Mirage 2012
Geraldine packed a change of clothes and her stack of Hoover books in her mother’s old hard-case grip. She looked at some of the Hoover Dam construction photographs and then leafed through the collection of vignettes. Mrs. Ursula G. Jones had written a preface: Some stories from those of us who knew “Bert” before he was neither orphan, engineer, millionaire, President, or otherwise. It was a six-hour drive from St. Johns to Hoover Dam. Geraldine kept the front windows down on the freeway to keep from suffocating in the August heat; the air conditioning had gone out three summers ago. In her rearview mirror, the girls’ hair whipped furiously. More than seeing the dam, the girls were looking forward to swimming in the motel pool in Henderson, where Geraldine had reserved a room. “Is it an outdoor pool, Mom, or an indoor pool?” Mia wanted to know. Neither of them could swim. St. Johns had filled in its community pool when Geraldine was a girl, after two children drowned in a single summer. At the hotel pool in Phoenix during the goat auction last year, Mia and Tanya had bounced on their tiptoes in the shallow end, staying in the water until they were purple and pruned. They stopped at a gas station to eat an early lunch of cheese sandwiches and goat’s milk under the shade of a nearby ramada. Geraldine read to them from the Hoover Dam history book. “Have you ever seen it?” Mia asked when her mother finished. Geraldine shook her head. When she was growing up, her family never owned a car that would have made it that far. “But we’re a part of it,” she told them, thinking of her mother. Traffic crawled on the winding highway approaching the dam, and they nearly missed the last tour of the day. They peered over the railing at the stories of concrete and the calm water, awed by the dam’s enormity, by their ability to stand on it without feeling any closer than they had miles away, catching glimpses of the giant white wall from the car windows. They rode the elevator below to see the cogs of the dam. The tour guide boasted about the power it made—how the generators funneled
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