Down the Great Unknown (15 page)

The men loafed or puttered around camp according to their taste. “Some packed freight for future use,” Sumner wrote, “[and] the rest slept under the shade of the scrubby cedars.” Powell was neither lugging freight nor napping. “Major and brother,” wrote Bradley, “are gone ahead
to see what comes next
.”

Much as he hoped for good news, Bradley knew perfectly well that any reassurance would be fleeting at best. Scouting the river more than a short distance ahead was impossible because the terrain was so difficult. “Can't rely on anything but actual tryal with the boats,” Bradley noted, “for a man can't travel so far in a whole day in these cañons as we go in a single hour.” And so the men were constantly in the position of motorists speeding down an unknown road—and possibly headed off a cliff—while never able to see more than a car length ahead.

Never knowing what surprise the river would spring next was the great hardship Powell and his men were forced to endure, far outweighing the dunkings and near-drownings and injuries and exhaustion and inadequate food. They could all have braced themselves to cope with nearly any privation—Powell wrote a three-hundred-page, first-person account of his expedition and never found reason to mention that he was missing an arm—but this was worse. Perpetual uncertainty was a greater burden than any physical ordeal.

“To travel hopefully is a better thing than to arrive,” Robert Louis Stevenson remarked, but the observation is also true if it is turned on its head. To travel in dread is worse than to face even the grimmest reality. Brave as they were, Powell and his crew were forever in fear that they would round the next bend and find themselves flung against knife-edged boulders or tumbling over a waterfall. At the outset, not knowing what lay ahead had been a comfort. Had they known, Powell and the men might never have ventured downstream. Now, having committed themselves to the expedition, they found themselves nearly crushed by the weight of living with endlessly dashed hopes and endlessly renewed fears that the next ordeal would be the worst one yet. They lived each day, Powell wrote, with “the shadow of a pang of dread ever present to the mind.”

All explorers confront that burden, which is the cost of being first into the unknown. It can also be a feature of ordinary life. Unknown terrors often loom larger than specific, named ones because the mind can project whatever torments it fancies on a blank screen. (Perhaps this is part of the reason for our fear of the dark.) “There's a spot on the X ray I want to look at,” the doctor says, and the weeks of waiting, which one might think would be mollified by hope, are in fact exquisite torture. “I'm afraid it's cancer,” she finally announces, and, faced with an ultimatum that cannot be appealed, people somehow manage to endure.

The same is true of children who live with abusive parents. Beatings are bad in themselves, but the capriciousness of life with a parent who might deal out blows one day and hugs another is far worse. This was, in a sense, the load that weighed so heavily on Powell and his men. Their challenge was not to endure an almost insupportable burden but to live perpetually in suspense, like a servant subject to a tyrant's whims.

“The sensation on the first expedition,” wrote one of the first explorers to try to duplicate Powell's 1869 journey, “when each dark new bend was a dark new mystery, must have been something to quite overpower the imagination, for then it was not known that, by good management, a boat could pass through this Valley of the Shadow of Death, and survive. Down, and down, and ever down, roaring and leaping and throwing its spiteful spray against the hampering rocks the terrible river ran, carrying our boats along with it like little wisps of straw in the midst of a Niagara.”

On several occasions, moviemakers have gone to considerable trouble to re-create Powell's expedition. They have commissioned painstakingly crafted replicas of Powell's boats—built using nineteenth-century techniques—and hired professional river runners to play Sumner and Bradley and the others. But authentic as they may appear in their period costumes of grimy shirts and suspenders and torn pants, these expert boatmen can never truly put themselves in the shoes of Powell's pioneering crew. They know too much. They have put in years on the water, first of all, and they are the indirect beneficiaries of the accumulated wisdom of all their river-running predecessors besides.

