The Victory of Lake Foul Over Glen Canyon : A STORY THAT STANDS LIKE A DAM: Glen Canyon and the Struggle for the Soul of the West : <i> by Russell Martin (Henry Holt: $24.95; 337 pp.; 0-8050-0822-5) </i>

In the fall of 1983, I rode on a Lake Powell houseboat with then Interior Secretary James Watt, who was celebrating the great dam and big reservoir. He stared out at the placid waters and asked of the former canyon--famous for its peaceful flow and glens of trees--”Were there rapids here?”

In the summer of 1988, I visited Barry Goldwater at his home in Phoenix. He was an old man hobbling about with a cane, but he remembered clearly the way the river had been when he had run it in the early ‘40s, becoming one of the first 50 or 100 people ever to do so. He expressed his regret over construction of the dam in Glen Canyon that he had supported, and he said there would never again be a great dam built in this country because people would no longer stand for it.

And over the years, I’d have lunch or breakfast with Edward Abbey, whose novel, “The Monkey Wrench Gang” (half a million copies sold), focused on blowing up Glen Canyon Dam, and whose earlier “Desert Solitaire” contained the most widely read lament for the way the canyon once had been. I never heard him say Lake Powell; it was always Lake Foul, with a bitter snap to the words.

The same as almost everyone else on Earth, I never saw Glen Canyon before the dam and know it only by reputation as the place where some kind of great crime had taken place, like the boarded-up house on a city block where a bad murder had gone down. Now Russell Martin in his fine new history, one written as both a saga and a parable, tells us what we missed and how the place came to be buried by a huge lake in a desert of rock. Glen Canyon Dam and Lake Powell changed the way the American people think about the West and about development. This new book tells why.

The book interweaves several strands: the history of the canyon (both human and geological); the struggle of men and machines to plug the Colorado with a dam of 10 million tons of concrete; the political machinations in Washington for a vast system of dams on the Colorado; the emergence from the fight of a fierce environmental movement exemplified by the Sierra Club, and the convergence of three men--Dave Brower, Stewart Udall and Floyd Dominy--in the battles for wild canyons of the river. It is well written, well researched, well paced and is an excellent introduction for the general reader to the civil war that has disturbed the West in general and the Southwest in particular for 30 years.

Sometimes the book founders in a sea of numbers (“ . . . eighteen ammonia compressors, eight condensers, ten chillers, and twenty-two ice-making machines, with a power installation of 6,275 horsepower and a refrigerating capability equivalent to the production of 6,000 tons of ice a day--a snow cone an hour for every kid on Earth”), but this seems to be inevitable with dam-building books. And sometimes it tries too hard to find heroics in the taming of a wild river.

The Glen Canyon Dam story lacks the romance of building Hoover Dam because by the 1950s we knew we could do it, because fewer men were killed (18 as opposed to 110), and because a prosperous nation that had flexed its muscles in World War II lacked the doubts and night sweats of the Depression-era Americans who built Hoover. Throwing together an instant town for the construction workers at Page, Ariz., was a matter-of-fact task for a nation that had planted military bases around the globe.

What makes the book really move is the battle between the Sierra Club’s David Brower and Bureau of Reclamation Commissioner Floyd Dominy. And the battle is for the soul of Secretary of Interior Stewart Udall. The three make for a perfect cast. Brower is the mystical zealot with a genius for publicity. Dominy is the hard-drinking, woman-chasing engineer with almost legendary guerrilla skills in the skirmishes of Capitol Hill. And Udall, son of Mormon pioneers, lover of wild ground, true believer in the goodness of dams, irrigation districts and hydroelectric power, is a man torn between making the land fruitful and saving the land from those very impulses. All three at times seem to hate each other. This is a book without villains or heroes, a crime novel with a body (Glen Canyon), a weapon (the dam) but no simple killer.

At the end, there is a wonderful set piece where the dam is finished, the lake filling, Rainbow Bridge National Monument being invaded by the lake’s waters (contrary to an earlier congressional stipulation), and Brower and Dominy for days running the rapids of the Grand Canyon together, drinking bourbon at night, laughing and joking and, at times, raging at each other. They also traveled on Lake Powell itself and visited Rainbow Bridge.

“For every person who could ever have gotten here when this place was in its natural state, goddamn it, there will be hundreds of thousands who will get in here, into all these side canyons, on the waterhighways. It’s your few against the hundreds,” Dominy contended, his voice rising with emotion. “Before I built this lake, not six hundred people had been here in recorded history.”

“By building this lake,” Brower countered, “mankind has preempted thousands of acres of habitat for its own exclusive use. . . . A thousand people a year times ten thousand years will never see what was here.”

“Read ‘Desert Solitaire,’ ” said Dominy, explaining that some guy named Abbey didn’t seem to think the dam would be around that long, the commissioner seemingly unperturbed by the notion that the dam that held this water back someday might be blown to smithereens.

Martin, to his great credit, does not take sides in these arguments. In his book, we find out what took place, and by our individual reactions to those facts, we each find out who we are. My brother often boats on Lake Powell. I have never gone with him and I never will. But the lake itself is beautiful and draws more people than the Grand Canyon. The dam is an engineering triumph and also beautiful. My state runs on power from that dam. My desert city will soon slake its thirst with the water stored behind that dam. The mixed emotion about the dam and the lake are perfectly captured toward the end of the book when Edward Abbey and the radical environment group, Earth First!, roll a 300-foot plastic crack down the face of the dam in a protest. The police arrive and one cop walks up to Abbey, holds out his hand and says, “Mr. Abbey, nice to meet you. I’ve been a fan of yours for a long time.”

Read Martin’s fine new book. We have needed such a record of the war between our appetites and our dreams, and now we’ve got it.