April 29, 2010 06:44 PM UTC

Floyd Dominy Passes-May His Rivers Run Free

• 1 Comments
• by: ClubTwitty

I believe the news was posted yesterday on Pols.  I did catch it somewhere surfing around, watching the horror playing out in desperation in the Gulf, and the spectacle of another self-destructing state-wide GOP campaign, and work.

But the ‘waterlord of the American West’ and father of the Glen Canyon Dam (and many, many others), Floyd Dominy, passed last week at his home in Virginia, he was 100 years old.  His daughter, who lives in the Grand Valley, recalls him in an article by Dennis Webb in the Sentinel.

One couldn’t craft a blog diary, indeed write any single or series books, to do the complexities of this man’s life justice–his lasting effect on the West: good, bad, permanent, at least within the scope by which we measure such things.

Floyd Dominy’s rise to power in the Bureau of Reclamation was astonishingly fast. From dirt sampler to waterlord of the American West took just thirteen years, and he might as well have been commissioner during the last three.  

Dominy had the instincts of a first-rate miler.  He could pace himself beautifully, moving on the margin of recklessness but always with power in reserve.  He knew when to cut off a runner, when to throw an elbow, when to sprint.  He also knew there was nothing like a grudge to make him run harder.”

Marc Reisner,Cadillac Desert

Floyd’s work, of course, still shapes Colorado–especially western Colorado–today. His battles and bargains with Wayne Aspinall, as the congressman worked to bring home the bacon from the Chair at the House Committee on Interior and Insular Affairs, damming the main stem of the Gunnison, along with the headwaters of the North Fork and the Smith Fork (to note just one system of several).

And Dominy had his eyes on more, including the biggest ones: the Green River, largest tributary to the grand prize, the Colorado. Here too, the history of our state entwines with the drama of western water politics.

Echo Park is inside Dinosaur National Monument, on the Green River along the river’s short trip through Colorado. Moffat County is probably still smarting from what happened next–and some still wish, I imagine, that they were zipping around on jet skis where the coyotes still roam.  

Many people consider the successful effort to stop the Echo Park dam the genesis of the modern environmental movement, defended by the young David Brower, who then agreed to let Floyd flood places like Cathedral in the Desert and Music Temple, in the hidden depths and grottos of Glen Canyon.  John McPhee’s classic Encounters with the Archdruid recounts a trip with Brower and Dominy down the Grand, another essential western read.

Floyd had drama, folks.  Big, consequential stuff. He impacted a lot of lives–human, animal, tree and plant–our whole world out here ‘west of the 100th Meridian’–probably forever.  

The other side of the story of course is not so easily expressed in glowing terms.  In the BuRec vision there was to be no river–and even few tributaries–left unplugged, all paid for with sketchy accounting, underwritten by the taxpayer, socialism at its finest. Most of Cadillac Desert details that side.  And many more books, articles, stories as well.

“Okay, God, I’m back,” Seldom Seen began, on his knees, head bowed.  “It’s me again, Smith, and I see you still ain’t done nothing about this here dam.  Now you know as well as me that if them goddam Government men get this dam filled up with water its gonna flood more canyons, suffocate more trees, drown more deer and generally ruin the neighborhood.  Why that there water is gonna back right up under Rainbow Bridge itself if you let them sonofabitches fill this dam.  You gonna let them do that?

…All we need here, God, is one little pre-cision earthquake.

Edward Abbey, The Monkey Wrench Gang

And you can count me among those who find it a shame that the once mighty Colorado does not run free through Glen Canyon. But this is not quite that type of diary.  

I understand that the Glen Canyon Dam, 4,901,000 cubic yards of concrete, human-made monolith is indeed, as Smith also said, a “temporary plug” on his beloved river.  Great men do great things and alter the course of human history.  But Nature bats last.  

Floyd: May Your Rivers Run Free