The Place No One Knew

I've hiked and traveled this country in recent years. I first traveled through it when a youth (19-1954), awed but not truly understanding what I was seeing. This book, along with Tad Nichols' ""Images of a Lost World" will drive home the point of what has been lost. It can't be recovered, even if the dam were to come down, or at a minimum, be drained, but these two books will make the argument for ending it and starting some sort of resurrection. If you look at these pictures you will understand the imperative.

I got a copy of Eliot Porter's Glen Canyon book after reading Edward Abbey's "Desert Solitaire," a chapter of which is devoted to a downriver rafting trip along this stretch of the Colorado River just before the dam was built. While Abbey's descriptions are vivid, I wanted to see with my own eyes what he was describing. And Porter's camera is the closest you can get to doing that today.His pictures are, of course, not the real thing, but they are about as breathtaking as photography can be. The colors, textures, reflections, and the play of light and shadow are wonderful, and each photograph is distinctly different. His own description of the canyon's display of color and light in the introductory essay "The Living Canyon" give an instructive insight into the eye of the photographer. His awareness of what he is looking at and his ways of choosing to look help the reader to see even more in the 80 photographs that follow. While some of the photographs capture the monumental scale of the canyon walls and formations, many focus on the myriad surfaces that are revealed to the eye: erosion patterns, lichen, rippling water flow, the dark streaking mineral stains extending from seeps, the rough texture of weathered sandstone in glancing sunlight, smooth river stones, the layered stripes of exposed sediment, the trickling spread of water falling from overhead springs, the hanging tapestry coloration of the walls, whorled and striated rock, dry sand. There are also photographs of plants: moonflower, maidenhair fern, willow, tamarisk, redbud, columbine, cane. Above all, there is the rich array of colors, capturing a great variety of moods and attitudes.Porter was recognized for his photography of birds, and while there are no birds visible in these photographs, his introductory essay makes mention of them, and when looked at with that awareness, many of the pictures also seem to capture a sense of "air space" for flight. Before turning to photography, Porter was a Harvard professor of biochemistry and bacteriology, and it's interesting to see the somewhat dispassionate eye of the scientist in the way he uses the camera. While the story of Glen Canyon may induce sorrow or anger, the photographs are strong for their lack of sentimentality. The pictures also excite a curiosity about the geology of the river, and the book concludes with a short essay describing how the canyon walls reveal the geological ages that have gone into forming this part of the earth, going back millions of years. The book also includes a catalog of all the plants and animals that inhabited Glen Canyon before its inundation. Altogether, with its quotes from other writers, including Loren Eiseley, Joseph Wood Krutch, Wallace Stegner, and members of John Wesley Powell's expedition in the 19th century, this book is a fitting record of a great lost national treasure.

These photographs are just about all that is left of Glen Canyon. After the Sierra Club and other environmentalists had lost the battle to prevent the Glen Canyon River Dam from being built, Eliot Porter took this extraordinary series of photographs to memorialize the gorgeous area that has been lost forever. Few people at the time knew much about the Canyon. It was too remote, too difficult to get to. Although it was one of the areas that John Wesley Powell found most beautiful in his first expedition down the Green and Colorado Rivers, no access roads or paths were ever built to make it possible for many people to view the areas firsthand. As a result, very few people knew precisely what we were about to lose.The tragedy is that these areas are really, truly are gone. Even if the Glen Canyon River Dam were magically removed, many of the areas viewed in these gorgeous photographs have already been silted up. The Green and Colorado Rivers carry extreme quantities of minerals, and when the dam stops the flow to form a reservoir, they tend to drop to the bottom. All dams have a limited life. They don't last for as long as one might imagine. Basically, they create a new landmass behind them over the course of a century or so. Many of the spots photographed in these pictures are now solid earth.One would hope that such beautiful photographs as these, photos that create tremendous longing for what we have already lost, would make us more concerned to preserve what is left. But with the current presidency even today as I write this review opening the national parks to snowmobiles and with people speculating that there will be new attempts to open arctic areas in Alaska to oil exploration, we can't assume that in the least. These photographs may end up being emblematic of all endangered areas, of the ongoing fragility of all of nature.

I was expecting a reprint similar to the small-sized Ballantine issue of the late 1960s. I was surprised to receive a book almost as large as the original Sierra Club hardback! The color in several of the photographs is even better than in the original (and difficult to find/very expensive) book, thanks in part to the cooperation of the museum which received Porter's works as a bequest.

I'm at something of a loss to explain why I've been so moved by a place I never saw and (barring visionary leadership and luck) never will. I was born about two years before the diversion tunnels closed in 1963. I, and most likely you, never had a chance to know what was there. What was there was, quite simply, the most beautiful place in the world, and Eliot Porter's photographs make this abundantly clear. A calm Colorado River gently whisked travelers through nearly two hundred miles of Glen Canyon, past zebra-striped 2,000-foot walls and twisted domes and spires of bare rock. Dozens of old mining camps and thousands of Anasazi sites, pictographs and petroglyphs lined the banks. Hundreds of smaller side canyons branched from the river. Some opened into massive ampitheaters like Music Temple and Cathedral in the Desert. Others twisted and turned for miles into salmon-colored sandstone, the rock's convolutions hiding the sky from view. In spots you could span the width of a canyon 500 feet deep with your outstretched arms. These were canyons lush with moss and trees, watered by streams and springs and rich with wildlife - all in the heart of one of America's most forbidding regions, all accessible to anyone with a canoe or rubber raft and a week or two of extra time. Now all of this is gone. The reservoir has inundated almost every scene portrayed in Porter's photographs with hundreds of feet of water and mud. A few pathetic fragments of the canyon's beauty and solitude remain along the northern edge of Escalante National Monument, but all of its most magical places have been obliterated beneath a faceless sump of oily water across which houseboats rumble and jetskis roar. The NPS and Bureau of Reclamation harp upon the "improved accessibilty" afforded by the lake. They neglect to mention the inaccessibility of permanently submerged canyons and the financial cost of trying to explore Glen Canyon in its current lobotomized state. To leaf through this book is to know what we had - an incredibly beautiful place, of National Park caliber - and also to know that we threw it away for the sake of a few megawatts of electricity, a net annual loss of available water for downstream use and for the purpose of boosting gasoline and boat sales in Coconino County, Arizona. Perhaps there's an emotional explanation for being haunted by a place I'll never see - an outraged sense of having been robbed.