Cadillac Desert_ The American West and Its Disappearing Water - Marc Reisner [331]
But not for long.
Jerry Brown, who was governor at the time, decided to intercede personally with Mark Dubois, promising to try to hold the reservoir below the Parrot’s Ferry Bridge, and Dubois, who had told a single emissary where he was and given him a padlock key, walked out of his hiding place. Between its clenched teeth, the Corps mumbled something about respecting the will of the governor of a sovereign state, which was its way of saying it would just wait everyone out. During 1982, the heavy rains and snows of the late 1970s returned. The Corps’s and the Bureau’s constituency—mostly conservative farmers and Republican towns with a God-given right to subsidized water and power and free flood control—staged demonstrations in Sacramento after releases from New Melones Dam overtopped the river levees and began flooding their fields. Jerry Brown, possessing one of the shortest attention spans of any politician who ever lived, soon lost interest in the whole mess. The Bureau of Reclamation, which was supposed to market the water in the reservoir the Corps got to build, complained about all the waste—even though it hadn’t signed a single contract to sell any of the water and had no means of getting it to any of the growers who allegedly wanted it. But this only meant that, if the reservoir was filled, southern California, by default, had a new water supply. What did a bunch of rafters matter, stacked against this? New Melones Lake had filled all of Camp Nine Gorge by the following spring. Another river that had flowed wild for hundreds of thousands of years was a memory.
Coincidentally or not, however, the filling of New Melones Lake brought the first Age of Dams to a close—at least in the American West. In California, virtually nothing has been built since. It has been the same everywhere else. The Narrows Dam in Colorado, Orme Dam in Arizona, the Garrison Project in North Dakota, O’Neill Dam in Nebraska, Auburn Dam, the North Coast dams—none of the projects whose construction seemed likely when I began writing this book exists. There has been no NAWAPA-scale apotheosis; it’s hardly mentioned anymore. The dam-building machine didn’t even coast down like a turbine going off-peak. It just suddenly fell apart.
So many factors have played a role that it’s hard to judge which mattered most. You have to give some credit to Mark Dubois: Like Rosa Parks climbing defiantly aboard her segregated bus, he started something that couldn’t be quelled. Millions of people who had never seen the Stanislaus River found themselves feeling upset, if not infuriated, over its loss. Among environmentalists, “Remember the Stanislaus” is what “Stay the Course” was to the Reagan faithful. Meanwhile, river recreation—rafting, kayaking, fishing, just watching the river go—boomed all through the Eighties, in a way that hauling a sinister, gas-guzzling fighter jet of a motorboat to the local mudflat did not. (Wallace Stegner estimates that about five thousand Americans who were alive in the 1930s had ever floated a whitewater river; by the early 1990s, thirty-five million had.) Rafting is fairly big business in states like Colorado, where whitewater companies advertise on billboards that once promoted agricultural chemicals, shale oil development, or Wayne Aspinall. Having a captive audience helps: A couple of days spent floating a beautiful, threatened river can turn whole families into environmental radicals where the fate of that river is concerned.
But the water lobby itself deserves most of the credit for its sudden drought of opportunities. Back in the days when most members of Congress cheerfully voted for each other’s dams, the