Dam Well aware that this is already been considered, pondered, palpated - Yes, the dam is a wonder of structural integrity. Like the holding arms of a lover, the dam's function is that of containment. We are quite content with this sort of containing, it is like an immense hug for the water and the subsequent land that needs it or needs it kept back. If water is life, or the experience of having had a life, then the dam would be the writer - poor person. The dam is tasked with a monumental load of work: impounding the wall of liquid, the halting of it's natural course, the stopping of it's momentum only to subsequently narrow it for irrigation (re-used for the land by way of agriculture) or nourishment (re-used for the people of that land by way of drinking water). Yes, the dam is the silent, sullen threshold over which stories flow, along with life, and its debris, all that flotsam and jetsum mingling amid the surface and just below it.
Our own Hoover Dam is an archetypical concrete arch-gravity dam in function, and quite impressive in form as well. Unlike most government work projects, the dam was actually finished two years ahead of time, and completed in just five backbreaking years. Other odd facts abound, and add to this Author-Dam metaphor. Take, for example, the following:
-The power created at the Hoover Dam is almost exactly 1/23rd that of a space shuttle's engines.
-While the Hoover Dam does in fact span two different time zones (Pacific and Mountain) there is a certain time in every year where the zones bisect one another and any traveler is caught in a confusion of time! Those coming to visit from the East will witness the addition of an extra 60 minutes of precious time manifesting out of thin air!
-The dam is/was the first single structure to contain more masonry than the great Giza Pyramid.
-J.G. Tierney was hired as a land surveyor prior to construction of the Hoover Dam. He began his work of scouting the perfect site to place the dam. In 1922, Tierney fell out of his boat and drowned in the Colorado River, making him the first death associated with the Hoover Dam. Oddly, 13 years later as construction was about to conclude, his own son, Patrick, became the very last death associated with the Hoover Dam. Patrick died on the 6th of February, 1935 - on the exact same day as his father.
The problem of the time zones is most interesting to me, of course. Wiggling as it is, time is such a funny thing. We pin it down, we affix a name to it, and out of nowhere we are bitten by some annoying gadfly simply by our pinning and our naming. Had we no zones with separate times to keep track of, vacationing families would not be an hour late or an hour early when crossing the span of Dam. The double pair of intake towers now bare a series of clocks, in an effort to help right the wrongs of our segmented zones of time. The four faces, two on the Nevada side, two on the Arizona side, seem to be caught in a silly dialog.
And, well, the two deaths seem to also be important for some vague reason. What does it mean that the death that ushered in the dam, and the one that concluded it, were related on a very concrete level (that of father-son relationship)? They bracket the accomplishment like two sad parenthesis. Father dies before he can even see what he has surveyed come to fruition, then the Son dies only after carrying out the heavy work which sprung from his father's initial efforts. Two generations lost, one on either side. This, somehow, might have something to do with the time. Life, as it is, wiggles a bit. No?
