Returning the Favor

I had been fighting the Colorado River for a hundred and eighty miles. The river swatted my boat and hit me sideways. I strained against the oars, trying to hold my line. Every rapid felt like a chaotic pummeling. Today was a flat-water day until the afternoon when we’d run the biggest rapid on the river. I was just a sophomore in college and had never rowed a raft before in my life. And I wouldn’t have been there if it wasn’t for the Australian river guide I was dating. I tucked my oars under my knees and looked down at my blistered hands. I rubbed them lightly on my thighs and looked up. The canyon rim was out of sight; cliff face was all I could see. I felt my heart beating against my chest and anxiety lurching around in my stomach. I took a deep breath and held it in, then listened to my own pulse.

At river mile 179 in the Grand Canyon, the Colorado comes to a brink and drops away. We call it Lava Falls. Guides down there take it seriously. The night before, one woman guide shaved her legs. She took a long time by herself down by the water’s edge. The clear contemplation on her face made me nervous and I had to look away. That night we sat around telling stories of the ledge hole and the cheese grater rock, the v-wave and the mountain waves. I took a swig off the Bushmills, passed it on, and listened carefully. I didn’t have any stories yet, just complete and utter fear. All the other guides had flipped there and it was only a matter of time before they flipped again.

The guide floating beside me now, in a wooden dory, had on a pair of fresh shorts that he’d saved for 13 days. The upstream wind felt like a hair dryer, chapping my lips. I closed my eyes, moved my head down, and re-opened them to look at the emerald green water in front of my yellow raft. Another guide pulled me out of my trance when he motioned to pull over for lunch. I looked for a long time at the deli spread, but couldn’t eat. I lay in the shade and practiced breathing. The trip paused there for a long time, not the usual eat-and-go. When the other guides started telling stories again, I stayed away. I couldn’t stand one more ounce of anxiety.

When we pushed off for the last couple miles before the rapid, I felt the current through my oars. Rotating the blades, I practiced moving them like my own cupped hands, swimming downstream. Coming around the last bend, I was looking out at my oar when the other guides signaled to pull over. Startled, I spun and pulled to shore. I couldn’t hear the thunder of the river dropping away even though I was right on top of it. The canyon opened up there and let the sound out.

I tied up my boat for the scout, but didn’t take my life jacket off. Instead, I cinched it down, my sandals too, and started up the trail between basalt boulders. I was thirsty, but didn’t want to drink. As I climbed up the hillside the noise from the water rose. I kept my eyes down. I wasn’t ready to look at it.

A million years ago the Colorado was dammed there by a lava flow. For a thousand years the Grand Canyon held a giant reservoir. Today, the canyon is book-ended by two of our nation’s biggest reservoirs behind the Glen Canyon and Hoover Dams. A number of other dams were proposed for the Grand Canyon back when David Brower was around to defend it. In the name of the Sierra Club, he ran the full-page ad in the New York Times, with a stunning photo of the canyon and it read: Would you fill the Sistine Chapel to get closer to the ceiling?

People cried out and the proposals were set aside. For now the Colorado River continued to flow between the bookends—highly managed, but flowing. Not far beyond the rim, Phoenix, Las Vegas, and Los Angeles bloated with sun-lovers, thirsty for water and air-conditioning. The easiest way to make off with those things was to dam a river, bury canyons with reservoirs, put a straw in and suck water across the desert. And the dam proposals still lurked. I feared the sun-lovers. There were so many of them. As I floated through a section of the canyon that was once dammed, I took comfort in the river’s ability to recover its canyon. Not in human time, but recovered nonetheless. I imagined the lava dam breaking away in a writhing mass of water, whipping suddenly from stagnant green to frothing brown and fantasized about Ed Abbey’s monkey-wrenchers with their eyes on present-day concrete dams.

When I got to the scouting rock where the other guides had gathered, I stood back and looked at the falls for the first time. The canyon walls laid shadows across the whitewater and took the glare off of it. The rapid was massive, deafening. It burst and kicked and spit and looked totally unrunable. And to my surprise my heart started to beat a little slower. I had a sudden desire to be in the meat of it. I wanted to know what it felt like to be inside.

I listened to the senior guides as they talked about how to run it. Enter on the bubble line because you won’t be able to see the rapid from above it. Run right. Hit the v-wave straight. If you don’t flip there, line up for the mountain waves at the bottom. That was the gist of it, enough information for me. It wasn’t as if I’d have control of my boat anyway. I left them there, talking and pointing. Not laughing. I looked back a couple times on my way to my raft, double-checking my entry, walking a well-worn trail from thousands of boaters previewing their fate.

