"Most rivers are confined to the needs and histories of men. Like roads, they seem inconsequential without their travelers. The Colorado is an outlaw.  It belongs only to the ancient, eternal earth. As no other, it is savage and unpredictable of mood, peculiarly American in character."

                                                                              ---Frank Waters,  The Colorado

The Colorado River descends over twelve thousand feet to the Sea of Cortez from either the Rockies of Wyoming (via the Green) or of Colorado (via the Colorado) where subapline marshes laced with bright yellow glacier lillies and with delicate pink elephant's head bloom in stark contrast with mesquite and saltwood flats south of the border.  This mighty river starts as the tiniest rivulet of snow melt and swells to a chocolate brown presence in a Sonoran desert. With the Wind Rivers of Wyoming or the Never Summers of Colorado in sight, the river flashes with pan-sized brook trout going for water striders skimming its icy surface. Pippits and rosy finches chirp and flutter above the bright green tundra.  By the time the river flows through Sonoran deserts of Arizona and  Mexico, large chub churn and thrash near sandbars under an unrelenting sun, and rattlers wind along the sandy banks in search of mice and other small rodents.

         This river drains over 246,000 square miles of mountain, basin and canyonlands (or one twelfth the area of the lower 48 states of United States), and it descends at a rate many times that of the Mississippi. It cuts through tablelands and mesas as red as blood until it twists through the mile-deep Grand Canyon. Before the advent of dams, the Colorado ran free to the sea, depositing millions of tons of sediment in the narrow slit of the Sea of Cortez contained by mainland Mexico and Baja California. So heavy was the silt that it fractured the Earth's crust and generated earthquakes in Mexico and California.  John Muir once remarked that God did not finish creating the world in six days (with a seventh day of rest)  because he's still at work using ice tools called glaciers which are forever grinding the flanks of Mount Rainier. The same could be said of a tool called the Colorado River still at work cutting and carving through the desert into ever-deepening canyons.

          When John Wesley Powell dared the river with nine brave men in 1869, the overwhelming sense of  place or what the French call "genie de lieu" captured his spirit and imagination in much the way it had done with earlier Spanish explorers and Native American peoples living along its shores. Powell remarked that clouds seemed to have wills of their own as they skirted the edge of narrow rims of canyonlands high above. Tribal peoples including Paiutes and Hopis express in their river legends  a sense of awe and mysticism which links spirit and land  to generate a strong psychic force which molds human perception and character.  (1)

         Imagine a Hopi dancer swaying back and forth in the heat of day with a live rattlesnake in his mouth in Shongopovi high above the Colorado River drainage basin. Such a dance manifests the oneness of humanity and the natural world so deftly described by Frank Waters in THE BOOK OF THE HOPI. Snake nature and human nature are conjoined. In ancient times, according to Hopi mythology, a solitary young man bravely rafted the  Colorado River through the Grand Canyon in pursuit of a giant snake.  As a result of his pilgrimage, the Hopis' special relationship with snakes was established. Such a dangerous solo voyage was replicated over and over again by brave twentieth-century adventurers including Georgie White Clark and Colin Fletcher.

         For Francisco Dominguez Escalante the year 1776 did not mean independence from the British but a challenge to discover a passable route through canyonlands and desert from Santa Fe to Monterey on the Pacific coast. The terrain through which he and his exploring party traveled was so forbidding and awesome (including Glen Canyon and the Grand Canyon) that he was forced to abandon his efforts.

         The Colorado River and adjoining mountains inspired all humans within its bounds to one degree or another in multifaceted ways: spiritual, mythological, artistic, ecological, philosophic, historic, adventurous and naturalistic.  Let us turn to A COLORADO RIVER READER itself for a closer examination of the above factors. (2)

          A spiritual allegory utilizing the Colorado River within the Grand Canyon can be seen clearly in the Paiute creation myth, the anthology's first selection. It provides us with an etiological tale that explains the origin of natural phenomena.  In this myth, lovers are separated by a chasm of anger and hatred. The rushing waters and vast canyon between Woman-Rock and Man-Rock serve as a warning for couples who refuse to reconcile their quarrels:

                                                      "If you do not listen to me

                                                       All your life you will be sorry.

                                                       Jealousy will put a gulf between you

                                                       that you cannot come together.

                                                       Then your anger will be silenced

                                                        and your hearts will cry forever.                                               

                                                       When other lovers see you

                                                        you shall be a warning to them

                                                        and the anguish of your sorrow

                                                        shall become tradition to them.

