Kai Holmwood
Return to the Dam
After “At the Dam” by Joan Didion
Since it first shimmered into holographic form before me on a summer afternoon in 2361, the ruined Hoover Dam has slouched gargantuan in my imagination. I will be virtually exploring the interlinked trees of the Amazon, or soaring like a bird over Europe’s verdant ecocities, and suddenly the dam will spring to mind. I will be walking through the redwood forest and call forth the image of that structure, its once-smooth slope crumbling and worn against the distant desert surrounding it. I ask the image to expand until it fills my view, imagining the trees themselves are the pillars that once stood in the inhibited lake. In the forestal wind, I hear the water flowing freely over the structure now as it never did when the dam was in use, damaging the vertical concrete and slowly erasing the memory of who we were and what we did and what almost became of our world.
~
Something about that dam has always reminded me of San Francisco—the city that stood testament to the endurance and resilience of the human spirit, until one day it stood only as a faltering memory, its evacuated buildings lapped at by Pacific waves reclaiming the coastal land. The dam equally is a relic of a different past, a reminder that we were almost too late.
This particular dam is perhaps little different from any other except in its magnitude and in the fame it once held, with tourists flocking to see its sheer and deathly pale face. And yet this particular dam, Hoover Dam, is the one that carries something else for me, some whispered hint that it might be able to explain why they did what they did, what they were thinking, and how they could fathom that this scale of natural alteration was progress rather than devastation.
~
It would be too simple, of course, to make some Ozymandian comparison. Nor would it be entirely accurate. The desert around the dam is far from “lone and level sands.” Perhaps back then, when they built the dam, its unrelenting control of the area’s water deprived the desert of the necessary nourishing moisture—or perhaps this land was never lone and bare, and always blossomed with the resilient desert life that thrives there today, but the people who lived there then wanted more, as they so often did. Regardless, one can imagine the women and men who built the dam taking misguided pride in its construction, imagining that it would stand for all time, an eternal monument to the labors of their hands and their machines.
The hologram shivers before me as one of the giant concrete blocks, half-loosed after two hundred years of freedom, tumbles over the side and crashes into the water below.
~
Once, I visited the dam in person rather than viewing it as a hologram. I toured it with a man from the Bureau of Remembrance—a man who dedicates himself to these grisly skeletons of the past so that our future may be full of life. He spoke of “sediment dynamics” and “floodplains” and “river habitat.” We walked a few steps onto the decaying structure, holding our breath that it would not choose this moment to give way, and I stood at that liminal point between the desert and the dam. There, the absence of human voices other than ours didn’t feel regenerative or restorative, as it usually does when one is in the wilds. Instead, it felt eerily empty, almost haunted. It felt like a glimpse into the future that could have been—the future that was almost ours.
He took me down, down, down to the swirling pool at the bottom of the dam. There, at the edges, water rippled between fallen concrete blocks, lapping gently at the shores. “Touch it,” the Remembrance said, and I did, submerging my hands in the clear water. A minnow darted away, and a few bubbles rose to the surface. In that moment, it might have been any lake below any waterfall. The moment that should have been meaningful was peculiar in its ordinariness.
~
When I left the dam that day, the hot wind flung itself through my hair, carrying with it the scents of Mojave sage and misguided dreams. Later, as I drifted in my solar- and steam-powered drone over the desert, I turned on the holographic remembrance view of the desert below, set to the year 2017. What must once have been Las Vegas shuddered into view, its garish neon lights and unhinged buildings flaunting their spatial and temporal incongruity with the landscape around them. When the Continental Restoration Counsel met centuries ago to discuss land reclamation, rewilding, and relocation, these consumptive desert cities were among the few that were almost universally agreed to be destined for removal. Today, nothing remains except their optional holographic memories, inviting anyone who sees them to ask, again and again, the question we who were born two hundred years after the beginning of the revitalization have been asking all our lives. I hadn’t thought to ask the Remembrance man, but I thought it then, with the twilight falling over the desert and the wind blowing on my windows and the holographic lights below the only memory of the past. Of course that was what I had always seen in the dam: the question of what they had thought they were doing, how they had ever thought any of it would work, and whether they had ever thought of us at all.
Kai Holmwood’s fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in Stanchion, DreamForge, Solarpunk Creatures, Flash Frontier, and elsewhere.
