The Emerald Mile: The Epic Story of the Fastest Ride in History Through the Heart of the Grand Canyon (28 page)

I
n July of that year, the Slot was wide-open, and the key that unlocked its entry was a narrow and continuously wriggling line of jade-colored water at the top of the rapid that squeezed through a small gap between the right-hand boulder garden and the keeper hole in the center. The trick was to allow your boat to drift down this tongue with the bow pointing slightly left and, at exactly the right moment, pull sharply on your right oar to pivot into the slower water and kill your momentum. A boatman who executed this move properly would emerge from the top of the rapid dry and happy, then find himself run through a sequence of enormous whaleback-shaped tail waves at the bottom. If you missed the entry for any reason, however, you would find yourself at the mercy of a complex series of events whose sequence and details didn’t matter much because you were totally hosed. Which is exactly what happened to the
Emerald Mile
on the afternoon of July 23, when Stevie Sperm tried to follow Regan Dale and the rest of the boatmen through that narrow little keyhole.

Dalton was just a few feet to the right of where he needed to be, but that was enough. Instead of riding the magic carpet through the center, he was rudely hurled into the V-wave, a mountain of water created by two standing waves that crash continuously into each other. Here the river gathered itself into a fist and delivered a roundhouse punch straight over his bow, a haymaker of frigid water whose arrival felt like a truckload of wet cement. As Dalton’s decks and footwells were swamped, the boat reeled helplessly under the shocking weight of more than two tons of water, then flipped—at which point the backside of the V-wave harpooned him straight into a murderous vortex along the right shore known as the Corner Pocket. When the Corner Pocket got its claws around the
Emerald Mile
, it began drilling the dory around and around, and with each rotation the boat was smashed into the side of a giant chunk of basalt called the
Black Rock, a series of crashes that swiftly began to dismember her piece by piece.

Dale, who had skated through without a hitch, was now tucked into a quiet eddy at the bottom of the rapid and thus unable to see what was happening upstream. But when he caught sight of several pieces of plywood with beryl-green paint bobbing down the river, he knew exactly what had happened and raced back along the shoreline to help. Unfortunately, he and the other guides could do little except gather on the tilted surface of the Black Rock and shout encouragement to Dalton, who was now clinging to the stern as he and the boat were repeatedly slammed against the side of the rock.

On one of those passes, Dalton made a grab for the rock and was pulled to safety. But the hapless dory continued to circle, ramming into the rock again and again, losing another chunk with each crashing gyration. The punishment continued without letup for at least twenty minutes—by which time the eddy was awash with shattered pieces of plywood—until Dale and the rest of the crew finally latched on to her carcass, levered her out of the water, and carried her bodily over the top of the Black Rock.

When they stepped back to assess the devastation, she barely resembled a boat. The stern was more or less intact, but her entire bow had been obliterated. The gunwales and bowpost were gone. Her front hatches were smashed or missing, and the front portion of her hull looked as if it had been lopped off by a drunken logger with a chain saw. Remarkably—and this was perhaps the most eloquent testament to the
Emerald Mile
’s resiliency and spirit—she could still float, largely thanks to the watertight hatches amidships and in her stern.

After taking stock of the disaster, the crew broke open the repair kits and got to work. They brought what was left of her side panels together across the front seat and anchored the ends together with baling wire. Then they started in with the duct tape, reinforcing the wire and closing up as many gaps as possible. When they were through, there was no question of applying a coat of paint or touching up her logo—she was now little more than a marginally buoyant piece of trash. The challenge was to devise a way of simply getting her down the river and out of the canyon.

Dalton, who had cracked several ribs when he was caught between the rock and boat during one of the brutal collisions, was in no condition to row. So after every piece of cargo had carefully been lifted from the hatches and transferred to other boats, her oars were handed to Rudi Petschek, a guide who had been on her maiden voyage back in the summer of 1971. While Dalton huddled in her stern, cradling his chest, Petschek applied himself to the delicate task of rowing her, backward, toward the end of the canyon.

The journey took three days and was touch and go the entire way. Under Dale’s watchful eye, Petschek cheated every riffle between Lava Falls and the Grand Wash Cliffs, hugging the shore wherever possible and doing his best to dance between the waves. His toes and feet were awash in water the entire time, and at several points he was convinced that the boat was on the verge of sinking. Through perseverance and skill, however, he nursed her through—entirely oblivious to how the dory’s saga was far from over and that he, along with Steve Reynolds up in distant Idaho, was ordained to play a key part in her final, as yet unwritten, chapter.

When they pulled into Pierce Ferry, the wreckage of what had once been the
Emerald Mile
was hoisted onto the back of Big Blue, the truck they used for transporting the dories, and Dale’s weary crew started the long drive back to Hurricane. Along the way, they debated what to do with the boat, eventually conceding that the most sensible thing was
to haul her off to the town garbage dump and give her a “Viking funeral”—setting her on fire, then pushing her off the back of the truck and into the rubbish pile. This, they all agreed, would offer a fitting farewell for what had once been the fairest member of their fleet—an homage to the seminal role she had played in the evolution of the dories and, simultaneously, a concession to perhaps the deepest and most sobering of the canyon’s many lessons: that all earth’s children—those whom she neglects and those whom she loves the most—are destined for oblivion. In the face of that truth, nothing was more practical or more poetic than consigning her to the flames.

So that was the plan. But when Big Blue finally pulled into the boatyard in Hurricane, a man everyone called the Factor stepped forward, cast his eye over what was left of the little boat, and declared that he had a better idea.

And in a single stroke, everything changed.

