The Emerald Mile: The Epic Story of the Fastest Ride in History Through the Heart of the Grand Canyon (29 page)

He wasn’t sure exactly how to approach the man in the frock, whose smoldering antipathy toward motor rigs was widely known. And in any case, Grua understood that he first needed to get some experience with an oar boat. So two seasons later, he told Ted Hatch that he was quitting and joined up with another outfit that rented out part of its boathouse to Martin Litton.

For the rest of that summer, Grua watched in fascination as Litton’s crews staggered off the water in boats covered in duct tape and then engaged in marathon repair sessions to get their battered dories ready for another go-around with Crystal, Lava, and the rest of the big rapids. The following spring, Grua strode across the warehouse and asked Litton for a job. The old man looked him over, hired him on the spot, and assigned him the
Chattahoochee
, an early knockoff of the
Emerald Mile.

G
rua’s new colleagues didn’t quite know what to make of him, but the thing they noticed first was the disproportion between his size and his strength. He was built like a wolverine, small and compact, but wired with quicksilver reflexes. He had small hands too, and when you watched him row, you could see that both of his thumbs were clubbed, a genetic condition that fortune-tellers call hammer thumb or murderer’s thumb. He barely weighed 135 pounds, but every square inch of tissue inside his skin was pure muscle, with not an ounce of fat anywhere on his body.

The dorymen also noticed that he didn’t sleep much, no more than four or five hours a night. If one of them awoke at 3:00 a.m., he would look over and see that Grua’s headlamp was on and he was reading a book in his hammock, or rattling around in his boat, or quietly strumming on his guitar, or flossing his teeth. During the day, however, Grua had plenty of energy to power through the long hours of labor—the rowing and the scouting, the rigging and the loading, and the hundred-odd other tasks that made up a boatman’s day. He was constantly gathering the clients together and leading them off on epic hikes up to spectacular vantage points high above the river or deep into the countless tributaries that branched off the river corridor. Once, when a river trip chartered by a group of alumni from Yale drank up all the booze within the first three days of their trip, Grua volunteered to hoof it all the way up to the South Rim for a resupply. He returned the following day, toting a backpack stuffed with $240 worth of hard liquor.

His colleagues noticed too that he understood the boats—their strengths as well as their limitations. This was as clear in the repair shop as it was on the river, and it was equally evident that he was good at reading water. Even though he often lagged behind the other guides when they pulled over to scout an upcoming rapid—usually because he was fixing something on his boat or explaining some aspect of geology or botany or hydrology to one of the passengers—they would hold off on forming a plan until he had arrived.

“Let’s wait for the little man,” someone would suggest, “and see what he has to say.”

What the dorymen noticed more than anything else, though, was Grua’s consuming fascination with the canyon. He was spellbound by the way it seemed so timeless and so eternal, yet also provided what he called
“an instant flash picture” of how the earth had been formed. He couldn’t seem to get enough of the place, and he regarded each journey as unique, except in one crucial respect: when it was over, he simply couldn’t wait to get back to Lee’s Ferry and start the whole thing all over. Each time he went through the canyon, the
list of places he absolutely had to explore and the things he urgently needed to experience—a cool new cave he’d spotted here, a drainage he had yet to check out there, a special little grotto that, granted, he’d already visited half a dozen times but simply couldn’t wait to show to yet another group of clients—grew longer and more compelling in a way that left him simultaneously bewitched and insatiate.
“It just seems like it’s going to go on forever and then—
boom
—it’s over,” he would grumble at the end of yet another three-week trip. “I want to do this again!”

Those were things his coworkers found endearing. But many other aspects of his personality also drove them nuts—in particular, the feverish intensity with which Grua insisted on flinging himself into each and every task to which he applied himself, oblivious to the needs of those around him. At 8:00 a.m., when the gear was stowed and the passengers were aboard the boats, expectant and eager, one might well look over and discover that Grua had emptied out his hatches and that every square inch of the
Chattahoochee
’s decking was stacked with tin cans, coils of rope, rubber dry bags, and sundry pieces of gear. When you asked him when he thought he might be ready to launch, he’d exclaim that he’d woken up in the middle of the night with a sensational new idea about how to redistribute the cargo in his boat so that the trim—the lateral balance—would be radically improved, and he was so excited by the possibilities that he needed to test the program
right now.
Two hours later, he’d have everything rearranged and pronounce himself good to go.

That intensity might have been less annoying—after all, each of the other dorymen had quirks of his own—if Grua hadn’t been such an incorrigible evangelist. An outgrowth of his fervency, they discovered, was his conviction that there was an absolutely right way and an absolutely wrong way to do absolutely everything. He had rules about how you should boil the water for coffee in the morning, and rules about how to make a proper scarf cut when you were replacing a fractured side panel on a smashed boat. He had rules about the kind of wood you should collect for the evening campfire, where that fire should be built, and what needed to be done with the coals the following morning. Grua took it upon himself to codify those rules, and having done so, he then judged both himself and everyone else by the standards he had framed.

Most of the dorymen acknowledged that many of these rules were actually quite good. But Grua was never satisfied with outlining them just once, especially when he could hammer the point home by repeating the thing six or seven times. If he had something on his mind, he’d come up, look you straight in the eye, and keep telling you and telling you. And when he was finally done pounding his lesson home, you knew you’d have to listen to the very same homily
all over again later that afternoon or the following morning or sometime next Tuesday when he decided to return to the subject.

