The Emerald Mile: The Epic Story of the Fastest Ride in History Through the Heart of the Grand Canyon (18 page)

When they reached the Grand Wash Cliffs, they had enough material to fill a coffee-table tome highlighting every feature inside the canyon that would be obliterated by the dams. It took six months to compile, with Brower writing the foreword and Litton doing most of the editing and contributing photos of his own. They called the book
Time and the River Flowing
, and it conveyed the same message that Litton had expressed in front of the board of directors eighteen months earlier. The Sierra Club fired off a copy to members of Congress and every news outlet they could think of.

That was only one arrow in Brower’s quiver. While Litton pressed on with the media effort by
helping to develop a traveling photo exhibit and a movie about the canyon, other members of Brower’s task force set about pressing news organizations to cover the controversy. By the following winter and spring, articles opposed to dams had begun to appear in
Life
,
Newsweek
, and
Outdoor Life
, precipitating an avalanche of mail to members of Congress, Stewart Udall’s office, and President Lyndon Johnson.

Bowing to mounting pressure, an exasperated Wayne Aspinall scheduled a renewal of hearings before the Interior Committee, which gave Brower his next opening. In a reprise of the Dinosaur strategy, he recruited experts who could expose the government’s misuse of its own facts and brought those people to Washington. His trump card was
a trio of young graduates from MIT—an economist, a nuclear engineer, and a mathematician named Jeff Ingram, who demonstrated how the payback plan that the bureau had devised for the new hydropower facilities was built around a numerical house of cards. Using the bureau’s own figures, Ingram proved that the construction of Bridge and Marble Canyon Dams—whose hydropower sales were supposed to pay for the network of new canals and river-diversion schemes in central Arizona—would actually
reduce
the amount of revenue that would accrue to the government until the year 2021.

While testimony unfolded, Brower launched a third offensive. On the morning of June 9, 1966, he ran a set of expensive and highly inflammatory full-page advertisements in the
New York Times
, the
Washington Post
, the
San Francisco Chronicle
, and the
Los Angeles Times.
“Now Only You Can Save Grand Canyon from Being Flooded . . . For Profit,” the headlines screamed in oversize type. Emphasizing that the canyon belonged to all Americans, the text of the ad closed with an admonition that echoed what Litton had told the board of the Sierra Club: “There is only one simple incredible issue here. This time, it’s the Grand Canyon they want to flood.
The Grand Canyon.
”

O
ne of the people who took note of those ads with particular displeasure was a congenial lawyer and
banker from Tucson named Morris Udall, who had taken over his older brother Stewart’s seat in the House of Representatives when Stewart was appointed Interior secretary. Morris was so outraged by what he read in the paper that morning—which he regarded as a wildly irresponsible misrepresentation of the truth—that he stood up on the floor of the House and denounced Brower’s entire ploy as “phony, irresponsible, utterly and completely false.”

The following afternoon at 4:00 p.m., a messenger from the San Francisco district office of the IRS delivered a letter to the headquarters of the Sierra Club stating that it was now under investigation for violating IRS regulations concerning lobbying. In the opinion of the IRS, the letter stated, the club was engaged in substantial efforts to influence legislation, a direct violation of federal tax law, and
its donors should be made aware that their contributions might no longer qualify as tax deductions. In short, the government had stripped the Sierra Club’s tax-exempt status as a nonprofit organization.

To this day, no one knows who initiated this investigation—Brower alleged that it was Morris Udall, who vehemently denied the charge, and his brother, Stewart, later suggested that someone in the White House was responsible. But whoever set the train in motion launched a graphic demonstration of the law of unintended consequences. Brower counterpunched by handing out copies of the letter to every reporter he knew. As word spread, it unleashed an absolute firestorm. If people were upset by the idea of the dams, they were positively apoplectic over the IRS’s attempting to strong-arm a group of conservationists who were trying to do nothing more than save the Grand Canyon. This triggered outrage, even in places where conservation was regarded with skepticism or disdain. The
Wall Street Journal
denounced the IRS’s move as “an extraordinary departure from its snail’s pace tradition.” The
New York Times
went a step further, calling it
“an assault on the right of private citizens to protest effectively against wrong-headed public policies.”

The most thunderous reaction of all, however, came from ordinary people. Congressional offices were immediately flooded with telegrams and phone calls from enraged citizens, and a few days later, the letters started pouring in. The secretary of the interior’s office alone received more than twenty thousand.
Morris Udall described it as a “deluge.”

