Voyage of a Summer Sun: Canoeing the Columbia River

8. Grand Coulee: A Man Has No Idea

8 6HftnO COUlII A Man Has No Idea There was nothing on earth to compare it to. Grand Coulee Dam was the biggest assault of man on nature in the thenhistory of the world. For seven thousand years the planet had spun unburdened by any man-made object larger than the Great Pyramid at Giza. Grand Coulee Dam was going to be three times that size. A flickering newsreel camera gazes down from D Street in Tent City, and the crackling voice of the narrator struggles for words. Colossal? Mammoth? Three thousand men on a shift, three shifts a day, men and their machinery as if God's footfall had lit on a gigantic termite mound. The narrator: "Enough concrete to pave a highway from Seattle to Texas! More steel than in the transcontinental railroad! Eight miles of tunnels within its bulk!" Squads of federal publicists, in their zeal to find scale and to pump up a Depression-ridden nation, were inspired to overlook the Great Wall ofChina and perhaps the Panama Canal, depending on how you figure it. But let's not quibble. Grand Coulee Dam is still the most massive man-made structure in the United States, and the largest concrete thing in the world. Grand Coulee Dam captured-deserved to capture-men's souls. 138 VOYAGE OF A SUMMER SUN They came from Astoria when the price of salmon fell to ten cents a pound and nobody could pay it, proud Scandy fishermen with the wife and three towheads and all they owned on a broken-down flatbed Ford. They came from Portland and Seattle, where the breadlines had never been longer and men sold small pyramids ofapples from upturned crates. They came from the woods when the mills shut down, and they came from the parched plains of eastern Washington when their farms went belly up. TheyJoaded up from the Hoovervilles of California , and straight from the lost heartland of America. September 1933: The government's first steel buttresses for the dam were a great magnet for iron-bodied but desperate men who needed work and couldn't find it.Jobs-thousands of jobs, at fifty cents an hour under the hot sun and choking dust-awaited those who would uproot themselves to harness the Great River of the West. As they came, they became: blasters, mixers, crane operators, carpenters, electricians. Those who could read and figure were foremen. Workers sorted themselves into camps around the vast construction pit according to job and social rank. The big shots took the only shade, down in the willowed burg called Coulee Dam. Up the dry hills sprawled Mason City, Electric City, Tent City. Thirty thousand souls rushed to the high desert, including those who came to clothe, house, feed, swindle, and preach. At Grand Coulee there was promise. There was hope. The English language lacks a single common word for a steepwalled , trenchlike gulch cut by flash-flood rains or melting snow. The Spanish call it an arrqyo, the French a coulee. The Columbia's grand coulee is an ancient riverbed where an Ice Age blockage shifted the river overflowing into lava-busting, terrain-carving floods. The coulee, today, is a high rimrock canyon without a river. Glacial melting has shifted the Columbia back into its even-more-ancient bed-its modern Grand Coulee 139 course-that bends north and west in search ofan outlet to the Pacific. The riverless coulee lies 280 feet higher than the surface of Lake Roosevelt. What intrigued freethinkers and surveyors in the 1920S was the idea that ifyou couldjust put some river back in the coulee, simple gravity would feed that water toward the high desert. You could tum the brown land green. From the upriver side, at canoe-level, the size ofGrand Coulee Dam was not immediately apparent. Lake Roosevelt stopped at a low concrete wall across the river. No trees or houses gave the wall scale between its buff rock shoulders, themselves massive. But the dam's size snapped into perspective when I realized that the flyspeck creeping across it was a car. The dam is a mile across; on the far side is a spillway twice the height of Niagara Falls. But I couldn't see that. What I could see was the big idea: gyou couldjust lift some river up into the coulee . .. The landscape ahead ofmy canoe made a 1: The Columbia River valley split...