A couple decades ago it was radical in terms of thinking that you could take a dam out. Taking a dam out and opening up a watershed, reconnecting it with the fish that were there for hundreds of thousands of years, I mean, it gives you hope. This morning I came, I saw, and I was conquered, as everyone would be, to see for the first time this great feat of mankind.
Ten years ago, the place where we are gathered was an unpeopled, forbidding desert. In the bottom of the gloomy canyon, whose precipitous walls rose to a height of more than a thousand feet, flowed a turbulent, dangerous river. We are here to celebrate the completion.
of the greatest dam in the world rising 726 feet above the bedrock of the river and altering the geography of a whole region the people of the united states are proud with the exception Of the few who are narrow-visioned, this great dam warrants universal approval. This is an engineering victory of the first order, another great achievement of American resourcefulness, American skill, and American determination. Yeah, this was the tape from...
Recently taped him at Hetch Hetchy, left it, and then just kept him after the OWASP. This old athletic tape keep him a little quieter. compared to this. Any words of inspiration for aspiring young artists that have a big dam canvas?
Go for it. Do it bigger and better. Definitely do it bigger and better.
It's like, great, 25 years ago we did a couple painted cracks on dams. Passing. It's all been done.
Take it a step further. Just something really impressive. I don't know what that'd be, but come up with something. Inspiration can be a pretty dangerous thing.
Michael's advice haunted me for months after we interviewed him. What sort of lunatic repels off a 200-foot dam with a paint bucket, alone, in the middle of the night, just to make a statement? Anyway, I'm getting way ahead of myself. We'll get back to that. My name's Ben, by the way.
I'll be your narrator. It was kind of embarrassing how little I knew about dams when I started working on this film. I used to sneak inside their overflow tunnels once in a while to take photos of my friends skateboarding. So the extent of my knowledge about dams mostly had to do with how to avoid getting arrested while crawling inside them. Dams don't just blend in as part of the landscape to me anymore.
Knowing what I know now, it's impossible for me to look at I'm the same way I did a few years ago or even rivers for that matter. Dams and hydropower represent a pivotal part of US history. There's no denying that. But just like any other resource development in the US, we took it too far. There are 75,000 dams over three feet high in the United States.
That's the equivalent of building one every day since Thomas Jefferson was the president of the United States. Dams have been a common part of the American landscape for centuries. Most early communities were established on the banks of rivers so dams could be built to divert river flows to water wheels to run machinery. Around the time Edison had the light bulb dialed in.
the first hydroelectric power was being generated on the U.S. side of Niagara Falls. At one point, nearly half the country's power was being fed by hydropower alone. As America's dependency on electricity grew, new dams were being built so fast that the engineering technology struggled to keep up. One of the worst disasters in U.S. history occurred in 1889 when Pennsylvania's South Fork Dam failed with no warning.
The city of Johnstown was leveled with 20 million tons of water. taking 2,200 lives. The flood is still referred to as a natural disaster, despite the fact that there's really nothing natural about impounding a river behind a poorly constructed wall.
In the late 1800s, the government was faced with a tough choice when they began to realize that every major fishery in the country was at risk. Either start regulating the impact of harvest, pollution, and dams on wild fish, or mitigate that loss by trading nature for science. The answer was the National Fish Hatchery System.
In 1902, the Reclamation Act was passed by Congress to promote the settlement of the West through the development of irrigation projects to support small family farms. This well-intentioned mission devolved into the Bureau of Reclamation, whose short-sighted projects began a legacy of resource abuse, transporting and impounding absurd amounts of water to support unsustainable desert agriculture and sprawling urban development. The mighty waters of the Colorado were running unused to the sea. Today, we translate them into a great national possession. In 1913, a seven-year environmental battle, led by the legendary Sierra Club founder John Muir, ended in vain when Congress gave the green light to flood a national park.
Yosemite's stunning Hetch Hetchy Valley was dammed to provide water storage for the city of San Francisco. On March 12th, 1928, 12 hours after a safety inspection by its engineer William Mulholland, California's St. Francis Dam broke free from its foundation, sending a wall of LA's water supply plowing downstream. Mulholland was cleared of any wrongdoing, but felt personally responsible for the dam's failure. I envy the dead, said Mulholland at a court hearing.
Don't blame anyone else. If there was an error in human judgment, I was the human. During the Great Depression, Reclamation began the two most ambitious engineering efforts in U.S. history. The Hoover Dam on the border of Arizona and Nevada, and the Grand Coulee Dam in eastern Washington. Both projects created thousands of coveted jobs and were proudly embraced by the public as national treasures.
By the time Coulee's generators went online, the U.S. hydropower system was feeding an insatiable demand for electricity to build airplanes, ships, and bombs for World War II. If the era of dams had a golden age, it was the following 20 years. The Army Corps of Engineers, the Bureau of Reclamation, and the Tennessee Valley Authority were the government's dream team. If it flowed, it was dammed.
Any river left unharnessed was considered a dangerous torrent with wasted potential. 30,000 private and federal dams were completed between 1950 and 1970. The Yellowstone. was one of very few unaltered watersheds left in the nation. When the Bureau of Reclamation began running out of ideal locations to build dams, shit started getting weird.
Massive dams were proposed in Grand Canyon National Park and Utah's Dinosaur National Monument. Led by environmentalist David Brower, the Sierra Club worked quickly to rally a massive outcry of public disapproval. But while Brower's attention was focused elsewhere, Reclamation's new secret weapon was quietly flooding a little-known national treasure. with very little opposition.
If he'd have known how beautiful that area was, he would have Fought it tooth and nail. Brower now says that that was the biggest mistake he ever made. In 1973, the Endangered Species Act was set into motion by President Nixon, a bold move to protect endangered species from extinction as a consequence of economic development.
Any dam contributing to the demise of a species could now be held accountable by law. In 1976, the Bureau of Reclamation set up a claims office in eastern Idaho. to divvy out $300 million to the communities in the flood path of their newly completed Teton Dam.
As its reservoir filled for the very first time, the 300-foot earthen dam started to liquefy and calve away, taking 11 lives downstream. During an interview with the High Country News in 1995, Clinton-appointed Bureau of Reclamation Commissioner Dan Beard stated that the Bureau's future isn't in dams. The era of dams is over.
