We came to the crossing of White Canyon, where I gunned the motor hard, geared down into second and charged through the deep sand. Old cottonwoods with elephantine trunks and sweet green trembling leaves caught my eye. Lovely things, I thought, as we crashed over a drop-off into a stream. Glimpsed sandpipers or killdeer scampering out of the way as a splash of muddy water drenched the windshield. “Hang on,” I said. Heard a yelp as my friend’s girl friend fell off the back of the truck. Couldn’t be helped. The truck lurched up the farther bank, streaming with water, and came to a halt on the level road above, more or less by its own volition.

We got out to investigate. Nobody hurt. We ate our lunch beneath the shade of the trees. In the desert, under the summer sun, a shade tree makes the difference between intolerable heat and a pleasant coolness. The temperature drops thirty degrees inside the shadow line when there is free ventilation. If homes and public buildings in the Southwest were properly designed, built for human pleasure instead of private profit, there would be no need for air conditioning. The humblest Papago peasant or Navajo sheepherder knows more about efficient hot-country architecture than a whole skyscraper full of Del Webbs.

After the siesta, in midaftemoon, we drove up from the ford and around a bench of naked rock several miles long and through a notch or dugway in a red wall. Below us lay Hite, Dandy Crossing, the river.

We descended, passed a spring and more cottonwoods, and came to the combination store, gas station and post office, which was not only the business center but almost the whole of Hite. At that time I believe there were no more than three families living in the place, which must have been one of the most remote and isolated settlements in the forty-eight states. There were also a few miscellaneous individuals—prospectors, exiles, remittance men—hanging about. The total population fluctuated from year to year with the fortunes of the uranium industry. Eventually the dam was built, the river backed up and everybody flooded out.

We stopped to buy gas—fifty cents a gallon, cheap at the price—and a round of beer. I met Mr. Woody Edgell, proprietor, who was already unhappy about the future prospects of Glen Canyon. He took a dim view both of the dam and of the Utah State Highway Department’s proposed bridge-building schemes for the vicinity. Not because they would put him out of the business—they wouldn’t; he could relocate—but because he liked Hite and Glen Canyon the way they were, neolithic.

Not everybody felt that way. I talked with a miner’s wife, and she said that she hated the place, claimed that her husband did too, and said that only lack of money kept them there. She looked forward with gratitude to the flooding of Hite—a hundred feet under water was not deep enough, she thought. She’d be glad to be forced to leave.