Shasta Dam Series, #1
Epic structures like this always inspire a kind of incredulous awe in me, and not only because of their towering mass. I mean, the idea — to say nothing of making good on it — that you could stop the flow of an entire watershed and harness it like a horse: it’s madness. And yet there it is, blotting out the sun before you, powering entire cities below, an artifact of a time when we thought the sheer force of our will could command nature itself with nothing but good coursing down the spillway on the other side.