Jimmy Hall

Some boatmen come to the Canyon, run a few trips, and fade away. Others stay for years, become familiar faces, and grow into the community. And then there are those few, those very few, like Jimmy Hall. Jimmy Hall was a bonafide institution. From the wild and wooly trips of the 1960s into the regulated and relatively tame nineties, you could count on seeing Jimmy on just about any trip, and expect to hear another wild tale in his drawling Southern twang. He told a million of them, and there were another million told about him. Like many boatmen of his era, drink was a large part of many of those tales. But the booze caught up to him and he flat out quit. In the the latter half of his career, Jimmy was famous for his outrageous, rigorous, blistering hikes. “Hike ’em ’til their feet bleed,” was his rumored motto, though he denies it. He entered what he refers to as the “guru phase” of boating, and a dedicated band of folks returned to do trips with him year after year. He was surrounded with charter trips. Then one day he was gone. Poof. Flat-out fired. Outta there.
Jimmy made a few guest appearances after that as a hike leader or a science boatman. In 1995, I caught up with him in Flagstaff, sat him down on a couch, and started asking questions. This is Jimmy’s story. Or one of them.
***
Hall: I was born in Dallas, 1947. I was raised out in San Angelo, Texas. I actually don’t know very much about the first years of my life. I was adopted by my grandparents, and I never knew my mother. And just this year, I found out what her real name was. I saw my actual birth certificate, and these were papers I had never seen.
I was raised when I was little by Lupe and Felix Gonzales. They took care of me throughout the day. My parents would pick me up in the evening, but I actually stayed at their house. And Lupe told me—and I never knew it—that my mother saw me up until I was about four years old, and that on the last day that she and I were together, that she actually just held me and played with me the whole day. And then they had me go out into the back yard so that leaving would not be traumatic for her and traumatic for me. A cab came to the door and Lupe said she went out to the cab. And it was very strange. Lupe asked her if she wanted to go back and just kiss me or hug me and say goodbye, and she said, “No, I can’t do that.” She left.
Dimock: Where’d she go?
Hall: I have no idea. I have no knowledge of it. And she’s somebody I’ve always very, very much wanted to meet. If I had one big thing that I could do in my life, one of the big things for me to do—and I don’t actually know any way of tracing her down—would be actually to walk up and just say, “You are my mother.” And at this point in my life, there would probably not even be a friendship or a love or anything, but it would be the acknowledgement of this is my mother.
My grandparents were very good to me, my grandfather was a very well-to-do man. I was loved very much by them, and I don’t feel any lack of love in my upbringing. They were very good people. My grandmother died when I was about—I think I was about fourteen—and my father remarried again, Audrey. She’s a very fine woman. But there’s still something very much missing in not being able to look up and say, “I know that individual’s my mother.”
That’s a little off the subject of river running!
***
Hall: I went to school in Texas after my grandmother’s death. I really did extremely poorly in school. I don’t believe it was actually lack of intelligence—I think it was a lack of motivation or something. And I really lost a lot of motivation in my life when my grandmother died. She was the kind of person that would kind of push you to a great extent. When that push stopped, I truly stopped, and I did not push myself. So therefore my education probably is roughly that of probably a high school sophomore. It’s funny, though, I honestly liked being in school. I loved being with the kids, I loved the social part of school. I remember I actually failed my senior year in high school, and it really wasn’t a problem to me, because I was happy being there. I virtually did nothing in my second senior year. One of my teachers told me that they had had a discussion about what to do about me. And essentially, they made a decision that they would graduate me, and I graduated from high school.
I went to college at Angelo State College, and I still had no motivation to be in school, except for the social aspect of being there with the other people. And so therefore I did very, very poorly in college and didn’t get a degree. But I wasn’t there for any other reason than just to be with the people.
***
Hall: My grandfather knew a man who owned a pool hall. His name was Doc. And I can’t remember Doc’s last name. After my grandmother passed away, the easiest way to deal with me was to have me come to my grandfather’s office when I got out of school. It was easier than just having me at home without anybody being in attendance of me. And I started playing pool. I have fairly good hand-eye coordination. I don’t have great hand-eye coordination. I learned how to play pool. And the old men in the place, they loved to put me under pressure, and I’d play for Cokes, or I’d play for a dime. It was a social club for the old men who honestly had no other place to go, and yet they could be with people of their age and of their experiences. Eventually, Doc died. One day he died in the pool hall. He was sitting in his chair. He just looked like he went to sleep.
After that, it was taken over by different people, and the whole atmosphere of the place changed and it became a lot rougher, it became a lot rowdier. And for some reason, I couldn’t accept it well, I didn’t like it. I ended up being thrown out of the pool hall.
In the state of Texas at that time, you could go into a bar and you could play pool all you wanted, as long as you didn’t go to a table where people were drinking. After that, one of my other friends who was thrown out—Jodie Hall—we found out that people would gamble, and they would gamble with us, and these people had no clue on this planet about how to play pool. They didn’t understand what it was to match up, face another man, say, “We’re going to play for ‘X’ amount of money per game,” and honestly understand you’re doing battle until one of you gives up or runs out of money. And so it was like we found this land of cotton candy where we could go and pluck money off a money tree. Jodie actually became a much better pool player than I did—played on the road. He was a pretty serious gambler. I learned how to play reasonably well. The average drunk in a bar has a problem, even now, when he runs into me.
***
Hall: After I failed my first senior year in high school, my grandfather, during the summertimes, sent me to the South Rim of the Grand Canyon to work for my uncle Troy Hunt, who managed, at one point, all the curio shops on the South Rim of the Grand Canyon for the Fred Harvey Corporation. Then he also ended up doing the buying for the curio shops and running the warehouse. When I first went up there, I worked in one of the curio shops.
In San Angelo, it had been picking money off the money tree. On the South Rim of the Grand Canyon, that was during the time in the mid-sixties when the pipeline was being built, and there were other men who were a bit older than I was, who had no clue on earth about gambling, and no clue on earth about playing pool. It was extremely profitable for me. All of them were making exceptional money as pipeliners, and I would play for five or ten dollars a game, and over the course of an evening—I might get into the Tusayan Bar at seven o’clock in the evening—I might leave at midnight or even later, and I might actually only come out ahead one or two games per hour, and the quarters would be strung out on the table forever. And so it was not hard at all to win sixty, eighty, a hundred dollars in an evening. And yet you didn’t win a hundred dollars from one individual. It was fun. I made good money.
And at that point I’d gotten old enough to where I really could get in trouble. I was twenty years old, about to turn twenty-one, and that was when I ended up meeting Dennis Massey, and Dennis Massey was my connection to river running.
Dennis, at that time, had probably run more trips as an individual, than any individual in his time. And what happened was, Dennis was on the South Rim of the Grand Canyon, I believe delivering motors to be carried down by mule into the canyon at Phantom Ranch, to meet a river trip who had run out of motors. And Dennis got up in the Tusayan Bar and he got incredibly drunk. Dennis was a character who had a very aggressive personality, and so he told the people in the bar that he wanted to gamble, he’d play for anything. The man who ran the bar knew me. He gave me a call at my uncle’s house, and it’s the one time in life I think God took my hand. For some reason I did the strangest things I’ve ever done in my life. I went to the cookie jar, I knew there was a man out there that was probably a road player, I realized that I would do myself no good on this earth matching up with somebody who was truly tough, and waging war with ’em in front of anyone. Number one, people would understand that I played much better than they had ever seen me play, they would understand that I played much more consistently, and they would probably understand that it would make absolutely no sense to play me for even ten dollars a game—mainly because you were virtually giving your money to me, when I wanted it.
God took my hand. I went to the cookie jar, I took out like $150, a small amount of money, $200—I don’t know what I took—and I went out to the Tusayan Bar. And here’s this little, short, blond-haired character, had a jaw that looked like Popeye—had forearms that looked like Popeye. Dennis was small, but he was very aggressive. I walked up to him and I looked at him, and I said, “You wanna play pool?” He looked at me and he said something like, “Yes. Who are you?” “Jim Hall. Do you want to play?” He said yes, and I looked at him and I thought, “Okay, this guy’s a road player. I don’t need to hear the song and dance, I’m just gonna say what I’m gonna say, and if he wants to do it, I told him that I’d play him a couple of sessions for a half, and that’s what I’d do.”
Well, Dennis kind of looked at me kind of funny. And even back then, when you talked about a dime, you were playing a game for ten dollars. If you were playing a game for a quarter, you were playing for $25. If you played a game for half, you were playing for $50. If you played for a buck, you were playing for $100. If you played for two bucks, you were playing for $200. And Dennis kind of looked at me really strange, and he said, “Look, I’ll play you for a buck.” And I looked at him and I thought, “Hey, this isn’t going to work out. I’ll play you two or three sessions for a half. You can have that, I really don’t care. But I’m not going to play you for a buck.” And the next thing I know, he looks at me confused again, and then he says, “I’ll play you for two bucks.” And I looked at him and I thought, “This guy’s a nut case! What’s happening here?” And then it snapped on me, I was so involved in the intimidation of how aggressive he was, I didn’t realize that he had never played pool in his life, and he was just aggressive.
So, strangely enough, I did the one thing that I had never done before. I honestly opened up at two dollars a game and slaughtered him for two nights. And I ended up winning $60 from Dennis. I could have made that much money going to sleep in the bar. But there was something in his aggression that brought out a very real aggression in me. And somehow I became very aggressive with him, and yet we made a connection.
To this day, I don’t really understand the connection, except Dennis had a different type of ego, a different type of carriage of himself. Dennis was not an extremely pleasant person. And he was very aggressive. But somehow we made a connection, and we honestly became friends as much as anyone became friends with Dennis Massey.
Dennis told me, he said, “Look, I’m gonna go back to Hatch River Expeditions. I’ll write you a letter, I’ll speak to Ted Hatch, and I’ll see if he’ll hire you.” Dennis wrote me a letter in about two weeks and he said, “Ted will hire you. Come out. I’ll be getting off the river,” at some date, it was like late in July.
