Colin Fletcher - River

Colin Fletcher

RIVER

Colin Fletcher was born in Wales and educated in England. After six years service in the Royal Marines during World War II, he went to East Africa in 1947, farmed for four years in Kenya, and later surveyed and built a road over a virgin mountain in Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe). In the 1950s he crossed the Atlantic and prospectedamong other pursuitsin northern and western Canada. In 1956 he moved south to California. Soon afterwards he spent a summer walking from Mexico to Oregon across Californias deserts and mountains. Later he became the first man known to have walked the length of the Grand Canyon National Park within the Canyons rim. Each of these feats generated a bookrespectively, The Thousand Mile Summer and The Man Who Walked Through Time. Mr. Fletcher continues to walkand to write books: The Complete Walker (revised twice), The Winds of Mara, The Man from the Cave, and The Secret Worlds of Colin Fletcher.

Also by Colin Fletcher

The Secret Worlds of Colin Fletcher (1989)

The Complete Walker III (1984)

The Man from the Cave (1981)

The New Complete Walker (1974)

The Winds of Mara (1973)

The Man Who Walked Through Time (1968)

The Complete Walker (1968)

The Thousand-Mile Summer (1964)

First Vintage Departures Edition, May 1998

Copyright 1997 by Colin Fletcher
Maps copyright 1997 by David Lindroth, Inc.

All rights reserved under International Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in hardcover in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., New York, 1997.

Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to reprint previously published material:
Cambridge University Press: Excerpt of Elizabeth Loftus interview with Jack Hamilton, from Affect and Accuracy in Recall: Studies of Flashbulb Memories, edited by Eugene Winograd and Ulric Neisser (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992). Reprinted by permission of Cambridge University Press.
Harcourt Brace & Comany and Faber and Faber Limited: Excerpt from The Hollow Men, from Collected Poems 19091962 by T. S. Eliot, copyright 1936 by Harcourt Brace & Company, copyright 1963, 1964 by T. S. Eliot. Rights outside the United States administered by Faber and Faber Limited, London.
Reprinted by permission of Harcourt Brace & Company and Faber and Faber Limited.
Houghton Mifflin Company: Excerpt from What Any Lover Learns, from Collected Poems 19171982 by Archibald MacLeish, copyright 1985 by The Estate of Archibald MacLeish. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Company.
Sterling Lord Literistic, Inc.: Excerpt from Desert Notes by Barry Lopez (Kansas City: Andrews & McMeel), copyright 1976 by Barry Holstun Lopez.
Reprinted by permission of Sterling Lord Literistic, Inc.

Photographs by author (sometimes with assistance, as mentioned or implied in text), with the following exceptions: by Anita Williams.

The Library of Congress has cataloged the Knopf edition as follows:
Fletcher, Colin.
River: one mans journey down the Colorado, source to sea / by Colin Fletcher1st Vintage, ed.
p. cm.
ISBN 0-394-57421-4
1. Colorado River (Wyo.-Mexico)Description and travel. 2. Rafting (Sports)Colorado River (Wyo.-Mexico). 3. Fletcher, ColinJourneysColorado River (Wyo.-Mexico). I. Title
F788.F56 1997
917.9130453dc20 96-13220

Vintage ISBN: 978-0-375-70182-5
eBook ISBN: 978-0-8041-5243-3

Author photograph John Sexton

Random House Web site: www.randomhouse.com

v3.1

river:

A copious stream of water flowing in a channel towards the sea

A copious stream or flow of (something)

the boundary between life and death.

The Oxford English Dictionary

Mile 0
July 1215

W ell, see you in six months, said John. We shook hands. Then I turned and began to walk out across the almost level floor of the mountain pass, toward the lakes.

At first, easy going: firm glacial moraine. Even with my heavy pack, I could stride out. But soon I was laboring across sodden, tussocky grassland that enveloped the lakes.

The four lakesno more than ponds, reallylay out in the middle of the pass. The first three drained south, the way we had come. So the fourth and farthest was the one. The map said it drained north, and if it did so then it would mark the beginning of the river. The river.

I slogged slowly on. Gusts of wind funneled past. Overhead, along snow-marbled peaks, clouds hung gray and low.

Underfoot, the grass grew even soggier, rougher. I moved slowly but steadily across it, eyes riveted on puddle and beehive tussock, mind preoccupied with decisions about where next to put a boot down. Then I looked up and found myself facing an abrupt green bank, shoulder high.

Beyond the bank I could see, almost at eye level, a water surface whipped by wind gusts. It was both dull and shining, like hammered pewter. I began to climb the bankknife-edge and nervously aware that the water was the fourth lake, and that it probably marked the true beginning of my journey.

I reached the top of the bank. A brief impression of a little lake, indeed no more than a pond; beyond it, a gentle slope mottled with snow patches and bare rock but softened by grass and dark spruce trees. Off to my right, a hint of an outlet. So the lake almost certainly drained north. I began turning to wave a final goodbye to John.

The start. Green River Pass. I walk toward the four lakes and, I hope, the rivers source.

Because of my packs inertia, I turned slowly. And I had hardly begun to pivot when I saw, bearing down on us from the south, a vast, swirling wall of grayness. The racing cloud wall filled the pass. It blotted out the flanking peaks.

My arm, poised to wave, stabbed southward in warning. The tiny figure on the far side of the pass turned to face the approaching storm. For a moment we both stood staring. Then we were waving hurried farewells.

I waited barely long enough to see John shoulder his pack and begin striding back the way we had come. Then I turned and began to skirt the lake, left-handed and lickety-split. The lake margin was windswept and soggy but on the slope beyond it the spruces and outcrops whispered campsite.