Excerpts

From the introduction of an upcoming book I wrote about the Grand Canyon...

"...The trip was marvelous for me not just because the rapids were fun or the people were friendly, or that camp time provided me a much needed rest and relaxation. The trip was marvelous because it was the first time I had ever been here. The first time you ever go down any river section, there is a sense of mystery and anticipation that can be experienced only once. It is the thrill of going somewhere new, somewhere unexplored. Having this feeling all to myself in such an imposing and inspirational environment allowed me to reflect on my own life, the joys and hardships of guiding, and being a worker in the Inter-Mountain tourist industry. If I survive the rapids, what sort of life, and what sort of society is waiting for me to return to? What would another year of the same habits and lifestyle look like?"

"I am not the world's foremost Grand Canyon expert. I do not know as much about its history and rocks as many other people. But I have been able to preserve the thrill of experiencing it for the first time in a rather unique way. I also do not intend to impress you with being the most reckless and “extreme” aquatic dare devil on the Colorado River. There are others who do this far better than me, and there are already enough worried mammas in this world."

"I am simply a guy who like a lot of other people got laid off and thrown on the scrapheap when the apocalypse happened back in '08. I was lucky enough to be introduced to Western Rivers and boats and the culture of running them right when it became clear that living and working in a city was promising to offer precious little in terms of personal fulfillment for the foreseeable. I met a river outfitter quite by accident and started working for them. Quickly I decided that spending my 20s messing around with boats and rivers and deserts was going to be a lot more healthy and productive way to spend my time than anything else I could think of."

"Now all rivers eventually end. Sometimes they dry up before they reach their destination. Most of them around here you can only go down for so long before they turn into a lake or a dried up bed. You can't, and shouldn't, guide the river forever, unless of course you do it in the Grand Canyon. Everywhere else low wages and seasonal insecurity predominate. Everywhere else as well, what we once considered to be free flowing and healthy rivers are increasingly subject to extreme climactic fluctuations that threaten local river running industries just as much as they stress native ecosystems. For the past two years in a row many river outfitters in Colorado have had to cancel trips and loose significant amounts of business because of extraordinary flows- high in one year and low the next- that made their most popular sections unboatable. That doesn't just mean that you didn't get to have a fun vacation this year, but it also means that a lot of people who were depending on you to come out here to go down the river, buy gasoline, stay in a motel, eat in a restaurant, and pay sales taxes to support a rural county's school budget are coming up short."

"Rivers have a way of taking you out of an artificially constructed world. We've built one where image, myth, celebrity and entertainment are what matters. The health and happiness of ourselves and the real world around us seem to be considered quite low on the scale of what is newsworthy. We debate whether or not climate change even exists while continuing to spend billions probing the Earth for ever more sources of fossil fuels to burn. We create popular cultures and films about vampires and zombies. Today the drug store here in Moab even sells zombie- shaped targets one can purchase and shoot at while fantasizing about a world where we can solve all our problems with a gun. As my fellow guide, friend, and visionary Jsun has put it, 'What we spend all our time thinking about, that is the world we are going to create.'"

"The long term psychological effects of spending countless hours staring at screens, and having one's ears' constantly stimulated by an incessant soundtrack of urban background noise, are only just beginning to be understood. Rivers offer an alternative to extract oneself from what is often an unhealthy, disorienting, and destructive modern culture. From within the safety of a canyon, we can undertake a journey at nature's own pace. We can study it first hand, and see how its mountains and gorges have stoically endures the ages. In a riparian ecosystem, more short term changes can also be observed as mining and industrial pollution, agricultural runoff, introduced species, changing precipitation patterns, and regulated flows have changed the way that many creatures are able to live."

"You can learn a lot from a river. I think that my recent adventure on one this Spring was sufficiently adventurous, and undertaken by a person sufficiently skilled at putting observations and discoveries into entertaining words, to justify it being printed and made accessible for someone like you to read. If you find it lacking, well them I invite you to go out there and find yourself a river and a boat and write a better story yourself. It's pretty hard to have too many good stories about rivers. And it's always good to have people capable of sharing their lessons with a world that needs to hear them- whether it knows it or not."

"You know, life is a lot like a river..."