Chapter Twelve - That Damned Dam

From the small town of Tonopah, NV, where Wally Wanker lived, it’s a 150 mile drive in any direction to find a place with more people than jackrabbits or rattlesnakes. In such a remote place, Wally couldn’t take refuge in anonymity like he might have in the city. Everyone knew everyone and everyone knew Wally, the weird, overweight kid with the thick glasses, the flat nose and the C+ IQ. Even his name invited ridicule.

He was a voracious reader and when he was 11, he discovered the western writer Edward Abbey, who had a tremendous influence on young Wally. Most of his days that summer were spent hiking the desert around Tonopah with a paperback copy of The Brave Cowboy in his back pocket. He discovered its stark beauty and began to see himself as a creature of the desert, a survivor in a harsh environment.

When he was 13, his father took him on a raft trip down the Colorado River in Southern Utah. For ten days they floated down Glen Canyon, retracing the steps of John Wesley Powell, shooting white-water, sleeping on the banks of the mighty river and eating trout that they caught along the way.

The diversity of the area amazed him; from red-rock cliffs and natural arches cut in sandstone to gentle river beaches and narrow canyons with walls rising hundreds of feet on either side. There were infinite shades of red rock and sandstone contrasting against the azure sky like pastels in a watercolor painting. In the castle rocks rising from the desert floor, he could see the layers of sediment, one on top of another in varying shades, as if God himself had written the area’s history there for all to see.

The fertile images and the experience of living in the delicate ecosystem made a profound impression on young Wally. As far as he was concerned, the trip had been the ten best days of his life, in a place where he finally knew that he belonged. For ten days his universe was just as it should be.

On the last day of the trip, they sat by the fire at Kane Creek Landing and his father said “Take a good look around son; you may never see this again.”

“Oh, I’ll see at again, alright, I’m coming back here every chance I get. When I grow up, I’m going to live here.” Wally replied.

“You won’t see this if you do. They’re building a dam a couple of miles downstream from here and they’ll flood this all out.”

“All of it?”

“A good portion of what we’ve traveled on this trip will be under water, part of a huge lake they’re going to call Lake Powell, after the explorer that discovered Glen Canyon, Major John Wesley Powell. The dam’s been under construction since ‘56 but they’re just beginning the flooding. That’s why I brought you here now; I wanted us to see if before it was too late.”

What cruel joke was God playing on him? He’d finally found where he belonged just in time for it to be destroyed. How could he have seen all the construction going on during the trip and not even wondered what it was about? He felt foolish for not questioning, not have a more curious nature, and vowed to be more aware from now on.

He had never heard of John Wesley Powell or of Glen Canyon Dam, but you could damn sure bet that he would find out about them real quick. They were naming the project that would destroy his discovery after Major Powell? It made no sense to him. It was the cruelest of ironies.

Wally slept fitfully that night, tossing and turning in his sleeping bag. In his dreams, he was standing on the Kaiparowits Plateau, two thousand feet above Glen Canyon, in the bright sunshine. He heard a tremendous noise and saw a huge wall of water crashing toward him, about to sweep him away and drown him while he struggled to free himself from his sleeping bag.

He woke with a start, gasping for breath, heart pounding. He lay still in his sleeping bag for a long time, waiting for his heart to return to normal. Then, in a moment of clarity, it hit him; he knew why God had brought him here. He knew what he was supposed to do with his life.

In 1962, at thirteen years old, before the world even knew what one was, he had become an environmental terrorist.


By the summer of 1964, construction on the Glen Canyon Dam was rapidly approaching completion. Early one June morning, just days after school ended for the summer, Wally packed his backpack and quietly slipped out the back door while his parents slept. He walked down to the highway, stuck his thumb out and two days later he was on top of a hill north of Page, Arizona, looking through binoculars at the activity below as Glen Canyon Dam neared it’s final form.

That night he slipped through the darkness, down the hill, armed for assault. With his knife, he cut hydraulic lines. He brought sugar for the fuel tanks, knowing that it would cause the massive engines to overheat and seize. With his hammer, he flattened connections, damaged bolt heads and smashed gauges. He opened hoods and poured sand into crank cases.

When the sun came up he was five miles away, asleep in a cave that had been carved in the sandstone by the Colorado River in its glory days.

Over the next two weeks, his continued this nocturnal pattern, striking in different places and adding new twists to his repertoire of destructive tricks.

One morning, after a particularly productive night, he woke with a start. He was being yanked by the foot of his sleeping bag into the daylight. The harsh sun stabbed his eyes. His back bruised and bled as he bounced off jagged rocks and he felt a warm stream on the back of his head where it had struck a piece of sandstone.

