My map booklet rates Badger’s difficulty as 7 (on a scale of 10) at this water level, but it looks to be nothing more than a stairway of large, breaking waves, with a tongue of smooth green water marking the obvious line of entry. (Converted to the more standard scale of whitewater rating, Class I through Class V, the major Grand Canyon rapids could all be described as “Class IV, but big.”) Rick’s considered wisdom, after a glance, is “Hey diddle diddle, straight down the middle.” And that’s where we go.
Just below Badger, TL has decreed, is our camp spot for the night. We haven’t covered much mileage, but never mind, we’ve consummated our escape from the realm of the dry. That we’re just eight miles from the put-in is less relevant, suddenly, than that we’re 218 miles from the take-out.
The moon appears late, as a waning gibbous shape over the south rim. The canyon walls occlude most of the sky, like big black shoulders, but along the linear gap between them stretches the Milky Way. So there’s sky enough, stars enough, world enough and time, to lull even a full, busy, vexed mind to sleep. My own mind is weary and, as I’ve been hoping, empty.
The river is a pathway through rock. The rock is a pathway through time. The span of time manifest in the exposed rock of the Grand Canyon is vast almost behind comprehension, reflecting more than a third of the total age of our planet. The Vishnu schist, a steely gray metamorphic formation lining the innermost canyon gorge with polished cliffs that rise sheer from the water, dates back1.7 billion years. The sedimentary layers lying on top are much younger, including that vertical stack of Paleozoic strata memorialized by my little mnemonic, all of which were laid down between 570 and 245 million years ago. That point bears emphasizing: that the youngest stratum atop the Grand Canyon rim derives from the end of the Paleozoic era, more than a quarter billion years ago. The Mesozoic era, with its giant reptiles, scarcely exists in this petrological record—too evanescent, too young. The Cenozoic, covering the past 65 million years, shows only as latter-day scuffs and scratches, such as the river canyon itself, or the spills of extruded lava that temporarily clogged it as recently as a mere million years ago. Among the more striking facts about this geological wonder—though not the single most mystifying one, which I’ll come to in its turn—is that though the rock layers are extremely old, the canyon itself is quite recent. The river’s channel (or at least the western half) seems to have been carved to nearly its present depth within just a few million years, and beginning only 6 million years ago. The river cut through like a silver knife slicing cake, though the cake itself had taken eons to assemble and bake.
My own age is fifty-three. That’s risibly old on the kayaker scale and immeasurably young on the geologic one. Time is relative, Einstein taught us, and such relativity is another factor in my secret agenda of recuperation. Hey, Dave, we’ve got a Grand permit, Bob Crayton told me more than a year ago, want to come? Not possible, I thought—too many deadlines, too many commitments, it takes too much time, my kayak skills are in disrepair, I stand at the threshold of geezerhood, quack quack quack. And then, in a moment of sublime, reckless clarity, I said: Yes! No matter how old you are, I had realized, if you set yourself down within the ancientness of the Grand Canyon, your elapsed years will seem like nothing. Your life itself may seem like nothing. Your woes and your moans, your disappointments and sorrows and grievances and guilts, may therefore seem inconsiderable also. Rinse yourself in the river, measure yourself against the rock; find yourself to be a tiny, wet creature, insignificant within the larger and longer scope. That’s the notion that put me on the trip roster. My shoulders are still in fairly good shape (always an issue, since dislocation is a common kayak injury) and, as far as diagnostic medicine can determine, so is my heart. I’ll never know how old is too old, or not, unless I find out.
