Review by Ed Quillen
Water – October 2003 – Colorado Central Magazine
Cadillac Desert – The American West and its Disappearing Water
by Marc Reisner
First published in 1986
Revised edition with afterword published in 1993 by Penguin
ISBN 0-14-017824-4
THIS BOOK IS DATED, with its last revision a decade ago, and it will never be updated, because Marc Reisner died of cancer at age 51 in 2000. And Cadillac Desert is mostly journalism of the moment, including interviews with the movers and shakers of 20 or 25 years ago. But instead, it’s a classic with much to tell us about the present and future.
To an earlier generation of Westerners, “desert” was a dirty word, not a place to take your Nissan X-Terra for fun. They denied they lived in a desert — when Texas historian Walter Prescott Webb wrote The Great Plains in 1931, the political correctness of the day required him to use euphemisms like “subhumid regions.”
As for the Cadillac in the title, we know the car he had in mind, one of those gargantuan pimpmobiles of 1958, with soaring tail fins and blinding quantities of chrome, the Cadillacs of Elvis Presley and Jayne Mansfield. Those cars weren’t transportation, they were ostentation.
That honest title describes Western water development in the 20th century. In a land where some “Beater Pickup” water projects would have been sensible, we generally built Cadillacs — expensive and showy, and not exactly practical or sustainable. We were taking a harsh and bare land, and trying to adorn it like a 1958 Coupe de Ville, when all we needed was an old pickup.
Reisner doesn’t argue against all water projects. Regions should be able to feed themselves, and in much of the West, that means water storage and irrigation.
And this goes back a long time. At the Western Water Workshop in Gunnison this summer, I saw a presentation by Ken and Ruth Wright — a retired water engineer and an amateur archaeologist. They have demonstrated that the Anasazi built storage reservoirs, most likely for drinking and cooking water, at Mesa Verde a millennium ago. What had been thought to be ceremonial dance areas turned out to be silted-in reservoirs.
Reisner even found a sensible modern project in Colorado, the Colorado-Big Thompson, which irrigates thousands of acres of productive farmland along the South Platte.
Although Cadillac Desert is non-fiction, and it’s mostly just good old-fashioned hard-nosed journalistic reporting, it has a classical form — it’s an epic turned into Greek tragedy.
Throughout history, many cultures have delighted in tales of national identity. The ancient Hebrews thrilled to the adventures of Joshua and David; such stories bound them together as a people, and tied them to a landscape — tied them so well, in fact, that 3,000 years later, they’re still warring over it.
Similarly, the Greeks had the Iliad and the Odyssey, epics that defined and confirmed their “Greekness.” We’ve got our own epic: “The Winning of the West.” It’s a set of stories we tell that form a cultural identity.
So that’s one story that Reisner tells, an early 20th- century tale of bright young engineers from the Reclamation Service, venturing into the arid West to bring water where there had been no water, and where previous efforts had been thwarted. They succeeded magnificently, as with Hoover Dam and Lake Mead, supplying electricity and water from the wildest of rivers in the deepest of canyons.
BUT THIS ISN’T JUST a heroic epic. It’s also a Greek tragedy. There was a formula — the hero would rise, then be brought down by his hubris, his arrogance, his refusal to recognize reality.
Reisner documents one of these tragedies: Teton Dam in Idaho, which catastrophically collapsed in 1976. And he predicts others to come: Reservoirs filling with silt, so that they are useless after the expenditure of billions of dollars; irrigated but poorly drained soil accumulating so much salt that it is no longer fertile and must be abandoned; water delivered so abundantly and cheaply that the population grows, and when the inevitable drought comes, even more people suffer.
Even so, the process started with noble intentions, propelled by a Jeffersonian vision, and augmented by John Wesley Powell’s proposals for family farms — 160-acre irrigated freeholds that would build a stable republic.
Yet, thanks to the dynamics of the American political system, it changed into a huge mechanism to subsidize big business as congressmen and senators started supporting each other’s water projects regardless of costs and practicality.
IT’S HARD TO WRITE about water without getting bogged down with cusecs and acre feet and parts per million — I know, because I get bogged down that way when I write about water.
But Reisner keeps his accounts moving by bringing us the personalities involved, most notably Floyd Dominy, director of the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation. For many years, Dominy was the man who could drink whiskey until 3 a.m. and then dazzle Congress with his testimony at an 8 a.m. hearing.
Reisner gives us farmers and engineers, environmentalists and developers, politicians and planners — all engaging people in a great struggle. As for the results of that struggle, his conclusion makes you either want to cry or revolt:
“We didn’t have to build main-stem dams on rivers carrying vast loads of silt; we could have built more primitive offstream reservoirs, which is what many private irrigation districts did — and successfully — but the federal engineers were enthralled by dams. We didn’t have to mine a hundred thousand years’ worth of groundwater in a scant half century, any more than we had to keep building 5,000-pound cars with 450-cubic-inch V-8’s. We didn’t have to dump eight tons of dissolved salts on an acre of land in a year; we could have forsworn development on the most poorly drained lands or demanded that, in exchange for water, the farms conserve as much as possible. But the Bureau [of Reclamation] sells them water so cheaply they can’t afford to conserve; to install an efficient irrigation system costs a lot more….
“But the tragic and ludicrous aspect of the whole situation is that cheap water keeps the machine running; the water lobby cannot have enough of it, just as the engineers cannot build enough dams; and how convenient it is that cheap water encourages waste, which results in more dams.”
With Referendum A — a proposal on the Colorado ballot this year, which authorizes spending some serious money on unspecified water projects — we all need to learn about what happens when politics, money, and water converge.
This is the place to start that education, if only to find Reisner’s memorable statement that “In times of drought, reason is the first casualty.”
— Ed Quillen
(Adapted from a talk given on Sept. 12 in Durango to introduce Cadillac Desert to the library’s community reading program.)