“Alright, you little piece of shit, the party’s over.” A burly man in a Sheriff’s uniform yelled. He rolled Wally over and handcuffed him. “Yer coming with me, ya little J.D.”

Wally was taken to the Kane County jail in Kanab, UT because the little cave he’d been sleeping in was on the Utah side of the border. For 18 hours he sat, speaking to no one, until he was called in to the visitor cell where his father waited, white faced and sullen. He’d expected to be yelled at knowing that his father couldn’t possible understand his calling.

“You look awful.” His father said. “Are you OK?”

“Nothing that won’t heal.” Wally said quietly. Looking down.

“Son, I brought you up right. I taught you to stand up for what you believe in and I know you think that’s what you were doing, but there is another way. We have a system of laws in this country. They aren’t perfect and they don’t always work, but without them, we are cavemen.”

A wry smile crossed his lips; the irony of where his son had been hiding wasn’t lost on him. “Do you understand what I’m trying to say?”

“I’m not sure.”

“If you really believe in your cause, learn the law. Beat these people in court, it’s the only chance you have. Otherwise, you’ll spend your life in jails like this one and the dams will still go up. Son, I’m proud of you for standing up for what you believe but you need to find a more appropriate way to do it.”

The fifteen year old in Wally was beginning to break through the tough guy act he’d been trying and his eyes began to water. In a shaky voice, he asked, “What’s going to happen to me, Dad?”

“I got an attorney. He tells me that because you are still a juvenile and have no history of being in trouble, they’ll probably let you off pretty light this time. If it happens again, that’s another story.”

In a matter of days, Wally was driving home with his dad, having learned his lessons well. Wally had decided to become the first Wanker with a college degree.


His college years were uneventful. He worked hard and spent his summers hiking and camping in Southern Utah. Many nights he slept on the shores of Lake Powell, trying to imagine the canyons below the surface.

It could never be the same, now that the dam was in full operation. If he blew the dam to smithereens, as he often fantasized that he would, it wouldn’t matter. A piece of history was gone, lost forever under a layer of silt.

Knowing that the water and electricity that the dam generated went to Southern California was like salt in his wounds. Glen Canyon was gone so that lights in Hollyweird stayed lit.

Just after Wally graduated from law school, he got married. His new bride was a working class girl who was mostly attracted to him because he was about to become an attorney and everyone knows that attorneys made a lot of money.

She had expected a carefree life on easy street but even after he finally passed the bar on his third try, Wally wasn’t that kind of attorney. She packed her bags once it was clear that the easy life she’d dreamed of was not in the cards.

It wasn’t that Wally didn’t have clients; he had more of them than he knew what to do with. It was just that most of his clients couldn’t pay. He had a strong sense of compassion for anyone in need and their ability to pay didn’t factor in.

What money he did make, he spent on his favorite environmental causes. He was a man driven by his passion for just causes and there was no cause more just than preserving the earth for future generations. The big money that he was always fighting in court could afford batteries of lawyers and it was tough for a lone attorney to take them on. That didn’t stop Wally and he won his fair share of cases, all things considered.

As the seventies wore on, his frustrations grew. Despite winning a few battles, the war was slipping away. Emotionally, Wally had always lived perilously close to the edge, but in 1975, when Ed Abbey published “The Monkey Wrench Gang”, he began to slip over.

He read the book over and over until he could recite entire chapters. The book was about a group of people who try to stop the construction of the Glen Canyon Dam by sabotaging, or “monkey wrenching” the construction equipment.

Wally was convinced that Mr. Abbey must have been inspired to write the book by reading news accounts of his escapades years before. It was obvious to Wally that the Hayduke character was himself.

Hayduke was an ex-Marine just back from the war. He was an earthy, even crude character with no social skills and no sense of purpose until he fell into The Monkey Wrench Gang. The gang and their work gave meaning to an otherwise meaningless life and Hayduke became the most fearless, single minded warrior they had. The parallels Wally saw between Hayduke and himself were uncanny.

Wally thought about the book constantly and began to emulate Hayduke. By 1980, he was wearing camouflage clothing and a bandana and driving an old, beat up Jeep, just as Hayduke did. He practiced law less and less and drank beer and slept in the desert more and more.

When he lost his house, the only asset he had, the transformation was complete. He preferred not to think of himself as homeless; his home was the entirety of Southern Utah.

Wally slept under the stars and pondered what to do next. Maybe his Dad had been wrong all those years ago. Maybe his little exploits had been more than the pranks of a misguided fifteen year old. They had inspired the greatest writer of all time to write about him, hadn’t they? One thing was clear, terrorism got attention, and court action had gotten him nowhere.

As the days and weeks went by, he pondered such things until, in a moment of clarity just like so many years before, he knew what he had to do.

The damned dam had to go.