The day after riding ever so briefly through that curious Escher-like landscape, I crossed the Columbia River and continued my ride through the petrified toffee and butterscotch basalt landscape. Technically, it wasn’t a river that I traversed. The bridge crossed over Wanapum Lake, a reservoir formed in 1963 upon the completion of Wanapum Dam (the lake and dam are named after the Wanapum Indians, who are long gone, and whose historical village site is now underwater, their cultural remnants hydrologically erased, as it were). Wanapum Dam is but one of fourteen dams on the main stem of the Columbia River, part of the Columbia Basin Project, or CBP, with the Grand Coulee Dam being the largest and its centerpiece. The CBP is the mother of all irrigation projects, authorized by Congress in 1943, and engineered by the United States Bureau of Reclamation.

I soon turned off the main road into the Lower Crab Creek and pedaled (perilously, on an ocean of large, loose, irregularly sized gravel rocks splayed across a wide road) through a Wildlife area of the same name. At the creek’s western entrance, I passed Beverly, a small, derelict village. It consisted of hardscrabble small homes, rusty machinery littering yards with overgrown weeds, and laundry rippling forlornly in the dry wind like forgotten banners. I didn’t see a soul.

To ride alongside Lower Crab Creek was to know the Columbia Plateau area as it was before the rivers had all been dammed. Well, in an approximate sense, because Upper and Lower Crab Creek now flow continuously, thanks to the CBP. But it is still sparsely populated, and, like back in the day, the only farms I saw were relatively small. Alongside the creek I saw fields of wheat and here and there, goats picking at the sagebrush.

But after climbing steeply out of the creek’s valley to the higher altitude plateau, I arrived at an anthropogenically re-engineered landscape. My first clue of having transitioned to this completely different world was when I stopped for a breather soon after the road (mercifully) leveled off. For the second time in two days, I heard (but did not see) the odd sound of rushing water in the middle of a parched landscape. When I looked to my right, I saw a clear stream of water hurrying down an irrigation canal into a shallow basin before it flowed rapidly into a wide concrete pipe.

I continued my overheated way southeast towards Othello, an agribusiness hub. For the next twenty-one miles, I witnessed one of the benefits of the CBP. In an area that averages under eight inches of rain a year, the wealth of irrigated water nourishes fields of wheat, barley, potatoes, and alfalfa. To my right, the sight and sound of water gurgling in roadside canals accompanied me all the way to Othello. To my left, the long arm of automated, motorized irrigation devices (like in the picture below) – primitive agri-robots – soaked the soil. In the high desert, these sights and sounds were both incongruous and outlandish.

Irrigating the desert. thanks to the Columbia Basin Project.

The Western Paradox*

Following his meticulous surveys of the west, John Wesley Powell reported to Congress in early 1878 that this vast arid territory was only suitable for two kinds of lifestyles: the wide-ranging seminomadic regimen practiced by the indigenous tribes or irrigation farming made possible by harnessing and distributing the water (equitably, Powell argued) from the west’s rivers, its only reliable source. It took about a quarter century of failed settlement schemes for the federal government to finally take Powell’s advice and harness the potential energy of that most prodigious of earth’s elements.

The US Bureau of Reclamation (USBR) was the federal agency created in 1902 under President Theodore Roosevelt, under whose direction the federal government began to carry out Powell’s vision. Over time, the Bureau became less proficient at executing its social agenda (distributing land and water rights equitably) and more interested in large, heroic projects; largely, building dams to make the desert bloom. The premise was that the dams would be the impetus to develop the west, providing cheap electricity and plenty of water to bring life to the desert (an achievement I had witnessed on my ride to Othello).

The United States is supposed to embody the myth of rugged individualism. This myth has been reinforced historically by the settling of the west, beginning with the trappers and mountain men to meet the demand of fashion-conscious easterners for beaver hats, and later with the Jeffersonian “yeoman farmer” who, with a cry of “Westward Ho!” and 160 acres of land provided by the Homestead Act of 1862, tried (and failed miserably, usually) to coax crops from the dry land. It’s ironic that the construction of dams -- a large, taxpayer subsidized effort (the antithesis of individualism) was what finally allowed the west to be permanently settled. In other words, it took an essentially socialist endeavor – the kind of large-scale projects I used to see championed on stamps from the USSR -- to truly realize the national goal of settling the west.

The collectivist nature of settling the west did not end with the phenomenal building spree of dams in the mid-20th century. To this day, water for irrigation is highly subsidized by the federal government. And due to a combination of factors – such as the consolidation of farms and the way water rights are handled in western states -- the beneficiaries of taxpayer-funded subsidies are primarily private businesses. For example, the potato and wheat farms I passed in Washington on my way to Othello were large, privately held or corporate farms.

It's colloquially funny (but no laughing matter) that when the federal government attempts to regulate beneficiaries of federal largesse or limits access to federal lands for private gain (something of a rarity these days), these businesses make a huge fuss and employ lawyers, lobbyists, and generous amounts of campaign contributions to block these efforts. Pulitzer Prize-winning historian and essayist Bernard De Voto (1897-1955) wrote about this very subject in essays published in Harper’s Magazine in the 1940s.“ He called it “The Western Paradox.” Namely, the livestock and timber executives resisted federal rules and regulation but simultaneously depended upon Congress to build dams, roads and reclamation projects (i.e., give us money and leave us alone). This paradox lives on today. Though they like to portray themselves as independent and free, these private enterprises are dependent upon the bounty of both nature and government.

Some information in this section was drawn from Marc Reisner’s excellent and meticulously researched book, Cadillac Desert - The American West and Its Disappearing Water.

Water & The West – Part II

Water & The West – Part I