Several days into the canoe trip my sunburned lips are swollen like a collagen injection mishap. My skin is slathered with mud and exfoliated with flurries of eroding Navajo sandstone. The raging water is resisting more than Level 10 on the gym’s rowing machine when a woman in our group laughs and shouts over the wind, “Feel the river dancing with us?” And I smile and think, This is so much better than spa treatments.
That’s what the Green River does to you.
Nature is full of the unexpected. For example, the Green River is brown, mocha brown, reflecting a rippling kaleidoscope of sky, tree and canyon. It melts from the Wind River Mountains in Wyoming, carves out 730 miles, then converges with the Colorado River in southern Utah. Our group of 16, varying in age from nine to 70-something, are canoeing from the town of Green River, Utah, to Mineral Bottom—68 miles in five days. Though it’s possible to join a guided boating excursion, groups with a little river running experience can rent canoes from an outfitter and chart their own course. But not everyone in the group need be experienced: I’ve canoed once. My assigned canoe-mate, Jim Vaaler, has rafted the Grand Canyon 14 times and the Salt River 17 times.
As we set out on the first day, all is serene and silent. The river is flanked by lemon-lime tamarisks and striated mesas wearing eroded sandstone skirts. My paddle plunges into the water, then drips rain-like over the surface. Plunge, rain, plunge, rain: a hypnotizing rhythm. There is nothing to do but watch dragonflies mate, count vapor trails scudding across a turquoise sky, and―
“Bird!” I call to Jim, pointing at a thin white brushstroke of a bird picking through the muck. We debate whether it is an egret or a white heron, but my guidebook informs us that there are no common egrets in southeastern Utah. That’s my motto, I think. No egrets.
Keridwen
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Lunch break: The group stops for lunch (coleslaw burritos, anyone?) while a few people swim in the muddy, but clean, water.
At the first day’s camp, I’m beginning to rethink that motto. My arm muscles are on the verge of exploding. The temperature drops with the suddenness of a theater curtain. There are no bathrooms or facilities of any kind here. Everything must be taken in and out—bottled water, garbage, human waste. Before departure, we were given “toilet training”: liquid waste in the river when possible, solid in the porta-potty (a.k.a. The Bun-hugger of Steel). As I crawl, shivering, to my tent, I repeat one prayer: Please don’t make me have to get up in the middle of the night. Every time I wake with a crick in my neck or my hair soaked with chilly dew from the side of the tent, all I do is think cheerfully, defiantly against the trickling of the river, Yes! I still don’t have to pee!
The second day we paddle into Labyrinth Canyon, named by famed 19th-century river runner John Wesley Powell. Jim is the assistant leader, so it’s his and my duty to lag behind everyone else, rescuing the stranded, capsized, or exhausted. He takes his job seriously, lagging so far behind that the only canoe in sight is a black dot a half mile ahead. “Sometimes it’s nice to just drift,” he says. I’m thinking, Constant paddling, let’s get to the next stop, everyone’s getting ahead. Jim lies back, slides his hat over his eyes and grunts, “You’re in charge.” The current revolves our canoe like the second hand of a slow clock. I try to calm my mind, easing it into “river time.”
If one had to sum up the multimillion-year history of the Green River in the time it takes for Jim to fall asleep, it would go something like this: About 300 million years ago alternating seas and deserts deposited sand layer by layer, which compressed into rock. Some of those layers contained trace amounts of iron that, when oxidized, stained the rocks a rusty red. About 50,000 years ago, continental uplift and glacier melt formed a river that, along with wind, would eventually erode towering, serpentine canyons. Around 1500 years ago the area was home to the Fremont Culture and then the Anasazi, whose pictographs of horned people and animals still march across the cliff walls. In the 1800s it was a center of the beaver trade and Wild West exploration. Today…
Keridwen
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Bow shot: Sections of the Green River are so remote that canoeists can paddle for days and hardly see another soul.
Jim is beginning to snore. I nudge him into action and begin paddling feverishly to catch up to the rest of the group. But we can’t nudge the water into action. It flows sleepily, stretching out across the riverbed, curling into the fetal position around the bends. Every so often, like a weekend after a week, we get to put down our paddles and ride the gently rocking riffles round the bend, then slog through the next lazy stretch of river.
Overhead, a pair of Canada geese soar to join their honking friends. POP POP POP POP! Suddenly gunshots explode, followed by raucous laughter. We row through a blizzard of gnats, past the hunters’ swampy hideout and their flock of eerily motionless faux geese. A woman in our group—a staunch environmentalist—shoots swear words at them. “You’re #$%@! insane to delight in slaughtering animals!”
“Get outta here, tree hugger!” they shout back. It’s the clash of an environmentalist and the hunters: two ways of enjoying the outdoors.
Despite intruders, nature continues to rule here. A sandhill crane belly-dances in a gray feather skirt, shaking off excess water. Sienna cliffs tiger-striped with desert varnish provide fine resort living for mud swallows. Overshadowed by immense cliffs, I’m content, for once, to feel small and transient. I am slowing down. I look at my watch less and less, which considering I didn’t bring a watch, means I’m really slow. Every time I look at my wrist, I see only an increasingly tanned and toned forearm.
