Cadillac Desert (75 page)

The main benefit of building Narrows, on the other hand, would be supplemental irrigation water for 287,000 acres of land downstream from Don Christenson’s farm, most of it between the towns of Brush and Sterling. There would only be enough water for inches per acre, and one could reasonably question whether, during the occasional severe drought whose ravages Narrows is supposed to make less severe, so little water would do any real good. In fact, the continued profitability of the farms making up those 287,000 acres through dry years and wet ones makes me wonder why the water is needed at all. The other benefits claimed for Narrows are recreation and flood control.

The high plains are home to some of the most freakish and violent weather in the world. Once, in Spearfish, South Dakota, thermometers leaped from two below to thirty-eight above zero in two minutes. A rutting ground for Canadian and Caribbean airflows, the plains are also known as tornado alley. Something like 90 percent of the world’s tornados occur in North America, most of them between the Rockies and the Mississippi River. A much more frequent natural phenomenon, however, is the tornado’s weaker sister, the hell-raising, rambunctious, exhilarating Great Plains thunderstorm.

One has to experience such a thunderstorm, preferably while lying scared to death in a ditch, to fathom the magnificent power of creation. In Texas, where the tropical flows are still saturated with moisture when they clash with colder air, a parade of thunderstorms dumped thirty inches of rain in twenty-four hours in the spring of 1978, far more rain than West Texas normally receives in a year. In Colorado, six- and seven-inch storms have been known on the plains, and since the natural groundcover is sparse, the flooding that results is spectacular. In 1964, such a flood occurred in the Bijou Creek watershed eighty miles east of Denver. Most of the time, Bijou Creek is less a creek than a dry wash; one has to search to find a puddle. During that storm, however, the Bijou became the second-largest river in the United States, carrying 465,000 cubic feet per second off the barren plains. Don Christenson was there. “It was the most unbelievable son of a bitch you ever saw,” he says. The Bijou rose in a few hours and was almost dry a day later: a phantom monster. But the damage downstream was done.

Bijou Creek enters the South Platte from the south, exactly at the site of Narrows Dam. Upriver, the Platte is well controlled; the main untamed tributary below Fort Collins, and the main cause of damage downstream, is Bijou Creek. The damsite is flexible enough so that one can more or less choose to put the dam in front of the Bijou confluence or behind it. If the dam goes in upstream from the Bijou confluence, obviously, most of the flood-control benefits are lost.

Originally, the Bureau was intent on capturing the Bijou behind Narrows Dam because the economics of the project would automatically improve: greater flood-control benefits could be claimed, and a much larger proportion of the dam’s cost would be nonreimbursable. Flood control, however, has always been the province of the Corps of Engineers, and the Corps, not the Bureau, would have to decide whether capturing the Bijou was worth it—or, for that matter, whether it was even safe to try to contain it.

The decision was to be made in 1965, shortly after Narrows was reauthorized by Congress and the Bureau began to push it seriously. On July 14, 1965, in a confidential letter to Commissioner Dominy, Pat Dugan, who had just left California to become the Bureau’s regional director in Denver, described his efforts to ensure a decision that controlling the Bijou was worthwhile. Having just attended a meeting of the Colorado Water Conservation Board, Dugan reported, “I stressed the necessity for an early answer from the Corps of Engineers on the benefits to be provided for control of Bijou Creek by extension of the dam. The Board strongly expressed themselves as being in favor of this facet of the Narrows Project, and
I am confident that the Corps will be under continued pressure to provide the necessary answer”
(emphasis added). Unfortunately for the Bureau, the pressure to provide the “necessary” answer came to naught. The Bijou flooded mightily, but it flooded most infrequently, the Corps decided, so controlling it wasn’t worth the extra cost. There was also some question as to whether another 450,000-cfs flood might not take out the dam.

With most of its flood-control rationale gone, Narrows went into eclipse during the remainder of the 1960s. In the early 1970s, however, the tide of fortune changed. Wayne Aspinall, the chairman of the House Interior Committee, was growing old and politically vulnerable, and Narrows, it seemed, was to be his swan song. The imperious old schoolteacher began pushing it so relentlessly that he even refused to let the project’s opponents testify before his House Interior Committee. At the same time, the first OPEC oil crisis hit, and everyone began eyeing Colorado’s huge reserves of oil shale. Some Coloradans seemed to want to turn the state into an energy colony and grow rich off it; others wanted to lock up as much water as possible so the oil, coal, and uranium industies would be forced to remain relatively small and the state’s rural character, what was left of it, would remain fairly intact. One of the main adherents of the latter view was the new governor, Richard D. Lamm; an even stronger adherent was his commissioner of natural resources, Harris Sherman. The fact that Narrows was nowhere near the shale oil and uranium was somehow lost. What mattered was giving the state’s unappropriated water to agriculture and locking it up, as best one could, now and forever.

