The Emerald Mile: The Epic Story of the Fastest Ride in History Through the Heart of the Grand Canyon (21 page)

In river hydrology, a phenomenon known as headwater capture touches, at least metaphorically, on what may have been taking place inside the heads of these men. Headwater capture is based on the notion that a river is an erosive machine that is perpetually transporting rocks, pebbles, and fine sediments downstream, continuously cutting back from its point of origin like a kind of liquid buzz saw. As this work unfolds—as more and more material is taken up and carried away—the headwaters recede until the river eventually cuts its way through to a basin occupied by an entirely different river. At this point, whichever river is flowing at a higher elevation will change course and begin flowing into its captor. This process informs a compelling theory that attempts to explain how the Grand Canyon was originally carved—the idea being that the canyon was incised by not one ancestral Colorado but by two separate rivers,
the more powerful of which seized the other and turned it from its original course. Headwater capture is also an imperfect but useful concept for understanding what happened to Litton’s guides: men whose lives were flowing in one direction, then hijacked and irrevocably changed.

Partly, this rerouting stemmed from the pull exerted on them by the beauty of the dories, an attraction strengthened by Litton’s practice of assigning each member of the crew his own boat, which would be his alone to row and care for. But the most potent element in the equation was the subversive sense of purpose the boatmen derived from belonging to a company that offered the longest, slowest, cheapest expeditions in the canyon as a way of building a constituency of ordinary-citizen activists who would fight to protect the environment. Following Litton’s lead, his guides gradually began to see themselves not as part-time summer employees but as role models and teachers. This imbued them with a sense of purpose—one might even call it a mission—for why they were there and what they were doing, responsibilities that went considerably beyond the challenges of mastering a set of delicate and unforgiving boats.

The issue of mastery, however, was destined to remain an unsolved problem that would make extraordinary demands on Litton’s fledgling crew throughout those early years. And here, too, they found that Grand Canyon Dories occupied a unique and sometimes unenviable niche within the river hierarchy, one that would put them through a miserable series of trials until they had honed their skills to become some of the finest oarsmen the canyon had ever known.

Believe me, my young friend, there is nothing—absolutely nothing—half so much worth doing as simply messing about in boats.

—K
ENNETH
G
RAHAME
,
The Wind in the Willows

D
URING
the
Emerald Mile
’s heyday, the years between 1971 and 1975,
no one had the faintest clue how to run the complete current that ran through the bottom of the Grand Canyon smoothly and safely, time after time, in small wooden boats filled with commercial clients. Litton’s crew quickly realized that the dories had two glaring liabilities. First, they were so delicate that even a tentative scrape against a rock was enough to administer nasty dings and scratches, while a direct hit enabled the canyon to drive its fist straight through their hulls. Second, they were exceptionally finicky. The slightest miscalculation would dump them upside down.

The boats also had the potential to do things that no other craft could, which meant they could be absolutely thrilling to drive. But they could only achieve that kind of performance at the hands of an oarsman who understood the nuances of white water and knew exactly how to thread the eye of the needle. In the earlier years, not a single doryman, including Litton himself, came close to meeting those standards. As a result, most of those initial dory trips resembled exploratory free-for-alls whose carnage invited comparison with that of the days of John Wesley Powell. “Try and imagine a group of boatmen who had no idea what the hell is around the next bend,” recalls John Blaustein, one of
Litton’s first guides, who had never touched an oar before his first trip in 1970. “Christ, it was like a war zone down there.”

During the first few seasons there were zero instructions and just one general rule, which was that everybody had to follow the boss, the only person in the company who possessed at least a vague notion of how the rapids worked. Litton, however, had an incorrigible habit of taking his eye off the ball, as he was often likely to be in the midst of yet another instructional lecture or anecdote, rather than paying attention to the river. Thus he’d be caught completely unaware—pointing out some feature of the canyon, building to the punch line of a long story, or concentrating on lighting up a cigar—while merrily drifting downstream with his back to an upcoming rapid. When one of the passengers gently inquired about the jet-engine roar emanating from around the bend just ahead, he would spring to action, ordering life jackets to be zipped up, drinks put away, hatch lids slammed down and battened, all the while
looking for a dry space to stow his cigar. In the midst of this frenzy, he would stand up to take stock of where they were, then turn to face the line of boats behind him and issue instructions about the name of the rapid and what needed to be done:

All right, everybody, this next rapid is called Forester, so we’re going to swing left at the tongue. . . .

Hang on—this doesn’t look like Forester. . . .

Oh, Jesus, it’s Waltenberg! Pull right!
For God’s sake PULL RIGHT!

As each oarsman struggled to relay this message back to the next boat and prayed he didn’t screw things up too badly, Litton braced for the onslaught. What unfolded next was often spectacular.

One afternoon at a rapid known as Bedrock, the
Bright Angel
was sucked beneath an immense boulder that splits the river in two, and its entire side panel was raked off. (A portion of the hull had to be rebuilt the following morning, using pieces of driftwood before the crew could complete the trip.) On another occasion, the
Lava Cliffs
smashed up against a rock in the middle of the river and submerged, forcing her guide and passengers to abandon ship. Forty-eight hours later when the river subsided, a Park Service helicopter lowered a river ranger onto the wreckage to attach a cable, the other end of which was run through a winch onshore in the hope of pulling the carcass loose. As the boat swung downstream, the cable snapped and the dory vanished for good, never to be seen again.

