Dams, the Reliquary of Life

During a visit to the Bonneville Dam I stood inside the viewing room. I watched for the fish escapement upriver. There was a long fish ladder built along the dam to allow the salmon and other species to navigate the dam. The room was lit by the light refracting from the water in the fish ladder through the thick plate glass viewing windows. I waited and waited for the salmon. It was a bright June day and the peak of the spawning season.

As I waited, I was reminded of a tour of Catholic churches my mother took me on, many years ago in Rome. In one of the cathedrals we toured, we were allowed to visit the reliquary below. There we viewed the remains of a dead saint sequestered in a glass case. Ambient light came from behind an alabaster wall. The light was from the many red votive candles that had been lit by the faithful. They had come seeking favors from the dead saint who had been martyred in the coliseum 1700 years earlier. It was in a gilded tomb that revered the life of a person, a saint properly recognized and remembered officially; a saint that comprised a tiny percentage of the vast population of Catholics on the earth. It seems we revere what is rare, like the salmon I was waiting for. They were becoming more and scarcer with each passing season. As I thought of the dead saint, I wondered if there would be a day when we would light votive candles there down in the crypt at the dam for the dead fish.

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Around 70 AD St. Paul landed in Puteoli, Italy, a few miles from where my parents were now living. He was under Roman guard on his way to Rome to bring his case to Caesar, face his accusers and hopefully plant the new faith. I was boarding a bus in the same town some 1900 years later to judge the work he did and bring some much needed scrutiny on his forebears.

My wife and I, along with my Mother, was off to the see the Pope. It was January, 1980. My mother had seen the last two popes including the one that lasted only 30 days. We were on a tour bus with members of the Catholic Church in Naples, Italy. Visiting the Pope is a blend of religious pilgrimage and celebrity sighting.

At that time my wife and I were way off the Catholic reservation. We were looking down from a high spiritual promontory built on an exclusive revelation, an apostolic vision handed to us by our very own Apostle. We had the great luxury of being right. Unlike the Pope we were about to visit, our Apostle had come by his calling honestly. He sold real estate and studied the Bible, and had one of those Damascus Road kinds of experiences, like St. Paul.

We were headed towards the center of religious harlotry in Rome. I had just finished reading one book on the evils of Catholicism, which dovetailed neatly with my new doctrines. It was a book that shifted the contemporary idea of the Pope getting his authority from the Apostles and ultimately from Jesus, to pagan Babylon. So with the two years of commune living, and with the one book I'd read, I was approaching Rome with a new level of gravitas. In my own mind this hadn't been seen since St. Paul landed in Potsueoli. The tour bus crept up from Naples on the same road built by the Romans 2000 years ago but now only a five-hour drive.

Rome is a gorgeous city. I was slowly being seduced by statuary, elegant buildings along the boulevards that spun out like spokes on a hub, at the center of which are great fountains. The whir of traffic, from a big city with enough cosmopolitan fare, began to soften my Christian paramilitary resolve. We pulled into St. Peter's square. It dawned on me that this place stood against much more than my minuscule contrary ideas. The square, which isn't just a square, but rather a vast circular cobblestone plaza, was hemmed in by a great wall with enormous pillars supporting a massive portico; a place big enough to hold a million of the faithful.

We were just in time for our audience with the Pope. We were hustled into the meeting hall, the Pope's receiving room. Our IDs were checked by the Swiss guard. I had thought of an exclusive intimate meeting with the Pope, one where he might ask me what I think. The gears were turning in my head. This could be my moment.

We were ushered through the side door of a vast hall. Once inside the hall, we were not alone. There were at least twelve thousand of us! My fellow congregants surrounded me. Many were dressed in their national costumes and seemed to hail from every corner of the globe. There were Coptic, Franciscan, and Dominican nuns and monks by the score scattered through the vast crowd. In front of us was a group of Austrians in green felt fedoras and lederhosen. A large group of Africans dressed in colorful gowns sat off to my right. There were also many older Italian women in black with veils covering their faces. It looked like casting for "It's a Small Catholic World." Like everything up in the Vatican, it was meant to overwhelm the senses. The building was built to contain the heavens, architecture to hold the infinite. It pressed down on me. I tried to hold my nickels worth of new faith against this grand place that holds the religious tribute of nations over centuries. In river terms, this was a permanent fixture, the largest denominational gravity dam in the world, of proportions that stagger the imagination. These were buildings that literally held the hope of a billion Catholic faithful. Behind this bulwark the tension was palpable.

