The Emerald Mile: The Epic Story of the Fastest Ride in History Through the Heart of the Grand Canyon (17 page)

D
uring the fifteen years following his first encounter with John Wesley Powell’s journals in his high school typing class, Litton had made contact with the rim of the canyon on only three occasions. He saw the place briefly for the first time on a road trip in 1938, then got a slightly longer look three years later
when he and his wife, Esther, had spent the first night of their honeymoon at the El Tovar, the main hotel on the South Rim. Between those two visits, Litton had also made a trip to Toroweap, a remote overlook on the North Rim, to write a story for the
L.A. Times
. But it wasn’t until 1955, the year that the Echo Park conflict was resolved, that he was given his first opportunity to actually run the river at the bottom of the canyon.

He and Esther signed on with a boatman named P. T. Reilly, who had assembled a fleet of small wooden rowboats. Two had been hand-built by Reilly, while the third,
an odd duck called the
Gem
, was a hybridized version of a white-water boat that had evolved on a river almost nine hundred miles to the north, in Oregon—a type of craft with which Litton would later develop a lasting connection. From the moment they pushed off, Litton found himself bewitched by the unique world of water and stone. Every mile or so, the walls opened and gave way to yet another side canyon filled with secret springs and waterfalls. The air was alive with pink-and-lavender dragonflies that paused, twitchingly, on the shafts of their suspended oars. In the mornings, the trilling notes of the canyon wren, the sweetest song of the river, dribbled down the walls. As they worked the boats beneath laced canopies of maidenhair fern that clung to the rock where the springs jutted out, they paused in secret, nameless grottoes where they marveled at the shades of the water and the textures of the surrounding cliffs. Like tiny particles of sediment, the impressions of this world worked their way into the bedrock of Litton’s sensibility: the color of the river when it was rinsed in morning light, the little tendrils of perfume that ascended from a brittlebush flower just before the rain arrived, the quiet music a boat hull made when moored inside an eddy at night.

In many ways, this was very much
not
the canyon of John Wesley Powell. There were dangers and complications, to be sure, but Litton’s predominant impression was that this was not a place where nature was an implacable enemy to be battled, but instead something to be enjoyed and savored. Moreover, the beauty of the river world and the sense of wonder it evoked set up a powerful contrast with the prevailing message of the rocks. The place seemed to transmit a shattering reminder of the insignificance and irrelevancy of human affairs when set against the twin pools of deep time and geologic indifference. At the same time, Litton found himself undergoing a rebirth of the kind of delight that only children truly possess. The juxtaposition left him enlightened and enriched—a feeling he later summarized as a
“major order of experience.”

He was so impressed that he returned the very next summer and did the whole thing all over again, which only deepened the connection. He would probably have kept coming back had he not found himself beset by the pressures
of making a living (by now he had left the
Times
and taken a demanding job as the travel editor at
Sunset
magazine). But then something unusual happened, because, in the summer of 1961,
he found himself in Oregon, covering the McKenzie River White Water Boat Parade for
Sunset
—and there he encountered his first white-water dory.

The dories on the McKenzie, which were locally known as drift boats, were reminiscent of the
Gem
, the unusual little craft that had taken part in Litton’s first run through the canyon. Unlike the
Gem
, however, these boats were the real thing:
double-ended cockleshells with open decks and a sharp upward rake on their pointed bows and sterns. They had been specially engineered for the fast, shallow, highly technical white water of the McKenzie, and
Litton was smitten by their beauty. But he also saw something intriguing: the possibility that, with some modification, they might stand up to the giant hydraulics of the Colorado.

Upon returning to California, he telephoned Reilly and suggested that they each purchase one of these boats and take them on a test-drive through the canyon. When Reilly agreed, Litton placed an order with a boatwright named Keith Steele, who lived in the little town of Leaburg, Oregon. The following June, Litton and Reilly hauled the boats down to Lee’s Ferry and shoved them into the Colorado.

When the trip was over,
Reilly pronounced his dory the finest thing he’d ever rowed. Litton, however, went even further. Something about those boats—their elegance and symmetry and balance—seemed to dovetail exquisitely with the canyon itself. In Litton’s mind, the dories and the river fit together in a way that was difficult to articulate but impossible to ignore, perhaps because each seemed to frame and perfect the other. The river imbued the boats with context and purpose, while calling forth their dexterity and grace. In turn, the dories provided a visual metaphor that distilled the essence of the canyon: its seductiveness, its vulnerability, its aura of timelessness and classicism. The connection was no less real for being subtle, and it was sufficiently compelling that, as far as Litton was concerned, each was somehow incomplete without the other.

By now, Litton’s response to the entire canyon—what he saw in the place, what he valued, what he knew of the truths that were embedded in its heart—
had become inextricably entwined with the boats. And thanks to the manner in which the dories had crystallized those sensibilities, he found himself in a singular position when Brower telephoned him in the spring of 1963 and explained that the Sierra Club’s directors were preparing to grapple with the Grand Canyon dams question. Not only did Litton understand the river more intimately than anyone else in the organization, but he was also able to speak
about the place with unique authority and persuasiveness. So when Brower asked if Litton would consider giving a presentation on why the club should fight against the dams with everything it had, he immediately said yes.

T
he
meeting convened at 10:14 a.m. on May 4, 1963, in the main conference room at the Jack London Hotel in downtown Oakland. Robinson opened the debate, and the case he presented was compelling.

