The Emerald Mile: The Epic Story of the Fastest Ride in History Through the Heart of the Grand Canyon (70 page)

His absence left an immense void. Those who knew him, friends and enemies alike, say that it is almost as deep and as grand as the canyon he loved.

O
ne of the few people who was unable to attend that memorial in the meadow was Steve Reynolds. In keeping with his character, he had shot off on a unique trajectory.

Shortly after the speed run,
Wren finally bought a boat of his own. She was a thirty-seven-foot sailboat, a sweet little yawl that had been converted into a sloop. She had a rounded bilge and a hand-pounded steel hull with a three-quarter-ton keel, and in the autumn of 1984 he sailed her off into the South Pacific, chasing freedom in much the same way that Bernard Moitessier, the great single-handed yachtsman, had done fifteen years earlier.

First Wren went to Fiji and Vanuatu, and then headed down to New Caledonia and from there to Brisbane, where he waited for the typhoon season to pass before sailing up the coast of Australia to Townsville and setting off for New Guinea. From there, he headed for Guam, then across to the Carolines, where he met a man who knew how to navigate from the stars and the birds and the tides. There Wren’s engine caught fire, which stalled him for several months, but when he had finished his repairs, he set a course for Tinian, where the planes had taken off to bomb Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and from there to Saipan and Pagan, where one morning an active volcano covered his decks with about an inch of soot. Then it was across to Okinawa, and from there up through the chain of little islands to Japan.

He ran out of money in Kyushu but found a job teaching English, and shortly after that, he met a Japanese woman named Noriko, whom he married. They started a little school, had two children, and lived in a town on the coast.

After several years had passed, Wren decided it was time to come back to the States and settle his family in Hawaii. So while Noriko and the children headed for the airport, he shipped his anchor and headed back across the Pacific. It was a difficult sail—a sixty-day crossing with poor winds and choppy seas, and although he saw plenty of dolphins and even some whales, he didn’t catch a single fish. But one night, somewhere on the long, eleven-hundred-mile stretch of open ocean between Midway and Kauai, the full moon came up, fat and shining, just as it had done in June of 1983. The wind was steady and the seas were calm, so Wren made himself a bed in the cockpit and sailed sideways to the moon on one of the nicest nights ever. Out there along that silvery expanse of star-draped sea, he found a note of grace that reflected back something he had touched only once, and only briefly, deep inside the Grand Canyon.

When he finally reached Hawaii, he rejoined his family and lived happily, running charter tours to watch the humpbacks off the Na Pali coast, until 2010, when he was diagnosed with liver cancer and flew to California for a transplant that would never arrive. But in the final weeks of his life he came full circle and met with me in a motel room in Santa Rosa to reminisce over the speed run, an achievement that he had never bragged about to anyone, but had never forgotten either. As proof, he pointed to the T-shirt that Anne Marie Nicholson, one of their timekeepers, had made and presented to him, one of only three that were printed. Its only lettering was the elapsed time of the speed run—36:38:29. He had kept it close to him all these years.

He also talked a bit about what still stood out most in his mind, which was that terrible explosion wave in Crystal:

“We hit that wave dead-on in the best possible spot, as straight as could be—a
perfect
run. But our boat was seventeen feet long, and even when we were stood straight up, there was the wave above us.”

Wren was dying when he made that remark. His skin had turned yellow, his hair was falling out, and his abdomen had swelled up with so much fluid that it looked as if he were carrying a bowling ball inside his belly. He was in terrible pain. But as he remembered what it felt like to slide down the tongue into that glittering maelstrom, the expression on his face softened and his lips curled into a smile.

“We just couldn’t make it—it was that simple,” he sighed. “We couldn’t get over that wave,
it was just such a huge thing. But it was a
beautiful
wave, a beautiful run.”

He passed away six weeks later.

When he died,
Rudi Petschek was by his side to hold his hand and say farewell.

A
mong the speed-run crew, this left only Petschek, the man who had pulled the
Emerald Mile
through her darkest and loneliest hour.

By the time of Wren’s death,
Petschek too had left the river, but only with reluctance. After the speed run, he had carried on for years, pulled back again and again by the flames of yearning that the canyon had ignited and sustained. At the end of every river season, on the first morning after he got back to California, he awakened to a sense of anticipation, looking toward the first run of the following spring.

As the years passed, however, the fire began to ebb. It took almost two decades, but with the flow of time, the anticipation of returning in the spring eventually stopped occurring the day after the last trip of the autumn. First it faded to a week. Then a month. When it finally receded to the better part of the winter, Petschek and the woman he had married—who was also one of Litton’s dory guides—retired to their wooden house nestled among the dripping hemlocks in the foothills of the California Sierra. He’s there now, and from his window he can look out on his own dory, the
Colorado
, which he and Kenton built together, and remember the desert and the way it smelled in the rain.

