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ball in midair instantly turned a touchdown into
twenty points.
But then, a few minutes later, out on the river,
all laughter aside, he would invoke from some
deep well of memory a wave of anger and outrage
at what had become of his country, offering with
the precision of the fi nest courtroom orator a
litany of scandal and betrayal that had left the
United States politically, environmentally, and
economically weakened and compromised. I had
never met a person whose love of country was so
sincere and yet so free of chauvinistic cant.
When Bobby spoke of his father and his
uncles, it was for him a natural thing, a simple
invocation of lineage. But for the rest of us, it
was as if a magical window had opened onto the
past. It left everyone on that river yearning for a
time when we might once again have leaders of
such caliber.
The opportunity to be with Bobby, Kick and
Tara on the river was a father’s dream. I would
watch Tara when Bobby spoke of what could be
in this country, and see how his words inspired her.
She was about to begin college in Colorado. What
better way to discover the American Southwest
than to know the Grand Canyon and to travel the
river with Bobby, with all his hopes and dreams of
making this a better world.
One day he told the story of what his
father had done, when word reached him in
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Indianapolis on the campaign trail in 1968
that Martin Luther King had been assassinated.
Against the advice of those who feared for his
safety, he immediately made his way to the
inner city, and as a pained and angry mob grew
around him, he climbed on top of a car and,
speaking from his heart, told the crowd that he
too knew what it meant to lose a brother. As a
result of his action, Indianapolis, unlike so many
American cities, did not burn that night.
As we all gathered that fi rst morning at
Lees Ferry no one could have known how
smoothly things would go. Watching Bobby
and Greg speak to the assembled media, with the camera crane rising overhead, and the
loaded rafts clustered along the shore, I glanced
at Kick and Tara, and then to the river, which I
viewed with some trepidation. Not for fear of
the white water, but rather out of concern that
this most legendary of river trips might somehow
disappoint. Plugged by no fewer than eleven
dams, the Colorado is the world’s most regulated
river. Nearly 25,000 people fl oat down it every
year. Its fl ow is determined not by nature but by
technicians responding to the electrical needs of
Las Vegas and Phoenix. The river provides more
than half of the water supply of Los Angeles, San
Diego and Phoenix, and all of the power for
Las Vegas, cities that are home to more than 25
million people.
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If the Colorado ceased flowing
the
water held in its multiple reservoirs might
hold out for three to four years, but after that it
would be necessary to abandon most of southern
California and Arizona, and much of Colorado,New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming. As it is, by the
time it reaches the delta its essence has been so
drained that there is no water left. It enters the
ocean a river only in name.
Hence we embarked on the Colorado exhilarated, but haunted by a question. Could
a journey down a river, by any defi nition
plundered and violated, still inspire? What
remained to be learned? What lessons might its
rocks still tell, its eddies invoke? Could a place
where park rangers monitor every broken
twig, and where river guides and their clients,
out of deference for the many thousands who
would follow and camp in the same sands,
comb the beaches in search of fragments of
food and other micro-trash, retain anything
of its wild character? If not, what is one to
make of this iconic canyon so revered in the
American imagination?
These were only some of the questions and
conceits I carried with me from the landing
at Lees Ferry. In the end, of course, the river
proved me wrong, making a mockery of my
myopic time frame, my parochial concerns. The
splendor of the river and its canyon even today
transcends all that man has done to it.
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