I told my uncle what I was going to do, and he had heard of people on the river. My uncle thought, “Hey, you have gone crazy.” And he knew what I was doing, playing pool and everything else. And I, out on the South Rim, I was making the discovery of girls, and the fact that girls could be a lot of fun. And Dennis had told me that girls on the river could be a lot of fun also. So it just sounded like something to do.
Dimock: What year would that have been?
Hall: I would have been twenty-one years old. I started the year after Steve [Bledsoe] started. Steve started in 1967. I started in 1968.
So anyway, I went into a room at the Pageboy Motel, and there was Ted Hatch, laying there—Ted, with his bright red face—and I think they were having a beer, and I remember Ted was in his underwear, and they had the air conditioner on high blast. And I walked in, all bright, young, freshly-scrubbed, and cheerful, and I said, “Hi, my name’s Jim Hall.” Ted said something like, “Great, but I don’t know you.” And then I said, “Dennis Massey told me that he spoke to you, and that you would hire me.” And Ted said something like, “No, I didn’t hire you.” At that point, I was totally shattered.
So anyway, what ended up happening was I ended up going to—God, I can’t remember whether it was the Empire House—it was some old bar on the main drag of Page, and at that point in life I drank. And I was drinking a beer, and they had a pool table that only had like three pockets on it. I was just slapping the shots in. Well, Ted ended up coming into the bar, and he was there with Dennis. And somehow or another, I don’t know what Dennis said or what happened, but in actuality, Ted said, “You can do a river trip.” So I ended up going down the river with Fred [Burke] and Dennis. It really wasn’t, at that point, a job. And amazingly enough, at the end of the trip, Fred and Dennis got me something like twenty dollars a day as a swamper, and that was the first money I made on the river.
Fred Burke was hysterical running a boat. Fred, at that time, was truly intimidated by Crystal Rapids and some of the rapids in the Grand Canyon. He actually wasn’t that bad a boatman. Dennis, at that time, was considered to be an amazing boatman. Looking back on it, Dennis was a good boatman, but he really was not any more than that.
The next year, I had my one training trip that was really a real, live training trip, and then I ran a boat. To be quite honest, it was a miracle that I survived. And the other thing of it is, the people on the boat, if they would have understood how well trained I was, they should have been absolutely terrified! I had no clue what a rapid was; I had no clue which way was downstream; and it was a matter of blind luck and following people as closely as I could get to them, that I got through the canyon. And that was how I got started in river running.
Dimock: I’d always heard various myths about that—it always involved a pool game with Dennis Massey—that you won your job in a pool game, playing with a broom handle.
Hall: That actually happened a lot of years later, and what happened was…God, I can’t remember. I had a girlfriend, and I honestly can’t remember who it was. And what I wanted to do was play a game of pool with the girl. And there was two guys playing on the table, and basically, I asked them, “Are you all through?” And they said, “No, why don’t you put your quarter up?” And I told ’em, “Look, I’m not interested in playing you, I want to play her.” Most people in that situation, if they’re not deadlocked in gambling, will look up, and if they’ve been around a pool room long, they’ll smile and they’ll say, “He wants to play her.” So anyway, the guy looked at me again, and he said something like, “I’ll play you.” And I looked at him and I said, “Look…” I can’t remember what I called him, but I was pretty well tuned-up at the time. “I don’t know who you are, but as stupid as you are, I can beat you with a damned shovel.” And that was the only thing that was laying around. And I had actually played with a shovel before. And then, strangely enough, I don’t know how it came out, but I was drinking heavily at the time. I said something like I’d play him for ten. And that wasn’t any big deal, I just wanted the guy to leave me alone. I wanted to play the girl. I wanted to play pool with her, and then I wanted to play with her. That was the whole point.
So anyway, the guy ended up, he played me a game for ten dollars, with the shovel. And I don’t know how it happened, I think he broke the balls. To this day, I’m not sure. The only thing I can remember is I ran a rack with a shovel. And I turned to him and I said, “Look, do you want any more?” And at that point, he got extremely irate. And then I tried to explain to him again, “I’m not interested in playing pool with you. I’m not even interested in your ten dollars. I want to play a game of pool with the girl.”
That doesn’t have much to do with river running!
***
Hall: The early trips with Dennis, basically it was everything that could be done to get the boats from Lees Ferry out to Temple Bar. And there was no other focus, other than getting the equipment through. And honestly, it was very scary. Nobody knew how to run a boat, nobody had any real clues as to what the runs were at different stages of water. I can remember Don Hatch, I believe, saying that he would never, ever expect a man to run a boat in Grand Canyon on less than 10,000 cubic feet per second (cfs). That was the absolutely bottom that he would ever expect a man to make an attempt on the canyon with. And the equipment was very, very bad. The equipment was, I don’t know, we called ’em “outside motor mounts,” other people called ’em “tail-draggers” and so on, where you actually hung off the back of the boat. And you actually had to deflate the back end of the boat in order to get the motor in the water. We were running short-shaft Mercurys, so basically the back end of the boat was sunk about…Oh, God, you know, you’re sittin’ with your butt about ten inches off the water. And we had two small duffle piles, one on the motor frame, and one up on the other part of the boat. Side tubes were called “training wheels.” It was with absolute disgust that you had to go down the river with training wheels on. It was a major moment in your life when you were actually able to take your training wheels off.
[We’d] row Badger, row Hance, row Lava Falls. If you got scared, you rowed Upset—get those great big whaling oars out, and away we went.
Dimock: What was the theory on rowin’ the rapids?
Hall: To be quite honest, we had no clue of a way in which it could be done reasonably with a motor. We didn’t know how to make a turnaround run. First person I ever saw kind of do a turnaround run with consistency, that was the focus of what he was about to do, was Steve’s brother, Dave. And Dave actually learned how to do that, imitating the rowing run in Lava Falls.
I remember when we first started, you hung out off the back of the boat, and you flopped into a hole, and the whiplash was incredible. First time I ever saw it really happen was Steve and I—Steve got frustrated with me ’cause I was takin’ too long at Lava Falls. Steve finally said, “Well, what are you gonna do? You gonna row, or are you gonna motor the boat through?” And I was terrified of the idea of motorin’ the boat through Lava Falls. So Steve finally looked up and he said, “Look, if it bothers you, I’ll do it.” Steve jumped on my boat, sat down on my bucking strap, and didn’t realize that I locked one leg completely under the bucking strap, and then I put my other leg on top of it. Steve, when he ran his, he sat down on top of his. And so he sat down on it, and kind of pulled on it a little bit, seemed okay. So we flopped off the ledge, and it knocked Steve dead square out. Steve’s eyes, honestly, crossed. It looked like he’d been hit. And the next thing that happened was I reached down, I grabbed Steve, I put him across my lap. I had a ton of adrenaline pumping, and by then the motor kind of banged over a couple of rocks, but it was still capable of running, and I started the motor and I started to pull in below, and I remember Steve looking at me, and he said, “It’s okay, I’ll run the boat.” And he honestly just kind of grabbed me by the shirt and scooted me over. And then he started kind of running somewhere. I honestly don’t know where he was running the boat, but we were headed at the bank. And then he looked at me, kind of a confused look on his face, and then he said something like, “Go ahead, you run the boat.” And we went over there, and we sat down for about a half an hour and drank a couple of beers. But yeah, we were clueless. And it was fun.
I honestly remember when Brick Wells explained to me how he was truly a grand old man of the river because he had honestly been through the gorge of the Grand Canyon ten times. And to be quite honest, that was a lot of trips. Within a couple of years, Dennis Massey ran fifty trips through Grand Canyon. Dennis was the first to run that many trips.
I mean, like in the first years that we worked, really neat things happened, yet we didn’t know they were neat yet.
Dimock: Didn’t seem that impressive back then, like you say, we didn’t know they were funny yet.
Hall: Right, we didn’t know we were funny yet.
***
Hall: I remember the first time I ever saw an inside motor rig. I thought they were death traps. Actually, it wasn’t until after we had run them that we realized that the inside motor rig was a much safer mount. The first rigs that we ran, if I’m not mistaken, were actually designed by Bryce Mackey. And Bryce had got his initial design from Western.
Dimock: Did you still have the floors in the boats then?
Hall: When we had the outside rigs, definitely, we had floors in boats. Actually, when I ran the inside rigs for John Cross, the floor was in the boat. It was actually cut out at the back. Once you got the boat moving fast forward, you didn’t really have any water on the floor of the boat. I don’t know the dynamics of it, but I know that it worked. It’s kind of hell, though, in a backdown run. But it worked, it honestly did.
Those first rigs were pretty brutal. I remember running double-rigs. I never ran a triple-rig. But I remember running double-rigs. We had what was called the “spider mount,” which somehow or another, they made a little triangular mount that the boatman stood in, that fit in between the two boats.
And the actual double-rig, the one that really worked that was pretty well perfected, that I remember seeing, was done in concert with John Cross, Jr., Jim, and Jerry. And they actually knew how to rig a double-rig in such a manner that it was a pretty reasonable boat to run—if you want to call two 33-foot boats tied together with a sausage tube in the middle “something reasonable to run.”
Dimock: When did you go to Cross?
Hall: I went to Cross in a year when John Sr. was having some difficulty with his business. He’d gotten into a situation, I believe, with taxes, where it was extremely difficult for him to get by. And at that point, I was about to marry Jean [Cross], and I went to work that season for John. That was the season that the water fell out so horribly at the end of the season, and everybody pulled out of Grand Canyon by the end of the season. And the end result of that was, I probably ran as consistent an extraordinarily low period of water as anybody has. To be quite honest, I don’t think it taught me much. I think I just got thumped a lot.
Dimock: Is that the low water of 1973?
Hall: I think so. And I was out like in October and way on out there. When you’d come up to places, basically you’d just fall off a ledge. I actually remember in one season—and it’s not the lowest water that I remember—going around the left-hand side at Bedrock, and there being no current over there, and not being flushed around, or anything else—just actually driving around the backside of Bedrock.
