Moses Tripped

A long time ago, when river running was in its infancy, so was writing for publication. One of the early Public Relations (pr) men for a famous writer was Moses. He had been leading one of the most famous adventure travel trips of all time, one in when his entire party decided to trek from Egypt to a coastal region in the Middle East. This trip’s destination was described in rather glowing terms, as often happens with adventure travel descriptions. In fact, the trip organizer described it as “The Promised Land.”
Of course, as often happens too with adventure travel trips, things did not go as smoothly or quickly as planned. For one thing, Moses had neglected to secure all the necessary permits. He also was rather cavalier about his boats. He ended up having to part the Red Sea just to get to the other side. He could have walked the Isthmus, but no, the authorities, bureaucrats one and all, were personally upset with Moses having decided to run such a substantial trip without permits.
So parting the Red Sea seemed to Moses a viable solution to what was essentially a case of excessive zeal on the part of government to regulate wilderness travel to the point of forbidding exoduses.
Most of us are aware of what happened to the Pharaoh’s rangers when they tried to arrest Moses and then detain his ragtag collection of backcountry hikers. Cecil B. DeMille filmed a startlingly unpleasant reenactment of this episode (which, by the way, also demonstrated in Technicolor how important it is to wear those life jackets). What most of us never knew was that some of the best writing produced by that trip ended up on the cutting room floor not long after this.
This happened, to the immense detriment of subsequent generations, in the following way. Moses had been working his way east and north without a guidebook or map. He was winging it, as many trip leaders have done in the past. But his winging it had led his trip up too many blind alleys, canyons that walled out, and into arid lands that threatened to wipe out his party via dehydration.
In fact, so many members of this trip had begun to lose faith in Moses as trip leader, that he decided to leave them all in camp while he went on a solo hike up to higher ground to try to figure things out on his own. Without the incessant babble of disgruntled clients clamoring in his sand-crusted ears, the proper route might become more obvious.
Moses spotted a fire on the side of the mountain he’d been ascending. Like most good trip leaders, he knew it posed an environmental threat. So he approached it with the idea that he might be able to put it out. Even back then people had the wrong idea about the efficacy of fire suppression in the wilderness. And this time was no exception. But it soon became a moot point. Moses could not extinguish the burning bush.
Instead the bush seemed to be trying to tell Moses something. This is a pretty unusual development, unless the bush is a Sacred Datura and we’ve been sucking on its blossoms. But Moses was stone cold sober. At least this is how he later told it in his incident report.
As these unusual moments with the burning bush unfolded, something even stranger happened. The normal geology of the mountain side underwent a local disturbance to produce three separate slabs of bedrock which exfoliated from the parent mass. Even more amazing, on each of these slabs were written, in Hebrew of all things, fifteen operating requirements, commandments really, specifying many don’ts, and a few dos, on how to trek through life in harmony and with the fewest negative impacts on one’s fellow trekkers.
Moses was impressed not only with the author of these Fifteen Commandments but also with their relative simplicity combined with their deep implications, which, when contemplated, could be seen to comprise fairly wise advice on avoiding several pitfalls lurking in the business of adventure travel.
Moses was now not merely trip leader, he was on a mission. He hurried back to camp to share with his trip members the new operating requirements for their trek through life. That Promised Land resided in their way of thinking, he now knew, and the sooner everyone was operating on this same wavelength, the better.
Unfortunately, as can all too easily happen when a trip leader leaves everyone alone in camp too long, Moses’ trip members have gotten really off track. Instead of keeping toilet paper at the portas and Clorox in the dish pails they had melted down their jewelry to cast a golden calf. Moses, already of diminished mental acuity due to his exhausting solo hike up and down the mountain, felt his self control slipping away. Where do these outfitters find such idiotic passengers? was just one of the thoughts that flitted through his dehydrated mind. There were, of course, other thoughts as well.
Overwhelmed by his responsibility as trip leader, by his disappointment in the performance of his other crew members in his absence, and in his reading of the profound Fifteen Commandments, Moses allowed his attention to the route lapse. A small protrusion of bedrock caught him in mid stride. Moses tripped on this, lost his balance and, to his horror, felt the three tablets fly from his grasp.
Instinct alone can be credited with Moses’ amazing recovery of balance and the tablets. A video replay of this would have been pretty amazing. Even so, as amazing as Moses’ recovery was, the third stone tablet had jetted too far forward for Moses to catch it.
This third slab of bedrock with Hebrew symbols on it spun through the air as if in slow motion then crashed to the bedrock and shattered into an incredible number of tiny shards.
In shock, Moses stared down at the mess. Now what had those last five commandments been? Moses wracked his brain to recall them. Yet, try as he might, Moses could only recall number eleven.
What was that Eleventh Commandment lost to posterity when Moses tripped?
We as Grand Canyon River Guides would do well to have that Eleventh Commandment etched into the Redwall above Vasey’s Paradise—or on the Big Black Rock in Lava Falls.

