Cadillac Desert (51 page)

In an economic sense, what the backers of the Pacific Southwest Water Plan were proposing was unprecedented. It violated every principle of economics, even the fast and loose principles of Reclamation economics. If the lion’s share of the power revenues were going to subsidize not only irrigation but
municipal
water costs—municipal water whose revenues had usually subsidized
irrigation
in the past—the project could not possibly be paid back for hundreds of years, if ever. The cost, which had to be in the many billions, would simply be borne on the backs of the taxpayers. From a national perspective, it was a stunningly ill-conceived idea; but from a regional perspective, it was a wonderful idea—an offer none of the basin states could refuse. At a price guaranteed to be affordable—not only affordable but dirt-cheap—the yield of the Colorado River would be increased by one-half. Oregon would get a slew of new irrigation projects, as would Nevada. California’s irrigators would be relieved of their most desperate worry, the self-inflicted groundwater overdraft. And it could all be accomplished by taking a mere 10 percent of the flow of the Columbia River and turning it southward.

Behind the proposal was a dramatic gamble—that Congress and the public would go along with the idea; or, even if they didn’t, that the Southwest had the political power to persuade them to. But how could one sell the public on a program that was supposed to remain a tightly guarded secret? On December 31,1964, two weeks after learning of the Columbia plan, Joe Jensen sent his New Year’s greeting to Stewart Udall, expressing “very great appreciation” for Udall’s decision to support the project that had always been Jensen’s dream. Then he added, “Since your program is to be kept confidential there is little that we can do except give you assurance of our support and our desire to assist in every way.” It must have been frustrating for Jensen. The Metropolitan Water District had the mightiest propaganda apparatus in the entire West, and he didn’t dare push the button to fire it up.

Maintaining a self-enforced silence about the proposal was actually the least of the proponents’ problems. By 1965, the war in Vietnam was consuming an ever-larger bite of the federal budget, and LBJ’s antipoverty programs also promised to cost a tremendous amount. No price had been put on the Columbia diversion, but the Trinity River version of the Pacific Southwest Water Plan was expected to cost $3,126,000,000; going as far as the Columbia for much more water could easily cost three times that much. The federal budget in 1965 was only $118.4 billion; to persuade the Congress to authorize perhaps $10 billion for a single water project would take some doing. But the biggest and most unyielding obstacle would not even be the enormous cost. It would be the man who, Udall foolishly felt, he could persuade to lead the bill through Congress—a pugnacious, five-foot-ten-inch, third-term Senator and fellow Democrat from Washington state named Henry Jackson.

In June of 1965, with no discernible opposition, Senator Henry Jackson tacked an innocent-looking rider onto an innocuous-seeming bill that established standardized guidelines for the allocation of costs to fish and wildlife enhancement. What the rider did, in a couple of brief sentences, was prohibit the Bureau of Reclamation from undertaking feasibility studies that Congress did not approve in advance. The effect of the maneuver, which few recognized at first, was the same as if Jackson had strung a six-hundred-volt electrified fence along the entire south bank of the Columbia River. Without a feasibility study, the Bureau couldn’t approach Congress for authorization. Without a Congressional authorization, it couldn’t build. Explaining his amendment to a couple of reporters who were smart enough to see what it meant, Jackson made no mention of the Columbia River. He was annoyed, he said, by the Bureau’s habit of “working up local interest and enthusiasm for projects in the field before presenting its case to Congress.” Such tactics, he said, put Congress in a “take it or leave it position” when the Bureau came to authorization hearings with a gaggle of local politicians and noisy project boosters in tow. His amendment was nothing for the Bureau to get upset about; “the Corps of Engineers has operated under similar provisions for many years.”