Along with his connection to the desert’s austere enchantments, Petschek has never lost his sense of wonder at the complexity of the great canyon, both geologic and human. That a place so huge and so imposing could nurture, at its deepest center, a tiny community of misfits and outcasts and dreamers who are bound together by their addiction to its beauty. That a place that seems so cut off from the world can also seem so central to the world. And most of all, that a landscape so universally recognized and celebrated, a landscape that is said to lay bare the mysteries of nature and the forces of time, can be filled with so many hidden treasures, secrets known only to a select few—and that he, Rudi, a refugee from the city of Prague, can number himself among that company.

As for the speed run, yes, he still thinks about it, and quite often. Not as frequently as he once did, which for many years was almost every day. But the memory of that mad race atop the swollen floodwaters still rushes back in unexpected moments: the rapids that Kenton and Wren and he battled; the disasters they skirted; the skills and the courage that they called upon to get them through. Like the witchery of white water, it is a thing whose luster never seems to dim. But what abides utmost in his mind is his gratitude for and amazement at the unlikely journey that brought him to the river. He is astonished that he found his way home.

“It was like
a perfect storm of luck,” he says, chuckling at the improbable wonder of it all.

P
erhaps the most improbable wonder of all, however, is
the still-raging storm of Martin Litton.

After years of struggling to keep his sinking company afloat, Litton finally sold it in 1987—and promptly went off on a tear trying to save the sequoias of Northern California, his first love and the only rival to his affair with the canyon. That crusade, which continues to this day, still takes him to Sacramento and Washington, and he has emerged as something of an elder statesman of the environmental movement, respected and admired and loved.

As his hair has gotten whiter and his beard has grown longer, however, Litton has begun carrying a sadness whose weight is perhaps most visible in his eyes and in the tone of his voice. He is haunted by the past—a man who is tormented by the heartache of having seen too much of the country’s beauty before it was taken away. So much has been lost, and only those like himself who knew the glory of it all before that loss can now take the measure of its magnitude.

His friends do their best to console him with assurances that somehow everything will be all right—that, like the rapids of the canyon, things have a way of working out for the best. But in light of what is now happening to the canyon, Litton’s pessimism seems both appropriate and justified.

From every direction, the place is under assault—and unlike in the past, the adversary is not concentrated in a single force, such as the Bureau of Reclamation, but takes the form of separate outfits conducting smaller attacks that are, in many ways, far more insidious. From directly above, the air-tour industry has succeeded in scuttling all efforts to dial it back, most recently through the intervention of Arizona’s senators, John Kyl and John McCain, and is continuing to destroy one of the canyon’s greatest treasures, which is its silence. From the east has come a dramatic increase in uranium-mining claims, while the once remote and untrammeled country of the North Rim now suffers from an ever-growing influx of recreational ATVs. On the South Rim, an Italian real estate company recently secured approval for a massive development whose water demands are all but guaranteed to compromise many of the canyon’s springs, along with the oases that they nourish. Worst of all, the Navajo tribe is currently planning to cooperate in constructing a monstrous tramway to the bottom of the canyon, complete with a restaurant and a resort, at the confluence of the Little Colorado and the Colorado, the very spot where John Wesley Powell made his famous journal entry in the summer of 1869 about venturing “down the Great Unknown.”

As vexing as all these things are, what Litton finds even more disheartening is the country’s failure to rally to the canyon’s defense—or for that matter, to the defense of its other imperiled natural wonders. The movement that he and David Brower helped build is not only in retreat but finds itself the target of bottomless contempt. On talk radio and cable TV, environmentalists are derided as “wackos” and “extremists.” The country has swung decisively toward something smaller and more selfish than what it once was, and in addition to ushering in a disdain for the notion that wilderness might have a value that extends beyond the metrics of economics or business, much of the nation ignorantly embraces the benefits of engineering and technology while simultaneously rejecting basic science. This contradiction is underscored most blatantly, at least for Litton, by the fact that when the rangers who give tours on the South Rim are confronted by religious zealots, they are forbidden from stating that creationism has no basis whatsoever in science.
How can you defend against such things, Litton wonders, when almost 40 percent of the population is convinced that the entire world, including the Grand Canyon, was slapped together in the space of a single week less than seven thousand years ago?

In the midst of this bewilderment, however, Litton has retained his connection with the canyon. In 1997, he embarked on the first of what would prove to be a series of “farewell” river trips, each designed to serve as his final journey through the canyon—only to be rendered moot when Litton, with characteristic disobedience, tossed aside the script by refusing to compromise with old age and “failing to deteriorate at the rate I’m supposed to.” Following each of these trips, he remained in good health and waited patiently until someone got around to issuing another invitation, then off he went again. On every one of these ventures, he has broken and reset his own record as the oldest person ever to row through the canyon.