What made all of this doubly onerous was that Grua’s rules were constantly being improved and revised. Whatever tack he was on was the right way, the
only
way, and he would preach its virtues until something shifted and he realized that, no, the answer lay elsewhere. Then he’d march off in the opposite direction. Like the fierce winds that swept upstream through the canyon each April, his standards were subject to change without warning. Coffee was one of his fixations, but then, all of a sudden, he was off it and passionately inveighing against the perils of caffeine. When he somehow got the notion that using a toothbrush was damaging the enamel on his teeth, he threw it away and spent about a year cleaning his teeth by rinsing them with water. Then he abandoned that idea and focused instead on food, restricting his diet to protein shakes and eventually becoming a vegetarian.

In many ways, Grua seemed to approach not only his standards of behavior but his entire personality like an endless boat-repair project: modifying this or tweaking that, adding a new feature here or replacing one there, occasionally rolling up his sleeves and pulling everything apart for a complete overhaul. You could wake up one morning and find his language or his demeanor almost unrecognizable, and the new configuration would mean that you had to make some adjustments in your approach—the techniques you used to handle him. In that sense, he was a lot like the rapids of the canyon.

On the other hand, some things about him never changed. In the mornings, no one was more solicitous of the passengers than Grua. He would wake before dawn and, regardless of whether he was on kitchen duty or not, brew coffee and then pad silently through camp, leaving a hot cup next to everyone’s sleeping bag.
“He’s the most considerate person I know,” Wally Rist once said of him. “Kenton is a gentleman.”

Despite such benevolence, however, Grua’s dramatic, high-stakes, all-or-nothing demeanor could be abrasive and enervating. Even those who admired him most acknowledged that, at times, being around the man was downright exhausting. On any given day, half the folks in Litton’s outfit were convinced that Grua was God’s gift to the Grand Canyon, while the other half wanted his hide nailed to the boathouse wall. The park rangers found him especially insufferable, and nearly everyone tired of his single-minded tenacity and relentless sermonizing.
“Christ, he could be impossible,” recalls a boatman who worked with him for years. “We got into some arguments back in the seventies that my head
still
hurts from.”

In the end, however, everyone conceded that Grua presented a complex combination of qualities that were charming, maddening, and utterly impossible
to ignore. Sooner or later everybody in the canyon—those who loved him, those who couldn’t stand him, and the large group in the middle that swung back and forth between those two extremes—eventually came to the same conclusion. Frequently inspiring, sometimes insane, always exasperating, Kenton Grua was a man with no antecedent: a Grand Canyon original who injected a uniquely wild-ass variable into the river equation that, like it or not, you simply had to factor in whenever he was around.

Hence, the name by which he came to be known.

I
f you spent any time working with the Factor, it wasn’t long before you could discern contrary elements of his character that were mirrored in the terrain itself, which may have helped to explain why he was endlessly measuring and testing himself against the canyon’s myriad challenges. High above Deer Creek Falls, for example, there was a gap between two cliffs of Tapeats sandstone whose width seemed just beyond the ability of a human being to jump across. One summer, he decided to give the leap a shot—and barely succeeded, cheating certain death by clawing at the opposing wall with his fingernails to prevent himself from toppling backward into the abyss. Once, for no reason other than that it seemed like an elegant thing to do, he decided to see if it was possible to row an entire trip without taking his oar blades out of the water. A few years later, he scaled a vertical face of limestone to reach a precarious footbridge that the Anasazi had constructed more than six hundred feet above the river. Then, at a place called Elves Chasm, he decided it would be fun to see if he could ascend and descend a series of rock ledges and tight vertical passages along a chain of waterfalls without using his hands.

Those stunts may have seemed pointless, but they spoke to something at the center of who Grua was, and to the forces that drove him. He wanted to know and experience the canyon in its entirety—not simply the river or the rimrock or the trails in between, but the grand whole of the thing. What’s more, he was determined to touch that essence as directly as possible, with the soles of his feet and the palms of his hands. This meant that, with time, he fostered a deeper relationship with the canyon than almost anyone else—scrambling along ledges and cliffs that no river guide would ever tread while developing a connection with the boats and the white water that no hiker, ranger, or naturalist would ever feel. Those around him saw clearly that he considered the canyon as necessary and essential as the air he breathed.

Perhaps the most eloquent expression of this addiction was that Grua so often acted as the canyon’s self-appointed custodian and caretaker. At the end of a long day, when the rest of his colleagues were draped wearily across their decks,
beers in hand, watching the light fade as the curtain of darkness came down the walls, they’d glance over and see Grua hard at work on some new project—building a stone cairn to mark an obscure trailhead, or shoveling a sand beach that the river was eroding, or pruning back the branches of a tamarisk tree that was offending his sense of the view. When they watched him perform those tasks, they speculated that perhaps Grua had become trapped in the emotional facsimile of a keeper hole. In those moments, it was evident to everyone that his feelings for the canyon were so potent that the current of his emotions had curled back on itself, reversing energy and direction and recirculating with such fury that neither Grua nor anyone else had the faintest idea whether he belonged to the canyon or the canyon belonged to him—or whether both things were true in a way that encompassed, in all the wonder and fearsomeness of the word, the full meaning of
possessed.