It was true that the Corps operated under a similar restriction; it was also true that it rarely paid much attention to it. But Jackson’s rider had made illegal the feasibility study that Dominy had quietly ordered on the Columbia diversion. Jackson, who obviously had heard rumors of the secret plan, was out to kill it in its embryonic state. The Northwest had water to spare, but it no longer had power to spare, and nearly all of its electricity came from dams. To remove ten million acre-feet from the Columbia River meant a reduction of several billion kilowatt-hours in power output, unless one diverted the water below the dams. The Bureau would undoubtedly want to do that; but suppose the pumping cost of a diversion from low elevation would add tremendously to the project’s cost, and it made much more sense to divert above the dams? If the enormous momentum that could develop behind the diversion scheme really got rolling, the Northwest would look awfully selfish refusing to part with some of its superabundant water just because it insisted on paying one-fourth the average national price for electricity.

“I told Jackson that we ought to let them study the idea,” recalled Daniel Dreyfus, who was then the Senator’s closest aide. “There was no way it was going to be economically feasible. Twenty years earlier, maybe. In the sixties, absolutely not. ‘Let’s let ’em study it,’ I told Jackson. ‘Study the damned thing and it will slay itself. It’s a crazy idea.’ But his reasoning was that there’d been other crazy projects that got built just because they were studied. I still never thought it could get built, but he was right on that point.”

Without a feasibility study—which Jackson, as chairman of the Senate Interior Committee, would never allow—the Columbia diversion was stillborn. What is more interesting is how quickly the Trinity Diversion died with it, even though Jackson had not publicly opposed it. One reason may have been that Los Angeles viewed it, as it had viewed the United Western Investigation, as a threat—an implied source of water that wasn’t the Colorado River (it didn’t mind the Columbia because that source was
really big
). But another and better reason was that it didn’t make any economic sense. The Trinity River offered too little water at too great an expense. No matter what the cost or opposition, the Colorado Basin had to get its hands on the Klamath, the Snake, or the Columbia; those were the only rivers left in the American West that were worth thinking about.

It was actually the upper Colorado Basin states, not the lower, that were pursuing the water importation idea with particularly feverish interest. California wasn’t worried. The Imperial Valley had so much water it was almost drowning in it, and Los Angeles had more on the way from the State Water Project, then just being built. Through the CAP, Arizona might soon receive most of its entitlement to the river through a single diversion. The upper-basin projects, however, were small and spread all over the map, and few of those authorized by the Colorado River Storage Project had yet been built. Several, in fact, had been denied startup funds in Congress—partly because their backers lacked the awesome Appropriations Committee clout of the California delegation or a Carl Hayden, partly because they were beginning to be regarded by some members of Congress as a scandalous waste of taxpayers’ money, especially with a war going on. Floyd Dominy had told Joe Jensen that he always got funds for projects that had been authorized, but the upper basin was learning that, indeed, this was not always the case. At the languid rate its projects were being built, the upper basin would be the last to develop its full entitlement to the river. And when the overappropriated river was played out, the compact might not mean a thing. Whoever was using the most water would end up keeping the most water; the various Congressional delegations—especially the powerful one from California—would see to that. No one was going to turn off the spigot to Los Angeles, Arizona, or the Imperial Valley for the sake of a few marginal irrigation projects in the upper basin—especially if they hadn’t even been built.

Exactly how adamant the upper basin was on this issue became apparent, for the first time, at a secret summit meeting attended by representatives of the four states at Denver, Colorado, on January 18 and 19, 1966. The subject of the meeting was the CAP legislation that Dominy, Udall, and the Arizona and California delegates had coalesced behind, HR 4671. HR 4671 was a drastically trimmed-down version of the Pacific Southwest Water Plan. It authorized only the Central Arizona Project, Bridge Canyon Dam (Marble Gorge, the other Grand Canyon dam, had been dropped because its more meager power output didn’t seem worth the inevitable fight), and a new aqueduct to Las Vegas. The bill also authorized something called a “development fund”—a receptacle for revenues from the power dams that, in the future, would help finance the augmentation scheme everyone knew would be needed. The legislation, in other words, authorized the projects that would ensure the Colorado River’s early exhaustion; it also authorized the means of financing the basin’s rescue. What it did not authorize—what it didn’t even
mention,
let alone describe—was the importation plan itself. Udall and Dominy had evidently concluded that the development fund would be enough to mollify the upper basin. Only after Dominy’s regional director in Salt Lake City, Dave Crandall, sent him his report on the Denver meeting did they see how utterly wrong they were.

