The Emerald Mile.
Yesterday, we stopped at our regular coffee shop in Cle Elum on our way home from a weekend spent camping and paddle boarding. While I waited, I noticed a little free library and wandered over to it. I love those things and always feel compelled to check them out when I come across one. I've gotten some good finds.
This trip was no exception.
There, I found a copy of The Emerald Mile, Kevin Fedarko's magnum opus. Years ago, a friend of K's and mine highly recommended it and I've thought about reading it from time to time. I'm two chapters in and already hooked.
Fedarko titles the second chapter, simply, "Leviathan." Appropriate, as it introduces us to the time period of June 1983 in the control room of this absolute monstrosity: Glen Canyon Dam.
I snapped this on one of Cosmo's and my autumn holidays as we drove across the bridge between Utah and Arizona over the Colorado River. Or what is left of the Colorado on the other side of the dam. In some quick research, I came across an AZ Central article titled, "For a while in 1983, sheets of plywood were all that kept the mighty Glen Canyon Dam from overflowing."
In it, the author aptly explains:
Soaring 710 feet and anchored in Navajo sandstone, the dam was conceived in desert thirst, born into controversy, and swaddled in argument.
From what I recall, The Emerald Mile weaves the story of the three-man crew, led by Kenton Grua, who sought a world record racing the two-hundred and seventy-seven miles down the Colorado through the Grand Canyon during that particular spring runoff in June of 1983, with the controversy that has surrounded Glen Canyon since it was chiseled into the sandstone walls that once held the most beautiful canyon of all. The place no one knew, before the dam was built.
Recently, I keep seeing articles in The New Yorker and The Atlantic pop up that discuss the absurdity, most often, of the city of Phoenix. A city born of our misbegotten prowess, thinking that plopping an ever-burgeoning metropolis in the middle of the desert wasn't hinged on the absolute faith that slab of concrete would forever hold.
Apparently, in 1983, it almost didn't. I'm excited to read how that story and the one of the little dory and her crew fared against the omnipotent, unrelenting Colorado River.
