Second Nature

Hidden in a cleft between hills of unreclaimed sagebrush, its presence signalled only by converging lines of skyscraper-high transmission towers, the Grand Coulee Dam still has the power to astonish. The front of the dam – where Guthrie admired ‘the misty crystal glitter of that wild and windward spray’ – is dry now, a stained and weathered concrete cliff, over which the engineers release water from Lake Roosevelt above the dam only for son et lumière shows, put on for tourists on summer nights. Wedged snugly into the landscape, the Grand Coulee has become a period piece, like the Mussolini-era railway stations that are its close contemporaries.

Though many other dams have since been built across the river – between the Bonneville Dam, upstream of Portland, Oregon, and the Grand Coulee, there are now eleven dams in US territory, plus a further three in Canada – the Grand Coulee is still the Columbia Basin’s haunting genius loci, the prime shaper of its landscape, and the hulking embodiment of the idea that man’s mastery over nature had reached such a degree that he could work transformative miracles of the kind traditionally performed by gods: water into megawatts, desert into garden, wilderness into civilization.

It wasn’t until 1950, under the presidency of Harry Truman, that the great federal irrigation scheme at last got under way. Nearly sixty years on, Truman, Guthrie, both Roosevelts and a string of presidents in between, would be astonished by the appearance of the rural wonderland they conjured into being in songs and speeches. On a recent drive across the Columbia Plateau, I had Guthrie singing on the CD player as I took in mile after bullet-straight mile of country whose desolate character remains obstinately unsoftened by no end of technological ingenuity and agricultural enterprise.

The roads run north to south and east to west, one mile apart in each direction. Aside from the occasional line of irrigated poplars, planted as shelter belts, the only verticals in the landscape are telephone poles; otherwise it’s like a gigantic sheet of graph paper. For this one must thank Thomas Jefferson who, in the 1780s, inaugurated the marvellous eighteenth-century rationalistic scheme of taming unruly American nature by imposing on it the ‘township and range’ system.

From an arbitrary point on the Ohio River, where it crosses the western boundary of Pennsylvania, surveyors were to map their way across the rapidly expanding territory of the United States, dividing it into ‘townships’, each measuring six miles by six, and further subdivided into thirty-six ‘sections’ of one square mile apiece. Section 16, near the centre of the notional township, three squares down from its northern limit and three from its western one, was to be set aside for the purposes of public education. In effect, Jefferson flung out a potentially infinite graticule across thousands of miles of as-yet-undiscovered country, planting phantom towns, each with its schoolhouse or college on every Section 16, wherever it might fall – on the craggy top of a mountain, or the muddy bottom of a lake.

Although actual townships never conformed to Jefferson’s grand plan but grew up for the usual reasons – because they were on a river, a cattle trail, a railroad, or, later, an interstate highway – the survey method, with its six-mile squares and square-mile sections, has improbably continued into the present. Wherever you are, in wide-open prairie or deep forest, you stand in a numbered section of a numbered township. Roads hew to the lines of the speculative graticule, paying no attention to contours, which makes driving in the West feel like being on watch aboard a ship on automatic pilot, locked to a rigid compass course. I was going south, on a road named ‘QNW’. Longitudinal roads were designated by letters, latitudinal ones by numbers: if one could count and spell, it was impossible to get lost on this dusty tableland, now more geometry than nature.

Each field occupies a full section – a 640-acre square, watered by a half-mile-long centre-pivot sprinkler, making a perfect circle of green or chocolate-brown in the pale-olive desert. The computer-controlled sprinklers, driven by electric motors, trundle slowly round and round on wheeled undercarriages, taking a day or more to complete a single circuit. The fields’ edges are strewn with the handiwork of the water engineers: pipes and spigots, squat pumphouses, lateral ditches and canals that, even after all these years, still look like rawly excavated trenches in the earth.

