The Emerald Mile: The Epic Story of the Fastest Ride in History Through the Heart of the Grand Canyon (38 page)

The logging mills of Oregon weren’t pretty places. The noise, the dirt, and the mechanized ferocity of the work could be harsh and ugly. But to Gamble those mills were helping to assemble the building blocks of civilization, and the people who toiled in them belonged to a brotherhood that was responsible for turning the world and making it run. Somewhere in his late teens, he realized that he didn’t merely respect this enterprise. He also wanted to be a part of it.

After studying electrical engineering at Chico State University, he discovered that his boyhood interests dovetailed perfectly with the oversize machinery inside the giant hydroelectric dams of the West. His first posting was at Shasta, a massive bulwark on the Sacramento River. When it was completed in 1945, at the apogee of the great dam-building boom,
Shasta stood as one of the Bureau of Reclamation’s jewels, the second-tallest dam in the country behind Hoover and a marvel of engineering. Although Gamble didn’t know it at the time, his appearance at Shasta in the summer of 1965 coincided with the start of a new phase in the bureau’s mission and ethos.

By this point, many of the West’s colossal hydroelectric dams had been cranking at full capacity for the better part of two decades, and their components were now beginning to wear out and break down. Shasta was an exemplar of this trend. When Gamble arrived as the assistant operations manager, it was painfully evident that much of the instrumentation and machinery would need to be rebuilt or replaced. Almost no one had the faintest idea how to handle these tasks. Not only had the men who had designed and built Shasta long since retired, but their expertise had resided almost exclusively in the art of putting the structure together, not taking it apart. As a result, the current generation of young engineers would be summoned to grapple with these challenges on their own, largely by the seat of their pants.

Gamble began by exploring every square inch of the dam. He methodically walked through Shasta’s entire network of tunnels and adits—the narrow and dripping passageways that ran through its interior. These sorts of places were
rarely accessed, and most people at his pay grade never bothered to go there. But Gamble wanted to see and touch each facet of the structure for himself. By the end of his first year, he had immersed himself in every piece of machinery there was—the transformers and the turbines, the generators and the penstocks, the cooling coils and the dynamos. He would come down to the power plant clad in his shirt and tie, change into a set of coveralls, and start crawling around the top of the stator winding, the electromagnetic component of the rotors on a generator, while the mechanics and the machinists stood around and scratched their heads.

This wasn’t the way that managers had conducted themselves in the past, and several of the older technicians, men who had developed some firm opinions about where bosses belonged and where they didn’t, regarded this behavior as unnecessary and somewhat bizarre. Gamble didn’t care what they thought. He was learning by doing, and he found the challenges before him invigorating. Something about fixing and maintaining things was seductive, especially when you had to feel your way through the process on your own. The calling may not have been as heroic as raising the dam in the first place, but the rewards were there. Tearing apart giant machines, repairing them, then putting them back together so well that they ran better than they did before was not merely satisfying and fun for Gamble; it also framed his ethos about how things should be done.

Running a giant hydro dam and a power plant was serious business. The forces that drove the turbines and the generators were absolutely enormous. The simple action of closing the breaker on a 230-volt transmission line—a routine act that could happen several times a week—sounded like a bomb going off, and the shock it would administer to a two-thousand-ton rotor made it seem as if the entire unit had been smashed with a sledgehammer. If you were responsible for technology like this, you handled it with extreme care, because when things went wrong the consequences could be horrific.
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So when Gamble encountered even minor lapses in duty—when, say, he spotted water dribbling out of a set of dresser couplings because no one had bothered to replace them—he was incensed. He couldn’t fathom what went through the mind of a manager who would tolerate that kind of thing.

When his stint at Shasta was over, Gamble took this philosophy to Folsom, another large California dam located on the American River. By now, his ideas
about integrity in the workplace were firmly established, and in an odd way, they echoed Grua’s approach to river guiding (a comparison Gamble probably would not have found flattering). There was a right way and a wrong way to do things, and, like Grua, Gamble judged himself and his coworkers by their willingness to adhere to those standards. Among the rules that were nailed to the wall of his mind, at the top of the list was “Be prepared, because you never know what’s gonna happen.”

