Introduction

The land around here’s mighty poor,

We don’t own the place no more—

You work all year on a place like this,

And you ain’t got change for fifteen cents.

            —WOODY GUTHRIE
               "The Talkin' Blues"

IN THE LATE summer of 1932, my father, Arno Harden, hopped a boxcar in Great Falls, Montana. He was twenty-one, alone, fresh out of work, and heading west. His traveling bag was a pillowcase. He had one pair of shoes, the work boots on his feet, a plaid wool mackinaw, and a black leather cap with flannel earflaps. Two months of bucking hay for a farmer who let him sleep in the granary had earned him eighty dollars. He had saved most of the money and it was in his pocket, along with a sandwich he bought in a rail yard cafe. My father also carried a letter—from his father.

The letter told him not to come home. It said there was nothing to come home for. His mother had died in the spring of liver cancer at the age of forty. Drought had ruined the family farm in northeast Montana. Three hundred and sixty acres of wheat, barley, and corn had failed, and the topsoil was beginning to blow. The livestock had nothing to eat for winter. His father was trying to sell 2,500 head of sheep, 60 cattle, and 25 horses. For the third time in three decades, the Hardens had bet their life’s savings on rain in a dry country. For the third time, they had lost.

The letter instructed Arno, the oldest of eight children, to find his way out to Washington State. It said Joe Harden, an uncle who worked in an apple-processing town called Wenatchee, might know of a job. It was understood that my grandfather, when he could sell the livestock, would give up on Montana, load the rest of the family in a four-year-old Oldsmobile, and follow my father west.

Uncle Joe, as hoped, came through with a job. My father went right to work at Columbia Ice & Cold Storage in Wenatchee, wrestling 150-pound cakes of ice into boxcars packed with apples. The rail yard was down by the Columbia River, and my father arrived on its banks just as the federal government was beginning to spend prodigious amounts of money to transform that huge, cold, swift river into the world’s largest electricity machine. For my father, as for almost everyone who wandered into the Columbia Basin in the wake of the Great Depression, the harnessed river offered up a radically different version of the American West. In this version, my family’s dismal cycle of westering dreams, dry-land failure, and bankrupt flight was suddenly and permanently broken.

My father secured a job at Grand Coulee Dam when it was built in the 1930s and again when it was expanded in the 1970s. He also worked at Wanapum Dam on the Columbia, and at Hanford Atomic Works, the federal plutonium plant built beside the river. He and my mother raised four children in a prosperous little farm town called Moses Lake, whose very existence in the desert outback of eastern Washington depended on a gargantuan federal irrigation project that funneled in cheap water from the dammed-up Columbia. For most of his working life, my father was a high-paid union welder whose work was linked to the river and whose wages derived from federal contracts. My parents (my mother worked as a supermarket checker) could afford a lakefront house with a bedroom for each of their children. Every few years, there was a new car in the driveway. By the time I graduated from high school, there was money in the bank for a private college.

I left the Northwest for the East Coast at age twenty-two. Aside from hurried visits to see my family, I did not return for nineteen years. I became a reporter and foreign correspondent for the Washington Post, in Africa and Eastern Europe. While I was away, I remembered/imagined the Columbia Basin as a soothing version of Garrison Keillor’s white-bread America—friendly and well scrubbed like the Midwest, but more handsome, with high mountains, low humidity, mild winters, and good fishing. The defining event of daily life in Moses Lake was a large supper featuring boiled potatoes. The defining event of weekly life was feeling guilty about dozing off during Pastor Braun’s Sunday sermons at Emmanuel Lutheran Church. Our social life revolved around potluck dinners at the church, PTA at the school, and monthly meetings of the Sons of Norway. Most everyone in the Columbia Basin, as I recalled, was white, Christian, politically conservative, and scrupulously paying off a loan on a pickup. Physical work was the highest earthly value, emotional outbursts were discouraged, and ambition was stifled by self-doubt. Big government was bad, unless it was helping us make money off the river.

When I told my father that I would be going abroad as a foreign correspondent, he was puzzled. “Why do you want to do that?” he asked. “Those people don’t care about you.” While struggling to fall asleep in a Sarajevo hotel as Serb artillery ripped apart the city, I finally conceded his point. I decided to go home, get to know my family again, and try to figure out where I came from.

The Pacific Northwest to which I returned bore little resemblance to my boiled-potato, Pastor Braun recollections. The region had devolved in my absence from a Lake Woebegon with dams to a natural-resource war zone. The builders of dams, people like my father, stood accused of killing the Columbia River and wiping out its phenomenal runs of salmon. Hanford, which had paid my father handsomely, had become the single most polluted place in the Western world. Some of its radioactive waste leaked into the river and some of it threatened to explode. Environmentalists, having closed down federal forests to save the spotted owl, had sued to protect creatures ranging from woodpeckers to caribou. Farm families that lived downwind from Hanford suffered from tumors, harbored conspiracy theories, and sued a government that had secretly salted them with radiation.

