Don Briggs

I was a highway engineer. My wife and I had been backpacking, and fishing. We joined the Sierra Club—this was 1966—and the battle over the Grand Canyon dams was going on. We were actually getting people to sign cards and send them in to the Sierra Club to stop the dams in the Grand Canyon… having never been to the Grand Canyon! And so my wife at the time said—I got to hand it to her, I mean I wouldn’t be sitting here without her I guess—she said “We should go to the Grand Canyon, since we’re trying to save it.” I said “Oh, jeez, that’s a good idea.” We were backpackers, what the hell? “We’ll go walk at the bottom of the Grand Canyon!” So we loaded up our stuff and drove out. This is in June (laughs), 1966. The hottest time of the year! We start down the Bright Angel Trail; the lower part was closed because they were putting the water line in. This is ancient history. But rather than go down the Kaibab, we looked at the map and thought, “Oh, you can go down here and just cross over on the Tonto trail… to the Kaibab and down.” Well, we got a late start and, you know, by the time we’re… (laughs) it’s like high noon and we’re trudging across the longest 3 miles on the face of the earth: the Tonto Plateau between the Bright Angel and the Kaibab. I only did it that one time. So we get over there, we finally start heading down, getting closer, and my feet are starting to develop blisters. I knew I should stop and change socks, but man, I just wanted to be at the bottom. So we finally get down to the bottom; I don’t even think you had to have reservations for that campground in those days; just go down there to the Bright Angel. The swimming pool was there, open to anybody who was camping as well as people in the cabins. We jumped into the pool. My feet were totally trashed. We were planning to walk out the next day, but it became clear I couldn’t do it because of my feet. Well, when we had crossed the bridge, I looked down and saw these great big rubber things down there. I kinda thought “Hmmm, I’ve heard about this: river running.” Or something like that. Didn’t think too much about it. The extra day we stayed there, we were hanging out at the pool with these other hikers who were totally burned out, and all of a sudden these groups of people would come up, maybe twenty people in each, and they’re laughing, they look fresh! They jump in the pool. We got to talking to them, they had been on a river trip and the boat stopped: they could hike up and go swimming. They said, “Oh God, this is the greatest thing I’ve ever done. You’ve gotta do it. You’ve gotta do it!” There were two different groups that day, one of them was Western and the other was arta, eventually to become azra. So that winter I wrote off to the two, and we decided the next summer to go with arta because of their conservation bent. In their brochures in those days, they were highly connected with the Sierra Club.
So next summer, we go down. Over the winter my wife’s mother died, and her father was a pretty cool guy. He sold and bought cattle. He was raised in Oklahoma. He knew cows. And he ate steak three times a day. Of course he liked me because I like steak. And boy he knew how to cook steak. He also got me drinking ginger ale and Haig & Haig or whatever that stuff is. But anyway, he was a good guy, so we convinced him to go down on this Grand Canyon trip with us. He had a big old air-conditioned Buick, and he drove us down to Arizona. We get up to Marble Canyon the night before the trip’s gonna leave. There’s that little stone cottage out there all by itself with the flagstone porches on it. They used to call it the Honeymoon Cottage. Well we stayed in that little place, and her father stayed someplace else. It was pretty cool. So the next morning we get up, go over to have breakfast, and we’re the only ones in Marble Canyon Lodge. We’re sitting there having breakfast, and these five guys come walking in. You know, they’ve all got sun tans and kinda blond hair, and I figured they looked like surfer types. I’ll never forget this. At this point I was 27 years old. I looked at these guys, they were laughing and yucking it up. I thought “Jeez!” I said, “Some rich people from California have sent their kids on this river trip to screw up my trip.” (Both laugh). I’ll never forget that. Of course it ends up being the boatmen. And none other than Rob Elliott was the head boatman! He was 23 at the time. I don’t think any of the rest of them were over 20. The head cook was 16! (Laughs) They were all just these punk kids. I didn’t know what to expect, but I figured: old grizzled river guides, I guess, like we are now. But… I had been doing a lot of rock climbing as well as backpacking, and so I immediately fell in with the river guides.
Steiger: You got over your . . .
Briggs: Oh yeah. I mean, what are you gonna do?
Steiger: How did the realization dawn on you that these were actually the crew?
Briggs: Well, I think we probably had breakfast and got in the car and drove down to the Ferry. Of course it was a dirt road in those days. And, you know, the little place between the tamarisk was probably about thirty or forty feet wide. You could only put in one or two boats at a time. Cause nobody was doing it then—the ramp didn’t exist. There was just a dirt road. I can remember Elliott saying—that was in 1967—there’d only been about 3,000 people that’d gone down. I think that’s what he said. We did an entire eight-day motor trip and never saw a soul.
…So we get down to Badger, and the other boat—the water was pretty low. I actually have home movies of some of this. The first boat gets too far right. As I recall, he was really far right, and the boat gets stuck on a rock at the top. I was on Elliott’s boat. We go down through, and Rob pulls over at the bottom and I can’t remember exactly what happened but they ended up—I remember somebody going upstream a ways and swimming down—jumping in the river and swimming down to get on the other boat to help get it off the rock. But whoever it was missed the boat (laughs)! It was pretty… you know… I’m thinking “My God, my river trip is over! The boat’s stuck! The guide’s gonna drown! This is it. The first two hours and it’s over.” (both laugh) But somehow they get it off and we keep going. And it was all part of this great adventure, you know? The trip was just completely wonderful.
So, the trip ends. We get in the car. I was going back home to continue to be the highway engineer. And I’ll never forget this either. I was lying in the back seat of that Buick. We used to take turns sleeping back there. My father-in-law loved to drive. He would drive thousands of miles every week, all over Colorado, Oklahoma, selling, buying cows. So he loved to drive, and he did all the driving and he would drive forever. I remember lying in the back seat going back to Colorado to be a highway engineer and thinking to myself what a wonderful trip it was and: “Why didn’t I do something like that when I was young?” It was exactly the thought I had. I was gonna go back and be a highway engineer. My life was gonna go on. But “Why didn’t I do something like that when I was young?” I was 27 and, I guess, over the hill.
