Throw Down Your Oars

Here is the link to the new, great, rolling stone article on climate change. Go read that. Then come back here.

Okay, welcome back.

So this blog has been about guiding. But I've been guiding a lot more than I have been writing this blog. And it is time for me to step back from guiding. Furthermore, it is time for a lot of us to step back from guiding.

2012 was The Year Of Low Water. It was a season that was going to be a slog and that is something we all knew from the beginning. It was hot. There were F-U upstream winds. The rapids disappeared, and with it, a lot of the fun. Everything seemed to turn into heat stroke, short tempers, long rowing days and depressed, micro- managing burn out trip leaders. Working 5 am to 11 pm 5 days a week. Driving across the state on your day off. Then rigging the next trip on your other day off. Maybe one real day off every or every other week. And then you're back. Back at this coal mine of a company town. Back with no autonomy, living in the parking lot of your bosses' house. No personal space. No library. No coffee shop. No where to write. And absolutely no dating. No hugs. No kisses. No "I love you's". No potential. Months of the heat, and the toil, and a fuse that's cooked through, burning out completely towards its own, inevitable, disintegration.

It doesn't matter that you cooked the steaks right. That you learned the rocks. That you walked over hot coals to save the guests from rattle snakes. Your sacrifices are not appreciated. You are a disposable cog in a fascist boathouse.

Now when you are 22 or 23 or 24 or 25, that's a pretty good deal. At that age, you're a disposable cog wherever you go. So why not at least have some fun with it? Ahhh... but I got old this year, friends. I got old. And I can no longer look forward to future winters and summers in the same way. The Year of Low Water wasn't just a punishment for our sins. It was brought here so we could all do some thinking, figure out where we are going, and what we really expect to get out of all this long term.

The river is dying. It can't be counted on. The thing's over allocated. It's dried up. This is the future, here. Whitewater rafting in the Rockies long term is not going to be a predictably fun or profitable industry over the next several decades.

Have you ever seen a killed river? A murdered river? That is what happened to the Dirty Devil. It flows slow this year into Hanksville where whatever is left is sucked up and turned into alfalfa. I went down the Dirty Devil on a boat this spring. It was an amazing place. Beautiful side canyons, a large and deep main canyon. Wildlife, snakes, cows, birds. After Cataract as we drive over the bridge, we looked down and we could see what it has become, trickling along at 0.25 cfs. A sandy wash with a few pools of moisture in it. A corpse.

That's what the Colorado is too, but not until it gets inside of Mexico. The water hasn't reached the sea since 1998. We usually don't see that. But if projections are right that is the way of the future. Slowly, the sandy wash will move upstream...

All of us old and smart river guides. What are we doing with ourselves? And what shall we do with this Fall that trails behind The Year of Low Water? Surely, it's getting hard to pretend any of us have a future here, laughing and drinking and "enjoying" boating.

There's getting less and less to enjoy. The recession was the last straw. It was time to kiss that civilization goodbye for good. We'll come out here to Utah, hide in a Canyon. And if civilization wants us to work and get paid, well by golly those bastards can come out here and pay us to do what we're doing anyway. But no... it was too good... hiding in the canyons. They took away our river too. It got heat stroke. It got dehydrated and dried up. It got sucked up and evaporated and blown away. It got stillborn from a snow that didn't come. There ain't no more river to run.

So it's becoming necessary to shift some gears. To figure out a new plan. One that doesn't involve hiding in a dried up river.

Finally, it seems I am considering using my brain for something other than the preparation of meals or the education and guiding of tourists for $4.11 an hour, one 17 hour day at a time. Yes, I am finally considering applying to Law School. This is of course a last resort. If my trip worked out like many thought it would, I'd finally have lived up to all those Christopher McCandles, Everett Ruess comparisons. But instead of drowning in a river, I came out of the canyon alive. And it is seeming that I'm getting dangerously close to starting to do something more productive with myself.

There ain't no future for an agin' river guide. Leave it for them kids, to pick over the scraps of this carcass of a river. Those ones who don't know they're walking down a blind alley. It'll be good for a while. It'll show them some canyons. Teach them some responsibility and some leadership skills. Aye. But I've been in that game too long, and it's not where I can have an impact. Certainly, it's burning me out. I knew that would happen, and it has. So I've hung up my hat at that coal mine, and I've moved to Moab and found myself a woman. I'm spending more time on my writing projects, and doing things with my friends and exploring. I'm remembering why I actually like this place so much, and what it was like before all the beauty turned into toil.

We don't need another guy rowing boats, and we don't need another guy talking to tourists about rocks. What we need is to turn our people who actually care about these places into environmentalists. Effective and radical environmentalists. I'm thinking about shifting some gears and moving into such a direction.

On the interwebs, I was talking to someone who just got out of law school, and they did something cool in their advice to me, which was to ask me some questions. This is what I came up with as some ideas and rationalizations. A little peak inside the head of a man who's done pulling goatheads for bowls of frosted mini wheats.

* * *

Yes, I have heard of the Southern Poverty Law Center. I understand they are a good outfit. I had some friends in Atlanta who worked for them...

Going to law school has always hung over my head like a Sword of Damocles ever since I was a little kid. The past 5 generations on my father's side of the family have been lawyers. It has always been expected that I would be one. They've been watching me starve and freeze out here for the past 5 years, hoping it will get so horrible I'll come to my senses and give up on vagrancy. They'd probably bribe me to go and pay my way, but I don't think they're paying enough attention to decide to bribe me. They know my life is hard enough and I can't hold out forever.