In 1997, the 162-year-old Edwards Dam on Maine's Kinnebec River became the first major dam removal in U.S. history. River Conservation Organization American Rivers declared 2011 the Year of the River, as multiple dam removal projects began, including the largest in U.S. history on Washington's Elwha River and Olympic National Park. We are here today to say free that beautiful Elwha River. Let her run free. We're here to say welcome back to the salmon.
We want you to live free again. There are a grand total in that pool over there, someone counted them yesterday, 73 salmon. Not 72, not 74. I love people with fisheries and wildlife. They're exactly 73 governor. So to those we say we want 73,000 more, welcome back, come on back, that's what this day is all about.
See a lot of people don't realize how deep this is, really deep this is, until you get right here to the edge and you look over. Yeah, I mean it was, you know, it was kind of knowing that today was the last day of our final operations up here on the dam was, yeah, a little reflective. You come into a plant and as you learn to operate and spend time with them, you learn to listen to certain sounds that are not normal, certain vibrations that are not typical.
But this machine, for as many years as it's ran, we would block load it and she'd just run and run smooth and I think she'd have kept on running just for years and years. June 1st was a big day. That was hard. I'll be honest with you, to shut down two perfectly good running power plants, it wasn't easy. We as a country right now are infatuated with tearing things down.
It's not just an enterprise to blow something up and build something new and grander. I mean, we're removing these for good. And we're not just taking dams out, but we're having to relocate families.
And they're losing their jobs. Yeah, I have a, I probably have some personal feelings towards, especially being a hydropower guy. Well, I think there's a very intentional movement by various groups in our country to remove every dam. There's no doubt about that.
We're all anxious to see, was this thing really worth it? Was it worth the $370 million to the American taxpayer to do this? Did it really make a difference?
And if in 10 or 20 years down the road we look back and say nothing really changed that much then I think we're all going to come to some similar conclusions. And only time's going to tell us if that's going to be true or not. What's my gut say?
I just assume not to say anything. That says a lot. I'm not running for politics, buddy.
I made a statement about taking out Elwha Dam in my first months in office. And it caused a lot of trouble. President Clinton took me aside and said, Bruce, what's all this talk about removing dams?
When I first moved to the state of Washington in 1991, I was a young man. I was told, got to get involved with the Elwha Dam Removal Project. It's going to happen any year now.
20 years later, it's actually happening. The dams, both of them, were illegal to start with because of existing legislation which stated essentially that any dam built had to have passage for migrating salmon. All the species of wild fish that have ever lived in Elwha are still there. Biologists know that. Adult Chinook salmon still beating their head against the bottom of the dam a century later.
They're still trying to get upstream into Olympic National Park. Taking a dam out and opening up a watershed, reconnecting it with the fish that were there for hundreds of thousands of years, it's a very powerful experience. There's three things that come to mind.
It's hope, humility, and happiness. The hope of recovery in a lot of these places, the humility when you go to places like southwest Alaska. and other places where you see the abundance and just a basic spiritual happiness that you can't find and I can't find in a lot of other things.
It was the elders that kept the memory alive. It was the elders that passed that knowledge, the knowledge of this river in its origin. They don't forget. They don't move on. They remember and they persistently seek restoration of what was once.
It's an answer to our ancestors prayers. And I'm just grateful that we're able to see it happen in our lifetime. So that's what we're doing.
We're saying thank you for making sure that the fish come back and sustain the people. People of the lower Elwha, they entered into a treaty in 1855 that gave the word of the United States that they would be able to continue their way of life and to live off the abundant resources of that free-flowing river. Although the US Constitution says that treaties are the supreme law of the land, the people of the lower Elwha Saw only injustice for about 100 years, but there is a healing now because that is changing.
All of Indian country is here in spirit and their eyes are focused upon the people of the lower Elwha. Where had they come from? The answer sounds like a fairy tale. The far reaches of the sea.
How had they arrived? Another fairy tale. By swimming against one of the most powerful rivers on earth past eight deadly dams all the way up from the Pacific.
Why had they made such an insane journey? Another wonder. These colored stones and clear currents so high and far from the sea once gave them life. So they'd become mountain climbers, literal mountain climbers, though they possessed no legs, hooves, feet.
They'd climb the Rockies to the pebbles of their birth by swimming home at the certain cost of their lives in order to create tiny silver offspring. I just want to welcome you folks to Grand Coulee Dam. This is the largest producer of hydroelectricity in North America and the largest concrete structure in North America.
For many years, it was the largest in the world. 250,000 gallons of water a second going through each of the big penstocks and when it's really cranking good, it will actually vibrate to the bedrock. You can sometimes feel it clear across the river.
So you just really know there's a lot of power there. There are those that would take out every dam just to save a couple of salmon. There are those that think that the Native Americans got a raw deal.
Some of them, of course, would like to go back and have their native salmon runs and live off the land. But things progress. The Alwa, the Condit, they were old dams, obsolete in terms of efficiency.
So if we want to selectively take out some of those older, smaller dams, not really a problem there. We can do that, restore some fisheries. But this dam, I can't conceive of anybody really seriously wanting to take this dam out.
A dam for salmon is essentially lack of access. Their basic life history requires the juvenile fish to go out to the ocean and the adult fish to come back to their spawning stream. So anything that blocks a river, like a dam does, is end of story in terms of their ability to access part of the world that they need to complete their life cycle.
Some people still define the Pacific Northwest region as anywhere a salmon can swim. It's a romantic thing to say. but that would mean the territory has been cut in half by dams.
At one point, the Columbian Snake River, shown here in red, were the most productive wild salmon fisheries in the lower 48. Now the runs hover around 8% of their former glory. Every fish that passes this window at Bonneville Dam has to find and negotiate an elaborate passage to move upstream. The only chance for their offspring to get to the ocean is if the dams are spilling water, but that equates to wasted power. So you'll commonly see juvenile fish being transported in barges and trucks downstream past the dams. Tens of thousands of now endangered Snake River sockeye used to make the 900-mile journey to spawn in Idaho's Redfish Lake.
In 1992, only one fish made it home past all eight dams. If you equate the number of Snake River sockeye that have returned in the 20 years since to the amount of money spent on recovery efforts, it comes to $9,000 per fish. The rivers are run like machines.
Every aspect of their flow is controlled by computers in a Portland office. During spring runoff when the rivers are cranking, there's actually a surplus of energy in the grid at times, leaving wind-generated power with nowhere to go and no one to pay for it. Seeing thousands of wind turbines generating power in the Columbia Gorge with no impact on salmon runs and water quality definitely raises the question as to how hydropower could be marketed as green energy.