I get back to Colorado, I had grown a beard and couldn’t quite bring myself to shave it off… I kinda wanted to brag about my trip. So I went to work on Monday with my beard. It was like, barely a stubble. But my boss comes out and says, “You can stay, the beard’s gotta go.” I didn’t think too much about it. I thought it was a little weird. But, you know, I was planning to shave it off anyway. I think I shaved the beard off—I might have left the moustache on. Anyway, within the next year or so I started—by now the hippy thing was really getting going—and styles in general, the hair was getting longer. So I grew a moustache and let my sideburns come down a little ways, and I started getting these looks from my boss. My hair got a little bit longer, but it was never below the collar. Never, ever. I can’t grow hair that long. I tried. So, this ended up being a big deal. …Pretty soon I’m starting to get a little more consciousness, you know: hanging out with all these hippies in the park and such; going to a few war protests on the Cambodia thing. There was a huge protest in Denver. I got some great photographs of it too: the cops with the shields and all the whole… and my boss kept telling me to get my hair cut. But my hair was never that long! So I’d usually go home and trim it. It wasn’t that big a deal. Even though I was starting to get a little upset about the fact that, you know, “C’mon it’s not even long! Forget it,” you know? Well then, my marriage started becoming a little bit rocky, and I was not that happy being a highway engineer. I really didn’t know how unhappy I was. But, the long and short of it is they eventually fired me. For having long hair. I basically said “Well you can’t really do that to people.” But they did it. And so I ended up getting this attorney and we decided to fight this thing. They said, “…unable to perform his duties because of his personal appearance.” Or something like that, some bogus thing. So we went in there and we had all these merit ratings, where every single thing… because this guy was promoting me to eventually take over his job. He was personally grooming me for his job, because he had his eye on a job that was higher up, and he was gonna build his own little kingdom there, and I was good at what I did there. But he turned on me, just because of long hair. It was totally absurd. So they tried to prove I was incompetent and to deny they would fire me because of my personal appearance, even though my attorney read the notice that said I was fired: “Mr. Briggs is unable to perform his duties because of his personal appearance.” He said, “You are saying that you did not fire him because of his personal appearance?” They said, “No, we’re firing him because he’s incompetent.” “But,” he said, “look at all these merit ratings! He has excellent merit ratings for all these years. How could he be incompetent?” “Well . . . .” They danced around the issue because they knew they couldn’t legally do it. And, we won. But it was obvious I couldn’t go back and work for the same guy. So they gave me another job, sent me out to Eastern Colorado, about 200 miles from home; and they were paying me professional engineering wages for sitting in a truck by myself counting cement trucks on an interstate project. You sit there all day and count cement trucks, write down the number and what time they went by… Oh god, it was just gruelling. However, I would go home on the weekends and call my attorney. I’d say, “You know, I didn’t win. I’m out here on a job I don’t even like. I didn’t win! We gotta go back and tell ‘em that.” “Don,” he says, “how far do you wanna take this?” I had already told him I was probably gonna quit. I said, “Yeah, but I can’t let‘em do this.” He said, “OK, if you wanna stick it out, I’ll do the rest of the attorney work for free.” So I ended up having to work out there for about 3 weeks… About this same time—now let me see, what was the sequence here? My wife and I split up and she moved to Japan and became a hostess. It was a pretty brutal separation because… just took her out to an airplane and put her on the airplane and that was it. I didn’t see her for a year and a half. Not the easiest way to end a relationship. But it was a good thing. And, she did get me to go to the Grand Canyon [once again].… she’d been teaching French, and there was this guy in her high school who was, as it turns out, a fairly well-known rock climber. Bill Forrest was his name, and he has a lot of first ascents around various places. So I started climbing with him on the weekends, and he was going to have a party one night. He said, “I’m gonna have a surprise at the party for you.” This must have been ’68 or ’69. So I didn’t think too much about it. But I go to this party and who walks in the door but Rob Elliott. Rob Elliott, by total coincidence moved across the street from this guy I was climbing with. That was my surprise! Because he had talked to Rob, and they had put it together and Elliott said “Don’t tell him until I see him at the party.” So Elliott shows up at this party, and I go on and on about how great that trip was and so forth and so on. Rob says, “Well,” you know, “you gotta go and work for us!” And I go “Aww…”
…What had happened, Rob was also in the process of getting drafted for Vietnam. But he became a conscientious objector. And to fulfill his community service, he moved to Colorado to set up the rafting program for Colorado Outward Bound. Tough job, right?
***
Don Briggs— filmmaker and photographer extraordinaire—looks back on life at age 62, still grappling with the question of whether or not he’s over the hill. He sits in a gorgeous, sunlit house in Marin County which he’s transformed with years of sweat and blood, sadly contemplating the fact that his second marriage too is getting shakier by the minute, and unless a miracle happens it’s only a matter of time before he’ll have to tear himself away from all he holds dear and start over one more @#!% time.
It’s hard to imagine what he’ll accomplish next… considering the first time he remade himself (totally over the hill at age 27) he went on to experience, and—Forrest Gump-like—help create, about two thirds of the evolution of river running in the Grand Canyon. More importantly, he recorded the journey, first with a series of stunning photographs and later with an unparalleled string of documentary films. One of them—“River Runners of the Grand Canyon” is, in this observer’s humble opinion, the best film that ever was or probably ever will be made on the topic. A pretty good start, you might say. We sat down to review a couple years ago and the only bad news was, we filled up nine hours of tape. The transcript stretched to 250 pages. What follows is only the tip of an iceberg that’s hilarious as it is heartening :
***
I set off to work my first trip in the Grand Canyon as an assistant to Alan Wilson.
They called him Crazy Alan. I meet Alan, and we go off to El Rancho. He has to pick up a few things for the trip. And, you know, I’m not the fastest guy in the world. I’m havin’ a hard time keepin’ up with this guy in the aisles of El Rancho. I’m just not walking that fast. I’m going, “Jeez, this guy’s really in a hurry.” Yeah, Alan just went everywhere fast. And the second boatman was Richard Neilson. He was also—it was like he was on speed. They would hit the deck at the evening and start cooking dinner, doin’ everything at a very high speed. I’m thinking, “Oh, jeez, that’s what you’re supposed to do.” But looking back on it, Alan was kinda naturally that way. Richard was too. They liked to put on a little show of efficiency, how fast they could get things done. So I tried to keep up with them, thinking that’s what you’re supposed to do. And it was in June, it was hot. I was in good shape and everything, but these guys wore me down. Somewhere in the trip I remember washing the last pot and pan and falling asleep in the sand, right there (laughs), I was so tired. We get down to Havasu and we parked the boats down below in those days—I climbed off, tied up the boat, climbed under a ledge there right where the boat was tied, and I slept. Didn’t even go up into Havasu (laughs), I was so tired.
Steiger: Didn’t know what you were missing. But you’d been there before, huh?
Briggs: Once, in ’67. But you get used to it after a while. And I learned that not everybody goes as fast as those two guys. I did a single boat trip with Michael Casstelli—a couple of them. That was just fifteen people, which is pretty nice, and Michael was a little more laid back than those two guys. But I remember going down (laughs) the left side of Unkar, and we got stuck on those rocks down below, on the left? Single boat motor trip. Maybe didn’t make the cut, lost the motor, or whatever. But Michael was pretty unperturbable. He just started moving the 15 people around on different parts of the boat, and we eventually worked it off, just shifting the weight. It was actually pretty easy. It didn’t appear like it was gonna be easy. But I think we put a rip in the boat. I think we had to stop at Phantom and patch like a 15-inch rip at 115 degrees.
Steiger: Bet that patch worked really good! (laughs)
Briggs: So I was learning lots of lessons early on in that first year. And of course arta had no area manager as such. Some guy down at Meadview was supposed to maintain the motors, but I don’t think he ever did. We had 25 horse Johnsons and 18 horse—we called them “Elvinroods” (laughs), Elvinroods, which weren’t maintained very well. So I learned how to work on motors. I’d never touched an outboard in my life. I was more interested in hanging out in the Canyon than learning how to run the boats anyway. When I called Rob Elliott, I’d said “Listen, I just want to hang out in the Canyon for a summer, figure out what I’m gonna do. I just wanna wash the pots and pans.” So that’s what I did. I was just hanging out and starting to take photographs as much as I could. So I worked five motor trips. And the motor trip cycle, which would run on a two week cycle, because it was an 8-day trip—there’s more time in between than on the rowing cycle, which is two days… So I had a coupla days, and I used to go up to the rim and go watch the Kolb movie, that’s when Emery Kolb was still around and you could go up and shake his hand and talk to him. That was pretty cool. I don’t know how many times I did that….
