My mother at 90
prefers the distant past to the present. When she sees the
Tournament of Roses parade on television, she recalls coming of age
during the Great Depression. When she hears that the nation might
be sliding into recession, she tells me what hard times were really
like.
Her job during the 1930s was to dole out FDR tennis
balls and FDR tennis rackets to penniless players at the newly
built public courts near downtown Colorado Springs. Franklin D.
Roosevelt’s Civilian Conservation Corps built those courts
along Monument Creek. Then they channelized the floodplain of the
creek bed, so that it would not flood the new courts during summer
monsoons.
Such feats so impressed my young mother that
she married a civil engineer. The couple honeymooned in Southern
California, attending the 1939 Rose Bowl. She remembers their first
night in a hotel room, where the groom lowered her into a
claw-footed bathtub filled with warm water and floating gardenias.
“They cost a nickel apiece!” she recalls.
My
father’s job site was along the Lower Colorado River, where
the bride learned to keep house in the Mojave Desert. “But we
were deliriously happy,” she says. “My husband had a
job. He was working on a great engineering project. The United
States Bureau of Reclamation was lifting the country out of the
Depression.”
“Lift” was the operative
word. Waters from the Colorado River filled that artificial tub.
The Colorado River made gardenias and football fields possible in
arid Southern California. The key to getting a river of water to
Los Angeles was Parker Dam. The Bureau completed it in 1938,
locating it on the Colorado just at the border between the
water-warring states of Arizona and California — about 300 miles
east of Los Angeles and 180 miles south of Las Vegas.
Parker Dam creates Lake Havasu, an Indian word for blue water. Near
the dam, you can hear a giant sucking sound made by colossal pumps
that move the water 1,617 feet up through three cavernous silver
pipes to a series of reservoirs and canals that eventually lead to
thirsty Los Angeles and the Rose Bowl. That isn’t all. Parker
Dam also makes it possible for pumps to divert the Colorado River
eastward into the Central Arizona Project. These lifelines make
Phoenix and Tucson possible.
Now, the whole Lower
Colorado River is a series of reservoirs, quaintly called lakes.
Beneath Lake Havasu lie the remains of the villages of the
Chemehuevi and Mojave Indians. The canyons of the Colorado River
must have been a fearsome sight when the water flowed free, joined
here at today’s Parker Dam by the Bill Williams River, the
last major tributary before the Colorado headed south toward the
Gulf of Mexico.
Today, thanks to Homeland Security, you
have to view all this elegant engineering through barriers and
barbed wire. An exception is the drive across the crest of Parker
Dam. The drive leads to the Bill Williams National Wildlife Refuge,
which runs for seven miles up the river and provides habitat for
neo-tropical migratory birds. When mountain man and scout Bill
Williams led John C. Fremont’s expedition to this junction in
1848, Fremont found both rivers lined with cottonwood forests.
Botanists named this tree with its large, graceful leaf after the
explorer and presidential candidate. The Indians told Fremont that
sometimes the smaller river ran higher than the Colorado itself.
To control its flows, the government built Alamo Dam
upstream from the refuge in 1968. But no one figured on the
aggressiveness of another invader, the tamarisk. It out-competed
the native trees and made a barren jungle of the refuge.
But that was not the end of the story. In spite of the Alamo Dam,
the Bill Williams River flashed in the wet years of 1993 and 1995,
running so high that it ripped out the tamarisk and allowed the
establishment of a corridor forest of Populus fremontii. Today, the
trees are an amazing 60 feet high. Biologists and engineers have
teamed up to manage the flows of the Bill Williams to nurture the
cottonwoods and the endangered birds that depend on them, thus
maintaining one of the last cottonwood bosques in the region.
When I tell my mother such ecological morality tales —
though I am not sure what the moral is — her gaze goes vacant.
Slipping back into memories of that gardenia-filled tub, she
insists, “You can’t undo the past. And those gardenias
were a nickel apiece!”
Tom Wolf is a
contributor to Writers on the Range, a service of High
Country News (hcn.org). Tom Wolf is a writer, living at
Lake Havasu for the winter.
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