One thing's for sure, though. the pro-dam crowd seems a little threatened by it. It's like Beanie Babies, the fad of Beanie Babies. Everybody had to have Beanie Babies. Well, wind is a fad that everybody has to have wind.
And then you buy all of these Beanie Babies and you load up the shelf and you got all of these Beanie Babies. And what are they good for? Well, not much. And it's the same with wind. It's just a fad.
It's really hard to have a balanced conversation on the subject of dams versus salmon when the most outspoken pro-dam politicians in the country refused all of our requests for interviews. Well, one of them reluctantly let us in, and then not so reluctantly asked us to leave. I can't say I really blame these guys for not wanting to talk to us, but I could.
It wouldn't help but wonder what their rhetoric would sound like. Lucky for us, we heard they were throwing a little party to introduce a bill that would prohibit federal funding from ever being used for dam removal or the study of dam removal unless explicitly authorized by Congress. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Thank you for your leadership on this issue. Thank you especially for holding this hearing to examine and expose the continuing drive of the environmental left to destroy our nation's system of dams.
Some people seem to have forgotten that before the era of dam construction, the endless cycle of withering droughts and violent floods constantly plagued our watersheds. Our dams tamed. These environmentally devastating events, they turned deserts into oases and laid the foundation for a century of growth and prosperity for the American West.
But over the last few decades, a radical and retrograde ideology has seized our public policy. It springs from the bizarre notion that Mother Earth must be restored to her pristine, prehistoric condition, even if it means restoring the human population to its pristine. prehistoric condition.
They're not satisfied with merely blocking construction of new dams. They're now seeking to destroy our existing facilities. We'll be required to stretch and ration every drop of water and every wad of electricity in their bleak and stifling and dimly lit homes, homes in which gravel has replaced green lawns and toilets constantly back up. To me, these glaring hypocrisies destroy their credibility.
And reveal an unabashedly nihilistic agenda. This is the kind of lunacy that we are facing. And as you deal with these people, you begin to realize we are literally dealing with the lunatic fringe of our society, and they are in charge of our public policy on these issues, because we let them.
We're not going to let them anymore. As tempting as it was to stay and high-five all our new pro-dam friends, there was a place just a few miles away that I wanted to visit. Just 57 years ago at this spot on the Columbia River, the Army Corps of Engineers committed what today would be called an act of cultural genocide.
As Sherman Alexie, a Spokane Coeur d'Alene Indian says, the salmon are the Eucharist of the tribes. The Eucharist, like the blood and body of Christ, it's that serious a symbol. And to run the dams in a way that wipes out their culture, their spirituality, and their revenue is like there being a federal bureaucracy that removes the cattle from ranches and tells cowboys that they're doing them a favor.
This is Salilaw Falls, the age-old fishing grounds of the Columbia River Indians. Here is a fisherman swinging his net, gathering fish for the salmon feast given to welcome the spring. My dad woke me up and it was dark yet. Come on, sonny, let's go.
The fish are coming. Took me outside the tent. She said, listen. It sounded like a thousand people with an oar beating on the water.
It was salmon coming up the river. The Celilo Falls was, you know, the grandest rendezvous place for our people and plateau tribes in general. It mattered not whether you was Yakima, Nespers, Pumatela, Cayuse, whatever you were. It didn't matter.
You was a part of it. The mist and the roar of that water is just... I think about it right now and I can hear it.
I say maybe that's one of my great things. In my memories, when I think about it, I can actually hear it. This is the first and unfortunately the last time that we will ever have a film of this ceremony. As you will see, the Great Dalles Dam, which is being built several miles below here, will soon back up over these... Falls, they will cover the great fishing grounds and a way of life that Indians have had here will disappear forever.
Celilo Falls was gone. So how do you think I felt? I knew what was there and I knew what they done.
Sometimes I get out and I look over that place and I can still see where some things should be and they're not there no more. The wind has changed. Because of the flat surface that's coming up to Columbia, the temperatures of the waters have changed. The dead water makes it harder for the fish to get up and down.
And now all it is is a big body of water, is all it is. It means nothing to me. All it means is what they took away. What these dams have done, they've completely torn my country apart.
This is not the same country as it was that we remember. Dating back more than 10,000 years, Salilah was one of the oldest continuously inhabited communities in North America until it was flooded in 1957. At one point, the Army Corps of Engineers offered to lower the water backed up behind the Dalles Dam long enough for the tribes to see the falls again, just for a day. There was a resounding no from elders that they could not live through seeing them flooded again. There were some elders that have never even been back there because it was so devastating. Like a death is what they called it, like a funeral, and they couldn't.
they could not go through it again. Just upstream from Celilo, where the Snake River meets the Columbia, you'll find what many agree are the most ill-conceived and environmentally destructive dams in America. Fed by 23 major tributaries, the Snake River was once the gateway to 5,500 miles of pristine wild fish habitat in Idaho alone. The four lower Snake Dams were built by the Army Corps of Engineers in the 60s, with the stated purpose of flood control, irrigation, navigation, recreation, and hydropower.
Combined, the dams only generate about 4% of the region's energy. These are run-of-river dams, which means they provide little to no water storage. That also means they're physically incapable of flood control, and it cancels out their need for irrigation. The main purpose of all four dams was river navigation, so a giant system of locks allows barges to haul goods up and downstream to port. It's hard to ignore the simple fact that there's a perfectly good railroad spanning the entire length of the shipping corridor from Lewiston to Portland.
If area farmers continue a recent progression toward shipping their grain by rail, It'll be hard to deny that barging is unnecessary. The lower sneak is technically open to the public for recreation, but I'd heard stories of boaters being harassed for simply trying to paddle downstream. I wanted to see firsthand if there was any truth to that, so I managed to talk my friend Travis into one of the worst ideas I've ever had. But I'll get back to that in a minute. In the meantime, I want to introduce you to this fella who randomly walked up to the mic at a public meeting and managed to simultaneously end his career and blow every mind in the room.
I'm Jim Waddell. I'm not sure I have a question, but I want to tell you something. I'm from the Army Corps of Engineers. I'm hearing all this stuff about the Lower Snake dams, and here I am. I know.
I probably know better as a civil engineer, better than anybody in this country, about those dams. And given what I knew, I just couldn't sit there any longer. And I'm going to get fired for what I'm about to tell you.
But it's time. Those stands are Christ. It always has been.
