Well, river stories. Last year, I came out ranting about how rafting was one of the peak experiences of my life. I would have to say that this, too, was a peak experience; but in a somewhat different way. For one, I think that my inexperience both with the desert and the river last year made the experience so different as to stand out. This year, I felt at home on the river much more quickly than last, so I didn't have to deal with as much strangeness and newness. The canyons are gorgeous, the rapids were fantastic, and I rode in Skip's boat every day, which was good. I have been missing him quite a lot, which is not particularly different from last year, I guess. Also different from last year was the fact that I am basically a lot happier with life and work and where I live and pretty much everything this year, so the river trip wasn't just one minor glint of light in an otherwise fairly miserable existence. Okay, I probably wasn't that miserable last year, but I wasn't happy. I hated Florida, I hated my job...not the greatest of times. Still, the canyon country is different enough from what I'm used to that it is always different. I'm surprised a rusty, rain-soaked, salt-water denizen like me can love the Southwest as much as I do.

This was Skip's last trip as a Holiday guide, not just for the year, but forever (basically), since he starts med school really soon and will have at most a month off during the summers from now on. It's sad that he won't be able to spend his summers on the river, as that is definitely one of the places he truly belongs. On the other hand, one of the things I love most about Skip is that he is a complete human being: he belongs as much in school as on a river or a rock face, and none of these things is necessarily better than the other. He and I were talking a little bit on the river about how weird I feel about being really good at my job. It is a strange thing to get some of your self-esteem from being really good at a job that essentially does no good for anyone. I have such admiration for competent people; it kind of drives me crazy that one of my areas of competence is in an industry with which I've had almost no experience and in which there is no obvious "wow that's so cool!" factor. It's like being an incredibly gifted plumber: people might want you to do your job well, but it's not as if there is a lot of social or internal glorification of the job. Anyhow, I'm trying to come to terms with the notion that it is as valuable mentally to be great at what I do as it is to be a great doctor, if not as valuable to society. Which of course is why I was a sociology major: I was really good at it. Sigh.

Anyhow, I'm glad that Skip could have me, mom, and Cathe on his last trip; as well as two of the other guides, who are both long-term Holiday employees and who obviously adore Skip. One of them, Kary, took Skip and his family on a rafting trip when Skip was about 10. He was feeling about as broken up as I was about saying goodbye to Skip, so we hit it off. It is nice -- if not surprising -- for me to see Skip just inspires such great love in others. Kary actually met us in the parking lot at the warehouse and introduced himself, welcomed us, and suggested we sign in with Jonathan (the name by which Skip is known to most of the world) in the office. He (Kary) was there when we were in the office and Skip walked in from a back room, so saw me hand him a pile of letters and say, "I brought you your mail." Then, of course, we had one of our marathon hugs (among his other gifts, Skip is one of the best huggers I know). I heard Kary say "oh" or "wow" or something behind me, so of course I had to turn around and say, "we've met."

Unfortunately, the guests this year were pretty awful. There were a couple of single parents with a total of four children between them, and all but one of the children were horrible. The parents were horrible as well. There was also one Good Mom with her daughter, who was a sweetie. Anyhow, if it were a children's camp, you would correct the horrible children without compunction. However, it is difficult to correct children when their parents are right there and not doing anything, and it is even more difficult to correct adults. The only people who would venture to speak up to the kids in any corrective form were the Good Mom, my mom, the guides, and me. Usually, mom and I would have been more involved (or tougher), but we just decided to avoid the horrible kids and their parents as much as possible. Mom and I were talking about this truly inappropriate and horrific single dad after the trip, and I couldn't understand how she knew all this stuff about him (like that he was a doctor, but wasn't practicing, and had beachfront property in Florida, etc.). She said, "If you even looked at him, he'd tell you his life story." I replied, "That explains it. I avoided eye-contact all week."

This idiot (Rob) was completely self-obsessed and was entirely image-conscious. He also immediately decided he had a crush on the single mom (Susan, who wore makeup and mascara every day), so he paid attention only to her (as in, to the exclusion of his child, unless paying attention to his child was either expedient or unavoidable). At one point, I was hiking near them, and I heard him say, "Soooo...how does it feel to be single again?" I got away from there. There were a couple of things that really sealed our (mom's, Cathe's, Skip's, and mine) opinion about the guy. He had rented gear (tent, sleeping gear, etc.) from Holiday, and on the first night one of the guides gave a little talk/demonstration about setting up the tents. This guy didn't listen at all, and then he couldn't get his tent up. He got all frustrated with himself, and blew up at his daughter (who was annoying and whiny, but didn't do anything to trigger this). Apparently (Skip saw this and told me about it, even though he had vowed not to mention it to me because he knew it would just piss me off), he grabbed his daughter by the shoulders, shook her, and then pushed her away. Then he sort of shook himself and immediately started to look around to see if anyone had noticed that the mask had fallen. Skip was standing by the boats, staring at him like "what the fuck do you think you are doing." He (Skip) grabbed the biggest guide he could find and said, "Why don't you go see if Rob needs help setting up his tent?" The other incident that creeped us out was that he and his daughter were bathing nude together. I'm not sure how old she was, but much older than an age where that might be appropriate.

