The Emerald Mile: The Epic Story of the Fastest Ride in History Through the Heart of the Grand Canyon (2 page)

She hit with a sharp slap and shot almost a quarter of the way across the eddy before coming to a stop, bobbing gently like a champagne cork. Meanwhile, the mysterious trio splashed through the shallows and hauled themselves on board.

The first of those figures presented an image that seemed to cut in two directions at once. In some ways, his appearance perfectly embodied the demeanor of the unbound river. His hair was wild and out of control, while his limbs moved with a fluid grace as he scrambled across the decking and positioned himself at the oar station in the center of the boat. But in other respects, he appeared to have no connection at all with the water he was about to ride. His breathing was even and measured, and the expression on his face was composed as he threaded the oars into their locks, curled his fingers around the handles,
and waited calmly for his two companions to stow the spotlights and the battery, then settle themselves into their seats in the bow and the stern.

When everything was ready, all three men turned toward the shore, where their driver was now staring at his wristwatch while completing a silent countdown.

When the second hand on his watch reached exactly 11:00 p.m.,
the driver cried,
“Go!”
—and with a sharp intake of breath, the wild-haired boatman thrust his torso forward with his arms outstretched, a move that sent the shafts of his oars planing sternward. At the top of this stroke, he snapped both wrists at the same time, a maneuver that squared up the oar blades just as they entered the water. Then he pulled back with his entire body while driving the balls of his feet directly into the front end of the footwell.

His first stroke sent them skimming across the eddy, and the second speared them into the main current. There, the boatman paused for a half second to permit the stern to swing downstream. As the dory completed this clockwise turn, the river seized the hull and hurled them toward the swiftly rising walls of rock that marked the gateway to the Grand Canyon.

And just like that, they were gone.

W
ell, almost gone.

In the final moments before the boat vanished, another vehicle pulled into the parking lot at the ferry and a second set of headlights swept the edge of the river. Inside that vehicle sat
a family that had driven all the way from New Mexico in the hope of embarking on a rafting vacation, only to learn from the ranger that all launches were forbidden—disappointing news, given the hassles they had gone through to secure a highly coveted noncommercial permit to run the canyon. After motoring back to Highway 89 for a late supper at a roadside diner, they were now returning to their tent and arrived just in time to catch sight of the mysterious boat as she cast off and disappeared—
an incident that they planned on reporting to the ranger first thing in the morning. In the meantime, they were left to ponder what had just taken place.

What in the world were those clowns up to, they wondered, launching into the teeth of a flood on the near side of midnight with the assistance of a gaggle of guides who knew perfectly well that the Colorado was closed? Were they out of their minds?

In a way, yes, they truly were—although the men aboard that boat were also engaged in an urgent mission. A gesture of poetry and defiance quite unlike anything the canyon had ever seen. A quest that was inspired and driven by the obsessions of the fanatical boatman who was now gunning his dory toward the maelstrom that awaited them downstream.

Kenton Grua was a veteran of the river world as well as one of its most vivid and eccentric characters, a dreamer whose passions for the canyon ran deeper than almost anyone else’s, and whose prowess as a dory captain was unmatched by all but a handful of boatmen. The voyage upon which he and his companions had just embarked, however, would call upon all of his skills and more.

Between Lee’s Ferry and the Grand Wash Cliffs, the sandstone portals at the edge of the Mojave Desert that marked the western terminus of the canyon, lay almost three hundred miles of river, the worst of which were studded with the most storied white water in all of North America. Threading that gauntlet in a rowboat was an odyssey that typically lasted at least two weeks and could
take as long as twenty-three days. Yet Grua’s illegal pre-midnight launch on the crest of this flood tide was designed to smash that timetable to pieces.

If he and his accomplices could steer through the darkness and keep their bow square to the biggest waves; if they could somehow avoid capsizing or drowning or being broken apart on the rocks; if they could stay awake and maintain their pace by spelling each other at the oars while dodging the brigade of irate rangers who would soon be alerted to their unauthorized presence on the river—if they could carry out all of those tasks without a single hitch, it was possible that the swollen Colorado might serve as a kind of hydraulic slingshot that would pitch them all the way from the ferry to the cliffs so swiftly that the duration of the trip would be calibrated not in weeks, or even days, but in
hours.

At which point, if everything unfolded according to plan, the little green dory with the bright red gunwales would be catapulted into legend as the fastest boat ever propelled—by oar, by motor, or by the grace of God—through the heart of the Grand Canyon.

