Second Nature

Forty miles east of Seattle, the crest of the Cascade Range, punctuated along its length by snow-mantled volcanoes, runs north to south, dividing Washington state into two regions. Crossing from one to the other over a mountain pass, you experience in minutes a violent change of climate and culture, as the inky green of Douglas firs, mosses, ferns and salal suddenly gives way to shale, sagebrush, juniper and piñon pine. Annual rainfall plummets from around eighty inches a year to ten or less; incomes and house prices drop; on the car radio, the news on National Public Radio fades into a drizzle of static, its place quickly occupied by a gospel or Spanish-language station. In the newly moistureless atmosphere, the light turns hard and clear, collapsing distances, so that the entire Columbia Basin, an area larger than France, seems to make itself visible all at once: a web of branching canyons, intricate as a leaf skeleton, threaded between bare whaleback hills.

On old maps, it shows as part of the ‘Great American Desert’ – an arid, treeless expanse, home to jackrabbits and rattlesnakes, fit for human use only for its mineral deposits and as an open range for sheep and cattle grazing on the sage and bunch grass. But the Columbia River and its tributaries, laden with snowmelt from the Cascades and the Rockies, flowed through the canyons, and the pillowy basalt uplands – solidified streams of the molten lava that coursed from the mountains during their formation – were coated
in fine wind-blown silt, or loess; soil in which almost anything would grow if it could be moistened with water from the rivers. What would turn into one of the most grandiose landscaping projects on earth began in a modest, ad hoc way, as nineteenth-century white settlers built diversion dams and sluices, and dug canals and ditches, tapping the nearest river for irrigation by using the same minimal technology with which Mesopotamians watered the Iraqi desert from the Euphrates, and the Hohokam Indians of Arizona periodically flooded their parched flatlands on the Gila and Salt rivers 1,500 years ago.

In the national mythology, it’s the quintessential American experience to arrive in a wild and inhospitable place, bend raw nature to one’s own advantage and make it home. So the land encountered by the Columbia Basin settlers was an American classic: mile upon mile of twiggy sage, spread over bald and shadeless hills, broken by sheer cliffs of fissured rock.

Near the junctions with the Columbia of steep, fast-flowing streams, settlers built weirs to channel water into irrigation ditches that hugged the contour lines and eventually, after a serpentine journey around the countryside, discharged into the main river, several hundred feet below the level of each weir. These ‘highline’ canals, most of them financed by railroad companies and consortia of city businessmen, opened broad swathes of land for cultivation. Sagebrush was ploughed into fields, fifty-dollar windmills were installed to pump the water to the soil and the lower canyons were transformed into a quilt of farms and orchards.

From the beginning, the US government watched over such private-enterprise schemes like a jealous parent. In the federal imagination, the watering of the dry West presented a fantastic opportunity, at once ideological and practical. The region was still best known for its mining camps, its migrant cattle and migrant men, and for wide-open towns whose success was measured by the number of their saloons, brothels, casinos and murders. Irrigation, on a scale far beyond the means of the private sector, would turn this barely governable land into a settled agrarian democracy – a society of family farmers with family values, beholden to the government for their good fortune. When the National Reclamation Act was passed in 1902, President Theodore Roosevelt called it ‘one of the greatest steps not only in the forward progress of the States, but in that of all mankind’ and forecast that ‘communities flourishing in what is now the desert finally will take their places among the strongest pillars of our Commonwealth’. Reclamation of the soil would bring about a greater reclamation – of morals, manners and citizenship.

The Act’s sponsor, a Nevada congressman named Francis Newlands, envisioned that 60 million acres of arid wilderness would eventually come under the plough. The enormous cost of irrigation would be paid for by the sale of public lands to homesteaders on ten-year mortgages. To stop the corporations – especially the railroad companies – from making a government-subsidized land grab, each family would be limited to a maximum of 160 acres and would have to prove permanent residence on their farm.

The plan had the charm of a perpetual motion machine: it would produce a continuously revolving fund of money from a limitless supply of at present useless land, and generate a steadily expanding tax-base of prosperous small farms. It would tame the lawless West, ease overcrowding in the eastern cities, feed the hungry and enrich the nation – all at no cost to the taxpayer. It was the quintessential politicians’ dream.