A man who has grown up rich can give away his fortune, but he can never experience the world as it appears to someone who grew up poor. Nor can a veteran boatman today forget all he has learned and imagine what it was like to run a wild river in the days when almost no one had done such a thing. Like mountaineers who compete to achieve first ascents of unconquered peaks, river runners today do still roam the world in search of first descents, on rivers that plummet far more steeply and pose far greater dangers than the Green or the Colorado. But a modern-day first descent, because it is a venture undertaken only by experts who have logged thousands of demanding river miles, is
less
of a venture into the unknown than was Powell's. “Basically, Powell and his men were on their first river trip,” says Brad Dimock, a highly regarded boatman who rowed a “Powell boat” for a
National Geographic
film. “We ran all the rapids—Powell portaged as many as he could—but we had 120
or 130 years of white-water skills on our side, plus we knew within an inch where every rock in the river was.”

The value of knowing the river so well can hardly be exaggerated. It made for confidence and security, first of all, but it had more tangible importance as well. Even in the hands of modern-day experts, Powell's boats remained hard to maneuver. The key to making it successfully through a rapid was to cut the maneuvering to the minimum possible, which meant understanding where to enter the rapid in the first place and at what angle. A good start made a good run possible; a bad start made disaster almost certain.

An experienced boatman scanning a rapid quickly identifies what are, in effect, entrance ramps. But that recognition only comes with practice and experience. A novice might find the ramp but take it at the wrong angle and careen out of control, or never identify the proper entrance in the first place, barrel through a “Wrong Way” sign, and spin into a guardrail. Veteran boatmen almost never make such blunders. They are experts at reading rivers in general, and, in the case of the boatmen replicating Powell's expedition, were rereading a text they had long since committed to memory.

“We knew intimately what was around every bend,” says Bruce Simballa, a retired boatman who participated in an IMAX movie about Powell's trip. By the time he rowed for the cameras, Simballa was a veteran of about twenty-five Grand Canyon trips. Kenton Grua, who rowed in the same boat, had made some seventy Grand Canyon trips.
*
“When you do the river all the time, you have little markers,” Simballa goes on. “You can be a mile above a rapid and look over at a rock along the shore, and by seeing the river's level on that rock you'll know
exactly
what you'll find around the next bend.”

On June 10, 1869, Powell and his men had no time to think ahead to any challenges beyond the immediate ones. “The river in this cañon is not a succession of rappids as we have found before,” Bradley lamented, “but a
continuous
rapid.” The result was a seemingly endless stretch of brute labor. The supplies (and sometimes the boats as well) had to be carried across a field of enormous fallen boulders. At one point, when the men were lining the boats down a rapid, “poor
Kitty's Sister
got a hole stove in her side” by a rock. The damage could be repaired, but it meant more delay. After a full day's labor, the expedition had advanced perhaps a mile.

The next day was more of the same. “Rapids and portages all day,” Sumner scribbled that evening before he collapsed into sleep. Bradley, as usual, was more inclined to linger lovingly over the awful details. He had been wet all day and would spend a wet night, for his extra clothing was wet, too. Beyond that, he had fallen while trying to keep his boat off a rock and had a bad cut over his left eye. “Have been working like galley-slaves all day,” he wrote. “Have lowered the boats all the way with ropes and once unloaded and carried the goods around one very bad place. The rapid is still continuous and not improving. Where we are tonight it roars and foams like a wild beast.”

Though Powell, Sumner, and Bradley each described the day's hard labor independently, their voices ring out in three-part harmony. Powell put a good face on a hard day, singing melody. “When night comes, . . . we are tired, bruised, and glad to sleep.” Sumner contributed a brief, matter-of-fact rhythm accompaniment. “Camped . . . under an overhanging cliff.” Bradley growled out a long, innovative bass line. Powell “as usual [had] chosen the worst camping-ground possible,” a spot so miserable that even a dog would have sniffed in disdain and turned away.

The next day was the same thing yet again, Bradley noted, “only more of it.” They advanced a paltry three miles, about the same as on the previous day. The lone bright spot was a brief river run, a rare chance to ride in the boats rather than line or carry them. But the pleasure was short-lived. The run, their longest in four days, lasted less than a mile. They made camp just above another monster rapid. It stretched a mile or so and looked impossible. “Still there is no retreat if we desired it. We must go on and shall—and shall no doubt be successful,” Bradley wrote gamely.