The same guy had brought all this fishing equipment (there is supposed to be good fishing at Jones Hole), and kept talking about fish; although the four of us pretty much determined that he didn't know that much about fish, fishing, etc. Also, he explained to Skip that he and his daughter had taken a rafting trip on the Colorado the previous year where they had motorized boats, which was "much better." Skip, of course wondered, "better in what way?" The answer seemed to be, "faster." All Skip could say was, "(A) Not sure I agree with you there; and (B) motors are not allowed in Dinosaur, fortunately." Anyhow, on the day that we went to Jones Hole, mom, Cathe and I all rode with Skip, and we were talking about this idiot. He skipped the big hike up to the pictographs and petroglyphs so he could fish. When we got back to the boats and had floated away from the rest of the group, Skip said, "Well, I got the scoop on the big fishing expedition. Apparently, they fished for about 15 minutes, didn't catch anything, and gave up. He spent more time tying his fly than fishing." This amused us all quite a bit. Ordinarily, Skip would never bitch about guests, even with us; but I think he was having a little last-tripitis. Also, when we pulled up to Jones Hole, there were more than a dozen bighorn sheep just hanging out by the creek, eating grass. Marissa (Rob's daughter) apparently asked her dad if she could go see the sheep, of course he said okay, and of course he ended up following her over to where the sheep were. Skip eventually noticed them getting quite near the sheep, and actually had to go tell them to get away. It's sort of incredible that you have to tell grown-ups not to go touching wild animals, don't you think?

On the second night, we were sitting around the fire, and Narcissistic Single Mom came over, sat down next to Rob, and wondered aloud if she should send the kids to bed, in case they were annoying the group (a completely -- and surprisingly -- appropriate observation to make). Rob's response was (and you have to say this as pretentiously as possible), "I love to hear them laugh. The laughter of the children is the most beautiful sound in the world." Skip and I both started looking around for a bucket.

I almost had the good grace to feel guilty for riding in Skip's boat the entire time, but not guilty enough to change my behavior. I was feeling a little bad about wanting to ride with him yet again on the last day, but he had saved me a spot in his boat (mom and Cathe, too, but they wanted to go in the paddle boat), so I didn't have to worry about it.

These river trips are odd because the only kids my age are the guides. Plus, I have had a ton of water and trip-leading experience; yet I am not a guide. It always gives me some role-conflicts. I'm not entirely comfortable letting them do all the work while I just sit on my ass. It's also a bit demeaning, because if you're identifying with the guides, you can't help but feel like the biggest flailer on the planet. They are so incredibly competent and strong (physically, mentally, emotionally...) that I am just a huge loser. I need to start hanging out with more emotional cripples. That'll make me feel better. I think it's an extension of what I was saying above: it's weird to be competent in uncool ways and weird to be more competent than normal people but to identify with people who are infinitely more competent than you. It's like being Craig Ehlo: you're in the NBA, which, by default makes you a better basketball player than most of the world; but you can't help compare yourself to Kemp and Jordan.

My other complaint about the guests was that their goals (whether explicit or implicit) for the trip were quite different from mine. One thing I really like about Holiday is that their company goals seem to be extremely in tune with my own. In fact, one of the things they say on their web site is something like, "our office is heated with wood; organized with computer." I may have mentioned that I really appreciate complete people...organizations, too. It is such a gift to be able to visit those canyons and to see the various artifacts of people who were there before us, that my goal for the trip is basically a deep appreciation without being destructive or offensive or unsafe. In other words, if the guides need to talk to each other about how they're going to negotiate big rapids, one does not need to be talking or trying to get their attention. And if you have a chance to hear something about the geology or history of the area, you don't need to be obviously bored about it. There was one group of people who just wanted huge rapids all the time; there were a bunch of self-obsessed people who just wanted everything to be all about them (oh my god, don't even get me started about Rob's attention-seeking...I could smack that guy); and there were a few quieter folks whose goals I never really figured out.