From the day that Congress first authorized those, it's been a shame. Part of what I did was to manage and lead the Lower Snake Feasibility Study. In 1995, the Army Corps was forced to address the environmental impact of the Lower Snake Dams when the Snake River Sockeye was listed as endangered.
Their answer was the $35 million Lower Snake Feasibility Study. I read the thing. I worked on this thing, and based on that, you know, I believe those dams need to come out.
On the Snake River, for the Snake River salmon, it's four dams too many. I mean, the taxpayers and the people of Washington and Oregon are not getting a good deal out of those dams. You know, they're losing fish, and the economics are not helping them. So anyway, it comes time for a decision. The colonel sits down with each one of us separately.
I read the first paragraph. And basically what it says is that my recommendation based on this document was that we should pursue congressional authorization to breach the dams. Travis checked out the Army Corps website and found a friendly little page that detailed how to pass through the Snake River lock system if you're in a non-motorized craft.
This is where my terrible idea was born. I wanted to see what the Army Corps had once billed as some sort of recreational utopia. Everyone we spoke to in Lewiston confirmed that it was a seriously bad idea. Even this piece of art seemed like some sort of bad omen, as if every canoe in the state had been retired as a memorial to a lost river.
Our plan was to kayak through all four locks from Lewiston, Idaho to Pasco, Washington, where our truck was parked about 100 miles away. It seemed almost wrong to call this seemingly dead body of water a river. Usually if you stop paddling on a river, you still move downstream.
Here, not so much. Day one sucked. Usually when it's 100 degrees out, you just look for a tree to sit under.
But they were all underwater. I was feeling pretty grumpy when Travis turned the camera on me. I think he wanted me to admit that my idea was a legend among bad ideas, but I wasn't ready to give him the pleasure of knowing that.
My nerves were wearing on me as we approached the dam. Mainly because I'm a pessimist, but also because I can't swim for shit and I kept imagining getting sucked through a turbine and pureed like an out-migrating salmon. There was hardly anybody in the district that would even talk to me anymore. Anybody that thinks we should breach these dams is obviously a communist and doesn't belong, you know, to be working around here. So I've been branded as not loyal to the organization.
I kind of feel like I failed at my job because here I was in charge of this study and in spite of my best efforts, I let $35 million worth of research end up ignored. As a public servant, that's our job, is to make hard decisions. I happened to end up with somebody that didn't have the fortitude or the strength to take that decision and go forward with it. I think we have a win-win situation.
Remove those dams, save the taxpayer money, improve a habitat, put more... dollars back in this community because people will come here to use this river and not only is it important to the ecosystem it's amazing it's just amazing that they come 900 miles into the Snake River system and it'd be a lot of teardrops of joy to see that river running again The largest possible salmon recovery venture of which humanity is capable would be the simply the removal of those four dams. Nobody's ever heard of it. Nobody's ever been there. It has to become a national issue.
The Snake River is a public waterway. Our tax dollars pay to maintain these locks and these dams. The lower snake feasibility study was ignored.
And Jim Waddell's recommendation to breach the dams was removed. Despite hundreds of millions a year, not one of the four endangered or threatened Snake River salmon species has been delisted. There's a great good here that belongs to the American people that's being stolen from the American people by a very small corrupt branch of the federal government.
The Army Corps website said to pull a cord to speak with the lockmaster upon arrival, but we couldn't find it anywhere. The last thing I wanted to do was get out of my kayak, but I knew our window was about to close any minute. I found a couple workers that told me how to find the cord, but also warned me that security was on the way.
Right as I was about to pull the elusive cord, we made some new friends. Hey, how's it going? Not too bad. You guys were actually thinking of getting a boost, is that it? Yeah.
You can. Why not? You do not motorize. The snake system clearly says that not motorizing...
I just heard that was the operator that's been in the van. That's federal law. It's our legal right to be able to go through it. Don't take my photo.
Why? Because. It's a... We're not on the top of the dam. You know what, you're being pretty combative and I don't...
I'm not being combative, I'm trying to talk to you about what the law clearly states here. Well, we need to know what the specifics are and... I think we should get the sheriff to come down.
Don't you? And just like that, I was off the hook. Travis had come up with an idea worse than mine. Despite the depressing reality of the situation, I couldn't stop laughing as two police cars and an Army Corps security truck were trying to figure out how to pull over two kayaks from a nearby road. One of the more excited cops deleted the video of the conversation you're about to hear, but he didn't notice the fuzzy microphone sticking out of my life jacket.
Okay, you guys understand this? This is federal. You guys get that? I understand you guys may or may not be terrorists. That's not up for me to decide.
But it's a big deal. All 18 were cooked for. This isn't going to... Right, right. This is...
He calls the federal investigators and they arrest you guys. And then they arrest you for taking photos. That's espionage. But don't recreational vehicles take photos through the locks when they cruise through? Yeah, they're not supposed to.
I'll tell you what. Let's just cut that crap. You guys know you recorded it, it's on there.
I'm not gonna delete it. There's no sense in not. Well he has a right to seize it here. It sounds like a silly crime. It's true.
It's terrorism stuff. Homeland Security is just no joke. No we don't, we don't want to elevate it.
You guys understand, this is federal. Yeah we got it. This is their rules and regulations. This is their river. The more the layers peeled off this story, the deeper I wanted to go.
There's one particularly divisive issue when it comes to dams that no one seems to want to talk about, and that's fish hatcheries. But before we tackle that beast, I think it's really important to have a little appreciation for one of the species that deserves our respect. You cannot have a creature come in from the ocean and enter the extreme state of vulnerability. that is spawning in shallow water unless the people in that watershed agree to greet this wild creature with great compassion and sensitivity.
I think most people have heard of a rainbow trout or had one wiggle out of their hands at some point, but few have had the honor and privilege of meeting a steelhead. These highly respected sea-run rainbows have been severely impacted by west coast dams. and eliminated entirely from some watersheds.
It's not uncommon for a fly fisherman to go weeks or even a season without feeling the pull of a steelhead, but their devotion to these storied creatures seems to fuel them. There's a uniquely cold stretch of water in Oregon where a pod of these wild steelhead have gathered for ages to rest before spawning. These particular fish have a special friend named Lee who lives about 30 feet away.
Lee is their guardian, and he's kept notes on everything that happens in and around the river for nearly 12 hours a day, for six months a year, for more than 13 years. This pool is known to a lot of local people as the dynamite hole because of the two, possibly three human generations when dynamite was readily available and no one else was up here. It was used in this pool possibly as much as two, sometimes three times a year. And of course for every dynamiting there are probably 20 or 30 snaggings or nettings or you name it.
