The Emerald Mile: The Epic Story of the Fastest Ride in History Through the Heart of the Grand Canyon (19 page)

Responding to this accelerating demand, new commercial outfitters began springing up almost overnight. Within a few years, twenty companies had obtained guiding permits from the National Park Service, and every one of
those outfitters was experimenting with some form of rubberized raft, many with outboard motors attached to the back. Each company had its own theory about the best way to put together these contraptions—the size, the rigging, the style of frame—and the results were as varied as the layers of rock in the canyon walls. Some suspended their engines from wood frames that extended off the back of army-surplus bridge pontoons, oval-shaped tubes that had enabled George Patton’s armored tank divisions to race over the rivers of France and Germany in their drive toward Berlin. These were known as tail-draggers. Others preferred tying three or four pontoons together lengthwise, which were called J-rigs or snouts, depending on how they were lashed, and could fit up to thirty people. Another popular option was a smaller, sixteen-foot raft equipped with a single set of oars that was capable of carrying five passengers, plus several hundred pounds of supplies. Each outfitter was convinced that his setup was the best, and perhaps the only thing everyone could agree on was that the era of the small, hard-hulled boat was over. Rubber was the future, wood a thing of the past.

Martin Litton stepped into this scene during the summer of 1969, shortly after deciding that he was fed up with writing stories on family-travel vacations for
Sunset
magazine. Having quit in a huff and then realizing, somewhat belatedly, that he now had to find another way to make a living, he concluded that the logical move—at least for now, he told his wife—was to use his trio of wooden dories to build his own commercial guiding company in the canyon. Characteristically, he made his entrance with a splash.

That summer marked the centennial of Powell’s pioneering voyage, and Litton decided to commemorate it by re-creating the bulk of the Major’s trip, launching above Dinosaur National Monument and running all the way to the Grand Wash Cliffs. The dories were temporarily renamed after Powell’s boats, and at every stop, Litton disappeared into the bushes to paste a set of fake whiskers to his face and don a nineteenth-century black frock and hat. Tucking his right arm under the coat and pinning the empty sleeve to the lapel, he made his way down the river in stages, shuttling the boats around the dams and reservoirs, giving speeches, and happily hamming it up for the newspaper photographers and reporters who flocked to cover the spectacle. After leapfrogging down the Green and the upper Colorado, he spent most of August in the Grand Canyon. When the entourage reached the Grand Wash Cliffs on August 30, the date that Powell and his starving crew had completed their journey, Grand Canyon Dories was officially launched.

To say that Litton’s boats offered a less than ideal platform for a commercial river company during this new era of white-water travel was something of an understatement. His dories were incapable of carrying more than four
passengers, which put them at a disadvantage with the large, motorized rafts that could ferry five or six times as many people down the canyon at more than twice the speed. Even more problematic, Litton’s boats had a tendency to break if they got anywhere near a rock, often requiring extensive and time-consuming repairs. But something about their history and their shape had seduced him, and to fully appreciate the depth of his infatuation, one needed to know a little about where those boats came from and how they had evolved.

W
hen he’d first encountered the dories in Oregon seven years earlier, Litton had learned that their story was murky and the subject of some rather contentious debate. One version argued that they were
part of a tradition that reached back to medieval Europe, where they were invented by Portuguese fishermen, then adapted by maritime communities throughout Britain and Scandinavia. Others argued that they had been developed in America by a Massachusetts boatwright named Simeon Lowell in the late 1700s, and were later adopted by New England cod fishermen for use in the North Atlantic, especially off the Grand Banks. The rivermen of the McKenzie rejected all of that history, however, and defiantly insisted that they had invented the things themselves, right there in Oregon, tailoring the boats to the unique conditions of their home waters to the point where, in the 1920s and 1930s, they became the favorite fishing vessel of celebrities such as Clark Gable, Babe Ruth, Winston Churchill, and Ginger Rogers. And perhaps that was the case—although it’s much more likely that all three versions of the story contained a kernel of truth. As with many designs of practical value, variations of the craft may well have arisen spontaneously in different places, with each group of inventors borrowing ideas and deriving inspiration from elsewhere. What no one could dispute, however, was that something about the boats was rather magical.

Thanks to their toughness and durability, the dories of New England were famously capable of absorbing a ferocious beating. Cheap, unpretentious, and dependable, they were the Missouri mules and the Ford pickup trucks of their day. The McKenzies, by contrast, were fragile and demanded great dexterity to avoid being smashed to pieces. But regardless of where they came from, they all shared the same mysterious property, which was that their profile was deeply pleasing to the human eye. For reasons that no one could quite put his or her finger on, the little boats evoked passion and loyalty among everyone who built, rowed, or simply looked at them.

