Wet Desert: Tracking Down a Terrorist on the Color

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As Grant and Fred started getting closer to Lake Powell, Grant started to feel giddy. He knew that seeing the remnants of the dam would bring back strong emotions. The image he saw when the Gulfstream had flown over the dam back in June, where a huge column of water sprayed out of the face of the dam, would haunt him for the rest of his life.

Fred interrupted Grant's thoughts. "Look at that," he said, pointing up ahead. "I thought they weren't going to tell anybody about this."

Grant saw a bunch of cars parked off both sides of the road. "They weren't," he agreed. "There must've been a leak."

When Fred reached the other cars, he had to weave through them like a gauntlet. The crowd converged on the car and yelled. What they were saying was impossible to decipher. One girl held a sign that said "DON'T DROWN GLEN CANYON AGAIN. LET IT LIVE." Grant noticed that a couple of the vehicles were Volkswagen buses. He wondered what was up with environmentalists and the Volkswagen bus. How could someone claim to care about the environment then drive a car that belched out blue smoke?

After passing through the protestors, Fred stopped at a police roadblock. While a policeman checked Fred and Grant's credentials and marked their names off a list on his clipboard, Grant looked back at the group. Among the waving signs, he saw a small girl, who couldn't have been older than ten, waving a sign that said, "DAMN THE DAMS."

The policeman waved them through.

"Wow," Fred said. "They must think something's up."

In the days following the bombings, environmentalism had reigned. The media was flooded with calls for legislation to assure that none of the dams on the Colorado be rebuilt, and that the delta be guaranteed an allocation of water for fishery and waterfowl habitat restoration. Public opinion, at least temporarily, seemed to support the environmentalists. The Democrats in the House of Representatives wrote a bill that would permanently outlaw any repair or rebuilding of Glen Canyon, Head Gate Rock, Palo Verde, or Imperial Dams. Additionally, they suggested that the United States immediately negotiate a treaty with Mexico, prohibiting Mexico from rebuilding the Morales Dam. The legislation would essentially leave Hoover as the only major dam on the Colorado. Initially unnoticed, deep inside the bill, was buried text that would have prevented repair of the California Aqueduct.

Although the press initially lauded the legislation as "exactly what this country needs," the farmers in Mexico, the farmers of Imperial Valley, native Americans of the Colorado Indian Reservation, and farmers in the Palo Verde Irrigation District all immediately announced opposition to the legislation, saying it would ruin the lives of hundreds of thousands of farmers on the lower Colorado. A little slower to react were the communities in California, Arizona, and Mexico, who would be starved of their allocations of culinary water from the California Aqueducts, Central Arizona Project, and the Mexican diversions.

The last and most surprising opposition to the bill came from recreationalists. Although millions of middle class Americans loaded up their boats every weekend and headed for the nearest body of water to fish, water-ski, jet-ski, sun bathe, gamble, camp, ride motorcycles, stay in house boats, hike, skinny dip, consume alcohol, and ogle the bronzed flesh of the opposite sex, they had historically been an easy target, legislatively speaking.

Over the years they had endured closures of lakes for endangered fish, restrictions on speed, closures to off-road vehicles for tortoises, closures of hunting areas, no wake zones, restrictions on motor size, restrictions on oil type, elimination of personal watercraft in certain areas, closures of sand dunes to protect milkweeds, restrictions of two-stroke outboard engines, etc. However, the draining of Lake Powell, a mecca for over three million recreationalists a year, had struck a nerve.

In late July, the Sierra Club organized a celebration at the site of where the Glen Canyon Dam had been. Thousands of environmentalists attended. However a much larger group of recreationalists, estimated at over thirty thousand, showed up to communicate their displeasure. Police staffing had been grossly underestimated. The two groups came together and communicated passionately. With virtually no law enforcement present, and a fifteen to one advantage, the recreationalists won handily. Hospitals in St. George, Utah reported treating over a hundred fractured noses. The Glen Canyon Massacre, as it would be known, shifted the momentum. The media took an anti-recreationalist bias, calling the boaters "thugs", and in retaliation, a million newspaper subscriptions were cancelled across the country. A movement began and congressmen and senators were called, emailed, written, and faxed. Republicans wrote a trillion-dollar appropriations bill to rebuild the Glen Canyon Dam and restore Lake Powell, more than a thousand times its original construction cost. The debate was on.

Environmentalists argued that the Colorado River had been overly regulated and diverted, the evidence being a sand dune-swept river delta that no one in the United States had known about two months before. Recreationalists, city dwellers, farmers, Mexicans, and Native Americans, argued that God and the U.S. government had given the river to them for their use, and they had a right to use it. The country was split.

On September 1st, two months after the bombings, the Republican President of the United States, who some called a liberal, and others called a right wing fanatic, flew Air Force One to Yuma, Arizona, where he, along with a smattering of senators, both Republican and Democrat, boarded six helicopters. They first flew to Mexicali, Mexico, to pick up the newly elected President of Mexico, then south over the delta — a place none of them, including the Mexican President, had ever seen.

Although no media representatives were present, a leak in the President's staff described the tour as eye opening. The delta was much bigger than anticipated, covering a thousand square miles. What appeared to be hundreds of thousands of birds, but easily could have been millions, had already returned to the delta in huge flocks. Judging by the activity in the water, millions of fish had migrated upstream into the shallow water. At one point a helicopter flying lower than the others had spooked a flock of birds, forcing the chopper to take evasive action to avoid, at the very least, an embarrassing incident, if not an actual crash.

As a surprise to the entire group, and speculated to have been decided on the spur of the moment, the main helicopter with the two Presidents hovered at water level, and both presidents hopped out with bare feet and their pants rolled up to their knees. The water could not have been more than a foot deep. The helicopters backed off and let the two men wade around and talk about whatever they were talking about. The leak estimated they were in the water for about twenty minutes. Pictorial evidence of the wading party was not released by the White House. The trip had been ten days before. The White House said nothing of the event. No press conferences. No statements to the press. Nothing. However, in the week since the trip to Mexico, the President had been meeting with key members of Congress and the Senate, both Republicans and Democrats. Details of the meetings were not shared with the press, and remarkably, all congressmen and senators declined questions. The media and the entire country knew the subject of the talks, however. Unnamed sources revealed they were talking about appropriations bills to rebuild the dams on the Colorado River.

Environmentalists were not happy. TV, radio, and newspaper editorials called for the President to back off. A million-environmentalist-march was scheduled in the capital. Recreationalists, who now called themselves "working citizens with boats", farmers, Native Americans, and a mixture of smaller groups that stood for all kinds of things from hydroelectricity to culinary water rights, demonstrated all across the country. The number of supporters for the pro-dam movement was respectable, and surprising to many.

As Fred rounded the last turn, and the view opened to what should have been the Glen Canyon Dam, Grant first noticed the roadblocks on both sides of the canyon stopping motorists from driving off the cliffs where the silver arched Glen Canyon Bridge had once been. Although partially obscured by the visitor center, a glance to Grant's left showed the empty expanse where the dam should have been, lined by shards of severed concrete still hanging from the rock wall. Across the canyon and up on the hill was the small city of Page, which was now isolated from the west by the missing bridge.

As Fred pulled the car to the entrance of the visitor center parking lot, they were stopped again. Their ID's and names were carefully checked. Grant was surprised to see that when the man flipped pages on the clipboard, the sheets contained photos of each invitee. They were checking pictures of every person. Grant had never heard of that. Finally they were waved through and told where to park. The front lot was almost full, the rear cordoned off and completely empty. Grant noticed five TV vans behind yellow tape in the corner of the front lot, one from each of the three national networks, one from Fox, and another from CNN. The little guys had obviously not been invited.

Grant and Fred straightened their ties and retrieved their jackets from the back seat before walking into the visitor center. Luckily, the air conditioning was running full blast, as the Arizona heat was much too hot for suits, even in mid September. After his eyes adjusted, Grant recognized Governor Rally Jenkins of Nevada over by the windows in conversation with a group of other men. When the governor saw Grant, he politely excused himself from the crowd and walked over to meet them.