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By Root 1776 0

In the early 1970s, however, the tide of fortune changed. Wayne Aspinall, the chairman of the House Interior Committee, was growing old and politically vulnerable, and Narrows, it seemed, was to be his swan song. The imperious old schoolteacher began pushing it so relentlessly that he even refused to let the project’s opponents testify before his House Interior Committee. At the same time, the first OPEC oil crisis hit, and everyone began eyeing Colorado’s huge reserves of oil shale. Some Coloradans seemed to want to turn the state into an energy colony and grow rich off it; others wanted to lock up as much water as possible so the oil, coal, and uranium industies would be forced to remain relatively small and the state’s rural character, what was left of it, would remain fairly intact. One of the main adherents of the latter view was the new governor, Richard D. Lamm; an even stronger adherent was his commissioner of natural resources, Harris Sherman. The fact that Narrows was nowhere near the shale oil and uranium was somehow lost. What mattered was giving the state’s unappropriated water to agriculture and locking it up, as best one could, now and forever.

As Midas turned everything he touched into gold, the Narrows Project had a miraculous ability to turn everyone it touched into someone else. It turned a crew-cut, rawboned young farmer like Don Christenson into an environmentalist. It turned a handsome young environmentalist like Senator Gary Hart into an avid water developer. Above all, it turned perhaps the three most powerful men in Colorado into bitter enemies.

One of the three was Glenn Saunders, the chief counsel for the Denver Water Board. A brilliant man with a silver tongue, Saunders had, for more than thirty years, been the water lawyer in a state where water lawyers wield power that makes them objects of profound respect. Under his tutelage, the Denver Water Board had become a kind of understudy of the Metropolitan Water District of Los Angeles: a well-oiled, well-funded suprapolitical machine trying to purloin water from every corner of the state, all in the interest of turning Denver into the Los Angeles of the Rockies—a goal which has been largely achieved. In a strictly legal sense, of course, the Water Board didn’t steal water. But cross the Front Range and go into the mountains, where most of Colorado’s water originates, and the response to a mention of the Denver Water Board is likely to be an oath.

Saunders was the perfect symbol of this rough-and-tumble political machine. With his Dickensian visage, in his checked suits and pastel shirts and vivid ties, he was the city sharpie making ruthless inroads into the virgin old West—terrifying witnesses in the docket, shouting down citizens at public hearings, and always scheming, pushing, plotting for more dams.

The second of the three men was Clarence J. Kuiper, who, through most of the 1970s, served as Colorado’s state engineer. In a state such as Colorado, where both ground and surface water are regulated and everyone wants more than there is, the state engineer is a combination of judge, jury, and cop. He decides what is a reasonable diversion to each farm; he decides who can put in a well and how much he can pump; he decides when a diverter can no longer divert during a drought and when a pumper can no longer pump; he makes sure enough water reaches neighboring states to satisfy compact agreements; and, in the course of making such decisions, he wins the wrath and, if he does his job honestly and well—as Kuiper did—the grudging admiration of every water user in the state. Kuiper’s whole life had been spent in water development: first as a young engineer in Turkey, for whose government the Bureau was building dams; later as a consulting engineer for the state of Wyoming, for which he drew up a water plan; and, finally, as Colorado’s viceroy of water. A gigantic man whose ponderous gait and basso profundo voice bely a quick and encompassing intellect, Kuiper was light-years from being a conservationist. He was a water developer and an admirer of