I remember things like Ruby, Serpentine, Deubendorff. It was monstrous! And somehow or another, we all survived. I remember going straight down the right-hand side of Horn Creek, where you go in between the ledge and the black rock at the bottom. And I remember doing that on several occasions. And I remember actually coming up and thinking, “This is the run.” You’ve honestly got to be seeing some regular low water to think “this is the run.” That’s some pretty low water.
When you come down to Crystal—and back in those days the Crystal hole was the hole—and you looked up and the rock that made the hole in Crystal was that far out of the water—two-and-a-half, three feet out of the water. And at that point, Crystal wasn’t any big deal, you just went around the rock. There wasn’t any hole. It was all the rest of the stuff you were terrified of.
Or when you go down through Lava, and remember when it was just tiers? Yeah, you just pull your motor. And you never picked up enough force that, when you bumped the big rock at the bottom, it did anything. You were goin’ so slow, you coulda stuck your foot out and pushed yourself off the rock without hitting it.
***

Dimock: What were the trips like then, other than the boating? Just fires on the beach, that kind of…
Hall: Yeah, we had fires on the beach. You had a shovel, you told people to bury it like a cat. The porta-potties weren’t there yet. You’d go behind the rocks up there at Deer Creek, and God only knows that was a mistake!
Yeah, we had fires, we cooked with fire irons. There weren’t any fire pans or anything like that. There were fire pits everywhere. And those things came along later. To be quite honest, the people expected the boatmen to be who the boatmen were. And the boatmen were absolute wild men. And back in that day, being a wild man would be Dennis Massey, Dean Agee, at Cardenas Creek, grabbing a bottle of whiskey, grabbing a bottle of vodka, getting drunk. Ended up in a pliers fight. That ended up in a fist fight on the boat. Then ended up with Dave Bledsoe, Steve’s brother…Dennis was aggressive…Dave ended up stopping Dennis from killing Dean. Dennis actually threw Dean onto an oar pin, and Dave somehow got a life jacket on top of the oar pin in such a manner that Dean slid off the oar pin. And remember, that was just an old piece of pipe. And then that developed into a fist fight. Then from there, Dennis and Dean went out, kind of in that little back lot out behind Cardenas. Dennis knocked Dean out. Dean didn’t come back for, oh, I don’t know, fifteen, twenty minutes. He was definitely unconscious. And then Dean comin’ back, and seeming to want some more, because he felt he had been blindsided in the fight. Those were the days of the real Wild West Show. And yet the people expected it. It was almost like it was watching a fake gunfight, realizing somehow or another it would all work out in the end—and somehow it did, we all got down the river.
Dimock: So did things start to change after awhile? Did plier fights dry up?
Hall: The fighting got stopped to where people would actually do something like that…yeah, then the Wild West Show changed. And I don’t remember what year it was, but somehow or another, we went into the age of… Do you remember a time that you would have almost called “the sexual revolution of the river?” I don’t know what you’d call it, we went through then, but somehow or another people’s wives, people’s children, people’s everything were absolutely fair game on the river. And we definitely weren’t sensible about it or anything else. And somehow or another, it seemed like people almost expected and accepted that out of us. We had become bronze-bodied river gods, and we honestly believed we had a right to your wife, your daughter, and your whiskey. We honestly believed that we had the right, the unmitigated gall, to feel that way.
***
Hall: I’ve always been in love with Georgie’s eyes. Her eyes were just so ice blue. Nobody on earth could tell a story like Georgie could. She could honestly hold you in the palm of her hand from beginning to end, and you’d be dying, waiting for whatever her next word was. And yet at the same time, we didn’t have the maturity to realize that Georgie’s trip was not our trip. Georgie’s trip, and Georgie’s focus, and Georgie’s love was mainly with the Colorado River itself. She knew about the canyon, and she also knew very well how to run a river trip. And yet, when Georgie did have bad things happen, a lot of times we had a lot to say about it. But the fact of the matter is, she did know what she was doing. And the firemen she got out of Los Angeles, who’s to say that in the time period we’re speaking of, they were any less qualified than us? And they had great enthusiasm. In many instances, they were not running around with the big egos that we had.
***
Dimock: When did you get into walkin’? What triggered that?
Hall: Before I got divorced from Jean, I’d started walkin’ a bit, and I think I honestly fell in love with Grand Canyon. I actually remember one time walking up Thunder River with Jean, and I was very much in love with Grand Canyon. At that point, I really couldn’t focus on the people. I was walking for me. If the people happened to follow, that was nice. And when Jean and I got divorced, I went through another time in which I would walk or work until I went to sleep at night. And yet it was funny, I was dealing with something at the time, whether I realized it or not, that had a very powerful and significant influence in my life. And so therefore I fell very, very much in love with the canyon.
