My kind of river, the White.
Near twilight, we camp at the put-in, a two-track rut into a
brush-ringed clearing on the outskirts of Rangely, Colo. No ramp,
no parking, no fire grates, no tables, no signs — a wide spot
on the river bank just out of town, where we lean our canoes
against the shrubbery and hunker surreptitiously for the night.
My kind of river. No permits, no designated campsites, no
river map, no officious ranger-types, no fees or lotteries or
orientation speech or protocol of any stripe. Drive up, put on, go
downstream.
The White isn’t much for whitewater, or water
at all, most of the year. The window opens during snowmelt, when
the flow is gritty brown, tearing out of the high country and
across ranch land, roiling thick with topsoil, full of flotsam, if
you can count the odd dead cow as flotsam. Below Rangely it dives
into canyons, bumps its way through Indian country, and adds its
dollop to the Green some distance south of Vernal.
The
flow is questionable, the floatable window brief and unpredictable,
the whitewater pretty nonexistent, and the surrounding country as
gritty as the spring river. We come with a gaggle of children, a
tough crew to contain within the hull of a canoe. They thrive on
the mudflats and sandbars of camp, or chasing lizards across
slickrock.
My kind of river, this renegade flow. The
White slips the gantlet in its eroded canyons below the sight
lines. Up on top the landscape is honeycombed with dirt roads
leading to drilling rigs, pads, oil tanks. An unbelievable welter
of bulldozed tracks, pipelines, nodding pumps. Up there, the smell
of petroleum overwhelms the hint of sage in the spring air.
But the White is clear of that, another dimension
entirely. Except for a bridge or two, the river pulses past. It
takes climbing to the rim to glimpse the carnage. Down below,
sliding around the bends under the loom of crumbly shales, the
White bears our red canoes past cottonwood groves, grassy banks,
alongside eroded fields of soft rocks.
The valley is home
to other renegade types. A pair of wild horses stare at us from a
bend. Their coats are full of burrs, patchy with winter fur. They
have that feral, cagey look in the eyes, ready to rear up and run,
clattering away, free.
For one entire day, headwinds pin
us in camp. We try to paddle but the gusts slam the boats bank to
bank, roar up the valley. The kids grip the gunwales, the boats
skitter and wallow. We retreat up a dirt bank, tie the canoes to
stout roots, and shelter in a thicket of scrub oak. All day the
wind pounds upriver. Late afternoon, we explore up a side canyon
full of cactus and lizard and cross-bed. Our hats go flying in the
wind.
The boys tear around the rock walls after lizards
like a pack of dogs. The next morning, at dawn, the air is still
and cold. We forgo breakfast, make our escape, say nothing to jinx
the calm. Even the kids are subdued. The White pulses its brown
spring muscle through the sere, abused land. The river is neither
benign nor malicious. Only this mass of wet molecules rolling over
again and again in response to the innate request of gravity.
Rolling with us on its back.
We stop mid-morning, brew
coffee. The kids roam. They find a millipede under a rock that is
glittering black and yellow, six inches long. It looks poisonous as
hell.
For a week we do this. It feels absolutely
anonymous to be here. We are unleashed from the lives we’ve
manufactured. Unaccounted for, invisible, cheating time and
savoring time. The kids have no idea. And yet, the White must be
inscribed somewhere on the circuitry of memory, somewhere in the
marrow and sinew of who they are. So that, when they are 22, or 40,
or tottering with age, they will see a nondescript flow of water
somewhere. A flow thick with spring, headlong and cold and
unexpected, rambling across country, diving around a corner into
the twilight of canyon.
They won’t understand why, but
some impulse in them will swell, some ache as fundamental as blood
or hormone or love, and they will long for the hull of boat beneath
them, the sidle of current, the call of canyon wren. They will,
then, no matter what life has brought them, want nothing but to
spend the night in some backwater thicket of shrub, and come dawn,
slide a boat into the current to go where it goes.
Alan Kesselheim is a contributor to Writers on the Range,
a service of High Country News (hcn.org). He is
a boater and writer in Kalispell,
Montana.
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