Cadillac Desert_ The American West and Its Disappearing Water - Marc Reisner [267]
The South Platte is one of two rivers left in Colorado that isn’t utterly and irrevocably appropriated, now and forever. To a state which is second to California in the arid West in population, industry, and irrigated acreage—but which has at its disposal about one-tenth as much water—the fact that some 7 percent of its share of the river still escapes to Nebraska is a fact of overarching significance. That the Bureau of Reclamation has offered to build an enormous dam across it to attempt to correct that situation is another. This last glimmering promise, in the face of a hopeless, nonnegotiable finality, has been enough to lead the members of Colorado’s political establishment into a world of fantasy, leaving both their senses and their principles behind.
Don Christenson’s crew cut stands up about an inch and a half, like a brush. A three-hundred-pound bear could nest down in that hair for the night and in the morning, after the bear lumbered off, it would spring right back up. The rest of Christenson fits the hairstyle: he is lean, weathered, bronzed as a Comanche. His jaw is made of cast iron. The one anomaly in his all-American countenance is a thick, voluptuous set of lips. In 1979, at the annual Conference on Rivers and Water Policy in Washington, D.C.—better known as the Damfighters’ Conference—Christenson, surrounded by longhairs, environmental lawyers, bureaucrats, and kayakers, stood out like the man from Mars.
Christenson’s presence at the Damfighters’ Conference was a signal event. Unofficially, he was the first verifiable irrigation farmer who had ever attended the conference. He was probably one of the first who had ever opposed a dam, but he had a good reason. The Bureau of Reclamation, having nearly run out of decent damsites, had finally decided to turn the Reclamation Act inside out. It was going to flood out a bunch of small farmers so it could give supplemental water to a bunch of bigger farmers, several of whom would be in violation of the Reclamation Act. Christenson was one of the small farmers, and he was the one with the biggest mouth, so the Bureau wanted to drown him with a vengeance.
When Don Christenson’s father settled in the Weldon Valley in 1926, there was already talk of a big dam at the Narrows of the South Platte, four or five miles downstream from his land. The first serious proposal seems to have emerged in 1908. The farm, the whole town of Weldona, and everything else from bluff to bluff for thirteen miles was to go under, but the elder Christenson refused to let the prospect faze him. “Dad would tell us, ‘Maybe they are gonna build it. But maybe they’re not gonna build it. Maybe they’re gonna build it but they’re not gonna build it for thirty years. I’m not going to sit here and let the goddamned government worry me to death. We’re gonna farm our land and live a normal life and keep our property up, and to hell with them.’ ” His prophecy was remarkable. Finally authorized in 1944 as one of three-hundred-odd projects in the Pick-Sloan Act, the Narrows Project had still not been built forty years later.
The senior Christenson’s attitude managed to infect all three of his sons, who raise their crops, paint their houses, fix their equipment, and otherwise carry on as