And then in time I saw it as a way of doing something I loved, but at the same time making a living in the river business. And to be quite honest, now, when I’m able to run a river trip, I do not find it unusual to receive a gratuity from a particular trip of $2,000 or $3,000. And the primary things there really are focusing on the people, not focusing upon yourself, trying everything that you know to make them comfortable in an environment that they may not be comfortable with, and then helping them to do things that they, under ordinary circumstances, would not do. And then it gets back to what you and I said before, where all of a sudden, other than the monetary reward—and that’s one of the things, as a guide, when you are doing it primarily as a livelihood, when you have children, you think of what you get monetarily—but also, there’s another reward that probably, for you as an individual, is greater than the monetary reward. And that is, when you take people who can never dream they would ever put their hands on the wall at Thunder River and see the water rolling off the top at them, and when you look at their faces, and they honestly are saying to you, “Isn’t this incredible?!” And even though you’ve done it a hundred times in your life, or even more, it allows you to see for an instant, through their eyes, how absolutely spectacular the place you’re in every day, is. And how privileged you are to actually be able to on almost a “when you call it” basis, walk to Thunder River, walk to Saddle Canyon, walk up into Redwall Cavern, walk wherever you wish in that environment. It’s an amazing privilege.
Dimock: It’s astounding.
Hall: And it’s also, in many respects…I don’t know how to say what it actually feels like inside of you when those people honestly are looking at you and saying, “Look how beautiful this really is.” There’s a connection to them, and a connection to the canyon at that time that’s honestly very clean, very beautiful. And it’s a wonderful feeling when you do something that positive for someone else.
You know, that’s one of the things that I really regret now, is actually what has ended my career in boating, was actually getting involved in what we spoke of as the “guru phase” of boating. Somehow or another, it’s very easy to step in such a direction that—I don’t know how you put it—that your personal philosophy, or whatever you think should be the topic of the day, is what they should be hearing. And the fact of the matter is, at best, when it all works, what we’re trying to do is provide people with a wonderful experience in the Grand Canyon.


And the other part of it is, it honestly is a holiday. It really is. When it all comes off right, people can honestly enter another world in which there are not business pressures, there are not social pressures, there are not nine million of the things that you deal with on a daily basis, involved in your life. And essentially, what you’re doing is standing with your hands on a wall at Thunder River, listening to the roar of Thunder River and seeing water come down. And I think for people that live embroiled in a business world every day, in which the tension is just right at your fingertips all day long, there’s something very, very cleansing for people in that time. And it doesn’t have to be necessarily something that’s that dramatic. Sometimes it can honestly be sitting down outside and watching the light change as the sun sets in the canyon, and having that become your point of focus. Where in everyday life, when the sun sets, you’re either at the computer, you’re in a business meeting, you’re in an office dealing with pressure of some sort. That’s the good part.
You know what was funny, though? On this last trip, somebody—and it was weird, because we had spoken those same words a few days before—somebody said something like, “Why are you a guide?” And I can’t remember exactly how it came up. And I said, “If you honestly want to know, I’ll tell you.” And I gave a description of something that had happened, and how somebody had truly shared in the beauty of something with me. [One guide] understood exactly what I had said. He’s old enough. Another boatman, a man who dearly loves to spark a bowl, totally did not catch what I said. And a young boatman thought I was just getting mystical. Somehow or another, you have to go through the whole progression. And once you’ve gone through it, then it all makes sense. But until you have gone through the progression of where you honestly wake up in the morning and sing “Big Balls in Cowtown,” because I am capable of taking a boatload of people through the Grand Canyon—until you go through the progression of being a guru, until you go through the progression of almost everything, then somehow or another, it dawns on you what really is so great about what you’re doing.
And I think some people have probably been able to catch onto it, without having gone through it all. But I think the majority of people honestly have to go through it.
Dimock: I wonder if there’s…It’s like some of those other things that took us so goddamn long to learn, that’s something that we can convey, and save somebody twenty years of beatin’ their head against the cliff.
Hall: I don’t think it is, I really don’t. I think it’s like growing up as a kid. Your father, when you’re fourteen years old, God never created a dumber man. And somehow, you have to live to a certain age before you understand that he has honestly gone through those things that you have gone through, and then somehow or another, at a given point, he becomes one of the smarter men on the planet. And what he was trying to tell you was not just to exert authority, or anything else. It’s based on honestly trying to help you, but you were never able to see it.
I think part of the progression is you yourself fall in love with it, and it’s like you can go to my house, and you have a very nice library of Grand Canyon books. Whatever. And you’ve fallen in love with it, and you’ve read about it, and you’ve dug into it, and you’ve learned more and more and more, and it’s become something that’s very important to you. I think that’s part of it also. You have to fall in love with it. But also, then at the same time, you have to fall in love with showing the people the canyon, and seeing their interrelation with it. It’s kind of like a weird little triangular affair. Kind of a tryst in which you’re in love with the Grand Canyon, but you’re also very much willing to share what you love with the other people, and yet at the same time, when they fall in love with what you’re in love with, somehow or another, that’s very, very gratifying for you.
***
Dimock: I saw you wearin’ a shirt once that said, “I survived Paria Riffle.” Now, what was that story?