Shasta and Folsom had both run well under his leadership, and by the time he received his next big promotion in 1974, Gamble saw himself, with some justification, as a hotshot manager. By actively working to get rid of people he thought weren’t performing, he had made more than a few enemies along the way, several of whom had tried to thwart his promotion up the ranks. But he had left Shasta and Folsom in better shape than when they were handed over to him. Now he was being given the keys to one of the largest structures in the entire system, a first-rate facility in a setting of unrivaled grandeur—the most remote and, as he was about to discover, the most notorious dam in Reclamation’s fiefdom.

H
eading up the Glen Canyon Dam wasn’t the premier assignment in the bureau—that distinction was reserved for the managers in charge of Hoover and Grand Coulee. Nevertheless, Glen shared at least some of the glory of those two icons. Unlike most of the dams that had been built during the astringent, cost-cutting years of the 1960s, Glen was the personal baby of Floyd Dominy, Reclamation’s hard-charging commissioner, and therefore a showpiece. Glen had none of the fancy artistic touches such as the sculpted Art Deco turrets that rose seamlessly from Hoover’s face or Coulee’s arresting visitors’ center, which was designed in the shape of a giant turbine rotor. But the generator hall in Glen’s power plant was gargantuan, and many of the floors, especially in the places where visitors were allowed to go, were done in polished terrazzo. Perhaps the most impressive of all the dam’s attributes, however, was the magnificent austerity of its surroundings.

The tiny town of Page, which was perched on a dust-blown bluff on the eastern rim of Glen Canyon, had been carved out of a remote corner of the Navajo reservation, one of the most isolated regions in the Lower 48. Phoenix was nearly a six-hour drive; Salt Lake City took seven. If you enjoyed fine dining and first-class entertainment—which Gamble certainly did—Page could feel like the dark side of the moon. On the other hand, Lake Powell lay directly on the town’s doorstep, and Gamble took full advantage of its wonders by purchasing a twenty-two-foot boat with an outboard engine. On his days off, he and his wife, Claudine, would put together a picnic basket and roar out across the
reservoir. In twenty minutes, they could be anchored inside their favorite side canyon on an isolated beach, fishing the deep-blue waters for carp, or staring up at the stone palisades that towered a thousand feet above. The sky out there was immense, and the way the clouds and the light moved across the surface of the lake was enough to take one’s breath away. At sunset, they would watch as columns of light pierced the clouds and illuminated the sandstone, bathing the rock in a lantern glow that made it seem as if the walls were being lit from within. At night, the heavens were so black and so fathomless that they actually got dizzy staring into the cosmos. There were more stars out there than Gamble had ever thought possible.

By the end of his first summer, he had come to believe that Lake Powell was one of the most sublime places on the planet. Regardless of how wondrous the canyon at the bottom of that reservoir might once have been, Gamble was convinced that the splendors of Glen could never have surpassed the unspeakable loveliness of the reservoir that had replaced it. All of which made it not simply puzzling but downright offensive when he began to grasp just how deeply the lake, the dam, and the engineers who worked for the Bureau of Reclamation were loathed by the people who had inherited David Brower’s and Martin Litton’s anger over what had been done to Glen Canyon.

Gamble got his first real glimpse of that hatred early one Saturday morning in the spring of 1981, when
five members of a newly formed environmental organization called Earth First! climbed over a fence and raced across the dam’s parapet hauling a tapered sheet of black plastic roughly three hundred feet long, which they unfurled down the face of the dam, making it seem as if a giant crack had appeared in the concrete. Minutes later, while more than a hundred cheering onlookers stood in the parking lot of the visitors’ center, a bearded figure clad in blue jeans and cowboy boots climbed into the back of a Chevrolet pickup and started to give a speech.

