David Owen's "Where the Water Goes"

One of my favorite books of 2017 is David Owen’s Where the Water Goes, an account of Owen’s exploration of the Colorado River watershed. He drives from the river’s headwaters, in Colorado, to its historical delta in Sonora, Mexico, a three thousand mile trip. Along the way, he stops at farms, resorts, dams, and pumping stations, and talks with scientists, farmers, environmentalists, and various other people connected with the river, including a type known as Water Buffaloes (water experts). The story Owen tells is of a great river that’s so transformed by human usage it’s “more like a fourteen-hundred-mile-long canal.”

Where the Water Goes is a longer, deeper, more detailed version of Owen’s superb New Yorker piece, “Where the River Runs Dry” (May 25, 2015). It contains an abundance of interesting material not even touched on in the magazine article. For example:

1. Almost all of Chapter 6, in which Owen travels the Upper Colorado River Scenic Highway (“It’s one of the most beautiful highways I’ve ever driven on”), tells about a tributary of the Colorado – the Dolores River (“The Dolores has had a surprisingly large impact on western water use – and the reason is salt”), describes a salt-removal facility (the Paradox Valley Unit) on the Dolores, meets with a member of the board of supervisors of Coconino County (“Coconino County is the second-largest county in the United States by area; it’s also one of the driest”), tells about Glen Canyon Dam and the reservoir it created, Lake Powell; he describes the Salt River Project-Navajo Generating Station, a coal-burning electricity plant near the lake’s southern shore, drives across Glen Canyon Dam, and visits Lake Powell Resort (“As I wandered among the houseboats, I was followed, in the water, by two ducks and an enormous carp. All three were apparently accustomed to being fed from the dock”).  

2. Almost all of Chapter 7, in which Owen profiles John Wesley Powell, “a one-armed Civil War veteran and geology professor who led the first two successful boat expeditions through the Grand Canyon, between 1869 and 1872”; he noses around Lonely Dell Ranch, the compound where John Doyle Lee lived in the early 1870s while operating a ferry that crossed the Colorado at “the last place for hundreds of miles where crossing the river on a horse or in a wagon was feasible”; he talks to a the owner of a rafting company that runs guided trips on the Colorado, and tells about a relatively recent development in the ongoing evolution of the Law of the River – RICDs (“recreational in-channel diversions”).

3. Most of Chapter 8, in which Owen visits Hoover Dam and tells about its construction (“The canyon’s walls were prepared by ‘high scalers,’ who used jackhammers to remove loose rocks and outcroppings while dangling hundreds of feet above the riverbed in primitive wooden bosun’s chairs, which looked like children’s swings”; “The sun made the canyon so hot that touching them with bare skin could be agonizing”; “Buried within each new section were separate networks of pipes: one that would later be used to inject portland-cement grout into cracks, joints, and gaps between columns, and one that would be used to cool the concrete as it cured by circulating refrigerated water through it”).

4. Most of Chapter 9, in which Owen visits the Las Vegas Springs Reserve (“People who look closely at the specimen plants in the botanical garden at the Spring Preserve are usually surprised to see that even the cacti are irrigated: there are little black plastic water emitters poking out from the sand and gravel at their bases. This is true not just of the botanical garden but of most of the city’s xeriscapes”), and the Angel Park Golf Club (“When I visited the course, the superintendent took me over to see the reservoir. He splashed his hands near the intake valve to show me there was nothing scary about recycled water, which he said was clean enough for bathing”); he visits Patricia Mulroy, “the principal architect of Nevada’s most innovative efforts to acquire and conserve water,” at the University of Nevada. She provides one of the book’s most powerful quotes:

“There are still those who want to talk about winners and losers,” she told me, “but they don’t understand the interconnected economy of the river. We have plumbed the Colorado to bleed water in all directions. We take water in Wyoming – outside the river’s watershed – and move it to Cheyenne. Come down to Colorado: we move it across the Continental Divide, from the West Slope to the Front Range, into the Kansas-Nebraska basin – outside the watershed of the Colorado. We move it across the Utah desert to the Wasatch Front, to Salt Lake, provo, Orem, and all those agricultural districts – not in the Colorado watershed. In New Mexico, we move it to Albuquerque, which straddles the Rio Grande. In Arizona, we move it across 360 miles of desert, to Phoenix and Tucson and still more agricultural districts. And in California, we move it over hundreds of miles of aqueducts, from Lake Havasu to the coastal cities – not in the Colorado watershed.