Hall: The story on that was Bill Ellwanger and I, when Bill Ellwanger first went down the river—in fact, I think it was his first river trip—we started off on a Sunday. The water was extremely low, and I ran into the rock at the bottom of the Paria Riffle with the front of the boat. And that was when we had the chains that looped completely around the boat. The chain hooked on the rock, and as the boat pulled away, the chain got ripped through the boat. So therefore, it almost cut it completely in two. So Bill and I pulled down to Cathedral Wash. It’s comical, one of the ladies on the trip looked up, and she said, “You know, is there any way we can get another boat?” “No, we’re here, we’re going.” And Bill and I actually made some attempt to patch this gaping hole. Essentially, all we did was we kept water out of it—it did not hold air—but it honestly did keep water out of it. We ended up swapping the front end to the back end. We just turned the rig around. And it took us all day to do it. We camped at Cathedral Wash, and the next day we were down below the Little Colorado with even time for a swim. But that’s actually what happened.
I remember I tilted the motor—this was back when we didn’t go over there against the wall, we used to kind of hang out in the middle—nobody knew to go against the wall—and so you titled the motor, and then you dropped it back in when you got through the shallows. And when I dropped it back in, the motor never restarted. So I bumped the rock at the bottom and hooked the chain. I did camp at Cathedral. And I can’t remember who it was—I think Smedley or somebody flew over me, and the news was out within seconds of the starting of the evening fire. I definitely did not get beyond the day without everyone knowing.
***
Hall: I’ll tell you a story. One time I came down onto the ramp, we were about to take off. I looked up and here comes Wally in a van, and the next thing I know, another van pulls down to the boat. I look up, and it’s a wheelchair van. A lady comes out in a wheelchair. I looked up and I thought, “Hey, somebody in a wheelchair’s down on the ramp. They’re gonna watch us take off in the boat.” The lady was strapped into the wheelchair. It was obvious that that particular woman had no use of her arms, she had no use of her legs, and they held her in the chair by having her strapped to the chair. She was going on a river trip. I went over and I looked at Wally and I said, “Wally, this is crazy.” Wally looked at me and he said, “Yeah, I know it is. Tell you what, you take her down on the river one day. If you feel that it’s too hazardous to her, and in your judgement the risk to her safety and other members of the party is such that this isn’t a valid thing to do, then you call out on the radio, we’ll take her out.” I said, “Okay, I’ll take her down one day.”
The water was runnin’ about, oh, 35,000–40,000. It was high. It was baby-soft water. The next thing I know,
they were tryin’ to get her into the boat.
Dimock: Multiple sclerosis?
Hall: You start shuffling, then you get to the point where you don’t shuffle anymore. That was what she had. So anyway, I remember them trying to put her on the boat. There were a couple of men; they weren’t that strong. Jeff was swamping the trip, and they nearly dropped her out of the wheelchair, getting her over the front of the boat. The front of one of those thirty-threes is pretty high to pick up a grown woman in a wheelchair. I admit, I totally freaked out. I said, “This is not going to fly. This really isn’t reasonable.” But for some reason, I went ahead, I strapped her wheelchair down. And then they looked up and they said, “We have to put a life jacket on you.” Now, in essence, what was holding her up was she was strapped to that chair. I honestly didn’t see any way on earth they could put a life jacket upon the woman’s body and re-strap her in such a manner that she’d be held solidly. The woman never said a word, never complained. They lifted up her arms, they slid the life jacket over her arms. They buckled it on her, and away we went.
The one thing I didn’t realize was this woman knew that the road was gettin’ short. One of the true desires this woman had in life was to see the Grand Canyon. And the desire was strong, and the desire was real. And therefore, to her, it really wasn’t an inconvenience that we had to slip the life jacket over her. Naturally, when she had to go to the bathroom, you had to pick her up and put her on the porta-potty, and you had to know that had to be hard for her, because she was in front of people she didn’t know. It was only her family that was on the trip, she didn’t know Jeff or me. That really wasn’t an inconvenience for her, because she really wanted to see the Grand Canyon. She knew that road was short.
So anyway, I went down the first day, got it through everything easy, never touched a wave, got her to camp, and I realized nothing had happened that would cause this individual not to believe that absolutely they could continue on the rest of the trip. But I was worried—didn’t say anything. The second night we went on down. We honestly hit a couple of waves, and I thought, “Hey, she’s not as confident as she was before, and neither am I.” Then I started thinkin’ about Granite, I started thinkin’ about Hermit, started thinkin’ about Crystal Creek, I started thinkin’ about Horn Creek, and the more I thought about it, the more worried I became. In fact, when I started thinkin’ about Lava Falls, I honestly got frightened. So I made a decision that night, I was gonna go over and I was gonna talk to her. I was gonna tell her the risks, and then I was gonna tell her that I didn’t think the risks were reasonable for her. So then I sat on a rock and I tried to figure out exactly how I was gonna say it. I thought about one thing, and I thought about the next. Then I thought, “Why not just tell her it’s not safe, and you don’t feel that you’re confident that you can get her through without her getting hurt?”