There was so much to see just sitting in the pew. There was a stage in front of me that looked to be 250 feet wide. The seat where the Pope sat was almost a speck. The backdrop to the stage was a vine-like polished wood that covered the entire wall behind the dais. It was magnificent, original and beautiful, like a starburst cross section of the roots of a great California Sequoia tree.

Suddenly the large back doors swung open. The Sergeant of Arms announced, in several languages, His Holiness. Everyone burst to their feet. The procession started with the Swiss Guards, then a gaggle of functionaries in red and black robes. The Pope's retinue splayed down the center aisle, then a glimpse of white, and Pope John Paul entered the building. The site of him created frenzy. It was apparent that this would be the first and last glimpse for most of us. It was a once-in-a-lifetime event. He was the Holy Father, the formal and official point man for God Himself on the earth, and he was just sixteen feet away. To the ardent faithful, it is fourth and goal with eternal blessing just yards away. People became ecstatic. They screamed, pushed, and climbed to touch him. The nuns down the pew from of us charged the aisle, in an offensive play Vince Lombardi would have been proud of. My mother, my wife and I were shoved hard together.

Meanwhile the Pope moved slowly up the aisle, touching hands, blessing children, making eye contact, and making the cross blessing with his right hand. He worked both sides of the aisle. His lieutenants and the Swiss Guard held back the fanatical and gently cautioned the crowd, but with no visible results. I told my wife to get on my shoulders. At least, in the pandemonium, we could get a picture of His Holiness. He finally got parallel with our pew. The press was great--so many bodies, raw emotion, people crying, reaching--it was very strange. I had been away from Catholicism for ten years, but I was not immune to the moment. Here was the most famous man in the world, who had been plucked out of the Soviet axis in Poland to lead the largest church in the world. Whether I was Catholic or not, was irrelevant. Simple words from this man's mouth had great sway in the world. Men ruled nations; the Pope ruled continents. His authority glossed over boundaries. In 1980 he was the man for the world. It was January and Ronald Reagen had been sworn in just last week, the hostages had been freed from Iran, and here we were. My wife took his picture and the Pope continued down the aisle. On the dais up front he was so tiny. In a ritual that was his whole existence, he greeted us, said a homily, and exited stage left.

After our audience, we toured St. Peter's Basilica. If scale is required to capture God, then St. Peter's comes close. It is big enough to have its own weather inside. When the scale settles in, my mind tries to bend around the architecture and the art. I had no concepts of generations--seeing St. Peter's was seeing visible history, and behind the structure, tens of thousands of lives that were poured into building it, some for money, some for glory, and many for the indulgences, tangible blessings, remediate sin and absolution of guilt. The building of the structure itself had caused the greatest rift in Christendom, the Protestant reformation. I tried to dismiss what I saw, yet this vast institution, with the Polish man at the helm, were engaged in a real battle, real politics. They were battling tangible darkness, the Soviet Union. Poland was the fulcrum and the Papacy was the lever.

That was my first glimmer that religion was different from spirituality. The Pope held religious power. He had a constituency that spanned continents who would prevail on their political leaders to align their power with his. It was a religious system that seamlessly aligned itself with the political system. Trying to separate what I saw, the religious power from the spiritual life, was like trying to imagine a river with no dams, vigorous, interconnected and vital, full of life. It wasn't rational to dream dreams like that. So that day we were caught up in the religious wonder of watching an old man walk down an aisle, not much to say for flow.

So there we were a couple of contemporary zealots, in the high moment of the growth of our little religious movement. But I saw in time that we were on the same track. Our apostle's star was rising and in many ways, like the Pope, we got our connection with God through him. He represented spiritual fatherhood. His presence took up all the space in the room. We, like the Italian workers who built St. Peter's, were busy building our own structures for the same multitude of reasons. The difference between us and them was the guilt tithe of Europe, thousands of sculptors and artists and the effort of generations; great physical differences but little real spiritual difference. Like those before us we were attempting to create another control mechanism, contributing to the scarcity of real life in our river of faith.