Litton’s attitude toward these disasters was philosophical, perhaps because he realized that nothing that might happen on the river could compare with the ordeal of crash-landing gliders into the Netherlands or Bastogne. In the summer of 1971, Blaustein (whose nickname was JB) rammed the poor
Hetch Hetchy
into yet another midriver rock at a place called Unkar, where the river cuts along the base of a thousand-foot sandstone cliff. He struck with enough force to split the hull from oarlock to oarlock.

“It was a terrible mess,” he recalls glumly. “I basically broke the boat in half.”

Litton, however, was unbothered. “Don’t feel too awful, JB, the dories have been damaged this badly before,” he said. “Just never all at once.”

After each of these disasters, the crew was forced to pull the boats onto a sandy beach and attempt to repair the worst of the devastation using whatever materials presented themselves: duct tape, steel wool, marine putty, loose pieces of lumber that had washed ashore. When the boats were finally able to float, the dorymen would drift down to Lake Mead, hobble back to their Utah warehouse, and rebuild the fleet for the next trip. Then they’d go out and break everything all over again.

The learning curve was steep and painful. Gradually, however, Litton and his team began to unlock some of the mysteries of the river’s hydraulics. The key to it all, they eventually realized, lay in the arcane art of reading white water.

A
long the 277 miles that separate Lee’s Ferry from Lake Mead, the Colorado falls slightly more than one vertical mile, but half of this drop takes place inside roughly 160 discrete pockets of white water whose linear distance, when added together, amounts to less than 10 percent of the canyon’s length. This configuration, which is referred to as a pool-and-drop phenomenon, means that the river is composed of long, languorous stretches of tranquillity punctuated by intervals of unholy chaos. Those pockets of chaos are strewn along the entire length, but they tend to run in clusters. While a handful are located in the upper and lower parts of the canyon, the majority are clumped in an area known as the Upper Granite Gorge. Here, where the cliffs are almost vertical and the Vishnu schist is exposed, the river corridor narrows and the hydraulics can turn exceptionally violent. Within the gorge, the consequences of an accident grow geometrically.

One of the things a novice boatman realizes upon meeting white water for the first time is that the waves in a river are not at all like those in the ocean. The most salient difference is that in the ocean the water remains in a fixed position and the waves move in lateral pulses, almost always rhythmically, often predictably, and generally in more or less the same direction. On a river, precisely the opposite set of mechanics unfolds: the water moves downstream, while the primary hydraulic features of a rapid—eddies, whirlpools, and waves of all shapes and sizes—essentially remain fixed. Among many other consequences, this means that while ocean waves tend to be far larger than their riparian counterparts,
a stretch of white water on a fast-flowing river can achieve an explosiveness that is rarely encountered on the open sea. Another difference is that the obstacles on a river that must either be avoided or surmounted—rocks, tree limbs, complex bends, and irregular features of the shoreline that jut into the current—are often impossible to discern until one is virtually on top of them. And because the current is continuously hurtling downstream without a break or pause, even small errors are compounded with breathtaking speed by the instant and terrible force that the river can bring to bear on a boat in trouble. The challenge is perhaps best envisioned by trying to imagine being caught in the middle of an avalanche as it roars down the side of a mountain.

Among the many problematic features lurking within the interior of a rapid, perhaps the most treacherous is known as a hydraulic jump, or, in river runner’s parlance, a keeper hole. This is a crater that forms on the surface of the river as water races across the top of a submerged ledge or boulder. Large keeper holes can achieve formidable dimensions—sometimes up to thirty feet deep and fifteen feet wide—and they are often paired with an enormous stationary wave, or “haystack,” on their downstream edge that breaks back upon itself, and is thus constantly flushing anything buoyant—a raft, a wooden oar, a person wearing a life jacket—back into the hole in an endlessly recirculating swirl. It is a difficult thing to imagine without having seen it firsthand, but perhaps the most lucid expositor of this hydrodynamic phenomenon is the science writer David Quammen, who is also an expert kayaker. As Quammen explains it, a keeper hole is essentially “
a whirlpool laid on its side with its axis of rotation perpendicular to the main current—a cylinder of moving water that rotates continuously, like one of those giant spinning brushes at an automatic car wash.” For a rough approximation of how it feels to become entrapped in one, Quammen invites his readers to take a pass through the car wash while riding a bicycle.
^I

Although keeper holes often form the deadliest part of a rapid, a host of other features must also be navigated, including boils, laterals, cauldrons, eddy fences, rooster tails, and always, of course, boulders—some exposed but many others, often the deadliest, concealed just beneath the surface. All the river-running advice in the world cannot adequately prepare a person for his first encounter with truly gigantic white water: the ferocity of the noise and turbulence, the mosaic of whorls, the fugues of competing currents that follow separate
and unpredictable paths—colliding, snapping like the tail end of a whip, or diving straight to the bottom of the river, where they can scour out holes up to ninety feet deep inside the Grand Canyon. To a casual observer, the combined picture is one of total insanity, a raging mess of tangled lines, studded with rocks and drenched with spray that flies in every direction.

Each rapid, however, possesses an architecture of its own, and a skilled boatman is often able to scan and trace the layout as clearly as an electrician can interpret a circuit drawing—a talent that was captured best, perhaps, by Mark Twain, who was a skilled riverboat pilot long before he became a famous writer.
“The face of the water, in time, became a wonderful book—a book that was a dead language to the uneducated passenger, but which told its mind to me without reserve, delivering its most cherished secrets as clearly as if it uttered them with a voice,” Twain wrote in
Life on the Mississippi.
“And it was not a book to be read once and thrown aside, for it had a new story to tell every day.”