Oh well, I just hung out with the guides and rode in Skip's boat, so I got to hear all the history and geology and legend anyhow. He is really good at the interpretive stuff. He assigned each of the rookies an interp spot about which they had to learn and that they had to present to us. They each did an okay job, but when you hear Skip talking about it, his passion for the place really comes through. There is this spot where you can see an old survey ladder from when Echo Park Canyon was being surveyed to be dammed. Having grown up reading The Monkey Wrench Gang and being told about one of the most beautiful places on earth that I missed seeing because someone decided to erect a completely pointless dam (Glen Canyon), I get a little emotional when I think about how close Dinosaur, Lodore Canyon, Echo Park, Steamboat Rock, and all that beauty on the Yampa were to being under a big, ugly, stagnant, sedimented lake. I just cry and cry when I think about it, feeling so fortunate to be able to go on these rivers and so cheated out of Glen Canyon at the same time. The two are interrelated, by the way. The president of the Sierra Club, David Brower, basically agreed not to fight the Glen Canyon Dam if the Bureau would give up on erecting a dam at Echo Park. The campground at which we stay the last night is downriver from the survey ladder, and is called Compromise.

Here's the Sierra Club's official take on it:

In a particularly important development, when Dinosaur National Monument was threatened by federal plans to build a dam at Echo Park in the early 1950s, David Brower and Harold Bradley urged the Outing Committee to plan a river trip to Dinosaur's spectacular canyons. With the development of flat-bottomed inflatable rafts, large numbers of people could be transported by a few experienced boatmen. Three one-week trips were scheduled by Outing Chairman Stewart Kimball, each taking 65 people down the Yampa and Green canyons, the heart of the monument. Families with small children went on these expeditions, demonstrating that, with precautions, rafting could be a safe and universal recreational experience.

More important, through only 13,000 people visited the monument in 1950, with fewer than 50 rafting the rivers, in 1954 nearly 71,000 visitors appeared and more than 900 floated down the canyons. These river trips took influential people to this endangered wildland, allowing them to see the monument in a way that was not otherwise available, and might never again be possible if Echo Park Dam were built. This was the traditional Club strategy with regard to outings--utilizing new technologies while encouraging appropriate recreational use in a threatened wilderness. Outings had their effect, as Muir had argued, when travelers came back from the wilderness ready to fight for its preservation.

David Brower has called this the "place no one knew" strategy. There is nobody to protect a place nobody knows. More outings would be organized for the wild rivers of the Colorado Plateau of Utah, and in the Grand Canyon in the 1960s to build opposition to dams that were planned there. A river-touring section began in the San Francisco Bay Area, and the coming decades saw increased national interest in enjoying and preserving rivers all across the continent.

Somehow they fail to mention that after Brower had compromised, he took a rafting trip down Glen Canyon and just wept and wept throughout the trip, seeing that he had agreed not to save that spot. Probably not his fault, and probably without the compromise there would have been two dams, and this was one of the first times that grassroots action really worked (Sierra Club membership really rocketed, too); but I'm still bitter. I would have appreciated the opportunity to do more than read about Glen Canyon.

Last year, you might remember me being obsessed with Jones Hole. It has a creek and these amazing, 1500 year-old pictographs and petroglyphs by the Fremont indians, and it has this waterfall that you can block from above, let build up, and then dump on people below. It was so amazing that I routed my cross-country trip through Vernal so I could go back via the fish hatchery (the road was closed, so I didn't make it). Anyhow, we made the hike again this year, saw the same panels that we saw last year and cooled off in the falls (I drank 90 oz of water just on the way up, and was still feeling a bit headachy until I cooled off under the falls). Skip had promised me a new panel of pictographs, but our lines of communication crossed somewhat, and I ended up missing the beginning of the hike up to it. When I finally figured out what he had been asking me (he had asked whether I was "coming up," which, at the time, I took to mean "up above the falls"), I wandered up the path I thought he had taken. I met two of the guides coming down, so I knew I was on the right path, and they assured me that I wouldn't be able to miss Skip. I didn't see him, though, so I ended up hiking alone above this big cliff, which was quite dumb, since I also ended up more or less out of earshot of the waterfall area all alone, and I went farther than necessary. When I finally realized that I had somehow missed Skip, I headed back down. However, I did manage to see this amazing panel of about a dozen tiny handprints (only of course they weren't prints), which was the one he had been trying to show me, so all was not lost. I feel pretty lucky to have seen that, actually; even if I did damn near fall to a bloody death, only to be eaten by bighorn sheep.

One of the best moments of the trip for me last year was singing with Skip and Pete on the last night. I don't very often get a chance to sing, other than in my car, and I really do enjoy it. So anyhow, Skip and I got a chance to sing together again, which was great fun. I had hoped he and his guitar would be around more often when he lived with me last year; but by the time I showed up, he was already dating Denison, so I didn't see that much of him. I am thinking, although I have absolutely no musical talent, about buying a guitar and an intro to guitar book and possibly taking some lessons. Even if I turn out to be as bad at guitar as I was at piano, at least I'll have a guitar around the house if one of my guitar-playing friends comes to call. And if I can actually learn to play chords, I will be able to accompany myself.

