Cadillac Desert_ The American West and Its Disappearing Water - Marc Reisner [198]
“Add all this nonsense to Congress’s interest-free loan for distribution systems and some other things they’re bound to cook up, and it’s all of a piece,” Steiger said with palpable disgust. “They’ll skin the cat twenty ways if they have to, but they’re going to make the water affordable. Congress will go along, because it will be goddamned embarrassing for Congress to have authorized a multibillion-dollar water project when there’s no demand for the water because no one can afford it. The CAP belongs to a holy order of inevitability. Will Congress bail out the big banks that pushed all those loans on Latin America, when the countries finally default? Of course. Will it make water affordable for Arizona’s farmers? Of course.
“The sensible thing would have been for the farmers to move,” Steiger said. “There are hundreds of thousands of acres of good farmland right along the Colorado River where you’d only have to build short diversion canals and maybe pump the water uphill a few hundred feet. But the farmers got established in the central part of the state because of the Salt River Project. The cities grew up in the middle of the farmland. The real estate interests, the money people—they’re all in Phoenix and Scottsdale and Tucson. They didn’t want to move. So we’re going to move the river to them. At any cost. We think.”
CHAPTER NINE
The Peanut Farmer and the Pork Barrel
At the restaurant in the Dillard Motor Hotel in Clayton, Georgia, a little town in a mountainous northern corner of that state, a yellowed old newspaper clipping has been posted by the telephone for years. The story includes a photo showing two men in an open canoe going through Bull Sluice, a Class V rapids on the Chattooga, one of the South’s preeminent whitewater streams. According to the official classification system of the American Whitewater Affiliation, a Class V rapids consists of “extremely difficult, long, and very violent rapids with highly congested routes which nearly always must be scouted from shore. Rescue conditions are difficult and there is significant hazard to life in event of a mishap.” In the photo, the man in the stern of the canoe looks scared to death, but the man in the bow has a look of grim, Annapolis determination on his face—as if he were smoking out a nest of wasps. According to the story, which is dated sometime in 1972, this was the first run of Bull Sluice in an open canoe, ever. Others have their doubts about that—which is, of course, to be expected on a river with this sort of reputation—but most everyone acknowledges that even if they were not the very first, they were among the first.
The man in the stern is Claude Terry, an expert local river runner. The man in the bow is the governor of Georgia, Jimmy Carter.
The lore of the South could not survive without rivers any better than the human body could survive without blood. Rivers wind through Twain’s and Faulkner’s and James Dickey’s prose; they flow out of Stephen Foster’s lyrics. Yet it is the South, more than any region except California, that has become a landscape of reservoirs, and southerners, more than anyone else, are still at the grand old work of destroying their rivers. With one hand they dam them; with the other they channelize them; the two actions cancel each other out—the channelized streams promote the floods the dams were built to prevent—and the whole spectacle is viewed by some as a perpetual employment