The Emerald Mile: The Epic Story of the Fastest Ride in History Through the Heart of the Grand Canyon (14 page)

That last sentence was no mere catchphrase. Over the next two decades,
thanks to a series of massive congressional appropriations bills, Reclamation would construct nineteen large dams and reservoirs along the Colorado and its tributaries between the Rockies and the Mexican border. This epic sequence of projects would complete the river’s transformation from the wild and savage beast explored by Powell almost a century earlier into something that resembled a municipal waterworks system. It would make the Colorado the first major river in the world to come under almost total human control. Every cubic foot of its water was gauged and metered and accounted for. The timing and volume of each discharge through every set of penstocks and turbines was carefully calibrated to optimize the supply of electricity and maximize power revenue. Nothing happened on the river that had not been carefully planned, reviewed, and approved—and for good reason, because the Colorado was now the lifeblood of the entire Southwest, a resource on which a dozen cities and more than thirty million people were completely and totally dependent.

By the 1970s, no river in the Western Hemisphere was more rigorously controlled, more stringently regulated, or more ruthlessly overused than the Colorado.
No river in the world was the subject of fiercer litigation and dispute. And none was exploited so thoroughly and so ruthlessly that, according to calculations run by hydrologists at the bureau, every drop was used and
reused seventeen times before reaching the sea—a claim that achieved a rather surreal dimension of impressiveness (or absurdity, depending on one’s point of view) since, in all but the wettest years, the final remnants of the river dried up in the desert south of the border before
a single drop ever reached the Sea of Cortés.

In the exertion of human control over one of the wildest and most ungovernable forces in nature, no river had more seminal importance than the Colorado. As the author Marc Reisner explains in
Cadillac Desert
, his groundbreaking study of water policy in the West, civil engineers not only built the first great dam here but also learned the lessons that would enable them to control the greatest rivers in North America while giving others the tools to harness massive rivers all over the world, from the Volga, the Niger, and the Indus to the Zambezi, the Paraná, and the Yangtze. During the 1970s and 1980s, this dam-building boom spread to virtually every major river on the planet. By the year 2000, the amount of water that was stored behind the giant dams on earth was between three and six times more than existed in all the world’s rivers—a redistribution of the planet’s supply of freshwater significant enough, according to the water expert Peter Gleick, to account for
“a small but measurable change in the wobble of the earth as it spins.”

Yet this is only half the story of the Colorado’s significance. Because although the era of the great dams was inaugurated and later reached a kind of engineering apotheosis on this river, the Colorado is also where the flood tide finally smashed up against something that refused to yield and ultimately broke the wave.

What no one realized at the time was that the demise of the greatest era of dam-building in human civilization had actually been seeded into the blueprint that was drawn up for the Colorado—and the stage upon which both acts would play out was nothing less than the Grand Canyon itself. What had begun at the bottom of the canyon with a stupendous dam that symbolized a future without limits was fated to conclude at the opposite end of the same chasm with yet another dam—one that would eventually come to stand, in the minds of many, as a kind of anti-symbol to everything that Hoover represented: a titanic monument to human overreach.

The fight to preserve the cathedral of stone between those points was what turned the wheel. The people who waged that war would establish a direct line between the end of the dam-building era in the late 1960s, a full century after Powell’s voyage, and the great runoff of 1983, when a reckoning finally descended upon the canyon, and the river conclusively demonstrated that man wasn’t in charge to the extent he believed. And at the very center of that story—the narrative that brought the age of great dams to a close—stood a barnstorming World War II pilot and a devotee of the dance that unfolds between wooden boats and white water.

His name was Martin Litton.

I.
High-scalers hold a special place in the history of American dams. They were regarded as almost mythic figures within the construction community, and newsreels captured their daring moves as they swung in giant, sweeping arcs across the faces of the cliffs, using ropes slung from the canyon rims, dislodging loose pieces of rock with jackhammers, and placing sticks of dynamite. They received the highest wages of anyone on the payroll, compensation for the dangers to which their duties exposed them. They also tended to die in spectacular ways—usually by plunging hundreds of feet to the canyon floor. In Black Canyon, ninety-eight of them perished in this manner—sacrifices that are memorialized in the bronze statue of a highscaler that now stands near the dam’s concession facility, the High Scaler Café.

Something will have gone out of us as a people if we ever let the remaining wilderness be destroyed. . . . We need wilderness preserved—as much of it as is still left, and as many kinds—because it was the challenge against which our character as a people was formed.

—W
ALLACE
S
TEGNER

W
HEN
Martin Litton was born in February 1917, Pancho Villa was being pursued on horseback through northern Mexico, and the last grizzly bear in California would not be shot for another five years. That same month, the very first jazz record had just been produced, and patent offices were reviewing applications for a new-fangled clothing fastener with interlocking teeth known as the zipper. In keeping with the spirit of the times, the bucolic little town of Gardena, which lay on the outskirts of the soon-to-be expanding city of Los Angeles, seemed poised on an ambivalent threshold between a past that had yet to fully recede and a future that had not quite arrived.

Litton’s father, a migrant from Tennessee who had moved West just after the turn of the century seeking work on the farms of the Imperial Valley, was now setting himself up as a veterinarian who specialized in doctoring farm animals but also found lucrative work treating the chimpanzees and lions that were serving as extras in a new series of
Tarzan
films. He purchased a small house on
a slight rise overlooking the Santa Fe railroad tracks, and almost every night in the summer, he and his wife would gather their four children in the backyard to sit on apple crates and watch the sunset. This innocuous thing, staring into the darkening sky awaiting the arrival of night, left a powerful impression on their oldest boy, who marveled not only at the choreography of light but also that such beauty was freely available to anyone who took the trouble to step outdoors and plant his backside on an apple crate.

