This morning we went to Hoover Dam which seems just one of those things you do when you’re in the area. I mean its such an iconic piece of American engineering that I don’t think you can give it a swerve.
I’m not going to rambling on with facts about one of the most well documented and studied engineering feats of the 20th century… I can always google that stuff up again later if I want… but what I do want to make note of us the tour that you go on to see the dam and hydro plant out here.
First you find yourself ushered into a small theatre which shows a fifteen minute film. I thought this film was going to be about the history of the damn dam – it’s inception, it’s construction, the trials and travails that were surely experienced while creating such an enormous structure that ‘was the largest man made fear of engineering since the building of the Great Pyramids of Egypt’ (yeah, heard that turn of phrase several times today) – and it did touch on some of these things very very briefly.
However, the bulk of the presentation was focused around telling visitors (of which there have been approximately 47 million since tours started some 75+ yrs ago) ‘how fucking fantastic are we?’ Yep, America has tamed the mighty Colorado River, Americas has created the largest man made lake in North America, America has undertaken and completed the biggest engineering fear if the modern era creating a Wonder of The World… and we did it all for You!
So You would have good water management (though I bet there were states downstream not too impressed with their water loss at the time), so You could have a clean hydroelectric power source, so You could have clean drinking water in your taps, so You could have pretty fountains in your parks, so You could have wonderful recreational opportunities around Lake Mead. Whole film felt like they were selling the dam to the public as a Good Thing™, some eighty years after it was a done deal. Weird.
So I roughly came away knowing very little more about the history of the dam, the difficulties encountered during construction or the people who labored up built it during the Great Depression than I pretty much already knew. No anecdotes of ingenuity or heroism or tragedy. Nothing much personal at all about the men who struggled and toiled out here in the desert to build it… just a whole lot of ‘aren’t we fucking fantastic’ and ‘it was all for your (collective) own good’! Just weird… if any place was begging for a built in, in depth history lesson, surely this was the place. Oh well, c’est la vie… I’m sure there’s a good book or fifty full of that stuff available somewhere.
It sure is impressive to stand at top though… and try as I might, I could not fit the damn thing into my photos with a 24mm lens. Oh and yes, we had more than our fill of bad dam puns today from our damn drivers and our damn guides to get your damn T-shirts.