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A Story that Stands Like a Dam by Russell Martin (review)

For David Brower, Edward Abbey, Ken Sleight, and others who remembered the hidden grottos and the sun “turning the bald Navajo [sandstone] to rust, to red, to crimson,” the impoundment of water was like “flooding the Sistine Chapel.” A Story that Stands Like a Dam, Russell Martin’s history of the Glen Canyon project, is an emotional account of an emotionally loaded epoch that transcends the polemics of both Monkey Wrenching and “Arizona grows where water flows” boosterism. Martin’s account is a story of landscape and of people—major actors and bit players—and how these lives and the land became inexorably entwined in the building of the Southwest’s last big dam. A Story that Stands Like a Dam details the pre-dam history of Glen Canyon with enlightening, highly readable stories of early occupations and attempts to dam the canyon. The Anasazi period, the Escalante expedition in 1776, the two Powell journeys, John D. Lee’s exile at what became Lee’s Ferry, as well as various entrepreneurial and mining busts are chronicled. Martin’s chapter “The Way Things Were” presents legendary river runners and canyoneers Art Greene, Norm Nevills and Ken Sleight (Abbey’s Seldom Seen Smith), as well as Abbey, former Sierra Club officer David Brower, and others. The reader meets both the major players in the planning of the dam (men like chief construction engineer Lem Wylie and Floyd Dominy, the mythic head of Reclamation) and the hierarchy of construction workers: