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Show an excerpt fronts "ALL MY RIVERS ARE GONE EDITOR'S NOTE: The Zephyr is proud to offer an excerpt from the Irrepressible Katie Lee's forthcoming book AU My Rivers Are Cone. By the way, rumors Ms. Lee celebrated her recent birthday by running naked through the streets of Jerome, Arizona are totally without foundation and are most likely true...JS. That night, July 12, we had our usual "farewell dinner at Art Green's Qiff Dwellers Lodge. There was much talk about the looming black cloud of a dam just 15 miles upstream from Lee's Ferry. Art spoke of 'concessions' on the 'lake', about marinas, and buying property upstream from the proposed site at least he wasn't going to be left holding the bag when everything concerning river trips in the Gen was over. I was mad. It won't be a lake, Art, if 11 be a goddamned reservoir! And they can't dam it anyway with Rainbow Bridge... Well, I ain't bettin' they won't. I've heard 'em talkin', seen how they work - some of the surveyors is stayin' here y'know. If s political Katie, not - logical. Next morning Frank flew back to Blanding - he had a San Juan trip hot on the tail of this one. Jim and I, Joan Nevills (one of Norm's daughters) and Bob Rigg who'd come to pick us up, trailed the boats back to Blanding through the Navajo Reservation - then called The Trail.' Unpaved all of it A nightmare trip in any kind of weather... and clouds were building. Talking among themselves, not to me, they spoke a lingo that I learned from my friend Dick Sprang, was actually a disease called Learned also, that sooner or later we all get it. Canyon-ituI turned my attention to the scenery, rewarding in a different way altogether than the rivers. I'd been through Monument Valley several times before this, but without boats. The sand traps, especially after Red Lake and around the Elephant's Feet, were something to s. squabble with. We all got out and pushed. (How many who roll through it so easily in cars today see anything but a few monoliths, orange sand and junipers?) Consider the monuments back then in July. You couldn't even hold them in focus; they waved like giant red flags in the heat mirages. Or consider trucking through in fall, as I often did later, when the wind tore the tumbleweeds from their'Russian roots and sent them bowling into an arroyo that we had to cross. They'd pile higher than the cab's roof and we'd drive thru with the windows rolled up, praying the tail pipe wouldn't set them all on fire! It had rained here and there, not where it was sandy and we needed it, rather at Chinle Pass where we didn't; where it made gumbo of the Chinle shales. Two miserable hours to deal with that It was long after dark when we drove into Blanding, all of us asleep except the driver, and I wasn't too sure about him. Next morning I had a hangover. Not from booze. That you can't buy in this good Mormon town and there was never any on our trips. Nor did I want any. From my first day on the river, I learned what intoxication was all about. Nothing could have made me drunker than that canyon, those rapids and my binge with nature. The hangover was from an overworked brain and what was to be done about the impending threat to our river? That dam. One reason I was so shook on the trip back to Blanding, was that I couldn't get anyone in the car to do anything but joke about it when I tried to tell them they had a problem; this was going to change everything didn't they care? Jim and I had three days to prepare for my Hollywood passengers who would be flying into Hite Activity in bland Blanding was in overdrive cleaning and restocking the boats, airing bedrolls, washing sheets, checking for leaks in air mattresses, buying food no time to talk with Frank, busy outfitting his own trip. No time to think river (merely what to take on it), study lists, check things off and make myself as useful as possible. Only at night, stretched out on Frank and Dora Wright's cool green lawn under the elm trees where a quarter moon squinted through, did the music of the river come back into my head to put me to sleep. In die morning before breakfast I took out my notebook and began a letter to our Arizona senator, Barry Go Id water. My three Hollywood friends, a director, a screenwriter, and a script girl, would see the Glen from a whole other side than mine, naturally. Cosmopolites - New York and LA., witty, hip, sophisticated, used to working on location sometimes far from the USA. They'd seen many and varied kinds of scenery, but how would they take to this wilderness? It's mostly what we bring with us that determines what we see and feeL Journal Note - July 17, 1954 CFS6000 -- Around the Dorothy Bar... were gone I and I am in familiar territory. Trachyte terrain; it is raining and we're are camped on Monte Christo heh-heh- ... Creek fades from view; we have a map so I can put the names on the aU laughing. First rain on the river forme, no music tonight, we island (Mile 152b). Every now and then Jim likes to make it more exciting, like when (he weather is stormy you don t amp on these islands, right? I ask him about it and he says it's mooing on east and nothing to worry about. Considering the speed of his movements, I've got no doubt he can get us and all our equipment off of here long before roe'll be high-watere- d. ...Everyone else is taking a siesta hank of sand that the river has cut like a under the willow shade on Good Hope Bar beside a five-foaway at some higher stage of water. The crossbedded pattern is ot picture. Various velocities of wind have shifted and lifted, swirled and drifted the rains have come to harden them, they've dried, more winds and grains, they've piled one atop the other. Dunes in the making. Now and then loose sand slides from (he top of the bank, forms a small slit in the cliff and piles up in a cone at the bottom. I look up to the outer walls of the canyon and see a duplicate of this miniature! Same colors, same in the high sandstone walls and in place of the cones on my miniature, huge talus slopes buttress the cliffs. Creation! Before my very eyes. Here's a whole Sahara, covered over, pressed dawn and solidified by tons of water, surfaced again, maybe baked in some grand oven and left here to be worn dawn again by all the elements and a mighty river not to forget man's little hatchets. Well now... that puts a whole other perspective on things. You do not... we do not, just Warily caver this creation over on the whim of a few piddling politicians, goddamnit! This dam... one hundred and thirty miles downstream, will encroach not just on century old the. or on history... prehistoric, nine to eleven centuries... this dam will encroach on antiquity -Tnassic, Jurassic, Cretaceous a geological age. These Floyd guys (the Domminy, our senators and representatives) aren't just moving a few rocks around; they are going to alter, destroy, drown, two hundred miles of an era that nobody knows how long it took the planet to assemble (we can't even think in that kind of time), and they're going to fix it all up to suit each other not you and me in six or seven puny years! The kind of time we can understand. Playing god in Glen Canyon! I bloody well don't think of politicians in such loft terms agree wit e.e. cummings, who says: "A politician is ah arse upon which everything has sat, except a man." cut-aw- ay cross-beddin- g - - ed - - said before that I was on familiar ground. Only my second time in upper Glen and I could predict what was around the next bend. How could that be? I'm coming moderately observant, but that was a bit much over 115 miles with a view change every spin of the boat, every meander in the river? prospect do I realize that the river, called inanimate by many, was becoming not 0 I passed ustia( Pce through. This river had a personality his shining through power. Walls were no longer just walls; I could see how they were the I |
