I gaze for a long while on the turbulent waves of the rapid, silvery and phosphorescent in the moonlight, before returning to camp, my tent, the welcome warmth of my sleeping bag.

Wednesday, Thursday, Friday

For three days I wait. I spend one whole day in the tent, reading, while icy rain pours down outside, then the next two days climbing the trail to the hoodoo land of rock above, exploring a number of coves and grottos and box canyons between the Doll’s House and the Confluence Overlook, descending at night. I find a new arch, unmarked on the topographic maps and unknown to the Park Service (as I later learned). I name it Deception Arch, its archness not apparent until you get within fifty yards of it.

Sanders is supposed to be here Thursday. Returning to camp by flashlight and moonlight, Thursday night, I am disappointed to discover that he has not arrived. For the first time in my solitary week on the river I feel a twinge of true loneliness, melancholy triggered by failed expectation.

A final day of explorations. High on the sandstone benches above the river I find a series of potholes full of rain water. The water is cold but not nearly so cold as the river. I fill my canteens then take a soapless bath, scrubbing myself with fine sand, drying my body in the wind and the glare of the sunlight. Cold, fierce, exhilarating sensations. Thirty, forty miles away, across the red wilderness of canyons and spires and needles and buttes, the thirteen-thousand-foot peaks of the La Sal Mountains gleam with power, covered with fresh snow.

Much later, after dark, I stand at the top of the trail and look down on Spanish Bottom, fifteen hundred feet below. I see no flicker of campfire at our appointed meeting place. Disappointed again, doubly disappointed, I pick my way down the rocky trail by flashlight and trudge across the long weedy flats to camp, hearing the sound of the wind in the trees, the distant surflike mutter of the rapids at the mouth of Cataract Canyon. I foresee another night with only Leo Tolstoy for company. Tolstoy is good company but he’s dead; there comes a time when you long for something more—vivacious.

I enter the grove of hackberrys where I’ve pitched my tent. I hear voices and see, now and at last, the glow of a fire. Below, under the sandbanks, out of sight from above, stands Ken Sanders with his arm around his girlfriend Lynn, three T-bone steaks grilling on the flames and a case of Dos Equis waiting at their feet.

Glory be.

Free Speech

The Cowboy and His Cow University Of Montana, April 1985

WHEN I FIRST CAME WEST in 1948, a student at the University of New Mexico, I was only twenty years old and just out of the Army. I thought, like most simple-minded Easterners, that a cowboy was a kind of mythic hero. I idolized those scrawny little red-nosed hired hands in their tight jeans, funny boots and comical hats.