The man in the truck was the writer Edward Abbey, who had, several years earlier, published a novel called
The Monkey Wrench Gang
, which offered an irreverent portrait of a group of activists who defended America’s wilderness through acts of industrial sabotage and vandalism that included burning down billboards, crippling bulldozers, and pulling up survey stakes across the once pristine Southwest. Although Abbey detested technocracy in all its forms, he reserved a special malice in his novel for the Glen Canyon Dam—a theme that was echoed in his earlier and even more famous work,
Desert Solitaire
, perhaps the single most influential document ever written on Glen Canyon. Abbey’s depiction of that canyon, which he had floated through in a state of inebriated rapture aboard a drugstore raft
back in the late 1950s, was gorgeous and evocative and deeply haunting.

I was one of the lucky few . . . who saw Glen Canyon before it was drowned. In fact I saw only a part of it but enough to realize that here was an Eden, a portion of the earth’s original paradise. To grasp the nature of the crime that was committed imagine the Taj Mahal or Chartres Cathedral buried in mud until only the spires remain visible. With this difference: those man-made celebrations of human aspiration could conceivably be reconstructed, while Glen Canyon was a living thing, irreplaceable, which can never be recovered through any human agency.

By 1981,
Desert Solitaire
had emerged as a kind of miniature pocket bible for a generation of young people—backpackers, river rats, and wilderness advocates—who had come to love the canyons of the Colorado as deeply as Abbey. Although most of these readers had never laid eyes on the wonders entombed at the bottom of Lake Powell, they had come to regard the lost world of Glen as a stolen birthright and the dam as something to be reviled, a repugnant symbol of bureaucratic overreach and the gratuitous destruction of beauty. Among those who were directly inspired by Abbey’s ideas were the founders of Earth First!, who had organized this protest, and now the author was about to air his views in person.

While Gamble’s team of security guards moved across the parapet to cut down the plastic sheet, Abbey laid into the evils of the dam.
“No man-made structure in modern American history,” he shouted, “has been hated so much, by so many, for so long, with such good reason.” He declared that the canyon beneath the waters of “Lake Foul” was a national treasure that had been snatched away from ordinary Americans by politicians and developers “in order to pursue and promote their crackpot ideology of growth, profit, and power.” He urged the crowd to “oppose, resist, and subvert,” and he concluded by announcing the launch of a nationwide petition demanding the immediate razing of the dam.

Videos of the event, entitled
The Cracking of Glen Canyon Dam
, were soon distributed all across the West, and within weeks minor acts of protest and vandalism were cropping up. College students would drive from as far away as
Oregon to urinate off the parapet and plaster
Bomb the Dam!
stickers on every surface they could. Several months later, the threats started. One night, Gamble’s phone rang at 1:30 a.m. An FBI agent in Denver was calling to let him know that a man at a bar had been bragging about how his friends had loaded a houseboat with TNT and were motoring down the lake with the aim of ramming it into the top of the dam.

Nothing ever came of such threats, but they left Gamble sobered and mystified
by the dark currents of anger out there. Why, he wondered, were these people so
pissed off
? What the hell was their problem?

For the next year or so, he tried to engage in dialogue with members of the conservation community in the hope of offering them another perspective. When he received angry letters or phone calls, he wrote long and polite responses, patiently explaining the benefits of clean hydropower and the important contributions made by all of the Colorado River dams—to flood control, to irrigation, to the Southwest’s electrical grid. None of those letters was answered. He attended a river runners’ conference in Flagstaff, where he was publicly embarrassed in front of his wife by a singer who performed a raucous song that ridiculed him and the bureau. He even approached Edward Abbey at a book-signing event and made an offer (which was never accepted) to give him a personal tour of the dam. Rebuffed at every turn, Gamble was eventually forced to conclude that these were people who had no interest in exposing themselves to information that might complicate or add nuance to the picture they had drawn for themselves.