July 2010

The journey down Cataract Canyon begins. Photo by David Lansing.

There is a somber mood in the boats today. Even amongst the crew. Extra time was spent, as we broke camp, to secure the rocket boxes and jerry cans, the jack pads and ditty bags. The chickie line—yellow rope running around the perimeter of each oarboat, used as a hand grip in violent water—was closely inspected by Arlo for frays and loose knots. Then the boats and oars were carefully examined for any hidden damage.

After breakfast, Arlo gave a safety talk. “If we get a man overboard, let the crew come to you. We’ll pull you out. Do not try and swim towards the boat. No one in the boat should attempt a rescue. You’ll only make it worse because then we’ll have to pull two of you out. Stay on your back. Feet forward. And, most importantly, do not panic.”

It’s always a little disconcerting when someone tells you, with a certain amount of gravity, to not panic. But then again, one only has to remind oneself that between here and the end of our journey, the edge of Lake Powell, the river drops 425 feet giving us whitewater every bit as hair-raising as anything in the Grand Canyon.

As Frederick Dellenbaugh wrote as the Powell Expedition prepared to tackle this same stretch of river, “…the life preservers were inflated, and casting off from Camp 62 we were borne down with the swift current. The water was muddy, of a coffee-and-cream colour, and the river was falling.”

Nothing has changed.

The Confluence of the Colorado and Green rivers. Photo by David Lansing.

Finally—finally—we have reached the Confluence of the Green and Colorado rivers.  It is both thrilling and horrifying. This afternoon, we pulled up on shore near the spot where, almost 141 years to the day, the Powell Expedition set up camp for four days “for the purpose of determining the latitude and longitude, and the altitude of the walls.” During their stay at this camp, Powell’s men dried and sifted their food supply, which was already running low, and repaired their boats and equipment.

On July 19, 1869, Major Powell and Georbge Bradley climbed up a side canyon below the Confluence into the Needles country to the east, and described their view: “And what a world of grandeur is spread before us! Wherever we look there is but a wilderness of rocks; deep gorges, where the rivers are lost below cliffs and towers and pinnacles; and ten thousand strangely carved forms in every direction; and beyond them, mountains blending with the clouds.”

Sara, a river swamper, lost in thought gazing at the Confluence. Photo by David Lansing.

We also took time out to climb the canyon as high as we could for those same views. Which were, all this time later, every bit as awe-inspiring.

High up in the canyon, overlooking the rivers, each of us found a little spot of solitude to contemplate his own thoughts about what lay ahead. I leaned back against a rock and thought of Powell and his motley crew who, for eight days, battled the unknown rapids in Cataract Canyon. They had to line or portage most of the rapids because their wooden boats could not survive heavy water and they were afraid of losing more of their valuable food supply. Indeed, Powell’s boat, the Emma Dean, was swamped on the first day below the Confluence. Portaging the numerous rapids was painstaking hard work; they had to stop several times to make new oars from drift wood and to repair the damaged boats. The 52 closely spaced rapids that they encountered, many of them severe, are what prompted Powell to name this “Cataract Canyon.”

Which is where we are headed tomorrow morning.

Take me to the river, dip me in the water. Photo by David Lansing.

I am thinking about something the River Buddha said after dinner as three or four of us were drinking brandy and admiring the surface of the water glitter in the moonlight: “The river always takes you downstream.”

It’s an obvious truth but, like much the River Buddha says, there’s a lovely wisdom to it, even if he didn’t intend there to be.

The river not only takes you downstream, it takes you back. Towards where we all came from.

Listen: I started this journey in an air-conditioned hotel room in Moab, then transitioned to a cot in a tent before deciding it was too much trouble, really, out here in the wilderness, and so I borrowed a rubber mat from the crew and slept near the bank of the river in a sleeping bag. But even that became too much. So, for the past week, I have taken a single wool blanket and dug a hold in the sand, like some feral animal, and slept outside with nothing but a soiled sheet for cover. In another week, no doubt, I’ll be sleeping in a loin cloth on bare ground. Perfectly happy, I’m sure.

In Frederick Dellenbaugh’s preface to the book he wrote about the 1869 Powel Expedition, he wrote: “The…River teaches much that is not geology.”

Amen to that.

The river always takes you downstream. It takes you back. Its muddy waters are the thick soup of our shared experiences. I am camping on the sandy bank of the river, perhaps close to where Powell and Dellenbaugh camped 140 years ago and I feel their presence. As if I am part of a long chain that extends back to Dellenbaugh and even before that to the Utes and Navajo that the Powell party came across on their expedition and, before them, the Anasazi whose granaries and stone dwellings, built almost a thousand years ago, still stand in the shadowed recesses of the canyons we passed this week.

Dellenbaugh said the immensity of the river tends “to produce a feeling that the Canyon has a personality—that it is something that might swallow you up as if you were a mere chip in a whirlwind.”

I don’t feel like she wants to swallow me up so much as just wrap a warm blanket around me. The river feels benevolent. But then again, we haven’t yet reached Cataract Canyon. So maybe I’m wrong. Maybe my real baptism is still to come.

Nearing Cataract Canyon. Photo by David Lansing.

“There are characteristic discomforts on a river voyage. Not the least is the incessant wetting and the sharp alternation of heat and cold. The water is full of silt and sand, and so, consequently, are the clothes one wears.”

–Wallace Stegner, Beyond the Hundredth Meridian

As that hoary ol’ swamper Vaughn Short wrote, “There’s no turning back up river/There’s no use to even try/Whatever lies before you/You’ve got to see it through/You can’t stop half way/And back off and start anew.”

So we pushed on.

“Like a teasing woman the river dawdled, meandered, surprised them with new forms, new colors, delayed and delayed and delayed the expected union with the Colorado. They watched, and rowed, and waited, and expected the rapids and cataracts that should accompany the junction in such a wild and moonlike landscape, but the river swept them on serenely…”

—Stegner

An Anasazi granary along the river. Photos by David Lansing.

All along this stretch of river are reminders of of the various Native American cultures that called these canyons home more than 1,000 years before John Wesley Powell ever passed by. According to one of Arlo’s geology books, the region was occupied by two distinct Native American groups. “One is called the Fremont Culture, a group whose presence is only known from distinctive pictographs, and who are thought to have inhabited the region sometime around 850 or 900 A.D. The second group is known as the Anasazi, or Pueblo Cultures, who dominated the region from about 1075 until they abandoned Canyonlands in the 12^th century.

“There is considerable evidence to support the idea that the climate was much wetter during times of Indian occupation between 900 and 1200 A.D., making it possible for the gardening cultures to survive. After this time the climate deteriorated; perhaps a drought set in as at Mesa Verde, and the climate became much like that of today. Archeologists find no evidence that marauding Indians forced the Anasazi from their dwellings. Whatever the cause, the Anasazi left Canyonlands in the 12^th century as quietly as they had come, leaving behind a treasury of stone dwellings, masonry granaries, and beautifully formed bowls and jars and hand-made jewelry.”

Yesterday after lunch, after we’d drifted down the river for a bit, we put into shore just below Indian Creek and hiked to some ruins up in the cliffs. It was interesting because here were the remnants of two cultures: an old granary from the Anasazi and, higher up, some pictographs—hand prints in the red rock.

The granary was interesting but it was the handprints that seemed so evocative, the fingers so long and slender, reaching up towards the sky, splayed, signifying what? This is our territory, do not come here? This is where we were successful hunting for game? Or perhaps just the simplest explanantion: We were here.