Quotes from Russell Martin

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.

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.

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.

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.

The first dam stood near the head of little Lake Canyon until November 1915.

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.

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.

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?