* * *
Camp #2 and the afternoon air is the color of lemonade. Backlit insects drop like liquid sunshine onto a river as smooth and shiny as chrome. Our canoes lap up to a shore shaded by cottonwoods, and we start to unload the gear. WHOOSH! Larry slips on the steep embankment and nearly backflips into the river. Tom slides down the slope smack into the bow of his canoe. “I’m alright now,” he says in the voice of a helium-sucking eunuch. The mud is slick as grease, with the suction power of a pool of peanut butter.
We toss our gear up the slope assembly-line style. The river is making us interdependent. We are a small clan, a true democracy, each quietly pitching in wherever help is needed. Apart from the hunters, we’ve seen almost no one out here. Cell phones and radios are useless. “L.A. could explode and we wouldn’t know it,” someone says. We are just as isolated as the Wild West explorers.
And probably just as dirty. Here’s how to take a shower on a river trip: Fill a bucket with muddy river water that other people have urinated in. Dunk head in and douse hair with All-Purpose Camp Suds. Splash muddy water over muddy limbs and face. Dry off, walk back to camp through sand flurries and mud that cakes your sandals till you look like a dusty Big Foot, feeling refreshed and ready for the evening’s entertainment.
* * *
It’s a mild night on a wide, rippling sandbar hugged by vermilion cliffs. Camp #3. We’re huddled around a lantern, sipping box Chablis from coffee mugs, passing Chex Mix, and swapping disaster camping stories. All the tales involve multiple “But wait, there’s more” plot twists and end in spouses who vow never to camp again. We decide to go tentless, falling asleep under the Milky Way and shooting stars to the trilling whistle of crickets. My slumber is interrupted by occasional gusts of sand that creep inside my mouth and grind in my teeth. But I don’t complain. It’s worth it to wake up to a cotton-candy dawn beneath the watchful soaring of a raven.
Priorities change on the river. Little things become Great Triumphs: launching a canoe without losing a sandal, putting in contact lenses on a windy beach, heroically brandishing a baguette to share with the group when their pita bread is polka-dotted with mold. Standards of cleanliness hit rock bottom. When Stormy’s chair collapses and her egg and cinnamon roll topple into the sand, our leaders don’t miss a beat: “Here’s some water to rinse off that egg.” “Just brush off that roll; it’s still good.” After a long day or night, when your arms are as stiff as frozen steaks and your neck muscles tight as a noose, some incongruous meal—a tortilla stuffed with unmelted cheese, coleslaw, and potato salad, or oatmeal cooked with “clean” dishwater on a plate smeared with scrambled egg residue—hits the spot more than you ever imagine it could. You begin to seek challenges: How fast can I go? How efficient can my paddling form get?
Keridwen
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Last day sunrise: A sandbar hugged by vermilion cliffs makes an ideal campsite for the last night on the river.
The final two days we don’t need to seek challenges; we’re buffeted with them. Winds 45 to 60 miles per hour tear through the canyon, whipping whitecaps on two-foot waves, pinpricking us with zillions of sand granules. We paddle with every ounce of strength yet only inch forward. If we stop, we go backward. Rapids teeter our canoe to the brink of capsizing. Gusts of wind streak across the surface of the water, pockmarking it with dimples that shimmer like sequins in the sun. We prepare for an oncoming blast when the sequins gallop at us head on. Finally, just as the first drops of rain fall, we pull into our final takeout.
But wait, there’s more. Rain and wind lash us as we toss our gear onto the truck for the ride back to Moab. Shivering under a cottonwood, we learn that our bus is stuck in the treacherous, slippery switchbacks at the canyon top. One of the locals has a truck that can accommodate a few people, but several of us will have to hike two miles, uphill, in cold rain and mud, in open-toed sandals. On cue, thunder rumbles. I trudge up the hill, my thoughts a mixture of “Let me at it” and “Might as well.” All week the river has forced me to reach down and find my strength, like pulling up coins from the sofa cushions. I have fortitude in my hand now; I can resolutely take it with me.
About halfway up we are rescued by a pickup truck. We ride up to our ramshackle bus which, slipping down the eroding road at the canyon rim, is forced to reverse up the switchbacks, tires roaring and gas spewing out of a spout that says DONT USE (sic). “Safe” inside the bus, we hit a rut that sprays a Jackson Pollack painting of mud on the windshield. The driver flips on the wipers, but only the one on the passenger side works.
But wait, there’s more. One of the canoes starts to slip off the truck just as hail erupts from the sky. “What’s next, locusts?” asks Don. The bus stops, and Kathy chooses this opportune time to disembark and squat by the roadside. Leaping back on the bus, she quips, “I couldn’t tell if it was the rain or me, hailstones or kidney stones.”
I ask Jeanie, who has taken this trip before (in perfect weather), whether she will do it again. “I probably will,” she says. “After I recover.”
It’s addictive, nature. The river has revealed what’s underneath: the stars behind the veil of light pollution, the strength beneath our comfort zones, the natural currents of the mind away from the confusion of rapid living. So even now I think only of campfire stories, vast star-prickled skies, and the sweet satisfaction of a peanut butter and trail mix burrito.
No egrets, man. No egrets.
Reach the reporter at keridwen77@yahoo.com.