Oh god, those were the days, weren’t they? It was all just—every single day was such a great adventure… I was driving this Porsche, and it was really a great car but I was in the process of trying to even be—I was still trying to become a hippy, I guess, and this river guide. Well the car didn’t quite fit the image. So the spring before I took off for—it was the ’72 or ’73 season—I sold the Porsche. I took the money. In the winter I’d go to these, you know, bread making classes and all these back to basics, candle making. I was gonna go to these classes so I could be a hippy and maybe meet some girls. And I’d always park the Porsche around the corner. Because, you know… I kinda was ashamed of this car (both laugh hard) ‘cause it didn’t fit the image. Oh, what a fool! I wish I had that car now. You could drive that car 90 miles an hour all day and get about 25 miles to the gallon. Oh, it was beautiful. Oh well. It was a ’59 Porsche. I bought a ’67 Volkswagen Beetle.
***
Each spring I started going out to California a little earlier, because guys that I was working with were all from California. And arta was based in California. So we’d go out and start running rivers in the spring. I got hooked up with Peter Winn, and boy, I mean that was good news/bad news. He always had some adventure of some kind that he could talk us into doing. Well the first one that we did was at the end of the ’71 season, when I worked that last oar power trip . . . I was training on that one. And I got to be pretty good buddies with Peter and Kent [Erskine]. It was mid-September, or something like that, and I didn’t know what the hell I was gonna do. Somebody came up with the bright idea that we should go run the Rogue River. You know, we were there in Flagstaff, and “Oh, jeez, that’s a good idea.” Peter had some boats. He had three old Navy ten mans that he’d gotten from Ron Smith, who was the competitor with arta. Anyway, we had to get some people to go on this trip with us. So Peter said, “Well, I know some California boatmen. I’ll call ‘em up.” And the first California boatman that he called—it was Bob Melville. The first time I saw Bob Melville, I was looking out the window of Peter’s car and there’s this Volkswagen that’s trying to run us off the road. It was Melville. We were up on I-5, on the way. And I was going “Isn’t that crazy…?” Anyway… Melville and I started to tell this story one time. Someone asked us at a Friends of the River dinner how we met. We started tellin’ this story, between the two of us, and we had to digress to explain this, to explain that. We went on all through dinner and everybody else got up and left, and Melville and I were still there. We hadn’t finished the story. (Both laugh) So I’m not gonna get into that part. We get up to the Rogue, and sure enough, it’s raining. Not only is it raining, about 200 feet up in the trees it’s snowing. I guess it never entered our minds not to go. No wetsuits. We went anyway. And I was kind of scheduled to row one of the boats over Rainey Falls. Never having seen it. So we get down there, which is pretty early there on the very first hour or so when we left from Grave Creek, I guess it was. It was raining. It was cold. We get down there and look at it. I was just goin’, “Holy shit. I don’t know about this.” So Dick Pfeiffer went over and got thrown—I don’t think he got thrown out of the boat, but it was not a very pleasant experience, you could tell that. I was goin’, “Oh jeez.” Kent took one of the boats down through the fish ladder, and he got an oar stuck; it was kind of the medium, easy way to go through. We didn’t really want to risk having all these boats turn over or anything, so Kent went that way. Then Melville took a Redshank over this 13 foot waterfall. So there was only one boat left, and Peter was just standin’ there lookin’ at me. I said, “OK, I’m gonna do it.” I went back down and I was just totally beside myself. I was completely wired. I was terrified. I wanted to do it and I didn’t want to do it. . . So I get up there and I’m untying the boat, these two women that had been invited on the trip came walking up. They said, “Oh, we wanna go over with you!” I said, “I don’t think that’s a good idea.” They said, “Oh no, those other people made it.” I said, “Listen, I’ve never rowed a boat like this before.” And they looked at me like “Isn’t he cute, isn’t he funny?” I said (laughing), “No, I’m serious.” I didn’t even row from where we put in down to there. It was the first time I ever rowed a small boat on a small river. And I was rowin’ this ten man over Rainey Falls. I couldn’t convince them that it wasn’t a good idea. So I get ‘em loaded up, and row out, and immediately get stuck on a rock. (both laugh) I have to get off of that, and maybe they’re starting to believe me by that point. So it took me a while to get it off the rock, and then I finally went out there. The trick, obviously, is going over straight. And I took maybe one stroke on one oar too many trying to…. And then, as I learned after the fact, when you go over, rather than leaning forward and grabbing hold of the seat, you should put your arms behind you and hold on from the back. But I didn’t know that. So my momentum was going forward to grab hold of the seat about the time that we hit the bottom of the falls, and the boat just kind of sandwiched. I flew up to the front between the two women, and actually I think hit my head on the front of the boat, and then it unfolded again, and I went out into the river. And down under and (laughs), I guess these two women were cheering and all this because they’d made it and all…everybody kept pointing backwards (laughs), cause I’m in the river, you know, and I’m floundering along, and it’s cold. So they had to come and drag me in, which is kind of humiliating, but maybe they believed me that I’d never rowed in one of those boats before. I actually have a film of that somewhere. Anyway, oh god, and it rained…
So I started coming out to California earlier each spring. We started going down the Stanislaus, which is a beautiful little river. About a nine mile run. In the spring of ’72 Peter said, “Well, you know, you probably oughta learn how to row if you’re gonna be on the rowing crew.” arta had this spring training on the Stanislaus. So, “Go to the spring training ‘cause they’re training a buncha people for California rivers.” I show up, and Melville’s one of the instructors, and Rob Elliot I think is an instructor and Alan Dubner; one of the Thomas brothers; Ron Caldwell. These guys knew that I’d worked a year in the Grand Canyon, they kinda figured I knew what I was doin’. Well, I proved that wrong. They had these what they called a “basket boat.” It was oval, but it looked kinda like a wading pool. They had the roll bar. They were life rafts, and they had the inflatable roll bars, which they could run a tarp over out in the ocean to protect yourself from the sun. But they were very floppy. They were meant to float in still water… But it was great. I mean it was such an incredible group of people. Jimmy Hendrix was on that training crew, and David Halliday, and I don’t know anybody else from the Grand Canyon, but Phil Town… he was fresh outta the Green Berets and showed up at this training completely decked out like he was gonna (laughs)… go on a mission. I mean he had the knives and the attitude; he actually told me the story later that he had come home from Vietnam and was just like patrolling the neighborhood at night (laughing) and I mean he was still at war. His mother somehow found out about this arta training trip. He says, “If I hadn’t a come there, I probably would’ve been one of these guys who went berserk and shot people.” (laughs) He became a river guide, and he eventually became a Transcendental Meditation guy and moved in to Fairfield, Iowa with the Maharishi and the whole deal. That’s a whole other story. Phil Town. Yeah. …But that’s when we started learning that this river, the Stanislaus, was gonna be dammed—that the dam was already being planned. That was in ’72. So we were aware of it, and people started putting the campaign together, the first campaign for Friends of the River. . . I kept working in the Grand Canyon in the summer, from May to the end of September, and then I’d end up coming back to California, spending more time each year in California, and got involved in this river campaign to try and save this river. At some point I met Mark Dubois, who is kind of the spiritual leader of Friends of the River. He’s kind of a Gandhi character, and didn’t wear shoes, on the river or in town. But he was incredibly devoted to saving this river. This was a campaign that got serious in ’74. Maybe it was ’73 when I started doing a few things. Getting people to write letters.
