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Of Powell’s many expeditions out West, none was as ambitious as the one he launched to solve the “last geographical problem of the U.S., that of the canyons of the Green and Colorado Rivers.” While the Green’s lower and upper ends were known, no one had explored its interior section.
Powell was a natural scientist, chair of geology at Normal State University in Illinois, who sported a beard and wore jeans and boots out West. He also designed his own boats for the expedition, three oak vessels with double sterns and watertight compartments for supplies. It is not clear, however, that he understood what he was getting into. He had never run a rapid before, and neither had the party of fur hunters, college students, and soldiers who embarked on this thousand-mile journey across inhospitable territory.
Still, the early days went fine. Strapped to a chair on the lead boat, Powell scouted the river and shouted commands to the oarsmen, who, as was customary, faced upstream. He waived a red flag to show the other two boats what route to follow. If difficulties arose, they would have time to alter their course or else pull to shore.
Two weeks into the trip, Powell’s party entered the Canyon of Lodore. Powell wrote that the water sometimes “descends with a smooth, unruffled surface,” and then it tumbles “in a channel filled with dangerous rocks that break the waves into whirlpools.” Trouble came on a series of rapids that dropped thirty-five feet in a little over a half mile. This was more than the Grand Canyon, more than Cataract Canyon, and much more than what they had encountered thus far (the river had been dropping twenty-two feet per mile).
This stretch consisted of two steep descents, each one fifteen feet in height, with water coming in through narrow channels and boulders that were fully or partially hidden under what another observer called “a continuous sheet of boiling foam.” At the upper fall, water flowed on both sides of a small island; at the lower fall, the current ran into the canyon wall and a cliff that came in at a right angle. The Green had no choice but to cut a channel in the limestone, resurfacing two hundred feet below.
As they approached the upper falls, Powell gave the signal to disembark and portage, that is, to carry the crafts and cargo over land. For some reason—perhaps the rapids’ intensity, perhaps high boulders—his red flag went unseen. One of the boats, the No-Name, smashed into rocks and broke apart, propelling three of the men into the waters. They scrambled to the islet, now known as No-Name Island. No casualties, but the boat and its contents were lost.
“We adopt the name Disaster Falls,” Powell wrote, “for the scene of so much peril and loss.”
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The party carried on through Lodore and then to the Colorado without further mishaps. Powell gained fame as an explorer who published his story of peril, loss, and survival with the Smithsonian in 1875: Report on the Exploration of the Colorado River of the West and Its Tributaries. He soon became a mainstay of American lore. “An incredible adventure story,” Tony Hillerman wrote of one recent book on the expedition.
Is that all it was? Were the stories of the Green and Disaster Falls nothing but tales of adventure? Delving into lesser-known corners of this history, I compiled a running list, a kind of police blotter of mishaps and near misses at Disaster Falls. The entries loomed larger alongside one another.
1932 A seven-member party traveling from Wyoming to Green River, Utah, loses a boat “while negotiating the leap over Disaster Falls.” The passengers are safe.
1934 Employees of Utah’s Fish and Game Department crash at the entrance of the falls. A passenger almost drowns, but a river runner grabs the line at the end of the boat and pulls him to shore
1938 River runner Norman Nevills attempts to slip through Upper Disaster, but one of his boats gets caught on a rock. As he tries to dislodge it with ropes, “a terrific current shoved the water right down my throat and choked me.” His party makes it out, but it is a close call.
1949 Two college students and a lab technician lose one of their plywood boats after it capsizes.
1951 An expedition of engineers, scientists, photographers, and representatives of the Colorado Game and Fish Commission crashes two boats. A river runner is caught under water; some passengers fall overboard and cling to a boat through a mile and a half of rapids. Afterward, they feel like “a group of men who had gone into the valley of death and returned.”
