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Dry Run on the River of Sorrows (cont.)
Our packing was unscientific. We lined the hulls with trash bags and stuffed them with clothes, sleeping pads, and Ziplocs full of food. Waterproof items such as beer cans and fuel bottles and a PVC poop tube were left to bang about in the bilge. Regulations required that we carry something metal for containing campfires; we brought a pizza pan. We also brought along Mikey Golins, a fearless 20-year-old river guide whom we thought we could talk into going first in the rapids. I dropped Damon and Mikey at an old diversion dam with a rocky chute on either side. Mikey paddled through safely, and then Damon launched. Within 30 seconds he was pinned sideways in his behemoth kayak. I could hear him cursing from where I stood on the banks. I felt bad for him, pinned in about 18 inches of water. Finally he pulled his skirt and popped out of his boat. Afraid of getting his feet trapped on the bottom, Damon tried to float, but the river wasn't deep enough. He sort of crawled face first down the channel, banging against rocks, cussing louder by the moment. As soon as Mikey towed him to shore, I snuck off to the truck, worried what Damon might do to me if he caught me. This whole stupid idea, after all, had been mine. We camped that night under a grove of cottonwoods. Damon kicked aside the dried cow pies, built a twig fire in the pizza pan, and roasted chunks of pepperoni on a stick and mixed them into our plastic bowls of macaroni and cheese. The poison ivy I'd acquired on my thighs the week before was rashing up nicely. For the first time, it resembled a river trip. The next morning we scraped over gravel bars as the river was swallowed up by a massive mouth of sandstone. There was no horizon but up. On the banks, the Mormon tea blossomed in bursts of yellow. As if emerging from the center of the earth, we floated through 200 million years of rock: from the red talus slopes of the Chinle to the towering black-streaked Wingate layer, the cracked Kayenta, the golden walls of the Navajo and Entrada, and finally the gray mounds of the Morrison. Will the Dolores ever again run wild and free? Southwestern Colorado won't give up irrigation anytime soon, and even if groups like the DRC convince—or pay—irrigators to reduce waste and keep more water in the river, the Dolores will be runnable only when the drought ends. Until then, the only ones to pass through its magnificent canyons will be people like Damon and me: the dreamers, the determined, the daft. The next morning, we floated toward the thunder of cars on Utah 128, and our boats bobbed against the wind to the confluence, at mile 171. The brown clouds of the Dolores marbled together with the translucent-green Colorado, and from there the precious and sorrowful water continued its journey from canyon to dam, from dam to canyon, to the fountains of Las Vegas, the golf courses of Phoenix, the lettuce fields of California, and maybe, though not likely, to the sea.
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