had a friend in high school who was two years older than me. He graduated way ahead of me and came back when I was a junior, and said, "Hey, I found a school you oughtta go check out, in Arizona.” A good friend of his had gone to Prescott College. I got the catalog and they had cool pictures—people rock climbin' and stuff. So I went. I don't know if I read the catalog, but they had cool pictures and it was out there, way far from New York, and there were cactus. I thought cacti were cool, so that's where I went.
The first thing that happened when I got to Prescott College, there was a thing they did—they still do, I think—kinda like an Outward Bound course, they take all the freshmen out to rattle their cages a bit; and they took me down Grand Canyon.
Off we went on this really bizarre Grand Canyon trip. We had this kind of wild character who taught at Prescott forever, named Vern Taylor, and Vern was the "Old Man of Grand Canyon.” He'd been down there a bunch; he'd done a lot of travertine studies and he'd take these little yellow duckies and tie two together and go through Grand Canyon in them with another researcher…just wild, you know, smaller than sport-yaks.
But Vern got it in his mind that Prescott needed a motor-rig. He bought one from Ron Smith, a big ole' "S” rig, side tubes and everything, and we had that on our freshman orientation trip. Then we had a paddle boat as well. Some of the kids got to go in the paddle boat, and everybody else sat on the motor-rig; and after a day or two, the boatmen who were runnin' the paddle boat got spooked that they needed these guys who they'd already taught how to paddle, so nobody else got to paddle in it. If you weren't in there in the first day or two, you didn't get in. So I never really got to go in it except one day, I think. But it was weird, because…well, Day One, we were gonna leave, and then neither of the motors worked. But the Quist brothers were there and Vern knew them—and I think it was Bob and Clair— they stayed up all night at that gas station that used to be there at the ramp, fixin' our motors. Meanwhile, the paddle boat had already left.
Steiger: They left before they realized you couldn't start the motors?
Dimock: Yeah. So they were down at Six Mile Wash or something, bivouacking with no gear. Oh, God, then we spent a night at Badger and a night above House Rock, and a night at House Rock, and then I forget how the schedule went from there. But you had to have everything lashed on that motor-rig so that you couldn't move it. Nothing would budge. And we all wore helmets.
Steiger: On the motor-rig! (laughs) Say it isn't so!
Dimock: It's true!…it was an interesting trip. But it really didn't make me think I wanted to go be a boatman or spend much time down there. It did get me interested in geology…So I went back to college, was studying geology, biology, and art. The next year, around Thanksgiving, this guy I'd met workin' in the dish room—we washed dishes—he said, "Hey, I'm goin' down Grand Canyon. We're takin' a private trip down at Thanksgiving. You want to go?” And I went, "Okay.” So we did a paddle trip over Thanksgiving—$#@ing cold Thanksgiving it was, too! Our wet suits froze every night, so we were sleeping on them, puttin' 'em under the sleeping bags so they wouldn't freeze…We did pretty good, but we got down to Granite over Thanksgiving weekend, and Vern had told us that you could not run on Thanksgiving weekend water, so we laid over for four days at Granite, just because he had said we had to. He wasn't even along! (laughter) (Steiger: "Just forget about runnin' on Thanksgiving.”) Yeah, just don't even…The water didn't change a bit for four days, and then we kept going—you know, went on our merry way. Vern also told us we had to portage Lava Falls, so we did. We didn't flip on that entire trip. We all fell out at Pipe Creek, hit a big wave on Thanksgiving Day, and all fell out of the boat, got back in over there on the right somewhere. I don't remember a lot of the runs.
But I got off that trip and got this idea. I had wanted to be on the fire crew with all my buddies, but I was such a weenie-armed geek that I washed out. I couldn't swing an ax right, so I couldn't be on the fire crew with all the cool guys. I said, "Well, maybe I could be a helper on a river company or something.” I figured I could never row, so I applied as a helper to all the motor companies. Of course they didn't write back, except for one. Canyoneers said, "Come on up for an interview.”
So I hitchhiked up to Canyoneers and Gaylord [Staveley] was out that day, as it turned out, but Joan Nevills and Pete Lindemann—Dan's older brother—talked to me for a couple of hours. They hired me as an interpretive assistant. I did my first trip, commercial, in probably June of '73, at twenty bucks a day. I never swamped a trip for free—one of my small claims to fame. Got a raise after my first trip to twenty-five a day, from twenty. Pretty soon I was assistant pilot, and I worked two seasons swampin'—or actually, interpretive assistant and assistant piloting. You're never a "swamper” or a "boatman,” you're an "interpretive assistant.”
In '73, '74, everything I studied at school had to do with Grand Canyon at that point. You know: geology, biology, archaeology, boating, expedition stuff, outdoor leadership. So I kinda got a degree in bein' a boatman; and in '75 I went back for another season of being an assistant pilot, and the lead pilot didn't show up. The day before the trip, I went in to Gaylord and said, "You know, I think I could probably drive the boat if Ed doesn't show up.” Gaylord said, "Well, I think you could, too.” The next day I was trip leader, because Cameron wasn't old enough.

* * *

Tough assignment here—bqr oral history with the guy who actually invented the bqr; and then…thought to publish oral histories in it!
Made tougher by the astounding career Brad has had and continues to have (Prescott College; Canyoneers; Sleight Expeditions; Grand Canyon Dories; Wilderness World; Grand Canyon Youth Expeditions, Sobek, Tour West, gce, azra…he's worked for half the companies in Grand Canyon, and on rivers all over the world.) Since he "retired” he's gone on to re-create some of the coolest trips ever…Buzz Holmstrom, the Hydes, Bert Loper…and he keeps building replicas of these very cool historic boats…no end in sight there…and writing all these great books about their operators….
This endeavor was made tougher still by the fact that the following excerpts came from five or six mostly wee-hour sessions spread out over the last twelve years. Worse, when we started recording them, somebody—it must've been Brad— said "Ok, the whole truth and nothing but the truth!” To which someone—me? said, "Ok, right. We'll just seal them, then. Yeah, that's it. These will be sealed until we're dead.” So we had that going for us throughout.
Brad Dimock gave birth to the bqr and ran the thing practically single-handedly for years on end. He religously took his name off a million things he did in that publication because he thought it was tacky to see it in there more than once, or even at all sometimes. The idea that since he's let go of the bqr and moved on, we can just go ahead and publish stuff from this long old interview we were only going to make public after he and yours truly were both dead has got to be making him squirm like crazy. Sorry, Brad. It's all my fault. And by the way, "Thanks for the memories.”

* * *

Yeah, Cameron [Staveley] was the other Canyoneers boatman. Cam and I ran together for a couple of years. Once he got old enough, he led a lot of the trips. I did a lot of my training under him. He's real quiet, a real good boatman, good driver, read water very well. One day I was drivin', and I was really gettin' it, you know. I was catching a Tour West boat, and they were faster than us. I was really excited, 'cause I was finally gettin' it! For like two hours I was gainin' on this thing, and then I caught one bad swirly, it took me off into an eddy for a minute. Cameron, the first thing he said to me all day, he just looks over, "You're not readin' the water.” (Steiger laughs) (Dimock swears under breath.) Bastard!

