Cadillac Desert_ The American West and Its Disappearing Water - Marc Reisner [79]
The Colorado has a significance that goes beyond mere prominence. It was on this river that the first of the world’s truly great dams was built—a dam which gave engineers the confidence to dam the Columbia, the Volga, the Paraná, the Niger, the Nile, the Zambezi, and most of the world’s great rivers. The dam rose up at the depths of the Depression and carried America’s spirits with it. Its electricity helped produce the ships and planes that won the Second World War, and its water helped grow the food. From such illustrious and hopeful beginnings, however, the tale of human intervention in the Colorado River degenerates into a chronicle of hubris and obtuseness. Today, even though the Colorado still resembles a river only in its upper reaches and its Grand Canyon stretch—even as hydrologists amuse themselves by speculating about how many times each molecule of water has passed through pairs of kidneys—it is still unable to satisfy all the demands on it, so it is referred to as a “deficit” river, as if the river were somehow at fault for its overuse. And though there are plans to relieve the “deficit”—plans to import water from as far away as Alaska—the twenty million people in the Colorado Basin will probably find themselves facing chronic shortages, if not some kind of catastrophe, before any of these grandiose schemes is built—if, indeed, one is ever built.
One could almost say, then, that the history of the Colorado River contains a metaphor for our time. One could say that the age of great expectations was inaugurated at Hoover Dam—a fifty-year flowering of hopes when all things appeared possible. And one could say that, amid the salt-encrusted sands of the river’s dried-up delta, we began to founder on the Era of Limits.
In terms of annual flow, the Colorado isn’t a big river—in the United States it does not even rank among the top twenty-five—but, like a forty-pound wolverine that can drive a bear off its dinner, it is unrivaled for sheer orneriness. The virgin Colorado was tempestuous, willful, headstrong. Its flow varied psychotically between a few thousand cubic feet per second and a couple of hundred thousand, sometimes within a few days. Draining a vast, barren watershed whose rains usually come in deluges, its sediment volume was phenomenal. If the river, running high, were diverted through an ocean liner with a cheesecloth strainer at one end, it would have filled the ship with mud in an afternoon. The silt would begin to settle about two hundred miles above the Gulf of California, below the last of the Grand Canyon’s rapids, where the river’s gradient finally moderated for good. There was so much silt that it raised the entire riverbed, foot by foot, year by year, until the Colorado slipped out of its loose confinement of low sandy bluffs and tore off in some other direction, instantly digging a new course. It developed an affection for several such channels, returning to them again and again—Bee River, New River, Alamo River, big braided washes that sat dry and expectant in the desert, waiting for the river to return. The New and Alamo channels drove into Mexico, then veered back north into the United States, a hundred-mile semi-loop, and ended at the foot of the Chocolate Mountains, where the delinquent river would form a huge evanescent body of water called the Salton Sea. After a while, the New and Alamo channels would themselves silt up and the Colorado would throw itself back into its old bed and return to the Gulf of California, much to the relief of the great schools of shrimp, the clouds of waterfowl, and the thousands of cougars, jaguars, and bobcats that prowled its delta. The Salton Sea would slowly evaporate and life would return to normal, for a while. The river went on such errant flings every few