As Midas turned everything he touched into gold, the Narrows Project had a miraculous ability to turn everyone it touched into someone else. It turned a crew-cut, rawboned young farmer like Don Christenson into an environmentalist. It turned a handsome young environmentalist like Senator Gary Hart into an avid water developer. Above all, it turned perhaps the three most powerful men in Colorado into bitter enemies.

One of the three was Glenn Saunders, the chief counsel for the Denver Water Board. A brilliant man with a silver tongue, Saunders had, for more than thirty years, been the water lawyer in a state where water lawyers wield power that makes them objects of profound respect. Under his tutelage, the Denver Water Board had become a kind of understudy of the Metropolitan Water District of Los Angeles: a well-oiled, well-funded suprapolitical machine trying to purloin water from every corner of the state, all in the interest of turning Denver into the Los Angeles of the Rockies—a goal which has been largely achieved. In a strictly legal sense, of course, the Water Board didn’t steal water. But cross the Front Range and go into the mountains, where most of Colorado’s water originates, and the response to a mention of the Denver Water Board is likely to be an oath.

Saunders was the perfect symbol of this rough-and-tumble political machine. With his Dickensian visage, in his checked suits and pastel shirts and vivid ties, he was the city sharpie making ruthless inroads into the virgin old West—terrifying witnesses in the docket, shouting down citizens at public hearings, and always scheming, pushing, plotting for more dams.

The second of the three men was Clarence J. Kuiper, who, through most of the 1970s, served as Colorado’s state engineer. In a state such as Colorado, where both ground and surface water are regulated and everyone wants more than there is, the state engineer is a combination of judge, jury, and cop. He decides what is a reasonable diversion to each farm; he decides who can put in a well and how much he can pump; he decides when a diverter can no longer divert during a drought and when a pumper can no longer pump; he makes sure enough water reaches neighboring states to satisfy compact agreements; and, in the course of making such decisions, he wins the wrath and, if he does his job honestly and well—as Kuiper did—the grudging admiration of every water user in the state. Kuiper’s whole life had been spent in water development: first as a young engineer in Turkey, for whose government the Bureau was building dams; later as a consulting engineer for the state of Wyoming, for which he drew up a water plan; and, finally, as Colorado’s viceroy of water. A gigantic man whose ponderous gait and basso profundo voice bely a quick and encompassing intellect, Kuiper was light-years from being a conservationist. He was a water developer and an admirer of Ronald Reagan; he was enough of a westerner to call Jimmy Carter’s water-projects hit list an “act of war,” even if, in private, he referred to most of the projects in question as “dogs.” Kuiper never stood in the path of a water project, unless it was a project in another state that threatened his own state’s supply. But that would change.

The third man was the governor of Colorado, Richard Lamm. Young, humorless, thoughtful, intense, prematurely silver-haired, Lamm was a prototype of the New Age politician. As a state legislator he had made a name as an environmentalist, and a rather bold one—he was the leader of the successful effort to keep the lucrative Winter Olympics out of Denver. In 1978, the
Almanac of American Politics
described him as “far-out.” He flew periodically to Chicago or New York to hobnob with people like Garrett Hardin, the ecologist, and Hazel Henderson, the “futurist,” who served with him on the national board of the Council on Population and Environment. He staffed his administration with left-leaning people in their twenties and thirties—people like Harris Sherman, his resources secretary, who had served as counsel to the Environmental Defense Fund. Lamm was the sort of politician one could imagine drinking Red Zinger tea amid the whiskey-swillers in the smoke-filled rooms; he had backpacks and bicycles in his garage, and his wife, Dottie, was a well-known feminist. From every Chamber of Commerce in every mean little Colorado town there arose a collective groan. Dick Lamm—the
governor?

But Lamm already had a reputation, in some circles, as a rather shameless opportunist. And even at the apogee of his alleged radicalism, he never was known as someone who didn’t like water projects.