* * *

Originally what they would do is take one snout tube and lacerate the front pointy part, that chamber, into about six strips, and then glue 'em onto the back of another snout, so you had this really funky place.
About the time I got to be a pilot, Russ Sullivan came in as the shop manager and over the winter, he tore the rubber all apart, and cut the whole snout part off of the back tube, and cut that first bulkhead off, and then took what would be the second chamber of the snout and pulled it clear up over the back chamber of the forward snout, so it made it six chambers, instead of seven—turned it into a thirty-two-footer. He redesigned the frame…there was more room on the boat than there had been before, even though it was five feet shorter…and really made a pretty tricked-out boat. He built these huge iron hinges instead of the trailer hitches, and those things were bomber! You could put 'em anywhere—we tried!
Oh, yeah, full load, twenty people on each boat. Always ran the hole in Crystal. Always hit the top hole in House Rock, pointed left so that it didn't knock you too far to the right that you couldn't still get off of Pour Over Two—'cause you couldn't not go off both of 'em. You were nobody. We ran everything we could find. We'd run the left edge of the right run at Lava so we could hit that huge crasher at the top of Lava, and still get all the bottom waves. Huntin' for the big stuff.
[The boats] worked. They were so heavy, and especially after Russell worked 'em over, they were so solid they were just about unbreakable and unstoppable. And so they didn't snap and whip around like a lighter boat does, and people didn't fly off 'em. It was just "ka-schperr” It was like a bus. If you snout rode, you flew, you fell off. But we had very few injuries on any of the trips I was on—almost none.
Took one down the left at Bedrock one day. On purpose. That was in '77 [late summer, about 28,000 cfs]. Actually, I think I was pretty good at that point with a motor-rig. I could put it just about anywhere—gently, delicately. Backed down the left side of Bedrock and eased the stern over into that far left eddy, swung the bow past the island, and motored straight out, never touched it. (With feigned braggadocio) "I'm the best boatman in the world!” And then the next day you crash into a rock, "I'm the worst boatman in the world!”
Steiger: That's pretty good, though. You backed in there.
Dimock: Backed down the left. See, it was short enough, it would swing.
Steiger: This is the old Canyoneers boat?
Dimock: This is the thirty-two-footer. So that was the "acne” of my career there.
But in '73, that first year I worked, in midsummer, Prescott College wanted to do an exploratory in Cataract Canyon, and I got word of this, and I wanted to go along, so I took a trip off from Canyoneers and went up and learned to row—Delahunt and I. You know Day? Well, Day and I decided to split a boat, and we both learned to row. (chuckles) All that flat water, and then a couple of rapids, and then flat water. But some people told us what to do. You know, you pull on one and push on the other, and it turns. Tuck in here…We thought that was pretty neat, so we took off down there, and we did pretty well. We went down there, the lake wasn't really full yet. I think there was still a riffle at Gypsum, or near Gypsum. But we went back, and in '74 I did a couple of Diamond Creek trips with Prescott College, rowing. I started to think rowing was actually pretty cool, and maybe I could row. And then in '75, Gaylord said, "I'm starting a rowing program, and I'd like you to head that up, Brad.” I was very flattered. I was the only one in the company who'd rowed, other than Gaylord. So we got these big Maravia Chubascos that were a lot heavier than the ones they built later. It was a heavier material, but classic Maravia seam failure stuff. But we thought those were pretty neat, and we were supposed to go out in a couple of weeks. I said, "You know, I haven't ever rowed through Grand Canyon, and maybe we should do a training trip. Will that be okay?” "Oh, sure.”
So we took off and rowed these things down through, and figured out how to do it, kinda, and went down a couple of weeks later with the folks. [Tim] Cooper was in on that, and myself, and Jim Norton. And we did one a year of those, and I really liked it. So I kinda had gotten this taste for rowing, and I wanted to do some more rowing, and Gaylord was thinking that this wasn't gonna work out, and he was going to phase the rowing program out. To me, it was kinda the death knell for my career there. And more or less, I'd been pretty happy. I was lead pilot by then. Cameron had left to go to school, so I was the top dog at Canyoneers—and doin' some pretty wild stuff in those boats.
But in the spring of '77, the famous low water, when they shut the dam down because of—I forget what it was that year—something.
Steiger: Yeah. Was that because of Rainbow Bridge?
Dimock: I thought that was '73. That was the low water of '73, which is what I was training on originally. My first few trips were big water, and then they shut it down in the fall of '73, and I worked the whole fall, back to back, doin' these just zero water trips. So in '77, they did it again in the spring for some reason, and I got a call from Gaylord, who actually asked for Cooper.
Cooper and I had bought "Leviathan” that winter— '76/'77, this $25,000 tenement from the bad side of Flagstaff—falling down, junk cars, rabid dogs. The whole building rented for $305 a month for five units, total. Coop named it. He was into words. It was big, cumbersome—it was gray, mammoth.
Steiger: It had already been sectioned into apartments?
Dimock: Yeah. It's a historic building, one of the oldest in the county. It was where the first Catholic mass was held. It was built by the guy who later hired these five brothers from back east, name of Babbitt, and then they bought him out. Anyhow, they added on, and added on, and added on. It became a dance hall and a brothel later on, and then a kind of sleazy apartment—which is where we showed up. So we put all the money we had down on it, and had no dough to survive the winter on. We lived on beans and had food stamps. God, we were just destitute. We didn't care.
Steiger: It was such a smart thing to do.
Dimock: Well, it wasn't smart. It turns out that it was a good thing to do, but there was no intelligence involved. We were lucky. Even a blind pig finds an acorn once in a while.
When we first had the building inspector over to see where we needed to go, he said, "Burn it. Burn it down. We'll get the fire department over here, and we'll just burn this thing down. It's the best thing we can do. There's no way you'll ever get this to code. The first thing you'd have to do is rewire it. That'll cost you more than the building's worth.” And then he went away, and we're just kind of goin', (whimpers) "Waa.”
But Coop knew Brian Dierker, and Brian Dierker knew everyone in town. So pretty soon we had some good advice. Anyhow, we rewired the whole building, up to code, and did this and did that, and finally got the thing livable. But in spring of 1977, Coop was off somewhere with his family, and I was home alone. I'd just taken one of the exterior walls off the building, so the rooms were wide open to the street. And I got a phone call. It was Gaylord Staveley, and he asked for Coop, because Coop always just seemed so much more competent than I did. He was so %#!in' cocky, that's why. I said, "Coop's not here. I'm here.” He said, "Well, Ken Sleight just called from Phantom and he needs a boatman tomorrow.”
I just took this huge moldy old piece of carpeting, about twenty feet long, that I had—which I was going to carpet the house with—and nailed it on the side of the building. Just made a wall of carpet over the side of the house, and left for a week or two—I didn't know how long I'd be gone.
Sleight had two trips on the water. One was an eight-day motor trip, and one was a twelve-day rowing trip; and neither one of 'em booked full, so he combined them into a ten-day rowing-motor trip. He had six rowboats and one of 'em had a motor; and then in the flat stuff, they'd tie 'em all together in a six-pack and motor it.
The crew I got put on there with—it's in the Vaughn Short poem—"Kim and Mark the Crumbo two, a couple of Bobs, and a guy named Stu.” It was Kim Crumbo, Mark, his brother—Mark O'Neill now—Bob Whitney, Bob Shelton, who still does an occasional trip for Sleight, Stu Reeder—it's the first time I'd met any of these guys—and me.
I drove up to South Rim and met Crumbo. They had a hotel room. So I met him at the Bright Angel Lodge, and I walked in, and I was really nervous and paranoid. They didn't know who I was. I introduced myself and said I was in charge of Canyoneers' rowing program, and they all burst out laughing. I'm just going, "Oh, *&#, Brad, just shut up and sit down. Don't dig yourself in any deeper.”
So we hiked in at dawn, and I met Ken and Vaughn Short. I'd never met either of them. They were hiking out. That's where the poem ends, Vaughn's poem. And off we went. It was kind of—I hadn't rowed that much. I had rowed for Staveley, rowing those Chubascos for a couple of years. But all told, I'd probably done five or six river trips in a rowboat. And here we were on about 1,500 cfs—Horn Creek, 1,500 cfs. It was wild.
But actually, I did okay. I did pretty good, really. What I didn't realize was that as soon as Ken started walking out, Stu Reeder immediately abandoned his boat and took Ken's, because Stuart had a bad boat. It was a brand new Rubber Fabricators Salmon. Nice boat, bad glue, and the thing just leaked everywhere. By the time you got loaded and ready to go, it was already gettin' down towards marshmallow. So I pumped it frantically, all trip long.
We got down through a lot of stuff, saw some things I'd never seen before, and will never see again, probably, down there. (Steiger: Did you guys go far right in Horn Creek?)
We tried to, yeah. Stu went off that falls. You know that big hole that used to be at the bottom of Horn Creek, that really isn't there anymore, it's just a wave now.
Steiger: The big hole?
Dimock: The wall. That wasn't even there, it was too low for that. That was a falls, sort of going over, and we had to go right of that—sort of a ghost run. Granite was just a rock pile. Hermit was pathetic. Crystal was just rocks—no real scary #*@$% out there, you know. Serpentine was nasty, nasty, nasty, though—just a ledge. Two-thirds of the way down you had to thread it in just the right place. There was a rapid about a mile below Deer Creek, where right now it's just sort of a riffle that goes down the right side, runs along the Tapeats—not much of a riffle at all: had the biggest @#! hole in it you ever saw, almost flipped Bob Whitney. Huge hole. But we got down to Lava, and Whitney and I had decided we were running right, down this series of waterfalls: crash, crash, crash—and the rapid was over by about halfway through. But Crumbo—and he always has been this way—never would go for the big stuff. He'd always go for the rock run. He and the other guys went over there, and started scoutin' the left. There was this pinball run down there. But it was there. Whitney and I scouted the right, they scouted the left. We got ready to go, came back up, and the passengers are runnin' around, "Brad, Brad, your boat blew up!” Apparently it scared some of the people half to death, because it went off like a canon. The whole front end had de-laminated, right at the bulkhead. So you've got four chambers, and two of 'em blew up at once, of the main boat. And of course no self-bailing floor. There's no fixin' it. And that took the wind right out of our sails.
So we thought about it for a bit, and then Whitney and I de-rigged. This was back in the early days of hauling out crap, and the idea was, that since it was so disagreeable, everybody had to have one can. (Steiger: There was a good idea.) That was a good idea, huh? (laughter) Everybody had some of the garbage, and some of the crap. We just started rearranging everything, and put all the crap and all the garbage on my boat, and just made it into something that was expendable. Then we rolled it up—the whole dead front end—rolled it up, 'til it rolled right up, and rolled a thwart tube in it, so it was a little round boat. Moved the frame way back, so I had this little round boat that was really heavy on one end.
Steiger: And the frame is probably just two-by-sixes, or somethin'?
Dimock: Oh, no, two-by-tens. Big, heavy, two-by-tens, red. And pins, of course. But they were these things that a lot of those Utah guys were rowing that was a solid yoke, iron yoke, with a pin right through the oar. And then you bungeed that down so there's no way that it could come off. You know, it just broke, or ripped the oar lock apart—the oar stand, which was a bunch of boards. So then I got in Whitney's boat, and we just towed my boat out and let it go. It had a beautiful run on the right, and we went down the pinball run, down the left.
We finished that trip on schedule—two days behind the original schedule—but on the new post-Phantom schedule we made it on time. And by then I'd decided I wanted to go work for Sleight.

