The Emerald Mile: The Epic Story of the Fastest Ride in History Through the Heart of the Grand Canyon (20 page)

A
fter her maiden run that July, Litton informed Briggs that their days of scratching with sticks in the dirt were over.
What he wanted now were copies, fashioned to the boat’s exact specs. Briggs would spend the next few years cranking out more than two dozen reproductions that mirrored her lines. This meant that the 1971 boat served as the matriarch of Litton’s little armada, the de facto flagship of the fleet.

As his roster of dories grew, Litton bestowed upon each new boat the name of yet another vanished wonder. The
Music Temple
was swiftly joined by half a dozen sisters christened after equally lovely features from the lost world of Glen Canyon: the
Hidden Passage
, the
Tapestry Wall
, the
Dark Canyon
, the
Ticaboo
, the
Rainbow Bridge
, and the
Mille Crag Bend.
The
Flaming Gorge
bore the name of the first of the canyons that Powell had confronted on the upper Colorado, now drowned beneath a giant dam. The
Vale of Rhondda
was a green valley in Wales destroyed by a coal-mining operation; the
Skagit
was a river in British Columbia stilled by a series of dams; the
Mono Lake
commemorated an ancient, landlocked tarn in the High Sierra whose waters were being drained into the aqueducts of Los Angeles. And for the special boat that spawned all the rest, the one whose lines had served as the blueprint for everything that followed, Litton selected perhaps the most beautiful name of all. It was a gesture of remembrance in honor of a dense and towering stand of continuous old-growth redwoods tucked deep in the coastal forests of Northern California—
an entire mountainside mantled in some of the tallest virgin trees in the world, until a chunk of it was clear-cut during the early 1960s by a logging company that was hoping to disqualify the grove from inclusion in a national park.

“Truly something to cry about,” Litton had declared at the time. And so she became the
Emerald Mile.

As each new boat completed the trip down from Oregon, it was wheeled into Litton’s boathouse in the tiny town of Hurricane, located just north of the Arizona state line along the North Rim country of the Grand Canyon, and painted with a different configuration of the distinctive company colors. Every boat was thus unique but also part of a matrix that was imbued with cohesion and meaning.

In the years to come, a handful of other boatwrights from Oregon, Montana, and Idaho would attempt their own designs. But none would ever quite capture the sleekness of
those first twenty-seven dories that emerged from Briggs’s shop next to the Rogue River. Bobbing through the canyon with their haunted names emblazoned on their bows, clad in their gay palette of colors, they resembled a collection of floating Easter eggs that provoked delight from everyone who spotted them. Nothing else on the water looked quite so gorgeous or compelling. And it was this, more than anything else, that enabled Litton to assemble his unique crew of boatmen, a band of river guides who would, with time, gradually mature into something as distinctive as the boats they rowed.

L
ike most outfitters of the day, Litton recruited his early guides from an eclectic mix of young men in their late teens or early twenties. Several came from among the drifters, dropouts, and misfits of Northern California, many of whom worked as ski instructors during the winter and lived in tepees or tents or the backs of their pickups during the summer. Others were jaded hippies, betrayed by the broken promises of the counterculture, uncertain of anything other than that they didn’t fit into mainstream America. But most were simply confused young men who found themselves caught in that limbo following high school or college when they had not yet gotten a fix on the trajectory that their lives would take.

Almost all of them were convinced they did not yet have a home, a place where they truly belonged, and although not a single one knew the first thing about white water or could tell the difference between a gunwale and a chine, they found themselves bewitched by the beauty of Litton’s boats and the hidden world at the bottom of the canyon. For all of these reasons, and because they were, to a man, young and free and looking for adventure, each was willing, indeed eager, to fling himself down the river armed with little more than his toothbrush, his tennis shoes, and, for the worst rapids, a hockey helmet.

Those things drew them in initially. But with time, other elements began to emerge, powerful forces that none of them could have anticipated and that would later cement them together around a body of ideas and principles that
ran deeper than mere adventure. This was partly because Litton was unlike anyone else they had ever met, perhaps the first leader many of them had encountered who truly seemed worth following—although this charisma was initially masked because Litton often displayed the demeanor of a cantankerous bear emerging from a troubled hibernation. Within his belligerent blue eyes, his gruffness, and the stream of profanities that seemed to fly off him like sparks from a grinding wheel, they found an intimidating taskmaster and leader. He could also be wildly mercurial, marveling at the colors of a Claret-cup cactus blossom in one moment, then in the next losing his temper over what a ridiculous knot someone had used to tie up his boat. But as one summer bled into another, they began to understand that both the man himself and the company he was building possessed an unusual spirit that seemed to set Grand Canyon Dories apart from every other outfitter on the river. His boats were certainly central to this emerging ethos. But they were only a part of the picture.

This quality was not easily pinned down, in part because, although Litton was a fighter, he was never an evangelist. He had little interest in telling people what they should think or how they should behave, preferring instead to state what
he
thought and then permitting his listeners to draw their own conclusions. As a result, he issued no philosophical statements about what his company stood for or how his boatmen should conduct themselves. But with time, they began to realize that Litton was offering his clients much more than the wilderness equivalent of a trip to Disney World.

