| The Hyalite Creek Trail’s gravel parking lot is overflowing; cars are parked all along the shoulders of the narrow road leading up to it, a most unfavorable omen for those hoping to find some solitude in nature. I remind myself that this is Montana, and this trail system connects to hundreds, probably thousands of miles of trails through the untamed Montana wilds. After I make sure that Pattra has her can of bear spray on her belt (provoking a wifely eye-roll), we make our way to the trail.
On our right, Hyalite Creek serenades us with a mesmerizing song of white noise. The sound reminds me that I’ve forgotten to throw our hammocks into the backpack. It’s late in the afternoon anyway – we won’t have time to sling our little primate cocoons next to the creek and enjoy a good book. Maybe next time. As one of my favorite writers might have said, “So it goes.”
We trudge up the surprisingly wide trail, and through a dense pine forest the color of American money, the music of Hyalite Creek rising and falling as the trail weaves to and fro. The temperature is perfect for shorts; few places have weather as perfect as Montana in the summertime. The creek’s gurgling keeps bringing me back to the Three Gorges Dam in China, and my mind won’t stop turning recent news stories and rumors over and over in my mind.
The thing about the Three Gorges Dam (the largest dam in the world), is that it might collapse. Dams collapse all the time, especially Chinese dams. What makes the Three Gorges special is that a failure would affect 600-million people downstream. Hundreds of millions would lose their lives in the most horrific manmade apocalypse that humanity has thus far managed to inflict upon itself.
Fine particles of pollen drift through the cool mountain air, ionized from the rushing water of Hyalite Creek. Pattra takes my hand in hers and gives me one of her gorgeous smiles. We share one of those moments that are the bounty for couples who persevere through countless battles and disagreements, emerging stronger. It’s one of those memories that I know will settle into the amber of my mind, transforming into a touchstone and waypoint where I will find comfort for the rest of my life.
We pass by several small groups, both of us subconsciously holding our breath until we’ve passed by, a weird pandemic game that Pattra and I have started playing with one another, akin to that game where you try to hold your breath while you’re going over a bridge or through a tunnel. A mile or so into the woods and the people became less frequent.
At Grotto Falls, the first of eleven waterfalls along this trail, six or seven people loitered near the churning water, taking turns rotating through the most advantageous spot for snapshots. We hung back and sat on a bench wrought from a colossal pine slab, probably with a chainsaw. We chatted playfully, though mostly we enjoyed the silence and the sound of the roaring waterfall.
The problem with the Three Gorges dam, apparently, is the same thing that’s wrong with China. It’s corrupt to the core. The same company contracted to construct the monstrosity was also hired to do the safety inspections and audit the safety inspectors. What could go wrong, right? The ubiquity of corruption in communist governments is a historical fact, and the Chinese Communist Party has taken it to a level unimaginable in the USSR, mainly because their cannibalistic mercantile economy seems designed from the ground up to encourage it, even as tremendous anti-corruption banners snap in the headwinds, and heads frequently roll; sacrificial lambs to the hungry ghost of Mao.
We push on past Grotto falls, leaving one woman in a bright red shirt standing on a rock at the foot of the falls holding up her smartphone and slowly turning around in a circle, as if the device was a holy sacrament in some elaborate ceremony. The crowd chatters behind us. I wonder if they’re thinking about the Three Gorges Dam as well. No, I’m sure they’re not.
The concrete is the main problem. Whistleblowers have come forward and reported that the prime contractor did not properly anchor the dam’s foundation to the bedrock below during construction. They used substandard concrete. They falsified safety inspections. The list of deficiencies is painfully long. All of these shortcuts and derelictions of safety weren’t the result of negligence or even incompetence. By all accounts, the dam is at risk of collapse because party bosses couldn’t help but cut corners to trim more fat the project, lining their pockets with money mortgaged against the hundreds of millions of innocent lives toiling downstream from the Three Gorges.
These are all common practices in China. Put “tofu building” into a youtube search and prepare to be horrified. Buildings that collapse with hundreds inside, or just fall over like a domino. It’s troubling, to put it mildly. If the Three Gorges Dam does collapse, it will leave a scar on humanity’s psyche that will never heal. It’s difficult to imagine a scenario where the government responsible for such an apocalypse could survive to build another dam. Or another concentration camp, for that matter.