                                                        Still Ke-ah-soit sat on one bank

                                                        And Yan-tan-ah on the other.

                                                        When darkness fell upon them

                                                        They were seated thus, and silent" (p. 9).

         Linda Hogan's essay at the end of the anthology is full of mythological implication. In her "Plant Journey" Hogan writes, "This new history of the Colorado River, the one that began so recently, doesn't contain the vision of those who, for thousands of years, have known the land in all its sacred power and detail. This is a land so alive that the Havasupai address songs to it.  And the Hopi people's place of origin is above the place where the waters of the Little Colorado meet with larger waters, a place called Sipapu, opening center. I know there is a wider way to see the canyon. I look for this wider way by looking down, at the plants" (pp. 185-186). The plant which is of greatest significance to her is the sacred datura. "Datura," writes Hogan, "has been of  great value as a medicine and spiritual ally for tribes on this continent" (p. 187). It has become woven in ceremony and mythology of tribal peoples over the centuries. As Henry David Thoreau remarked in his JOURNAL all history eventually becomes mythology.

         No better example example of an artistic focus on the Colorado River can be found than John Van Dyke's "The Silent River" from his DESERT (1901). Art historian Van Dyke becomes a painter of words in this essay. As he traces the flow of the Colorado  to the Sea of Cortez, Van Dyke paints it in many and varying moods. "After the river crosses the borderline of Mexico,"  he writes, "it grows broader and flatter than ever. And still the color seems to deepen. For all its suggestion of blood it is not an unlovely color. On the contrary, that deep red contrasted with the green of the banks and the blue of the sky, makes a very beautiful color harmony. They are hues of depth and substance"hues that comport excellently well with the character of the river itself" (p. 46).

         Numerous essays contained in this volume deal with matters ecological, whether with specific impact of dams or with human impact in general on the river and its canyons. They range from pessimistic to hopeful, from satiric to straightforward commentary. John McPhee's "Encounters with The Archdruid" serves as a good example of an ecologically focused essay on damming. He bears  witness to a dialogue between Floyd E. Dominy of the Bureau of Reclamation and conservationist David Brower of the Sierra Club while on a float trip through the Grand Canyon.  As they bounce and bob through the rapids with Dominy letting out warhoops and Brower sitting white knuckled, McPhee records an adversarial dialogue on whether dams are best or letting the river flow free.  McPhee writes, "Brower braces his legs and grips one of the safety ropes that run along the pontoons. He says, '"how good it is to hear a living river! You can almost hear it cutting.'

          Dominy pulls his Lake Powell hat down firmly round his ears. He has heard the same sort of thing before. Brower is suggesting that the Colorado is even now making an ever deeper and grander Grand canyon, and what sacrilege it would be to dam the river and stop that hollowed process. Dominy says, "I think most people agree, Dave, that it wasn't a river of this magnitude that cut the grand canyon"

         Brower is too interested in the coming rapid to respond. (p. 89).

         Philip Fradkin, in "A River No More," takes a more serious view that the riparian environment of the Grand Canyon has been so radically altered that the Grand Canyon is really nothing more than the ultimate waterway or ditch. Fradkin laments that "with all these changes, it is hard to say the river and its immediate surroundings could be considered to be in their natural state any longer. But unless you whisper this repeatedly to yourself while floating down the river, it is difficult to realize that the Colorado within the Grand Canyon has become the ultimate ditch in the efficient transport of water from Lake Powell to Lake Mead" (p. 117).

         Famed riverguide Georgie White Clark, after describing the awesome beauty of Glen Canyon, soon to be dammed, exclaims: "Today we don't run the upper canyon anymore. Some river runners run the Catarac [sic] and San Juan, but it's a float trip. I am, of course, still running the Grand Canyon. But the dams have really destroyed the entire Colorado adventure as I used to know it, and have changed the entire complexion of river running everywhere, forever" (p. 111).

         Both Edward Abbey and Ellen Melloy exhibit in their writing a philosophic quest for a higher understanding of the nature of life through the medium of canyonlands. Abbey's essay "Down the River with Henry Thoreau" exudes in the philosophical. He could not have chosen a better metaphysical traveling companion than Henry David Thoreau.  As Thoreau, the philosopher, deftly critiqued the society of his day, so Edward Abbey played the role of social critic of his day. In critiquing society's materialism and superficiality, Thoreau and Abbey quest for a deeper meaning.  Reminiscent of Thoreau (whom he frequently quotes), Abbey reflects: "We hear the demand by conventional economists for increased "productivity," for example. Productivity for what? For whose benefit? To what end? By what means and at what cost? Those questions are not considered. We are belabored by the insistence on the part of our politicians, businessmen and military leaders, and the claque of scriveners who serve them, that "growth" and "power" are intrinsic goods, of which we can never have enough, or even too much. As if gigantism were an end in itself" (p. 124).  Thoreau's motto to "simplify, simplify" was even more meaningful to Edward Abbey in an age of technological materialism run rampant. It is on the river that one  is energized to think things out as one listens to shoreline coyotes or glances at soaring hawks high above moenkopi sandstone heights.

         Like Abbey, Ellen Melloy is given to musings as she rafts down the Green River through Desolation Canyon above the confluence where there are no ravens to be seen. Melloy reflects that the "linguistic world of Navajo is split into things and round things. The shapes and textures of the physical world affect verb stems. In Navajo you need one verb stem for a round thing, a different verb stem for a long thing, other verb stems altogether for a granular thing or something that is bundled up. A single word might also consider the object's direction-"is it above you, are you lowering it, or does it fall on its own accord? So often Desolation's riches, real or sensory, flow over me like the riches of this intricate native language. I will never understand them, sort them, make the finest distinctions and nuances, store them in my mind to be brought out properly during winter's exile. It would take several more lifetimes to become literate here; my passage will only carry knowledge like a strong taste on the tongue" (p. 153). The river generates thoughts which flow like the current. Nature becomes a philosophic emblem of the mind.

         Of course, all of the essays in this collection have historic value, but three that come to mind which have a poignant historic focus are Silvestre Velez de Esclante's "Journal," Robert Brewster Stanton's "Cataract Canyon" and the late T.H. Watkins' "River Runners"   Escalante's journal is of immense historic importance.  He was sent by the Catholic Church of Mexico City to find a suitable route connecting the missions of New Mexico with those in California. The selection chosen in this anthology concerns his exploratory party's crossing the Colorado River in Glen Canyon (now flooded by Lake Powell). A sense of awe and fear pervade his writing as he attempts to find the way from Santa Fe to Monterey through some of the most rugged canyon country on the planet. On November 6, 1776, Escalante writes:  "On the 6^th, after it had stopped raining, we left Santa Francisca (a camp named in honor of Saint Frances) and headed northeast, after we had gone three leagues we were stopped for a long time by a strong blizzard and tempest consisting of rain and thick hailstones  amid horrendous thunder claps and lightning flashes. We recited the Virgin's Litany, for her to implore some relief for us, and God willed for the tempest to end. We continued east for half a league and halted near the river because it kept on raining and some rock cliffs blocked our way. We named the place San Vicente Ferrer. Today three leagues and a half" (pp. 13-14).

         Robert Brewster Stanton's "Cataract Canyon" is chronologically arranged with much reference to railway surveying (thankfully the railway was never built) through adjusting of instruments and triangulation of high points along the shoreline.  Each rapid of "the Cat" is measured in terms of its length, its descent in feet per mile and its peculiar characteristics.  He incorporates quotes from his own diary into his essay to enliven it with sometimes hair-raising detail including  the separation of survey parties from each other and brushes with death. Stanton had to persuade his men to continue on with the survey with very scant food reserves: "At such times, men's real characters come to the surface. I said to Hislop: "Well, Hislop, what are you going to do?" Straightening up his six feet two, and stiffening his Scottish backbone, he said: "Mr. Stanton, I came down here as your assistant engineer, to obey your orders. I am here, sir!" I spoke to the two Negro men, Gibson and Richards. They both said they would stay with me, and then C.W. Potter came without my asking and volunteered to remain" (p. 35).

         The major purpose of T.H. Watkins' essay "The River Runners" is to provide a survey of river running on the Colorado from 1909 up to the mid 1960's when river running had become clearly in vogue as a natural recreation.  Of the first ever purely recreational run, Watkins writes, "The first purely recreational trip down the river was undertaken in September of 1909 by Ohio manufacturer Julius F. Stone. Accompanied by Nathaniel Galloway, a trapper who had run much of the river in search of pelts, and equipped with Galloway's specially-designed "cockpit" boats, Stone left Green River City, Wyoming (Powell's starting point), on September 12 and arrived at Needles, California, on November 19.  The pair made it through without a single upset, an accomplishment rarely matched and one that may be attributable to Galloway's innovation in river-running: instead of taking rapids bow first, as Powell had done, Galloway ran them stern first, so that he could see where he was going. The method was adopted by nearly all who followed him" (p. 83).

         Every essay in this book has an element of adventure in it, but certainly Frederick Dellenbaugh's "Wonderland of Crags and Pinnacles," Frank Waters' "Its Delta," Bill Beer's "Rapids, Icewater and Fire," and Colin Fletcher's "Big Drop" can be categorized as being adventure-packed, especially Beer's essay depicting a long cold swim the length of the Grand Canyon!   Frederick Dellenbaugh's "A Wonderland of Crags and Pinnacles" is a recording of John Wesley Powell's second voyage of exploration of the Colorado River and its canyons beginning in September 1871 when the party first entered Cataract Canyon  after four months of navigating and shooting rapids from Green River, Wyoming. After a few days in this canyon, Dellenbaugh narrates: "We began by running a graceful little rapid, just beyond which we came to a very bad place.  The river was narrow and deep, with a high velocity, and the channel was filled with enormous rocks. Two hours of the hardest work in and out of the water, climbing over gigantic boulders along the bank, lifting boats and sliding them on driftwood skids, tugging, pulling, shoving every minute with might and main put us at the bottom" (p. 55).  Such a process had to be repeated over and over before this expedition had negotiated all eight rapids of Cataract Canyon.

         In "Its Delta" Frank Waters bears witness to the highly unusual phenomenon of a tidal bore that occurred before the damming of the Colorado. The force of the river's current met with the incoming tide of the sea of Cortez to produce a four foot wall of water moving upstream like a cobra's head through the Mexican delta.  Waters writes, "One night it came. The river rose rapidly. The Rio Colorado [his passenger boat] jerked at her anchor chain. The captain stirred for the first time. The anchor was brought up and the engine started, though we did not move. Greasy lanterns were lit, and in their dim flicker the crew lounged restlessly, rolling cigarettes. Far downstream sounded a low resounding boom. Swiftly it advanced upstream upon us, clearly visible in the moonlight: a wall of water some four feet high sweeping round the bend. The Rio Colorado, unfettered and with engine running, met it squarely. She went nose down until her decks were washed and came up with a dizzy roll streaming torrents from every passageway" (p. 73). Though everyone was soaked and dripping, all were pleased that they had survived. Inasmuch as such a phenomenon no longer exists, Waters depiction of it in such graphic terms is as good as having  a video recording of it.

         Bill Beer and his companion John Daggett succeeded in swimming in wet suits the entire 280 miles of the Grand Canyon in icy water, churning rapids, and howling dust storms. We, as readers, experience a chill in the bone, anxiety of separation of two friends by miles of wild river, and sheer exhaustion at windy nighttime campsites along the roaring river. We wonder how Bill and John muster up enough strength to slug into icy waters once again after a quick breakfast. Beer explains, "It was an agony we were to feel many times a day in the weeks ahead. Wading off the silt bank into gradually deepening water, pushing our [supply] boxes ahead of us, we resisted the increasing current as long as we could, putting off the moment when we had to surrender and get swept off our feet to begin swimming toward midstream. The moment we stopped swimming we could feel our bodies try to fight off the cold. The water, of course, was relentless. Water is so much more efficient than air at conducting heat. And a little more than half the body temperature it can swiftly carry away much of whatever warmth the body is able to produce" (p. 135). Amazing that these two companions were able to wade ashore, at last, from the deep waters of Lake Mead.

         Colin Fletcher, in his sixties, was the first person to raft the Colorado River solo from the heights of the Wind River Mountains of Wyoming 1,700 miles to the mouth of this river in the sea of Cortez.  His journey is recorded in RIVER (1997), a gripping book that carries the reader along each mile of descent from snowcapped peaks to saltbush desert. After reading such a book, the reader is ready grapple with the pressures of the modern-day work force.  It is not difficult to imagine being onboard Fletcher's raft when he describes Cataract Canyon's rapid number 2: "Instant bedlam. Wells of surging white water, tainted brown. But everything straightforward. Just a careening rush. Small oar pressures to hold the raft at right angles to each wave, nothing more. The waves were big, though. As big as any we'd taken [Fletcher personified his raft as a second person]. But the bulging bow rode up and over them, one after another. At each  wave water showered us with glistening off-white cascades that were cold, very cold; but the little raft held true. No twinge of danger, only exhilaration. Then we were clear, floating level, and I was scanning the right bank for a sheltered campsite, above rapid 3" (p. 172).