The principle of nature’s accessibility and openness extended to embrace most of California, whose splendors rendered it one of the fairest places on the planet. In the 1920s, much of the state’s primal glory was still intact—and oddly enough, the impulse that drove Litton to go out and explore those wonders originated with John Wesley Powell, whom he first encountered at school, in his typing class. When Litton was instructed to transcribe several pages of the Major’s journal, he found himself pecking out sentences that, many decades later, he would effortlessly recite at the drop of a hat:

We are now ready to start on our way down the great unknown. . . .

 . . . The great river shrinks into insignificance as it dashes its angry waves against the walls and cliffs that rise to the world above. . . .

 . . . We have but a month’s rations remaining. . . .

 . . . The sugar has all melted and gone on its way down the river.

Those images fired Litton’s imagination and sent him out on a series of exploratory ventures to places such as the Pinnacles, a set of dramatic spires east of the Salinas Valley that would later become a national monument, and the Kern Plateau, a landscape that would one day form the heart of the Golden Trout Wilderness. When he and a friend rented a mule for seventy-five cents a day and headed off to climb Mount Whitney, they were gone for nearly two weeks. He returned from those adventures not only imbued with an abiding love of wilderness but also equipped with powerful arms and a massive chest that would enable him to join the eight-man varsity crew squadron at UCLA. There he rowed stroke until 1941, when he and the rest of his generation found themselves swept into the whirlwind of the Second World War.

He enrolled in the Army Air Corps shortly before Pearl Harbor with hopes of becoming a fighter pilot, an ambition that was swiftly derailed when his vision tests revealed that he was color-blind. Booted out of flight school, he refused to accept the results and concocted a bold scheme to get himself assigned to the only other outfit where he might still be permitted to fly.

The spearhead to virtually every major Allied airborne operation in Europe involved the US Glider Corps, a fleet of crude, motorless gliders that were
crammed full of troops and equipment, everything from jeeps and small tanks to ammunition and medical supplies.
Known as flying coffins, these fragile transport machines were strung behind an armada of tow planes, and their pilots were forced to make a low and fast descent directly into the combat zones. The gliders, which were fashioned from steel tubing and covered with strips of canvas, had no weaponry and no armor plating to protect against enemy fire—and the men who flew these machines were equally devoid of frills. Unable to take evasive action, they were consigned instead to playing the role of clay pigeons as they drifted through a withering hail of antiaircraft and 20mm machine-gun fire. Those who survived this ordeal then confronted the challenge of making their way through the German lines, back to the coast, and across the Channel to England, where they would be handed another mission and made to go through the exercise all over again.

The pilots, who were either selected or volunteered for these barnstorming assignments, were highly unusual—
“the most uninhibited individualists in the army,” in the words of one historian. Deciding that he fit the Glider Corps to a tee, Litton and a friend conspired to sneak into the hospital at his air base and steal a copy of the test booklet for the color-blindness exam. After petitioning to retake the test, he passed, was granted a special waiver, and before long was merrily practicing Cuban Eights, Immelmann turns, and the rest of the aerial combat maneuvers that were part of a glider pilot’s repertoire.

He arrived in England in May of 1944, and a month later found himself
delivering troopers into northern France during the invasion of Normandy. Three months after that, when the Allies put together an airborne mission known as Market Garden to free the port of Antwerp and set the British up to smash a hole through German defenses in the Netherlands, he led a formation of gliders into Holland, then made his way back to the Channel from sixty-five miles behind enemy lines, for which he was awarded an Air Medal.

Later that winter, he volunteered, along with roughly a hundred other pilots, to fly ammunition, gasoline, medical supplies, and a team of nurses and combat surgeons into Belgium to relieve members of the 101st Airborne Division, which had borne the brunt of a German counterattack in the heavily forested Ardennes and was now completely surrounded in the village of Bastogne. To enable the defenders of Bastogne to hold out until General George S. Patton’s tanks could break through the German encirclement, the Allied high command flung several waves of gliders through a curtain of massed antiaircraft and small-arms fire on the day before Christmas.

Casualties were extremely high, almost 35 percent in the first wave. Although Litton was not in that vanguard, his formation suffered heavy losses—the sky seemed to be filled with flaming transport planes as he made
his approach, and he watched several tugs in front of him get blown to pieces. Nevertheless, he managed to land and deliver his supplies within the Bastogne perimeter. When Patton’s tanks broke through a few hours later, the 101st justifiably received front-page coverage from London to San Francisco, but the newspapers were largely silent about the glider pilots. To this day, their achievement remains one of the more obscure and unheralded feats of the war.

U
pon returning home, Litton took a position as a “roadman” in the circulation department of the
Los Angeles Times
, which required him to travel all over the state, managing sales accounts with the paper’s dealers. The job enabled him to return to many of the places he had visited as a boy, and what he saw left him dismayed by what was being done to California’s scenic wonders as the nation entered a period of postwar expansion and prosperity. All around the state, it seemed, remaining pockets of wilderness were under siege. In Tuolumne County, he saw that an entire forest of majestic sugar pines was being logged. From the Sierra foothills to the northern coast, he noticed new roads and highways being pushed into the last stretches of virgin sequoia and redwood trees. To Litton, it was evident that Californians were destroying their birthright without understanding the value of what they had been given or how, like the medieval cities of Germany that had been firebombed during the war, the original splendor could never be restored once it was gone.