“I never saw anything like it,” Dan Dreyfus, an official at the Bureau of Reclamation, later told the journalist riggr. “Letters were arriving in dump trucks. Ninety-five percent of them said we’d better keep our mitts off the Grand Canyon.”

By late summer,
My Weekly Reader
, the newspaper for elementary-school children, had taken a vehement stand against the dams. “You’re in deep shit when you catch it from them,” remarked Dreyfus, ruefully recalling the incident.
“Mailbags were coming in by the hundreds, stuffed with letters from schoolkids.”

It took another eighteen months for the endgame to play out, during which Morris Udall explored a possible deal that would involve eliminating one of the dams if the Sierra Club would agree to withdraw its opposition to the other—a proposal to which Brower responded by declaring, “One bullet to the heart is just as deadly as two.”

By the autumn of 1968, a final version of the bill—minus the hydroelectric dams in the Grand Canyon—was approved by both houses of Congress. When President Johnson signed the bill into law, the Sierra Club—captained by Brower and goaded by Litton, among many others—had been transformed from a group of alpine picnickers into the first truly powerful conservation lobby in America. Brower
was heralded by
Life
as “his country’s number-one working conservationist,” and the environmental movement had scored one of its
greatest victories, a platform upon which more sweeping successes, such as the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, and the National Environmental Protection Act, would eventually be built. While many disagreed with the manner in which this victory had been achieved, no one could deny that the battle over the Grand Canyon dams marked the coming of age of American wilderness conservation.

Something else was true too. By the time the fight was finally over, most Americans believed deeply in the principle that the Grand Canyon should not be messed with—not now, not ever, not for any reason. People from places as diverse as New Jersey and Alabama and North Dakota—people who might never set foot in the Southwest, much less see the canyon with their own eyes—now viewed it as a kind of national cathedral of geology and light: a wonder of nature that, foremost of all the country’s treasures, was sacrosanct.

Although many conservationists had participated in the effort to bring this about, the lion’s share of the credit rightfully redounded to Brower—even though Brower himself was never entirely comfortable with this distinction. Whenever someone pointed out that he was the star of this play, its virtuoso performer, he would emphasize that the campaign had been waged by hundreds of people, men and women who would go on to make deep and lasting contributions to the way that Americans think about landscape, nature, and human responsibility to the world we all share.

Among this group, Litton was by no means the most important. In many ways, his role was fairly minor. But in one crucial respect, he was absolutely vital—and many years later, Brower went to some effort to point this out:

“Some people get the kudos and others, out of inequity, don’t,” he declared. “Martin Litton is due most of those addressed to me in error: more years than I will ever admit, he has been my conservation conscience.”

I
f he wanted, Litton could easily have continued to follow Brower, who was forced out of the Sierra Club, but went on to found two new conservation groups. Instead, the irascible old glider pilot decided to follow an entirely different heading, a tack inspired by one of the men he admired most, and whose spirit he increasingly seemed to embody.

Seduced by his fleet of wooden boats, Litton disappeared down the Colorado in the footsteps of John Wesley Powell, where his story was about to intersect with that of a dory called the
Emerald Mile
.

The Sweet Lines of Desire

If rightly made, a boat would be a sort of amphibious animal, a creature of two elements, related by one half its structure to some swift and shapely fish, and by the other to some strong-winged and graceful bird.

—H
ENRY
D
AVID
T
HOREAU

Martin Litton’s fleet of dories, moored at Bright Angel beach in the heart of the Grand Canyon.

The glory of the dories is their lightness and maneuverability; the way they go dancing over the waves, the way you can turn them like the knob on an outhouse door.

If you sacrifice that . . . you’ve lost the whole goddamned ball of wax.

—P. T. R
EILLY

A
MONG
its many other consequences, the Grand Canyon dam fight wound up kicking the river-running industry into high gear. Drawn by the controversy, a number of celebrities and prominent politicians began booking excursions on the Colorado during the mid-1960s to see the place firsthand. Perhaps the most famous of these was Robert F. Kennedy, who took his entire family down the canyon, along with a group of friends that included the mountaineer Jim Whittaker, a member of the first American team to summit Mount Everest; the humorist Art Buchwald; and the singer Andy Williams. The publicity surrounding this and other trips proved to be a direct stimulant to river travel. By the time President Johnson signed the legislation that closed the door on the dams, a Grand Canyon white-water trip
had emerged as the classic American wilderness experience, a pilgrimage at the top of the bucket list for anyone who loved the country’s natural wonders.