A raft trip with friends on the Green River
Desolation and Gray Canyon:A few pictures are here
The drive to the put-in at Sand Wash was long and dusty. Along the road through Nine Mile Canyon are some of the most numerous and fine petroglyphs to be found anywhere. "There's some on that rock..." someone would say as we passed by in a blur. "Anthropomorphs..." We stopped to have a short look at one panel, but the rest were sped by in an effort to get to the river before dark. My big truck was loaded with rafts and multicolored drybags and toilets and oar frames and 60-odd gallons of water in a strapped-down pile that heaped above the cab. In the cab were 4 expectant rafters and 2 already-weary shuttle drivers.
We dreaded the fabled swarms of bugs at the river's edge, but they did not materialize. After inflating the rafts with a cigarette lighter pump, we sent the drivers off into the mild dark of a Utah night. Just us and a pile of gear remained the next morning, all of it somehow needing to make it to the other end of the run 8 days later.
The river was low, warm and silty-green. Just the way desert rivers are supposed to be in late July. After the frigid blasts of dam-fed water I had rowed through in the Grand Canyon a few days earlier, it was both a relief and a worry. This run would be mild, but rocky and slow. Two rafts and an inflatable kayak found themselves rigged, manned and floating over partially submerged sandbars by late morning.
All the rafters were previous acquaintances except for two friends of mine from California. They were quickly learning about the themes of the wacked group of folks they had signed on with. Anarchy. Wilderness. Politics. Ed Abbey and his writings. Chaos. Consensus. Conflict. Community. Friendship. Family. Craig and Laura didn’t skip a beat and joined right in.
I came expecting something different from the canyon. I had read Ellen Meloy's "Raven's Exile" years ago and of course Powell's writing about his explorations, as well as other accounts from modern river runners. These filled me with the impression that the canyon walls would be high and close, with ecosystems much like that of other Southwest canyons. Like the Green and Colorado through Canyonlands. Maybe like the San Juan. Or even maybe the gone but not forgotten Glen Canyon. The Desolation and Gray Canyon complex very different from these others to which it is connected by threads of silty water.
Desolation is a high canyon, almost alpine in a desert sense. Pinion and Juniper grow along its side. Cottonwood, willow and the ubiquitous tamarisk flank its banks, but also box elder. It's walls are of young stone compared to the other canyons, looming but not cliffed for the most part. Banded and chaotic and confused in soft yellow and gray colors. The side canyons spill from open mouths wide alluvial fans of brick-sized sandstone and limestone. An occasional dark band hints at oil shale. Douglas Firs, the trees of my wet Oregon youth, are found just up from the river in a suprising stretch of high plateau to low silt stream.
The low water is stretched thinner in the numerous rapids, exposing most rocks and just blanketing others. Running them becomes an obstacle course. Set an angle. Push. Push. Scrape. Turn and pull. Pull. Pull! The oarlocks clank and the oarsmen grown. The inexperienced take a turn at the oars and do very well. A run through a rapid without hanging or spinning on a rock is a great success. "Hurrah!" we yell, "Good job.' The oarsmen beam. On this river at this flow, we celebrate progress instead of survival. Especially in the afternoons when the winds kick up and the pulling begins.
I love to row. The persistent but yielding feel of pulling blades through the water exhilarates me and satisfies something in my core. Hard work. Movement. Breathing the scents of river and sweat and sky. River and sweat and sky. Again. Again. Rhythmic repetition. Read the river, see the flow, choose the path. Angle and spin and push. Feel the currents and eddies as an extension of the river into me and me into the river.
Early in the trip we camped in groves of cottonwoods, worried that we were progressing too fast. I brought my guitar and played, and some of us sang. Laura took the guitar and showed her newly trained voice. Rediscovered folk songs learned in the sixties. Led campy-fun camp songs (“there was an old woman who swallowed a fly…”). Found in Mike an encyclopedia of shared songs and a smooth baritone voice to join her own. One night, I sat low between them and had one voice stereo in each ear singing unknown songs popular before my time.
Rain threatened but never really got serious about wetting us for long. We hiked and gawked at glyphs and took our own merry time down the river. Mars greeted us each dusk, more orange than red, in retrograde motion near Antares. The Andromeda galaxy spun high in the clear night after the first quarter moon set. Mike asked me to wake him each night to point it out, but each night when I woke and saw it I neglected to do so out of weariness or worry that he would not like to be woken. He ended the trip still without having seen it. I drew him a star map on a napkin in Moab afterwards so that he might sight it on his drive home, but on my own drive home, sitting in a hot springs in the middle of Nevada, I saw that I drew the pointers in Cassiopeia’s “W” wrong and that he would have to take liberties with my precision to actually find the darn thing. So much depends on a fuzzy patch in the midnight sky that you can only really see by not looking directly.
On the riverbanks were shy herons, bold herons, graceful herons. Herons we chased unintentionally down the river. Herons which took to pterodactyl flight and herons which swiveled their pointed heads suspiciously as we passed. Herons which looked like sticks and beaver noses that looked like sticks but were really beasts and fowl upon closer approach. Bighorn ewes and lambs. Two big bucks in the company of one another, 8 points and 10 points apiece. Curiously quiet Canada Geese. Beavers which didn’t slap their tails. Schools of catfish, whiskers waving in the air, feeding at the surface along eddy fences for the just-hatched flurry of mayfly bugs (julyflies?). Bats. Swallows. And finally a gracious dearth of the dreaded mosquitos which are said to plague the upper part of the run.