Among the seven of us paddling little boats, four are essentially professional kayakers, having grounded their lives in the sport either as instructors (Al Borrego, a quietly affable fellow who shifts to ski-patrolling in winter) or as sales reps (John Kudrna, Rob Lesser, and my geology consultant, Rick Alexander) within the whitewater world. Alexander, aka “Rick the Stick” for his paddling prowess, is a big burly guy roughly the size of a doorway, who looks like he might enjoy punishing people on a rugby field; his pale blue eyes and glinty smirk conceal—then sometimes reveal—a fundamental sweetness of character and a keen knowledge of natural history, gained during an earlier career directing outdoor-education programs in the Southwest. Kudrna is a compact whitewater athlete whose shoulders have been rebuilt more times than the engine in a ’64 Volkswagen. Lesser, with more than thirty years’ paddling experience, is a legendary maker of first descents on harrowing Alaskan river canyons such as the Stikine. In addition, there’s Mark Gamba, the photographer on assignment as my partner, whose long legs barely fit into a kayak. Mark’s role obliges him to ballast the back of his boat with a case full of heavy photo gear and to wear a camera-encasing waterproof apparatus the size of a small television (he calls it a “surf housing”) around his neck like a millstone. They’re all younger and better paddlers than I—all except Lesser, who is older (God bless him) and (damn him) much better. Once again, as on previous kayak assignments, not all of which went off without ugly moments of drama, I find myself running in fast company.
The raft oarsmen include Brian Zimmer, a wry schoolteacher who consents cheerily to carry the army-surplus rocket boxes that will serve as receptacles for what is delicately known as our “groover” (the portable toilet) and accordingly christens his eighteen-foot yellow boat Winnie da Pooh; Jason Dzikowski, known as “Diz,” a steady and earnest young carpenter from North Carolina, whose white raft is a twin to Brian’s and therefore becomes Piglet; Mike Jaenish, a criminal defense attorney from Salt Lake City, soon to be a grandfather, who clears his court schedule and goes AWOL to run rivers at any reasonable offer, bringing his own raft (parakeet blue, with a banana-yellow sun canopy), his kitchen setup, his flask of Knob Creek bourbon, his aluminum cot, and his guitar; and Steve Jones, another lawyer by education but a contractor and a river rat by choice, whose renunciation of legal practice has allowed him, in the past three decades, to make fourteen previous Grand Canyon trips. These generous raft jockeys carry the freight that allows us kayakers, as well as themselves, to river-camp in comfort bordering on decadence: tents, lawn chairs, tables, beer, coolers full of fresh fruit and vegetables, frozen meat, many loaves of bread, many pounds of cheese, beer, rice, pasta, coffee, tortillas, canned beans, beer, dutch ovens, cookies, eight kinds of salsa, marshmallows, dozens of eggs, I think I’ve said beer, dry clothes, boccie balls, hiking shoes, two-burner propane stoves, a pancake griddle, a fire pan, charcoal briquets, battery-powered lanterns, some Budweiser for when the beer is all gone, and (I swear to God) a croquet set. Steve Jones has even thought to bring four pink plastic flamingos, with stab-in metal legs, for decorating the river frontage at each evening’s camp.
Compared to an eighteen-foot raft loaded with such paraphernalia, a kayak has only the most modest capacity for cargo. It can carry a few items, but they had better be small and precious. As we launch on the morning of day two, and for every day thereafter, my own boat contains the following: an extra paddle, in two conjoinable pieces; air bags, to save the boat if I abandon ship and resort to swimming for my life; a pair of river sandals, for hiking side canyons; a water bottle; a rescue rope coiled in a throw bag; a baseball cap; a little waterproof pouch (which rides in a handy bungee-cord shelf under the front deck, just above my knees) containing my river map, a pencil, and a Rite in the Rain notebook; and a roll-top waterproof bag, holding certain important sundries. The sundries are my wallet, my watch, one energy bar, a container of sunscreen, and two books. The books are Illustrations of the Huttonian Theory of the Earth, by a Scottish mathematician named John Playfair, and Selected Poems, by W. H. Auden. I’ve chosen those two as my intellectual and emotional sustenance for the trip. Like the energy bar, they’re small packets but densely nutritious.
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I’ll have no time to read except during stolen moments in camp, evening and morning, so the books could just as well be in my dry bag of other stuff (sleeping bag, pad, headlamp, etc.) lashed aboard Piglet. But I prefer keeping them close to me, like survival gear.