I mean it is something that none of us don’t need to hear often.
Especially, perhaps, those of us who imagine that our being a river guide will last as long as the grass shall grow and the rivers shall flow.
As I mentioned in the last issue of the bqr, our profession is addictive. This is true in part because there exists virtually no other profession of which I am aware, not Hollywood superstardom, not rock music stardom, not brain surgery, not astronautry, nothing, that earns for one as many genuine benefits, personal rewards, positive development, and admiring fans as guiding on the Colorado through Grand Canyon. This remains true even if the pay that Outfitters dole out for our fourteen-hour work days does often suck.
The profession becomes a lifestyle. The only desirable lifestyle. And the mere thought of losing forever that profession and lifestyle induces in us a feeling of panic. That panic and the bleak imagery that spurs it fosters in many of us a process of denial—denial that we will ever lose this profession, this place, this lifestyle, this sense of fulfillment, of purpose, of beauty, and of our belonging to something so fantastic. This denial causes many of us to fake ourselves out. Despite what we know to be true and real about human nature and biology—about our own individual nature and biology—we deny the ultimate reality that the day will come when we absolutely will not be able—or be allowed to—work in that Canyon.
Many guides have conquered this tendency to fake ourselves out by denying reality. Several have thanked me for writing “Put me in, Coach” in the last issue of the bqr. Some have explained to me that coming to grips with the realization that Grand Canyon guiding would someday be only a memory was the toughest thing they had ever done, as if they were an agave growing on a Redwall terrace suddenly wrenched out, roots and all, fatally.
Yes, this does sound dramatic, but it is also real. And what converts this realness into very dangerous territory is whether or not we have made the efforts necessary to develop a secondary professional ability that, out there in the commercial world of the 21st century, can earn us a decent living. Our lack of a parallel profession can be a killer.
On the other hand, our possessing an alternate professional ability and our psychological ability to put it to use outside the Canyon to support ourselves is, metaphorically speaking, the life jacket that yanks us to the surface during an otherwise fatal underwater swim in any long, nasty rapid during high water (you know, like Hance in late June of 1983).
We all know guides who have pulled off a professional expansion of abilities, some of them proactively, others reactively. We may even envy some of these fellow guides. Some of us may chalk up their success in this to luck, or to special breaks, thus justifying our own failure to have achieved the same sort of personal accomplishment. Thus faking ourselves out.
It was not luck, nor was it a special break, nor was it a good horoscope. Neither was it the favor of God. Instead our fellow guides who have taken personal responsibility for their own fortuitous futures have done just that, they have faced reality, embraced it, and made proactive though difficult decisions about educating themselves to function in an economically viable way in a non-Canyon world. Some of these, our peers, are teachers, nurses, contractors, carpenters, photographers, writers, salesmen, sky-diver-outfitters, writers, musicians, doctors, physical therapists, and so on. Every single one of them had to confront their own demons, had to work, had to do some very uncomfortable things, and had to believe in the future. They most of all had to not fake themselves out about endless guiding in the Canyon to accomplish this.
If you are a Grand Canyon River Guide who has done this—or is in the process of doing this—I tip my gcrg baseball cap to you. And I make this plea to you: encourage your fellow guides who need it to believe in the future and in themselves to take proactive steps to broaden their skill set to a non-Canyon setting. Encourage them to invest financially and behaviorally in their own futures. Indeed if you become a mentor to just one fellow guide, you may save a life.
On the other hand, if you are a Grand Canyon River Guide who secretly denies the future and believes that you will be able to sustain a long and happy life merely through guiding, take a good look at the X-rays of any long term guide’s spine. If that doesn’t sober you, take a look at your own financial net worth and compute how many years you can live in the style you’d prefer based on that worth.
I don’t want to beat all this over the head any more than necessary, but it is a matter of life and death.
So, if you are not already doing so, start thinking about your own economic future, start clarifying in your mind what you want that future to look like, start examining options that can get you there, start talking to your peers who are further ahead on that path than you are, start believing in the real future, start believing in yourself as something more than your currently are, and, most of all, stop faking yourself out with a denial that the future is coming in which you will no longer be a Grand Canyon River Guide.
And, oh yeah, Moses. That third tablet that he butter-fingered into oblivion, What was written on that, anyway?
Well, most scholars who have donated their lives to solving this riddle agree on just one thing. The text of the Eleventh Commandment proscribed the following: “Thou shalt not fake thyself out.”

Michael P. Ghiglieri