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would be required to pump it. The Bureau figured that six nuclear plants would do, and calculated the cost of the power at one mill per kilowatt-hour, a tiny fraction of what it costs today. The whole package came to $20 billion, in 1971 dollars; the benefit-cost ratio would have been .27 to 1. For each dollar invested, twenty-seven cents in economic productivity would be returned. “That’s kind of discouraging,” says Stephen Reynolds. “But when you consider our balance-of-payments deficits, you have to remember that we send $100 billion out of this country each year just to pay for imported oil. The main thing we export is food. The Ogallala region produces a very large share of our agricultural exports.”
     
    More water projects. In the early 1960s, the Ralph M. Parsons Corporation, a giant engineering firm based in Pasadena, California, released a plan to capture much of the floor of the Yukon and Tanana rivers and divert it two thousand miles to the Southwest through the Rocky Mountain Trench. The proposal, called the North American Water and Power Alliance, wasn’t highly regarded by Canada, which was the key to the “alliance,” but in the West it was passionately received. Ten years later, as environmentalism and inflation both took root, NAWAPA seemed destined for permanent oblivion. But then OPEC raised the price of oil 1,600 percent, and Three Mile Island looked as if it might seal fission’s doom. California was hit by the worst drought in its history; had it lasted one more year, its citizens might have begun migrating back east, their mattresses strapped to the tops of their Porsches and BMWs. All of a sudden the hollowness of our triumph over nature hit home with striking effect. With hydroelectricity now regarded by many as salvation, and with nearly half the irrigated farmland in the West facing some kind of doom—drought, salt, or both combined—NAWAPA, in the early 1980s, began to twitch again. The cost estimate (phony, of course) had doubled, from $100 billion to $200 billion, but by then we were spending that much in a single year on defense. The project could produce 100,000 megawatts of electricity; it could rescue California, the high plains, and Arizona and still have enough water left to turn half of Nevada green. The new Romans were now saying that it wasn’t a matter of whether NAWAPA would be built, but when.
     
    Perhaps they are right. Perhaps, despite the fifty thousand major dams we have built in America; despite the fact that federal irrigation has, for the most part, been a horribly bad investment in free-market terms; despite the fact that the number of free-flowing rivers that remain in the West can be counted on two hands; perhaps, despite all of this, the grand adventure of playing God with our waters will go on. Perhaps it will be consummated on a scale of which our forebears could scarcely dream. By encouraging millions of people to leave the frigid Northeast, we could save a lot of imported oil; by doubling our agricultural exports, we could pay for the oil we import today. As the ancient, leaking water systems and infrastructure of the great eastern cities continue to decay, we may see an East-West alliance develop: you give us our water projects, we’ll give you yours. Perhaps, in some future haunted by scarcity, the unthinkable may be thinkable after all.
     
    In the West, of course, where water is concerned, logic and reason have never figured prominently in the scheme of things. As long as we maintain a civilization in a semidesert with a desert heart, the yearning to civilize more of it will always be there. It is an instinct that followed close on the heels of food, sleep, and sex, predating the Bible by thousands of years. The instinct, if nothing else, is bound to persist.
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
    T he lights of Salt Lake City began to fade, an evanescent shimmer on the rear horizon. A few more minutes and the landscape was again a black void.