Miles of this flat, robotic agriculture separate farmhouse from farmhouse – a far cry from what was envisioned in 1952, when a lottery was opened to Second World War veterans, who had first dibs on eighty-acre parcels of irrigated land, each just one-eighth of a section, for an initial investment of $4,600. The federal planners were incorrigible sentimentalists, still clinging, in the mid-twentieth century, to that peculiarly American mythologization of the small farmer as the fount of human goodness and the small farm as the essential building block in the atomic structure of democracy. ‘Farmers are the chosen people of God, if ever he had a chosen people, whose breasts he has made his peculiar deposit for substantial and genuine virtue,’ wrote Jefferson. The planners saw the Columbia Plateau as an organic society of pocket-sized family farms, like an epic Robert Frost poem, full of salt-of-the-earth types mending walls and fences, planting seeds, their long two-pointed ladders aimed at heaven through the trees.

What actually emerged was an enormous tract of government-subsidized agribusiness, a monotonous and lonely landscape dedicated to the mass production of such valuable items as the fast-food frozen French fry. Within the federally regulated area of the plateau, the family farms quickly swelled to a dozen times their original size, while on its fringes the agricultural corporations moved in during the 1970s and 1980s, to piggyback on the federal project, using cheap federal electricity to pump cheap federal water over farms whose acreages are measured in the tens of thousands. One barely credible statistic: in 2001, the New York Times reported that Columbia Basin farmers were paying $1.50 per megawatt of electricity at a time when a megawatt was commanding a price of $375 to $400 on the open market.

Sharing the narrow roads with eighteen-wheeler refrigerated trucks, catching intermittent glimpses of the Columbia River, flanked by sheer cliffs of dark basalt, nearly 1,000 feet below the plateau, I thought of how I’d been brought up with the quaint idea that cultivation gives a human shape and scale to the land. But this land seemed now less friendly to the human than when the farmers first arrived. The rectilinear severity of its roads and its vast identical fields of beet and potatoes robbed it of distance and perspective. Its chief architectural feature wasn’t the farmhouse but the ‘facility’ – the white metal shed, spread over the best part of an acre, where the vegetables were processed and packaged in the loading bays full of eighteen-wheelers, lined up hull to hull. From these grim facilities came French fries – machine-cut, parboiled, pre-fried, flash-frozen – along with tinfoil sachets of instant mashed potato and the rubbery, vermicular tangles that pass for hash browns on the breakfast plates of every chain restaurant at every freeway exit in America.

I stopped for lunch at Mattawa, a familiar-looking grid of bungalows and trailer homes, just big enough to support a supermarket and high school. SERVICIOS EN ESPANOL said the signboard by the Mormon tabernacle, an unnecessary piece of information since everything in Mattawa was so obviously en Español – the Catholic church; the grocery-cum-video store; the hair salon; the laundromat; the family clinic; the rival taquerias, La Popular and El Jato, where a Mexican soap opera was turned up to full volume
on the TV.

Mattawa was a displaced barrio, more than 1,000 miles from home, with the melancholy air that displacement brings. Its per capita income, as I later found out, is around $7,500 per year; a minimum-wage town, and typical of the Spanish-speaking settlements scattered over the plateau. Where the town peters out near the Shell gas station, the facilities begin: one is a potato-packing plant, one makes malt from barley, a third produces compressed hay cubes for cattle feed. They are all owned and managed by Anglos, with Mexican, Guatemalan or Mexican-American workforces. During the picking season – from May to September – the Hispanic population doubles, as truckloads of migrant labourers pour into the Columbia Basin, filling spare rooms and run-down cheap motels, with many living in encampments hardly distinguishable from the Hoovervilles of the Great Depression.

From the Mattawa restaurant, sucking on a bottle of Pacifico beer, waiting for tamales to arrive, it was hard to conceive that such gigantic investment – of rhetoric, sentiment, rural nostalgia, as well as now incalculable billions of public money – could have resulted in a farmscape so characterless and bleak, the majority of whose inhabitants appeared little better off than the dust-bowl refugees for whom this land had been designed as an agrarian sanctuary.