They had pulled into camp early, at about three in the afternoon, to dry their clothes and food in the sun. Bradley immediately began fishing, which always cheered him up even when, as today, he failed to catch anything. Even so, only the day before he had been fretting about his injured eye and lamenting that he was fed up with always being wet. Now, with the sun beating down and drying out his clothes and his papers, life looked better. “My eye is very black today,” he noted with wry pride, “and if it is not very
useful
it is very ornamental.”

Powell, on the other hand, was uncharacteristically glum. He dealt with the river in a handful of words—“Still rocks, rapids, and portages”—and knocked off the whole day in three sentences. For Powell, for whom a bend in the river or a sunset was ordinarily worth at least half a dozen adjectives, this was remarkable. The last of the three sentences was one of the plainest that Powell ever wrote. “Everything is wet and spoiling.”

At the time, it seemed a more or less innocuous observation, akin to a routine note—“the patient has a cough”—in a medical chart. Soon enough its true significance would emerge. This cough was tuberculosis.

Since Disaster Falls, the expedition had been beset with a kind of free-floating anxiety. A night or two after the loss of the
No Name
, the men had made an unsettling find while they were building their campfire. “We discover an iron bake oven, several tin plates, a part of a boat, and many other fragments,” Powell wrote, “which denote that this is the place where Ashley's party was wrecked.” Actually, Ashley and his men left the Green more or less intact. But
someone
had apparently come to a bad end, and the find was hardly encouraging.

Now a new fear was taking shape. To this point, none of the men had grasped the possibility that they could run short of food. The hunting had been poor all along, but that had seemed merely an annoyance, little more than a joke at the hunters' expense. No one anticipated that eventually the game (and the fish) might vanish altogether. The expedition's supplies still seemed bottomless. Early on, and without a second thought, Hall and Hawkins had thrown away hundreds of pounds of food to lighten their load. Two weeks later, the wreck of the
No Name
had cost one-third of the remaining supplies, but, with the endless portaging, the men continued to see their food stores as a burden rather than a blessing. “We have plenty of rations left,” Bradley wrote the day after Disaster Falls, “much more than we care to carry around the rappids, especially when they are more than a mile long.”

But Bradley, and everyone else, had missed the point. The men hated manhandling the boats and the tons of supplies because it was dangerous, exhausting work. Their complaints were fully justified. But in emphasizing how hard the work was, the men neglected the other side of the coin—how
slow
it was. The expedition confronted two enormous problems. The rapids were dangerous and getting worse, and the alternatives to running them—portaging or lining—were hard, slow work. For Powell and his men, the dilemma could hardly have been more stark. Move quickly or slowly. Drown or starve.

On June 13, the men stayed in camp to recover from their labors and to dry their clothes and gear. It was a Sunday, Bradley noted, the first one they had honored by resting. That was presumably coincidence, Bradley complained, “for [I] don't think anyone in the party except myself keeps any record of time or events.” He was wrong about that—Sumner and Powell may have been writing in their own diaries at the same moment that Bradley set down his complaint—but he was right that for Powell, Sunday was just another day.

Powell had been raised in a devoutly religious household. Throughout his childhood, the family gathered twice a day to pray and read the Bible aloud. As a precocious young boy, Powell learned all four Gospels by heart. His father was a Methodist preacher who believed that the Bible was the unchallengeable word of God. The preacher and his equally pious wife named their son for John Wesley, the founder of Methodism, whose sermons put a heavy weight on the value of self-denial, sobriety, and hard work. Powell retained the discipline but abandoned the dogma, not by any overt act of rejection but simply by sloughing off the beliefs of his parents and moving on, as a snake unceremoniously abandons his outgrown skin. All religious doctrines, Powell came to believe, were “mythology.”