People got into trouble on the Green during these decades because the river was becoming a recreational area. One of the first men to run it for fun in the late 1800s had introduced a forward-facing rowing technique that made it possible to traverse rapids that Powell had had to portage. By the early 1930s, local “piloting dudes” were making a little cash as river runners for adventurous travelers.
One of these runners, a local builder and outdoorsman named Bus Hatch, launched commercial trips in 1932. His wooden boats could only carry one or two passengers, however, and they sometimes split after hitting boulders. A solution emerged after World War II, when the U.S. Army made its surplus rubber rafts available commercially. These cheap inflatable devices, which required little maintenance, could hold up to fifteen passengers in relative comfort and proved easy to manoeuver in waves and holes. Hatch introduced six-day rafting packages for families and large parties. In 1953, Dinosaur National Monument awarded him its first river concession permit. Soon, there were a dozen operators and close to twenty thousand people on the river every year. It is here, on the rapids of the Green, that whitewater rafting and commercial tourism first came together.
These rafts seem to have reduced the number of spills. In the early 1950s, a local newspaper referred to Disaster Falls as “a boulder-choked spume of rapids,” but praised Hatch “for the few accidents that have occurred with large groups being taken down the rivers.” Passengers would disembark at the top of Upper Disaster and walk to the foot of the rapids. Only the most foolhardy rafted this section. A Sierra Club party that included toddlers and old ladies came out of “the tumbling cataracts of dread Lodore soaked and battered and happy.” I assume that they portaged Disaster Falls.
The most important change in this environmental history occurred in 1964, with the opening of the Flaming Gorge dam and reservoir fifty miles upstream. Whereas warm and silty water had previously swelled in the spring depending on snow accumulation, the dam now let out a steady flow, cold and clear. This transformed the river’s ecology, with dire consequences for wildlife, but it also controlled the rush of rapids that had proved daunting for so long. Today, the Green runs on average between 800 and 4,700 cubic feet per second—considerably less than the 24,000 cubic feet that Powell faced.
Disaster Falls, in short, is no longer much of a fall. But it remains disastrous. It is between Upper and Lower Disaster that Owen drowned.
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What can history do after this?
On some days, I considered counterfactuals and allowed myself to believe that events could have unfolded differently. Belknap’s Waterproof Dinosaur River Guide explains that, in the 1950s, a proposed dam at Echo Park, near the boat launch at which our trip ended, would have destroyed an entire ecosystem on the Green and the Yampa rivers. Had environmentalists not defeated the project, water would have flooded gorges, creeks, wetlands, and cottonwood groves. Disaster Falls and other rapids would have vanished as well. “But O would be alive,” I scribbled in the margin.
On other days, I looked into the evolution of safety regulation on that stretch of the river. This was not an easy thing to do—I could find only bits of evidence—but I did learn that Dinosaur National Monument required permits and liability insurance in the late 1950s. Independent-minded runners such as Hatch, long entrusted with maintenance and rescues on the river, did not take such regulation well. By the 1970s, two seasonal rangers watched over the campgrounds and intervened when vacationers ran into trouble. The Park Service also reduced the number of rafters permitted on the river by half. Perhaps it did so for safety reasons, but mostly, it seems, the thousands of touri
sts were harming the environment.
When I called the Dinosaur river office in search of archival records about Disaster Falls, a manager told me there weren’t any. To gain clarity, I turned to kayakers who had recently run the rapids and written about them. Some deemed the stretch harmless. It was “an easy run,” one environmentalist recounted a year before our accident. “The rapids we faced this afternoon don’t much resemble the ferocious falls that sundered the No-Name.” I felt relief upon reading his words: they suggested that we had not dropped Owen into an impossible place.
But if Disaster Falls had been reengineered into a harmless ride, why had we fared so poorly? Why hadn’t I done better on that easy run?
