August 13, 1869—What falls there are, we know not; what rocks beset the channel, we know not; what walls rise over the river, we know not…. The men talk as cheerfully as ever; jests are bandied about freely this morning; but to me the cheer is somber and the jests are ghastly.

Write on, good Major Powell. How prescient you were. I know exactly how you felt. I can read your every emotion on the face of John Blaustein.

We push off. Sunlight sparkles on the laughing wavelets of the master stream. Little birds twitter in the tamarisk.

It looks like a good day to die. All days are good but this one looks better than most.

As Sharky pulls us into the current, lashing about lustily with the oars, I glance back at the beach we are now departing. Only once. A black shadow lies across the unwet rugosities of oracle rock.

The highest sheer walls in the Canyon rear above our heads. Two thousand feet straight up. With terraces and further higher walls beyond. Toroweap Overlook rises at Mile 176, three thousand feet above the river. The suicide’s nemesis. We float beneath it.

When I worked at Grand Canyon, a young English major from Yale, unlucky in love, drove his car all the way from New Haven, Connecticut, to jump from Toroweap Overlook. Would have more class, he thought, than the banal routine off Golden Gate Bridge. Arriving here, he took one good look down into our awful chasm (“Gaze not too long into the abyss/Lest the abyss gaze into thee”—F. Nietzsche), walked back to his car (1970 Chevrolet Impala Supersport), attached a vacuum cleaner hose to the tailpipe, ran the other end of the hose into the car, started the motor and gassed himself to death. While gassing he wrote a note explaining his procedure; also a final poem on life, death and the bitterness of youth that all the critics agreed was not very good. It begins:

I came to Toroweap today

To look, to laugh, to leap away

From all these cares of mortal clay;

I looked—and found a better way….

You see the fatal flaws. Inept alliteration. Heavy-handed rhyme scheme. Iambic tetrameter—wrong foot for elegies. (“Foot like a hand.”) Cliché filter not functioning. Sorry lad, you’ll have to do better than that. C minus.

The river slides seaward in its stony groove. Will never make it. Mohave Desert-type vegetation now—mesquite, ocotillo, catclaw acacia, barrel cactus, clock-face and cow’s-tongue prickly pear adore as best they can the talus slopes below the cliffs. Names, names, the naming of the names. What’s this? What’s that? they ask me, pointing to this bush, that bush. I give my standard reply: What it is, ma’am, no one knows; but men call it—creosote bush. Larrea tridentata. What’s in a name?

We stop for lunch at Mile 177, not far above that riffle, from which point we can see the first remnants of the lava flows.

August 25, 1869—What a conflict of water and fire there must have been here! Just imagine a river of molten rock running down into a river of melted snow. What a seething and boiling of the waters; what clouds of steam rolled into the heavens!