He pointed out, correctly, that the new dams would not actually “flood” the entire canyon by filling it up to the rims; they would merely inundate several hundred feet of an abyss that was more than a mile deep. In fact, neither reservoir would be visible from any of the hotels or the popular lookout points where most tourists gathered.
The club’s smartest move, Robinson argued, was agreeing not to oppose the dams in exchange for extracting some concessions in how recreation would be handled on the reservoirs. His proposal was that the club insist—adamantly—
that a set of elevators be built to enable anglers on the South Rim to access the blue-ribbon trout fisheries that would thrive in the cold, clear water pouring from the tailraces at the bases of the two dams.

Brower had warned Litton that this might happen, but Robinson’s proposal
nevertheless sent him into a fit of rage. Before the meeting, he had gathered together some Magic Markers and drawn a map of the canyon on the side of a grocery box. Clutching his cardboard sketch, he rose from his chair, climbed onto the dais, and began to quote from a speech that Theodore Roosevelt had delivered from the South Rim on May 6, 1903:

In the Grand Canyon, Arizona has a natural wonder which is in kind absolutely unparalleled throughout the rest of the world. I want to ask you to keep this great wonder of nature as it now is. I hope you will not have a building of any kind, not a summer cottage, a hotel or anything else, to mar the wonderful grandeur, the sublimity, the great loneliness and beauty of the canyon. Leave it as it is. You cannot improve on it. The ages have been at work on it, and man can only mar it.

Then Litton started laying into Robinson’s arguments. Unfortunately, no one bothered to transcribe his words. But the gist of the stem-winder he uncorked is well remembered to this day.

He began by declaring that
it didn’t make a hoot of difference that the canyon might not look any different from the top if the dams were put in. The river was the essence of the place, its heart—the thing that had not only carved and shaped the rock but also sustained the unique and fragile ecosystem at the bottom.
If the river were dammed, the spirit of that place would vanish, and what replaced it would be a poor substitute: a pair of stagnant reservoirs whose surfaces would endlessly and noisily be crisscrossed by powerboats and houseboats and water-skiers.

What this amounted to, Litton continued, was the annulment of a space whose value resided not in the fact that it was accessible, but rather in that it was isolated and untrammeled. Indeed, access to the masses was the very thing that would destroy what made the place so precious by canceling out those elements that the canyon now possessed in abundance—the silence, the solitude, and the fact that it was so implacably cut off from the rest of the world. Those qualities were as fragile as a little wooden boat, and as Roosevelt’s words clearly implied, the willingness to nurture and protect such treasures amounted to a national test of character, as well as a covenant with future generations of Americans. A test that the Interior Department and the Bureau of Reclamation had demonstrably failed. Inside the canyon, Litton thundered, Interior and Reclamation are
interlopers
, and we don’t have to surrender to their scheme because the place doesn’t belong to them.
It’s
our
canyon. It’s
our
national park.

As for the idea that the government was too big and powerful to confront head-on, Litton’s contempt was scathing. Of course it will be an uphill battle, he said. Of course our resources are limited and our numbers are few. But in God’s name, how can anyone in this room look themselves in the mirror if we don’t resolve to go after this with everything we’ve got?

Historians often minimize or discount the impact that any one individual can have on human destiny—and for good reason. Given the broad tides in the affairs of men, and the complexity of the forces that shape and change history, it is almost always a mistake to ascribe too much significance to the actions of a single person. But even the most jaded observer can concede that, every now and then,
a man or woman steps up to the plate and takes a mighty swing that clears the bases and fundamentally changes the game. In the Jack London Hotel that morning, this is what Litton achieved.

After an hour and a half of debate, it was moved that the club should oppose any further dams and diversions in the canyon. The motion carried.

Many years later, when asked how he had primed Litton for his presentation, Brower chuckled.
“Martin doesn’t have to prime for a speech,” he replied. “Martin poured it on—what a ridiculous thing this would be to do—and the audience applauded, and Bestor subsided, and we voted ‘no.’ ”

Later that afternoon, when the meeting had wrapped up, Litton was sitting out in the hotel’s lobby having a drink with a friend when Robinson approached their table.

“Well now, just because we don’t agree on everything doesn’t mean we’re not friends,” Robinson said, extending his hand agreeably to Litton.

“Oh?” Litton retorted. “I wouldn’t say that.”

L
ater that summer, Litton submitted a strongly worded essay to the
Bulletin
, the Sierra Club’s magazine, urging the organization’s twenty-two thousand members to write directly to their political representatives to voice their opposition to the dams. This kicked off a media campaign that would continue through the fall and winter of 1963. Meanwhile, at Brower’s urging, Litton commissioned another dory from Oregon, gathered his tiny fleet, and set off the following spring for the Grand Canyon with a writer and a pair of photographers on a special river mission.

As they left Lee’s Ferry on April 26,
they passed by a line of bright red fire hydrants that had just been installed for the marina that would service the boaters and water-skiers who would flock to the reservoir once Marble Canyon Dam, the first of the two new structures, was built. Thirty-nine miles downstream, they passed by a set of scaffolds that climbed several hundred feet up the cliffs on both sides of the canyon.
Here, a series of test tunnels had been drilled to determine the quality of the rock where the dam would be anchored. Much farther downstream, the river took the boats beneath a steel cable that marked the spot where
similar test bores had been drilled at the second site, for Bridge Canyon Dam. At each of these landmarks, and everywhere in between, the photographers shot rolls of film while the writer, a journalist named François Leydet, took careful notes.