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river classic goes back to press. John Blausteinąs book of Grand
Canyon photographs, with a journal by Edward Abbey, will be re-released
this spring with twenty-eight new images and a new introduction
by Martin Litton. A few choice excerpts follow...
In time the tug of wilderness would be felt by more and more people,
and by 1950 the total number of persons who had floated the river
hit one hundred. Historian Dock Marston told us that my wife, Esther,
and I were numbers 185 and 186 (the order depending, of course,
on who was at which end of the boat at the finish line); that was
in 1955, so the snowball was beginning to roll. But even now, with
twenty thousand or more people spread over a distance of some two
hundred miles in a river-running season lasting seven or eight months,
only the most reclusive among us will feel that the glorious river
trail through the Grand Canyon‹easily the longest, wildest, grandest
white-water route in the world‹is overcrowded.Š ŠIn the long-term
perspective of a canyon millions upon millions of years old, carved
inch by inch down into a rising plain of which the youngest rocks‹the
upper Permian surface formation we call the Kaibab‹are a couple
of hundred million years old and the oldest‹the mysterious flinty
schists of the innermost gorges‹still glitter with the dawn-light
of Creation, it seems almost funny to worry about what we do to
it.
The proud dams above and below, those ugly concrete plugs Ed Abbey
would have liked to have blown up, are at worst fleeting aberrations.
And although there is much concern over what damage we may be causing
in the canyon by going through it on rafts and in boats, there seems
to be room for agreement that we are scarcely leaving enough twentieth-century
artifacts and drowned corpses behind to make a decent fossil record
of our times in the siltstone forming at the bottom of Lake Mead.
If for nothing more than pleasure, instruction, and inspiration
for the transitory race called human, we should be determined to
sustain the river experience in the Grand Canyon. Few things in
this world are really beyond description; it is safe to say that
the exhilaration in approaching, entering, and running a big Grand
Canyon rapid in a small boat is one of them. Add to the scores of
rapids the compelling subjects for contemplation (including, at
times, the responses of your fellow wayfarers, and yes, even the
sandstorms, rainstorms, and inevitable cuts and bruises) and there
is nothing more, with the possible exception of a hot shower now
and again, that anyone should ask of lifeŠ
Martin Litton from the introduction
Water topples upon us, filling the boat in an instant.
The force of the river carries us through the first wave and into
a second, deeper hole. . . . I think I can almost see bedrock bottom.
The third wave towers above us. Far above. The Great Wave. Heavily
our water-loaded boat, askew, climbs up its face. Never makes it.
As the wave hits us from the portside our dory turns over with the
grave, solemn, inevitable certainty of disaster. No one says a word
as we go under.
Edward Abbey The Hidden Canyon
Discount to GCRG Members
John Blaustein is giving gcrg members a 15% pre-publication
discount on orders placed before May 1, 1999. The book will not
be available until April. Softcover $19.95 ($16.95 to gcrg members).
Hardcover $35.00 ($29.75 to gcrg members). Postage is $3.00 for
the first copy and $1.00 for each additional copy. California residents
add 8.25% sales tax. Please send check or money order to: John Blaustein,
911 Euclid Avenue, Berkeley, ca 94708; 510-525-8133; fax: 510-525-7936;
e-mail: john@johnblaustein.com. Signatures/inscriptions on request.
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