I figured whether or not you are a lawyer in a court, having a law degree makes you a useful person. You can work at different advocacy organizations. You can work in different places helping people. So that is good. I'd like to think I'd go where no one else wants to go and help people who need it there. Chasing after money is not what I am all about. I've been living in a truck and a tent for years because I can't stand people who scrounge and compete and fight each other for money.

In the messianic alternate reality version of myself I'd like to be a great civil rights and social justice lawyer and represent jailed union organizers and activists... But I don't think that will happen. As much as I'd like to think that I could be that person, I am too alienated from people to do that. I've always been a loner and have never had relationships with anyone anywhere that make me feel connected enough to humanity to be able to sustain that kind of sacrifice for other people. It would be a good thing to do, and we need people to do it. But I don't think I would be that good at it. Besides, I can't stand the South. I can't stand its thickheaded people, its humidity, its bad traffic, its religion, and its money grubbing cities like Charlotte and Atlanta.

(I do like its rivers and mountains though. But that is not usually where jobs are at).

Realistically I might be best as an environmental lawyer. I see climate change as the biggest threat we have to deal with, whether or not everyone understands that now. The goal is to make fossil fuel companies pay for the costs of what they are doing to the atmosphere. You do that by getting carbon taxes in place. Then the market makes it unprofitable to continue burning more fossil fuels, and the energy companies have to shift from sending geologists and engineers to figure out how to extract the last remaining obscure and inaccessible reserves of natural gas and oil, to investing into actually renewable energy. You gotta fight that on two fronts. You got to wake the people up and get them involved and making the movement. That's the engine. And when that engine is pressing on the power structure, you need the technicians to go in and make the tweaks they can while the pressure is there. That's what a lawyer is, a technician of social dialogue.

Now, a social revolution that strangles the last Exxon executive with the entrails of the last Koch brother would do the trick too. But that's a way off... and heck, even if it does start tomorrow, the social revolution is going to need legal help along the way too.

That's sort of a big picture issue, and a really important one. I also have this passion for the environment and the wild places. Not in a purest sense of course. The deer and elk would be inconvenienced for a while but eventually they'd be fine if oil and gas development in Utah and Western Colorado was allowed to take its course. I more oppose that for what it is doing the atmosphere than anything else. But the environment is important. It's not just resources we can use for the future, but wild places themselves are important to have. Modern man needs them more desperately than he ever has, and I feel strongly about them, and about protecting them. Some people go to the wilderness a few times a year and they see it is pretty. I camp every single night of the year. I camp in a parking lot at a ski resort. I camp on a mountain in the national forest land. I camp on BLM land. I camp on a river section managed by the national parks. The wild places are my home. They're where my people live. They're the only places that have ever been safe and free and welcoming for me to live. So I'm in a better position to actually care what happens to them, and to be counted on to stand up for the rocks and the lizards and the pronghorns better than most people are who live in cities and only view "the environment" as some abstraction that comes in occasionally through the Discovery Channel.

Besides, why wait? I'll turn 29 this New Years Eve and while everyone else is out partying maybe one or two people will send me a text message saying happy birthday that I'll notice around midnight after working a double shift in a restaurant. I tell you what this is the last winter I want to work in any restaurant. I am wasting my life and my brain and I know that. It's a little frustrating to see everyone else fall in love and get married and have kids, and I am still locked in a survivalist mode of cutting costs by living in a truck in a library parking lot at a ski resort all winter long, running around in circles at 11 pm trying to fix some body's steak that was cooked a few minutes too short or too long. That's no way to spend your life.

I've gotten, in my way, established out here in the west. I've run all the rivers, often in very epic ways. I've guided out here for years, and been in charge of interpreting these places for people. I've lived and suffered and triumphed and lived and suffered for my love of these places. I know the rocks, the histories, the water issues, the climate history, all of this, better than most people who were born here...

I figure with a law degree, some specialized knowledge about environmental law, and some internships here and there with good organizations, I'll be on a better track to being a more useful, and marginally stable citizen. I can't go live in Atlanta and work for the SPLC and commute in that traffic and dedicate my life to helping people who don't care about me. That'll make me nuts and then I'll be no good to anyone or anything. But I'm working now on getting my writing going. Next summer if I guide rivers again I will be a guide in the Grand Canyon. That's the apex of guiding in this country. So I'll have my writing, my guiding, my truck, and some legal / activisty experience. Switching between all those things, using them to compliment one another, documenting it all and spinning off books now and then, helping the world in a big picture way while still keeping my own life sustainable.... that seems like the direction to go in for me.

There isn't any future to where I am right now. I just starting dating a friendly and attractive archeologist who works full time in Moab. My whole plan is to wander in the desert from September through November because that way I avoid city bills and stresses, and I can live on the cheap while having a good time doing interesting stuff and seeing cool things. But now here I am, finding myself emotionally invested to someone who has a big kid job and lives in the same city year round. So am I just supposed to break that off, and walk away from whatever it could be, so I can be some hippie in a truck living off the fat of the land? No... I am too old for that. I've done it too many times already. It's time for me to get on a better track, and not just keep on drifting with the wind, hiding in a subsistence "survival" mode.