River Trips

We don't go on exciting vacations, but we do read about them.  And if you're going to read a book about people nearly dying while going down an unexplored river, why not two?

The River of Doubt by Candice Mallard (353 pages)

Lets review what we all know about Theodore Roosevelt.  He was a scrawny kid, had asthma, became a boxer, grew a fabulous mustache, became president, went on a hunting trip to Africa, ran for president again, split the republican vote with Taft and let Wilson win.  So what does a guy do when he's bummed out after losing a presidential election? If you said, "Lead a trip down an unexplored river in the Amazon." you win a cookie.  (I'm sure this is what Mitt did, right?)  The ex-president booked a trip to South America to deliver some speeches, look at a few museums and then do some adventuring in the Amazon down a known river.  The trip would have been exciting for sure, but not all that note worthy.  But, as they were making their way through South America, he seems to have realized that the trip as planned didn't meet his uber-manly standards (can you imagine the memes if he were still around?) and he adjusted the itinerary to go down a river known as The River of Doubt.

Isn't that the best possible name for a mysterious river in the Amazon?  It's a pity that they re-named it the Roosevelt River, though as a consolation prize I do get to imagine Brazilians trying to say his name.  (It would come out something like "Who's a velch?")  The Brazilian government hooked him up with their most famous explorer, Cândido Mariano da Silva Rondon, (so that's who all those roads are named after) who had found the headwaters of a river that went off into the rain forest and ended up who knows where.  I mean, really, they didn't know where it went.  Obviously it ended up in the Amazon River eventually, but they weren't entirely sure how long it was, or even which other river it would hook into.

So, after sending half of his fellow travelers off on an easier adventure, they set off down the River of Doubt.  It turns out going down a river involves a lot of not sitting in a boat, because if you get to rapids too big to run, you've got to carry your boats around them, and that is hard work.  Oh, and there are mosquitoes, and malaria, and hostile Indians, and piranhas, and at least one crazy dude in your expedition.  They made it out alive (you'd probably have heard about the trip if Teddy Roosevelt had died down there) but not without some seriously close calls.

Apparently President Roosevelt had not read Down the Great Unknown by Edward Dolnick (294 pages).  We'll cut him some slack because it wasn't published until 2001, but if he had, it might have helped him out on his trip.  The full title of the book, Down the Great Unknown: John Wesley Powell's 1869 Journey of Discovery and Tragedy through the Grand Canyon could have given him a heads up on what he was going to face.  Powell was a Civil War vet, explorer, geologist and whatever else he decided to be, who hatched a plan to hop on the Green River in Wyoming and hop off the Colorado River in Nevada.  Easy peasy.  Ok, I don't think he ever claimed it would be easy, but that was the plan.  He and 9 other guys set off in 4 boats to go down two rivers that had never been traveled before.  Between them, they had absolutely no river running experience.  One of the first days, in calm water, when they pulled over to camp for the night, one of the boats missed the landing point and ended up 400 yards down stream.  Yup, these were the guys that were going to take on world class rapids in the Grand Canyon.

This book made me long for the bare, red rock and steep canyon cliffs of the southwest.  Once again, going down the river involves a lot of getting out of the boat and carrying it, or, more often, hooking ropes to it so you can guide it through the rapids while you're not in it.  This trip had many of the same components of danger that Roosevelt had - Indians, rapids, etc. - but got to trade in the malaria and piranhas for cliffs and bigger rapids.  The cliffs don't sound like such a problem until you realize that sometimes the Green and Colorado rivers fill the canyons from wall to wall, which means there is a risk that as you round a bend you can be faced with a set of rapids and getting out to walk around them simply isn't an option.  Powell made it out, as did most of the crew (they named a Lake after him, after all) but 10 guys with 10 months of food and 4 boats went in, and when they made it to the confluence with the Virgin River, there were only 6 guys, 2 boats and 5 days worth of rations left.

Both books were pretty entertaining.  In the middle, they both got a little bit slow as the monotony of a river trip wore on.  With journals to work from, the authors are able to account for each day with detail as they went through each set of rapids, portages, and spoiled soggy rations.  At times, I was really hoping for a sentence that started "Then it was pretty much more of the same for the next 10 days until . . ."  In the end, the authors managed to pull it out and rescue the narrative before it got too bad, though.  Both books were worth reading, though I think I liked The River of Doubt more (though it had the advantage of being the first one I read.)

One final thought from John Wesley Powell.  He wrote up a 300 page first person account of his trip afterwards and in the entire thing, never found a reason to mention that he only had one arm.  (Lost his right arm in the Civil War.)  So next time you're tempted to complain on facebook about something, consider a man who climbed and rafted through the Grand Canyon in a wooden boat, with no map and only one arm who knew what it meant to only worry about the things that you could do something about.