There were hearings in towns across the Northwest. Federal and state officials gathered in school gymnasiums to shuffle their feet, blink nervously, and listen to citizens denounce them as liars.

Federal technocrats admitted that it had been a mistake to “develop” the Columbia so thoroughly, to pour all that concrete and spill all that waste, to kill all those salmon and dispossess all those Native Americans, to flood all that land and transform the river into a chain of slow-moving puddles.

At the same time, river users were determined not to lose the federal subsidies on which their profit margins depended. Simultaneously dependent upon and contemptuous of the federal government, their creed, as historian Bernard DeVoto once described it, was: “Get out and give us more money.” Irrigators, utilities, barging firms, and river towns had joined together to convince politicians and consumers that if environmentalists had their way—if too much was done to deconstruct the engineered river for the sake of salmon—we would all starve in the dark.

Yet subsidies were drying up. Political power in the Northwest had long since shifted to the chain of suburbs that runs from Vancouver, British Columbia, down through Seattle and south below Portland. These high-wage, smart-work people hoped to have it both ways, complaining about ecological decay and development excess even as they clung to the subsidized river system that gave them cheap electricity.

The Columbia represents an American West that for most of the past two centuries has summed up progress, patriotism, and virtue in a single word: conquest. When I returned home, I set out to follow the self-righteous rise and disputatious fall of the West’s most thoroughly conquered river. In particular, I went searching for myths that users of the river made up about themselves, myths of western individualism that had been sustained by other people’s money.

I have written this story from the inside out, as a legatee of the conquered river. For I was as sustained by federal largess as any river user. The federal dollars that rained for decades along the Columbia gave me and my family work, water, electricity, and pride in ourselves. When I returned home, I could not help but bridle as people in Seattle and Portland sneered at the Columbia Basin as an environmental wasteland populated by cowboys on welfare.

Yet, the more I saw of the puddled remains of the river, the more I felt like a stranger looking in on a foreign way of life. The familiar landscape was deeply unsettling. The community I grew up in seemed contaminated by self-deception.

This book is about the destruction of the Columbia by well-intentioned Americans whose lives embodied a pernicious contradiction. They prided themselves on self-reliance, yet depended on subsidies. They distrusted the federal government, yet allowed it to do as it pleased with the river and the land through which it flowed. As long as there was federal money, they did not mind that farmers wasted water, that dams pushed salmon to extinction, or that plutonium workers recklessly spilled radioactive gunk beside the river.

Users of the Columbia—the generous and God-fearing westerners among whom I grew up—remained locked in old habits of pride, denial, and dependence. My story of the river is a memoir, a history, and a lament for a splendid corner of the American West that maimed itself for the sake of subsidized prosperity and that continues not to understand why.

To explore the river and befriend those who collaborated in its destruction, I traveled on a big freight barge sailing west from Idaho. The pilots and deckhands on that barge, like most of the people I encountered on the river, were furious. Their livelihoods depended on subsidized slackwater, the sluggish navigable ponds between dams. They felt betrayed by schemes to remove dams, ground barges, and save salmon.

At the confluence of the Snake and Columbia Rivers, I got off the barge to see what had happened to the salmon-choked river that Lewis and Clark had discovered in 1805. The waterway I found was a remote-controlled “pool,” the level of which fluctuated to meet electricity needs on a grid that reached to southern California. In the bathtub river, dwindling numbers of salmon were distilled from the water, sorted by computer, and hauled to the sea in trucks and barges.

To follow what the Columbia has become, I could not simply ride downstream in a barge. I bought a car from a farmer who was having trouble with his payments, and drove twenty thousand miles up and down the river. I drove north to Grand Coulee Dam, where my father worked, where I worked (before getting fired), and where the river was harnessed for the sake of jobs, electricity, and irrigation.

From the dam, I tracked a wholly artificial, concrete-lined branch of the river back to my hometown. Irrigators around Moses Lake enjoyed a half century of deeply subsidized security before outsiders—salmon advocates in the Northwest and budget cutters back in Washington—began to question giving so much water and so many below-cost benefits to members of the middle class.

From Moses Lake, it was an eighty-minute drive to Hanford, where the Columbia skirts around America’s largest nuclear dump and where federal dominance in the Columbia Basin, nurtured by decades of secrecy, reached its toxic apogee. Back on the barge below Hanford, I floated west out of the desert, through the Cascade Mountains, and into the rainy, crowded, and affluent West Side of the Pacific Northwest. There, the majority no longer engaged in resource extraction. More people wrote software than felled trees. They went outside to play, not to make a living.

On the west side of the mountains, the integrity of the Columbia River and the survival of its salmon had become lifestyle concerns. The river was a major attraction in the giant civic park that the Pacific Northwest had become. Accordingly, the West Side majority favored spending a moderate amount of money to save salmon. They wanted to re-machine the Columbia so that it could resemble, at least during salmon migrations, a living river.