The last day of the trip, I just found myself crying down the river. It was such a beautiful place, and I was feeling so melancholy about leaving and about saying goodbye to Skip. Finally, I turned to him and said, "I think I might be over identifying with you. I'm just crying and crying about leaving this place."

Last year, we rafted the Yampa River, which is one of the last un-dammed (and possibly un-damned) rivers in the Colorado system, which means that you have to worry more about water-level. Holiday runs it only in May and June, when the water is big. I think when went last year it was at about 18,000 cubic feet per second (or however they measure it); this year I heard it peaked at around 24,000. In contrast, we were on the Green River this year, which is dammed, and we had about 4,400 cfs. Lower water levels can mean that it's a more "technical" run...there are a lot more exposed rocks (and not-quite-exposed rocks) to avoid, and fewer paths one can take through a rapid. As long as there is enough water to make it fun, though, you don't have to worry about it being too low (on a dammed river, you shouldn't ever have to worry about it). Higher water levels might mask some rapids, but big water tends to lead to very big rapids. Which is probably why we ended up flipping a boat last year. If the canyon is narrow, big water can be very exciting (a lot of unexpected wave action off the walls and stuff). Skip was telling me that there are places with 20-30 foot standing waves. The biggest we saw were probably only about 8 feet. ("Only.")

One amusing side-effect of rafting at this level (we hit the confluence of the Green and Yampa rivers on the penultimate day, so the last day and a half of this year's trip were the same as last year's) was that it can be kind of fun to play pin-ball off the rocks if you're a good guide. So on the last day, after the last of the huge rapids, Skip decided to bounce off every rock that looked entertaining. On the trip, he had 2 other super-experienced guides and three rookies. Skip was the first down the river, then Kevin (another trip leader), then a rookie named, for the purposes of this story, Barney (okay, actually his name was Ken, but he sounds exactly like Barney Google from the Simpsons). After Skip hit a few rocks and I cottoned to what he was doing, I said, "the funny thing is that Barney is probably going to try to follow you through here." Skip thought that I thought Barney had the second boat, so told me that Kevin was next and wouldn't follow him. That wasn't what I meant, but I was too lazy to correct him. So anyhow, we go rebounding off all these rocks, and Kevin takes the normal, rock-free route through the canyon, and then here comes Barney, trying to follow his illustrious trip leader. He looked quite surprised at having to zip down slots between rocks that were barely big enough for his boat and at having to avoid so many boulders. Also, mom was telling me about how she almost fell out of the paddle-boat (boat #4), also piloted by a rookie guide. We figured out that Darryl, her guide, was probably trying to follow Barney, who was trying to follow Skip, and that he got surprised by a rock. Cathe said that he looked quite surprised and embarrassed.

Also, rafting at lower water levels gave me the chance to utter Skip and Kevin and Kary's favorite line of the trip: "Hey, I don't remember that rock." I said this in reference to this huge -- like upended pickup truck-sized -- rock right in the middle of the flow, so it didn't strike me as completely inconceivable that I would remember it (it was probably buried or barely above water last year, however). Anyhow, Skip did point out that he'd floated that river about 100 times, and that he didn't remember every rock. I was just glad to provide him with such amusement.

Mom and I had a good time driving down and back, and we didn't even kill each other. We got to see a lot of wildlife, including: herons; sandhill cranes; peregrines; a golden eagle; lots of other raptors; bighorn sheep (including lots of babies); a beaver; chipmunks; three coyotes (the one in Teton National Park was about twice as big as the normal ones); a female moose; a black bear (mom and I have driven to dumps and dangled sardines out of our pockets all over America to see a bear, up to now to no avail); four female elk and a calf; three huge male elk; a bison; and a few mule deer. We also drove up to the parking lot at Old Faithful in Yellowstone just in time to visit the restroom, walk out to the boardwalk they have around the geothermal areas, and see it erupt (do geysers "erupt"?), so our timing was pretty impeccable. We didn't win any money in Reno, but we didn't lose that much, either. Reno is really quite gross and scary.

I also found out that I have a situational caffeine dependence. I had discovered the same thing when I first started working at Harborview: I was getting these terrible headaches about mid-morning; and, even though I had been caffeine-free for years, I switched my morning coffee drink to caffinated, and my headaches went away. Anyhow, I went through quite a long no-morning-coffee period recently as well, but I got a nightmare headache the first day of the river trip that would not go away (for that matter, I also got one in Reno). I took tons of drugs, tried to nap, and even ate a Hershey bar that Skip liberated from their supplies for me, and it only slightly abated. Finally, when I got up to pee in the middle of the night, I took one more Aleve, and it went away. For the rest of the trip, I made sure to drink caffinated coffee each morning, and no more headaches. So, as a preventive measure, I now get to drink as much coffee as I want, especially in the morning. Also, I can eat limitless chocolate. It's a medical condition.

Well, that's sort of the trip summary, more or less.

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last modified: February 19, 1998.