At my raft I sat between the oars and waited in the calm water eddy. I heard only a slight lapping against the rubber tube of my boat. I could have been sitting on a lake. I stowed my hat and sunglasses and thought about every rapid I’d run the past two weeks. I didn’t even know why I tried to row. I had no idea what was happening or where I was going. I would have been better off dropping the oars and balling up on the floor of the raft until the thrashing was over. Lava Falls didn’t seem like the kind of rapid that might forgive a disoriented fool, and a part of me was looking forward to that.

The other guides moved back to their boats and got ready to run. They each made eye contact and gave a nod before we pulled out in a line-up. I pulled in last, watching each boat drop out of sight. As I approached the brink, the sound hit me and I watched the boat in front of me flip. I put my right tube on the bubble line and dropped in.

In that instant, the world slowed down. I scanned waves and holes, totally oriented. I caught the corner of the ledge hole and it sent me straight into the v-wave. Leaning forward, I braced my oars so the crashing waves on either side of me couldn’t knock the oars out of my hands. I didn’t feel the water that blasted my body and buried the raft. In that instant, under all that water, the river pulled me close, whispered in my ear and showed me something wild.

A breaking wave blocked my boat, wrapped its strong, wet fingers around me and squeezed. For a moment I didn’t matter. Nothing mattered. On the other side my eyes were open and my hands were on the oars. Disoriented from being right side up instead of upside down, I sidled slightly to the left and lined up for the mountains. Time dilated; I took a breath, waited, then stood and leaned on the oars. The boat climbed the first wave for what seemed like forever. I wondered if the bow would tip beyond 90 degrees and topple over backward. My oars were planted like the submerged fins of a ship to keep it from rolling in rough seas. The bow blasted through the lip of the wave, drenching me. Water streamed under my clothes. Pitching down the backside, my body shuddered. When I blew out the bottom of the rapid into the flat water, the other boats pulled back out into the current with me from the eddies where they had waited as safety. Leaning back, my oars under my knees, I twirled on downstream. The river had taken a dusty desert girl and made me an insatiable river runner.

It was the Colorado River that caused me to fall in love with rivers. And now it seems that I’ve dedicated nearly a decade of my life to the Colorado Watershed and the health of its riparian systems. Today I work for the Tamarisk Coalition, a 501(c)3 nonprofit organization working to restore western riverside habitats primarily by reducing the negative impact of the invasive tamarisk plant. A new tamarisk mitigation method is the biological control agent, the tamarisk leaf beetle or Diorhabda elogata. The leaf beetle controls the spread of the tamarisk by repeatedly defoliating the plants over several years, essentially starving the plant. The tamarisk leaf beetle was released just southwest of Moab, Utah in 2004, and quickly spread up and down the Colorado River system. Their population now stretches from the Grand Valley in Colorado to Lake Powell. Preliminary studies of the beetle’s effectiveness in controlling tamarisk populations show promising results. However, monitoring the beetle populations is critical to determine their direct and indirect impacts on the riverside ecosystem.

After several years of work and research, I have finally organized a trip to share this amazing river and the many important lessons it has to teach. Please join me for an extraordinary trip through Cataract Canyon May 10-15, departing from Moab Utah. The trip is a fundraiser for the Tamarisk Coalition Education Program and will be the river trip of a lifetime through Utah’s stunning canyon country. This adventure has it all -

• An unparalleled opportunity to talk to the experts about river ecosystem health and to participate in a critical scientific monitoring effort of the tamarisk biological control agent, the tamarisk leaf beetle;
• Exhilarating whitewater rafting;
• Plush camping including deliciously prepared meals;
• Hiking trails leading to geologic and historic wonders, including ancient ruins, petroglyphs and pictographs;
• Opportunities to watch for the wild animals that are drawn to the only major source of water in the area such as bighorn sheep, bobcat, great blue heron, ring-tailed cat, fox, and beaver.

These experiences will inspire visions of a wilder North America, while imparting a desire to preserve the integrity of the wild places we have left! This trip is an extraordinarily unique opportunity for you to join experts to collect data and experience a scientific process that will inform scientists, policy makers, land managers, and decision-makers alike. Additionally, money raised by this expedition will fund scholarships to educate students about this important problem. OARS, an outstanding worldwide river company, will guide us downstream through Cataract Canyon, a stunning chasm in the heart of Utah’s Canyonlands National Park boasting spectacular scenery and heart pumping whitewater.

For more information please go to TamariskCoalition.org or contact Sarahlee Lawrence at sarahlee.lawrence@gmail.com or (541) 279-0841.

SARAHLEE LAWRENCE is a 2008 featured athlete, river rafting guide and experiential educator who lives an adventurous life running rivers, researching riparian environments, training horses, farming and writing... {more»}