Liz George, an old family friend, told a good one recently. It had been handed down by a wise old aunt.
“In your first thirty years,” Liz’s aunt said, “you spend a great deal of time wondering what everyone thinks of you. But along about thirty-five or forty an important shift occurs. You begin to spend a great deal more time not caring what people think of you. And then at sixty, another shift. You finally understand... they weren’t thinking about you at all.”
Looking back on it, I wish I’d heard that one a year ago. Being President of GCRG was a great honor on one hand, and on another it reminded me of my early river trips as a leader. I was a typical 2nd boatman beforehand: there’d of course come a time when I knew I was smart enough to do it better than those dumb s.o.b.s who were doing it. Then finally I got my chance and all of a sudden it hit me that I was responsible. For everything. And sometimes that felt like a pretty big job.
Naturally I went a little overboard in the beginning, and took it all personally. Rain. Wind. Heat. Water level. Occupied campsites. Every little thing. My responsibility. My problem. My duty. My fault!
The GCRG stint felt like that at first. All this stuff goes on and if you’re the President of GCRG you’re supposed to, like, do something about it. Then it starts sinking in that some of these issues really aren’t all that simple, either. And it’s not quite like on the water, where on even the worst of trips, if you just stay out there and keep going, the river eventually brings you home. Up above the rim we all have every different direction to pick from, all the time; and current events in Grand Canyon being what they are, if you really did care about everything and felt it was your job to contribute somehow, it could make you nuts if you were the nervous type...
Whale. Coast Guard. The Prospectus. Private vs. Commercial. Drug testing. Overflights. Wilderness. Glen Canyon Dam. Wages. Benefits. GTS. Adopt-a-Beach. Constituents’ Panel. The Colorado River Management Plan... And to top it all off, “Leave it as it is, man can only mar it...” an edict handed down a century ago by Teddy Roosevelt of all people (not to mention “No compromise!”—given to us by one Martin Litton, who, about 60 years, later really did save the Grand Canyon from being dammed up when the chips were down). All those and more are things the president of this organization might lie awake nights worrying about if he or she isn’t careful.
What’s truly hilarious about GCRG is, there’s all kinds of wild stuff flying around out there these days and for a lot of it we’re the pickle in the middle. On one extreme we have enraged representatives of the private sector calling us shills for a commercial industry bent on nothing more than self-perpetuation and increased profits. On the other end are a few suspicious outfitters and guides who are pretty sure we’re closet-commies. (Never mind the pissed off power users, chopper pilots, and jet-skiers who all have their own different descriptions of us.)
I got over taking all this personally, actually, along about March. The true strength and beauty of GCRG is, we’re not like the Army, where an officer can say “jump” and somebody actually has to. So that kinda frees the president up, in my mind. GCRG is a group thing, that has its own ebb and flow. At our least we’re kinda like the internet: a conduit for the thoughts and feelings of a diverse and fascinating community held together by one of the world’s best places. (Tied together? Handcuffed together. Whatever. It is one of the world’s best places and it has brought us together, mainly for the better.)
On the rare occasions when we all do come together, we are, as Bill Beer once told us, a force to be reckoned with. That’s good, because, like Bill also said when he spoke to us a couple of GTS’s ago, the place is going to need quite a force to do right by it in the next little while. The challenge to the “best of Grand Canyon” continues to look fairly formidable.
The best of Grand Canyon? Teddy Roosevelt had a feeling about that sort of thing back in 1903, but even then it took 16 more years to muster the political force necessary to make Grand Canyon a National Park. In 1919, when the Park was finally established, it had about 40 thousand visitors. By 1999, when the next Colorado River Management Plan will be settling into place, total visitors will surely exceed 5 million. The same kind of pressure will continue to bear down on the river in the future and, just our luck, it falls to our community—here and now—to somehow help the National Park Service address that trend.
The pinnacle of GCRG’s past accomplishments was probably our contributions to the call for a Glen Canyon Dam EIS and the subsequent Grand Canyon Protection Act. Next to the upcoming CRMP, those were duck soup because the “enemy” was far away and anonymous. Now it’s like Pogo said: “We have met the enemy and he is us.”

Private. Commercial. Motor. Rowing. Paddle. Big company. Little company. Science. That’s us. We’re all a part of GCRG, or at least of this community. And even somebody who wasn’t naturally nervous might get a headache trying to sort it all out.
What’s clear to me is, barring an alien invasion that vaporizes about two-thirds of the world population, we’re probably not going to get it all perfectly arranged in the next little go-round. But we do have an opportunity to come together and shift a few gears in a way that does lasting good for the Canyon and the future generations who will surely follow our footsteps.
Things may not be perfect now, but the rest of the story is, they aren’t all bad either. We do a lot of things right these days, and our tracks are looking better all the time. Considering the human explosion we’ve been up against, we’ve done pretty well over the years. In areas like human waste, low impact camping, interpretation, and even more sensitive operation of Glen Canyon Dam, we are at least holding our own, and at best setting a worthy example for the world.
As a whole we’re a pretty good bunch of people too, when you get right down to it... we have the experience and we are, collectively, moving toward the wisdom that will allow us to digest what we’ve seen in the last fifty years and take another significant step forward, toward the next fifty.
For my money, the biggest flaw in the current CRMP is that the user-day system rewards faster trips, bigger trips, bigger boats, and more exchanges. None of which seem automatically ideal for the once-in-a-lifetime visitor. I think we—the commercial sector and the Park Service together—can do better than that, either by tweaking the current system, or moving to launch days and overall people counts instead of what we have now. Regardless of what the system is, we—the commercial sector as a whole—need to keep up the good work. We’ll have to keep getting better in order to justify our very existence in the face of increasing private demand. What does “getting better” mean? Being good guides. Taking good care of the place and everybody in it. Recognizing our good fortune at being here at all, and not getting too greedy.
We need to listen real hard to Kim Crumbo and what he says about wilderness designation—not in terms of “how many trips will I get next year?” and “what’s my bottom line on that?” but rather “what do I owe the Grand Canyon?” “what lives up to it?” and “what’ll it look like in fifty years if we blow this chance off now?”
Tom Moody might just be onto something too, with thoughts like he served up in the last bqr: checks and balances between governed and government—the concentration of power—and better incentives (like true long-term outfitter stability) for quality performance.
Rod Nash might be right about “unguiding.” Fred Burke is definitely right about how an outfitter ought to treat his employees. Wesley Smith says it all when he talks about how there’s good in everyone.
Teddy Roosevelt must have known something back there in 1903, but what the hell did he mean, exactly?

Liz George’s aunt knew what she was talking about at the age of sixty... it’s all in our heads and everyone of us lives in their own little world. From which, I keep having to be reminded, we magically seem to get back out roughly what we put in. People in general magically seem to either live up, or down, to our expectations of them.
All I know for sure, from the perspective of one more old has-been boatman gradually looking back over his shoulder at the whole glorious Grand Canyon conglomeration- is this: words cannot express how glad and grateful I am to have lived here and been a part of this, just for a moment.
It’s the best of places. And it has drawn to it a truly awesome group of people—by which I mean, when you get right down to it, just about everybody here. Personally, I expect great things to come out of us all in the days ahead. Won’t be easy. But in the end we’ll do our part.

Luckily for Jeri, things seem to be running pretty smooth along about now. Few little odds and ends she’ll have to deal with of course, but hell... she’s up to it. She’ll do fine.
Can she handle the power, the glory, the perks, the adulation? Only time will tell. Won’t be easy. But in the end, she’s home free. When it comes to contributions and heart (and backbone), she’s already done her part times ten.

Lew Steiger