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Waterborne by Bruce Murkoff Rating: ••• (Recommended)
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Flows Character after character, chapter after chapter, Bruce Murkoff lays out the pieces of his debut novel, Waterborne, packing everything in. While there may be an extra hundred or two pages of exposition and development here that doesn’t make it better novel, in many ways Murkoff has shown us everything at once. It’s as if he’s dealing cards from a deck, and has decided not to stop dealing until he runs out of cards. Nonetheless, Waterborne is a fine first novel, even though readers may learn more about Boulder Dam than even engineers would like. Here’s an excerpt from pp. 154-159: The pair of young coyotes cut across the road and disappeared into the piney arroyo along Rawhide Creek. Filius had been watching them for a few miles now, first spotting them as daylight spread over the wind-flattened and dusty grasslands. They surfaced again on an old wagon trace that led to a distant farm; he could make out a big red cow barn and the roof of the ranch house below the sandstone cliffs that jutted out from the Wyoming plains. A large herd of shorthorns grazed along the road, but the coyotes ignored them as they zigzagged back and forth across the rutted trail, their lean, bony bodies more gray than tan, then turned south to lope alongside the sagging barbed wire, playing catch-up with the car. One of them had the foreleg of a calf in his mouth, the meat stripped off long ago, the hoof still tufted with hide. Without reason, they shifted direction and surged forward, leaping back in front of the car before darting into a deep ravine on the other side of the road, gone for good. An hour later, he turned west on Route 26 and followed the North Platte River. The drought-stricken banks were chalk white and exposed on both sides, cradling a slim channel of barely moving water. Filius could remember when these rangelands were fuzzy with wheat grass and the small towns between the Nebraska border and Casper jumped with commerce and social activity. Every restaurant was a red-velvet steak house where cowboys and cattlemen mingled with prosperous sugar beet farmers, the new pioneer gentry. Now all he could see was graying homesteads, and the wide streets of towns like Fort Laramie were nearly deserted, the boards that covered the storefront windows as shrunken and withered as the prairie was forlorn. He drove into Guernsey and stopped at Leonard’s Café. An old man in a white apron sat in a chair in the open doorway, rocking a baby boy in the cradle at his feet. He held a birch stick from which a feather dangled on a string, and he bobbed it up and down between his legs, always just out of the baby’s chubby grip. The baby screamed and swatted, his puffed and teary face as red as his tormentor’s, his image in miniature. The old man winked at Filius. “Feisty little bastard, ain’t it?” Then he pointed at the Chrysler. “Illinois plates, huh?” Filius inhaled deeply, looking at his dust-speckled car. “Son,” the man said, “you a long way from home.” Addie called her husband a “dam bum.” After the Don Pedro Dam was completed in 1923, they lived like nomads, touring the country with their infant son and setting down temporary roots wherever the Reclamation Services sent them. They camped in the Crazy Mountains on their way to build the Hubbard Dam in Montana, and returning to California they looked for fossils in the badlands where wild horses still roamed outside of Melville. During a break on the Mormon Flats Project at the Salt River in Arizona, they hiked the southern rim of the Grand Canyon, taking turns holding the baby on the easy cutbacks of Bright Angel Trail, and celebrated Addie’s twenty-fourth birthday at the El Tovar Hotel, where a sudden midnight lightning storm opened like a black iris to illuminate the abyss of the canyon. ‘When Filius finished his work on the Bullards Bar Dam on the Yuba River, they took mules into the High Sierras and fished for golden trout in the clear, fathomless Cottonwood Lakes below Mount Whitney. In two years they put a decade’s worth of miles on their Essex sedan and saved boxes full of photographs and postcards so they could recount the trip to Ray when he grew up, telling him of the wonders of the western states he’d slept and cried through as a child passed back and forth between mother and father. After another government job in Oregon, Filius signed on with the Utah Construction Company in 1925, hired by the great dam builder himself, Frank Crowe. They’d first met the year before in Denver, when Crowe was still acting superintendent of the western region for the newly titled Bureau of Reclamation. Before that he’d been a field engineer, used to scraped knuckles and a sunburnt scalp, and he took this job with the bureau because he thought overseeing dam construction in the nineteen western states would be a challenge, and because he now had a family to think about. But most of the challenges he faced here were administrative and petty, and he missed smelling the clay and diesel that hovered over a dam site and walking the canyons and tunnels carved from the earth. A turbulent soul, he was unable to sit still, especially behind a desk, and since his chair rarely saw the seat of his pants, he did most of his business while pacing back and forth on an antique Bessarabian donated by the estate of an Aspen silver tycoon. Once inside his office, Filius found all the windows wide open, allowing a flurry of a late spring snow to blow inside, and noted that Crowe was wearing a crisp white shirt, with no jacket or sweater, despite the fact that his words formed puffs of steam in the cold air. He was a tall man, bigger and broader than Filius, but quickly slipped across the room, grabbing his suit jacket off the coatrack and