Further up the trail, we pass a couple with a puppy. It’s a very wolfy looking puppy, and it’s on a leash. I lean down to pet it, and the pup slinks away, startled. The woman holding the leash, a friendly thirty-something, reassured the puppy, and after she gave my hand a good sniff, I scratched behind her ears.
“She looks very wolfy,” I offered, as the dog licked my hand.
“She should. She’s Eighty-percent.”
I studied the dog more closely. Yes, it was obvious now. The little black dog was far lankier than a regular dog and had a longer tail. The couple moved on, and the pup gave me a glance over its shoulder.
Recent satellite photos have shown that the dam is deforming visibly. There has been a huge increase in landslides and earthquakes all around the Three Gorges region. There was a sci-fi inspiring event recently where the hills began making an incredibly loud roaring sound, like some post-apocalyptic trumpet, and the locals flocked to hear it. That’s another youtube query that won’t disappoint you.
The Chinese people believed it was the sound of a dragon beneath the earth, roused by the careless humans on the surface doing things like, oh, I don’t know, perhaps building megadeath-scale engineering products using nothing more than paper mache and pipe cleaners to hold back an apocalypse.
Shortly after the hills began their eerie biblical trumpeting, there was a 3.4 magnitude earthquake nearby. China has been ravaged by bizarre weather and natural disasters in 2020. The catastrophic flooding they’ve been experiencing for the past month is reportedly the worst in a hundred years; entire villages have been washed away. The Three Gorges Dam is discharging floodwaters at full capacity, breaking all the previous records for flood-levels.
We passed a sign that indicated we were approaching Arch Falls. Through the trees, about a hundred feet beneath us, a window in rock framed a torrent of white water, rushing forth on its endless errand. The trail narrowed and skirted the edge of a cliff. The sound of roaring water increased, and I tried to stop myself from imagining breaking dams. Landslides. Megadeaths.
The waterfall came down through a rock arch, forming a unique spectacle. We rested at the rocky outcrop at the top of the waterfall. Pattra took off her shoes and put her feet in the icy, rushing water. We shared another of those petrified-amber spousal moments, and after about fifteen minutes, the couple with the wolf pup showed up again. Pattra and I donned our backpacks and moved on to allow them the same pleasure of solitude in this special place that we had just enjoyed. It was good timing.
When the Three Gorges Dam came online in 2012, Chinese state media boasted that it would withstand a 10,000-year flood. Several years later, without acknowledging the sleight of hand, they revised that number down to 1,000 years. A year after that, another reduction of confidence in the state media: the Three Gorges Dam could withstand a 100-year flood. It’s all very 1984, with the government stealthily tossing previous assessments into a memory hole.
In Chinese Communist Party’s most recent public statement on the dam in 2010, and even before distortions in the structure began appearing in satellite imagery, Chinese officials were quoted as having said, “people shouldn’t put all their hopes of flood control on the three gorges dam.” 1984 indeed.
As we climbed the steep, rocky trail back up and away from Arch Waterfall, the sound of the roaring water diminished until it was like a distant radio tuned to static. It was audible, but not roaring, and I imagined it was likely similar to the background thoughts of those unfortunate Chinese folks living downstream from the dam. They can turn the anxiety down to a low background noise, but never turn it off completely, like the sound of a nearby waterfall.
Pattra takes my hand and gives me one of her gorgeous smiles. We walk in silence, and I say a prayer for hundreds of millions of people living downstream of the Three Gorges. I will continue hoping and praying that the dam continues to stand firm. God have mercy on their souls if it doesn’t.
Even back in the car, winding our way down the dirt roads that lead back to America’s version of civilization, it seems like I can still hear the roaring of that waterfall in my ears. On the way out, we drive over a local dam at Hyalite Reservoir. The lake’s surface is covered in folks enjoying the beautiful weekend: people are out there paddle boarding, canoeing, swimming, kayaking. I wonder if the safety inspections of that dam were falsified. Is it anchored to the bedrock? I’m struck by a wave of gratitude for being blessed to live in a country where the rule of law is truly the bedrock that our civilization’s rebar is anchored to.
Meanwhile, in China, record-breaking rainfall continues to devastate the country as flood levels increase. The internet censors memory-hole any discussion of the floods and destruction, just as quickly as they remove any mention of Winnie the Pooh or the awful Tiananmen Square massacre. All the while, The Chinese Communist Party’s mechanical and social engineering tolerances are being put to the test as the dragon continues to stir beneath the earth, threatening to bring it all crashing down.
|
