The Emerald Mile: The Epic Story of the Fastest Ride in History Through the Heart of the Grand Canyon (31 page)

He reached the Grand Wash Cliffs on April 4, five weeks to the day after he had started, and by his best reckoning, he had covered just under six hundred
miles. This was the first time in recorded history that a human being had traversed the entire length of the canyon, and although he would have been justified in calling a press conference or trumpeting his astonishing feat, he did neither—nor did he ever bother to publish a single word about what he had achieved. For him, it was sufficient that he had made good on his declaration that somebody needed to “do it right.”

Nevertheless, word leaked out within the guiding community, and for those who learned of Grua’s navigational tour de force, his disinterest in publicity or profit was almost as impressive as the hike itself, if not more so.

There was, however, one important task he felt he needed to complete before he could call the job finished. Later that spring, he returned to each of his food caches, where he retrieved his empty honey jars and packed them out, making sure to collect his old socks when he did so. He wasn’t willing to leave that sort of thing behind, even in a remote location that might never again be visited by another person. It would be poor style and just not right.

A
fter that, it was impossible to be on the river and not have heard about the Factor—although it could be hard to know exactly which portions of the stories being peddled about him were actually true and which were hype. Some people firmly believed that Grua had completed his marathon wearing nothing but flip-flops. Others insisted he had shunned modern footwear altogether and pulled the whole thing off in a pair of sandals modeled on what the Anasazi had worn. And another group declared that, no, he was actually naked the entire time.

It probably said as much about Grua as about the hike itself that all three versions of the story were completely believable. And so these tales took their place among what would eventually become an epic anthology of narrative hyperbole—anecdotes, yarns, whopping lies—that was recounted in the bars of river-guide towns from Flagstaff to Lewiston, and often what was even more entertaining than the stories themselves were the larger arguments they provoked over where the truth about Grua ended and the legend began. He was rumored, for example, to be the only doryman ever to have his boat flip upside down in one wave, then have a second wave flip him right side up so fast he was still at the oars. (True, and verified by witnesses.) There was another tale about how a wave had exploded beneath him in Lava Falls with enough force that the
Chattahoochee
had performed a double backflip. (Utterly false.) And one account suggested he had once saved himself from flipping by leaping over the shoulders of a passenger into the bow to counterbalance his boat. (Probably untrue, but still debated to this day.)

Hearing those stories, one had to speculate that, among many other things, Grua might be more than a little crazy. He wasn’t the sort of person who could simply be dismissed as a crackpot, but the tales provoked a compelling question: What the hell was it that drove him?

One possible answer resided in the notion that all of Grua’s achievements in the canyon—the six-hundred-mile solo traverse and the death-defying leap at Deer Creek and all the rest of his feats—may have been inspired by something considerably more complicated, and infinitely more treacherous, than simple lunacy.

Grua’s fascination with the smallest details of the world beneath the rim—his eagerness to test his skills against each of its features, as well as the unhinged exaltation that those trials evoked in his heart—was the hallmark of a man smitten by every facet and curve on the face of the river and the canyon that contained it. A man who, having permitted this place to seduce him so thoroughly, had become, in a literal and a symbolic sense, both its steward and prisoner. Therein, perhaps, lay the insight that unlocked an understanding of the complex torrent of forces that ran through the center of his soul.

There may well have been more sophisticated psychological explanations for who Grua was and what fueled him: the disruptions that a wrenching family move had inflicted on the mind of a twelve-year-old boy; the nagging insecurities of a man who had failed to finish college; even the possibility that he may have suffered from some sort of obsessive-compulsive disorder during an era when such afflictions lacked even a name. Ultimately, though, those theories were nothing more than bubbles. Like the Slot run at Lava Falls, they offered an ephemeral trail you could try to follow, but they were not the thing itself.

In the end, only one line cut smoothly through the confusion and contradictions that characterized Grua’s inflamed response to the Grand Canyon. As hokey as it may sound, he was in love. And the force of that love, a passion as wild and as turbulent as the river itself, was about to inspire in him a gesture that would connect his name to the river as indelibly as the dories themselves.

And so in time the rowboat and I became the same— like the archer and his bow or the artist and his paint.

—R
ICHARD
B
ODE

A
LTHOUGH
it was a given that everybody on Litton’s payroll was bewitched by wooden boats, no one came close to Grua’s obsessed fixation with the dories, and a large part of that fascination was rooted in intimacy. The dories rode closer to the surface of the water than any other craft, putting you in direct contact with the river—not only with its nuances and its quirks but also with the swelling powerhouse of its energy—in a way that simply wasn’t possible in a raft or a motor rig. And like all forms of intimacy, that closeness also made you vulnerable in ways that were both unnerving and seductive.