Rereading the material I had collected, I now latched onto the perils that boaters continue to face. The Vernal Express, a local newspaper, warned in 1954 that “light craft and unskilled guides may spell disaster when such groups approach the many places in the canyons where the river becomes a churned-up demon of destruction and terror.” These words were written before the dam’s construction, I knew this, but the environmentalist who later depicted Disaster as an easy run similarly claimed that the new dam at Flaming Gorge had turned the Green into “a machine with teeth of stone.” I took note.
One day, I discovered a blog by an outdoorsman who had spent thirty years running the major rivers of the West. His takeaway is that Disaster Falls remains treacherous because currents converge into a narrow channel with a huge rock in the middle. The biggest danger in such situations, he wrote, is to wrap one’s boat. This happens when one hits a rock sideways and the current bears down with too much force to allow any movement. “Wrapping is worse than flipping the boat upside down,” the blogger went on, “because it can be virtually impossible to free a boat that wraps on a midstream rock.”
Beneath the surface of the Green, a churned-up demon of destruction and terror continues to lurk. For a while, this gave me another kind of solace. It explained why amateur boaters could deem Disaster Falls runnable and then find themselves overmatched, pinned against rocks in their kayaks and duckies.
And yet, this story about Disaster Falls had its own dark side. Alison and I had brought our sons to a notorious place whose name had long served as a warning. And we had had no clue. Wallace Stegner wrote that “nearly everyone who runs any part of the canyons now—and they are many thousands each year—either carries this story of Powell’s in his duffel bag or has it read or recited to him around the fire.”
Not us. During the bus ride from the hotel to the river on the morning of the accident, I was not reading Powell but rather Joseph Mitchell’s Up in the Old Hotel, a book about all-but-forgotten slices of New York City history. I knew too little about the Green to even anticipate a region of gloom on our own voyage of exploration. Did the other members of our party know about Powell’s expedition? The traveler from San Francisco, the Las Vegas police officer who had come with her two children, did they know? That morning on the bus, I did not spot them reading about the Gold Rush or the first casinos in Nevada.
It is possible that the guides planned to recite this story of Powell’s after dinner that night, but we never made it to the campfire.
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The final character in this history is Colin Fletcher, the founding father of American wilderness backpacking. In 1989, Fletcher hiked and rafted the entire length of the Green and Colorado rivers on his own and then wrote a book about it. Like others before him, he ended up at Disaster Falls. While scouting the rapids, he recalled the crash of the No-Name and considered potential outcomes. I read his account several times, my mood fluctuating according to the words I chose to underline on that day.
Sometimes, I saw a run that Fletcher deemed passable: If this was as straightforward and unimpeded as it looked, probably no problem….The whole thing looked very runnable….Not at all a scary business.
At other times, I saw rapids that harbored hidden dangers: But if that torrent thick-souping through the chute concealed any obstacles….The undertow could suck you under and pin you there, helpless.
Fletcher’s account could go either way. It could mean anything, so it might as well have meant nothing. This is what I came to feel about history as well. I had spent so much time trying to determine whether we had run the same waters as Powell; I had invested the question with so much urgency. At some point, however, I had to acknowledge that the falls would always prove as disastrous as I wanted them to be. History could provide neither explanations nor release.
And yet, history lived on as my personal obsession, comparable to Alison’s compulsive walking. Perhaps this is what we all need in the wake of catastrophic losses, some means of channeling the manic energy and conflicted yearnings that well up within us. After his son’s death, a friend of mine took up martial arts and became a black belt.
History also endured as presence: the history I wished I had known, the history that might have led us to make different decisions on rapids that never seemed as safe as we were told. I could now open myself to the signs that, inscribed within the rocks and sands of the Green, make it clear that these storied falls could suddenly turn tragic.
History channeled, finally, the mythic power of a place in and out of time, a place whose primeval force had pulled us in and pushed us forward in ways I might never fully understand but could now feel. Owen and I came together within a history of nature and civilization that neither began nor ended on the day of his death. What took place that afternoon could have faded into oblivion, an event effaced by the same catastrophic forces that, as Owen and I knew too well, had wiped out Talman Street in Brooklyn.
