So long as they’re in the womb of the Grand Canyon, river guides stand atop a social hierarchy of society's most accomplished members—doctors, lawyers, spies, moviemakers, and actors. But as soon as they leave—and eventually they all must—they enter a world where their river-running skills are useless and their prestige is not translatable. No one understood this better than Curtis Hansen

At some point in the past seven years, I seem to have misplaced my soul. No, not in Las Vegas or in the devil’s lap. Not over a game of poker or a desperate plea for fame and success. In a much more mundane place. At a traffic light, perhaps. In the stack of papers waiting for me back at the office. Maybe in the outgoing envelope of a mortgage payment. Beneath my byline. Or in an effort to make a deadline.
Anyway, I have a feeling it—my soul, that is—wandered off somewhere.
Maybe here.
The Grand Canyon.
So that’s why I came. To pick it up. 

Curtis Hansen was, more than likely, looking for the same thing when he trampled here 37 years earlier. Unfortunately for him, he had misplaced his soul in a hopelessly cluttered space—somewhere between the bullets of his machine gun, the helicopter from which he shot it, and the Vietnamese landscape.
He chased it through the next 25 years, from Watergate to Monica Lewinsky, John Lennon to Kurt Cobain, and the boom of television to the boom of Windows 95. In those three decades, Hansen found a lot of things: He found a nickname—Whale. He found the Rubber Magnet—later named Whale Rock—in Hance Rapid twice. He found work. Then lost it. Found work again. Then lost it. He found lots of pot and booze. Then sobriety. A trailer. Then a house on Elm Street and a roommate who would become his best friend.
If he ever found his soul, he must have lost something he considered even more valuable—his paycheck, perhaps, or that damn wallet. Maybe he just lost his way. Whatever Whale couldn’t find between River Mile 1 and River Mile 225, he must have figured he couldn’t live without it. So sometime in those lonely mid-morning hours of Labor Day 1995, Whale found his roommate’s 38-millimeter. He found a stump 50 yards off a Forest Service road just west of Flagstaff. And he found the trigger.

Both of our searches began at a 135-year-old launch spot downstream of a bend in the Colorado. They call it Lee's Ferry. Its name has long roused my imagination with visions of saloons and Wild West shootouts. In reality, Lee’s Ferry is just another put-in—a sandy beach, a boat ramp, and a glorified outhouse a dozen miles from Page, Arizona, 15 miles south of the Utah border and 15 miles downstream from the ever-shrinking Lake Powell. The most rousing fact regarding this sun-scorched place has nothing to do with the place itself, but the person who built it.
Five years after John Lee completed the crossing here in 1872, a firing squad bound, blindfolded, and executed him. The 65-year-old pillar of Utah Mormonism had 15 years earlier, it seems, led what Harper’s Weekly would later call the Mountain Meadows Massacre, a Mormon attack and siege on some Arkansas emigrants that eventually escalated into an execution for all 120 of them—120 unarmed men, women, and children just trying to make their ways to California.
This history is not a secret, by any means. But this isn’t what people talk about when they arrive here.
For the 140,000 people who journey here every year, Lee’s Ferry is better known as the entrance to Grand Canyon National Park and the beginning of one of America’s greatest adventures. It is where you go as a private boater when luck—or some lucky friend—finally snagged your raffle ticket. If you’re a client, it’s where you go once you’ve earned enough disposable money—$2,000 to $4,000 for a seat—in your life and only if you still have enough life left to enjoy it. Lava. Granite. Crystal. The Redwall Cavern. Havasu Falls.
A river so coveted its waiting list stretched 15 years before the national park service rebuilt the permit system in 2006. Today, your chances are one in about 30.

