June 2010

The expedition Wrecking Crew aboard our J-Rig. Photos by David Lansing.

Our expedition consists of nine peeps (a “peep” being river lingo for people like myself who go river rafting on organized adventures), a six-person Wrecking Crew (the support staff), two yellow inflatable neoprene boats with oaring frames in which the peeps travel, a pontoon boat with an outboard motor on the back, which Arlo calls the “J-rig,” carrying most of the crew as well as food supplies, and Arlo’s ducky—an inflatable kayak tied atop the pontoon boat.

There is, as you can see, a unique vocabulary that comes with river rafting. For instance, the large metallic kitchen boxes that hold much of our food are called Sarah Jane’s World in recognition that nobody ever gets into them except our cook, Sarah Jane. The rope secured around the perimeter of the inflatables, used to grab on to when we run rough water, is called the chickie line (the Wrecking Crew never, ever uses the chickie line; only the peeps) and the plastic wash buckets used to do dishes and the like are called chickie pails (because they look like chicken feed buckets).

Lunch at Tex's Grotto.

We seldom see the J-Rig which acts as a sort of advance team for our little party. When, for instance, we pulled onto a rocky sandbar this afternoon and made our way through a dense thicket of tamarisk to a hollowed-out indentation in the limestone cliffs known as Tex’s Grotto, our lunch—sliced ham, turkey, cheese, tomato, lettuce and two different types of bread, along with fresh fruit, chips, cold drinks, and chocolate chip cookies for dessert—was neatly arranged on a cloth-covered portable aluminum table, thanks to Sarah Jane and the other crew members who had arrived here an hour earlier.

As I walked up to the table for lunch, Arlo handed me a chilled Budweiser and then reached into his dusty daypack for  his well-worn copy of a journal from the second exploration of the Colorado written by Frederick Dellenbaugh, Powell’s assistant topographer. He read of Dellenbaugh’s description of his own first meal on the river, a modest helping of fatty, sandy bacon. “But how good it was! And the grease poured on bread! At the railway I had scorned it, and now, at the first noon camp, I was ready to pronounce it one of the greatest delicacies I had ever tasted.”

Stashing the book in his backpack, Arlo says, “River running makes everything taste good.” He’s right. Never before have I contemplated the complex flavors of a chocolate chip cookie washed down with a cold beer.

Our expedition leader, Arlo, aboard his pirate boat, Paradise Lost. Photo by David Lansing.

A belligerent sun smirks overhead as we drift like water skippers atop a soupy chocolate-colored river not far from where we put in at the Potash boat ramp early this morning. It is day one of our excursion down the Colorado, what our guide, Arlo, calls simply The River. The carrot at the end of our liquid stick—the hellacious rapids of Cataract Canyon—are 45 miles downstream.

I have to say that my initial impression is disappointing. This isn’t what I was expecting. When I first contemplated running the river, I imagined an extended roller coaster ride; several days of lurching, gut-wrenching rapids culminating in Cataract Canyon, so named by Major John Wesley Powell because “the declivity within is so great and the water descends with such tremendous velocity and continuity that (Powell) thought the term rapid failed to interpret the conditions,” according to the diary of expedition member Frederick Dellenbaugh.

Instead, our journey down Meander Canyon is as desultory as a kiddie’s pony ride at the state fair, as turbulent as the water in an inflatable wading pool.

To keep us from getting bored, Arlo tosses out crumbs of geological factoids, chumming for our interest. But none of us are biting. Each one of his fascinating details about the surrounding cliffs (“Those slab-topped pinnacles are white rim sandstone of Permian age”) is met with indifferent silence. It is too hot, too still.

We sip water. We spread Blistex over our lips for the millionth time. We ask each other—again—if we would like a stick of gum, some dried apricots. After a couple of hours, I ask Arlo if I can get out of our inflatable and float beside the boat. Sure, absolutely, says Arlo who, with his upturned sombrero and Pancho Villa mustache and goatee, looks like a Mexican pirate (he’s also flying a pirate flag on our inflatable which is ironically nicknamed “Paradise Lost”). So I pull on a faded-orange life-vest and fall off the back of the boat into the water. I float on my back, like a log. Drifting aimlessly down the river which is cool and refreshing. I close my eyes. It is so quiet and peaceful in the water that it is easy to imagine falling asleep. While floating. And it doesn’t seem such a bad idea.

The Confluence of the Green and Colorado Rivers as seen from our plane. Photo by David Lansing.

What is this thing I have for following in the footsteps of other explorers? I keep going farther and farther back in time. All summer I’ve been reading about John Wesley Powell, a Civil War veteran who, at the age of 35, descended with nine companions in boats from Green River, Wyoming, to the mouth of the Virgin River in 1869, and for the first time made known the character of the interior of the long line of canyons and the general conditions of the country through which they carved.

And now, here I am. In Moab, Utah preparing to run Cataract Canyon where Powell and his men had more incidents than on any other part of their expedition, including the Grand Canyon, and experienced their greatest challenges. What I’m wondering is, Can it possibly be similar, in any way, to what Powell experienced 140 years ago? Has the Colorado River, tamed by dams and gentrified by easy access, lost its wildness?

From Wallace Stegner’s great book on Powell, Beyond the Hundredth Meridian:  “They named the bad stretch Cataract Canyon. The walls became lower, became smooth, monolithic, salmon-colored sandstone stained with vertical stripes of desert varnish. Through most of its course the canyoned Green and Colorado, though impressive beyond description, awesome and colorful and bizarre, is scenically disturbing, a trouble to the mind. It works on the nerves, there is no repose in it, nothing that is soft. The water-roar-emphasizes what the walls begin: a restlessness and excitement and irritability.”

And from Powell’s own journal: “We have an unknown distance yet to run; an unknown river yet to explore. What falls there are, we know not; what rocks beset the channel, we know not; what walls rise over the river, we know not. Ah, well! We may conjecture many things. The men talk as cheerfully as ever; jests are bandied about freely this morning; but to me the cheer is somber and the jests are ghastly.”

Flying into Moab yesterday in a small Cesna we flew low over the canyons to get a good look at our destination, but what we saw was only a thread of a river, green and muddy in low water. We did not see the rapids that for the first time gave Powell and his men a touch of danger and exhausting work, and we did not hear what is perhaps the most nerve-wearing accompaniment of any voyage in these canyons: the incessant, thundering, express-engine roar of the water which, in many parts of the canyons, never ceases, day or night. As Stegner wrote, “It speeds the heartbeat and deafens the ears and shakes the ground underfoot. It comes from every side, echoed and multiplied by the walls. A man’s voice is lost, shouting in it.”

Tomorrow we begin.