Cadillac Desert (39 page)

The Bureau’s project, Devil’s Canyon Dam on the Susitna River, was, by contrast, almost invisible. But it was still huge: a high plug in a great canyon on the river which ranked sixteenth in the United States in terms of annual flow, Devil’s Canyon would produce hundreds and hundreds of megawatts of power, depending on how high it was built. In Alaska, it was second only to Rampart as a hydropower site.

The Bureau’s dam would drown Devil’s Canyon, a remote stretch of almost unbelievable wildwater rapids about a hundred miles north of Anchorage. Even fish couldn’t navigate those rapids, and no sane person would try—although in the mid 1970s, a group of kayakers led by Dr. Walt Blackadar, a fifty-three-year-old surgeon from Salmon, Idaho, did, and succeeded, at least in the sense that none of them died. Devil’s Canyon’s value was mere spectacle, even if it was the greatest spectacle of whitewater on the North American continent.

Rampart Dam, however, was an ecological disaster probably without precedent in the world. It would drown the entire Yukon Flats, a sightless plain of marshes, bogs, and small shallow lakes that nurtures more ducks than
all of the United States
below the Canadian border. In its report on the project, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service stated, “Nowhere in the history of water development in North America have the fish and wildlife losses anticipated to result from a single project been so overwhelming.” At least a million and a half ducks were contributed to the North American flyways by the Yukon Flats, besides 12,500 geese, thousands of swans, an estimated ten thousand little brown cranes, eagles, sandhill cranes, osprey, and moose—thousands and thousands of moose, to which such boggy habitat was pure paradise. The ducks, the moose, the geese, and the swans all required drowned lands, shallow wet habitat, and the Yukon Flats were the greatest continuous expanse of it in North America.

There were salmon. More than a quarter of a million salmon passed through Rampart Canyon every year, some of them destined to go through two time zones to spawning tributaries all the way across Alaska and into Canada. A high dam would end their migration, irrevocably. The Corps’ plan to lift them out and carry them across the 250-mile reservoir in barges wouldn’t help, because the tiny fry couldn’t possibly navigate such a vast body of slack water on their way back to the sea.

There were also furbearing animals—wolverines, lynx, weasels, martins, muskrat, otter, mink, beaver—animals which were the livelihood, to greater or lesser degrees, of most of the Yukon people. Some forty thousand pelts, accoridng to the Fish and Wildlife Service, could be taken from the area to be covered by the reservoir on a sustained-yield basis every year.

And there were people—twelve hundred of them in the taking area, another eight or nine thousand whose livelihoods would be drastically affected, by either the drowning of animal habitat or the end of the salmon runs. Many of those people were Canadian citizens, many others were American Indians and Eskimos who had been promised, by treaty, a land that could sustain them forever. The Corps was promising jobs building the dam, jobs in the tourist industry, jobs in the lake trout fishery that was supposed to replace the salmon. Those were promises; what was already there had sustained their ancestors for five hundred generations.

The whole idea behind Rampart Dam was to turn Alaska, overnight, into an industrial subcontinent. Five million kilowatts were enough to heat and light Anchorage and ten other cities its size, with power left over for a large aluminum smelter, a large munitions plant, a couple of pulp and paper mills, a refinery, perhaps even a uranium-enrichment facility tucked safely away in the wilderness—and even then, about half of the power would be left over for export. But that was the problem. Export where? The dam made sense only if all of the power could be immediately sold.

Realistically speaking, the dam made no sense at all. Neither did Devil’s Canyon Dam. The last thing Alaska had to worry about was an energy crisis. It had 300,000 inhabitants; its population could fit inside a few square blocks of Manhattan. Even then, before the gigantic North Slope oil field was discovered, it had proven oil reserves estimated at 170 million barrels (the North Slope was to increase the figure by some ten billion more). It had 360 million board-feet of timber; the driftwood floating down the Susitna River seemed enough fuel to fulfill Anchorage’s needs. It had, right around Anchorage, some of the most dramatic tidal variations in the world; the difference between high and low tide approached twenty feet, and a single tidal project taking advantage of similar conditions at DeRance, France, was producing hundreds of megawatts, more than Anchorage (which held half of Alaska’s population) would need for decades. Mainly, though, it had plenty of smaller hydroelectric sites scattered about, some of them practically at Anchorage’s doorstep. They should be developed first—that was the “orderly” water development the water planners were always talking about.

