The Emerald Mile: The Epic Story of the Fastest Ride in History Through the Heart of the Grand Canyon (32 page)

Over the years, the search for that cipher had taken Grua on some strange journeys. In the midseventies, he and a handful of his colleagues got it into their heads that somewhere deep inside the Big Hole lurked an invisible seam where something abnormal was taking place. That hole had a spine running through the middle of it, with water rooster-tailing off to the side in both directions, and at that one spot, according to the theory, several teaspoons of current were passing smoothly through the vortex and over the haystack behind it. If a guide could put the center of his bowpost into that exact spot at precisely the right angle with pitch-perfect momentum, the boat might simply whoosh through the tourbillion and materialize, intact, on the downstream side of the hole. (Basically, this was the equivalent of the Slot run at Lava Falls, but even more mysterious and phantasmal.) Unlike the rest of the dorymen, however, Grua was also convinced that, with enough practice, an oarsman could perform this trick not just once, but every single time, a hypothesis that he set out to test by repeatedly attempting to drive the
Chattahoochee
straight through the worst part of the Big Hole.

In addition to some spectacular wipeouts, this had produced
a sequence of ferocious arguments between Grua and Regan Dale, who was in charge of most of the expeditions on which Grua pursued this quest, and who also had an exceptionally complicated relationship with the Factor. Having joined the company the same year, each man was the other’s oldest friend; but because they had taken fundamentally different approaches to rowing dories, they were also rivals and, where their visions collided, adversaries. Dale had polished his style of steely minimalism and finesse to near perfection, partly because it suited his personality and partly because it represented, in his view, the most responsible way to handle dangerous white water when the lives of passengers were in his hands. In Dale’s eyes, the demented experiments that Grua was conducting inside Crystal not only violated his sense of guiding ethics but also challenged his authority as the TL, and it incensed him.

Kenton, these people aren’t our guinea pigs—we’re responsible for their safety, Dale would exclaim, outraged that Grua’s runs required him to persuade at least one passenger to accompany him to counterbalance the boat. Those passengers, Dale would point out, had signed on with Litton’s company in the
belief that they were likely to emerge alive at the bottom of the canyon because the boatmen actually knew what the hell they were doing.

Grua couldn’t have cared less. On one trip when Dale had flat out forbidden him to solicit volunteers among the dory clients, Grua planted himself at the little harbor at the top of Crystal and beseeched those on other river trips until he found someone to ride shotgun with him. What bothered Dale even more than the insolence and the insubordination was the ego behind these games. What made Grua think it was acceptable to put the lives of other people in danger like that? Dale would demand, still angry at the recollection many years later.
How could he have been so selfish?

What Dale could neither comprehend nor condone was that although safety was a genuine concern for Grua—who generally did his best to protect the welfare of his passengers—this was ultimately superseded by two things that mattered even more to him: his curiosity and his sense of wonder. In his mind, Crystal justified the risks he was courting, both to himself and to others, because it confronted him with the same allure that an equation holds for mathematicians when it refuses to yield up a neat and elegant solution. What’s more, the possibility that there simply might not have
been
a solution to Crystal’s conundrum only deepened Grua’s fascination, perhaps because he found this notion to be so simultaneously grotesque and so sublime. Crystal beguiled him because it threatened to undermine the principle that a river possesses inherent symmetry and coherence, thereby raising the heretical possibility that a dory’s magic might not, in all circumstances, enable it to merge with the mysterious mechanics of white water. Yet, in committing this offense, Crystal also offered up some compellingly graphic testimony to the notion that the river and the canyon conformed to their own definitions of symmetry and coherence—and that perhaps those principles could never truly be understood or controlled by anyone.

The tension between these competing truths meant that Grua simply found it impossible to let Crystal go. To him, it was the single greatest unsolved puzzle on the river, a riddle whose answer always seemed to lie just beyond his reach. When it came to the dories themselves, however, most problems surrendered to his persistence. And it was in this arena more than any other—the black arts of designing, building, and improving wooden boats—that he made his most lasting contributions.

The innovations that Grua conceived transformed Litton’s outfit in ways both large and small. Some of his ideas were rather absurd, such as the notion of stuffing air bags into the bow and the stern of a dory to render the boat unflippable. But many of the schemes he concocted were quite brilliant. It was Grua’s idea to teach passengers to “high-side” vigorously when a dory was out of kilter
in the big waves, thereby preventing innumerable flips. He came up with the notion of using a sawed-off oar shaft in the footwell as a brace so you could hook your toes around it and gain leverage while rowing, and he was the first to employ inflatable tubes for rolling dories onto and off a beach.

It was also Grua who invented the technique for righting upside-down boats in midstream instead of pulling them onto the rocks at the side of the river. He developed an elegant system for waterproofing the hatches using aluminum channels and piping that ran through the boat, which kept supplies dry. In his boldest experiments, he modified the entire concept of rowing, first by designing a dory with a sliding seat like an Olympic rowing shell, then later (and most radically) by building another boat with a deep footwell and raised oarlocks so that he could row while standing up. Most of his colleagues dismissed this as ludicrous. But on certain stretches of the river he could row circles around the rest of the crew.

