Cadillac Desert_ The American West and Its Disappearing Water - Marc Reisner [159]
Two interesting questions are raised by Dominy’s response. One is whether he really had enough influence with the Sacramento Bee to enlist it in an orchestrated campaign to perfume the Bureau’s reputation. One also wonders what he had in mind when he spoke of Reclamation projects “enhancing” fish and wildlife habitat in the Central Valley. By the mid-1960s, nearly 90 percent of the valley’s wetlands habitat was gone, almost entirely because of irrigation farming, and wetlands were by far the most important natural feature in all its five-hundred-mile length; the valley was once the winter destination of a hundred million waterfowl cruising the Pacific Flyway, and now their numbers were reduced to five or six million, jammed onto refuges or forced to scrounge a meal in unwelcoming farmers’ fields. The Sacramento-San Joaquin river system once had six thousand miles of salmon spawning streams, but by the mid-1960s there were perhaps six hundred miles left, and it was the Bureau’s dams, cemented across rivers low down in the foothills, that blocked the salmon most effectively. So what had the Bureau done to “enhance” fish and wildlife resources? At best, it had created a series of slack-water reservoirs that were host to such rough fish as catfish, crappie, and bass, plus some trout and an occasional landlocked salmon. The reservoirs were useless to ducks and geese, which couldn’t feed in their deep waters and would be driven mad by the powerboats anyway.
Those reservoirs, however, were the only thing Dominy could have had in mind, unless he had completely lost touch. To him, it seemed, nothing in nature was worthwhile unless it was visited by a lot of people. If it was a pristine river, accessible only by floatplane or jeep or on foot, navigable only by whitewater raft or kayak or canoe, populated by wily fish such as steelhead that were difficult to catch, then it was no good. But if the river was transformed into a big flatwater reservoir off an interstate highway, with marinas and houseboats for rent—then it was worth something after all.
There was, for example, Lake Powell. Before Glen Canyon Dam had been built, that stretch of the Colorado River was one of the remotest, most inaccessible places in the United States. Only a few thousand people had seen it. Utterly unlike the turbulent reaches of the Grand Canyon, Glen Canyon was a stretch of quiet water drifting sinuously between smooth, rainbow-colored cliffs. Labyrinthine and cool, some of the canyons were as lush as a tropical forest, utterly incongruous in the desert. All of this was drowned by Lake Powell, but to demonstrate how nature had actually been improved, Dominy decided to publish a book called Lake Powell: Jewel of the Colorado. He even decided to take the photographs and write the text himself. “Dear God,” he wrote on the inside cover, “did you cast down two hundred miles of canyon and mark: ‘For poets only’? Multitudes hunger for a lake in the sun.” He went on:
How can I describe the sculpture and colors along Lake Powell’s shores? Over eons of time, wind and rain have carved the sandstone into shapes to please 10,000 eyes. The graceful, the dramatic, the grand, the fantastic. Evolution into convolution and involution. Sharp edges, blunt edges, soaring edges, spires, cliffs, and castles in the sky.... Like a string of pearls ten modern recreation areas will line Lake Powell’s shores, with names that have the tang of the Old West.... Feel like exploring? Hundreds of side canyons—where few ever trod before the lake formed—are yours.... You have a front-row seat in an amphitheater of infinity.... Orange sandstone fades to dusky red—then to blackest black....