Cadillac Desert_ The American West and Its Disappearing Water - Marc Reisner [144]
Dominy approached the problem in a somewhat schizophrenic way. Privately, he was appalled by the lassitude of the Reclamation program, by the indifference of the engineers to its problems, and by the hypocrisy of members of Congress who voted for bad projects as special favors to colleagues and then griped about the money they were losing. At the same time, he was, in public, the program’s most belligerent defender after Mike Straus. His defenses were so eloquent he even came to believe them himself.
Once a prominent Senator from South Dakota, Chan Gurney, sent Straus a copy of an article that was witheringly critical of the Belle Fourche Project in his own state, implying that he agreed with it. For years, Belle Fourche had been perhaps the Bureau’s preeminent fiasco. Streamflow calculations and reservoir carryover capacity were based on nine months of gauging during a wet year; when the drought of the 1930s came, the reservoir was dry within months. No investigation had been made of the need for drainage, which was turning out to be a terrific problem the farmers could not begin to pay to solve. Farmers settling the project were not selected on the basis of character, aptitude, or available capital, and the vast majority of them were bankrupt within a few years. Even with the Bureau forgiving almost all their obligations, many of the farmers were going broke. They were still receiving water, however, so the project was technically in violation of the law. Congressmen hostile to the Reclamation program loved to crucify Belle Fourche at appropriations time; it was like stoning a flightless auk. Even blustery Mike Straus was going to send Gurney a milquetoast letter in response. When he reread the draft that had been prepared by an aide, however, he couldn’t bear to do it. So Dominy volunteered.
Of course the project was in deep trouble, Dominy wrote. It was planned at the turn of the century, one of the first large-scale irrigation ventures since the Fertile Crescent. There was hardly any experience to go on. Records of North America’s climate scarcely existed. But it was Congress, not the Bureau, that had been especially anxious to get the Reclamation program underway—that was the main reason Belle Fourche was undertaken on such a paucity of data. It was Congress, not the Bureau, that had established impossibly short repayment periods, that had failed to appropriate funds for demonstration projects. It was Congress that demanded projects in areas where the value of agriculture wasn’t worth the cost of irrigation, making subsidies inevitable. The point was the project was there. Thousands of South Dakotans depended on it; they had helped feed the country when the state’s dryland farmers were utterly ruined. What would the Senator do? Shut it down? Tear down the dam? Kick defaulting farmers off their lands and onto the relief rolls? Or would he help the Bureau come up with solutions to put the Reclamation program on a sound foundation? After all, if anyone was embarrassed by the Belle Fourche Project, it was the Bureau. Did the Senator believe that the greatest amalgamation of professional talent in the government was glad when its projects became financial disasters? “Straus read that letter and loved it so much he read it twice again,” Dominy chuckled. “He didn’t change one word. I was in thick with him from that point on. We really blew smoke up that Senator’s ass.”
Dominy had the instincts of a first-rate miler. He could pace himself beautifully, moving on the margin of recklessness but always with power in reserve. He knew when to cut off a runner, when to throw an elbow, when to sprint. He also knew that there was nothing like a grudge to make him run harder.
If Dominy harbored a lifelong grudge, it was against engineers. Away from their drafting tables, he thought, engineers could be inexcusably stupid. On the other hand, they had a mystical ability to erect huge structures along exact lines, using bizarre formulas he could not even read. They could map a river basin, analyze some abutment rocks, measure the