The list of his contributions was endless, and in addition to his design and performance innovations, no one had a better sense than Grua of the best ways to repair damaged boats. If you came off the river with a smashed chine or a hole in your stern, you turned to the Factor for advice. He was a wizard in the boathouse, able to tear a boat apart and put it back together better than almost anyone else, and his skills as a carpenter were unrivaled. So it seemed somehow fitting and right that when Regan Dale’s crew pulled into Hurricane during the last week of July 1977 hauling the mess that used to be the
Emerald Mile
, the Factor stepped out from behind the boathouse, put his hands on his hips, and announced that there wasn’t going to be a Viking funeral.

Instead, Grua intended to gather up what was left of the stricken dory, put her back together, then take her for his own. And like everything else he set his mind to, that’s precisely what he did.

F
or a man whose passions raced like wildfire, the Factor was oddly slow, especially when he was solving problems. His willingness to stick with something until the job was done, moving methodically and refusing to be rushed, could be both exasperating and deeply impressive. If the rig truck broke down in the middle of the desert on the way to Lee’s Ferry because of some complicated electrical snafu that no one, including Grua himself, had the faintest idea how to fix, the Factor would disappear under the dashboard, carefully tracing the wires while everyone else stood around wondering if it wouldn’t make more sense to start hiking to a pay phone. Three hours later, he would reemerge, calmly insert the key into the ignition and start the truck, then head off down the road without a hint of irritation or bother.

So it surprised no one that when
he broke out his tools and applied himself to bringing the
Emerald Mile
back from the dead, the work unfolded at a glacial pace. The project started in the autumn and went on throughout the winter and the better part of the following spring. In the process, he introduced some bold changes to the boat, some of which had never before been seen in a canyon dory. To enable the boat to handle large waves from both directions, he got rid of her tombstone-shaped transom and transformed her into a double-ender with a pointed stern that mirrored the profile of her bow. He increased her potential for speed by adding a second set of oarlocks to enable her to be rowed by two people at the same time. He also installed false flooring in the footwells, then punched drain holes through the hull so she was completely self-bailing.

As with all things, each of these advances was purchased at a cost. The seats in the bow forced the passengers to sit backward, which was awkward and uncomfortable. The self-bailing footwells raised the boat’s center of gravity, which made her less stable. But in bringing her back to life, Grua demonstrated what can happen when obsession, discipline, and a touch of madness combine to form art.

When he finished, the little dory was both a restoration of her former self and something entirely new, the Lazarus of the river. She had been transformed from a battered guest boat into a streamlined instrument that had some problems but was nevertheless very much ahead of her time. She was also a tool through which Grua could continue to answer the call that had already driven him to challenge his own limitations by climbing up to the Anasazi footbridge, leaping across the Deer Creek Narrows, and undertaking his epic mega-transect of the canyon. The quest to which he harnessed himself next would be odder and more irrational than all those things put together. But it also had the potential, in ways that were obvious and ways that were not, to transcend them all.

A
t the center of this new quest lay a narrative that dated back more than a century, starting with John Wesley Powell’s last sack of flour and extending like a thin, improbable filament through the subsequent history of boating in the canyon: the element of speed. To fully understand how this dovetailed with the story Grua was about to write, one has to know a few things about the history of Grand Canyon speed runs.

During the years that followed the one-armed Major’s original trip, the canyon witnessed a thin trickle of rather bizarre boating schemes, several of which achieved impressive levels of misery, carnage, or farce. In 1889, an ill-conceived effort to survey the bottom of the canyon for a river-level railway ended in
disaster when three members of the expedition drowned less than thirty miles below Lee’s Ferry. (This was the trip that produced Robert Brewster Stanton’s striking description of a debris flow as he and the other survivors clawed their way toward the rim.) That tragedy was later followed by some rather comical attempts to shoot Hollywood motion pictures on the river, one of which included a former tenant of the Central Park Zoo named Cataract and a “mostly Airedale” mutt from the Salt Lake City pound named Rags. Together, they became the first bear cub and the first dog ever to boat through the Grand Canyon. Then in the winter of 1929, a pair of newlyweds from Idaho headed downstream in a cumbersome wooden scow accessorized with a kerosene-burning stove, a mattress, and a set of box springs, which was later discovered floating in an eddy forty-seven miles from the end of the canyon. (The bodies of the couple, Glen and Bessie Hyde, were never found, and the details of their disappearance remain a mystery to this day.)

As dramatic as those ventures may have been, none involved an effort to sprint through the canyon in the manner that Powell and his starving crew were trying to do as they completed their “race for a dinner” during the desperate weeks of August 1869. But finally, in the summer of 1949, the second chapter of this subchronicle was composed by an overweight pharmacist from Paso Robles, California, named Ed Hudson. On the morning of June 12, Hudson and a group of friends pulled out of Lee’s Ferry in a motorboat called the
Esmeralda II
. They had two goals in mind: to test-drive the boat, and to stash gasoline supplies in preparation for returning the following year when Hudson planned to take a bold stab at running the entire canyon backward by charging upstream from Lake Mead to Lee’s Ferry—an audacious vision that, as he would discover, would prove impossible until
the advent of the water-jet engine.
I