t came as a surprise to learn Roger Henderson was from the Chicago area. He was as much a part of this country as the coyote nights and getting stuck in the mud. ³Whatever the truth is,² he said, ³it seems to be in the land itself.² Northern Arizona University drew him west, and by the late 1970s he had rowed his first baggage boat down the Colorado. The hook was set, and his river running spanned fifteen years and several river companies. He also worked as a cameraman, ran a seismic survey crew, and at times dreamed of wilder places and went looking for them. He might head off to Patagonia or north to Alaska, but he always returned to the Southwest. And no matter where he traveled, the stories kept coming. Roger would sit behind the wheel of his pickup, a roostertail of dust following him down a backroad as he hauled a load of firewood for a ceremony, laughing as he told about a trip to France for the opening of a Navajo exhibit. He described hanging out at the Ritz, smoking Cuban cigars in the bar where Hemingway showed up with a Tommy gun and a thirst during the liberation of Paris. And then he would be on to the next story, and then another. After leaving the river, he became an archeologist for the Navajo Nation. Medicine men called him ³the ghostbuster,² since his job was to rebury the bones whenever heavy rains or a cat churned up an Anasazi burial. They taught him how to protect himself from the dead

Scott Thybony

What is it about some people that when you meet them for the first time you have a sense you can trust them anytime, anywhere? That's the way it was with Roger Henderson. He covered the ground he stood on and more than that—he watched your back.
When my father died, I was in the small shack where I lived packing some stuff in a duffel to go back to Virginia. I heard the tell-tale whine of a Willeys jeep approach the cabin. There was a knock on the door, and Roger entered without saying hello. He just started writing in his open check book. Without looking up he asked, “Now, just how much was that airline ticket?”
Roger liked to talk. We would sit in his hogan or lean against a bar sipping Guinness, talking late into the night. Always the talk was of books, films, rivers, Alaska, Navajo tales, holy places, skinwalkers, adventures, mishaps, parallel realities, justice, values, good people we had known, plans for the future—and of course, women. He had a way of telling you stories that would kind of creep up on you and keep you awake at night. They would come to mind on long drives or while rowing the river.
“I'll tell you what,” Roger said, “the Navajos don't just believe in a parallel reality. They know it is out there. I watch pretty closely. I see things and hear things and never let on. It is no place to ask questions. And I can tell you this: it exists, it is there. I have fuckin' seen it. I have seen what they didn't want me to see. Remember the sing in New Mexico before we went down in that plane? Well, I walked into the big hogan when I wasn't supposed to. I didn't tell you at the time, but the sand painting was floating about two feet off the floor. It was luminous and glowing from the inside out. I couldn't believe my eyes. They made me come inside and sprinkle some white sand to make clouds in the sand painting sky. Later I remembered they were the same damn white clouds I had seen flying in. Our own people can never understand this stuff. They sit watching television in big box-like homes and move through life like robots. How many people do you know, boatmen even, who will sit down and stay in one place and look at the world? Open your eyes—and I'm telling you, it is quite a ride. Medicine people know that. It is an open secret.” Then he added dryly, “A safe secret around here.”
One time an old Navajo woman told Roger that when you have a fire you are never alone. “I thought about that,” he said. “She's right; there is something about a fire. You know how you can tell? Because when it goes down to nothing, something has actually left, gone, split! Think about it. The fire didn't really stop in place and die; it up and left. After she told me that, I have never seen a fire in the same way. You tell that to some people and you might as well be talking to a parking meter. A fire is company.”
Jeffe Aronson and Roger were guides on a googaloo trip. A lot of people were emoting, singing, sobbing at the beauty, talking sweetly to insects, incoherent drumming—that sort of thing. “Finally,” Jeffe wrote, “we arrived at Blacktail Canyon. Entered that magic place and sat at the end listening to the water dripping into that silence. There were about eight or ten of us, Roger and me included. After a while, Eagle Feather (not her real name) came along and, raising her arms high above her head, said, ‘The Rock speaks to us!' Roger looked over at me and I at him…oh boy, here it comes. ‘Listen to the Rocks!' she says. I can relate to that on a certain level. We look around and everybody but us has their hands cupped around their ears, ears against the walls listening, eyes closed in rapture. Roger looks over at me again, cups his hands over his ears. He puts his ear against the rock and listens. He then leans over and whispers in my ear, ‘It's for you.'”
“How many lives can a man have?” Roger once wrote. “I'm on my third, and I think that I have four. What makes a life is the style, people you know, health and head space. I was on a corkscrew of a path from birth to cancer. That was one. Then cancer, which took my thirties and eight to ten years to deal with it physically and psychologically, and that was two. Now this one.”
Roger mailed a letter to me two years ago. It never reached me in western Mongolia and traveled about 26,000 miles before I finally opened it a month before he died. “My soul yearns for the simple life of a fisherman,” it read. “Alaska still pulls me like nothing else does. The last of what is left that is wild, clean, open.” He liked being where you were still part of the food chain. “It is a place of beauty without a drop of mercy. Our time is limited on this earth. We need to live in its magnificence. This requires that we make as much of it as we can. To live in a big, free way.”
Roger didn't get sick and die of cancer. Cancer had to hunt him hard, track him down, and kill him. Roger never gave up.
Dave EdwardsPhotographs

Dave Edwards.