Dam

My mother does this:

She bites her pinkie finger when she's upset to make herself not cry.

She drinks Chardonnay.

She always says what she means even if that means telling my friend Todd that she doesn't like the red pants he's wearing or my friend Jeff that all writers had tortured lives and if they didn't they can't be real writers or telling the waiter that the music is too f-ing loud.

She doesn't swear except to say god or damn or jesus. Usually in the same phrase.

She expresses her disgust by throwing her head to the left and pushing a th sound out from between her lips.

Sometimes the head shakes back to the right. Sometimes eye rolling accompanies the sound. If her shoulders get involved in a sort of humping shrug, her whole body is involved and you know you've committed a seriously egregious faux pas, like saying it's OK to put a shoe with gum stuck on it in the freezer to freeze the gum to get it off. Something like that may even make her shoulder twitch.

* * *

The main lesson at the dinner table was restraint. Singing was prohibited. As were elbows on the table. You must cut your salad greens into manageable bites. Eating too quickly or talking with food in your mouth—not allowed. Nor was salting your food before tasting it. Dad would always tell the cautionary tale of the guy who was interviewing for a job at IBM and they took him out to lunch. The guy salted his food before he tasted it and did not get the job. Apparently because he didn't look before he leapt or made decisions before he had all the facts. Or they thought he'd get high blood pressure and the cost to insure him would be too high. He never mentioned whether ordering a glass of wine before the other guys could have cost him the job as well. When I was interviewing for jobs, seven different people warned me to wait until my hosts ordered wine. Then I could drink up.

After we were done eating, my sisters and I had to ask to be excused and take our plates to the dishwasher. All good lessons, in the end, I think. We ended up to be relatively well-mannered people, conscious of how we appeared to others. My dad, though, had a problem with mustard. Maybe he had a problem with condiments in general, but in particular, whenever he'd get mustard on the side of his mouth, my mother's shoulder would twitch and eyes would roll. Jesus, she'd swear, and reach over to rub the offensive yellow off his face, like she was scraping gum off a shoe.

It was one of the few things she felt she had over him. He made the money, was supposedly the "smart" one, did the taxes, drafted blueprints for the hot tub room. But she outclassed him with a refined etiquette and a distaste for mustard.

* * *

The building of the Glen Canyon Dam began in 1956, when my mother was ten. By the time I was born, it was finished and finally nearing capacity—3,700 feet above sea level. The Glen Canyon Dam website boasts that "[t]he controversy surrounding the construction of the dam is often cited as the beginning of the modern-day environmental movement."

Cited reasons for said environmental movement:

Changes

Glen Canyon Dam has created a new Colorado River. Before the dam was built, water temperatures in the river fluctuated seasonally from 80°F (26°C) in the summer to near freezing in the winter. Now, the water temperature below the dam averages 46°F (7°C) year-round. The Colorado River was once filled with silt and sediment. Now, the river deposits its load of silt as it enters Lake Powell near Hite, Utah. Water released from the dam is clear and the Colorado River is muddy only when downstream tributaries contribute sediment.

As the habitat has changed, so have plant and animal species. Native fish, unable to...