This lady was a lot smarter than I am. She saw and she understood exactly what I was thinking. So, I can’t remember whether it was after dinner or a little bit before, she called me over. She looked at me and she said, “Jimmy, you’re scared, aren’t you?” And that kinda took away my head of steam. And so once your head of steam’s gone, and all your plot’s gone for what you’re gonna say, you might as well tell the truth as simply as you can. I looked at her and I said, “Yeah, I’m scared.” She said, “You’re scared somethin’ might happen to me.” I said, “Yeah, I’m scared somethin’ might happen to you.” She said, “You’re scared in some way you might be responsible for my death.” I said, “Yeah, I’m scared.” She looked at me and she said, “You know, I’ve come to the point in my life where I look at my death every day. I honestly have one desire in life that I really want right now, and that is I want to see the Grand Canyon. I know that you’re gonna do everything within your power not to see me get hurt, and if it happens, it happens. Well, what would you do? Would you rather that somehow or another, you could put me in a hospital and nothing would hurt me? Do you think the progression of the disease I have is going to grant me that much more time? I really want to see the Grand Canyon.” I didn’t have much to say. I honestly didn’t have anything to say. She said, “You know, as long as I can be outside, doing things, and as long as I do not have to sit in a room waiting for the last moments of my life, I’m going to live as much as I can, while I can. You know, I’d really like to see the Grand Canyon.” So I looked at her and I said, “Okay.” After somebody says something like that to you, you go, “We’ll try it one more day.” And then I realized very quickly no matter what happened on that trip, the one thing she really wanted was to see the Grand Canyon. The people around her were totally clueless. It had become time to let go of her, and let her live out what she had coming, in exactly the way she saw it, doing the things she wanted to do, ’cause God only knows, it didn’t matter a goddamn bit to her whether she died today or tomorrow, just as long as she was living. They were at that point where they wanted to say, “Be careful! Don’t do this, don’t do that!” And all she needed was somebody to let her be free. We made it all the way down the river.
I used to have a funny thing that I used to do with little kids—and this isn’t a guru thing, really—I’d tell ’em about the Indians’ death stone, a magical, powerful thing. And when you’re a little kid, what you do, is if you came to the Grand Canyon and it was a wonderful place for you, what you did is, you picked up a small stone out of the Grand Canyon—it could be an ordinary rock—and you put it in your medicine pouch if you were an Indian, and then when the time came in your life that you had honestly come to the end of the road, rather than only seeing fear out in front of you of what you don’t know, at some point, you could look back and see some of the truly beautiful things of your life. Also, for those who were close enough to you, when they came of an age to know, you could share your stones with them. For example, let’s say that you had a son who was fourteen or fifteen—almost the same age that you were when you came down through the Grand Canyon—you could look back at your stone and recall those memories.

So anyway, I was walkin’ down in a creekbed doin’ somethin’. The woman naturally never left the boat. The only time she ever left the boat was at camp. She ate lunch, she did everything on the boat. She went to the bathroom on the boat—whatever. So anyway, I was lookin’ down in this creekbed—and I’ve never seen one again—it was honestly a white rock, and it had a blue circle in it, with some other blue circles inside of them. And to me, it reminds me of a couple of things: number one, dropping a stone into a pool of water and watching the ripples that go out from the one action, or I think circles somehow or another, in certain societies, have meant something to do with eternity. So anyway, I looked up, and I thought, “Hey!”—and it was immature, probably—I grabbed it up and I said, “This is a death stone for her, because her day is coming soon.” And I did not honestly focus upon how close and how real she knew her death must be. And so I went runnin’ up to her on the last night of the trip, and I gave her this stone. And I can’t remember what her name was, it could have been Mary, and I said, “Mary, I found the most beautiful death stone for you.” And then I just shut my mouth. I said, “Good God, what did you say?!” And then I realized how close her own mortality was to her. And then she realized that it had all caught up with me, and that maybe I thought that I had really said something terrible. And the next thing I know, she gave me a kiss on the cheek and said, “Thank you.”
***
Not everything was rosy, of course. Frictions grew, personalities clashed, grudges built, ideologies collided. Bile and bad feelings still linger regarding Jimmy's final departure from the River. But in the end, Jimmy Hall takes credit for his own demise. When he was at the peak of his career, with dozens of charter trips requesting him, he got the idea he might just take all that business with him to another outfitter. There are some things that just aren't forgiven in the river trade.…
Hall: …and the only thing I know is that when Ted Hatch fired me, the only thing that he ever said was—”Jim, did you honestly think I was going to let that happen?”
I’ll tell you what, you know…God, what’s his name? Is his name Stan Jantz—that works for Gloeckler? I remember when I was in the heat of talking to people, I talked to him. And Stan’s a cool guy, he really is, he’s a nice guy. And Kimmy was out there, and I was talkin’ to Stan, I said, “You know, my sin was big.” And he said, “Yes, your sin was big.” And I told him, “I must have been insane—mainly because management will protect management—that’s just part of life.” And anyway, he laughed a little bit, and Kimmy said, “Well, there was this kid that got caught with a fifteen-yearold girl. And the father ended up discharging a gun. And he was fired, and we hired him this year.” And Stan looked at Kimmy and he said, “Jimmy wishes that had been the kind of sin that he had committed.”
Well…maybe some day they’ll let me play in the ball game again.

edited by Brad Dimock