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This area on the Columbia River I was viewing that day from the Bonneville Dam, had been one of the prime fishing grounds for the natives that lived near here. Before the dam was built, they would catch the salmon with spears and baskets, just below one of the most violent rapids in the hemisphere. I try to imagine what it must have been like to stand suspended on a platform made of saplings and small trees tied together with leather straps. And this over the unbridled Columbia crashing beneath, balancing you, ready, and watching for one of millions of perfect fish to come within range. There are probably many words that could capture the moment but only one comes to mind. Wonder.

It was an odd contrast. Down there in that biological reliquary, it was the scarcity, not the abundance of salmon that made them sacred. "Holy" must be what is extinct. Maybe there was something in remembering the dead saint. Real ones seemed to be pretty scarce these days.

I continued to wait for the elusive salmon to pass by. Lots of carp and shad passed up the ladder, but no salmon. So we tried to go to see "Bob" the sturgeon further down in the crypt, but it was closed for repairs. There we were, at the peak of the salmons' yearly migration returning to the Snake River and tributaries of the mid Columbia--except there were no salmon.

The natives who fished this river saw the salmon as a miracle. They revered the abundance and cherished it. They had a context for wholeness that is missing with us. I pondered how dams actually affected the river, and what values were lost when the flow was altered and the reservoirs created. When I look at a map it still says the Columbia River in italics, next to the undulating blue line that widens and thins across my Rand McNally road map. But then I look closer. There are little slits across the blue line and the name of the small slit, the Bonneville Dam. As you follow the Columbia River on the map, the names of more dams and lakes appear. One caught my eye, the Priest Rapids Lake, kind of an oxymoron. This was the name of the place where the river narrowed and the velocity quickened into one of the great rapids on the river. The next dam downstream is the McNary Dam. In between these two dams is the place where the water levels are micromanaged for speedboat races.

It is the efficiency of the river that veils the life that is lost. Nothing seems to have changed, the water is moving, and the maps still say there is a river there, so we are lulled into believing that everything must be just fine. But the dams hide the intimacy that has been lost. When a dam is constructed, especially of the type that are on the Columbia River, it is the body equivalent of a human going into a coma. The body is still alive but the capacity to function normally is gone. There can be no more natural conception, regeneration, or movement--no quality life.

Everything about the river became managed. The dams that exist now on the river are interconnected to complement one another and create vast efficiencies. The spring runoff is stored in the upper reaches of the river system to be released in winter when the demand for electricity is high and the water reserves are lower. The river is now restrained in spring and released in the winter, which is the river equivalent of spending your life standing on your head. The water of the river is measured and every quart is accounted for. Every quart of water that doesn't go through the turbines to create power is considered, literally, money over the dam. The dams don't just create power; they turn the river into a commodity, a cash cow.

When a dam is finished and ready to contain water and generate power, silt immediately begins to accumulate. The reservoir begins to fill up and the canyon or valley slowly drowns. That intimate river bottom, that supported all manner of living things, disappears and becomes a watery desert. Below the dam, the waterway is scoured, devoid of any living things. Fish that actually make it back, headed for their spawning grounds, are confronted with a brand new world. Swift water has turned slack. Intimate places have become vast. Nutrients are blocked and the river becomes starved. In the reservoirs the temperature has extreme variations from warm at the top to cold at the bottom. The flowing water that modulated the temperatures has stopped. Spawning for the most part is blocked and the river becomes sterile; the regenerative power of the river to nurture and mature life has ceased. The river can no longer clean itself and the river becomes defiled. It is no longer a river, it is a water system, man-made plumbing on a grand scale.