One clue was his oratory. Regardless of where they might find themselves in the canyon, Litton seemed to treat every rock and bush as an excuse to launch into an impromptu conservation lecture, extolling the surrounding wonders while fulminating against the forces of greed, commercialism, and ignorance that conspired to neutralize nature’s power. In someone less eloquent or lacking his rough but endearing charm, this kind of behavior would have been boorish and impossible to tolerate. But the passengers who signed up for those early trips couldn’t get enough of it. They stared, rapt, when he ordered the boats to pull over at the Marble Canyon Dam site and pointed to the sides of the cliffs where the core samples had been drilled from the rock, then drank in his words as he uncorked a speech filled with graphic descriptions of what the reservoirs would have done to the bottom of the canyon. At night, they gathered around and pelted him with questions about David Brower, the Sierra Club, and the Eden that had been drowned upstream by the Glen Canyon Dam.

In addressing those queries, Litton gave also himself license to range freely over interests of his that had nothing to do with the canyon or the Colorado. At any given moment, he was immersed in half a dozen conservation campaigns
involving parts of the country that lay far beyond the river. There was an effort to expand several parks and monuments in Northern California that protected the remaining stands of redwoods and sequoias. There was a crazy scheme to set up a refuge for a surviving population of California condors and feed them with dogs and cats that had been euthanized in Santa Barbara’s animal shelters. There was his ongoing boycott of products manufactured in Japan to protest that nation’s whaling industry. (According to one of his boatmen, after rashly offering a free river vacation for anyone who could find a single Japanese item on any of his dory trips, Litton was forced to spend an entire day going through the gear and grinding off
Made in Japan
from every piece of cookware in the kitchen.) In talking about these matters, he peppered his passengers with his opinions, entertained them with his invective, and invited them to warm their hands at the fires of his rage. And what his guides began to notice was that many of the people who completed those trips seemed to emerge from the bottom of the canyon with deepened convictions about the importance of fighting to protect not only the river itself, but all wild places that were threatened by development.

The guides also noticed that Litton offered few luxuries and charged his passengers almost nothing. In an era when the price of a one-week motorized run through the canyon was roughly $700,
he was charging the same for a no-frills trip that could last up to twenty-three days. When the cost of his supplies and his payroll had been subtracted, his profit was almost nonexistent. Yet, on top of the already low prices, he also insisted on giving away many trips for free. Politicians, pundits, photographers, writers, and anyone else in a position to influence legislation or public opinion on matters concerning the environment were brought down the canyon at no charge. The reasons behind this, the guides eventually realized, had nothing to do with altruism. During the fight to block the Grand Canyon dams, Litton had become convinced that the best way, the
only
way, to protect the country’s remaining scenic treasures was to enable a wide range of citizens—schoolteachers, janitors, housewives, hairdressers, factory workers—to see these places firsthand and to experience their wonders for themselves. Only then could they fathom the magnitude of what was at stake. In Litton’s eyes, the rock-bottom prices for ordinary folks and the giveaways to people such as
Diane Sawyer, James Taylor, Bruce Babbitt, Richard Holbrooke, and Bill Moyers were investments that might reap valuable dividends if people could simply be induced to step into his boats and be exposed to what the river, the canyon, and Litton himself had to say.

In noticing these things, Litton’s guides also couldn’t help but notice the glaring and undeniable truth that their boss was an abominable entrepreneur who didn’t have the faintest clue about how to run a business. His fiscal largesse
ate away at the company’s bottom line to the point where GCD was soon stumbling from one season to the next on the threshold of bankruptcy. Even worse, perhaps, Litton’s efforts to stem the flow of red ink were often rather crude. While other companies were providing expensive amenities such as tents, sleeping cots, and steak dinners on the grill, his commissary consisted mostly of canned goods—baked beans, stewed tomatoes, fruit cocktail—and instead of handing out tents, he gave everyone a tarp and told them to decide how to rig it. He also tried to trim costs by buying up consignments of day-old bread and cases of cheap beer near his home in Palo Alto and then flying them to Hurricane in his single-engine Cessna 195,
a vintage tail-dragger with a radial engine and a propeller that had once exploded in the middle of a takeoff. Whatever pennies he might have saved on the food were consumed in the cost of aviation fuel required for the flight, but this never seemed to dawn on Litton (perhaps because the only thing he loved more than boating was flying). Upon landing at the little airport in Hurricane and delivering the supplies to the boathouse, he would start rummaging through the trash cans, pulling out used paintbrushes and seizing upon half-empty tubes of glue, demanding to know why these perfectly good items were being thrown away.

This combination of big-picture profligacy and nit-picking parsimony might have been amusing to the boatmen if his most effective cost-saving measure, by far, had not been to pay his guides the lowest wages in the entire industry. While boatmen at motor companies were earning as much as $60 a day, Litton’s biggest earners pulled down no more than $25 for each day they were on the river—and on top of this they were expected to devote additional days to repairing whatever damage they inflicted on their boats without any pay whatsoever. One might assume that under such conditions his employees would have trickled out the door along with the lost revenue. Oddly, however, their sense of loyalty seemed to grow only stronger with time.