To mess with fish that have passed through the gauntlet that these fish have gone through after they're up here and home free, it just seems like it's ridiculous to me. One of the things that never ceases to amaze me is how curious these fish are about everything. I think the curiosity that I...
The sea possibly represents their feelings of vulnerability at being in this pool, which is, compared to the Pacific Ocean, a puddle. And they sometimes respond idiosyncratically to people. Some people put these fish in a conniption fit. Some people have very little effect on them whatsoever. And I'd be willing to bet that these fish have as fine an appreciation of what's going on around this pool as I do, and perhaps finer, probably finer in a lot of ways.
You know the things that have that have influenced me in life besides blind accident are things of great amusement. One of the more amusing stories that I read about steelhead fly-fishing was by Gary Snyder and he said something like well we started fly-fishing on the Russian River for steelhead then we started taking the points off our hooks then we started taking the flies off our hooks and finally we just decided to go swimming and that's There's something very amusing about that, but very meaningful and true too. I think I needed something to open my eyes to the beauty of the North Umpqua and these emblematic fish that run her.
It would be nice to think that these fish know me because I've been watching them and their parents now for 13 years but I think I would just be playing a game with myself. Having Parkinson's has has made me to a certain degree more aware of the fact that this will have to come to an end perhaps sooner than I otherwise would have liked it to. It's wonderful to have an opportunity to do something as positive as this is and as simple as this is. That is a great gift to me. Well I sometimes wonder what the final day will be like for me here.
I think that someone will come along and continue to stay with these fish. Because one thing is clear, it's too easy to get here for there not to be a human presence here at all times from this point on. And there will be, I'm confident of that. Wild fish are the real deal. We still have them, thank God.
And hopefully we always will. The great beauty of wild fish is we don't have to do a goddamn thing. Since they've been put through the chemical bath, MS222, they are not fit for human consumption. So we can't eat them.
They are going to be processed into fish fertilizer. Like that stuff that maybe your folks put on the garden, you dump it out, it's really gross looking. Super sneaky, big stuff grow.
They are big. They are big. That's why you kill them, so they don't go back into the wild? No, no, no, no, no, that's not why we kill them. Because there's no habitat for them.
We produce them here and they're coming back to where they were. They're coming back to where they were. they were hatched, okay? And we're taking the eggs out of them, and we are producing 15 million salmon to provide to the commercial fisheries, to native tribes catching.
The reservoir flooded out lots of their natural habitat, so we are a mitigation facility in taking up the loss of habitat. Just like their wild cousins, hatchery salmon sacrificed themselves for the next generation by returning home to spawn. But for these Columbia River hatchery fish, home is a government-run factory where they're beaten to death and artificially spawned to create a very expensive illusion of a salmon run.
Historically, hatcheries have been used as a way to justify trying to rebuild fish runs without actually dealing with the root causes of their decline. Sort of habitat change over fishing and dam construction. It's a lot easier to basically...
To adopt the philosophy of, oh, we'll just make more fish. So I call it a type of a whack theory, where the question is, how many fish do people want to whack? And we'll try to produce those and bring them back, but that isn't the same as saving the salmon. Bonneville Power ratepayers are saddled with an $800 million a year burden to fund the Columbia Hatchery System.
This is now the largest fish and wildlife program in the United States. We're spending a lot of money trying to get it right, but it's a business operation, and it's a big business. Hatchery fish tend to suck at life and equate to a bad return on investment for a handful of reasons, and I don't think you have to be a fish biologist to understand why.
If you're raised in a concrete pool with no predators, where delicious brown pellets mysteriously rain down from the sky, chances are you'll be pretty naive when you're flushed out of a tube into the real world. If you took a bunch of suburban kids and dropped them off in the middle of the Congo jungle and told them to walk to the coast, they're gonna be not very well suited to survival in that habitat. They release millions and millions of smolts, very, very few of them come back. Very few. They're no different than industrial agriculture.
It's a disaster. So it is true. I was a critic of BPA's fish programs, and now I operate BPA's fish programs.
We have hatchery legal obligations to provide hatchery production to support harvest. So the question is, how do we do that in the smartest possible way so we're not impairing wild fish? That's an age-old question that we continue to address and try to resolve, is where is that balance between providing hatchery stock that can be fished and harvested without harming the native? population fish.
If you load up a stream with lots of hatchery fish, the wild fish that are still in it can be out-competed. If you look at, say, the rivers of New England, the fish farm escapees and hatchery fish outnumber the wild fish in their own rivers 100 to 1 or so. Anybody outnumbered 100 to 1 is gonna have a hard time holding on. If we keep piling hatchery fish on top of these salmon recovery efforts, we're crippling.
our chances to really recover these systems. Now the second problem is they tend to breed with the wild fish that are in that watershed, and that's shown to reduce their ability to produce offspring. The wild fish are genetically diverse, whereas a hatchery clone, it's a bunch of first cousins fucking first cousins, you know, so you end up with a bunch of Bedeeps.
They're immediately being inbred out of existence. It really is like trying to replace Bach, Beethoven, and Mozart with Yanni. Yanni and Yanni. No diversity. There is sort of this deep psychological need or desire to control nature.
And I think dams and hatcheries are the same thing. The whole purpose of the $300 million Elwha dam removal project was to restore wild fish runs. But instead of letting things happen naturally, $16 million went to the Elwha Klallam tribe to build a new fish hatchery and start pumping the Elwha full of manufactured salmon and steelhead.
The one common element is to build the dam, we got to put a hatchery in. Well, to take it out, we got to put a hatchery in. It makes you kind of wonder sort of what the real sort of purpose behind the desire for hatcheries are and if there's other reasons why they tend to be very popular than the good of the fish.
I don't like to openly oppose something that the tribe has a right to do, but in this case, I feel like they're making a mistake. We're here to celebrate the largest dam removal project in U.S. history. An extraordinary opportunity to watch more than 100 miles of pristine wild salmon habitat return to its natural state, as the Elwha reconnects with the sea for the first time in nearly a century.
The wild salmon of the Pacific Ring of Fire, have evolved to repopulate themselves in watersheds devastated by volcanic eruptions, earthquakes, glaciers, landslides. They've been doing it successfully for millions of years. But because we've somehow lost our faith in Mother Nature, we're about to start releasing inbred, out-of-basin hatchery stocks into this newly restored habitat.
