those dams in Campbell County. It was one thing to hack a farm out of a jungle clearing—that was brutal and monotonous work, requiring neither brains nor talent. It was quite another thing to build a dam, store the water, and make the desert bloom. That, in a small way, was changing the order of the universe. On the same day he returned to Washington, Dominy went to a phone booth and put in a call to the Bureau of Reclamation. He had a job in three hours.
As a land-development specialist for the Bureau, Dominy proved his mettle quickly. His experience helped, as did his prodigious energy, but Dominy also had something a great many of the Bureau’s engineers lacked—a knack with people. “It was two things,” he says. “First, I cared about making these projects work. The engineers would build the dam and the irrigation features and walk away from it. They felt the projects were supposed to work out by themselves. When I got there, we had projects failing all over the place. The Bureau would send a threat out to the farmers to shape up, then forget about them for five years. No one took us seriously. Well, by God, they took me seriously. I was tough, but they saw I cared about their problems. That was number two. I proved myself right away. One of our early projects in big trouble was Milk River in Montana. The regional director, Ken Vernon, had revised the repayment contract under political pressure and it was a complete giveaway. I had moved up to Allocation and Repayment then, and I sent him a blistering letter about it. Vernon was several ranks above me and he couldn’t believe it. He called up Goodrich Lineweaver, my superior, and made himself hoarse chewing him out. ‘Who is this goddamned upstart?’ Lineweaver thought he could put me in my place by sending me to negotiate a better deal. He was sure I’d fail. So I went out to Montana. I saw these old farmers lined up in a room like a country church. They were hostile as hell. I demanded that tables and chairs be brought in. I gave them all pencils and a scratch pad and something to drink.