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I have always been drawn to rivers.
My heroes as a boy growing up in
Québec were the coureurs de bois, the
fur traders and explorers who broke
open a continent. I would spend hours
on the banks of the St. Lawrence, imagining
their journeys up the river.
When I, along with Tara, was invited to join
a celebration of the Colorado, and travel the
length of the Grand Canyon, by reputation the
greatest white water trip in North America, I was
delighted. It was, after all, at Lees Ferry that the
modern rafting adventure began. The idea for the
expedition originated with Greg MacGillivray,
a pioneering IMAX fi lmmaker and dedicated
conservationist. Recognizing that the supply
and quality of fresh water were among the most
daunting of global environmental challenges,
Greg wanted to tell a story of water conservation
against the backdrop of the Colorado, at once
the most iconic and compromised river in the
United States. Inspired no doubt by his love for
his own daughter, Megan, Greg envisioned a
journey in which two fathers, each in their own
ways advocates for the wild, would run the river
with their daughters, just before the girls left
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home to attend university for the fi rst time.
With this premise in mind Greg, together
with Liz Ferrin and her team from fi lm sponsor
and investor Teva, recruited the two of us, along
with Bobby Kennedy Jr. and his daughter, Kick. It
was a bold and somewhat risky experiment. The
success of the fi lm would in no small measure
depend on how these four characters got along.
If the chemistry was not right, it would surely
show, especially once projected onto an IMAX
movie screen six stories tall.
As it turned out, any such concerns evaporated
within hours of our being on the river. Kick and
Tara bonded from the start, forging a friendship
that continues to deepen to this day. Bobby and
I knew of each other, and had met once before
the trip, when by chance we had both addressed
a conference on river conservation.
But only once we were on the Colorado
did we realize the extraordinary ways in which
the trajectories of our lives had intersected. We
had gone to Harvard at the same time, studied
anthropology, and found inspiration in many of
the same courses and professors. Both of us had
come of age in Colombia, and as we compared
notes, we were able to work our way down
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through the landscape to countless remote
mountain crossroads and small lowland towns that
we had both come to know. A single phrase or
reference, a forest traversed, a tribe encountered or
an escapade survived, invoked telling laughter that
reinforced our growing sense of fraternity even as
it left both of our daughters wondering just how
crazy their fathers had been in their youth.
Bobby had gone down the Colorado with
his father in 1967, a journey that inspired in him
a love of white water and a passion for rivers
that would in time lead him to become the
country’s foremost advocate of water and river
conservation. I found him to be an extraordinary
man, charismatic and brash, decent and true,
with a terrifi c sense of humour and immense
reservoirs of physical energy and strength.
In one instant he was an Irish bard regaling
the guides with some bar room joke. In another
he would be orchestrating the entire crew in an
impromptu game of football in which the rules
changed by the moment, with extra points being
awarded on the spot for the most clever and
cunning innovation. Kick, running the length of
the rafts, bouncing from one pontoon to the next,
catapulting off the rigging of the last to catch a
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