This spring brought the passing of author and boatman François Leydet. In 1964 David Brower recruited Leydet to join him, Martin Litton, P. T. Reilly, Philip Hyde and others on a dory trip through Grand Canyon. The purpose was to write a book in defense of Grand Canyon, then under assault by the Marble Canyon and Bridge Canyon Dam projects. The resultant large format Sierra Club book, Time and the River Flowing, authored by Leydet, was and is a classic conservation text.
But Leydet, like many of us, got hooked and returned year after year as a boatman and eventually trip leader for Litton. “He was very at ease at the oars,” recalls Martin. “He was the first person, actually, to ever run Lava Falls in a dory. We had always portaged it, just as Reilly and Nevills had.”
“This trip—it might have been 1965—I had already lined my boat down and François and my son Johnny wanted to try running it. Of course we didn't know how to run it, so they just lined up and went straight off the ledge. François was rowing Reilly's old boat, the Susie Too—that's the one at South Rim now, renamed the Music Temple— and when he launched off the Ledge, a bit of a vacuum must have formed in the hatches, pulling them shut extra tight. Well, the latches Reilly had put on only held when there was tension on them, so they all sprung loose, and when François hit the bottom of the hole, every hatch on the boat flew wide open. It was spectacular.”
In later years Leydet sold Jaguars, wrote for the San Francisco Chronicle, wrote the Sierra Club book on the Redwoods; finally retiring in Tucson, where he was long a docent at the Arizona Sonoran Desert Museum.
His legacy lives on, though, in the Canyon he helped to save. He closed off Time and the River Flowing thusly:
To paraphrase Newton B. Drury, fourth Director of the National Park Service, America is not so poor that it needs to sacrifice its magnificent places for power generation, nor so rich in such places that it can afford to.
The next time you visit the Grand Canyon, you might find yourself a quiet perch somewhere on the rim. Look off through the blue cast of space at the cliffs and terraces and amphitheaters and temples, search out the thin thread of the Colorado, rumbling through the gorge it has cut into the antiquity of the world, and breathe in your part of it all. It is within your power and of those you can awaken to make certain that this will endure. In a special way, Edwin Arlington Robinson's admonition in Tristram applies to the creative genius in every man:

. . . you are one
of the time-sifted few that leave the world,
When they are gone, not the same place it was.
Mark what you leave.

Brad Dimock