Introduction to The Dream

Dear Reader,

I have a new crowd of people reading my blog than were reading it back in 2008 when I last wrote about this subject and so I thought I would step back and rewrite/repost a series that was especially meaningful to me. It was a trip of a lifetime that I was able to take and in many way, changed me and affected me in the years since. This trip occurred 22 years ago nearly to the day. I hope you enjoy it.

Ed

I stepped out of the airport into a brilliant white light that I hadn't seen all winter long back in Iowa. Sunlight. I quickly shed my jacket and stuffed into my already bulging duffel bag containing all my gear for the next month and made my way off the runway and into a small building representing the international airport of Flagstaff, Arizona. It felt good to be free of the 'canned' air that I had been breathing most of the day. As convenient as they are, I just can't adapt to flying through the air in a hollowed out aluminum tube at 500 miles per hour breathing heavily conditioned air. After all, I was a mountain man and mountain men weren't supposed to be riding in airplanes, but rather going on wild dory boat journeys down the entire length of the Grand Canyon.

Being unfamiliar with the airport there, I waited for a half hour in the hot sun outside the only set of doors at the taxi sign before it occurred to me that traffic might be so light that one wasn't going to come unless I called. I wandered back inside, found a phone and surprisingly enough, a phonebook so that I could dial myself a ride. A yellow taxi showed up a half hour later and I threw my gear into the back of the cab before we headed off for a motel on the other side of town. After a while, the cabbie broke the silence by asking me what brought myself to town. In the best John Wesley Powell/mountain man/explorer/adventurer voice that I could muster I told him that I was spending a month boating down the Colorado River in a wooden dory boat. It didn't get the response that I had expected and in fact drew no response at all. Silence prevailed for the rest of the taxi ride.

Down the River by Edward Abbey was perhaps the second or third book I read of his. I remember being fascinated by it and asking my father about the Colorado River only to learn that he had been down it on one of those huge rubber rafts when he was younger. He didn't remember much of the trip and couldn't answer many of my questions but my fate was sealed and I knew that someday I was going to have to boat down the river in a wooden dory boat. Abbey made it sound as if that was the only way to float down the river and after having done so, I couldn't agree more with him on the issue. So the years went by as I grew up and went to college all the while scheming that before I got a real job, I would take a wooden dory boat journey down what was left of the Colorado River between the Boulder and Glen Canyon dams.

Towards the end of my college career my planning started getting serious. I did some research and learned that the outfit Abbey took, Grand Canyon Dories was still in business. They offered several different versions of the trip and after much research; I elected to take the first trip of the season in April for a couple different reasons. The wildflowers would be blooming and the temperatures would be relatively mild compared to the oven baking temperatures regularly seen during early summer in the bottom of the canyon. The temperatures during the middle of summer are simply unfathomable. Second and perhaps most importantly, the first trip in April was allowed to depart a full two weeks before the rafting outfitters could begin allowing us to have the river to ourselves. I could take any of three different parts of the trip but decided on doing all three segments and one upping myself by taking the extended version which was three days longer than the regular version giving more time to hike. However two things stopped me in my tracks. One was that the waiting list for that trip was over a yearlong and that it required a staggering amount of money, that I as a self-financed college student who was finishing up his fifth year of college, didn't have. With just over one hundred dollars to my name and a car that held all my worldly possessions, I accepted a job immediately after graduation and sulked up to Minnesota with my dream put on hold.

I didn't forget about the trip completely and even half-heartedly negotiated being able to take a month off from work to do the trip after I had saved up the required vacation time. It took several long years to do so and like a kid the night before Christmas, it was slow time. With no assets to start a life post college, I scrimped and saved, living on as little as I could comfortably do to accumulate the necessary funds to book a spot on a trip. Whenever I wanted to splurge by eating out instead of cooking in, I kept a picture of a wooden dory boat with a man half crouching in the middle looking down the gullet of a monstrous wave where I could see it. After two long years, with my vacation days calculated and a cold sweat breaking out at the thought of spending such a large amount of money, I finally made the call a year and a half in advance and booked myself on the first wooden dory trip. I was the first person on the list and there was no backing out.