Despite overwhelming evidence showing the presence of hatchery fish works as a powerful detriment, The wild salmon recovery, we insist once again on helping the natural process. My wish then is that we could somehow find the patience and the faith to let Mother Nature do what she's always done. Thank you for your time.
What do you think of people characterizing Floyd Dominey as an enemy of the environment? Bulldozer in front of you, paving everything. How do you feel about that? I've changed the environment, yes. But I've changed it for the benefit of man.
It would be wrong to make a film about dams in the U.S. and leave out the story of Glen Canyon. In the archaeology profession, there's a very unromantic term used when the sole purpose of the job is to document cultural treasures before they're flooded by a dam. They call it salvage. The biggest single salvage project up to that point in American history. It was the most thorough thing of its kind ever done at the time.
I think by the end of 1958, when that picture was taken, where we're all standing there, we all had a pretty good idea that this was really something very special. Glen Canyon Dam was authorized in April of 1956. Colorado Storage Project Act. We didn't have to relocate any railroads.
We didn't have to relocate any highways. We didn't have to build barrier dikes around any little towns. There was nothing there.
Nothing there. Did you ever meet Floyd Dominique? Oh, there we go. What was the psychology like?
Yeah, I know I never met him. I'd have cut his balls off if I'd have met him, or I'd have had somebody else do it. Deceptively called a lake, Glen Canyon now rests under the second largest reservoir in the country that flooded it.
Glen Canyon Dam was essentially a bank account for the Bureau of Reclamation, built to generate power that would fund other projects and provide water to cool a nearby coal-fired power plant. An estimated 45 million tons of sediment is trapped behind the dam annually, starving the Grand Canyon's ecosystem downstream. Every year, as Lake Powell evaporates under the desert sun and seeps into the porous sandstone, 8% of the Colorado River's flow disappears, one of many factors that contribute to the river commonly drying up before it reaches the Gulf of California.
When construction began in 1957, two archaeology teams began a five-year push to document more than 250 culturally significant sites in Lower Glen Canyon. At the same time, a handful of devoted river runners began the process of saying goodbye to the place no one knew. The gates were going to close and we had to at least be finished with what was flooded. It's going to go under, but at least we're going to salvage it so we'll have the stuff and we'll have the records and the data. So we can write books about it and we can make museum displays about it and we have a dam.
So we can run around on our boats. It's progress. Two guys and me, it seemed to be a pattern. One of them being old enough almost to be my father and Tad, an old friend that I'd known since I was in high school. And one's a photographer and the other one knows the river very well, Frank.
Just friends. None of this hanky-panky. Nobody's trying to get laid and nobody's...
We're just all enchanted by what's around us. Why were you initially afraid of it? Because I didn't know how to swim. Because I'd never run a motorboat. Because I'd never camped out in my life.
Once you get through being afraid of the country, it was a magical place. Forgotten Canyon, that was the high point, I think. The people had walked away about... About 1300, 1310 maybe, they left the ashes in the fireplace.
They left great big pots sitting on the surface. Food remained still in them. There was a ladder that still went down into the kiva, into the ceremonial chamber. They had just walked away a thousand years ago. Nobody's been here since.
That's pretty, that doesn't happen very often. I would actually hear speaking in the wind sometimes. You go around the corner, well, everybody hears a whistle here and there, but nah.
I heard more than whistles and I just said there's something queer about this place. Maybe it's scary. At first it was and then I thought no I think there's just something here that's supposed to be part of me. 125 side canyons every one of them different. Every one of them with a personality of its own. We would go Around a corner and spread out before us would be this incredible sight that A, nobody ever seen before.
B, nobody had touched it. C, it was utterly and incredibly beautiful. Everything was in the right positions.
All the colors were perfect. All the senses came just flashing out. I mean I could hear better, I could feel better, I could speak better.
Everything just was amplified. What was it like to walk naked through Glen Canyon? Well, I'm sorry, but I can hardly explain that. It was just absolutely the most natural thing in the world.
Music And this one I keep to myself. I never let this one out. I might decide to let you guys have it.
You know I never dream about it? It's because it's on my mind all day long, every day. There's no... I don't need to dream about it.
I think about it all the time. What was lost? Eden.
I don't think Eden could have touched Glen Canyon. We flooded out the rattlesnakes and the prairie dogs and a few deer and a beaver or two. That's all that was flooded out when we...
and a lot of beauty. But we created a lot more beauty and made it available, which it wasn't before. We haven't destroyed...
the world, we've made it habitable for a lot more people. A young man not long ago said to me, he said, are you a hero or a villain based on your record as Commissioner of Reclamation? Well I said, I think I'm a hero or should be considered it by you because you wouldn't be here if it wasn't for the development of the West sponsored by the Bureau of Reclamation. Possibly the most hypocritical sign in history has bolted to Glen Canyon Dam's most popular overlook.
It warns that defacing natural features destroys our heritage. I can't look at it without imagining Edward Abbey rolling over in his unmarked desert grave. If you've never heard of Ed, you might have heard of his book The Monkey Wrench Gang that inspired an environmental movement called Earth First, whose first act of civil disobedience just so happened to go down at Glen Canyon Dam on March 21, 1981. I think we're morally justified to resort to whatever means are necessary in order to defend our land from destruction. Invasion. I see this as an invasion.
These look like creatures from Mars to me. I feel no kinship with that fantastic structure over there. No sympathy with it whatsoever.
Yeah, I would advocate sabotage, subversion, as a last resort when political means fail. When I'd seen the plastic crack and when I saw pictures of it, you know, talking to people and brainstorming, like, how could we, you know, how could we up this? And we thought, God, wouldn't it be cool if we could paint the crack?
And it was clearly impossible on a dam like Glen Canyon. There's no way you could ever get away with it. But if we had a dam that was unguarded at night, it would work.
At the time Earth First does a shirt, it's a hand with a ranch and it says defend the wilderness. I was wearing that shirt out on the dam looking down over the edge with this kayak. I'm on the roof.
This is I'd rather be monkey wrenching you. It's like Frickin do that, you know One point I looked over and there's a ranger standing there looking at me with binoculars. I'm like, oh shit You know sometimes there's always a like a A little period where you have sort of butterflies going, oh shit, are we really going to do this? It's ridiculous, you know.
Michael and his friend made history that night, leaving their mark on the 430-foot face. Photos of the crack were wired to newspapers across the country. The plan seemed flawless until it wasn't.