As is always the case with progress, things are sacrificed. Someone gets to decide what goes and what stays, what is important to preserve, and what is dispensable. Some of the decisions are clear-cut, others inadvertent. Whatever the case, progress must go on. Thus, the native villages that had been on the river for thousands of years, whose whole lives depended on the great cycles of flow that were the river and brought salmon, were buried under water. The manifest destiny of Americans, displaced and destroyed their way of life. The grand country which the river charged through became tame, with its edges manicured. The wild salmon in the river, whose whole physiology was adapted to the wild river, began a physical decline of the species. Because the river is less they become less.

And the mighty Coho, that spawned above the Grand Coulee Dam? They are now extinct. Their passage was blocked by the Grand Coulee Dam, a concrete wall 710 feet high. Their epic passage took them to the farthest reaches of the Columbia River, a journey of almost a thousand miles. There they would die in the upper reaches of the river and bring the ocean nutrients to a remote inland world. Once the dams were built their journey became one of slack water and concrete slides. They were doomed to travel through sterile water in an empty world. It was the same geography but a different place. The wildness was gone, along with most of the life.

So the river we see today, 60 years later, has hardly any resemblance to the river of yesterday. From the Lower Columbia to British Columbia the flow of the river is even and quiet. You can see the sailboats moving up and across the river just east of Portland, Oregon. Go farther up the river and there are the sailboarders at Hood River, looking like hundreds of monarch butterflies touching the water. Tugs and ships navigate the dredged bottom between the ocean and Portland. The locks in the system allow cargo to move by water from Lewiston, Idaho a new inland port 500 miles from the ocean, to foreign ports. Half a million acres in the Columbia Basin are now irrigated with water from the Columbia. So in one sense the trade off of man-made efficiencies for the actual life of the river seem to balance out. What was exchanged was relationship for membership. The Columbia River became the Columbia River System when the dams were built and its power harnessed. That power created conveniences and alternately constituencies, linked together by the power and the money the river system created.

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Every Sunday across America, in churches large and small, each person is no longer an individual, but a congregation of 200, 400 or 5,000. Churches and their management derive a significant portion of their authority by the exponential of the number of people attending their church. This is the political quotient of power where everything is managed, accounted for and defended.

I understand that this is being done each week with the best of intentions. It is the prevailing and moral idea of dominion that builds dams and, in most cases, churches. The essential fundamental management techniques are similar across the board. It would follow therefore that the problems encountered in the management of life would have a universal element about them.

We have traded in the spiritual intimacy with God and each other for efficiencies of the religious aggregate. We have religious or doctrinal memberships in church organization instead of relationships. We have accountants and managers, janitors and deacons, boards of directors and conferences and buildings and agendas. We have powerful memberships that are tied with our political memberships. Our nation is hooked together by these associations. We keep trying to make membership do the work and have the effects of real relationships. But it can't. Memberships are regulated. And the evidence of declining life in our river of faith continues to mount.

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The rain and snow keep falling on the mountains. The release of that water flows into the stream and eventually into the Columbia River. The main function of the river has always been the release of tension. It is a natural open system, it absorbs the seasonal changes of flow easily. The river explodes in the spring and goes quiet in the winter. These seasonal changes are those primary signals that usher in a new phase of development and open the door to maturity and a vast new array of interconnections. But put in a dam and you immediately take control of vast and powerful forces. Enormous tension is created. The cycles of nature do not stop. The silt accumulation alone gives dams a short life span of a few generations. The rain and snow keep coming unregulated, the spring snowmelts gather up, as do the great amounts of silt and debris. But the dams shut the door of passage and interconnection. Those who build the dams take responsibility for the distribution of silt and debris. But it is a responsibility without ability. No one has figured out how to move the tremendous amounts of accumulated ooze, debris and pollution. It is the essence of defilement. The river as a system becomes a closed system with all the attending problems of accumulated waste.

