When I sent Don Congdon Ed’s bonus check for $15,000, author and agent said they had forgotten about the “edit clause.” After Ed’s death, Clarke Abbey, his widow, acting on one of his last requests, asked Avon Books, the paperback reprinter of The Fool’s Progress, to restore one of my cuts, which they did. Thus the high folio of the hardback edition is 484, the paperback 513.

Included as the final piece in this anthology is a copy of Ed’s “Postlude,” as he edited it.

J.M.

A Colorado River Journal

BRIGHT-EYED AND BUSHY-TAILED, we assemble at Lees Ferry, Arizona, on the banks of the brand-new cold green Colorado River. Green because of microplankton. Cold because this water is issuing from the bottom of a dam twelve miles upstream—that Glen Canyon Dam. The temperature of the water here is 47ºF. (I place a six-pack of Michelob in the water for quick chilling.) And brand-new? This river is not the Colorado we knew and loved. The real Colorado died in 1964 when the engineers of the Bureau of Reclamation closed the gates at Glen Canyon Dam, changing the Colorado from a wild and free river into the domesticated, well-regulated conveyor belt for baloney boats that it is today. Probably no man-made artifact in all of human history has been hated so much, by so many, for so long as Glen Canyon Dam.

There’s John Blaustein himself, loading his little wooden boat, a dory called Peace River. He looks anxious. Can’t blame him. He has many problems on his mind—cameras, the passengers, the rapids.

His boss, one Martin Litton, who owns and manages Grand Canyon Dories, is hanging around nearby. Nine years ago I was the ranger here at Lee’s Ferry. I used to squeeze Martin’s life jackets, testing them for safety.

From The Hidden Canyon: A River Journey (1977)

“Look here, Martin,” I say, giving one of his flimsy boats a kick in the slats, “you don’t really expect us to float down the river and run the rapids in a thing like this. What’s it made of, plywood? One rap on a rock and it’ll crack like an egg.” Talking of old times and new problems, he ignores my facetious fears.

I turn my attention to the boatmen and to my fellow passengers on this suicidal journey down the river of no return.

There are seven dories, bright and gaily painted craft, each named after some natural feature destroyed or maimed by the works of man: the Peace River (dammed in Canada); Tapestry Wall, Moqui Steps, Music Temple (lovely places in Glen Canyon now sunk beneath the stagnant waters of Lake Powell National Sewage Lagoon); the Vale of Rhondda (a ravaged coalfield in Wales); and the Columbia and the Celilo Falls (drowned by the Dalles Dam on the Columbia River). The boats are about seventeen feet long from stem to transom, seven feet wide at the beam. Closed hatches at bow, midships and stern make them virtually unsinkable, we are told. An obvious lie. I don’t believe it for a moment. “Virtually unsinkable.” “Virtually” indeed. What sinister ambiguities are contained in that sly equivocation? Why not say “virtually floatable”? How about “virtually sunk,” “virtually drowned” or “virtually dead”? Yeah, virtually; I can see through this transparent scheme. It’s a conspiracy to get us down there among those awful wavelets in the Paria Riffle. Asphyxiation.