I.
In the years to come, a number of these women would demolish Litton’s prejudices by matching or surpassing the best among their male counterparts, eventually emerging as some of the finest guides in the canyon.

If a man is to be obsessed by something,

I suppose a boat is as good as anything,

perhaps a bit better than most.

—E. B. W
HITE

Kenton Grua and his dory

“And you really live by the river? What a jolly life!”

“By it and with it and on it and in it,” said the Rat. . . . “It’s my world, and I don’t want any other. What it hasn’t got is not worth having, and what it doesn’t know is not worth knowing.”

—K
ENNETH
G
RAHAME
,
The Wind in the Willows

A
MONG
the many odd members of Litton’s crew, perhaps the most unusual was
an eccentric and contrarian boatman who had mastered the art of Grand Canyon river running at the throttle of a motor rig before converting to the science of oars, who loved the rocks as deeply as he adored the water, and who, despite his upbringing in the astringent faith of Brigham Young, harbored an abiding fondness for top-notch reefer as well as Kessler, a bottom-shelf brand of hooch so cheap it was mostly sold in plastic bottles.

By the age of twenty-nine, Kenton Grua was so bald that his skull looked like a wind-blasted billiard ball, yet his shoulders supported a peltry of back hair that could have doubled as a shag rug. He was so short that he barely cleared five foot six on tiptoe, but his personality was large enough to generate its own weather. He was stubborn and combative and intensely playful; fiercely self-righteous and enormously sensitive to the needs of others; often inspiring, frequently ornery, never punctual, endlessly original, chronically cross-grained, and almost invariably a colossal pain in the ass. The cocktail of traits he presented was complex enough to evoke intense anger, weary exasperation, and
genuine love—in equal measure, and often within the same instant—from the dory rats in whose midst he lived and worked for most of his thirty-three years on the Colorado.

Something insane, absurd, and at times a little frightening lurked in the depths of passion that Grua nurtured for the river and the dories. But a hint of something singular, a whiff of the extraordinary, wafted off the surface of those fixations too. More than anything, perhaps, he stood as an exemplar of the obsessions that can spontaneously ignite the tinder of a man’s soul and then race like a wildfire through the upper branches of his spirit when he decides to surrender the entirety of himself, unconditionally and without reservation, to the narrow and seductive world at the bottom of the canyon.

He was born in Salt Lake City in the summer of 1950 and spent his first eleven years in the citadel of Mormondom, although the primary altars of worship that held his interest were the ski slopes in the Wasatch Mountains just outside the city. The year he turned twelve, his family pulled up stakes and moved 175 miles east to Vernal, a high-desert town in the northeastern corner of the state, where his father was starting up a small trucking company that specialized in hauling freight to the isolated outposts of Wyoming, Utah, and western Colorado. Cupped in the shadow of the Uinta Mountains and perched less than fifteen miles from the point where the Green River flows through Dinosaur National Monument, Vernal was remote, tight-knit, and deeply self-contained—the kind of place where if a man dislocated his shoulder after getting tangled up with his horse, it was written up in the newspaper. In Grua’s eyes, Vernal’s chief deficiency was that it lacked access to good skiing, and he initially disliked the place so much that when his birthday finally arrived, his father decided that his son needed not one present, but two: a ten-speed bicycle and a river trip.

They hired on with a local outfitter owned by two brothers, Ted and Don Hatch, who ran large motor rigs all along the Green and the Colorado, and whose head boatman, Shorty Burton, was a gifted and generous guide. Burton, who had four children of his own, took the boy under his wing as they floated down the Yampa to its confluence with the Green at Echo Park, the place that had so enchanted both Powell and Litton. By the end of the trip, having learned how to bake biscuits in a Dutch oven and having been given his first chance to row, Grua was utterly hooked. Later, when his father purchased an old army-surplus raft, he began disappearing on solo trips that took him through Lodore, Desolation, Split Mountain Gorge, and the rest of the canyons along the upper Green and the Yampa. By the time he graduated from high school, Grua was a full-fledged boatman.

The year he turned eighteen, he was given the opportunity to build the sort of life whose arc would probably have taken him far from Vernal and its rivers when Utah senator Wallace Bennett nominated him to compete with eighteen other candidates for a spot at the US Naval Academy in Annapolis. Failing to win the selection, he headed off to Salt Lake City to attend the University of Utah, where he intended to study mechanical engineering. But at the end of his first semester when he returned home for Christmas break, he had a chat with Ted Hatch about the possibility of working as a river guide the following summer in the Grand Canyon. When Hatch asked if he was available to start the following week, Grua immediately said yes, quit school, and signed on.

His first training run was in March of 1969, and on the very next trip he was in charge of his own rig, a set of thirty-three-foot bridge pontoons with a frame made from two-by-sixes and equipped with a twenty-horsepower Mercury outboard engine that hung off the back. Hatch was then one of the largest outfitters in the canyon, and the ten-day trips he ran in those tail-draggers were fast and highly profitable. They were also exciting, especially for the guides. The tail-draggers were long and highly flexible, and if you smashed through a large standing wave or plunged into a hole, the stern could kick up with enough force to catapult you straight over the bow. To prevent this, the Hatch boatmen lashed themselves to their sterns like rodeo riders. Grua was thrilled by the action, but what really caught his attention during that first summer, and what stayed with him later, had no connection with the motor rigs he was riding.

Sometime in August, he whisked past a pod of wooden boats led by an imposing figure in a black, nineteenth-century frock who was pretending to be John Wesley Powell. Those boats were graceful and intriguing, and the moment Grua spotted them, he knew he had to find a way to get himself into the driver’s seat of one.