The Interesting WayWe were recently up near Lock & Dam #7 on the least industrious of our rivers. I did not have the opportunity to walk it, but I should have ample chance in the coming months, and it seems that the foot of this particular pool is well visible from all sorts of interesting places to waste a meal or a day, watching the slow dances of traffic on the water. Instead of spending time at the river, I was up in the fields above it, fussing with charcoal and grilling meat, much to the annoyance of the neighbor's cat. I have not yet fully learned the fine art of walking away from the thing and just letting the food progress, but I am getting better.
All of the dams on the aforementioned river are fixed crest dams, low berms of stone that lurk to impede the flowing course, invisible from upstream and a pretty flecked cascade from down. They are very simple structures, humble in their strength, gently coercing a quiet river into simple steps. They are old-fashioned, dignified things, except perhaps when they are abused to fling Bruce Willis skyward in a boat. They have shortcomings, in that they are utterly useless for active concerns such as flood control. They are subtle. I like them quite a bit .
On the outflow, downhill river, the first lock and dam is of the fixed crest variety, but instead of a type known as a gated dam (on both the main and back channels). Instead of defining the river with its height, gated dams soar above the surface, sending vanes and plates into the air and putting up a wall to box in the view. Gated dams offer a bit more flexibility in managing flow, but they are still not really meant as flood control structures, and I find them ugly.
It is a little sad, then, that the US Army Corps of Engineers is consolidating two pools behind fixed crest dams on the other, workhorse river, putting all that flow behind a gated dam. It is progress, I suppose. An interesting footnote to all of this was the recent demolition of one of the old, fixed crest dams being replaced. I never would have expected them to blow it up the interesting way, but they did.
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