Of the four upper-basin states, the one that seemed most intent on a specific authorization for the rescue project was Colorado, within whose borders half the river’s flow originates. This, from Udall and Dominy’s point of view, was most unfortunate. Colorado’s delegation was headed by Felix Sparks, the head of its Water Conservation Board. Sparks had won the Medal of Honor in World War II, among many other medals, for single-handedly storming a machine-gun nest with a sidearm and a jacketful of grenades and killing half a platoon of Germans. According to those who knew him, he was not afraid of God, man, or the devil. He was also stubborn, vindictive, and a bully, but in Colorado, where water was concerned, he was king.

According to Dave Crandall, Sparks had terrorized the Colorado delegation into asserting that “a feasibility study of import must be a part of the [CAP] bill, otherwise they would not support it. They would prefer an authorization of import but recognize the impracticality of seeking such authorization at this time.” Wyoming, he said, took a similar view: “It feels that import is an absolute necessity for their future development and protection and they desire conditional authorization.... Studies of importation are an absolute minimum and anything else would result in opposition to the bill.” Utah was slightly less adamant than Colorado and Wyoming, but not much. New Mexico would accept a bill that only authorized a feasibility study, but nothing less than that. Between them, as Dominy well knew, the four states had the power in Congress to kill any bill they didn’t like. Wayne Aspinall of Colorado was the autocratic chairman of the House Interior Committee, which would have to report out the bill in order for it to reach the floor of Congress; he could bottle it up forever if he desired. Clinton Anderson of New Mexico had similar power in the Senate, Carl Hayden notwithstanding. And there were plenty of others in both houses to be reckoned with.

However, for all their insistence on an augmentation project that might be viewed as something akin to a military invasion by northern Columbia or the Pacific Northwest, the upper-basin representatives were curiously ambivalent about the one item
already authorized
in HR 4671 that would generate the billions that would allow such a rescue project to be built—Bridge Canyon Dam. “New Mexico observes that its inclusion could be untimely and unwise,” reported Crandall to Dominy. Even the choleric Felix Sparks, he wrote, was inclined “to defer to the lower-basin states on this question.” Wyoming’s and Utah’s positions were “not materially different than the position of Colorado and New Mexico.” And yet if Bridge Canyon Dam were not built, with its promise of huge amounts of high-priced peaking power, how could the rescue project they insisted on be self-financing? It couldn’t. But no Reclamation project had ever been built that didn’t at least create the
illusion
that it was self-financing.

For the moment, however, the upper-basin states were not worried about that. They were much more worried about a former magazine editor and amateur lepidopterist from Berkeley, California, named David Brower.

D
avid Brower’s passionate opposition to dams has its origins in his teeth. Brower’s childhood, spent in that most tolerant of American cities, had not been happy. He had an awkward case of shyness and, to boot, a row of missing teeth, and his schoolmates taunted him mercilessly about both. In his midteens he departed for the only place in California where he felt he would be left alone or at least find better company: the Sierra Nevada. In those days—the late 1920s—back-packing and mountaineering were considered the oddest of preoccupations, the province of slightly deranged British peers. The Sierra Nevada, which is invaded by so many hikers today that it feels like a zoo, was virtually devoid of humanity. The rapture Brower experienced there transported him to a mystic state; it became a dependency, a drug. He had food and supplies cached all over the place; he could return to one weeks after laying it in and it would still be there. Like his hero John Muir, Brower grew intimate with vast portions of that range. He would return to Berkeley, work at odd jobs for a while, make enough money to quit, and leave for the mountains again. By his late twenties, Brower had become the sort of person the water-development lobby cannot fathom: someone who puts unspoiled nature above the material aspirations of mankind. For his part, by the time he became the first paid executive director of the Sierra Club, in 1952, Brower had decided that no work of man violated nature as completely, as irrevocably, as a dam.