The dam changes the fundamental structure and function of the river. The primary loss of function is relationship. The river because of its reduced flow has a limited impact on the ocean. The early records of ships trying to breach the breakwater into the Columbia from the ocean are filled with tragedy. The breakwaters at the mouth of the Columbia were ferocious. Ocean crosscurrents and fierce outgoing currents created a cauldron of high waves and powerful undertows. At the first reading of the records, you would naturally think that the ocean acted as a sort of barrier with its heavy volume of tides. You would visualize the whole ocean pressing with all its volume against the shoreline. But the Columbia River pressed back with its own great force. Volumes estimated at seven billion gallons per hour compressed by banks that made the river no more than a mile wide at the mouth shot out to the sea, (198,000,000 acre feet of water per year) with the greatest velocity in North America for a river its size. The fresh water finger that was pushed into the ocean before the dams were built was estimated to stretch 900 miles into the ocean. How the ocean is affected by the diminished flow that is one quarter of its previous force is difficult to measure. But it was only the first relational casualty of the river.

There is a relational complexity of living creatures, currents, fresh and salt water that spins exponentially out in every direction. Although much has been studied as far as species of plants and fish invertebrates, there are still big gaps in our understanding of how this interaction of the fresh and salt water worlds really work. The true effects on the ocean can only be measured in time. I have to think, when something has been a constant natural connection for millennia, and then that vital connection disappears, there must be a reaction, and that the ocean is less for the loss of connection. It is hard to fathom how much sediment, debris and plankton, invertebrates and other small creatures, and food and nutrients in the food chain are being moved out to sea in this current. And what reciprocating creatures on the other end are waiting for this bounty to come to them from the high mountains. Now the flows are diminished, but worse, most of the nutrients that used to feed the ocean are now collecting as anaerobic ooze at the bottom of reservoirs. But because the river is all about relationship, everything is affected by the dam, not just the ocean. The big impacts trickle down into the minutest elements of the river.

When we think of the ocean, we think in grand aggregates because it is simpler. The ocean area that the Columbia fed is called the Mendicino Fracture Zone. It has a specific depth and geological texture. The California current sweeps south across this fresh water finger, taking its portion of food and nutrients down the coast of California, on to Mexico, and then west along the equator. The connections just keep going. The depth and the scale of the natural interconnections are breathtaking. Because the dams changed the essential structure of the river in terms of flow, its function to provide the ocean with essential nutrients was diminished greatly. How much? In fractional terms, the river velocity is down to approximately one fourth of its former flow velocity. The volume is down because of all the water held by the reservoirs for peak power demands. Because the flow is down and dams are holding back a large proportion of the water, the nutrients that used to flow freely to the ocean are down to a fraction of what they once were. It is a different river.

The ocean reciprocated, as do all natural relationships. The numbers of salmon before the discovery of the Columbia River vary, but estimates put the combined yearly runs of the various species of salmon from ten to thirty million, depending on year class cycles. Each species and year class would spend three to five years growing and maturing in the ocean. When they returned to the river they would be essentially ocean fish. Their entire physiology would be derived from ocean life. They were the ocean. And they would be able to move through this river of enormous flows to the upper reaches of the river and its tributaries, lay eggs, fertilize them, and die. And in their death they would bring the ocean to the mountains. Every inland creature and every plant would taste the ocean through the death of the salmon.

The dam on the other hand connects power, not life. The changed structure accommodates a new function. The river now becomes a river of measured components, with the elements of life taken apart and reassembled for transformation into power. Because of the transformation of life (water) to a power commodity, it is hoarded, regulated and measured. Because of the scale of volume and the velocity of the water, the river, operating as a machine, is able to create vast efficiencies and conveniences that are part of a closed system. The new river creates entitlements and expectations from this harnessed power. The irrigators in the Columbia Basin get water for their crops, and the aluminum producers get cheap electrical power for the manufacture of aluminum. The barge companies are able to use the river as a transportation connection to the interior of the river system, and electrical users in the Northwest get cheap electrical power for their homes and businesses. All this at the expense of the river's death.

Any changes to this river will meet the fierce resistance of those who benefit from the efficiencies and conveniences produced by the system. There are real jobs and reputations at stake. There are the wives expecting their husbands to bring home a weekly paycheck, just like the farmers are expecting water to be pumped up from the river.

In a similar way, seminaries are training young people in buildings that were built by the trustees and benefactors. There are long-standing historical and cultural expectations to keeping the status quo going.