Despite differing theories about why these craft added up to more than the sum of their parts, an unspoken consensus held that the dories’ charm was rooted in the blending of three elements: simplicity, balance, and ruthless
reductionism. These qualities fused into an austere beauty not unlike the effect that the Shaker cabinetmakers strove to achieve—and maybe too the Shinto-temple builders of Japan. Like the very best products of human craftsmanship—indeed, like all small objects that have been fashioned with great care from humble materials—the boats were charged with the power of honesty, composure, and time. They embodied a peculiar kind of perfection that gave pleasure to anyone who admired that narrow strip of ground where utility and art converge—an allure that was captured best by John Gardner, a naval architect from Massachusetts, who was the foremost historian of this craft. “
There must be something about dories that intrigues people,” Gardner wrote. “The sweet lines of some of them all but took my breath when I saw them for the first time, out of the water in all their naked elegance. I reveled in their good looks and desired them as much for their beauty as for their use.”

This notion offers perhaps the finest encapsulation of why Litton was determined to stick with his wooden boats, despite their impracticalities. At the end of that first summer, Grand Canyon Dories was—and would remain—the only commercial outfitter to guide the Colorado exclusively in dories.

S
omewhat to Litton’s and everyone else’s surprise, the dories were an immediate hit with the passengers, and as word leaked out, more and more people began telephoning his house in California to ask about booking a trip for the following summer. They were partly drawn by the connections to the past—the notion that while every other outfitter was embracing new technology and design, Litton’s outfit harkened back to the earliest river runners. But an equal measure of the attraction stemmed from aesthetics. While rubber rafts were considerably more resilient and far easier to manage, they could be downright ugly. Fat, bulbous, and squishy, they lacked the dories’ elegance and grace, qualities that were further enhanced by Litton’s decision to paint each of the boats in the same colors—red, white, and turquoise—which supported the primary hues of the canyon, and they fit in beautifully. He also inaugurated a tradition of naming every craft after a natural wonder that, in his view, had heedlessly been ruined by the hand of man—
“to remind us of places we’ve destroyed without any necessity,” he would bark to anyone who inquired, “so that maybe we’ll think twice before we do it again.”

Litton’s original dory, the
Portola
, was thus renamed the
Diablo Canyon
in honor of a pristine stretch of California coastline where
the Sierra Club had lost a bitter battle in 1968 to prevent the construction of a nuclear power plant atop an earthquake fault. P. T. Reilly’s old boat, the
Suzie Too
, was likewise rechristened. Her new name, the
Music Temple
, commemorated
one of the many gemlike features inside Glen Canyon that now lay submerged beneath the waters of Lake Powell. They were followed by the
Hetch Hetchy
(Yosemite’s sister valley, drowned by a dam in 1914), the
Diamondhead
(the volcanic crater in Waikiki whose interior serves as a US military reserve), and the
Malibu Canyon
, a hidden pocket in the Santa Monica Mountains that had been Litton’s favorite spot in the world before it was marred by a commuter highway.

The other outfitters had no idea what to make of all this. A man stubborn or foolish enough to reject improvements in order to wallow in the past was clearly out of his mind. But as the phone continued to ring, Litton found that each winter he had to expand the size of his fleet by making repeated dashes up to Oregon to order additional batches of boats. By now he had broken with his original boatbuilder, who was unable to keep up with production demands, and shifted over to a gifted boatwright named Jerry Briggs, who lived in the little town of Grants Pass along the banks of the Rogue River. With each new order, Litton and Briggs strove to improve their design, parsing which features didn’t seem to be working and often brainstorming their way through the solutions by
scratching makeshift blueprints in the sand next to Briggs’s driveway with sticks. They tweaked the rocker back and forth. They made adjustments to the length and the beam. They tinkered with the height of the bow and the angle of the flare, juggling elements back and forth until finally, in the summer of 1971, Briggs nailed it.

The boat he wheeled out of his shop was sixteen and a half feet long from bowpost to stern, with side panels fashioned from quarter-inch, marine-grade plywood and braces made of aromatic Port Orford cedar. Briggs had reduced the flare on the sides, and crucially, he had dampened the rocker amidships so that the middle of the bottom of the boat was virtually flat, and only the bow and the stern had an upward rake.
He also straightened the chine, the corner along the length of the hull where the sides and the bottom come together, and he adjusted the freeboard amidships, so that the oar handles rested at the perfect ergonomic position—halfway between the boatman’s belly and his chest—for pulling a stroke.

The changes were subtle, but their effect was noticeable the moment the boat was placed on the river. The chine now acted as a kind of keel, helping to keep the hull parallel to the direction of the river current. This enabled her to track, building the momentum she needed to catapult over the biggest hydraulics, while the upward kick on her stern and bow enabled her to pivot on a hot dime. The prow was high enough to split all but the largest standing waves, while the watertight decking easily shed the hundreds of gallons of water that came rushing over the sides. Most important, she achieved a balance of
geometry—a blending of ballast, beam, and the angle of her oars—that simply felt right.

Thanks to that equilibrium, she was capable of catching every nuance of the current and responding instantly to changing conditions inside a rapid. Unlike the rafts and the motor rigs or the generations of wooden boats that had preceded her, she didn’t plow piggishly through the waves, but instead seemed to dance over them. As she planed across the surface of the river, breaking the water into a series of interlocked, V-shaped ripples, she achieved a bewitching visual alchemy, almost if she were suspended partly on the surface of the river and—through some ineffable trick of her rocker, her rake, and her radiance—partly on the air itself. She was unlike anything else that had ever been seen on the Colorado.