Grand Coulee is a vast, sharply defined landscape in Washington’s scablands, carved by immense prehistoric floods and transformed in the 1930s by construction of Grand Coulee Dam. For Joe Rantz, it is at once an unfamiliar desert environment, a dangerous industrial worksite, and a place to earn the money that could keep his education and rowing ambitions alive. The scale of the land and the labor required to reshape it give the setting a force that reaches beyond scenery: the coulee tests Joe’s strength while bringing him into a new community of workers and fellow rowers.

Geology and landscape

Grand Coulee was formed by a series of floods between twelve and fifteen thousand years ago, as ice-age conditions gave way. A high ice dam had held back a vast lake in Montana, later known to geologists as Lake Missoula. When the dam failed repeatedly, enormous volumes of water surged across what is now northern Idaho, eastern Washington, and northern Oregon. In the greatest flood, the water’s flow exceeded that of all the world’s rivers combined. The torrents cut deep channels into bedrock, stripped away topsoil, and left the coulees that give the scablands their name.

The largest of these excavations presented Joe with a country unlike the western Washington landscapes he had left behind. Its visible elements included broken rock, sagebrush, sparse desert grasses, windblown sand, and stunted pines, beneath cliffs of basalt. The open, dry terrain was also a living environment: jackrabbits crossed the highway, coyotes moved away through the brush, and burrowing owls and ground squirrels watched from fence posts and rocks. These details establish the coulee as both a place shaped by remote geological catastrophe and a present-day landscape in which people must work within demanding natural conditions.

The dam and the worksite

Joe drove up the coulee to the ramshackle boomtown of Grand Coulee, near the Columbia River, where the government had committed to building a dam on an immense scale. The project was expected, once completed, to be the largest masonry structure built since the Great Pyramid at Giza. The town and construction site made the landscape a place of rapid industrial change: across the river were work areas, bridges, and facilities associated with the developing project.

The construction activity encompassed far more than a single trade. Steam and electric shovels moved loose rock; bulldozers and tractors cut and reshaped the ground; dump trucks hauled large boulders from the canyon; loaders fed side-dump trucks and conveyors; and cranes and pile drivers worked over the river. Men with hand tools cleared fallen rock at the foot of the cliffs. Others, suspended by ropes, drilled into the cliff faces with jackhammers. Before the dam’s foundation could be laid, crews had to remove hundreds of feet of loose material to reach the older granite, then shape the granite to fit the planned structure. The hard stone rapidly consumed the steel on the cutting ends of the jackhammers and drills.

Joe Rantz’s arrival and work

Joe reached the site after leaving Seattle for the summer in search of work. His old Franklin struggled over Blewett Pass, and he continued east through orchards and wheat country before turning north into the scablands. At Grand Coulee he went to the National Reemployment Service office. Although most remaining positions were common-labor jobs paying fifty cents an hour, he noticed that men who worked from cliff faces with jackhammers earned seventy-five cents. He chose that higher-paid position, passed a physical examination, and told the doctor that he rowed crew at the university. Within half an hour of entering the office, he had a job.

The work demanded sustained strength and balance. For eight hours a day Joe hung from a rope in the canyon heat, operating a jackhammer that weighed seventy-five pounds and pushed back against his grip. Dust and flying fragments were part of the job, and the machines’ repeated impact made communication difficult. The danger and physical strain were inseparable from the project’s progress: crews had to break and remove rock before construction could advance. The scale of the operation, measured in both the material being cleared and the equipment consumed, made the individual worker’s effort part of a much larger transformation of the canyon.

Work, fellowship, and purpose

Joe arrived uncertain about what he had taken on. He was broke and discouraged by the previous year’s swings between promotion and demotion in the rowing program, which had left him feeling that his place on a crew could be taken away. Yet the possibility of Olympic gold had begun to matter to him. Reaching that goal depended on making the varsity crew; staying in school depended on finding the money for another year. The jackhammer job connected those ambitions to a specific immediate task: he would have to earn his way back to the university through the summer’s labor.

The work soon became something he could take satisfaction in. He and the men working on neighboring ropes watched for falling rocks, warned workers below, and searched the cliff for seams in the stone. Joe valued the practical cooperation and companionship of the crew. The exhaustion at the end of the day recalled the bodily effort of rowing, but the work also brought a different kind of confidence: he felt limber and physically capable after the hours on the cliffs.

Two weeks after he started, Joe discovered that Johnny White and Chuck Day, both associated with the Washington shell house, were also at Grand Coulee seeking summer work. Joe had not known either well, but the three formed an easy alliance. They set aside the previous year’s rivalries and insults, despite knowing that they would again compete in rowing. Grand Coulee therefore became more than a temporary source of wages. Its demanding labor created room for a friendship that crossed the divisions of the shell house, while the money Joe sought there made possible the next stage of his pursuit of a place in the varsity crew.