The new US Bureau of Reclamation sent out teams of geologists to scour the West for possible sites for dams, and involved itself in a multitude of schemes, most of which ran awry as irrigation works fell behind schedule, costs overran, and farmers went broke trying to meet their monthly payments on the proceeds of scanty harvests. In 1923, the Secretary of the Interior admitted that, ‘Reclamation of arid lands by irrigation from Government funds…is failing on a majority of projects.’ Although successive presidents, including Hoover and Coolidge, talked up the federal dream of landscaping the West, it wasn’t until the Great Depression and Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal administration, more than thirty years after the passage of the Newlands Act, that the big dams, so long promised, at last began to take real shape.

In 1933, the first concrete was poured at the Boulder Dam across the Colorado River on the Arizona–Nevada border and work started on the Fort Peck Dam across the Missouri in Montana, and the Bonneville and Grand Coulee dams on the Columbia. ‘We are in the process of making the American people “dam-minded”,’ Franklin Roosevelt said at the Grand Coulee site in 1934, where the sheer gigantism of the project made the dam a symbol of national regeneration in hard times. ‘The largest structure ever undertaken by man,’ Roosevelt called it, and a New York Times reporter, travelling with the presidential entourage, tried to convey to his readers the immensity of the Grand Coulee, first in familiar New York terms – ‘a structure that will be higher than a forty-storey building, longer than four ocean liners the size of the Queen Mary, and almost two city blocks in thickness’ – then in terms of the extraterrestrial: ‘It stretches across the Columbia like the crenellated wall of a giant fortress built to withstand the artillery of some super-warriors from Mars.’

It took eight years to build, the urgency of its completion mounting every year as conditions in the dust bowl worsened and more than 100,000 homeless farm workers and their families streamed into Washington state. Some found work as labourers on the dams, others as seasonal fruit pickers in the orchards around Wenatchee and Yakima; they set up home in smoky encampments along the Columbia Valley, living in tents, plywood shanties and cardboard boxes. More bold promises were made: irrigation would create farms of ten to forty acres, where half a million refugees from the agricultural catastrophes to the east could be resettled and their self-respect restored.

In 1941, when the dam was finished and the first hydroelectric turbines spinning, the Bonneville Power Administration, a federal agency, hired Woody Guthrie to sing its praises, giving him a month-long contract, a chauffeur-driven Hudson and a $266.66 pay cheque. The short, sparrow-weight folk singer was known to the FBI as Woodrow Wilson Guthrie, a Communist Party sympathizer, whose guitar soundboard carried the message, in big letters, this machine kills fascists. For four weeks, Guthrie was driven up and down the Columbia between the Bonneville and Grand Coulee dams, during which time he was reported by his driver to have never changed his clothes or taken a bath: ‘Poor guy had BO so bad you could hardly stand it.’

If his songs are to be believed, Guthrie’s usually sardonic take on the world melted in the face of the Columbia Basin project. ‘This is just as close to heaven as my travelling feet have been,’ he sung in ‘Roll, Columbia, Roll’, and seems to have persuaded himself that something not far short of a socialist utopia was dawning in the Pacific Northwest. In a homely voice, pitched midway between a croak and a yodel, he extolled, in ‘Pastures of Plenty’, the electrification of rural America – lighting farmhouses, powering factories and mills, and the greening of the desert.

Guthrie wrote: ‘I saw the Columbia River and the big Grand Coulee Dam from just about every cliff, mountain, tree and post from which it can be seen’ – vantage points from which that other panorama, of penniless rural nomads in their Hoovervilles, unfolded all around him. Many of the songs, including ‘Talking Dust Bowl (Washington Talking Blues)’, are phrased from the point of view of the ‘Okie’ travelling man, wistfully imagining a settled future on a watered plot, his crops sprouting all around him.

But these songs were thick with cautiously subjunctive ‘woulds’ and ‘coulds’ because the irrigation scheme – Grand Coulee’s original main purpose – had already been shelved. More than a year before Pearl Harbor, the US government decided that, in view of the ‘national defence emergency’ created by the war in Europe, only the hydroelectric function of the dam could be justified for the time being, and the green pastures of plenty would have to be put on hold until the end of the war.