Russell Martin > Quotes

“Secretary of the Interior Stewart Udall, and his chief construction engineer on the site, an Arkansas-born bulldog named L. F. “Lem” Wylie, Bureau of Reclamation Commissioner Floyd Dominy had sanctioned January 21 as the day the diversion tunnel in the west wall of the canyon would be sealed.”
― Russell Martin, A Story that Stands Like a Dam: Glen Canyon and the Struggle for the Soul of the West

“Hoover Dam became concrete proof that America’s engineering skill and industrial might together could work a kind of magic. Land and water existed only as rough raw materials to be manipulated, to be subdued, to be conscripted to the cause of the common good. The desert would bloom and great cities would sparkle with light if only we would set our machines in motion.”
― Russell Martin, A Story that Stands Like a Dam: Glen Canyon and the Struggle for the Soul of the West

“Trapping the river between the canyon’s serpentine walls, the dam would create a slackwater reservoir 186 miles in length, the longest in the world, covering Creeping Dune to a depth of 350 feet, reaching up Lake Canyon as far as that dune which itself was once a dam.”
― Russell Martin, A Story that Stands Like a Dam: Glen Canyon and the Struggle for the Soul of the West

“The Sierra Clubbers with whom he and the dam’s chief designer, Louis Puls, had shared a boat ride up from Lee’s Ferry back in 1956 had seemed like decent sorts.”
― Russell Martin, A Story that Stands Like a Dam: Glen Canyon and the Struggle for the Soul of the West

“This was the third dam in Glen Canyon. The first, slowly shaped by sand and fed by a persistent stream, blocked a side canyon sometime before history began, forming a thin sweetwater lake that ultimately survived a civilization. The second dam belonged to the Anasazi, the people who forged that fragile civilization out of the rock and niggard soil. Their dam, built of sandstone blocks and sealed with clay mortar, stood in the canyon bottom at Creeping Dune.”
― Russell Martin, A Story that Stands Like a Dam: Glen Canyon and the Struggle for the Soul of the West

“Ah, how could I possibly admit weakness of the one sense which should be more perfect in me than others, a sense which I once possessed in the greatest perfection, a perfection such as few in my profession have or ever have had?”
― Russell Martin, Beethoven's Hair: An Extraordinary Historical Odyssey and a Scientific Mystery Solved

“Those first 33 feet of the lake, high enough to back water upstream about 16 miles—sending it into the side canyons of Wahweap, Antelope, Navajo, and Warm creeks—were proof of a different kind to David Brower, evidence of the heart-wrenching certainty that the canyon soon would be submerged. Brower, executive director of a small, San Francisco-based conservation organization called the Sierra Club, had traveled to Washington, D.C., on the day Glen Canyon’s west diversion tunnel was scheduled to be closed, hoping that he could convince Udall to forestall what he knew someday would be inevitable.”
― Russell Martin, A Story that Stands Like a Dam: Glen Canyon and the Struggle for the Soul of the West

“How painful it must have been for the animated, easily impatient man to be obliged to wait for every answer, to make a pause in every moment of conversation, during which, as it were, thought was condemned to come to a standstill!”
― Russell Martin, Beethoven's Hair: An Extraordinary Historical Odyssey and a Scientific Mystery Solved

“But this gargantuan dam in Glen Canyon, authorized in April 1956, and begun just five months later with appropriate presidential fanfare and a pig-tailed string of blasting sticks, wasn’t the first audacious impoundment of the Colorado. Twenty-five years before, in 1931, work had gotten under way in Black Canyon, 400 miles downstream, on an enormous dam that would ultimately be named for Herbert Hoover—the largest dam in the world at that time, and the first time engineers had been able to test their convictions that a high concave wedge of concrete could successfully stop a river. Often called Boulder Dam during the desperate Depression years of its construction, Hoover Dam claimed the lives of 110 men before a swarm of workers topped it out, but it also captured the wonder and pride of the nation at a time when there were few palpable symbols of America’s continuing might. It was a public work on the grandest scale imaginable, and its sweeping walls of concrete crowned by fluted, Deco-inspired intake towers attested to the fact that we as a nation knew we would be great again, signaled the certainty that our natural resources remained our secure and fundamental wealth.”
― Russell Martin, A Story that Stands Like a Dam: Glen Canyon and the Struggle for the Soul of the West

“Two decades later, Ferdinand Hiller had proposed in a long essay—published in a special issue of the magazine Salon that celebrated Beethoven’s centenary—precisely where the light of his genius shone most brightly. He had concluded that the fundamental brilliance of the master’s music was that it achieved softness without weakness, enthusiasm without hollowness, longing without sentimentality, passion without madness. He is deep but never turgid, pleasant but never insipid, lofty but never bombastic. In the expression of love, fervent, tender, overflowing, but never with ignoble sensuality. He can be cordial, cheerful, joyful to extravagance, to excess—never to vulgarity. In the deepest suffering he does not lose himself—he triumphs over it. . . . More universal effects have been achieved by others, but none more deep or noble. No, we may say without exaggeration that never did an artist live whose creations were so truly new—his sphere was the unforeseen.”
― Russell Martin, Beethoven's Hair: An Extraordinary Historical Odyssey and a Scientific Mystery Solved

“The first dam stood near the head of little Lake Canyon until November 1915.”
― Russell Martin, A Story that Stands Like a Dam: Glen Canyon and the Struggle for the Soul of the West

“although each was physically separated from the other by the great, wondrous gash of the Grand Canyon, Hoover and Glen Canyon dams had much in common: each dam and its companion power plant ultimately would generate 1.3 million kilowatts of hydropower, enough electricity to supply a city of a million people; measured at its crest, each dam rose precisely 587 feet above the Colorado’s mucky, boulder-strewn bed. But there were subtle differences between them: Hoover was taller by 16 feet when the measuring began at bedrock; Glen Canyon contained 1.5 million cubic feet of additional concrete. The reservoir behind Hoover Dam held more water, but Glen Canyon’s reservoir encompassed double the miles of shoreline and its length extended 76 miles farther upstream. Hoover Dam was wedged between hard, black walls of igneous andesite; Glen Canyon Dam abutted stained, striped, orange cliffs of spalling Navajo sandstone.”
― Russell Martin, A Story that Stands Like a Dam: Glen Canyon and the Struggle for the Soul of the West

“only my art held me back. Ah, it seemed impossible to leave the world until I had produced all that I felt was within me, and so I spared this wretched life.”
― Russell Martin, Beethoven's Hair: An Extraordinary Historical Odyssey and a Scientific Mystery Solved