Amy led us to a almost unknown granary set close under a ledge high above the river. She and others had discovered it on a previous trip. The sealstone was still in place but unmudded. After a thousand years it looked sturdy and intact and ready for more cobs should a maizefarmer find a modern need for storage on such a pretty perch.
We were late on the river most days, either because of hikes or because of relaxation. The wind punished us in our afternoon rowing. Hard pulling that exhausted oarsmen and kayak paddlers both. Hands cramped and shoulders stung and most were more than a little cranky when we reached camp in the evening. Worry began about our ability to reach the take-out on our planned date.
And then came the problem that some might wish that I not mention. There were 9 people on the trip, and one person choose to behave in ways immature and inappropriate and rude. Act with conduct which was unjustified and indefensible. Treat so-called friends with disrespect and irrational anger. Turn the trip upside-down with social conflict and ultimate selfishness. This person chose to act out whatever private angst is grating at them in public, and so it is public. It was my trip too, and in the face of this person’s public behavior, I refuse to pretend like it didn’t happen. It’s part of the story.
We were drug through all the stages of the Dysfunctional Cycle. The morose foreboding. The creation of a crisis. The blaming of others for the crisis. Ranting and raving. The twisting of any and all words into self-directed daggers. The proof of unlovability. The angry refusal of comfort. The ignorance of reason. Acts meant to punish those close to them. Harsh and crass accusations. Withdrawal. Justification. Rationalization of motivation. No apologies. No efforts to reconcile. And the ever-predictable pretending like it didn’t happen. The person basically checked out of the trip and made few contributions to the common work during the cycle and used the times they did as tools for punishment. There was no escape, for we were all stuck on the river with each other, interdependent and all dragged down.
The morning. This person rigged one boat, and I rigged the other. Other rafters waited on shore. I called for gear as I needed it to fit in the spaces. People brought it. This person went ashore to get the gear that rode on their raft. When complete, this person called out to the already-punished group “Thanks a lot for helping! I had to rig my boat by myself. Everybody helped Chris but they didn’t help me!” Someone objected “Chris asked for help, we weren’t sure what you needed…or if you wanted any help…” This person was unreachable, unreasonable, irrational. The person raved on “And by the way, I’m still angry! Rant rave rant rave rant rave. We loaded up my raft, and quickly pulled out, trying to sing a song to drown out the ranting. Didn’t work. Only distance worked.
It took about a day and a half for the cycle to run its course. Most everyone had their turn making efforts to calm or contain the outbursts, but were in general met with a screaming brick wall. If nature had thrown different circumstances at us (higher winds, bigger rapids, more storms), the situation could have become physically dangerous (exhaustion, dehydration, injury, running off alone up a canyon, suicide). As it was, it was just emotionally and psychologically draining and damaging. At one point, I wanted to hand the person my river knife and say: “If you are so miserable, if you have for some time refused the council of friends and the help of professionals, if you feel justified in smearing the stinking pus of your unlovable soul amongst all those around you both friends and acquaintances, then here, cut out your own still-bleating heart from your screaming chest and die here in the wilderness either smug and satisfied at the darkness you find therein or astonished at the chambers you discover which might have filled with joy and love if you had only let them in. One way or the other, please spare us.” I thought of duct tape instead. I thought of how to keep this person hydrated while we transported them to the nearest psychiatric intensive care ward.
The others, not quite so intent on salvation, seemed happy with just the lack of rancor and screaming that the pretending-like-it-didn’t-happen phase produced. They were probably right. Just get through the trip in one piece. There was much walking on eggshells and biting of tongues for the final day to take-out.
I don’t pretend to understand such dysfunction. I don’t pretend to know the best ways of dealing with such people and such behavior. My own reactions probably made things worse. What this person needs in order to reach some semblance of peace I cannot guess.
The last morning on the river, I woke up disoriented. I was physically and psychologically drained. I was in my tent because of the threatening spatters and dark skies the night before. I hate sleeping in tents. I didn’t know where I was. I had slept on many different beaches beside many different stretches of river in the preceding months. The previous night, I had said things in front of the group that I wasn’t quite sure I believed. I had heard things said by others that I knew were untrue. I’d gone to pace the beach before going to bed in an effort to sort things out a bit. I woke up feeling unmoored. Feeling unsure of what was true and untrue in such a world that I had lived over the last weeks. I lay there trying to get bearings. I looked out to see a clear sky, the last bright stars fading in the dawn. Andromeda would have been visible again in the predawn dark. I could hear Mike near me already packing gear. I grasped old touchstones: getting up, getting to work. Healthywealthyandwise. Much hard labor to do, many miles of rowing. Take out, packing, hauling and unpacking. And the hardest work of all: tolerance, forgiveness, compassion. All were in short supply that sunny morning, and the wind was promising to blow. Sigh, stretch, rise.