The problem was simply that Alaska might have to build those itself.

Behind their fiercely independent stance, Alaskans, in the 1960s, were a people completely dependent on Washington, D.C. Their major industry, after fishing, was the U.S. military; their third major industry was the rest of the U.S. government. Alaskans spoke of their state as a “colony,” but as colonies go they had themselves a pretty good thing, and they exhibited all the character traits of colonial people—which is to say that they wanted to exploit “their” resources for themselves, but expected the federal government to pay the cost.

Senator Ernest Gruening, formerly a governor of the state, was the main booster of Rampart; he lobbied for it with a zeal that bordered on the fanatic. Behind him were pressure groups like Yukon Power for America, or the more picturesque North of the Range association, which said in its brochures that Alaska’s future depended on “coming forward with both guns blazing.” What mattered most to the boosters was that Rampart was an opportunity—the first real opportunity—to leave mankind’s mark on a place that held it in magnificent contempt. George Sundborg, Gruening’s administrative assistant, dismissed the area to be drowned by the dam as practically worthless; there were “not more than ten flush toilets in it.” Gruening went further: it was totally worthless. “[T]he Yukon Flats,” he wrote, “—a mammoth swamp—from the standpoint of human habitability is about as worthless and useless an area as can be found in the path of any hydroelectric development. Scenically it is zero. In fact, it is one of the few really ugly areas in a land prodigal with sensational beauty.”

And, since these were the 1960s, and since this was the army that wanted to build the project, there may have been a further consideration working behind Rampart Dam. Ernest Gruening had, he said, recently returned from Russia, where he had seen “hydroelectric power dams larger than the largest in America.” The dam, then, was to be a monument against Communism; and if it made it any easier to build it, one might as well note that the ducks whose habitat would be drowned were Communist ducks—many of them migrated to Siberia. Did it make sense, a director of Yukon Power of America asked, “to mollify these feathered defectors”? It is hard to judge whether or not he was serious.

It is also hard to say, in retrospect, how close Rampart Dam ever came to being built. The odds are, moderately close. But Floyd Dominy killed it.

If the dam was built, the Bureau would have no future in the last place where there were still plenty of big damsites left. Congress wouldn’t authorize another dam there for decades; the power probably wouldn’t be needed for two hundred years. That was the argument Dominy used, and used brilliantly. With Stewart Udall’s enthusiastic blessing, Dominy had the Bureau turn all of its guns on Rampart Dam—the planning division, the hydroelectric division, the demo-graphics branch: everyone who had some expertise that could cripple Rampart’s chances was enlisted in the cause. In 1967, the Interior Department produced its Rampart report, a document nearly a hundred pages long, complete with appendices and reams of supporting documentaton in the files. The report demonstrated that Rampart power had to be sold immediately or the project would be a financial fiasco of the first order. But it also showed that the power market projected by the Corps and the local boosters couldn’t possibly develop within the state—not in twenty years, not in fifty, perhaps never. Shipped to the nearest market—the Pacific Northwest—the power couldn’t possibly sell at competitive prices; the cost of
transmission alone
would be more than people were paying, more even than nuclear electricity.

In the end, Dominy was asked to testify on Rampart Dam, and it was one of the most brilliant performances of his career. Without anger, without malice, he tore the Corps’ justification to shreds. Even the pedestrian rhetoric of his successors—of a Gil Stamm or a Keith Higginson—might have demolished Rampart’s prospects, but Dominy spared nothing in his presentation. When he was finished, Rampart Dam lay pretty much in ruins. The project surfaced a few more times during the 1970s, then floated under and hasn’t been seen since.