Playfair’s Illustrations of the Huttonian Theory of the Earth is not just a classic of science explication but also a famous act of personal loyalty. James Hutton, another Scotsman, sometimes considered the founder of modern geology, conceived a revolutionary and percipient vision of how Earth’s surface has been shaped and reshaped by geological processes. But the grand opus in which Hutton presented his ideas (Theory of the Earth, with Proofs and Illustrations, two volumes, 1795) was so turgid, so repetitious, and so poorly received, that his good friend Playfair undertook, after Hutton’s death, to revivify the theory by describing it in concise, readable form. The essence of Hutton’s theory centers on three points, all of which seemed outlandishly heterodox in his time: 1) Earth’s surface is constantly being eroded by water, ice, and wind, which grind old rock into chunks, pebbles, and fine sediments that are carried downstream by rivers for eventual deposition on the sea bottoms; 2) sea-bottom sediments, transmogrified slowly by pressure and heat, become stratified layers of new rock; 3) further heat from below (what is its source?—that remained puzzling long after Hutton’s time) also causes the slow uplift of those strata, and of the magmas of molten rock beneath them, eventually forming jagged mountains, domed plateaus, granitic knobs, great rifts and warpings, exposures and juxtapositions of variously tilted strata—all of which are subject to further erosion. In short, mountains become silt which becomes sedimentary rock which becomes mountains, with erosion driving the process from above and subterranean heat driving it from below, in a repeating cycle that seems to go on indefinitely, showing “no vestige of a beginning,—no prospect of an end.”
Hutton wasn’t an impious man, but his theory provoked accusations of impiety. Among its corollaries and saucy implications were that 4) marine fossils at high elevations were not put there by Noah’s flood; 5) the processes affecting topography nowadays—erosion, deposition, barely detectable uplift, and an occasional volcanic burp—are the same and the only processes that shaped the world from its beginning; and therefore 6) planet Earth is much, much older than the figure of six-thousand-some years that had been calculated by biblical literalists. “Time,” Hutton wrote, “which measures every thing in our idea, and is often deficient to our schemes, is to nature endless and as nothing.” Most of Hutton’s prose wasn’t so piquant, and his friend Playfair did a breezier job of arguing the Huttonian case, describing great cycles of “decay and renovation” to account for the world as we see it. Everything that rises will be torn down, Playfair explained; everything torn down will be remade into something else, equally stony, equally grand, and rise again. My copy of Playfair’s book is a facsimile of the first edition, published in 1802.
The Auden volume, by contrast, is a work of consummate twentieth-century modernity. Published in 1979, it samples the best of a long, vibrant poetic lifetime. Although a few of Auden’s later poems are even more opaque than an eighteenth-century disquisition on geology, I find deep pleasure and consolation in his grim, mordant, yet bravely humane work from the 1930s. Some of it is political, some intimately personal. Certain of these poems are written in a deceptively simple style that flows like light verse. One that I’ve read often, and will read again on the river, begins this way:
As I walked out one evening,
Walking down Bristol Street,
The crowds upon the pavement
Were fields of harvest wheat.
And down by the brimming river
I heard a lover sing
Under an arch of the railway:
“Love has no ending.
“I’ll love you, dear, I’ll love you
Till China and Africa meet
And the river jumps over the mountain
And the salmon sing in the street.”
Both books fit easily into the back of my boat, their waterproof bag clipped in with a carabiner, beside the rescue rope.
For most of its length in the canyon—say, 90 percent of those 226 miles—the Colorado River is like a giant sleeping snake, its latent power barely intimated by a gentle reptilian snore. The current glides slowly along, with only an occasional swell or whirlpool on an eddy line reflecting the vast, merciless energy held contained. But the river’s elevation drops almost 2,000 feet between Lees Ferry and Lake Mead, and about half that total occurs in short, abrupt plunges—that is, rapids. During the next couple days, we get our first real taste of the river’s wild side.
Soap Creek rapid is another frothy chain of waves, with no holes lurking to swallow and hold a boat, so Mark takes it as an opportunity for action close-ups. He runs Soap Creek backward, bracing himself with one hand, deploying his surf-housing camera with the other, clicking off motor-drive shots of Rob amid the churning jiggle-jaggle of the waves. Halfway through, Mark flips upside down. I watch his boat bottom from not far away, awaiting a recovery. Underwater, he drops the camera and gets both hands on his paddle, then rolls briskly up, to discover that one of his surf-housing straps has failed and the apparatus—all $3,400 of it, with a Nikon F-100 inside—seems to be gone. Bad moment, bad setback, to lose such a crucial piece of equipment so early in the trip. Then he notices the thing trailing behind him, on one strap, like a drag-bag of beer left in the water for chilling. He reels it in.