There are many aspects of the Columbia River that would be changed if the system that is in place today was to be built in these times. The ideas that were put forth by Major Butler of the Army Corps of Engineers in 1932 would be fiercely contested knowing what we know now. It would be an open review with all the stakeholders weighing in on the effects of the dams. What would happen is hard to say. But without a doubt, much of what we see today wouldn't be there. Many of the tribal rights would be honored. Commercial fishermen would have a greater say in the process. Environmental concerns would have a much larger role in design and implementation of any alterations. Potential vested interests would have a greatly diminished role, as no power would yet be generated and they would have to prove national benefit, weighed against all the other concerns listed. And what of the original native stakeholders, whose lives once completely revolved around the river's life? They too have been replaced by the vested interests, i.e., those whose lives depend on the power of the river, not the river's life.

Honestly, this is a contemporary society, and the fact that we dammed the river was, on one hand, a natural economic thing to do. The nature of society is that we are continually in the business of transforming things into various forms of mechanical power. The Columbia River System stands out as a great tableau on which is written our religious history. We have been very successful in making our river of faith, Christianity, a powerful religion at the expense of the spiritual life in it. It is no longer a religion of dynamic relationship but of political power, money, seeking open, not secret prestige in good works to attract constituents. The constituents, their tithes, and their collective good works are measured and quantified. Exclusive elaborate membership has taken the place of honest, fluid relationships. This transformation by the religious machine homogenizes the life of the congregant to an integer, a commodity whose energies and monies are mingled and blended with thousands of others to produce "good works." We are, like the Columbia, a river of components that are transformed into power.

I wonder about all the doctrinal dams in Christianity. Would these great religious institutions exist, knowing what we know today and seeing how divided and essentially relation less we have become? By relationships I mean intimate friendships, not working relationships based mainly on function. Most of what we see today was arrived at the same way the Columbia River was dammed, by a closed system. Much of Christianity functions on the high end, each with a battery of theologians and seminaries, presidents, popes or vicars. These functionaries all direct things for a season and then are replaced by others who will toe the same religious line, and pay homage to the forebears and the trustees. The management works hard to put a good face on their spin of doctrine. They display the heroes and heroines, good works, social programs, books, publications, etc., past and present for the congregation to put their trust in. The congregation assents to the management with their political will, not their spiritual will. Spiritual will can only be used in the creation of intimacy and that is an abstraction that cannot be managed, anymore than you can manage a single salmon in a wild river.

But, there are cultural, social and economic trade-offs and benefits that occur when dams are built. The current managers inherited this system from predecessors, and are faced with the unpleasant task of managing the long-range effects of the dams and remediation of the damage to the river, all against the bevy of vested interests. The former Native People have been diminished and have nominal effect on current policy. And even if there was political will to alter the river and take down some dams, the Bonneville Power Administration is in debt. A huge nuclear energy plan, the Washington Public Power Supply System (WHPPS), appropriately called whoops, put the BPA billions in real debt. So the debt, and the large economic constituency, coupled with actual deconstruction, present problems that are extremely complex, complex enough to keep putting the ideas of restoration and remediation into a blender where money, conferences, committees, and politics are whipped together to keep any real solutions from being engaged, while at the same time making it look like there is a lot happening.

I realize that, regardless of their indoctrination, many of the men and women who see what Christianity is supposed to be, and see what it has become, are faced with the same dilemma. Restoration and reformation are typical buzz words of the faith. Some see restoration as aesthetic elements in the local churches, restoration of old titles with expanded authority, and reformation of the church structure, with the same bottleneck of who will be in charge. Everything looks like it is changing but really nothing is changing.

Most of the Native peoples are now gone. For those who remain, about all they can do is stand where I stood, at the center of a dam and remember that once there was a great whole river here. Maybe the young ache to stand where their fathers dangled over the wild river spearing great fish. And then again, the fish no longer bring the ocean to the river and its inhabitants. The river no longer connects to the deep ocean. And so, all the connections and vital relationships are greatly diminished or gone forever.

The memory of a great river that once teemed with life reveals to me a spiritual life that was once vital, relational, and full of wonder. There was not much wonder where I was standing, watching fish make their way up the concrete slide. And the salmon, wild or otherwise, that sunny June day were a no-show.

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