All those far-flung places, Mulroy said, nevertheless constitute a single system, which extends far beyond the river itself and adds up to more than a quarter of the economy of the United States. “We may be citizens of a community, and a state, and a country, but we are also citizens of a basin,” she said. “What happens in Denver matters in L.A. What happens in Phoenix matters in Salt Lake. It’s web, and if you cut one strand the whole thing begins to unravel. If you think there can be a winner in something like that, you are nuts. Either we all win, or we all lose. And we certainly don’t have time to go to court.”

We are also citizens of a basin – that, for me, is one of this good book’s important messages. The New Yorker piece makes this point, too, when it says, “Most of the water in the Colorado River originates in snowpack in mountains in the northern part of its watershed, but the biggest consumers of that water are at the river’s other end – in Southern California.”

How Colorado River water gets to L.A. and beyond is one of Where the Water Goes’ main narratives. Pumps are a crucial part of the story. One of my favorite scenes, in both the New Yorker piece and the book, takes place in the enormous Whitsett Pump Plant on Lake Havasu’s western shore. Here’s the book version:

The plant’s main building has a terrazzo floor and Art Deco light fixtures, and it contains nine-thousand-horsepower General Electric pumps, with robin’s-egg-blue housings. “That’s eighteen school buses per pump,” Nash said, as we walked down the line. “Each one could fill an Olympic-size swimming pool in twenty seconds,” Nash said, as we walked down the line. The pumps run so smoothly that when you place a nickel on any of them—as visitors are sometimes encouraged to do—there isn’t enough vibration to make it slide off. They take Colorado River water from the lake and push it through nine enormous pipes, which rise three hundred feet up a steep slope directly behind the plant. From the top of the slope the water flows through a mile-long tunnel to Gene Walsh Reservoir, in the Whipple Mountains. A second pumping station then pushes it higher still, and through a six-mile-long tunnel, to Copper Basin, a bigger reservoir. Nash said, “Then it goes by gravity down to Iron Mountain and Iron lifts it a hundred and forty-four feet; then to Eagle, and Eagle lifts it four hundred and thirty-eight; then to Julian Hinds, and Hinds lifts it four hundred and forty-one.” Nash turned to his daughter. “Am I getting it right so far?” he asked. Altogether, there are five pumping stations, ninety-two miles of tunnels, and a hundred and forty-seven miles of open aqueducts, buried conduits, and siphons. The siphons are minor masterpieces of early-twentieth century hydraulic ingenuity; they carry the water, without mechanical assistance, under desert washes, to protect the aqueduct from inflows of silt during flash floods. “They’re like the P-traps in your house,” Nash said. “The water comes in on one side and daylights slightly lower on the other.”

That “The pumps run so smoothly that when you place a nickel on any of them—as visitors are sometimes encouraged to do—there isn’t enough vibration to make it slide off” creates an arresting image of immense mechanical engineering precision and ingenuity. It’s one of two images that, after I finished reading the book, linger in my memory. The other is of the white “bathtub ring” of mineral deposits on the surrounding bluffs of Lake Mead. It’s briefly mentioned in the magazine piece. But in the book, Owen describes it more vividly:

The lake and the surrounding landscapes are so vast that when you see the bathtub ring from far away you have little sense of the scale. Viewed up close, though, it makes you gulp: the distance from the surface of the water to the top of the white band that day was 130 feet.

Lake Mead’s white bathtub ring is a haunting reminder that all the mechanical ingenuity in the world won’t avail if there’s no water to pump.