House Rock is more serious, a right-bending rapid in which the heavy chop pushes into a rock wall on the left and, near the bottom, a pair of tall waves guard the exit line, one of them not just breaking but recirculating. For the kayakers this doesn’t present much trouble. Each of us enters on the flat green tongue, angling right, and with a few strokes amid the heavy water we’re able to stay off the wall, ferry rightward, and punch through the wave-hole along its right corner. We catch eddies at the bottom and hold position, ready if needed to help with a rescue. For the rafts, so heavily loaded, so lumbering, it’s a different matter. In fact, this particular rapid proves a good reminder of a truth we already know well: Some stretches of water that are easily run by a competent kayaker can be wickedly problematic for a raft oarsman, and vice versa. In their strengths and their foibles, a big raft and a little kayak are as different as a locomotive and a horse.
Brian’s locomotive runs next. With the unsavory groover boxes strapped firmly to its frame, with Chase Crayton and his high-school buddy Cole Arpin whooping in the bow, Pooh edges barely away from the wall, drops straight into the wave-hole, and goes nearly vertical, eighteen feet of fat yellow sausage standing on end. Diz follows the same line in Piglet, with young Kinsey Crayton and Margie Penney (a nurse from Colorado, old friend of Cyndi’s) dangling forward, clutching handholds, to get thrillingly drenched in the breakers. Later, Bob will confide to me that he found himself quite flustered as he sculled in that eddy, watching his twelve-year-old daughter ride through the rapid. It was a new sort of whitewater excitement, jangling and unexpectedly disagreeable, for the old man. This time on the big river, he realized, he had given hostages to fortune.
And then comes Mike, his yellow canopy lowered for stormy running, a straw cowboy hat on his head. His raft being the lightest and the shortest, it’s the most mobile but also the least stable, and he has no passengers to help with high-siding or bailing. He begins with an angle to the right, but then somehow his boat gets swung leftward, way leftward, and slides toward the paired waves like a van skidding on ice. When he hits the waves broadside, there’s an alley-oop motion and Mike is suddenly in the air—then in the water, gone. He bobs up beside the raft, minus his hat, and catches hold of an oar. By the time kayaks converge on him, he has already hoisted himself back in and brought the boat under control, a nice recovery by any measure.
Mike has made five earlier Grand Canyon trips. Experienced and provident, he appears next day with a different hat.
By the end of a week we’ve followed the river downward through more than a billion years of time, descending past all nine major formations of Paleozoic sedimentary rock and into the Vishnu schist, dark and Precambrian. The cliff sides are suddenly closer, steeper, more stern and chilling, like melodramatic pinnacles in a woodcut by Rockwell Kent. The gunmetal-gray schist is shot through with sinuous veins of pinkish, mica-flecked intrusion, known as the Zoroaster granite. In their physical presence as well as their mythic evocations, the Vishnu and the Zoroaster provide a somber, eerie sense of embrace. Rick says: “Welcome to the inner canyon gorge.”
I’m still wondering how the river carved its way down here so quickly. The question is made even more baffling by the geologic conundrum I alluded to earlier, which involves a mysterious surmounting of certain obstacles. “The Colorado River has cut through several major upwarps, including the Kaibab Plateau, seemingly in defiance of the laws of gravity,” according to an expert named Larry Stevens. “Controversy over how and when the Grand Canyon formed has raged for a century, but every new theory seems to be missing a critical piece of evidence.” One enigma any such theory must explain is that the early Colorado River, flowing at what seems to have been a middling elevation across an area known as the Marble Platform, managed to carve its way over—and then down into—a big, elongated dome of elevated rock known as the Kaibab Uplift. From the surface of the Marble Platform to the crest of the Kaibab Uplift, as they stand today, there’s a rise of several thousand feet. Did the water run uphill? Certainly not. Then how did the river get over that mountainous mound?
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