The Three Gorges Dam

THREE GORGES DAM

I've seen dams. Big ones. I've gone through ship locks. Also, big. China has the topper. Three Gorges Dam.
Gayle says to me she's going to the Three Gorges on a cruise ship. 'I wanna go,' I whine. And she says, 'Come along!' She explains I gotta talk to Marvin. So, I send Marvin an email and he adds me to the tour.
And, that's how I got to do one of my life's most memorable and exciting excursions.
Gayle and her group of English Teachers, Americans teaching throughout China, planned this trip for a couple months. I just arrived in China six weeks ago and I just didn't wanna wait. Anyway, I had the same May Day Vacation, seven days off, to go.

Nutshell

In a nutshell, from Xi'an [Shee-ahn], where I teach conversational English, the only kinda English I know, to university kids, I fly southeast to Wuhan. An hour's flight. Then to Holiday Inn on the Han River. Next morning, a few hours' bus ride to the boat dock, we climb on the boat, dragging our luggage, and settled in our staterooms for five days on China's famous Yangtze River. We see the great dam, Three Gorges Dam. Then, the vertical green gorges, Ghost City and more, finally arriving into 30 million population Chungqing. Marvin adds a couple museums, a United-Nations-Honored grotto, then, exhausted, I fly back to Xian, collapse in bed. That's the nutshell.

Big Dam

Well, you just can't take the Yangtze Cruise, look back, without first recalling the big dam, Three Gorges Dam. Its earlier name, Sanxia Dam.
There's other stuff on the Cruise I'll get to later, like careening on a clay trail uphill riding a carry-chair stretcher, canoeing in a sampan, viewing Ghost City from the river, but you gotta hear first about the dam.
‘Course, I haven't seen all the world's big hydroelectric dams, but give me a break: I've seen Hoover in Las Vegas and Glen Canyon in northern Arizona. I've puttered around on Lake Mead and lolled around the red cliffs of Lake Powell. Each, grand. Memorable. Early in life, I viewed the world's busiest locks at Michigan's Sault Saint Marie.
So, too, Three Gorges Dam in China.This is some dam. I saw it from two angles. First, the cruise leader took us there by bus. Later we hit it aboard the Cruise Ship, going upriver and over the dam, via massive locks.
I remember on the bus craning my neck to get my first glimpse of the dam. Finally I saw it from the bus, massive, lots of concrete. But, it wasn't until we got to the visitor's center that I was able to take it all in. It helped in the visitor's center, inside the building, there was a diorama.
Three Gorges Dam is not like Hoover or Glen Canyon Dams. Hoover and Glen Canyon are in narrow, high rock canyon walls. Over 400 feet high.
Engineers at Three Gorges didn't have the luxury of vertical canyon walls. So, although Hoover and Glen Canyon are narrow, probably only a thousand or two feet across their gorge, and in shape, curved dams, jamming their edges into the hard rock canyon walls, Three Gorges Dam, some 1.2 miles in length, just lays straight across the rather wide Yangtze valley. Three Gorges' strength lies in its internal construction, with a substantial footprint facing downstream, holding back mega-tons of water some 375 miles.
It looked good to me. I'd guess the designers and engineers know what they're doing. And, when you're the world's largest anything, you've got a lot of critics. True, for the dam, too.
So, I know there's people saying they shuddenta built it, shudda done nuclear plants instead. But, y'know, water falls through the dam so fast it spins 26 turbines that make a third, or a ninth, others say, of China's electric needs. And, a million—or was it 300,000--people killed over the last century by floods, now controlled.
I stood at the foot of the dam, looked upward from a tourist viewing site. Massive. Concrete everywhere. To the sky. Water at the foot of the dam escapes turbid, displaying small white caps. Active water rolls, roils, bursts the story of its gushing fall through the dam, turbines, emerging to struggle again for lost peace at the river level.

The Locks

On to the dam. To my right, the massive concrete locks with huge doors that swing slowly open and shut.
We wait three hours for our turn to enter the lowest lock. Finally, we enter, accompanied by nine other ships. These are pretty big ships. Maybe 200 feet long, each. We sit there in the first lock, three ships side-by-side, and three ships front-to-back.
Okay, this is cool. We are at the low level of water. The big doors slowly swing shut behind us. Once shut, the water begins to move us upward. A few inches every few seconds, it seems. It takes maybe 15 minutes, and our ship has moved up the wall 75 feet, perhaps more.
I'm taking pictures. Gray concrete walls can get old in a hurry. Where's the guy that does murals on walls? These locks need something, desperate. I turn my camera around to catch the other ships in the lock. That's an okay picture, doesn't call to me much. Water is greenish, muddy.
I don't really figure out the plumbing. Just where does the water come from, to make us go up? Well, I know it comes from the reservoir above us. But, how big is the pipe? I mean, the culvert. Or, are there two, or twenty-two?
And, what's the name of the guy that closed the doors? He better do his job, I worry. I don't wanna hear he went out for a smoke and forgot to hit the back-up door lock. That's why they call them locks, you know. You gotta lock the door.
Finally, we reach a black line on the lock wall and they open the doors ahead of us. Well that was one lock.
We move slowly forward with the other eight ships into lock number two. And the process repeats itself: Close the doors behind us, let the water in, open the doors ahead of us, and bingo! we're through lock two. Repeat this two more times, and we're at the top just three hours later.
We move forward, at last, out of the last lock, onto the surface of the reservoir, some 450 feet higher. And, we putt-putt along upriver, sun has set, moon rises above the dam's upper edge. I take a couple crummy pictures. One good. And, that's Three Gorges Dam.
Yep. There's Hoover Dam, and another big one in Brazil. But I'll remember the biggest: Three Gorges.
And, thanks, Gayle, for inviting me.
C 2005 Paul Tripp