Back home, I went out onto the porch with a fresh cup of coffee I had no intention of drinking. The lights across the lake were coming on, neat rows of golden squares beneath the darkening forest. Once, Helen and I had spent a winter evening watching a pair of elk pick their way along that shoreline. Now a line of vacationers was moving between fire pits, and I could hear laughter carrying over the water. I found myself thinking, not for the last time, about the dam at the southern end of the valley.
The dam had been part of my life long before I understood what an engineering degree was. My grandfather used to take me fishing below the concrete wall because trout gathered where the water stayed cold. On the walk back to his truck he would check the inspection markers and tell me stories about the men who had poured the concrete in 1962. He knew every one of their names. When a bearing was replaced or a cable inspected, he kept the old part in a shed until somebody had documented exactly why it was removed.
After Granddad died, my father continued that habit. When he passed away in 2008, I found forty-six years of inspection notes filed by season in a steel cabinet beside the control building. There were handwritten measurements, water-quality reports, surveys, letters from county officials, and photographs showing the reservoir in every imaginable condition. I added my own records to his. During a career spent watching what happened when people cut corners around water, I had come to regard documentation as a form of respect for everybody downstream.
The control building sat on the southern bank above a sixty-foot concrete structure built into the narrowest part of the old valley. It had been designed with regulated outlets and spillways that could lower the reservoir for inspections while maintaining the required flow in Plat Creek below. I'd overseen partial drawdowns several times, including inspections in 2015, 2019, and 2022. But I had never emptied the basin down to its original creek channels. Doing that would require an entirely different level of planning.
I called Martin Cross that evening. Martin had been a colleague for more than twenty years and had participated in the 2019 inspection of Whitmore Dam. He was the kind of engineer who stopped a meeting to ask a question everybody else considered inconvenient. When I told him someone had built a resort on my shoreline, he asked whether I was joking. When I told him the number of cabins, he asked me to repeat it exactly as David had.
"One hundred and nine," I said. "A full resort. Garrett Peton says he won't remove them, and he thinks he can keep us in court for years." Martin listened while I described the layout, the dock system, the rental prices, and the survey. Then I asked him something I had been asking myself since sunset. "If we perform the full reservoir drawdown contemplated by the dam's maintenance plan, how long until the lake is mostly out of the basin?"
Martin did not laugh. He asked for the current inflow readings and the date of the last detailed outlet inspection. We discussed the condition of the dam, the sediment accumulated over six decades, the three creeks feeding the basin, and the very real hazards of releasing water too quickly. Based on the records we already had, he thought a controlled drawdown might expose most of the lakebed in roughly four to six weeks. He also said that any such operation needed a fresh engineering assessment, agency coordination, monitoring, and protection for aquatic life and downstream residents.