Devil’s Canyon Dam, however, was seemingly dead, too—at least as far as the Bureau was concerned. (Late in the 1970s the state of Alaska announced plans to build the dam itself; it will be interesting to see whether it can without falling into the kind of financial hole that the $18 billion Itaipu Dam dug for Brazil.) And there the irony of the whole long fight between the Bureau and the Corps of Engineers came full circle. Had they really cooperated—as General William Cassidy had stated they would, and must—there is no telling what they might have built. Their rivalry prevailed, and grew more intense, during one of history’s truly unique periods—a time when we had the confidence, and the money, and, one might say, the compulsion to build on a fantastically grand scale. The money invested in the dozens of relatively small projects each agency built—in many cases because the other threatened to build first—would have sufficed to build the great works they insisted were necessary, but which required extraordinary determination, cooperation, and raw political clout in order to be authorized. Fifty million here, eighty million there, a hundred million here, and soon one was talking about real money. In the 1960s, Dos Rios Dam could have been built for $400 million; today it might cost $3 billion or more. A diversion from the Columbia River to the Southwest could have been built for $6 billion or so in the sixties, and there was so much surplus energy in the Northwest that a few million acre-feet of water removed from a river that dumps 140 million acre-feet into the sea might not have been missed. Today the cost seems utterly prohibitive, and Washington and Oregon would probably resist the engineers with tanks. The opportunity was there. But the Corps of Engineers and the Bureau squandered their political capital and billions in taxpayers’ money on vainglorious rivalry, with the result that much of what they
really
wanted to build does not now exist, and probably never will.

CHAPTER SEVEN

Dominy

W
hen Emma Dominy, writhing and shrieking, finally evicted her son Floyd, the doctors dumped him on a scale and whistled. Floyd Elgin Dominy, ten pounds, four ounces, at birth. Floyd Elgin Dominy, larger than life. All of Floyd’s siblings were born huge. His brother Ralph weighed twelve pounds. Emma’s six giant babies were a cross she was to bear through the rest of her life. Her uterus became distended, causing her horrid pain. She developed a nervous condition. Her temper became explosive, her outbursts hysterical. Strong-willed, French-Irish, and beautiful, Emma May Dominy was a handful anyway. Charles Dominy and his wife fought day and night. They had what is referred to as a “difficult” marriage, cemented precariously by children, religion, and a pious wheatbelt condemnation of divorce. Life, remembers Floyd, was like living on an earthquake fault. There was never any peace. “They fussed and fumed from morning to night. We’d lie awake at night and listen to them tearing into each other.” He is seventy when he says this, but his childhood is still a bad memory; you can read it in the turned-down corners of his mouth. “I remember what a relief it was to get away from home. It bugged me right through college. When everyone else was having nightmares about missing exams, I was having nightmares that my parents were murdering each other.”

Hastings, Nebraska, is a long way from paradise: Libya in the summer, Siberia in the winter; too wet for the Bureau of Reclamation, too arid for trees. Hard up against the hundredth meridian, Hastings occupies America’s agricultural DMZ. Neither God nor government has taken it under its wing. Disaster is Hastings’s stock-in-trade—that and dullness. “The capriciousness of nature is the one thing that livens that place up,” says Dominy. “When they aren’t talking crop prices or tattling on their neighbors, all anyone talks about is the weather.” Hastings is tornado country (one of the few double-funneled tornadoes ever seen was photographed near there), baseball-size-hail country, banshee blizzard country, drought-without-end country. The region’s whole economy can be drained by a summer’s drought, dashed by an afternoon’s hailstorm. The anarchy of nature may be one reason why most of Hastings’s residents—Republican or Democrat, dry farmer or irrigation farmer, city dweller or country dweller—devoutly believe that man should exercise as much dominion over the earth as he can. Hastings, Nebraska: birthplace of Floyd Dominy, future Commissioner of Reclamation.

Floyd was headstrong and impulsive—“an independent cuss from the beginning.” He was an above-average but somewhat uninterested student, and his intelligence was more obvious than evident in his grades. His distinguishing characteristic was self-reliance. Floyd had great confidence in himself. At the age of eleven, he could manhandle a neighbor’s two-thousand-pound Belgian draft horses as if they were a pair of pygmy ponies. He fixed things, ran things, organized things. Other children respected and feared him. To most children, the home is a refuge from a dangerous world; in Floyd’s case, it was the other way around. Compared to home, shadowed by gloom and rumbling with thunder, the world was a sunlit place.