Green River Redux

The Green River meanders its way across the Utah landscape as if on a lazy Sunday, window shopping its way down south toward the border with Arizona. One hundred twenty miles downstream from our put in spot, the Green will rendezvous with the Colorado, its rambunctious young cousin from the east. It’s here that we’ll pull out, just one mile before the fabled whitewater at Cataracts, a pile of rocks that’d eagerly make mincemeat out of our flimsy canoe if given the chance.

At Crystal Geyser, not far from Moab, the Green is a giant, undrinkable, unquenchable, frothy cappuccino peppered here and there with misplaced water bottles that we dutifully collect. It’s been ten years since my last trip down the Green, and I see changes like this afoot, though it seems silly to worry about a place that’s been carved by hundreds of millions of years of water and weather. We bipeds are nothing more than squish-able, burnable ticks in this rock solid canyon – a sentiment that leaves us stupefied and humbled over the next seven days.

On night four we pull in late to a site and set up camp in an area that feels just plain eerie, like we should not be here in this sacred place. We camp next to a large rock for shelter as the sky darkens and shadows the canyon and obscures our nightly view of Orion’s belt. The rain falls. The next morning we awaken to a view of petroglyphs within feet of our tent. We are anxious to pack up and leave this site in peace.

At Mineral Bottom, the Engineer and I meet a wizened old man who serves as resident volunteer for the Bureau of Land Management from Easter to Halloween. He has a smart dog, a little trailer, and an array of solar panels – enough fodder to keep Casey engaged for life. He gives Casey a CD that outlines his theories of electro-magnetic fields. He gives me a peppermint patty. We’re out of Nutella so this measure of kindness strikes right to the core.

I close my eyes to the sun and slice my paddle into the Green for what must be the hundred-thousandth time. The height of the canyon walls is unfathomable, dwarfing all sense of the self, crushing whatever ego remains. This reminds me of a conversation I heard in passing while hiking in the Rockies.

Lady: These mountains are even higher than New York City skyscrapers.

Friend: Yeah, for sure.

We slice on, into the Green, lost in our thoughts.