Coast to Coast by Jan Morris

Author:Jan Morris [Jan Morris]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780571258314
Publisher: Faber & Faber
Published: 2010-09-15T04:00:00+00:00

19.

Dams, Bridges and Bones

It is science that has done all this to the Indians, taming their prairies and humbling their befeathered warriors; and science, in its most spectacular forms, is still a dominant social force in the West, harnessing rivers, reclaiming deserts, altering the face of the land and the lives of all its people.

Take a road north-west out of Kingman, Arizona, through the scrubby desert that surrounds the Colorado River, and before long you will see science applied to nature at its most magnificent. The road passes first through gold-mining country; little dusty tracks lead off into the blue Cerbat Mountains, and sometimes in their foothills you can see, imprecisely, the cluttered buildings of a mining camp, or read on a crooked notice beside the road the high-sounding name of some small hopeful enterprise. There are no towns for fifty miles or more, only an occasional cocky shambles of a shack and a gas station out in the wilderness; but a side-turning goes to a mining village hideously named Chloride. On either side the mountains rise, a desert plain intervening, sometimes red, sometimes a startling purple, and alone in this human landscape crouch a few shrivelled cactus trees. Presently the highway enters the hills, and winds over the dry dusty rises, doubling on its tracks, and twisting, and falling precipitously; and sometimes far below you can see a brown sluggish mess of slow water—the Colorado River, already 150 miles from its moment of glory, the Grand Canyon. Up and down the road goes, across interminable ridges, hot and dirty-looking, the only sign of life an occasional little cheerful donkey trotting along a hill-side. The mountains are higher now, but the air is heavier, and you are beginning to wish you had driven straight through into the orange-groves of California; until suddenly, in the narrowest of canyons, squeezed in between glowering ridges, high above the river, like a towering white fortress, or the wall of the Potala without its prayer-banners, proud, gleaming and monumental, appears the Boulder Dam. I would fly to America again tomorrow, and make the long hard journey across the continent, and spend an uncomfortable night in a second-rate hotel, for five more minutes beside it.

The dam is necessarily very narrow, and immensely deep (still the deepest, I believe, that has ever been built); and the armies of pylons that march away from it, carrying power to California and its factories, are built willy-nilly up the side of the surrounding hills; they stand at grotesque angles from the ground, sometimes hanging horizontally over the gorge, sometimes so drunkenly leaning that they ought to sway, sometimes just a trifle out of true, so that you look at them twice and feel a little giddy. What with this queer crooked menagerie of steel objects, and the road running through the canyon, and the power-house in its depths, and the enormous face of the dam itself shining through it all, Boulder gives an extraordinary impression of jumbled brilliance; and to

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.