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.

My Book of Poems is Out

Long awaited, and finally out...

For you the reader here is my book of poems. Poems of rivers and life, the world, justice, difficulty, love, betrayal, death, hope and struggle. Prose of the desert and the ghost towns and the wild places. Voices of myself, snap shots of moments in time, travel, and observation.

As you may understand, a lot of poetry is narcissistic fluff most people have little patience for. Honey sweet words with no substance of life to them. My poems are not like that. My poems are true works of life. They are for people and the world. The are not soothing lullabies to put you to sleep, or to tell you that everything is beautiful and perfect. They are here to wake you up and prod you and reach out a hand to you. Take from them what you will. And pass them on if they are found to be useful.

Walking Away From Dixie has been self published and printed at the Canyonlands Copy Center in Moab, Utah. Awaiting national distribution, it can currently be purchased by using pay pal to send payment + $3.50 S&H to cawright2007@yahoo.com . Current asking price is $10, which can be raised or lowered depending on the purchasers' needs and generosity. All proceeds benefit my food and gas budget as I spend the fall writing a book on Utah's Ghost Towns, a book on the solo duckie run of the Grand Canyon, and a book about living, working and traveling around the Colorado Plateau during the recession. It is 45 pages long of concentrated experience and observation, and is my first book.

Index:

The Ripping of the Rivers' Tears
There was a river
Activate the Emergency Response System
Red Velvet Cafe
Head for the Hills
The One Who Travels Alone
The Winter
Me Too, Love
Outer Suburbia

11.11
That's About Enough of That
Ghetto Blues, DC
Late Night Re-Runs
Of What Standards Fall Short?
Walking Away From Dixie
Sleepwalking Through the Days of Cotton
The Deception Years
State Highway
Could it be?
I run

America Dawns Malicious
Gunslinger Punk
The Revolutionary that waits
Foreign Fighters
Unbeatable Wall Street
Smacked in the Face
National Forecast
Life Pushes Down
Plenty of Ways

Take Life
Tour
When You're Homeless
Servants
Banks Pay the Tab
Insight
River Character
The Ghost Towns
Occupy SLC
The Interviews

There Was a River

Once, there was a river
Whose annual flood
Swept the banks clean
Tore out old vegetation
And left wide beaches
And a rich, fertile soil.

Today my banks are overgrown
Into huge, speculative derivatives

To Boldy Duckie...

I have navigated, alone, the entire Grand Canyon, from Lee's Ferry to Pearce Ferry. 279 miles. 70-something named rapids. As many again unnamed rapids and "riffles" that would be considered class three rapids on any other river. I made it through most of them fine, and only portaged once, at Lava Falls, where at low water there was no left line. Enormous waves, man eating holes, jagged rocks, fangs, sucks, and boils. Arizona bark scorpions. I had never done the Grand Canyon before. And I have completed the journey there. My experience was a combination of great joy as well as trepidation, as I cautiously made my way down stream, scouting every marked rapid, and firmly adhering to my own superstitious rituals, as luck was suddenly a thing I was very conscious of. Each night for the fist 180 or so miles I wondered if that dinner would be my last. I thought about people I knew, and I thought deep thoughts that looked into myself. Yes, my vacation. In the morning I'd sleep in late, read my books of literature and geology, enjoy my coffee, and shove off to find out what was around the bend.

My humility, ultimately, was rewarded, as the Canyon allowed me to pass through it, with only six flips...

Red Velvet Cafe

How does one think
Inside the Red Velvet Cafe?
The rattle of that AC
The phone ringing at your counter
The constant pop music
Just a few notches too high
So that one must raise one's voice
To speak over it.
The customers
Trying to use the wrong door
And order at the wrong counter

What good is this espresso bar
With Wifi only for the credit card machine?

Endless mountains
And palm trees blowing in the wind...
Look away
There's enough going on in here already
This huge salad doesn't fit on its small plate
It will take all my concentration
Not to spill it.

For eighteen days I stared at water.
Water that will kill me.
Rocks that will break me
And tear holes in my boat.

Silent Ancient Canyons
That have never talked
In a million years.
And the only thing
That existed in the whole universe
Was the angle
And the speed of the water...

The Dirty Devil River

This trip I had been meaning to do for some years, and this year I got my chance. Had my last night of work in Park City and two days later I was pushing off and going under the HWY 24 bridge at Hanksville. 8 days later I came out of a windstorm, dragged my duckie onto a pile of rocks below the Dirty Devil campsite, crawled into my sleeping bag and fell asleep. Did the shuttle the next day and headed off to Junction, getting ready for a visit home before the Grand Canyon.

Needless to say, despite all that was said and done, and all the journals I wrote, I have not yet had time to write a proper story about this amazing trip. This will suffice for now, and hopefully I will find more time this summer. Until then, the one thing I will say, is that you should not do this trip in 8 days. 8 days gets you covered for the paddling. But you need more than that to do the many hikes. 10 should be a minimum...

The Geology of Utah's Rivers

A book review

By C. L. Wright



The Geology of Utah's Rivers is a topic that one can easily spend years and years and years trying to learn, only to wake up the next day and hear a new theory that makes more sense than the one you've been telling people about for the past several seasons of guiding. A few formations are easily recognized and learned quickly, while others that are thinner or rarer may be harder to learn. Some rather prominent formations are called different names by different geologists. Others rest "comfortably" on top of each other, and represent a smooth transition of similar environments, say, marine limestone for example, and the exact moment of contact from one to the other is practically impossible to pin point.


And once (or if?) one begins to feel comfortable with stratigraphy (the study of different rock layers what sorts of environments they represent), much larger and often more vexing questions of geography remain. The rivers on the Colorado Plateau curiously cut through a large number of uplifts, plateaus, cliffs, anticlines, and mountain ranges that it seems they should naturally be inclined to flow around. Numerous theories over the years have been advanced to explain these feats of canyon cutting. Paleogeography - the study of ancient geography, becomes key to understanding the present geography. Eventually one may come to know more about seas and rivers and sediments that no longer exist than the contemporary ones one is floating down. Differentiating the contributions various scientists, with their own names and competing theories, takes of course even more time to master. The ambition to accumulate a totality of knowledge of these landscapes can easily, and elusively, become a live long goal.

Happily surprised, I recently came across a copy of William T. Parry's Geology of Utah's Rivers at the outdoors store in Kanab....