And the same ranger who was out at the dam, he pulls up behind me, he says, what's your name? I said, like, Bill or something. I just made up a name. He's sort of beating around the bush, asking questions. Finally, he asked for ID.
And I said, oh, yeah, sure. And then he goes, wait a minute, you said your name was Bill. I mean, this is a federal cop, right? He knows what he's doing. At that point I'd been arrested a bunch for sitting in trees and locking my neck to corporate headquarters and chaining myself to bulldozers and You know was I nervous?
I'm sure I was you know, probably inside my shoes. My toes are going Finally he gets to the point. He says okay.
Look, I'm a fan of that Abby's I read the book and assumed that the ranking ranking was getting so we had an incident out of the dam last night You know anything about anything that happened out there blah blah blah. Yeah, you know three or four questions. I said no no no He says okay.
Well, you're free to go You know, I mean I walked on that one he had me We did the Hetch Hetchy crack learn kind of how to do it and realize oh, this is really cool We need to do more of this The Earth Forest group stayed around the area for a while and then we got wind that they were going to do something up at the dam. We put an extra ranger on duty that night. I drove up there at night and that's the first time I saw it. I was like, oh this is ripe for a crack. Dropped my gear off, schlepped it all out over the fence, drove back down, parked the van, got on my bicycle, rode up there, stashed it, glides canyons near vertical.
It's very steep, it's dark, it's a damp, slippery dam, and there's a 200 foot abyss right below. So we've got this rope straight across here. I clipped my rappel rope into that, locked it off, five gallon bucket of paint, hooked on my harness, and I hung off the edge of the dampen and just let go.
I remember this moment well. It was dynamic rope, not static, so it stretched a lot, just went. At one point I was sure I was gonna get busted. up to be quiet, but that bucket, when I jumped, the thing kind of swung and smacked into the side of the dam.
It was just so loud. I was like, oh shit. The guy who got through painted a huge crack and then off to the side he wrote they'll all be free. I'd swing way over and I'd paint a bit, you know, as a roller and then I'd go swinging back.
Get a couple moves back and forth, get going, get over there and paint a little bit more. My fingernails, my hair, my ears, my eyes, I was covered in paint. So I finished the be free part, finished that, and I was out of paint. Paint. I've got, oh, be free.
I'm like, no, I can't. There's no way I can't do, I can't leave this. Nothing worse than having a gigantic typo on a dam or whatever, you know, I just could not live with that. Just dropped everything, left it all on top of the dam, ran out, grabbed my bike, zipped down, jumped in the van.
I had like two quarts of paint, like a gray and a green or something. Mixed them up really quick, changed the anchor, rappel down, dawn is really close. Somebody could show up at any minute and I'm making all this noise.
Now I wasn't even being careful. I was just going for it. If I'm busted, I'm busted. I wanna have it finished.
Beautiful crack. The guy was an artist. There was no question of it. And he did that all in one night.
It was an amazing feat. And he was interviewed recently. Said he didn't want to be remembered for that, but boy, I think he should.
He should be. I think that sort of woke up people to the fact that something had to be done. Water. It's the same as the blood in our bodies.
Stagnation brings on death. People who are in their last throes, the blood is barely moving through their bodies, there are parts of their bodies that there's no flow at all. Rivers are regions with that same kind of stagnation.
When it's all slack water reservoirs, its uses are really limited and it's not vibrantly alive. As soon as the reservoirs were drained, the Elwha found its path of least resistance and carved a new river channel, in the process revealing something long forgotten. Preserved under a century of sediment were the remains of an ancient old-growth forest that had been clear-cut when the dams were built.
Almost instantaneously, the Elwha's watershed was coming back to life. Just a year after the removal of the lower dam, biologists were counting fish by the thousands in stretches of the Elwha that hadn't seen a salmon in 99 years. The beautiful thing about salmon, they're incredibly resilient. If you give them half a chance, they can come back in many ways, but you have to give them at least that half a chance. When Glynes Canyon Dam is fully removed upstream, salmon in Steelhead will have 70 miles of new habitat.
reviving the flow of nutrients between the Pacific Ocean and the mountains of Olympic National Park. The science and engineering behind removing the Elwha dams was totally experimental. There's no handbook to consult because it's never been done before at this scale.
In almost every case, the biggest hurdle for dam removal engineers lies behind the dams. Decades of silt, sand, gravel, and wood that should have been flushed naturally through a watershed is stockpiled in the reservoirs. Different dams will last for different periods of time based on how much sediment they trap coming down the river. So when the reservoir fills with mud, it's kind of outlived a lot of its utility.
The plan at the Elwha was to chip away at the walls slowly, releasing sediment through the watershed just a little at a time. Massive plumes of silt could be seen reaching miles into the ocean at the mouth of Elwha, restoring a coastline that had been eroded to bare stone in places. These natural sediment flows are insanely critical to river habitats, wetlands, offshore environments, and to protect coastal communities from storm surges and sea level rise.
300 miles east of the Elwha, the second largest dam removal in U.S. history, was already underway on Washington's White Salmon River. A tributary to the Columbia River, the White Salmon was once home to a vibrant salmon run before Condit Dam was built in 1913. The White Salmon has since developed a reputation as a world-class whitewater destination in the stretches above the dam site. In 1996, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission forced Pacificor, the dam's owner, to either build an extremely expensive fish passage facility or to decommission the dam in order to meet environmental codes.
Knowing the dam's contribution to the power grid could be replaced by as few as three windmills, Pacificor chose to scrap Condit and save their ratepayers some money. Before the removal process began, a not-so-subtle hint was dropped that the river community was ready for Condit to be gone. A year ago...
I was here at the White Salmon River. When the dam blew, there was this moment where, you know, there's like the countdown, and then there's this moment of silence. You're kind of wondering, you know, is it really going to happen?
And then you could feel the ground shake. The plan to remove Condit was a little more aggressive than the Elwha. It involved 800 pounds of dynamite stuffed into the end of a 90-foot tunnel that had been drilled at the base of the dam.
The theory was that the weight of the reservoir would flush a century-worth of sediment through the tunnel and downstream to the Columbia in one dramatic pulse. Due to the concussive forces of the blast, there was a heightened level of nervousness, if you will. There was the possibility of infiltration by folks wanting to get a closer look, video, etc.
It came as no surprise that and we were denied permission to film the blast. But I didn't want that little detail to get in the way of actually filming the blast. A couple days before, we scouted a hillside with a good view of the dam and built a crappy camera blind for me to hide in for 18 hours. Blast day was a little bit different.