* * *

I got along really well with Ken Sleight. I worshipped him. I mean, I thought he was so cool. I thought the world of him. He was kind of a cowboy—tall, lean, womanizin' kind of a guy. Never had his #*@$% together; was always scattered from here to there, and was just tryin' to pull it together at the last minute. And he drank a bit, and didn't live anywhere. He lived in the cab of a two-ton truck. He honestly did. He did not have a house. (Steiger: No property?) He had a house that he bought from Stu Reeder in Green River, Utah, the south end of Long Street. Yeah. Stuart, when he worked for Mackay, I guess, had bought this little hovel for a couple thousand bucks in Green River. And then he sold it to Ken. But Ken didn't have a bedroom in it. It was just his office.
Steiger: So Ken's stuff was just in his truck, and he was just forever on the road?
Dimock: He didn't have any stuff. Ken was in his truck. He'd sleep on the road. It was the damnedest thing. And he still does it, he drives all night. He'll show up somewhere to give a talk. I'll say, "Why don't you come over to the house tonight?” "No, I'm drivin' to Green River.” Off he'd go into the night. You'd swear you'd never see him again. "Seldom Seen.” Creature of strange habits. But a really neat guy. He was goin' into some real hard times, I think, then, because that was the year they outlawed fires in Grand Canyon, and that just crushed him…That year they outlawed fires, and Ken made this tearful, impassioned speech on behalf of wilderness and fires and camping out. It fell on deaf ears at the Park Service. He ran that next year, but then he sold his company to Mark [his son], and kept his Desolation permit for a little while, and then he sold that, and just sort of vanished from the face of the Earth.
But he's back, he's Ken again. I've seen a lot of him in the last four or five years, and we get along just great, still. He's the sweetest person—completely selfless. He's like a lot of those real hero types, you know, like Martin [Litton]—They may have this wild charisma and a lot of personal faults, but they live for the cause, and that's Sleight all over the place. He lives for the cause, for the fight. He's run for office a few times. He said, "The thing you want to remember if you run for office is never run for anything you might win.” (laughter) Just get up there and say what you believe, and get those viewpoints out there, and get a few votes. For God's sake, don't win.

* * *

After that first trip with the Sleight boys, Brad went back to work for Canyoneers and then the next year got on with Sleight Expeditions and Martin Litton's Grand Canyon Dories too…This isn't going to be a comprehensive Brad history, by a long shot. We racked up almost three hundred pages and didn't even touch on several of his more well-known exploits…i.e., the first successful descent of the flooding Little Colorado, with Tim Cooper, who tells a pretty good rendition of it in Christa Sadler's new "There's This River;” or the first, or was it the second? descent of Tapeats Creek, with duct-tape helmets and the Dories' Metzler canoe, which they risked life and limb to accomplish, only to find out afterwards that Dugald Bremner had beaten them to it a couple days earlier. Or was that vice versa? We never even mentioned the three-day speed run in one little Callegari with Carol Fritzinger, Kyle Kovalik and Helen Yard in 1983 on about 50,000 cfs…

* * *

The high water, '83 through '86, was really almost as intense as anything that's ever happened in my life. To run dories through the gorge at 40,000–50,000 [cfs]…again and again and again and again and again…And I was usually leading. At that time I lead almost all the trips that I was on. Tremendous amount of responsibility, and working with the dynamic of the crew, you know, having the big heavy meeting a few days before Crystal of "how do you guys want us to handle Crystal?” Because Crystal was almost impossible in a dory at that level. I mean, the odds were you would make it, but there was no guarantee. It got almost everyone. It didn't get Rudi [Petschek], and Eric [Sjoden] didn't get knocked over. Almost everybody else went over. (Steiger: At some point.) Yeah. I think Rudi went over elsewhere. But Crystal, I will never forget the intensity of that, because there was no entry. The feeder wave comin' off the right shore was so tall. I remember the first time I really went down and looked at it, there was something horribly wrong with it. If you looked at it from the front, it just looked like a regular breaking wave that you could pop through. But if you went to the back, and looked at the back side of that wave, none of that water was coming towards you—it was all going sideways. It was in a lateral stall. And if you busted through the initial foam of that, and didn't have any momentum, you'd still get carried. You could surf on the backside of the goddam thing. The water stopped dead. Lookin' at it, straight down at it from the sky, you could see why that was, because the river was turning very sharply there, and somehow you just didn't notice that from the shore. But the river was turning right back, and the water was pooled way over on the right, and just rushing off to the left. And that explosion wave was moving sideways. You couldn't get through it very often, or very dependably. Like I said, most boats didn't flip, but it was not at all unusual to flip one or two or three boats on a day at Crystal with that kind of water.
Steiger: What were the techniques?
Dimock: Row like a bastard into it. I wish to hell I knew as much then as I do now. I'd push it just to see…I don't think it'd work, but it'd probably work as good as pullin' did. Because if your angle wasn't absolutely precise, you were doomed. And so most people, when they didn't make it, they were maybe a little off. But a lot of people were dead straight into it, and they still didn't make it…It was really intense, and what we came up with was a system that sort of evolved. I don't think any one person was in charge of it. People were walking, and we would go through with two boatmen in a dory. One would high-side and one would row. Once you got that boat to shore, below, whether you flipped or not, then the two of you would come back, and the other one would row their boat. And so it was this bonding thing. And a lot of that was never decided 'til on the hill at the scout. You'd just kind of look at somebody and go, "You wanna go with me?” "Yeah, let's do that.” And we'd pair off. It was something that the passengers were not really included in at all—just incredibly high energy, high anxiety, high tension deal—a very elemental thing. And when we were through, we were so high on that. More, certainly, than the people who had been sweating in the sun, and then marching for half a mile across hot rocks, to get back to the boats. But it was obvious enough when we were out there, what we were going through. Almost always it was not a problem. It wasn't divisive in the trip. I think a couple of times some people were pissed off. We usually gave 'em a good enough show. We couldn't take 'em. It was just negligent to even consider takin' people out there. We came so close a couple of times to the worst case scenario, which was being cut in half by your boat in the rock island, 'cause they're hard boats, and unless you had 45,000 [cfs] or more, there were rocks out in the island that you could hit, and we did hit. We busted boats into a million pieces. If you were in the water when that happened—I don't know how many people thought about that—I thought about it every time, every minute I was out there—just the thought of being crushed to death (snaps fingers) like that, or cut in half, or somethin'. You were risking your life if you're on the downstream side of a boat. If it hit you against a rock, it would kill you—I'm just sure of it. So, you know, everybody, I'm sure, had their own things. But I was pretty hardwired to be on the bottom of the boat like that. And I almost always was, just almost instantly on the bottom. (Steiger: Went through a few flips, though.) Yeah. Not so many in Crystal, but I was in several flips, and some really, really horrible runs in Crystal. I went with some people that had some pretty bad rides, and I had a few myself. We cracked the Mono Lake just about in half out there one day.
You'd make that entry, and either it would work, or it wouldn't—and usually it wouldn't, it seemed like, at 40,000 cfs—you just couldn't get through it. Then it was: do you flip there in that feeder wave, or do you get surfed out and flip in the Land of the Giants going down towards the big hole? The big hole was still there, and it was huge. That flipped a lot of boats, because once you're in the Land of the Giants, you are goin' into that hole, no matter what. There was no way around it, you're goin' in. Then it was just ka-bloom! That run I remember on the Mono Lake, goin' in there sideways. And just boom! You're just gettin' beat to hell, and just out there [high-siding], across the gunnel, hitting that thing, and just flying up, and then the whole thing just falling back into the hole, and doing it again. And then there's (boosh!) coming out the side like a melon seed. (Steiger: This is you in the Mono Lake?) That's me and Ron Thompson, who was the boatman. He was washed out. I went and grabbed him, put him back at the oars. (slaps hands together) Washed him out again. Pulled him in again, just as we were about to hit Big Red at the bottom of the rock island, and I just got on one oar and pulled for all I was worth, to try and pivot away from the thing. We hit just off center, and just tore the guts out of the boat, then pivoted off it. Aluminum boat. Split it in two. It just cracked the whole side open, in the chines. A weld ripped. It ripped along the chines, and it ripped the bulkhead—almost sank it. We got it in below Crystal, above Tuna, and floated it up with thwart tubes, because it turns out they didn't weld the bulkhead between the two side hatches to the bottom of the foot well. So the water could go from foot well to foot well, once it was a foot deep. I guess it didn't rip a bulkhead into the crosshatches—it might have sunk it…So we filled those with thwart tubes and inflated 'em and rowed it to Bass Camp and laid over, gave Ron the sledge hammer and some earplugs. And Bass Camp rang all day. Boom! Boom! Boom!
Steiger: He pounded the dents out?
Dimock: Well, pounded it close enough we could duct tape it shut. Yeah. Just hundreds of layers of duct tape.
…Those were wonderful, wonderful times. It was nothing you enjoyed doing, but to have done those runs at Crystal with those people…
Steiger: You said two days in advance you'd have a crew meeting?
Dimock: Sometimes a couple days, sometimes maybe the night before at Granite…"Do you want to do it before or after lunch? Do you want to do this? Do you want to do that? Do you want to make teams now?” We made some mistakes early on. I used to team up with Mitch sometimes, who's taller than I am. The two of us could right a boat in a second, with our height. But then we had a boat with two little teeny guys on it, that couldn't get it up. And, "Oh! the tall guys should go with the short guys.” Yeah, like Kenton is in a bad way when he's upside down. He does not have the altitude, the leverage, to turn a boat up. I righted one myself once, in Hermit. (Steiger: All by yourself?) Yeah, it got knocked over in the fourth wave, and it was just one of those "catch the gunnel and start up.” I think I was standing on the gunnel, about to go up on top, and there was another big wave. I think I just had a rope and pulled it up. Just went (ka-wham!). Sounded worse than it was. I wish I could think of more to say about runnin' Crystal in that water.
Steiger: How about that day when Elena [Kirschner] was rowin' the baggage boat?
Dimock: Oh, God! I don't remember the whole day that well, exactly who was doin' what. I might have the notes somewhere. We had probably six dories. Elena was just getting her training wheels, she was runnin' the raft, which was a big Avon Spirit. I think we had a real frame on it by then—yeah, we had a Big Fella aluminum frame and cooler, and a reasonable load of baggage—heavy, but reasonable. We had three people that wanted to go first run. I said, "Okay, I'll ride with somebody.” And so I rode through with Elena. She wanted to go in the first group. Is that it? I think that's it, yeah.
Well, it didn't work out, anyhow. We went left, come plowin' into that lateral, and it would just clobber ya', it would kill ya', it'd stop ya', half the time flip ya'. We didn't flip, but we filled up and surfed out into the Land of the Giants, and just all hell broke loose. I don't remember exactly the details of how badly we got beaten up, but we got pretty well trashed out there. Didn't hit Big Red in the rock island…I just started bailing, and bailing, and bailing, and bailing, and bailing, with a big five-gallon pickle bucket, and watchin' the shore go by. Elena was pullin' for all she was worth for the right shore, and not getting there. We went by Thank God Eddy, the other three dories are in there. My dory's still above the rapid, and we're headin' for Tuna. I just kept bailing and watching the shore until I saw—there's this barrier that's really a bitch to get around, to climb. I saw it coming. I said, "Elena, we'll see ya',” and just dove in and swam ashore. That's when she started to hate me. (laughs)
Steiger: No she was impressed by that. I remember, 'cause she told me that story. Did you have to swim very far, do you remember?
Dimock: I have no idea. The things that were done out there a lot of times were—you know, you had so much adrenalin in you.
Steiger: According to Elena—it was "Gotta go, darlin'.”
Dimock: Had to leave.
Steiger: There she was, all by herself on this unbelievably full boat, which I guess she got it in above Tuna.
Dimock: She got it in above Tuna. And she counted the buckets of water, and we later calculated it was more weight than a Volkswagen she bailed out of that thing. That bottom end would have been like this, full of water…So I swam ashore, and hiked all the way back to the top of the rapid, got my partner, and went down and ran Crystal.
Then another day, we got there, another six-boater, and I forget how this happened, but it ended up Mike Davis and I both had to go through three times, 'cause we had a couple people that either got beat up in the first run, or just didn't feel up to it. Boy, that was exhausting. And Mike was in a flip, too, I think on his second run through, with Kenly. That's the trip we camped at Tuna, on the right at about 45,000 [cfs]. It was time to stop, there were about 500 trips ahead of us. There were no camps below. I had a great hike, went way the hell up Tuna Creek. God, what a beautiful place.
Steiger: Dugie has a picture of you…
Dimock: Me and Mitch.
Steiger: Vertical in the new wave, I think it is, muddy water. Yeah, you in the Skagit. I don't know if that rings a bell or not. I remember seein' one of those…Unbelievably violent.

Dimock: God, it was so huge. I consider myself really lucky to have been that age, at that level of skill, of resilience, of strength, right then, in dories. I mean, rafts were gettin' creamed there, too, but somethin' about it…It was scary enough in rafts—I was freelancin' still—but in the dories it was just intense—really, really intense.
Steiger: I remember hearin' stories about Regan [Dale] and those guys with their combat boots—those Vietnam ones.
Dimock: Well, he wore those from the seventies. We wore helmets. (Steiger: Not a bad idea, either.) It started to get to—I mean, at first the married men started bringin' 'em, and then we all started goin', "You know, I'm not proud, I'll wear a helmet out there today.” And then Kenton, of course, had his whole outfit, which took him quite a while to get into—wet suit and helmet and pads and bumpers and boots. But he had a whole series of flips. He had like ten years or something without a flip, and then he couldn't keep it right side up to save himself…I think Kenton thought he couldn't flip for a long time, and believed it so hard that he didn't, maybe. Then once he knew he could flip, maybe he lost his conviction. I don't know. Kenton was really good. I think he actually slipped a notch for a while, but now that he's in his pushmobile, I think he's gotten really good again…
But it was so cool to be there, doin' that. And the crews had gotten very, very tight—a very tight family. Some of us went through various major emotional crises during the eighties. ‘'85 was big, a lot of mitosis going on there, people splitting apart and rejoining with other best friends' girls. Versa visa. I was in the thick of that, and found out how much support I really had from some of those people who I didn't really know that before. It was really pretty touching, in a way, to find out how much that group of people took care of each other. It's amazing. Still is. It's still out there. It's a lot more dilute. We've got a huge trip together this summer—a seventy-two-person trip on the Snake. It's almost entirely that crowd and their families.

* * *

I know, we should backtrack a little, back to '85. During all this incredible high energy, I was also breaking up with my girlfriend of seven years…Carol Fritzinger. And that was pretty hard on both of us. By that fall, I was a bit of a mess. I'd got involved with a bunch of other gals, and just was runnin' around like a chicken with my head cut off, didn't know what I was doing, really depressed, and working pretty hard at drinking my way out of it, with a fair amount of success, actually, at times. (Steiger: Self-medicating.) Yes. But I did a lot of off-season trips with the early science—Humphrey Summit Associates, workin' with Tom Moody and Mike Yard and Brian [Dierker] and [Steve] Carothers. Some real neat trips. But on one of 'em, in the fall of 1985, an oars trip pulled in, and this guy, Mike Boyle, was on it, who I barely knew. But even if you barely knew Boyle, you were his best buddy, he was just the greatest guy—one of the world's great boatmen, I always thought. He said, "Well, what the @#!'s wrong with you, Dimock? What's your problem? You know what you need? You need to come down to Chile. Come kayak along on one of our Bio Bio trips.” I said, "Yeah? Yeah, that's a great idea!” I didn't think much of it for a while. And then I decided that yeah, maybe I should. He'd given me his address, and I wrote him, and he had me call Sobek. Sobek said, "Sure, come on down, we've got kayaks here, and you pay your $200 training fee,” or whatever, "and you can go along.”
I got this idea I was just gonna go on a little walkabout, and try and get my #*@$% back together, take my self-help books, and go down and spend a couple months in Chile, where I didn't speak the language, and see what happened—which was a really scary thing for me to do. I remember I was absolutely petrified when we landed in Colombia, and I couldn't find my plane. I had to switch planes. Couldn't speak the language.
Anyhow, I went down there just after Christmas in 1985, and fell in with the Sobek boys, who at the time were Gary Lemmer and Jim Slade and—!@#, who else was on it? I can't remember at the moment. I should. But they kind of put up with me. They didn't know who I was—some dory flake. Lester—Alistair Bleifuss—was on that first trip. We went off to go down the Bio Bio, and I was in an old Hollowform kayak. Started workin' on learnin' a few words of Spanish, and paddlin' along with these guys who somehow got it in their mind that I knew what I was doing enough in a kayak that they didn't have to watch me—which was really disconcerting, because I was in over my head in a few spots, I thought.
But immediately, when we got on the river, I realized that, you know, "I wonder if they ever needed to hire somebody else in the next two months, if they'd consider hiring me?” And then I heard a rumor. Well, Mike Boyle, who I'd come down to see, had gotten crushed in Lava South a few months earlier, and had been flown back to the States, so there was going to be an opening…Yeah, between the boat and the wall at Lava South—broke his sternum. So he wasn't even there. So there was this chance of another boatman maybe being hired the next trip, and I was just so excited to be out of the United States, away from this life that was not really doing that well for me. I'd stay up until after everybody else was asleep, partyin' with people, and laughin'. I'd be up an hour before anybody else got up, makin' coffee and takin' it to everybody. That made big points, by the way. (Steiger: Yeah, the old swamper trick.) The old swamper trick. Make sure you're the first one up, coffee's ready, all those things. And don't make any noise. I was the ultimate swamper, just runnin' around, tryin' to take care of everything I could, and help out, and be there, and be the life of the party, tell everybody funny jokes. I was havin' a ball. I just got my ass kicked in Lava South, too—went bouncin' down the wall, upside down, and came flounderin' out of there, and paddled up to 'em, and I'm goin', "Jesus Christ, you see what happened?” And they're goin', (shouts) "Help us goddammit! We need oar stands!” A couple of 'em had sheered oar stands off on the wall, and they were headed into the next rapids. All of a sudden I was rescuing them, paddling from boat to boat with oar stands and Allen wrenches and carrying ropes. At the end of the trip they said, "Well, you're rowin' next trip.” I said, "Fine. I'd be happy to.” And so the next trip I was a boatman for Sobek. On the Bio Bio.
Steiger: Which nobody else was doin' then, huh?
Dimock: No. There were maybe one or two Nantahala trips a year…But that was really, really, really exciting for me, because I fell in with a crowd of boatmen who were very senior to me in that realm, that type of boating. Stan Boor, Butch [Carber], [Jim] Slade, Bart Henderson.
Steiger: What do you mean "that type of boating”?
Dimock: High gradient rubber boating, very technical, dangerous stuff. Class V. Occasionally Class VI, I think, at Lava South. There was a move there that was about as bitchin' as that same one at Crystal, you know, at high water. There's the move, fat chance you're gonna make it. If you're damned lucky and hit it just right, you might make it…Oh, God. There was this huge, house-size rock—entry move that you have to get left of, and then you'd come back beneath it, and then hug that boulder bar as you went down into the maw of death. Then there was a big guard rock, and then a big ski jump rock, and you wanted to go "over there.” But there was no way it could conceivably be done, unless you were in the perfect position, with the perfect momentum, and damned lucky. Bart and I, we came up with it. Well, Bart had said he had seen a paddle boat go there once, which is a whole different thing. He said, "Well, there's gotta be a way around doin' this goddam down-the-wall bull#*@$%.” And so we looked at it that next trip, and just looked, and looked, and looked, and looked, and looked, and looked, and looked. There was one place you could stand, where you could see that maybe it was hypothetical. Anywhere else you looked, it was obviously impossible, couldn't be done in a rowboat. But we went, and we did it. (Steiger: You guys both made it?) Yeah. I think there are people who got really good at it. I got pretty good at it. We were better than fifty-fifty on it. It was really good. A lot of times you'd go right off that ski jump rock. Once I just jumped it straight ahead, and just slid down the back side. But that was fine, 'cause you missed the hole, you didn't go into the wall. But that was about as intense as Crystal, only we were takin' people through it, 'cause that was the company way. I would tell people, "If I had a choice, I would not go through it as a passenger. I think it's pretty dangerous.” But people wanted to do it. There was a lot of macho, sort of ingrained in Sobek…I think that's probably changed now, but there were a lot of pretty eager beavers.
The one thing that opened my eyes to it was that very trip, when we invented that new run, Bart and I…we went down there, and we had a charter trip of river runners, who knew it was beyond their capabilities. They were, you know, Class III, Class IV boaters. But we figured they're all gonna want to ride through this. They came down and looked at it, and talked for a while, and pointed at things. They said, "We're all walkin'. This is not a good rapid to be in a boat.” "You're smart.” It was tough. But God, other than that, we had so much fun…I feel really, really lucky to have been on two big waves, to have caught two of the great rides: Sobek at its peak, and Grand Canyon Dories at its prime.
It was fun to be at the two extremes of boating, you know—running a wooden boat in really huge, huge, huge hydraulic water, and running a rubber boat in really steep, boulder drop, vicious water. (Steiger: Millions of rocks.)…Yeah, that's as good as I ever was.
The Bio-Bio was a heart-breaker in the end. That's my own little glimpse into what it must have felt like for the people who used to run Glen Canyon. The Bio Bio wasn't Glen Canyon, but it was a place I really fell in love with. Had some wonderful, wonderful experiences there—and then to see it destroyed was just really sad. There were some places that I really got into down there, that were sort of trademark things that "we do on Brad's trips.” One of 'em was a place that was about a half a mile from one of the camps down towards the end of the trip, where you walk up back along a dirt road and up into this side canyon that was kind of like Upper Elves, only way more water, which is this amphitheater with a thousand waterfalls and ferns and flowers and fuchsia. It was unbelievable. It's "the prettiest place in the world,” is what we called it. And people agreed, you know, we'd go in there. A few years after I quit, somebody—I think it was Bruce Keller—came up and said they were camped below there, and watched them dynamite that. They blew it up. They blew up that whole place. For gravel. Oh, God, did that hurt. I just had to go lie down. I can't believe they would do #*@$% like that. And it was just incredible.

* * *

Oh, I'd always loved publishing. I never really got too involved with it, but I always loved it. When I was a little kid, we had these hand-crank ditto machines that made those little purple things, and I always liked to hang around those. I liked office supply stores. There was just this penchant. (laughs) When I was in high school, three of us had an underground newspaper for about a year—"Gintaag” it was called. It didn't mean anything at all. We got quite a bit of acclaim in high school for being…We weren't really rabble rousers, we were sort of more philosophical. Then I didn't do much more with it in college. I got involved with their newspaper for a month or two but drifted off. Did a lot of photography, graphic design, and an awful lot of boating…So when I came to gcrg, they had this newsletter, and [Tom] Moody just sort of dragged me into it. At the same time, I had kinda taken over a little occasional publication that the dory guides did called The Hibernacle News, and I did my first one of those in Flagstaff after the company moved. I learned how to run a Macintosh and pretty much took it over from Moody. Then we got a bigger Macintosh, and I got a bigger program, and I just kept learning and learning—editing, formatting. I've been kinda the editor and chief for a couple of years now. What used to be a little mimeograph sheet, now it's a thirty-six-page magazine—ridiculous, out of hand, out of control, but it's fun. I enjoy that, and I'm trying to teach Shane Murphy how to do that now [1994] and pass a lot of that off 'cause I think it's dangerous for one person to identify themselves with a cause like gcrg too much, or for other people to identify, to start to mix one person with an organization, like Dave Brower being the Sierra Club. It was good at the time, but it's probably better for both of 'em to separate a little, I don't know.

* * *

In terms of rowing technique and what I know about it…I think it'd be good to talk to a few others: people like Regan [Dale] and Andy [Hutchinson], people who are pushing their own personal envelopes with rowing.
Steiger: Well, it's amazing how there are different schools of thought, and how much more is known. You look at kids startin' today, and how…I think they don't even—you'd never realize how much you're bein' saved from, just by virtue of gettin' to go with people that already went through so much—not havin' to reinvent the wheel.
Dimock: Well, yeah. I mean, I can—and this isn't really about me, it's just about the knowledge that's out there—I found that with a new guide, when I was the old trip leader and had some young guides I was workin' with, I could teach them something just in a rapid scout that took me ten, fifteen years to figure it out, of just bangin' my head and my boat and passengers against the wall, over and over again. You know, like how do you get through Granite right-side up in a dory?…And how to get through Dubendorff. The reason that you miss that run over and over again—I didn't know why for a long time—'cause that's not an eddy. That water's flowing right through that island, and out into the hole. So people punch in there, and they sit on it, and they're gone. They think they're in an eddy, they think they're in slow water next to an island. Even Holmstrom saw it, he describes it. The water is flowing out of that island and heading left. So it's just deceptive. Things like that. How to hold onto your oars. And that's true, I think, in all the aspects of guiding—how to deal with people, how to do this hike, how to set things up safely at a major rapid—stuff we had to figure out that took us so long to figure out. I think all of us, all people, fight change to some extent, so it takes a long time to make these changes, unless you're with a pretty loose group in trip protocol. But God, nowadays, somebody new comin' into the system, and you've got these boatmen on the trip who everybody from Drifter Smith to these hot young people that came in and learned from really top-notch boatmen, and got really good, really fast. That wasn't there when I started, really.
Steiger: Yeah. Fred Burke does a trip with Ted Hatch—he does one trip, and then the next thing you know, Ted needs a bunch of boatmen, because he's got a big ole' Sierra Club trip, and Ted says, "Here, Fred, drive this boat for me. You've been down there, you know what to do! Follow Dennis Massey.”
Dimock: Yeah.
Steiger: "Just follow Dennis.”
Dimock: I learned from Danny Lindemann—he drove a decent boat. And Cam Staveley, who was seventeen. They were like God to me. I mean, they knew everything. But they did not have many trips under their belt, and they were figurin' it out as they went along. We'd never heard of Matkatamiba Canyon, we didn't know what was beyond the first pool at Havasu. We knew a couple of camps and used 'em pretty regularly. Could barely get the boat rigged within two, three hours after the passengers showed up at the Ferry. We were still flailing.
It's interesting to sort of follow the history of the boating community from the time I showed up, to where it is now. When I showed up, I remember this one outfitter—I was headed to Vernal—I said, "Anything I can do for you up there?” He goes, "Yeah, firebomb Ted Hatch's warehouse.” Just in jest, but there was no, or very little, company-to-company camaraderie. There were a few people who had friends in other companies because of their schedules or something. But mostly, from the perspective that I saw, there was very little camaraderie. There was no open hostility, you didn't mess with people, but that was Tour West, and that was Hatch, and Western…very separate. And it came slowly, but it came, I think, in the early 70s, with this huge explosion of river running around '69, '70, '71, when a lot of us showed up for the first time. All of a sudden, there were a zillion of us goin' down there.
But one of the things I saw change it was the beginning of what was then the bts, the Boatmen Training Seminar. The early ones were up at South Rim, and we went up there and camped out in, I think, probably the Mather Campground. I met these people like Dennis Silva and O'Connor Dale and people from different companies. Bob Whitney. We all got together and, "Hey, we're all in the same boat. Hey, we've got great stories. Hey.” And it started to happen. I saw a lot of it happen at the training seminars, where you just put 'em all in the same bucket and stir it. We did one early on—I think it was in the seventies—up at Lonely Dell—one of the last events where they actually let people stay there. We all camped. Again, this big hodgepodge of boatmen from every company. And you go, "Wow! A Western boatman who's really cool! A Tour West guy who's not a Martian!” Developing these connections. You'd know one person in that company, and so pretty soon you knew a few. And it started to grow. I just tried as hard as I could to get on every guide training seminar, every guide training trip that I could get on. Not only the camaraderie, but the information you were getting, doing trips with Bill Breed and Steve Carothers and Art Phillips and Bob Euler and Carl Tomoff—all those guys. I did probably ten or twelve of those. I got a tremendous amount of information. I would hound them all day long, follow 'em around, sit around at night, ask 'em questions.
Steiger: I remember the whole motor/rowing thing kind of isolated…I was workin' for arr, motor company, and I thought that the controversy kind of made it worse for a while there. There was a point where people weren't really speaking to each other. And there I give Kim Crumbo credit, 'cause it seemed like right after that settled down a little bit…I remember goin' on this bts trip that Crumbo ran—he organized it. My first experience with it was he got Fred [Burke] to donate a boat, and Fred wanted me to drive it. I was like, "Go on a Park Service trip? As a volunteer? No way! I'm not goin' down there on a Park Service trip for free! You're gonna hafta pay me!” (laughs) And then I get there, and it was one of the best trips I ever did in my whole life. Within five minutes of being there it was like, "This is so cool!”
Dimock: Oh, they're fabulous. They're fabulous.
Steiger: It really did—there was that shift where all of a sudden we were all kind of in it together. Then I guess gcrg was kind of another little…
Dimock: Well, Grand Canyon River Guides didn't come along 'til the late 80s. And it was already happening in the 70s and early 80s. Another thing that I saw really change the isolation was '83, '84, '85, the big water. All of a sudden we were pretty damned glad to see each other. When we'd get to Crystal we'd go, "Hey, you guys runnin' second? We'll wait below.” Or, "Would you wait below for us, until we get a couple boats through here?” You know, boats were gettin' swept away, and it just became increasingly clear that we were all in the same boat. And it was good. Every bond you made with another company, it was good for everybody. Then I think the next real step was Kenton's boat club [Grand Canyon River Guides (gcrg).] Which was a little contentious at first, because Kenton is such a figure. It took a little while to really draw people in. But one of the great saving graces there that I saw was when [Tom] Moody came in, who was just a genius at being all inclusive. And when we got a couple issues that we could all unite behind…
Steiger: Really safe issues for the whole—I mean, who doesn't want to save the Grand Canyon? We don't have to be a union!
Dimock: There was "Save the Grand Canyon,” the banishment of Bego for fireworks. They were threatening to basically ban him as a career boatman. And the other one I think was a new alcohol guideline that interpreted by a bad ranger could basically ban a boatman for life for havin' a beer, or being said to have a beer while on duty. And everybody fought like hell on that, and really brought that group together. It was about that time that the guide training trips were about to be dropped by the Park Service. I think it was Kenton I remember saying, "Well, we'll take over. Grand Canyon River Guides will take on the burden of doing that, of trying to raise the money from the outfitters,” and took it over. We struggled to make 'em the biggest and the best for a long time, before a lot of us went out in flames from workin' so hard. We had a big blooming of the old school of boaters. It's basically like throwin' the biggest party of your life. We were doin' three-day gts's at that point. But they were huge melting pots of people. And runnin' the river trips every year, and every year it built on this whole community of boatmen that began to come together. I kind of began to focus on it at a certain point. I guess we should talk about it a bit. To me, that was hugely important, was that community. When I got involved with gcrg, there was something missing from their mission statement, I thought, and it was about community. We struggled and struggled with it—and is it still in the bqr? I can't remember. It was something like "celebrating the unique spirit of the guiding community.”
Steiger: So that was you that wanted to put the goals on the masthead? Or was that Moody?
Dimock: [Moody]had the first three. Then I came up and struggled for that fourth one. We all came up with the language. To me, there were a couple of things going on with the community, and one was that there wasn't much pride in it. A lot of boatmen…You know, I mean pride with other boatmen, but to your family, to other people, you're pissin' your life away on the river. I wanted to try and draw in the historical aspects, and printing the interviews was how to do that: Here's a very cool person who pissed his life away on the river and just, helped change lives…And so as I got more and more involved with gcrg, that was always one of my main things. I had to go to the stupid meetings, and I had to fight irritating issues…But what I really liked was pushing towards community, having the gts be as big and broad as it could, getting everybody on the river, not just a couple of companies—and writing about it. To me, that's been my favorite project, and I feel like things have happened a lot in that area, to where that boatmen's bond has really become, I think, bigger and stronger as a result.
Steiger: Yeah, that's kinda comin' in handy now that we're gettin' old and fallin' apart here.
Dimock: Well, it is. With Whale's suicide, and the birth of this Whale Foundation—it was another one of those ideas. At first I think it was [Bob] Grusy and Robby Pitagora and a couple others are going, "Well, great idea, but what are you gonna do?” And they have taken that thing by the horns and it is tremendous what they're doing. They're savin' lives—with a couple other people who are mostly nameless. I've just heard tales from Sandy [Reiff] and some of the others involved, and they're basically takin' the gun out of their hands, metaphorically—people who are in big trouble.
I mean, this crowd that came in, in the early 70s—we're the gray-beards now. We show up at meetings, some of us still do trips now and then. I'm goin' back in, gettin' my license again to do a few. But we didn't have anybody ahead of us to look at—just a few people. Mostly, they turned into outfitters, the people ahead of us. There weren't that many of 'em, or they came and went real fast, before it became a lifestyle. So we're kind of out hangin' ten still, out on the front of this wave of this profession. It's very, very interesting. We just had our first intervention a couple of weeks ago of a group of senior guides goin' in for somebody we thought was gonna die or kill someone. And it might work. My God, it might work.
…When the first people had to quit drinking within the community, there was not much sympathy for alcoholics. And man has that changed. You see it in a lot of outfits now, there are functioning recovering alcoholics on the crews. And they're respected. So it's the change of the definition of courage. "Are you brave enough to drink with us?” "Are you brave enough not to?” Are you strong enough to stand up for yourself and help other people with what, in many lives, has become a problem? And I think that's a very cool thing. I think it's happening in society at large. But to see it happen in a community with that much "Yahoo! Whoopie!” in it, and that much—there is machismo, even in the women in the guiding community. To see the intelligence and the sensitivity and the creativity strong enough to balance this all out into something that can evolve and can change. It's never gonna be like it was in the 70s or the 80s or 90s. It keeps changing.
Steiger: What was this intervention? You guys intervened on an old-timer that was havin' a tough time, and it seems to be workin'?
Dimock: Well, it's too early to tell what's happening, but it was…To me—I think to all of us—it was one of the most frightening things we'd ever done. But one guide, Mike Boyle, started callin' us up and sayin', "Look, our buddy's goin' down, and I can't watch it anymore. I want to do something. Are you in?” We all said yes. We worked with Dick McCallum, old outfitter who used to be a counselor and is counseling again, and spent a month going to meetings with each other and building up this plan, and rehearsing it and fine tuning it, to where we went in.
Steiger: Before you attacked him.
Dimock: Before we went in.
Steiger: What our generation is up against, too, as we're gettin' older, we're gettin' to where we're about to fall off the edge. You know, you get depressed because these things are pilin' up on us, and the end of that last trip, or the fallin' out of the rotation…the glory days of river runnin' are fast receding in the rear view mirror. You get to the point where—I think a lot of us, you know, you can see the writin' on the wall. It's not gonna be that much longer that you're gonna get to do it. Or even, who knows?…we've seen so many of our peers disappear on us overnight.
Dimock: Yeah. The thing, I think, that's so seductive about the river lifestyle is that problems are finite. You get home and you've got these canker sores of life that you have to deal with that go on and on and on and on, and you wake up in the morning and they're still there. On the river, you've pretty much solved it, usually by nightfall—whether you flip the boat or somebody broke their leg, or you were worried about the camp you were gonna get. Solve it, slam a few beers, have a gin and tonic, cook dinner, tell stories. And "yeaaahhhh!” you're out there in this great wild environment which is totally controlled and really tame in real life, but not that tough. But yeah (whew!) man, is that seductive. (Steiger: Boy, has it been fun.) Boy, has it been fun. So yeah, and it's gonna keep being interesting, watching this community go on into the next decade and the one after that…I'm not lookin' very far into the future, because I've just seen so much change in my life. I never would dream at any point in my life that it could end up where it is five years from then—the direction it's gonna take. When I work on history, I look at Bert Loper's life at any certain point, or Buzz Holmstrom's—these people are in this place, the robber barons have taken control of the country, it's gone into economic collapse, there is no hope for the future. Fast forward. Here it is, ten years later, it's totally different. Everything fell. Or, we saved the world from Hitler. Or Communism collapsed in two days. That was a good one. Or, this has become an ultra-right theocracy in the last four years—the United States. Wow, I didn't see that comin'. What next? So I've given up despairing about it. I'll fight and push, and certainly won't just resign my ideals and go with it. I say just keep pushin' in the way you want to go, 'cause you've got no #*@$%in' clue, the magnitude of change that's possible for no apparent trigger. Head forward with cheer.