musings

Staggered out of the tent at about 9am dripping with sweat. Went to the KOA shop and bought breakfast - a quart of milk - and then set about writing to family. Also wrote the Salt Lake City postcard to G Walton.

We hit the road once again and whiled away the miles writing and sleeping. The latter was difficult because the temperature reached 106° and there was no escape. The wind rushing in from the windows was like the air coming out of a fan heater. Our water bottle was too hot to drink from and the sweat trickled down our backs like water.

As we approached the Utah/Nevada border we started seeing signs for the Hoover dam. The freeway turned into a slow and winding road leading down and down. Passed through roadworks announced by a set of three signs: “construction - first warning”, “construction - second warning” and finally “construction - third warning”. The traffic was controlled by flag women who smiled and said “hi” to each motorist, despite the temperature and their boring job. Or maybe it was because of.

Then we saw the Hoover dam. It was much smaller than I had imagined, quite a small white arc of concrete bounding calm, bright, green water. We all wilted at the sight of that cool expanse. Dragged ourselves over to a Pepsi machine and downed the stuff so quickly we sounded like a family of frogs burping away.

Took the car across the dam and parked. It was built in a very 1930s style with all the plaques and notices in typical Broadway typeface. The place was crowded with tourists, and a set of speakers on one of the towers was echoing out messages to roll-up for guided tours. Between these, they played piped music which sounded 1930s too. Muzak on a dam! Suddenly the pleasant jingly music was interrupted - “Get on the other side of a wall!” the Big Brother voice echoed round the rocks. There was a guy sitting on the safety wall taking pictures of the dam. The command was repeated. A security guard appeared, gun on hip, walkie-talkie at his mouth. He intercepted the culprit as he wandered away, and gave them a lecture, wagging his finger in the tourist’s face.

I looked over the low side of the dam and decided it wasn’t quite as puny as all that. A huge white bowl of concrete tapered gracefully down to the river hundreds of feet below. The rock on either side of the river was cut away to accommodate the generating stations. From the top of these a string of wires were slung to pylons perched impossibly on the canyon sides, and from these they led away to homes and factories God knows where. It seemed incredible that the whole engineering miracle was built for those 12 or 15 wires.

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 24th, 1976 at 12:21 pm and is filed under travel. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.