When I began my travels it seemed both logical and inevitable that the West Side—the world of high tech and hiking boots—would win control of the Columbia. But the more time I spent on the river and the more I learned about what was at stake, the less sure I became. The West Side was not losing sleep over the fate of the Columbia. When its residents did pay attention to the river, they behaved like dilettantes, motivated by a passing desire for a pristine playground or by abstract notions of saving endangered species. River users, however, were fighting for their jobs. They were defending a subsidized status quo that they believed to be their birthright.

Size is not the most meaningful measure of the Columbia River. It is, of course, big: 1,214 miles long and nearly 10 miles wide as it nears the sea. Snaking south out of the Canadian Rockies and flowing west to the Pacific, it drains an area larger than the Eastern Seaboard from Maine to Virginia. Its annual discharge would spread a foot of water across all of California and Arizona. The river jabs a four-hundred-mile finger of freshwater out into the Pacific. There are three bigger rivers in North America. The Mississippi, the Mackenzie, and the St. Lawrence all travel farther and discharge more water. But none of them even comes close to the Columbia for muscle.

For a principal river of the world, it has an astoundingly steep drop. The Columbia falls nearly twice as far as the Mississippi—in about half the distance. The greater a river’s drop, the greater its power. Every half hour the Columbia expends as much energy as was released by the explosion of the Hiroshima bomb. The river possesses a third of America’s hydroelectric potential.

When Franklin Roosevelt saw the Columbia from a train window while campaigning for the vice presidency in 1920, his first instinct was for control. “As we were coming down the river today, I could not help thinking of all that water running unchecked down to the sea,” he said as soon as he got off his train in Portland. “Those great stretches of physical territory now practically unused” along the river must be “developed by the Nation and for the Nation.”

By the mid-thirties, the four largest concrete dams ever built were going up in the West. Two of them (Bonneville and Grand Coulee) were on the Columbia River. At the time, no river with the Columbia’s power had been dammed anywhere in the world. Over the next forty years, as the Columbia was transformed from America’s largest free-flowing stream into its most elaborately engineered electricity-irrigation-transportation machine, there would be twelve more big dams on the mainstem of the Columbia and more than a hundred others on its tributaries.

The engineered West offered its inhabitants a superior brand of life, particularly in the far northwest corner. Dams gave people who lived in the Pacific Northwest the cheapest electricity in the country. They turned the deserts of eastern Washington and Oregon into gardens. Their power made aluminum for the airplanes and fuel for the atomic bombs that helped win World War II. Their locks turned a town in Idaho—a town 465 miles from the sea—into a major seaport. The Bureau of Reclamation made no secret of what it was doing. Its official slogan was “Our Rivers: Total Use for Greater Wealth.”

The sum total of the concrete miracles, over half a century, transformed Washington, Oregon, Idaho, western Montana, and the Canadian province of British Columbia from a boondock into a high-tech, high-wage region whose gross national product ranked tenth in the world.

As river stories go, most everything on the Columbia happened quickly, in little more than fifty years. The river ran free when my father arrived in Washington State. It is worth remembering, as you travel with me on the river, what he and many Depression-era newcomers did not understand when they began working together to stopper up the Columbia.

He knew next to nothing about salmon. He had never eaten or fished for one. He did not know the Columbia teemed with them. He did not know that the local Indians centered their lives on them. The first time he walked down to the bank of the river in Wenatchee, he saw what he thought was a silvery log in the shallows. When he kicked it, it came alive.

“Scared the hell out of me,” my father remembered. “Never seen anything like it. Nobody talked about fish then. I never seen anybody fishing. Not very many people ate fish, I never seen them anyhow.”

People born and raised in the Pacific Northwest are often said to have some special affinity for salmon. Public agencies often describe the fish as “our most potent symbol of endurance and vigor.” But if you grew up in irrigation country, that is nonsense. I never had any feeling for the fish. We did not fish for salmon, we could not afford to buy them, and we did not have the foggiest idea when or where they migrated, though the Columbia was less than an hour from our house. In twelve years of public school and four years of private college in the Northwest, the issue of salmon dying for cheap electricity never came up. I dimly remember hearing that dams killed salmon, but it seemed unimportant, especially compared to the mystery of having enough water to live in the desert.

It is also worth remembering, as you consider what has happened to western rivers like the Columbia, who these people were who built and believed in and benefited from dams. A lot of them were like my father, farm kids who came of age in a rawboned West where cowboy myths about self-reliance had a firm grounding in fact.

Before the Depression forced him to flee Montana, my father broke wild horses, hauled lignite coal in an open wagon through prairie blizzards, and took lickings from a father who was quick with the razor strop. He boxed nearly every Sunday in the living room of his house against relatives and neighbors.

Like many beneficiaries of the engineered river, my father and our family savored those hardtack memories—even as we became middle-class cheerleaders for federal subsidies. Applying a brand of logic peculiar to westerners who prosper with the help of federal money, we understood the government-planned, government-run, and government-financed damming of the Columbia as an affirmation of our rugged individualism. We incorporated the harnessed river into our mythic West.

It was an enchanted place where, in memory, a man could break wild horses and box on Sunday with his neighbors. But where, in fact, he and his family would never again have to swallow their pride, pack up their belongings, and move on.