The Emerald Mile: The Epic Story of the Fastest Ride in History Through the Heart of the Grand Canyon (68 page)

Regardless of how minor these and other crimes might be, each and every case that came before McKay bore unusual symbolic weight. Because the park fell within federal jurisdiction, the imprimatur of the language suggested that the proceedings demanded the attention of the entire country.
Case Number 83-2079M was no exception:

UNITED STATES OF AMERICA, PLAINTIFF

VERSUS

KENTON GRUA, DEFENDANT

Like most of McKay’s cases, this was a nonjury trial. Litton and Meade took their seats on the defense side of the room along with Grua, who had exchanged his river sandals and shorts for shoes, trousers, and a clean shirt, and was doing his best to look presentable. On the prosecution side, three other men also took their seats. The first was a ranger who was acting as the solicitor on behalf of the National Park Service. The second was John Thomas, the ranger who had witnessed the
Emerald Mile
’s run through Crystal. He looked decidedly uncomfortable about having been called to appear. Finally, arriving
late and obviously pressed for time, was Richard Marks, the superintendent himself.

When McKay entered the room, everyone stood as he stepped onto the raised dais. Then the judge settled himself behind his desk, rapped his gavel, and inaugurated the final chapter of the speed run.

T
he Park Service solicitor began
by explaining that Grua had violated Title 36, Section 7.4(h)3) of the Code of Federal Regulations—a densely worded legal provision whose operative clause stated, “No person shall conduct, lead, or guide a river trip unless that person has a permit issued by the superintendent of Grand Canyon National Park.” This offense fell under the category of a “moving violation,” and the notice that Grua had received in the mail was, with unintended appropriateness, the same form that the rangers used for issuing speeding tickets to motorists inside the park. Having thus established the facts, the solicitor turned to his first witness and called his boss to the stand.

Contrary to what Grua had been led to believe,
Marks didn’t appear to be the least bit angry or upset. He settled into the witness box calmly, with a neutral expression on his face. But as he answered the questions put to him by the solicitor, the depositional layer of facts that Marks laid down brooked little in the way of alternative interpretation or wiggle room. Selecting his words carefully, the superintendent provided an efficient history of the permit application process and explained that Grua’s efforts to obtain a special-use permit had been reviewed in the usual manner and nixed at every stage. In the absence of either written or verbal sanction, he therefore had no right whatsoever to conduct his river trip. And what’s more, added Marks, Grua and his companions
knew
as much.

When the solicitor sat down, Meade, a savvy trial lawyer who had cut his teeth in the cutthroat world of divorce and real estate law in Newport Beach, was given the chance to see what he could do with all of this. He began by hitting Marks with a barrage of clever questions designed to get the superintendent to unwittingly admit the possibility that, in their own minds, Grua and his companions might have had some reason to believe that permission had been granted.
True, Meade stipulated, the application had been turned down. But was anything said—or, more important,
not
said—that could have led the dorymen to conclude that the Park Service was tentatively or provisionally
considering
some kind of approval? Was it possible that something—
anything
—about the telephone conversation with Litton or the confusion surrounding all the other emergencies inside the canyon had somehow conveyed the shadow of an understanding that it was okay for them to launch?

Alas, Marks was having none of this.

Nope, he replied. Categorically impossible.
They knew the answer was no. They went and did it anyhow. Period, full stop, end of story.

Having delivered up these facts, and with no further questions from Meade, Marks excused himself and went back to his office.

Next to take the stand was John Thomas, and the park solicitor’s only aim was to establish before the judge that Thomas had witnessed the
Emerald Mile
’s illegal run and that he had recognized Grua at the oars. The solicitor’s questions were perfunctory, and when he was finished, Meade declined to ask any questions of his own.

Meade now had only a single arrow in his quiver. At crucial times in the past—most notably before the Sierra Club board in May of 1963, Martin Litton’s ability to stand up and deliver a stem-winder had saved the day. Perhaps by rekindling those fires, the old man could do the same here, thought Meade. If Litton’s words had once helped to block a pair of giant hydroelectric dams and prevent the greatest river canyon on earth from being turned into a chain-linked series of bathtubs, how hard could it be to convince an aging magistrate that this effort to railroad the captain of the
Emerald Mile
was overzealous and wrong?