Steiger: Now was this the State of California that’s gonna dam the Stanislaus?
Briggs: It was the Army Corps of Engineers was gonna dam it. So we took them on. We got this petition campaign going in I think it was ’74, and we had to collect so many hundred thousand signatures. The proposition process was designed so that citizens could go out and gather the names. But of course if corporations wanted to pass a proposition, they just pay people to go out and get the names. We were doing it all on a volunteer basis. And we had a really incredible time getting this proposition—Proposition 17—on the ballot. We got people to sign these petitions everywhere. We’d sit out for hours in front of the co-ops in Berkeley, and we’d go to different events. We went to the World Series games when Oakland was in the World Series. Anyplace there was a lot of people. Went to a blue grass festival here in Marin County. And we couldn’t stop. We’d go all day long. And this is like, Melville, and Bruce Simbala was in on this… I remember, one time we went in to the Starry Plough, which was kinda the Irish hangout in Berkeley. You know, like a place where maybe ira wannabees would hang out or something. I mean it was a serious place, and they had pretty good music there too. We went in, we figured that maybe we’d get some petitions here. I mean we would petition anybody and everybody. So the band took a break, and somebody went up and talked to the guy and the band, and they were totally into it. So somehow we spontaneously were gonna put on a skit. I don’t know how we did it. It was Melville, Simbala and myself. We ran out to the car and got an old folding shovel and somehow put together this little skit about the Army Corps of Engineers damming this river. The keyboard guy got into it and was playing this melodramatic music, like an old-time music (ta-ta-ta-ta-ta, laughs), and we got everybody to sign. That was in the spring, and then I went back to the Grand Canyon. And in the fall we had to campaign for the election. But the contractors and the local people who wanted the dam to be built had gathered all this money. The contractors stood to lose a lot of money. It was a multi-purpose dam, you know, recreation, hydroelectric, irrigation and fish…. The contractors were the heavy-duty contractors. They wanted to build the dam. They had hundreds of thousands of dollars, and they hired this PR firm in LA to put out this totally deceptive advertising. All the polls proved that the general public wanted to save the river. So when they found that out, the vote that people wanted to do was, you had to vote “yes.” But they put up these billboards and all these things… they ran a campaign that said, “Vote No on 17. Stop the river hoax.” Then it said “Save the River.” And if you could confront them on it, what they would say was, “Well, we’re trying to save the lower part of the river for the farmers.” It was down in the Central Valley. So “We’re trying to save that. Because. . .”
Steiger: If you don’t build the dam . . .
Briggs: “If you don’t do it, then it’s gonna damage the lower river.” I mean it was completely, totally deceptive. So they had these billboards all over the state. We figured—I think this was Bruce’s idea and my idea—we decided to have what we eventually called the Bananner Campaign. We gathered together some money, went to all the Good Will shops and got all the white sheets we could get. We made banners. We made our own billboards. We got refrigerator boxes and cut out the letters and made our own billboards that said, “Yes on 17.” You know. “Save the River.” I actually have a little movie of this, which is pretty cool We were up at the Vallecita warehouse, and Bruce Simbala was sitting there with a tredle sewing machine in his bare feet smoking his corn-cob pipe, sewing these sheets together. We knew that we were gonna have to do something in LA, cause we figured the northern California vote would go our way. So we took a coupla school bus loads of river guides down to LA. Some Friends of the River people down there had a little office on Wilshire Boulevard. And we set about tryin’ to do this grassroots stuff. So I went down, I had these banners in my old Volkswagen… I think I drove 150 miles in one day just circling freeways and mapping all the overpasses; all the potential places where we could put these banners—places where everybody going to work in LA would have to go past one of our banners. We had this entire campaign. We had them staked on hillsides. …We actually made a Spanish version of our brochure, and Simbala and I went in to East LA and were handing out brochures on the night of the Day of the Dead. I mean, you know, this is 1973.
Steiger: How was that? Was that pretty scary to do that?
Briggs: No, we never even thought about it. I don’t think it was like it is now, but we never thought about it. People were cool, you know. We kinda had the River Magic protecting us. Everybody kinda knew that we were doin’ good stuff.
Steiger: Well, did it work?
Briggs: Well, no. We lost Prop 17. All the polls that were taken afterwards proved that the general public really wanted to save the river. So we kinda got screwed on that one. But by the time spring came and the river was startin’ to flow again, we were all back there, and people kept coming up with other ideas.
Steiger: You weren’t gonna just give up?
Briggs: We wouldn’t give up. And they started building the dam. So Mark Dubois said, “Well, we have to have national media. We have to make this a national issue.” We said, “Well what makes an issue national?” “Well, if you read about it in national publications.” I said, “I tell you what (laughs) . . .” In the meantime, to backtrack a little bit… there was a guy that came down the Grand Canyon with me who was the ex-president of cbs. Jack Schneider. The only reason he could’ve taken this vacation is he had just been fired. Everybody I ever talked to said that he was the best and they never should’ve fired him, but it was one of those corporate things. So he was on this river trip for the lower half. I get to talkin’ to him a little bit… he smoked these cigars and he drank Irish Breakfast tea. One morning I went up to him and said, “You know, I’ve been just dyin’ to ask you, what does the president of cbs do on a typical day?” He kinda leaned back. He was a wonderful guy, but just think about being the head of cbs. I mean, how do you do that? He takes a puff on his cigar and says, “Well, basically you go in in the morning, you kick the machine to get it goin’.” (both laugh) And then he went on and laid down all his grid works and board meetings and yatayatayata. We got to be pretty good friends. And he saw me shooting some film. This guy was very smart. I said, “Oh, maybe I’ll come see you some day.” He said, “Yeah, come on.” You know? Gives me his number. So I go back and this is about the time we started needing some national media coverage. I’d been approaching magazines and stuff. I’d talked to Audubon. I mean the easy stuff, the environmental things: Audubon in New York and well, some other magazines. But this guy was television. Hey, this is the big stuff. I mean, he’s the man. I call him up and say, “Hey, this is Don, here in town.” He says, “Good. Come over and see me.” By then he was running Warner Amex, which was one of the first cable companies. This must have been the mid to late ‘70s. He says, “Well what kind of footage do you have with you?” I said, “Oh I just got some workprint from stuff I’ve been shooting in the Grand Canyon.” He says, “Bring it on down.” So he knew, he said, “What are you doin’ in New York?” He already knew I was doing this river-saving thing. I walk in the door, and I had this big old puffy down parka, it’s in the winter, I’m pretty shaggy. He gets up from his desk. He has this huge desk and there’s not a thing on it except a pen holder. He comes over and takes my coat off, brings a chair, scoots it up for me. He says, “Have a seat.” And he goes around, pulls out this yellow pad, says, “Before you leave town, I want you to go see these people.” He starts down this list, tellin’ me who they are. He knew exactly why I wanted to see him. He listed all the contacts at every single network and who I should talk to. “This guy is a producer for Walter Cronkite. Jonathan Ward. He’s a great guy… I’ll call him. Let him know you’re comin.” And I’m just goin’(makes a face, amazed)… Schneider pushes the pad over. All that business was totally taken care of. Then he says, “Hey, how’re you doin’?” You know, I didn’t have to wade through that whole thing and eventually have to ask him. He knew exactly what I wanted to do and he just gave me the stuff. So man, I immediately got that list and started callin’ people. He said, “I want you to call me every day. Give me an update.” So I spent a day and then I called him at the end of the next day or something. I said, “Well, jeez, this is workin’ good. You know, I’ve got Jonathan Ward who said he’ll do a piece. And I talked to Steve, and they did this,” and I pretty much had gone through the list that he gave me.

Steiger: In one day.
Briggs: Well, or had appointments lined up. Then I said, “You know anybody on 60 Minutes?” Stupid question, right? cbs. He said, “You greedy bastard.” (both laugh) That’s exactly what he said. He says, “OK.” So he starts givin’ me other names, and he gets me in to 60 Minutes. And I eventually start meeting all these people. But the issue was, even though it was our issue, and we were all totally into it because it was our little river, the issue was an old issue.
Steiger: It was over . . .
Briggs: Well, no. No. We were still trying to stop the dam at this point. At some point they were continuing to build the dam, but we were still saying “You don’t need to fill it.” Because we had all these reasons why they didn’t need to fill it. There were already thirteen dams on the river. They had enough water. They didn’t know what they were gonna do with it. They just wanted to build it. That’s the Army Corps. We all know that. And they could justify anything. So . . . I went into 60 Minutes, and the story was an old story—the Army Corps of Engineers damming a river. Come on, they’ve been doing it for years. That’s what they do. So what’s—and Jack told me, he says, “You gotta have a hook. You gotta make it something that makes this different, some reason why they’d want to do it.” He gave me all these hints. I did the best I could, and I got these guys kind of all set up, but there was nothing really gonna happen right away.
Steiger: Nothing distinctive about it all.
Briggs: I got into 60 Minutes and I was walking through and there’s Morley Safer sitting there drinking a cup of coffee, and I go in and see Brook Janis, the producer, I give her the pitch. She says, “Well”, and they all asked really good questions to make me justify why they should do it. I wanted to save that river so bad, I kinda wasn’t listening to them. I was determined that it was important. They just couldn’t see that it was important. It was just me. So she said, “Yeah, well we’ll call you.”
Steiger: “It’s a nice little river, but there’s no hook, nuthin else.”
Briggs: So somewhere along the line—I get a little messed up on the timing—but Mark Dubois decided that he was gonna go in and chain himself somewhere at an undisclosed location, and if the Army Corps was gonna fill the dam, they were gonna have to drown him. This was an idea that was floating around for a while, no pun intended. There were these huge discussions that he didn’t want it to be a Friends of the River thing because it was a pretty radical thing to do. But it was gonna be a personal statement so Friends of the River would be able to deny that they were a part of it. And it would be the truth. “Yes, Mark Dubois is part of the Friends of the River, but this is a personal statement, and we in fact tried to talk him out of doing this, because we love Mark.” So Mark had to find somebody… All along I was telling him, “Mark, this is my hook! You’ve been tellin’ me to get national media coverage and this is it.” He says, “No, I don’t want it to be national media coverage. This is a personal statement.” I said, “Mark, if you drown and nobody knows about it, what good does it do?” I mean I was—you know, I used to say Mark was willing to die for the river, but he wouldn’t lie, and I was the other side. I would do anything to save the river. So Kent Erskine’s mother was a friend of mine, and I got to be friends with her, and when Kent moved to Oregon I continued to be friends with her and stuff, and at one point in time over in Corte Madera Creek in Kentfield, she chained herself to a tree ‘cause the Army Corps was trying to channelize this little creek, Corte Madera Creek. And I’d known that, and it had really changed her life. Like her husband, who was Kent’s stepfather, I guess left, and it was a big thing for her. They were building a concrete ditch, and she and a bunch of other activists around Marin County, housewives and stuff like that, did this. So I convinced Mark to go talk to Marty. I took him over there. He was only in there about 20 minutes (laughing) and he comes out. Cause she just basically said, “Well, are you willing to die?” He says, “Yeah.” And she says, “Well go for it!” (Laughs) I mean it was a longer conversation than that. Well she knows this old guy who was an environmental writer, Harold Gilliam, who had been around forever at the Chronicle. And Mark did not trust the press. That’s part of the reason he didn’t want the press, ‘cause they were always misinterpreting what we’d do and callin’ us obstructionists and all this stuff. But she convinced him that Harold was a friend of hers and he would do a good job. He would actually report it for what it is. So Mark talked to this guy. Then it came time for the action. And because I was kind of always operating on the fringes of Friends of the River—I mean I was never on the staff, and I was always doing my own thing… but because I was tryin’ to do this national media stuff, he wanted me to be kind of a part of it to help him out. But he totally didn’t trust me either. Because he kinda figured if I knew where he was going, I’d send the press in. I said, “Naw, I won’t do that.” So, he had this other guy who was a river person, and they kind of signed this blood pact type deal: that this other guy was going to help Mark, and he promised Mark that he would not come in and get him or tell anybody where he was. Mark believed him, but he didn’t believe me. So it was the three of us. We nicknamed the other guy Deep Paddle. Every night Deep Paddle would paddle in to where Mark was. He was the only one who knew. And then he would take messages in from me, and the next morning he’d bring messages and he’d call me. So I took Mark—and Mark had kind of set me up a little bit. I was the last one to deliver him—to drive him to where he was gonna go. And he had me convinced he was gonna go one way, and when we get to that point in the road, he says, “No, go that way.” You know, he was covering, just to make sure because I guess he didn’t trust me. So I take him to this big bridge and he walks off into the dark. It was on a Sunday night. The article was scheduled to come out on Tuesday morning. So it was Sunday night, and he walks off, and we had this battle cry, it was “Parrot’s Ferry Is the Limit.” Which is if they only raise the water to Parrot’s Ferry, then that would preserve the nine mile stretch that we liked, that was so beautiful. It was an incredible place. I stand up on the bridge and yell out into the dark, you know, “Parrot’s Ferry is the Limit!” That’s the last thing he heard. He goes in there and chains himself, and the water’s coming up. He sent a letter to Colonel O’Shea, head of the Army Corps of Engineers in Sacramento, this wonderful letter saying why he’s doing it. And it was a very pure action; otherwise it wouldn’t have worked. So it’s kinda at night, and I get about half way across the central valley in my little Volkswagen, I had to pull over to the side of the road and sleep. I get up in the morning and drive in to Berkeley, my phone number in Berkeley in this room was the only contact number available to anybody. I was gonna be the media coordinator for Mark. That phone started ringing off the hook, and it didn’t stop. It would go from 8:00 in the morning until 10:00 at night. Everybody calling from Friends of the River . . . And I literally was chained to the phone. I had to borrow the phone from the woman that lived next door to me in the next room so at least I had a secure number that if I had to make a call…‘cause my phone did not stop ringing. I didn’t even leave that room for a day and a half. I mean his mother was calling, saying “How could you do this? Tell us where he is!” I’d say, “I don’t know where he is.” She’d say, “Yes, you do.” I’d say, “You know Mark, he wouldn’t tell me.” “Yes you do. He’s gonna die!” So I had his hysterical mother and I’d say, “Listen, I just got a call from cbs, and I have to take this call.” So, once the word got out, then everybody in the California media and the people in New York were calling me.
Steiger: 60 Minutes now is ready to talk to you.
Briggs: Not 60 Minutes, but Walter Cronkite’s guy. So I was trying to hold them off, ‘cause the water was still coming up, and he was out there somewhere, I didn’t know where he was. And Deep Paddle was going in and seeing him, and they were sending out search parties, the Army Corps of Engineers. People were trying to find him. They said, “This has gotta be easy. You just ride around the edge of the lake and look for him, right?” No way! He had found a place and put the chain around some big rocks that couldn’t be undone, and then he took the key and he took it about 30 feet away, and went back and locked that thing together. I mean he was serious.
Steiger: Deep Paddle was the only one that could’ve saved him?
Briggs: Deep Paddle would go in and knew where he was and he promised he wouldn’t tell anybody. I kept sending messages in at night and then he would bring messages out. So at some point in time Colonel O’Shea came out and made a statement to the press that “We have stopped filling the lake, because that’s as much as we were gonna put in this spring anyway.” Which is totally bogus. They pretended it had nothing to do with Mr. Dubois being in there. “We were gonna stop anyway.” You know. And nobody bought it for a second. So the water had stopped, and he was still in there. And we were waiting. And at that point I said, “Mark, all these people wanna come in and see you. I think it would be a good idea. What do you think?” So I had to wait for days. Finally he said “OK.” So the first night , this might’ve been Wednesday night, I sent in Bill Rudd. He was an LA Times reporter that Mark liked. There was a local reporter at the Modesto Bee, Thorne Grey, who was important to the campaign, and a woman from a little newspaper up at Sonora. And so then Deep Paddle had to take a boat in to get those people, and then these people in New York were pissed.
Steiger: That you let those other guys in.
Briggs: They said, “Listen, you’ve told us that you want to do a national story. And you’re not gonna let us do it. We’re gonna come out there and you’ve gotta take us to him.” I said, “I don’t know where he is.” They said, “Yes you do.” They absolutely would not believe me. I said, “This is a real thing.”
Steiger: This is Walter Cronkite’s guy.
Briggs: Yeah. I’m saying, “Sorry.” I mean I didn’t want them to slip away, but like I say, everybody in the world was calling me. So I sent a note in with Deep Paddle that we were gonna bring in cbs. And Mark says, “yeah.” So I said, “I’m not gonna miss this.” You know, things are startin’ to calm down a little bit, and so . . .
Steiger: The thing is stopped with the lake. But he’s stayin’ in there. He’s not goin’ to go out right yet.
Briggs: I guess. I don’t know the exact timing of everything. But I decided I wanna go in with cbs. I mean, God, it was so great. It was this little clandestine operation, you know, and I had to meet the cbs guys up at the motel room and lead them down into the Canyon. And Deep Paddle had this old, unmarked bread truck, with a fully rigged boat in it. And so he backed it up on the bridge . . .
Steiger: A raft.
Briggs: Yeah. And we took it out, carried it down the bridge. Which was not easy, but we couldn’t take it into the parking lot, ‘cause, you know, everybody’d know what we were doing: anybody who was going out in the river at night. Somebody wrote in one of the papers, “It seems like the only thing we need to do to find Mr. Dubois is follow the trail of film cannisters.”
Steiger: People are pissed!
Briggs: Oh yeah. They’re not real happy about this whole thing. So we get this boat, and we take it down, put it in the water. And the correspondent we get is Harold Dow. Harold Dow is this black guy . . . he was there in his black leather jacket, and I swear he’d never set foot on a piece of dirt in his life. He was a city boy, what can I say? We get the boat down there, and we get the cameraman, and the cameraman will do anything. So we’re on our way down there, and Harold is starting to get a little nervous. Off in the dark, just about maybe twenty feet out in the water there’s this little hole where the water pours over the rock. But it’s makin’ a pretty good noise, which was good. He says, “I thought this was gonna be flat… What’s that noise?” (Laughs) We say, “Aah, that’s OK. Don’t worry about it.” (Laughs) So we get him loaded on the boat, and we go out, we’re floating along, and there was some pretty good current for a while. Once we got away from that little hole, it was quiet. I mean it was a beautiful night, and the crickets and the frogs and everything were goin, the stars were out. Pretty soon he got into it. He says, “Wow,” he says, “This is really cool.” So we go in, and we do the interview, and I have my 16 mm Scoopit, and I take about 30 seconds. They did the video camera for the news thing, and it appeared on cbs the next day. So that was kind of the big event to keep the water from going up. And at least we had the river one more year. ‘Cause this was happening when the spring water was coming up. So we saved it—or Mark saved it—for one more year, which gave us more chances to come up with more hair-brained ideas. But things were not looking good… Eventually, then, two winters after that, these huge rains came and that was that. The river went away in about a week. There was so much water everywhere, and the little river that we used to run on—1,500 cubic feet per second was a great water level—was runnin’ at about 30,000. Of course, some people went up and ran it. And somebody nearly drowned doin’ it. Yeah. So that was that. Then Mark set about still trying to get ‘em to lower it, and we even came up—we had the twentieth anniversary gathering last fall, of all the people who were involved in this. And there was a guy that came up with a really great idea about how we can get the river back.
Steiger: And that is?
Briggs: Well, in the meantime, because everybody’s pumpin’ wells all over the place, the water table is dropping. So all the farmers are screaming, you know, ‘cause the water’s dropping. So they’ve come up with these ideas to recharge the ground water, you just let out a whole bunch of water from the dam. Because the water’s not being committed to any irrigation district, ‘cause there’s no canal to deliver it to the district that has the rights. So the water’s just sitting there. So now, you know, we’re gonna come up with this idea to get ‘em to do this ground water recharging. You go down on the floodplain, and you keep the water in there, in the spring. It seeps down, it recharges the aquifer all over the place. So that’s our latest idea. (laughs)
Steiger: You still haven’t given up, twenty years later?
Briggs: No. But after that little deal with swac, the Stanislaus Wilderness Action Committee, about the same time, the Tuolomne River was being threatened by the Modesto-Turlock Irrigation District. And if we didn’t switch, we were gonna lose that one too. ‘Cause we were ahead of the curve on that one. They just wanted to do it. They didn’t have plans for the dams or anything. So it was a winnable thing. And finally, another looong story, we did win that one! We got help from all kinds of people, including Richard Chamberlain, Dr. Kildare, and we won, in the first term of the Reagan administration. I took Chamberlain down the Tuolomne and that got him fired up about saving it.
Steiger: Beat James Watt and everything.
Briggs: Wild and Scenic River. We did it. I mean it was a great victory… Oh jeez, I didn’t even talk about the Stanislaus film.
Steiger: Well, we better.
Briggs: Well, I eventually got this film together on the Stanislaus, the idea being that if we couldn’t take people—anybody we would take down the river would be on our side, but we obviously couldn’t take all the politicians, so the only way we could do it was to take the river to them. And the only way you could do that was through a film. So that’s when I took on making this film. And, you know, it was my first film. I really didn’t know what I was doing. I tried to answer every political question in this film, to counteract everything they did. So it ends up being a little too detailed on the technical stuff. But on the other side, I was there at a time when the Army Corps came in and bulldozed this guy’s farmhouse where his family had lived for a hundred years, when they were burning his place, and he was going completely berserk. I got him recorded yelling and screaming, mostly screaming at me, because he knew I was a white water guy. He was just beside himself. I mean it’s this old guy losing his house, and it was incredible. Barns being burned and bulldozers pushing, really pretty dramatic stuff.
***
It’s like I’m two different people. Before Grand Canyon and after Grand Canyon. You know, I was a kind of an unhappy highway engineer, not knowing what I wanted to do when I grow up, and now I’m a river guide not knowing what I’m gonna to do when I grow up. (laughs) But I had a good time getting here. I loved being a commercial guide. I did a private trip every year the first three or four years I was there. And then… (Steiger: Those were training trips, though, right?) No, they were straight private trips. The all paddle trip happened to be something that we were gonna do anyway, and because we were good friends with Rob and all that, he was logically gonna go with us. And just part of him being there was for him to think about maybe possibly trying to run a commercial all-paddle trip, under the auspices of the Whitewater School. Which we did, I think the very next year… We had a philosophy in the oar-powered division, that was basically started by Peter Winn, of getting people involved in running the trip. Not only was it a good way to do things, because the more they were involved, the better time they had, but the more you could get ‘em involved, the less work we had to do! So we would always get people to come in and help cook. We would let ‘em row the boats whenever they wanted to. Not all the boatmen, but most of them. We’d let ‘em row the boats, and it was just a really good way to do it. And I know we used to, in the early days, we would feel insulted if we got tips. If we weren’t ending up being friends with these people at the end and somebody wanted to tip us, we figured we weren’t doin’ a good job! And it was partially true, but also the situation over the years changed to the point where, and I guess the boatmen too, where all of a sudden tipping became, you know, something that should be done. But I always felt a little weird about tipping, even though I never gave my money back. . . . We made the transition from rowing the 25-foot shorty pontoons to snout rigs, and in that first year, which I think maybe was ’72, we usually had half and half on a trip. We used to flip a coin to see who got to row the snouts because they were so easy to row. We used to call ‘em slugs and rockets. So we eventually got all snouts and forgot how hard it was to row a shorty pontoon, and got to be pretty good with it. I mean they’re pretty forgiving. You’re kind of kidding yourself that you had any control anyway, so you just kind of lined it up and go. Except for, you know . . .(Steiger: Bedrock!) some of the strong guys, like—yeah, even in Bedrock, we had techniques. And, you know, you learn through technique what you cannot do with brute force….
I suppose that I’ve had my share of firsts in the canyon, most of them of dubious nature. I was on the first oar-powered arta boat that ever flipped, in the fall of ’71 in Grapevine. It was a training trip, and Eric Carlstrom was rowing, and I was a passenger sitting next to Bill Breed. Eric rowed out of Grapevine camp and went right down the left side of the rapid and hit that diagonal crooked. That was a 25-foot shorty pontoon. It was a fairly gentle flip. I reached up and grabbed the water pitcher on my way out. Then, I think I flipped the first arta snout rig in Crystal. In ’73. Um . . . I’m sure I wasn’t the first to jump across upper Deer Creek. But I did it in 1971. A coupla times. . . I was on the first trip that Martha Clark was ever on. That’s a first. Well, it was the first of the infamous “Dips Trips,” named after—they were trips done by the Executive Council on Foreign Diplomats. They would run these Outward Bound type experiences for foreign diplomats and American businessmen, ostensibly to develop good will between nations… It was through the Southwest Outward Bound School and they wanted to do it in the Grand Canyon. Well, they had to have qualified river guides. So because of Rob’s connection with Outward Bound and so forth, azra was gonna run these. I was gonna be one of the boatmen, and we had two separate trips. There were enough people that we had four or five, probably only four boats per trip. And this was the first one… And so here was Martha, who came with John Rhodes, who was the Southwest Outward Bound guy, and she was his assistant or a guide for Outward Bound. And of course Martha was a lovely young lady, and I think at that point, all the rest of the guides were male. It was—I can’t remember everybody on the crew. I think Jimmy Hendrix was there. Michael Winn. Melville. Myself. Steve Dupuis. I don’t know. But anyway, all these—by the time I got there these azra guides were following Martha around like a pack of dogs in heat. Or is that the other way around? Never mind. So I could see, I mean they were all trying to do this and do that. And, you know, trying to impress Martha. Trying to find out who was gonna be on which trip. Mike Winn found out that he was on the trip that I wasn’t on. So Michael immediately went to work on me. Trying to convince me… and he was good, you know. “Listen, so-and-so’s on the other trip. You haven’t worked with him in years.” You know? (Steiger laughs.) “You’d have a better time going over there.” I let him go on and on, and finally I said, “Naw, I don’t think so…”
There was also the first trip that David Edwards ever was on, that private trip in ’73. And then, because he was from the Bay Area, I started hanging out with him in the winters and stuff. And then, I don’t know whether it was the next year, or in a couple years, I took him and his girlfriend down as guests. Then for the next coupla years I got him on as an assistant. And, you know, he was a great guy, and we were pretty good friends. But also because he was the assistant, who could row my snout boat, we were also in the process of—we used to take a Redshank with us, and then below Lava or something we would break it out, just to keep people entertained in the lower part. Then we graduated to a little Adventurer. And we kept breaking it out a little earlier (laughs) as the years went on, for whatever reason, to the point that I decided—I was really getting into paddle boating, partly because of the whitewater school things that I’d worked on. And so one summer we blew up the Adventurer at Lee’s Ferry, and I paddled the entire way, from Lee’s Ferry to Diamond. And it was really great. I mean it was kind of at the heighth of me really being in touch with the river….
Oh, I guess I should talk about working with Wesley a little bit. Because I think Wesley started about half way through the summer of ’71 and I started at the beginning of ’71. So we started at about the same time. He ran motorboats, but he eventually came over to the oar power crew. He was such a character. But you’d get in a little bit of trouble hanging out with Wesley from one way or the other. He would get a little carried away, most of the time at night. He could keep people awake all night chanting Navajo chants and everything else. We’d think “Oh my God, we’re gonna get bad letters from this trip. He’s keepin’ everybody up.” We’d get back, and weeks later, Wesley gets the good letters and we get the bad letters. (Laughs) And it was because Wesley was totally tuned in to the people. I think when some of the rest of us were kinda trying to run a show and entertain people, Wesley could always be right there with people. He would take care of their little needs, band-aids and all this little stuff… But this one thing that Wesley did one time—well, he did a lot of things, but this is maybe one of my best river stories besides 1983. We had taken four snout boats and we had a full interchange at Phantom. The people who hiked in were a charter trip from the Boston Museum of Science. I can’t remember who was the head boatman. It wasn’t me. We get down to above Tapeats, and they planned to do this Surprise Valley hike. So I didn’t want to go on a hike. Because I’d already done that hike (laughs). I always say, “You know why they call it Surprise Valley? ‘Cause you’re so surprised that you make it across.” (both chuckle) So all the guys decided they wanted to go on the hike. And we weren’t at the mouth of Tapeats; we were on that beach up above on the right. I said, “Well, you know, I’ll take one of the boats down to Deer Creek, but what about the rest of them? You know, how are you guys gonna do this?” So they proceeded, mostly Wesley, to talk me into taking the four snout rigs from that beach to Deer Creek, letting passengers row the snout rigs. (Steiger: “Hey, you can just take’em down there.”) I said, “Hey,” you know, “this isn’t an easy stretch.” They’d say, “Oh yeah, but well Richard’s been rowing my boat. He’s really good. And his son,” you know. I’m going, “You guys are nuts!” I said, “Do you see that hole out there?” (Steiger: Tapeats Creek, yeah.) I said, “Helicopter Eddy, does that mean anything? This is not as easy at it looks.” Wesley went to work on me, and it took a long time, but he finally just (laughs) it was incredible. You know, he was so, uh, sort of nice about it. He kind of challenged my manhood, or my boating abilities. “Oh, you don’t think you can do this?” Or, you know, it wasn’t sarcastic at all. He was not that way. It was a perfectly calm, logical approach to why I should do this. And it sorta made sense. And, I didn’t wanna be a jerk. Anyway, they talked me into doin’ it. So they go off on the hike, and there was one boat’s worth of old people that were gonna go, so I was gonna row the senior citizen boat. Then these other guys were basically gonna take an empty snout rig. So I got’em all around and smoothed out this big piece in the sand, and I marked, you know, every quarter mile of the river from there down to Deer Creek. I proceeded to tell them… I got little sticks for the boats, and I told them “Now there’s two places you can’t go, between here and there. You can’t go in that hole down there that you see, and further down there’s this big eddy… You can’t go there. Other than that, you’re gonna be fine. Two places you can’t go.” (Laughs) And so I put the boats down, I put four boats down, kind of like in military fashion. “OK, now, this is what we’re gonna do. You’re gonna watch me, and you’re gonna do exactly what I do. You’re gonna get the exact angle that I do, and we’re gonna go into this rapid in formation.” So they’re… Richard was rowing one boat, and there was a teenager rowing another one. There was a guy named Jack, and his young son, he might have been about twelve, was riding on the front of that boat. So I keep repeating, “There’s two places that you can’t go. Just do what I do.” We get out there, and we’re going down, and I’m lookin’ back and man, it’s perfect, just like the Blue Angels, right? So I’m coming down and I’m, you know, kinda of making sure I… coming maybe a bit further right than I should, just to make sure. So I turn to go straight down the rapid, and I look back, and I see the guy turnin’ behind me, you know, and everything is perfect. I look downstream, over at the beach at Lower Tapeats and I see a motoboat over there. But, you know, I don’t pay any attention to it. I look back up, and for some reason, I’ve no idea, Jack has turned his snout rig around and is rowing for the left side. I’ll never know why he did that. I’m just goin’, “Oh no!” So, you know, I had six people. I turned and started rowing for the left bank as hard as I could. I’m part way down. I mean, I’m still a little bit in the tail of the rapid. I’m about even with the lower beach, and I’m not paying any attention to that motor rig, ‘cause I’m watchin’ this guy Jack. He comes, he goes into that hole, that steep hole over on the left side. He goes over it pretty straight. But man, he just gets catapulted out of that boat (laughing) like nobody’s business. He went about eight feet in the air. Then the boat went over I guess there’s that little rock cliff there. The boat goes over and it sticks. There’s a little ledge that goes into the water, and the boat stops. This kid is, you know, on the snout holding on for dear life in the boat. He’s just kinda sitting there. You know, it’s not in any danger, but it’s kinda stuck, and Jack was floating by. So I row to the shore and I tell these old people, “When I hit the beach, you jump off and hold this boat. ‘Cause I’m goin’ up there.” So I get off and I’m runnin’ up there. You know, I got a hundred yards or better to go up there—I tell Dick to get Jack, and that appears like that’s gonna happen—I’m running up to get this boat, and I hear this motorboat fire up. I look over there, and this motoboat is motoring up. It’s the Park Service, American flag. (Laughs) Watching this whole deal. I’m goin, “Oh dear.” So I run up there, and this boat is kinda stuck, and I’m goin’, “Jeez, what am I gonna do here?” And I just kinda run into it, and it slides right off. It was just barely hovering there. So I hop in the rowing seat and take a few strokes, and the motorboat is going “hrrrmrmrm” coming up. I just hop on the boat and kind of lean over on the oars and kinda give a little casual wave to the Park Service, like, you know, “Things are fine.” (Steiger: “No big deal. We’ve got it under control here.”) So we go down, and we gather everybody together. The Park Service goes back to their camp or whatever. I’m goin, “OK,” (laughs) “…let’s try this again. Now there’s only one place between here and Deer Creek that you have to look out for. It’s down there and its a little eddy, and just do what I do… You just don’t wanna get caught in that eddy.” So I get ‘em all lined up again, and we’re working our way down there and… Damn! So the young kid gets caught in Helicopter Eddy. I’m down there a ways and I pull the boat over to the side again. I said, “OK, you guys, you need to hold the boat again.” The other guys kind of floated into the canyon there, so they were gonna be ok. I told them to pull over and wait. So I go runnin’ up there, and I get up on that big slab. (laughs) This kid is goin’ around in that eddy. You’ve seen it. A snout rig caught in that eddy? And I’m just goin’, “Well now, let me see.” I had only one choice. (Steiger: Jump.) I had to wait until it came around, and get a good run at it and jump off the rock onto the boat. Which I did. It was great. It was a monumental leap… It was pretty cool. So anyway, I jumped in, got this kid, rowed down to my boat. I said, “OK, we’re gonna be fine now. It’s just all flat water.” I go and get in my boat and we take ‘em on down, we pull in, and I tie up the boats. (Laughs) And I went up under the ledge—that ledge that you always see pictures of me on, I went up there and hid for about an hour. There was a little thunderstorm later. It was quite a nice day the rest of the day. Wesley! He used to do that to me all the time. Talk me into these things.
***
The hardest part of trying to squeeze Don Briggs into a bqr piece is contemplating the 98% of his stories that had to be left out for space, not least of which (though Briggs personally told them as such) were his epic struggles to make each of the fine films he’s bequeathed us. Someday Don’ll finish reviewing his transcript and it’ll reside in the archives at Cline Library…(maybe someday we’ll find a way to put the whole project on the web). Meanwhile Briggs putters around his new houseboat, scheming on how the heck to raise enough money to do his next film: a biography of Martin Litton done right—one that considers ML’s entire life instead of the relatively narrow slice of it that pertains to river running and the Grand Canyon… (another great American saga that certainly deserves to be told right). For fun Briggs relives the boating experience anew through the eyes of his beautiful daughter Lucy and the children of his old boating cronies, now codgers every one, but still able to grip the oars or paddles or throttles now and again…
You can send tax-deductible donations made out to “Earth Island Institute” to Briggs care of gcrg, or e-mail him about it at donbriggs[at]earthlink.net