If you were at the helm of a motor rig or behind the oars of a rubber raft, you knew that regardless of what the river might try to do, you were probably going to muddle through one way or another, even if things got messy. But in a dory, you had to be on your toes every single second. If you failed for any reason to anticipate, to react, to assemble the proper sequence of moves—pivoting and squaring up in perfect sync with the waves and, above all and always, reading the current and going with the flow—you’d find yourself upside down in the blink of an eye. As Grua never tired of pointing out,
it took something extra to get a small wooden boat through, which not only called forth excellence but also injected an additional charge: a frisson of energy stemming from the awareness you were piloting an eggshell that could break into pieces.

For Grua, however, even that didn’t fully capture the essence of the dories’ magic, which lay in something he called touch. The dories simply felt different, and it wasn’t just a matter of their exquisite sensitivity, the alacrity of their responses to the shifting dynamics of the water. It was the feelings they transmitted to you, the subtle vibrations they were constantly broadcasting up through their hulls and their chines and the shafts of their oars. They were sort of like floating mandolins, delicate little instruments that vibrated in tune with the harmonics of the river at a frequency that was impossible for the ear to discern, but which you could sense in your forearms and your wrists and, most especially, in the palms of your hands. If you attuned closely enough and with your whole body, you realized that the boats were singing to you, and that the music they made wasn’t a by-product of white water alone. You could sense their music in the flat water as you slid back and forth across the laced and undulating patterns of light and shadow that shifted with a mysterious cadency known only to the river. You could even hear the music when you were asleep, rocking gently in the eddies at night.

For Grua, the dories were luminously alive in a way that no other kind of boat could be—and if that weren’t enough, there was also the spectacular bonus of what they could achieve inside the hydraulics when they were properly handled. Like the fact that if you arrowed out of a heavy eddy at just the right spot and with precisely the right angle, you could spear into the current and skim ten or twenty or even thirty feet across the river without taking a single stroke. Or the way you felt when you dove into the trough of a giant haystack such as, say, the #6 wave in Hermit—the way you could see the wave swelling and building and then opening for you, and if you had your bow square and everything was truly dialed, you would plunge down that trough and up the front side of the wave, and when you reached the crest, the boat would seem to just shoot into the sky. In that moment, it would feel as if the strings of gravity that were supposed to keep you tethered to the river had briefly parted and left you free, hanging on to your oars, for a delicious moment of pure weightlessness in which you were
actually flying.
And then, in the next instant, your bow would crash down over the top of the wave and you would head into the next sequence, up one crest and down another, on and on until you came out at the bottom, soaking wet and awash in the kind of giggling delirium you hadn’t tasted since you were twelve years old.

Grua was among the first to concede that to someone who had never rowed a dory, this probably sounded a bit infantile. But that didn’t make the appeal any less real, and the potency of that appeal achieved perhaps its most exuberant expression when he struggled to put his feelings into words and found his thoughts tumbling over themselves in a kind of jumbled poetry that mirrored the looping chaos of the water itself.

“You could do this until you died, and then you could get born again and do it another ten, twenty,
fifty
lifetimes,” he once exclaimed when his good friend Lew Steiger asked him to explain his feelings for the boats.
“You could do it straight through the year, all year long, and you’d never, ever get tired of doing it—
never
,” he said, laughing. “I mean, they’re too much fun to row down there. It’s the funnest thing there is to do, and you could never do anything else once you start doing them—and at least be happy. You might do something else because you felt
guilty
, because you weren’t really doing anything with your life, you know? But between them and being in the Grand Canyon? Yeah—you could just never do anything else once you start rowing dories. . . . It’s just like—
God
, there’s just nothing better. Once you’ve been in a dory, that’s it. And the only way to really know it is to do it. . . . It’d be the best thing if every boatman down there—every boatman that’s really a true boatman that loved the Grand Canyon, motorboatmen especially—could at least once—of course you can’t do it once!—could row a dory through the Grand Canyon.”

To Grua, it was
“the best drug in the world.” And thanks to that feeling, by the end of the 1970s he was perhaps the only boatman on the Colorado who could row a dory the way Louis Armstrong had once played the trumpet—with the kind of ferocity and joy that bordered on madness.

O
ther guides on the river possessed skills at the oars that certainly matched and may even have surpassed Grua’s. But almost everyone acknowledged that the Factor had something special, a feel for the boats that seemed to flow directly from the wellspring of his connection to the river and the canyon. He commanded an uncanny sense not only of what the dories could and could not do, but also of what they wanted to do—and unlike many of his colleagues, he relished taking risks to explore the outermost frontier of the boats’ potential. Although this often got him into trouble (he didn’t always have a golden trip), he was willing to push the limits further than anyone else, and this willingness took him to places few were prepared to follow. Especially when it came to the rapid that enthralled him most.

Of all the nasty pockets of white water on the Colorado, Crystal was Grua’s
favorite. He had come to the river only two years after the debris flow at Mile 98, so he and the rapid had become a part of the canyon together. He was fascinated by the way it linked together so many exceptionally challenging elements—the deceptive entry, the huge current, the massive hydraulics. But the main reason he found it so irresistible was that, unlike with Hance or Granite or Horn Creek or even Lava Falls, he was never able to find the master key to its secrets, the solution that would unlock all its doors.