Litton gave it his best shot. The status of the permit, he declared, had been left open by the superintendent’s failure to call him back, as Marks had said he would do. What’s more, the run was entirely benign. It was not designed as a stunt—a bid for fame or notoriety—but had arisen instead from a genuine desire to add to the body of knowledge about what could be accomplished on the river. In fact, Litton added, his voice rising, the journey had been undertaken as a public service in the interest of expanding
river knowledge
and promoting
boater safety.
When viewed in that light, it was not only inappropriate but downright
offensive
to condemn Grua’s run as a violation of the letter of the law when it was actually one of the best things that had ever happened on the river. The speed run partook of the same spirit that had inspired John Wesley Powell’s own trip—an odyssey launched in the name of science and sustained by the noble purpose of unraveling the mysteries of the canyon. And what’s more, it had worked, because now, after 114 years of rowing through the dark ages of ignorance, everyone on the river knew how long it would take to traverse the canyon by manpower alone. Not approximately how long, but precisely and without a shadow of a doubt:

Thirty-six hours, thirty-eight minutes, and twenty-nine seconds!

On and on Litton went, riding up the face of his own rhetoric, plunging forcefully into the trough of another argument, only to be catapulted by another surge of poetry and soar once more into the air. His oratory was eloquent
and impressive and fabulously entertaining—and perhaps for those reasons, neither the judge nor the Park Service solicitor made the slightest effort to interrupt or contradict what he was saying. But unlike the great speeches of the past, in which his listeners had found themselves transfixed and wooed, his words fell flat and the audience was unmoved.

The reason for this was no great mystery. Unlike with the free-flowing rivers or the virgin stands of redwood or any of the other natural wonders on whose behalf Litton had spoken with such passion and such rage for so many years, his heart wasn’t really in this. Yes, he found the Park Service meddlesome and irritating. No, he didn’t like Richard Marks at all. But Litton also knew that the superintendent and his employees were the main reason why the inside of the Grand Canyon didn’t look like the Jersey shore. And finally, Litton knew that the pretext under which Grua’s venture had been launched was as ephemeral as a plume of virga, the delicate desert rain that is released from clouds above the canyon but evaporates and vanishes long before it ever has a ghost of a chance of reaching solid ground.

Everyone understood this, including Grua himself. Sitting there in court, he bore the look of a dark-horse candidate on election night who knows in his heart that he is about to lose.

T
he closing arguments were brief and devoid of hyperbole.

The Park Service solicitor stated that Grua had committed an unambiguous transgression. In response, Meade declared that there wasn’t sufficient evidence to support that allegation and that in any case it was a victimless crime, which had harmed no one.

McKay didn’t even pretend it was a hard call. After taking no more than a minute to deliberate, he seized his gavel and positioned his little wooden sound block in front of him.

“I do find the defendant guilty as charged,” he declared, and brought the gavel down with a bang.

T
he punishment turned out to be rather benign. Truth be told, the whole thing was actually a bit of a joke—especially in light of the overheated rumors about Grua’s being run out of the canyon and banned from the river.

If Marks had ever wanted to do those things, cooler thinking—including his own—had tempered the impulse and brought him back to the principle that the punishment should fit the crime. So
McKay began by imposing a $500 fine,
a sum that Meade immediately protested as larger than what any dirtbag river guide—a creature who, by definition, dwelled in permanent financial distress—could reasonably be asked to part with.

The matter was taken under advisement, and eventually, after further negotiations and verbal appeasements over the phone, it was agreed that Grua could work off his fine through some unspecified acts of community service. Which, depending on who was telling this part of the story in the years that followed (and how many beers had been consumed),
Grua may not ever have bothered to perform. In other words, he pretty much got off scot-free.

This was deemed acceptable by the Park Service, however, because everyone, including the superintendent, was less concerned with making Grua pay for his crime than with upholding
the idea that one was no longer allowed to do this sort of thing. The days when a trio of speed bandits could shove a dory into the river and go highballing through the canyon were now gone. For having defied this principle, Grua had been made to answer, and in the eyes of just about everyone involved, things had worked out more or less as they should.
The Park Service pronounced itself vindicated and was now prepared to move on—thereby enabling the story to quietly subside and, with the passage of time and the erosion of human memory, eventually disappear.

There the matter should have been allowed to rest.

Except that it wasn’t, because, simply put, too much had happened. Too much water had gone down the river. Too much drama had unfolded on its surface. And most important, too many people were unable to resist the irrational but wondrously seductive possibility that the
Emerald Mile
had cut a line of symbolic clarity that seemed to bring the river, the canyon, and, yes, even the dam itself into a new and irresistibly compelling focus. And so, unbeknownst to any of the players, including Grua himself, the wheels of the machine that would eventually turn this dubious exploit into a legend began to turn.

The process would take years to unfold, years that would usher profound changes into the lives of everyone involved. But the legend rested upon one simple truth, an idea that was perhaps most succinctly affirmed by the writer Philip Pullman, who has no connection to the canyon or the river, but whose words capture the essence of what Grua had brought to life: