I thought of the cattle baron as I wrestled with rocks on what was once his private getaway, deepening my swimming hole, forming the perfect curvature on the wall of my dam. God knows what crazy scheme the scoundrel might have come up with had he lived another twenty years, what fresh disaster of industrial ingenuity, but the sad fact was a new generation had revived the old dream of a dam on the Gila, and this time they had a big pile of money and real political power—not to mention a thirst for water that had about it a whiff of dipsomania.
WE SHALL RETURN, in due time, to their methods and their madness, but for now we must leave them to one side of the story, just as I was happy to leave behind all thought of them on the day the rain began in earnest in the canyon that September, the cleansing power of a flood clearly imminent. The dying remnants of Hurricane Newton moved up from the Gulf of California to saturate the mountains, rain falling for twenty-four hours straight. I knew my time had come—time to honor John and Ella Jaz with a fool’s journey down the river alone, kept company only by my memory of their words and the presence in the water of their ashes. The headwaters began to swell with runoff. I watched my dam start to buckle. I said adios to the Swede and told him I’d be back by the end of the week if my inflatable Sea Eagle proved up to the rigors of one more Wilderness run.
It took me a day to prepare. I had staged my boat at the Swede’s pied-à-terre back in town on my way to see him up the river, thinking of precisely this moment, so I hauled it out of his basement and gathered the necessary food and supplies, dry bags and lifejacket, camp stove and sleeping bag. With the help of a friend, I parked my truck at the take-out spot on the far side of the Wilderness so I would have wheels at the end of the journey. Then I drove back toward the headwaters in a truck I had borrowed from the Swede. In the shadow of the bridge where the forks of the river converged, I inflated the boat with a bellows pump and packed and strapped down my dry bags. All the while the river kept rising, its waters the color of coffee with a splash of cream. Burnt logs from the burn scars in the mountains bobbed past and joined for a while with a miniature jam at the base of the bridge, only to burst free when a big one plowed into the mess of limbs and trunks and other flotsam, and the force dislodged the whole thing and sent it scattering and scalloping in the current.
The sun had re-emerged, the sky dotted with a few brilliant white clouds. The river sang its sibilant song of high water.
I skidded the boat across the sand to the water’s edge and jumped aboard, off and running in the flow.
THE GILA is one of the undersung glories of boating in the American West. In its upper reaches it is a true Wilderness run: no hand-holding river rangers, no telling in advance where the hazards lurk. Its rapids, nearly alone among such rivers, remain unnamed. There exists no guidebook devoted to itemizing its dangers or highlighting the hot springs and camp spots along its banks. Local intelligence can be had if you know the right people, but mostly you are on your own, and anyway the river’s mood can change in a moment. It is only floatable at flood stage, meaning you can rarely plan a trip ahead of time, and at flood stage it can be unpredictable hour to hour.
A group of river rats I knew, a family of innkeepers from Gila Hot Springs and one of their neighbors, had jumped on it three years earlier at what they thought was high water after an autumn thunderstorm, unaware a major logjam had formed upstream in one of the headwater forks. Heavy rain had flushed tons of burned snags into the watershed, and the jam held back enormous quantities of water. When it burst it caused the river to jump from less than 5,000 cubic feet per second (cfs), still a significant flood of the sort seen only every few years, to almost 30,000 cfs, the fourth-highest flow ever recorded on the upper Gila River in ninety years of measurements.
The river rats pulled their crafts off the stream and sought high ground as dead trees and debris roared by like a locomotive of hydrologic energy.
“We were not going to play bumper cars with that,” one of them later told me. After the debris flow passed, they jumped in their boats and rode the back side of the wave, almost certainly the wildest journey ever undertaken by humans on that stream.
A few days later, some friends of mine set off on a nine-day run from the confluence of the river’s forks all the way to Safford, Arizona, a trip whose second half would no longer be possible if the dam were built.
My ride occurred at a flow of around 1,200 cfs, which was plenty hairy enough for my skill set—I had only been down the Wilderness portion of the river one other time. The first few hours were glorious, just me and the river and the knowledge that with me in the river were the remnants of John and Ella Jaz, all of us carried along together by a force older by far than anything human: rain running downhill and converging in the form of a river. Water moved all around, pouring in rivulets over the lip of the canyon, and the willow brush in the floodplain bent and shivered with the force of it where the river jumped the channel and braided across the bottomlands. I dodged a strainer and skirted several sweepers hanging low over the surface, alders and cottonwoods reaching down with their branches to touch the stream like crooked fingers. I tried to stay in tune with the moment and the wishes of the river, tried to stay centered in the main channel.
When I saw a raven circling and soaring over the canyon ahead of me, I thought of some words I had once read by Ella Jaz—
I prayed to the Raven.
I asked him to help me get wings to fly.
To help me be rebellious like him.
To help me see the world from above but be part of it too.
Before she left us she had indeed taken flight like the raven, soaring over the forest on a mission of watchfulness. She had rebelled with dignity in protest against those who schemed of damming the Gila. She had seen the world from above and joined, too soon, with her very favorite part of it, by going in ash with the river.
Before long, thoughts of prayer would come to me too.
IT WAS AN ALDER that knocked me akilter, or rather a pair of alders, each a simple sweeper hanging low above the current. I saw the first coming too late, so I ducked and hoped. I sat up just in time to see the second and duck again. Its branches brushed against the boat and turned it sideways. Before I could right the ship, it ran up against a log held in place by a hillock of grass on what had three days before been dry floodplain, but in those three days the flow had increased more than twenty-fold. The boat snuggled up against the log and paused there, perpendicular to the current, suspended ever so briefly while all around it water moved—and then it filled and flipped.
I went under for a moment, popped to the surface like a cork, went under again and came up coughing and spitting, searching for something to grab hold of, but there was nothing but moving water and me moving with it. The boat floated upside down behind me. I could see a water jug bobbing and the bellows pump sinking, and I no longer held my paddle in my hands. For a hundred yards I swept along helplessly until I managed to grab onto the boat and push it into a slackwater eddy in a sharp bend of the river, where I hauled myself and my craft onto shore.
I shivered from some combination of cold and fear, awed by the force of the river, grateful it hadn’t swallowed me whole or spit me out mangled.
On a flat bench above the high water mark, I stripped off my clothes and hung them on limbs of oak and juniper. I built a fire, unstrapped and unpacked my dry bags, and took stock of the shape I was in. Half my drinking water: gone with the river. No big deal, since I knew the location of good springs downstream. My bellows pump: gone in the river. No big deal as long as my sorry little rubber ducky didn’t puncture over the next thirty miles.
My paddle: gone down the river…
I took a moment to wonder at what a fool I was, not having brought a spare. It was a rookie move, a pretty serious piece of carelessness or arrogance or both—as if my benevolent posture toward the river were enough to protect me from its dangers, as if it would understand I meant it no harm and would do me no harm in return.
Up the river without a paddle!
With a mixture of curiosity and dread, I marked the river’s edge with a stick. I spread some loose tobacco from a waterlogged pouch on a rock next to my fire. When it dried I rolled a smoke and cracked a beer and boiled some water for dinner—a freeze-dried backpacker’s meal, followed by a Clif bar for dessert.
I sat with my back against a log and watched the river as darkness drew down on the canyon.
In an hour the marker stick was gone, carried away on the gathering flood.
I DID NOT PRAY, although I was tempted for the first time in decades. I did not panic, although I felt the press of fear against my throat like the dull edge of a knife.
I was twenty-seven river miles upstream from a road, ten miles downstream from one, and there would be no turning back. I had committed—and I needed a paddle.
That night around my fire, I spoke to John and Ella Jaz, whose remnants in the river gave me a peculiar form of comfort: if my time to join the river was now, we would have ourselves a reunion in eternity. It wasn’t a macabre idea—just a fact—but after entertaining the notion for a little while, I came around to a conviction of sorts, the best I could muster under the circumstances. In the morning, I told myself and them, I would fashion a makeshift oar from driftwood and bark held together by Gorilla Tape, the last thing I grabbed when I left the Swede’s place in town, almost an afterthought at the time, now quite possibly a lifesaver. In order to preserve the integrity of my cowboy oar, I would only steer with it, never paddle, simply going with the flow, surrendering to the wishes of the river until I too was of a piece with the river—either on it or in it.
If I was lucky enough to make it out the other side using gifts of the river’s gallery forest to navigate its flow, I vowed to finish the story of the fires in the mountains and the ashes in the watershed, braiding it together with stories of the river and the dead—their beauty and their grace, their passion and their purpose—and I would make an offering of the story in the hope it would touch others as they had touched me.
The next day’s journey was so enchanting that to fix it in words would only diminish it. Perhaps it will suffice to say that I made it unharmed—and along the way the river answered questions I had never thought to ask. Will a deer swim when startled by a man in a boat? Might grace arise from fear? Can water talk to water?
This, then, is the story I owed the river and the dead.
A HUMMINGBIRD’S KISS
SUMMER 2014
I THOUGHT I HEARD a shout from somewhere far below me. Snug in the cocoon of my sleeping bag, face averted from the honey-colored sunrise pouring through the windows, I could not at first remember where I was and why. For a moment I experienced the tingly, dissociative terror one feels upon waking from a bad dream—only to realize I was waking into one.
The shout came twice more before I linked the voice with one of the few people I could imagine greeting with open arms under the circumstances. It belonged to Teresa, fiancée of my friend John, whom we had been missing, cursing, and mourning for three weeks. She had started up the mountain before daybreak, a steep, two-and-a-half-mile hike from the trailhead on the highway. Sleep eluded her past about three in the morning anymore, so she found ways to make use of the dawn hours, fueled by plenty of coffee. For me the trouble was the night, but I sedated myself in the customary manner.
Although her days of paid fire watch were behind her, Teresa still surpassed me by almost two decades of lookout experience, having worked thirty seasons in total, most of them in the Gila, our shared home forest. She last occupied a tower in the Gila the year before I wandered into the country. My rookie season coincided with her venturing north to work lookouts in Oregon and Idaho, so I had missed out on the pleasure of hearing her voice over my two-way radio. Hearing it now, in person, I felt sorrow and gratitude at once. The sorrow would have been there with or without her presence, but I was grateful I needn’t hide it from her, as I would have from the average day hiker. On the contrary I could share it with her, and share in hers. Perhaps we could dull the edge of it for each other just a little.
During a dozen summers on lookout, I had mostly spent my nights in a cabin in another mountain range twenty miles away, but there was no cabin on John’s peak, only the tower—a spacious live-in model. I invited Teresa up the stairs, feeling funny at having to proffer the invitation. She had spent far more time here, hanging out with John, than I ever had; I was merely an emergency fill-in, on loan from the neighboring ranger district. A fire there the previous summer had burned a couple hundred square miles all around my lookout tower, which now had the feel of a bird’s nest marooned in a charscape. Not a lot remained that could still catch fire in that country, so my boss figured he could spare me for a few weeks while I covered John’s shifts, and my relief lookout worked extra to cover mine.
I slipped into my pants and went hunting for my hat while Teresa’s hiking boots rang on the tower’s metal steps. Given her intimate understanding of the profession, she refused to climb an occupied lookout without permission from its resident caretaker, aware that fire towers in our part of the world serve not merely as scenic overlooks for tourists, but as actual work spaces for lookouts, some of whom consider pants a sartorial extravagance.
Rare is the pleasure hiker whose love of the wild in all its manifold splendor is capacious enough to include a surprise confrontation with a hairy human ass. Nonetheless, I had discovered that an unsettling number of visitors to John’s mountain disregarded the sign at the base of the tower, which informed the curious that the structure had an official purpose, and that permission was required to climb it during its annual period of occupancy, roughly April through August. People being people, some ignored the official verbiage and began their thoughtless trudge up the steps without even a shout of hello. Maybe this impertinence could be pinned on the implausibility, in our day and age, of some lucky bastard still getting paid by the US government to stare out the window at mountains all day; maybe some people could no longer be troubled to read from a surface other than a screen. In any event, when John had ruled the roost he would intercept trespassers partway in their ascent and inform them that he was just about finished with some very important and time-sensitive government paperwork. He would be glad to share the view if only they would wait at the base of the tower for ten or fifteen minutes—twenty tops—while he dotted the Is and crossed the Ts. After this harmless but satisfying exercise in territorial pissing, he would abruptly return to his glass-walled perch on stilts and laugh to himself. The fact that our job demanded no such thing was part of what we loved about it.
I joined Teresa on the catwalk, where she stood very still next to the hummingbird feeder, loose-limbed but confident in her posture, her cheeks burnished pink from the exertion of the hike. Once the bird she was studying zoomed away, she fixed her pale blue eyes on the horizon, searching in the habitual way of lookouts for a wisp of smoke, a low-flying plane. Her ginger-colored hair and freckled face made her look a decade younger than she was. Our brief acquaintance had revealed that her tolerance for macho bluster was the inverse of her capacity for solitude, and her capacity for solitude was as large as any I knew. I had seen her verbally fillet more than one fool who had highlighted his foolishness with a bigoted phrase or a fraudulent argument after one too many cocktails—a wit that could slice with a scalpel’s precision being a useful implement for a woman who tended to move in realms pungent with testosterone. She laughed at her own jokes with unrestrained delight and feared nothing that I could discern. More than once since we met, I had found myself thinking that I wanted to be like her when I grew up.
We leaned against the catwalk railing, facing north toward the Gila River and the mountains that gave birth to it. Tinsel tufts of ground fog traced the creases in the land, the major canyons and the creek valleys. It was one of those mornings of fresh-scrubbed serenity that made the forest look like a world at the dawn of time—a view, from where we stood, so magnanimou
s with earthly beauty it made me want to live forever, even as I was more aware than usual of the fact that I would not.
In the middle distance we could see the southern half of the Gila Wilderness, the original American experiment in shielding wild country from the appetites of the machine age. In 1924, as an idealistic young forester, Aldo Leopold convinced his superiors in the Forest Service to create a buffer around the only mountains left in the American Southwest not carved up by roads and keep them that way. His plan made the land surrounding the Gila River headwaters the world’s first Wilderness with a capital W, off limits to automobiles and tourist developments, a place where all travel demanded the exertions of animate flesh, either one’s own or that of a horse. This exercise in willed restraint had preserved, for ninety years and running, a big enough stretch of country to allow for a pack trip with mules lasting two weeks, during which the pack string never had to cross a road or its own tracks.
Even if Leopold weren’t venerated as a sort of high priest in the new religion of ecology, having changed the way we think about the natural world thanks to his visionary land ethic, he would be remembered for changing the terms of our relationship with some pretty big chunks of it—none more resonant with symbolism than the Gila. For some of us it was not only the first Wilderness but one of the best: a beautifully jumbled land of mountains, mesas, and deeply incised canyons, the major wildland bridge connecting the southern Rockies with the northern Sierra Madre, and a place of rich biological mixing where life from the Nearctic realm mingled with migrants from the Neotropical.
A Song for the River Page 2
