Cadillac Desert_ The American West and Its Disappearing Water - Marc Reisner [330]
On May 20, 1979, an enormously tall, charismatic, and obsessed young man named Mark Dubois hiked into the canyon of the Stanislaus River, concealed himself near the river’s edge, threw a length of chain around an undercut boulder, padlocked the ends of the chain together, tossed the key into the river, and leaned back against the boulder, waiting to drown.
The flood that was going to submerge Mark Dubois within a day or two wasn’t moving downriver from the thick snowfields melting rapidly in the Sierra Nevada. This was a flood moving in reverse, up the river. A few months earlier, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers had closed the gates of New Melones Dam, its most recent snub of nature, a mammoth rockpile wedged in Iron Canyon a few miles downriver. The reservoir had already submerged the older, much smaller Melones Dam and its reservoir, and now its tentacles of turbid water were creeping up the side creeks and the main river itself. Dubois had concealed himself somewhere in Camp Nine Gorge, nine miles of superlative Class Three whitewater that could have been conceived by Disneyworld engineers on amphetamines; after the Youghgighenny River in Pennsylvania, it was the most popular rafting and kayaking run in the United States. Dubois, an expert boater and evangelical environmentalist, was the sort of fixture on this river that old Harry Truman was on the slopes of Mount St. Helens before it buried him in volcanic ash—you could hardly think of the Stanislaus River without thinking of Mark Dubois. He had invested ten years of his life battling New Melones Dam, and for a while it almost looked as if he might win. But in the Seventies, in a contest with the Corps, the Bureau of Reclamation, and California’s unquenchable irrigation lobby, he and his minions really had no chance. They were the cavalry; he was the Sioux; the chain and padlock were his Wounded Knee.
By then the Corps’s regional hierarchy knew Dubois almost intimately and chose not to undervalue his inhuman will. If he said he was prepared to die, he probably was. Within thirty hours, the spill gates of the dam were opened, and a posse of searchers combed the river canyon on foot, by helicopter, and in rafts, trying to find his hiding spot. Even though some of them must have passed within a few yards of it, they did not. Meanwhile, the whole story had blown around the world—Dubois was being compared to the monks who incinerated themselves in Vietnam—and reporters and people from all over the place were roaring toward the Stanislaus to see what the fuss was all about.
I was one of the first of them, and, probably for the only time in my life, I saw a river born again. A short distance below the old Parrott’s Ferry Bridge, where eighty thousand boaters had hauled out in the river’s final year, was a small bouncy rapids, an effervescence of frothy, jumping haystack waves. On the morning of May 21, the reservoir was beginning to eat through them. I sat on the bank and watched. One after another, the big waves flattened out, their booming stilled, their splashing stopped ... then they disappeared under gurgling little whirlpools, and where there had been rapids minutes earlier the river went dead calm.