R
OUGHLY
thirty thousand yards upstream from the
Emerald Mile
’s point of launch on the evening of June 25,
a distance of some fifteen miles, a rampart ascended into the night that bore no resemblance to the canyon and whose surface was burnished by a radiance that had no connection to the moon. Instead of running naturally along the edges of the Colorado, this wall stood directly athwart the river’s current, thrusting more than seven hundred feet into the air from its foundation in the bedrock deep beneath the surface. The shape of that wall was a complex parabolic arch whose camber and curves had no organic analogue, and its texture was equally synthetic. Unlike the corridors of the canyon, whose facades are broken by the endlessly striating cracks and blemishes of living rock, the face of this barricade was smooth and flawless.

Something blunt and clean and undeniably impressive resided in the alabaster perfection of all that concrete. Nearly ten million tons of the stuff had been slung across the breadth of the river by an army of engineers and laborers
who had started assembling its frame in 1960, pouring and shaping with such care and precision that, three years later, when they were finally through, it looked as if a highly skilled machinist had tooled the edges of a giant clamshell and dropped it neatly between the embrasure of stone. Aesthetics aside, however,
the overwhelming impression that this monolith left on the mind, the element that overwhelmed the senses and blocked out everything else, was its sheer size.

The wall was
more than twice the height of the Statue of Liberty and
its length exceeded that of the
Seawise Giant
, the longest supertanker ever built. The dimensions were so implausible that, upon seeing this colossus for the first time, one was tempted to conclude that it could have been conceived only under conditions where the normal laws of gravity and physics did not apply. And this notion, that perhaps the structure did not belong fully to this world, was buttressed by an odd event now unfolding across its face.

At 11:00 p.m. on one of the hottest nights of the year, the entire wall appeared to have been overtaken by a snowstorm. Only when the eyes had adjusted to the scale did this agitated cloud reveal itself as a nation of disoriented moths, tens of thousands of them fluttering like confetti around a line of sodium-vapor floodlights, each of which was sending a pilaster of blue-tinted light upward, like the columns on a Greek temple, toward the parapet of the Glen Canyon Dam.

T
hose arc lights were mounted along the flat roof of a windowless structure that was anchored at the very bottom of the dam, a building whose profile boasted none of the grace and symmetry of the great white wall behind it. Nine stories high and shaped like an enormous shoe box kicked onto its side, Glen’s hydroelectric power plant was devoid of a single curve or bend that might have enabled it to harmonize with the face of the dam.

Located on the far west side of the plant, eight stories above the surface of the river, was a chamber roughly thirty feet wide and fifty feet deep known as the Control Room.
Staffed by a team of ten technicians
who worked on three eight-hour shifts that rotated at 8:00 a.m., 4:00 p.m., and midnight, the room housed as many as five employees during the day.
At night, however, there were usually no more than two: an assistant who roved around to inspect the many gauges and valves within the power plant as well as the extensive network of tunnels that ran through the interior of the dam itself; and an operator required to stay put behind
a large steel desk equipped with three telephones and a two-way radio.

The US Bureau of Reclamation, the arm of the federal government that had built the dam and was responsible for its operation,
has long been particular about disclosing the names of its Control Room personnel, a security precaution that applies to all National Critical Infrastructure facilities deemed vulnerable to attack. Accordingly, the bureau has redacted from its logbooks the employee who was on duty on the night of June 25, and so we do not know his name. But the manager in charge of the Control Room during this period
was Dick White. And according to White, if the normal pattern of behavior was being observed for the graveyard shift, his operator was sitting in a government-issued chair designed for air-traffic controllers, with his ankles crossed and his feet propped on the surface of the steel desk.

From this vantage, White’s man was positioned at Glen’s nerve center and serving as the cerebral cortex for the entire facility. Arranged before him was
a bank of panels studded with so many lights and switches and dials that it looked as if he were monitoring the public transit system of a large city. Thanks to that instrumentation, he had his finger on the pulse of not just the dam itself but also the power plant and the transmission lines snaking out of the canyon. Every aspect of the chamber in which he sat—its cool colors, its neat lines, the unwinking vigilance of the lights and the protective symmetry of the encircling walls—upheld the principle of control: the affirmation that here in this place, at this hour, human beings were indisputably in charge of a renegade river that had once been the scourge of the Southwest.

For each member of the Control Room team, the gadgetry on those panels was as familiar as the knobs on his stereo at home. But according to White, every time you sat down at that desk, it was impossible not to feel a flitter of exhilaration and unease that flowed from the awareness of being in the driver’s seat of one of the largest machines on earth. A piece of technology so enormous that it made other things that are often invoked as reference points for jumbo-size industrial design—the bridge of an aircraft carrier, the cockpit of a C-130 cargo jet, the command module of an Apollo rocket—seem puny by comparison.