Bride Gets Charge From Wedding Site

Every wedding starts with high hopes.

This one was just a little higher than most.

The Friday afternoon marriage of Don Haas and Mary Donges will go down in history as the first nuptials ever held atop the mighty Chief Joseph Dam. Once word leaks out, it won’t be the last dam wedding. This is a glorious setting, overlooking the broad blue of the Columbia River and the massive gray concrete of the world’s longest straight-line powerhouse.

Overshadowed by Grand Coulee’s celebrity, Chief Joseph Dam is plenty impressive in its own right. The electricity it generates, if you didn’t know, lights up the city of Seattle.

The wedding party, wearing tuxes and gowns, tied a white trellis and sprays of red flowers to the bridge above gate 18. Dressed in a dark blue Sunday-go-to-meetin’ suit, Judge John Harmon, a white-haired fixture on the Douglas County District Court bench, performed the ceremony.

Mary, 39, and Don, 41, exchanged vows. They sealed the deal with a kiss worthy of Al and Tipper.

“So,” asked the new Mrs. Haas a few minutes later, “do I look like an electrician now?”

Only if white satin wedding gowns become a fashion statement for hydroelectric workers.

The atypical location for a wedding isn’t what brought me to this vista, some 140 miles northwest of Spokane. What got me here was the story of a bride whose ambition could power a turbine.

A divorced mother of three on public assistance, Mary turned her life around the hard way.

She graduated last June from Spokane Community College with a two-year degree from the electrical maintenance program. She was hired by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers as an apprentice hydro worker for Chief Joseph Dam.

Even in this liberated age, bending conduit, threading 2-inch pipe and scampering about narrow catwalks high above a river isn’t a career path worn down by many female feet.

Not to mention someone like Mary, who is 5-foot-2 and 110 pounds.

“We have a 50 percent attrition rate, but Mary hung in there,” says Wally Sowers, who has taught the SCC program for 26 years.

Larry Gazaway, who also teaches the program, remembers Mary as an overachiever who “always asked for more to do. She always had a smile.

I’m proud of her.”

Both Sowers and Gazaway attended the wedding, calling Mary one of their most memorable students.

Mary says working at a dam fulfills a childhood dream.

“My grandfather, Mark Haney, helped build the first powerhouse at Grand Coulee Dam,” she says. “He always told me when my legs got big enough he would teach how to run his equipment.”

Haney died before that happened. Mary shelved her desire to follow grandpa’s boot steps.

Mary says she went back to college with an idea to pursue a safe career like bookkeeping or accounting. She was, after all, a single mom with kids to look after.

Then she interviewed Sowers for a technical writing class. He told her about the virtues of the electrical maintenance department. High wages. Demanding work.

“That was it,” says Mary. “The light went on.”

The light bulb also clicked when she met Don, who was taking classes at SCC.

Don tells his own survivor tale. He was a Silver Valley miner who became permanently disabled after an accident underground crushed his lower back.

Single with two kids, he went to college. This fall, he says he will begin graduate school at Central Washington University for a master’s degree in education. After Mary landed her dream job, Don thought a wedding on the dam would be a poetic touch. It happened thanks to a special-use permit and the blessing of Ed Reynolds, the dam’s operations manager.

Don is an unabashed fan of his wife. He calls Mary his “hero,” and it’s hard to disagree.

“She’s someone who can bake cookies and work on a transformer,” says Mary’s brother, Mark Donges. “She’s pretty special.”