Still, Owen stands alone. Alison, Julian, and I had been there on the Green, we had taken part in this history, but he is the one who joined William Ashley, John Wesley Powell, Bus Hatch, and Colin Fletcher on a river that cut across Dinosaur National Monument, rushed through the Canyon of Lodore, and twisted itself into a series of rapids that, regardless of the dam and regardless of the flow, will always bear and deserve the name of Disaster Falls.
Iris: Was Owen eight turning nine or nine turning ten?
I want to write that after a full year of grief, after watching a child die and uncovering hidden suffering around me, I led a life of heightened kindness. This is not what happened, but I want to write that it did because this would ward off the notion that the father still standing at the end of that year was a slightly older but otherwise undistinguishable version of the one who had left New York for Utah with two children and returned with one. Something had to come out of this.
In nineteenth-century England, Anglican tracts presented the death of a child as a “providential dispensation,” a kind of spiritual challenge for the parent’s soul. One of them asked grieving parents, “Are you really willing that this affliction should prove really beneficial? Are you willing to be improved by it?” I was more than willing, not out of religious leanings, but due to an ingrained belief in progress and personal growth: each year better than the next; life as a series of experiences that yield insights into oneself and others; at the very least, a little less pain each day. Owen’s death had weakened, but not extinguished, this belief. Alongside grief, intertwined with it, there was now a fear of decline and the intolerable suspicion that things were returning to the way they had been except for the fact that one of our sons was gone.
“A Nearness to Tremendousness—An Agony Procures,” Emily Dickinson wrote. “By a departing light / We see acuter, quite.” But the emotional acuity of the early months petered out with the light that second year. The tension and wakefulness that gave my days such density, the immersion in a fleeting present, the molecular awareness of fragility, the exposure to the pain of others: all of this slowly faded. It did not entirely vanish, since I continued to consider the possibility that the men and women who surrounded me carried their own unspoken losses. But people can only spend so much time in the company of dead children. Even close friends seldom inquired now about my internal state, pe
rhaps fearing that if I was not thinking about Owen at that moment, the question would upset what they saw as a delicate equilibrium.
To be fair, my cues remained contradictory. As Julian’s bar mitzvah approached, sixteen months after the accident, Alison and I resolved to celebrate one son while finding a place for the other. I would have to be a father to both that day, rejoicing with Julian while remaining with Owen, a task that on many days seemed insurmountable. Alison and I threw a party that evening and danced late into the night, as if to invite our guests into some kind of collective release.
But when friends emailed us the next day about the beaming smiles on our faces, and when, a few weeks later, a colleague told me that he and others were beginning to see me again as a historian rather than a mourner, I did not feel relief. I feared this return to normalcy—having to become the friend and the professional I used to be. What would happen to the father who lived off the map of human experience?
And what about Julian? Alison and I believed him when he said that Owen’s death was not as hard for him as it was for us, but we also saw him break down in tears because he felt lonely. Julian told us he was forgetting the sound of Owen’s voice, and that he could feel happy and sad at the same time. It was impossible to tell him how to resolve quandaries that continued to confound us.
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A few weeks before his bar mitzvah, Julian showed us a poem he had written for the service. Entitled “Owen,” it made no pretense that all was fine. The person whom he missed more than any other was not coming back. “Above us hangs an uncertain gloom,” he wrote. “Everyone knows there is an elephant in the room….My bar mitzvah is just a day, a day that I have no one with whom to play.” Julian would plunge to these depths with his assembled relatives and friends and then pull them up. “Thank you for keeping us alive from the sharp pain. Today is our day, do as you see fit.”
When the day came and Julian recited his verses, standing alone in the middle of the room, I allowed myself to think that the river might not prevail after all. Though nature had swept Owen away, culture—poetry and ritual, community and meaning—might still reassert itself. But the bar mitzvah was just a day; grief retained its inward pull and this more than anything else made Emily Dickinson’s acuity flicker.
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