Cadillac Desert_ The American West and Its Disappearing Water - Marc Reisner [282]
Repeating the story, Don Christenson mused, “If that’s the way they run a railroad, then this country hasn’t got any hope.”
Meanwhile, in Denver, Clarence Kuiper had taken early retirement. “The Narrows thing got so annoying to me I couldn’t stand it, so I retired,” Kuiper says. “I’ve lived too long to put up with that sort of nonsense.” Early in 1984, he was no less convinced than ever that Narrows, if built, stood a respectable chance of collapsing like Teton—an issue that had become all but lost in the minutiae of the debate. “Unless they extend that grout curtain a hell of a lot farther than they plan to, they’re going to get seepage, just like they did at Teton. Seepage is one of the worst things that can happen to an earthfill dam. I’d rather have water going over the top in a waterfall than chewing away at my abutments. That’s still the number-one issue as far as I am concerned.”
Neither the Lamm administration nor the Bureau was ready to listen to Kuiper. Lamm, however, had finally found a way to get even. The firm with which Kuiper now serves as a consultant, the Harza Engineering Company of Chicago, was the other contender, with Woodward-Clyde, for the lucrative South Platte Basin Alternatives study in 1982. Because of Kuiper’s relationship with Harza, it didn’t get it. Suave Bill McDonald, who relieved the intemperate Felix Sparks of his command of the Colorado Water Conservation Board, put it right into his letter. Unless Harza dumped Kuiper as a consultant, it stood no chance of getting the contract. As far as Kuiper is concerned, he is being blackballed throughout the state. “They’ve stolen a man’s livelihood,” he says. “My pension isn’t enough to live on. I know this state as well as anyone, but they’ve made my name mud.”
If one were to put an epitaph on this story, one might do no better than to quote Glenn Saunders, the man who championed water development for fifty years in Colorado and then, in the end, came up against a project he wanted to kill—and couldn’t. As he readily admits, it changed his whole way of looking at things.
To Glenn Saunders, Narrows Dam was not so much a dam as a symbol of a senescent society seeking refuge in the past. “What that dam represents,” he said, “is, first of all, the fact that there are very few honest people in the world. Ninety-eight percent of humanity cannot admit when it’s made a mistake. This applies especially to politicians. A politician for some reason thinks it is political suicide to admit that he was wrong. Dick Lamm cannot bring himself to admit that he has been in error about Narrows. He has one of the finest minds in Colorado, his thinking on some subjects is some of the best thinking any politician in this age is capable of—but he cannot bring himself to say, ‘I was wrong on the Narrows Dam.’
“The Bureau is the same way,” Saunders went on. “It cannot admit when it has made a mistake. It has also run out of good projects. And on top of that it has all of these bizarre cash-register funds—the Missouri Basin Fund, which is behind the Narrows—that are supposed to make these projects self-financing. They do not, but no one understands that. The Bureau is like one of these crooks with money earning interest in twenty different banks—it has to spend the money on something. It is all borrowed money—it belongs to the people of the United States—but the people of the United States don’t know that. The whole thing is a machine, a perpetual-motion machine that keeps churning out dams, which the politicians and most westerners are reflexively in favor of, and the whole business is running the country into the ground.
“The people who support these boondoggle projects are always talking about the vision and principles that made this country great. ‘Our forefathers would have built these projects!’ they say. ‘They had vision!’ That’s pure nonsense. It wasn’t the vision and principles of our forefathers that made this country great. It was the huge