In 1975, when Don Christenson and his Weldon Valley landowners’ group went shopping for a lawyer to represent them in what they were sure could culminate in a legal battle with the Bureau of Reclamation, they decided they had better choose well. “Everyone we talked to said, ‘You want the best, go hire Glenn Saunders,’ ” Christenson remembers. “I said, ‘Glenn Saunders, hell! Name one dam he’s ever opposed. He isn’t going to bother with a bunch of farmers like us.’ Well, we went to see him anyway. At first he looked like he couldn’t wait for us to go back out the door. But we served it up to him straight, and that man listened to us. You could watch his prejudices dissolve. I mean, he was a lawyer, first and foremost, and he knew we had a case.”

“Here was this bunch of farmers marching in here saying they wanted to stop Narrows Dam,” a raspy-voiced Saunders recounted. “I said to them, ‘Stop Narrows Dam! We don’t want that. We want to get everything we can built!’ But they kept throwing facts at me, and they finally had me convinced Narrows is a boondoggle. When I took a closer look it was an even bigger boondoggle than they said.”

“Old Saunders had sort of half agreed to represent us,” Christenson recalls. “But I think he still wanted to hear what the Bureau had to say. So he ups and says, ‘Get your coats! We’re going out to see the Bureau.’ Just like that! We drove out there to the Bureau’s big box of a headquarters, Mr. Saunders and Marvin Etchison, our president, and me. Saunders knew just the man to see. We walked into the bureaucrat’s office—I can’t remember who he was—and sat down like we owned it. I was tickled—mad as I was at the Bureau, I never would have done something like that. And Mr. Saunders and this Bureau guy got into an argument right away. I don’t even know about what, but the Bureau guy said, ‘Well, Mr. Saunders, you of all people should know that.’ ” Christenson is given to explosions of laughter, and the recollection makes him almost giddy. “ ‘You should know the answer to that!’ Saunders doesn’t say another word. He was mad! He gets up and kind of calmly says to Marvin and me, ‘Come on, Marvin and Don. We can accomplish nothing further here.’ And out we went, just like we came in. In the car, Saunders says, ‘I want you to go back to the Weldon Valley and start raising a kitty of a hundred thousand dollars. That’s what it’s going to cost you to fight your government.’

“A hundred thousand dollars! You could have licked me if I thought we could raise that kind of money from a little old bunch of farmers.”

In plotting their strategy, the Weldon Valley landowners’ group had made one crucial mistake. They had always assumed that their main fight would be with the Bureau, the Colorado Water Conservation Board—a chamber of commerce for dams—and the Lower South Platte Conservancy District, which was scheduled to receive water from Narrows. The Lower South Platte Conservancy District was led by two brothers, Dave and Don Hamel, both influential in state and national politics; Dave Hamel had run unsuccessfully for governor and was a former administrator of the Rural Electrification Administration. (If Narrows was built, the Hamels would probably be the chief violators of the Reclamation Act in its service area, for they owned several thousand acres there.) But, as it turned out, the Bureau and the Lower South Platte people were merely a major and a minor irritant. The really tough opposition came from the person they had originally counted on for help: Colorado governor Dick Lamm.

What had happened to Lamm, the onetime radical environmental legislator? His former friend Alan Merson, who beat Wayne Aspinall in the Democratic primary in 1972, lost the general election, and ended up as regional administrator for the EPA, thought he had his finger on it. “Lamm got religion rather late in life,” Merson told an interviewer. “Once a political aspirant gets elected, he finds he has this strange new dilemma: rather than worrying about what people want to hear, he has to worry about what they want to have. There’s a big difference. People move out here because of the Rocky Mountains, but if some huge hand came down and swept away the Rocky Mountains a lot of them wouldn’t even notice. They’re too busy getting rich. Well, Dick Lamm was elected in the middle of the biggest boom in this state’s history. He saw that the great big capitalist machine creating all the filth and ugliness and pollution was also making his constituents fat and sleek and happy. He came to feel that he had slighted the capitalist machine, which suddenly seemed to him to be working miracles. I mean, you look out from the capitol dome and all you see is brown inhospitable plains on the one side and ice-covered mountains on the other. It looks like a tough place. But the capitalist machine was scratching phenomenal wealth out of it. At some point Lamm realized that the whole damned machine runs on the impoundment of water. So he said, ‘By God, we’d better impound some more water.’