The Taut Arc of the Dammed

Wires upon wires

A civilization's trajectory says a lot about it. Ours shows signs of being on the decline, with leaders who make Nero look effective and a weird hybrid of entertainment and religion that makes the bloody sacrificial rites of Aztec temples seem fairly rational. Some say we have reached great heights from our 1776 Declaration, or perhaps rocketed more steeply still off the ruins of 1945 Europe and Japan. That is too grand a scale for me, though, and I'd like to look at a smaller piece, at and arc that expresses American destiny through domination of our vast natural birthright: dams.

Other than a year in the realm of the Tennessee Valley Authority, I never lived near dams or gave them much thought. There, far from any salmon run, too close to the mushroom shadow of the Oak Ridge nuke labs and only at a middling distance from Appalachia's squalorous Depression history, the dams seemed fairly benign. I preferred playing in the small un-dammed creeks and streams, rills full of salamanders, but a sweep of flat impounded water next to a grassy park manicured by federal crews could be soothing after months of living with horizons hidden by trees and endless Smoky Mountain ridges. The cheap electricity helped hold poverty at bay.

Thousands of miles west and decades later, I entered dammed country once again. Older and more ambiguity-prone, it's a little harder for me to see them as simply good. Sure, they crank out the megawatts with none of the coal smoke or uranium leaks that plague other power generating schemes. But then again, they displaced people from their ancient homes, cut off the salmon from their up-river breeding pools, and drowned fruitful valley land.

Water, Gimme Water

The arcs of dams are many, and though the results transformative, none is the steep parabolic trajectory ascribed to America by hyperbolic boosters. Like the dip of the lines stretching between poles marching away from the turbines or the shallow arch of each segment in an irrigation pivot, the trajectory of dams is shallower than the water behind them.

The grandest of dams are concavities of concrete, water-weight pushing them firmly into place, plugging rapids and canyons. The technology of power generation has been refined, but the basic concept remains the same: let water drop through turbines, tubes filled with curved blades shifting current from water to wire. And the lines stretch out into the country, thousands upon thousands of little copper arcs sway between poles until finally they dive to ground in towns, allowing people and their enterprises to spread away from the drowned valleys.

Pipes and pumps, siphons and canals suck up the gathered waters of Cascadian rains and snows, and send them fieldward. Most of the water from Grand Coulee and the other primary dams flows through, but the small percentage diverted by the Columbia Irrigation Project through thousands of miles of canals big and small still waters nearly 700,000 acres of land that would otherwise be desert, and the plan allows for over a million acres. But by the time the final 300,000+ acres get water, some of the original acreage will be salted from years of irrigation and fertilization. Check out the soapy scum around the reservoirs, the crusty accumulation on rocks in the crop circles. Irrigated deserts always follow the same arc from barren to miracle and back. Ashes to ashes, soil to salt. Loess and less.

As an archaeologist, I've seen arcs abandoned, the scummy rings at the high water mark of civilization advanced and receded. The woods are webbed with old power lines ending at a pile of ketchup bottles and foundations where a logging town boomed and busted. Etched in the arid plateau are crop circles plowed, irrigated, and let go in less than a lifetime. At the acme were a million board feet or potatoes, extracted from a land then considered unworthy of continued human presence. It must have seemed spectacular as the trains hauled out log after log or when bumper crops trucked off to market, but really the peak was not that high, and the far end of the trajectory usually ended up lower than the starting point. Impoverished and eroded, forgotten. Damned by American civilization's version of progress and profit.