his gray Stetson off his desk. Then he threw an arm around his visitor and swung him toward the door. “Mr. Poe?” “Sir?” “Let’s get out of here.” They’d headed down Colfax to Broadway on the slushy sidewalk, climbed into Crowe’s big Packard and driven west with the windows down, Filius all the while fielding questions about his engineering experience and the detailed history of the dams he’d worked on. They passed through cottonwood forests and followed the road higher into the mountains, where the trees began to thin, and Crowe listened attentively, envious of the younger man’s wanderings. He missed the foul language and the hard work of actual construction, the day-to-day problems of such a huge endeavor and the spur-of-the-moment decisions that saved time and lives. He missed living where men worked for years to achieve something so grand they couldn’t recognize its beauty until it was completed. He listened to Filius as they drove through Empire and climbed higher into the Fraser River valley, and only when the mountains closed around them did he complain about the Bureau of Reclamation and the weak-chinned politicians who held it together. “I feel stuck, Mr. Poe. Nothing gets done. I voice an opinion to men too goddamn afraid to react or respond, then they water it down and send it along proper channels, and by the time it reaches Washington there’s nothing left. And that bothers the hell out of me.” “What about the dam in Oregon, Mr. Crowe?” “What about it?” “Build it.” Crowe threw his head back and laughed. “If only I could!” The clouds broke over the Continental Divide, and the sun threw bright lances from a sudden expanse of deep blue sky. “I’ll rumble around Denver and take my medicine. Hell, I wanted the title and now I’m paying for it. But you go to Oregon, Mr. Poe. You build the dam.” “I will, Mr. Crowe.” “I have no doubt.” They had driven through the Corona Pass, fifty miles outside of Denver, and climbed into the Front Range. The spruce stood tall and straight in the frozen ground of the northern slopes, their upper boughs crusted with snow. Here it was cold enough for even Crowe to roll up the windows. When they came around a bend, there was a huge explosion. A plume of gray smoke and dirt rose like a storm cloud in front of them, and as it collapsed and settled, Filius was able to make out the grand excavation site at the base of James Peak. Crowe had smiled, turning onto the dirt road that led to the east portal of the Moffat Tunnel, and parked amidst the trucks a quarter mile from the entrance, the air buzzing with the sound of a thousand drills. Filius buttoned his jacket and followed him to the mouth of the tunnel. Every man they passed tipped his hat or greeted Crowe with a handshake, and he had a name and a smile for each of them, stopping to talk to a thin man in khakis and a plaid woolen coat who was unloading dynamite crates from a flatbed into a battered jeep. “When’s the next blast, Sam?” “Twenty minutes on the nose, Frank.” They all climbed into his jeep, and Filius perched over a box of fresh drill bits as they entered the tunnel. Once his eyes adjusted to the bright flashes of lanterns attached to the walls, he admired the timberwork holding back the muddy shale that seeped and dried on the tightly framed planks. After two miles, the sound of drilling became a high-pitched scream. A hundred yards ahead, Filius saw men working under incandescent lights on the granite walls of the exposed mountain. The jeep lurched to a stop and twenty hands reached into the back to remove the dynamite and drill bits, the crew working in synchronized haste to set the dynamite in the blasting holes that pocked the granite, and in this rush of activity the drilling never ceased. Crowe put his lips to Filius’s ear. “Six miles of railroad right through the heart of a mountain range! Think of it, Mr. Poe! What audacity!” Filius shut his eyes, succumbing to the sharp whir around him and the wet force of Crowe’s words. “To hell with the money it costs or the time it takes. We can afford it. It’s the earth herself, Mr. Poe! We will beat her with our hammers and scorch her with our fires. We will mold her and tame her, and in turn she will reward us all.” The drilling stopped, and for a brief moment Filius felt an utter stillness under the twenty-foot ceiling of jagged rock. Then the lights went out, casting the tunnel into a divine darkness. This lasted only long enough for him to catch his breath, and then the generators and engines thundered and the lanterns and headlights came on and the air was filled with the sour smell of diesel. Filius and Crowe climbed into the jeep as all around them men scrambled onto open-backed trucks that would speed through the tunnel and deliver them to daylight. After they parked in the muddy lot, Filius walked up the slippery bank to admire the thick bands of gray and black clouds above the timberline. In a light snow he stared at James Peak and awaited the dynamite, bracing himself for the moment the land would tremble and swell beneath him. Then he heard the detonation, dull and distant in the core of the mountain, and saw snow shimmer and fall from the tallest pines—the earth itself shaking as if it were being recreated, only to settle again into something familiar and perfect, except for the smoke and dust that billowed out of the tunnel’s mouth like a great snort of contentment. Crowe climbed the bank and stood next to him, both listening to the rumbling of the mountain. And as the echoes from within softened and relaxed, he put his hand on Filius’s shoulder. “Will you have dinner with us tonight, Mr. Poe?” Waterborne is a finely written debut novel that will satisfy many readers, and will have us look forward to Murkoff’s next book, curious to see where his talent flows next. Steve Hopkins, July 26, 2004
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