It was unbelievably stressful. If you've ever hid in the woods from a guy with binoculars in a surveillance helicopter, I'm sure you can totally relate. At one point my mom called me to tell me she read somewhere that the explosion could make my ears bleed, but luckily that thought had already crossed my mind at the hardware store. When the helicopter finally cleared the area, everything was quiet, and I knew the horn would come soon.
You know, you start on a project like this and it seems so big and so insurmountable and it's just the forces against you are so intense and it just feels like many days that you're just never going to get there and we finally did it. This is a day that I've dreamed about for over a decade and today is the day that we just get out to float down the river and... enjoy this place that we've all been working so hard to restore for so many years.
So my wings with the bodies in the good Feel my kiss now, say not a word Knowing my hands, they'll shake like crazy Some just pray like that When I first started this and got involved in dam removal and asked myself the question, you know, what is it that makes a dam removal happen? And you might think that it's, you know, policies or politics or maybe it's the guy with the plunger. but when it comes right down to it, it's people who are passionate about the river. And it's the people who are out there kayaking, it's the people who are out there fishing, it's the people who are out there just sitting on the banks of the river enjoying the place, and it's the passion of those individuals that makes it all real and makes it happen.
If you think of all the sort of resources that our descendants are going to really value in say two, three hundred years, and as a geologist I can think that long and not think that that's too far out of line, a resource that fends off the for itself, grows a huge source of proteins and omega-3s that then swims home so you can harvest half of them. You can take half of a salmon fishery, eat it, and they'll keep replacing themselves. I mean, what kind of a gift is that? What kind of a species throws that away?
And if we look towards feeding the world in the future, it's insanity to not try and recover salmon runs as far as we can. I never did forget it. And I'll leave my soul in the sand. We may have fueled the early industry in this country and the Industrial Revolution in this country, but we wiped out our fisheries in the process.
So just because a dam has been sitting in a river for 200 years does not mean that it's going to stay there for the next 200. The state of Maine has over 800 dams, many of them obsolete and still causing a lot of harm to their watersheds two centuries later. For most sea-run fish, efforts to band-aid these impacts with fish ladders or elevators haven't solved the problem. In 2010, the Penobscot River Restoration Trust came up with a pretty wild idea.
The trust raised $24 million and purchased three dams on the Penobscot River from the local power company. Here we are. As we sit here today, we own three Penobscot dams. And it feels good to own three Penobscot dams, knowing what we're going to do with them. Charles Lindbergh said something pretty amazing.
He said, if I had to choose between birds and airplanes, I'd choose birds. To paraphrase, if I had to choose between electricity and fish, I'd choose fish. The Atlantic Salmon Federation has called the Penobscot project the best and perhaps the last chance of restoring a major run of Atlantic salmon in the U.S. 1,000 miles of habitat was reopened to migrating species like salmon, sturgeon, American shad, river herring and eel.
Seeing the results of all this effort actually come to something, boiling with life, which we had predicted it would, and to actually see it happen is awesome. I'm so deep, baby, why are you all on my shoulder? Gonna wait for you to say it to us The most ambitious river restoration project ever proposed in the U.S. is slated to begin in 2020 on the Klamath River, which originates in Oregon and flows through California to the Pacific.
In a historic settlement, tribes, farmers, commercial fishermen, and the owner of the Klamath dams have all signed off on the billion-dollar project. But one significant hurdle remains. It's now up to Congress to give the project final approval to move forward. With no fish passage at all, the four Klamath dams annihilated the third most productive salmon fishery in the lower 48 and caused toxic algae blooms in the reservoirs that have wreaked havoc on water quality. Like all constructed things, dams have a finite lifetime.
And that's not time to, like, pull out every dam in the country. That would be economically foolish. But it would be just as foolish not to rethink every dam in the country and try and decide which are the ones that actually... still make sense in the 21st century and which are those that we can get more value both economically, culturally, aesthetically, morally, and ecologically out of a river system by sending it part way back to the state that it was in naturally.
The history of thinking in the Western world is radical ideas eventually can become conventional. And a couple decades ago, it was radical in terms of thinking that you could take a damn out. It was unthinkable. Go back 50 years, it was legitimately crazy talk. You know, the conversation's changed.
For the most part, the era of dam building is a closed chapter in U.S. history. But as of 2014, the state of Alaska was rushing through the permitting process to build a $5 billion dam on the Susitna River. This pristine watershed drains a remote region south of the Alaska Range near Denali National Park and is home to one of the most productive king salmon runs in the state.
Many assumed Alaska was bluffing after abandoning the idea twice before, but now they've sunk $165 million into the planning alone. If the state succeeds, the 735-foot-high dam will be the second tallest in the United States and flood a 42-mile wilderness corridor. After Glen Canyon was flooded, David Brower of the Sierra Club wrote, Neither you nor I, nor anyone else, knew it well enough to insist that at all costs it should endure. When we began to find out, it was too late.
In the words of Edward Abbey, sentiment without action is the ruin of the soul. We would be if I'm alright It was no small feat. Someone or perhaps several people painted a giant pair of scissors on the face of the 200-foot abandoned Matilaha Dam near Ojai. Ventura County owns the dam.
They believe it was done last week. Destroying the dam has been debated for years. Officials say the graffiti... sends a clear message some people really want it gone. It's probably time for this thing to come down.
Well, it is time for this thing to come down. We're just trying to figure out the best way to do it. And heck, I'm sorry they ran out of time, you know, because we don't know where the stitch mark belongs on the other side. It's such a peaceful demonstration. And, you know, I don't see any harm in the scissors.
I think it's my hat's off to the people that did it. Officially, there was a crime committed, but does it rise to the level of sending people out? No.
There's better things to spend that kind of money on. Near Ojai, Leo Stalworth, ABC7, Eyewitness News. It's been so ruined to silk, you make me sleep Like a young child with warm milk, you have Tired of when I pushed you away You turned my sorrow into silk You turned my sorrow You make my heart spin so ruined to sleep You make me sleep like a young child with warm milk You hold me tight When I pushed you away, you turned my sorrow into silk.
You turned my sorrow. You're so hard. Super, super.
You're so hard. You're so hard. Super, super.
You're so hard. Every canyon at each turn. Oh, hi. I'm in the middle of an interview. You can know One of the attorneys, Elmer, he said, with all this restoration you guys got going in the watershed and everything, do you have invasive species up here?
I said, yeah. Well, what are they?