As it happens, the first official chap
ter of our journey is to be written in a place called Page.
Those of you who are familiar with Northern Arizona and Southern Utah will know Page, Ariz., as the closest neighboring city to Lake Powell. We arrived just short of midnight, so we didn’t initially see the lake. But I knew we were getting close when we crested a hill and saw smoke billowing from the three massive chimneys at Navajo Generating Station.
Those chimneys are nearly 300 feet taller than the tallest building in Phoenix, and, if the Salt River Project’s website is to be believed, the sulfur dioxide scrubbers inside them help make Navajo Generating Station “one of the cleanest coal-fired power plants in the country.” Then again, if the advocacy group Environment Arizona’s website is to be believed, NGS “is the eighth-dirtiest plant in the country.”
Navajo Generating Station is just one of Page’s entries into the great Human Ingenuity vs. Environmental Responsibility debate. Located a few miles across the rust-colored plateau, clogging the cold green waters of the Colorado River like a colossal cinderblock, is Glen Canyon Dam.
Glen Canyon Dam provides hydroelectric power to parts of Arizona and Utah, and, more importantly, stores water for 27 million people in the West. It also provides irrigation for 3.5 acres of farmland.
But, for many Westerners who love this part of the country for its wide-open beauty, Glen Canyon Dam is an icon of ecological degradation. When the dam was completed in 1963, it began flooding an 186-mile stretch of the Colorado River and submerging the geological splendor of Glen Canyon. An entire ecosystem died. Sierra Club founder David Brower called the dam “America’s most regretted environmental mistake.”
I’m a little embarrassed to admit I’ve never read The Monkey Wrench Gang by Edward Abbey, but I know what it’s about: Four “environmental terrorists,” who love the wildness of the land and loathe the federal government’s idea of progress, plot to blow Glen Canyon Dam to smithereens.
I’ve been to Glen Canyon before. I’ve walked across the dam, and I’ve spent many an enjoyable day on Lake Powell, the recreational area created by all that flooding. So when Jill and I pulled into the empty lot of the Carl Hayden Visitor Center at Glen Canyon Dam, I was really only curious about one thing: Would its gift shop display the most famous book ever written about this particular tourist attraction?
I thought I might buy a copy.
As it turns out, the visitor center’s gift shop is more like a bookstore. It is operated by the Glen Canyon Natural History Association, and it indeed houses a small section of books devoted to the work of Edward Abbey. There are selections of his nonfiction, a biography, a collection of essays, a compilation of notes and photos. But the novel I’m looking for is conspicuously absent, so I mosey over to the salesperson and pose my loaded question.
“Do you guys stock The Monkey Wrench Gang?”
The salesperson’s reply seems practiced. He has no doubt fielded this question before. “That book,” he says flatly, “ is not approved for this location.”
Every outsider, be they an engineer or an environmentalist, brings his own history into a place, and I’m no different. I come from East Tennessee, where, in the 1930s, the federal government began building dams to harness the hydroelectric power of the Tennessee River. The Tennessee Valley Authority was created to manage that power and spread electricity across the South. The TVA also created thousands of jobs in a time of deep depression.
Maybe this is why, despite my lament for the canyons and side canyons lost under all that water, I’ve never been able to work up much ire about Glen Canyon Dam. I look at the endless concrete plugging up a wild river, and I can’t help but think of the families it helps.
What’s the price of this progress? In the case of Glen Canyon Dam, it’s 272 million 1963 dollars and 1.2 million acres of drowned America. In the case of Navajo Generating Station, it’s $1 billion and air pollution equivalent to 3.5 million automobiles.
This is the sort of stuff that was going through my head yesterday morning as I photographed Lake Powell with my iPhone.
An iPhone. Now that’s progress I can get my head around. Mine even has an application that can pinpoint my location and tell me where the closest library or bookstore is.
Looks like there’s an independent bookseller up Highway 89 in Kanab. I sure hope it has a used copy of The Monkey Wrench Gang.
—Scott