     The last category to be examined is the natural history of the Colorado River and its canyons. Every essay in the collection has an element of natural history as would be expected, but the two essays I will focus upon are John Wesley Powell's "From the Grand to the Little Colorado" and Ann Zwinger's "Badger Creek and Running Rapids"  Though John Wesley Powell's primary purpose of rafting the Colorado from Green River, Wyoming to the western edge of the Grand Canyon of Arizona was exploration and charting, nonetheless he was a naturalist at heart with an intense interest in botany and geology. His Aristotelian description of the geological layering of marble Canyon is all-encompassing. In Marble Canyon Powell analyzes the relationship of the texture of rock to the flow of the river: "With some feeling of anxiety we enter a new canyon this morning. We have learned to observe closely the texture of the rock. In softer strata we have a quiet river, in harder we find rapisa and falls.  Below us are the limestones and hard sandstones which we found in Cataract Canyon. This bodes toil and danger. Besides the texture of the rocks, there is another condition which affects the character of the channel, as we have found by experience. Where the strata are horizontal the river is often quiet, and, even though it may be very swift in places, no great obstacles are found. Where the rocks incline in the direction traveled, the river usually sweeps with great velocity, but still has few rapids and falls. But where the rocks dip up stream and the river cuts obliquely across the upturned formations, harder strata above and softer below, we have rapids and falls. Into hard rocks and into rocks dipping up stream we pass this morning and start on a long, rocky, mad rapid. On the left there is a vertical rock, and down by this cliff and around to the left we glide, tossed enough by the waves to appreciate the rate at which we are traveling"(p. 17).  Powell is equally impressed with the mosses, ferns and flowers that thrive within the fine mist of a Marble Canyon waterfall.

         Ann Zwinger brings to us both an artist's and naturalist's eye. In her essay "Badger Creek and Running Rapids," Zwinger meticulously observes, draws and comments on what's on, under and beside the roaring Colorado"whether fish swimming in the river or waterbirds skimming the surface or a shoreline Grand canyon rattler flicking out a forked tongue.  Here is a sample of her geological observations:  "White streaks and big burnt orange patch of Hakatai Shale color the left slope above the rapid at Mle 76.5.   Some layers of the Hakatai (the Havusupai name for the Colorado River) contain brilliant purples and reds and startling patches of brilliant orange hornfels from the oxidation of iron-bearing minerals. When molten volcanic rock pushed into the shale, heat and pressure metamorphosed it to this vibrant color, which, where it outcrops, lights a canyon wall with hot coals. When polished by the rain it gleams like the elegant black and cinnabar red of Japanese lacquerware" (p. 164).

         All of the above essayists could be examined under some other category other than the one for which they were in that they all concern themselves to some degree with natural history, history, conservation and so forth. Part of the reason for the overlap certainly has to do with the subject itself, the mighty Colorado River. How can one avoid at least mentioning the entrada or Navajo sandstone formations; the Native American legends and stories; the bird, rodent and fish life; the spoliation of the natural environment and the need to restore ecological balance; the history of earlier rafting expeditions; the sheer thrill of nearly vertical descent into furious and noisy suck holes; and the spiritual and philosophic values of river time in a complex, technological, fast-paced world we all live in.  And yet, the river continues to flow! It is highly probable that this river will continue to generate a significant literary and artistic response that will rival music from Havasupai reed flute compositions to Ferde Groffe's "Grand Canyon Suite," or the photographs and paintings of our best nineteenth- and twentieth-century artists and photographers including, Thomas Moran,  William Holmes, Bruce Aiken , William Henry Jackson, William M. Pennington, and Lisle Updike.  The Colorado River is a river that runs through us to tug at our innermost psyche with the force of its own flow through canyonlands duplicated no where else on this planet.

1)     For a more detailed discussion on this topic, see my essay "Psychic Landscape," in A Dictionary of Literary Themes and Motifs, ed. Jean-Charles Seigneuret, Greenwood Press, 1988, Vol. 2, pp. 1005-1009.

2)   Richard F. Fleck, A Colorado River Reader, University of Utah Press, 2000.