For the eight Wilderness Rivers Expeditions guides working this trip—five men, two young women, and one work-your-way—Lee’s Ferry is the beginning of another 12 days in the sacred womb of the Southwest. Another 12 days of telling Major John Wesley Powell stories, and of describing how each of the Canyon’s 27 rock layers formed. It’s the beginning of 12 days of 5:30 a.m. coffee calls, Coleman stove pancakes, Dutch Oven desserts, and groover duty. All for about $100 to $190 a day.
Down here, these guides share some of the world’s grandest geology with society’s most accomplished people. On this trip alone, for example, these six professional river runners will be guiding three gynecologists, a retired pediatrician, a British spy, a college professor, and a young entrepreneur. The Chief Financial Officer of Midas was in their care on the last trip. Al Neill, 35, was one of the behind-the-scenes guides that made possible IMAX’s recent Grand Canyon movie with Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. Heck, even Tom Cruise has been here.
But of all these very important people, these MDs, PhD.s, CFOs, and SISs, the six guides rowing these rafts are the most important. That they are uneducated by academic standards and somewhat homeless by U.S. Postal Service standards doesn’t matter. Nor does the fact that most of these 20- to 30-somethings keep the electricity on in the winter by working as seasonals at ski resorts. What does matter is their role here: They are the trustees for the safety and entertainment of these 22 people.

It’s tough work, rowing 20 miles a day, then unloading camp chairs and propane tanks, building makeshift kitchens in the sand and making beds on fidgety rafts. For this reason, four-year-guide Christine Barkowski (pictured below with Amanda LaRiche), 24, works out all winter, adding five to 10 pounds of muscle to her athletic frame, while waiting tables at the ski resort in Winter Park.
“The first four trips,” she says, “can really kick your ass.”
She’s on the river for 108 days; at home—a house she rents with three other guides—for four to six days a month, just enough time to pay bills, return calls, check mail, and pack again for the next trip.
But this place, this sanctuary from cell phones and internet never gets old. And that’s the problem.
Guiding the Grand is almost never supposed to be a lifelong career. The days are too long for old guides; the seasons too consuming for married ones. Less than half of the 15 outfitters scattered throughout Flagstaff, Page, and Phoenix offer any kind of health care or retirement plan. And the skill of guiding is virtually non-transferable to any other job.
The young guides, of course, aren’t here for security of finance and health. 
For Christine and her 22-year-old, guitar-strumming friend, Amanda, it’s a rite of passage, in an Edward Abbey sort of way. A biding of time, while they figure out what majors to declare in college.

To some extent, that’s how it started 17 years ago for Brett Stark too. But it’s not how it went for him. This will be his 165th trip. At this point in his career, Brett is almost always the trip leader, the one person who settles guide disputes and decides whether to push on to the next camp five miles downstream or to set up here while there’s still plenty of light and just make up those miles tomorrow.
Seventeen years earlier, the Salt Lake City native was realizing his wrecked shoulder had just sabotaged any shot at pro hockey he might have had. A good time, the Mormon kid figured, for some adventure. He found it renting out motorboats in Page, a 6,000-population resort town on the red cliffs of Lake Powell.
In that spring of 1992, his buddy landed him a job guiding flatwater day-trips from Glen Canyon Dam to here, Lee’s Ferry. The job was fulfilling enough until his then-four-year girlfriend returned from a trip through Hance, Lava, and Crystal with stories and photos that churned in Brett a Canyon ambition.
A few months later, Brett landed his first trip down the Grand the way most Canyon guides first experience the river: as a work-your-way. His was on a two-boat motorized trip.
His job was to complete the chores the guides couldn’t—or wouldn’t—and to learn as much about being a river guide as possible.
His teacher was Whale. 
“Everything was awesome,” he says with his goateed, mellow smile.
He moved back to Salt Lake City that fall and took a job at a ski shop. That year, Wilderness offered him a job as a full-time guide.
“The next thing I knew, I had been guiding for 10 years,” he says.
The Canyon, Brett found, was the world’s best office. But it came with a demanding boss that swallowed him completely, a boss who is easily threatened by marriage, children and stability, who offers no retirement plan, no health insurance; who gives just six months of work, but demands 12 months of commitment. A boss that forced Brett to pack up every fall, and work through the winter at a Salt Lake City ski shop. 
“I moved every six months for 10 years,” he says. “It gets pretty old.”
A few years back, Brett started guiding winter trips for United States Geological Survey geologists, and, to fill in the employment gaps, he frames houses, and works for masons.
The winter trips have brought him a brand of stability he’s never known in his adult life. He has a girlfriend, whom he’s dated for seven years, and who, he says isn’t too concerned about marriage, or children. Still, he admits, getting out of the Grand is always on his mind, always there, nagging him.
“I just can’t seem to find anything that would be as rewarding,” he says.
When his 21-year-old brother, Devon, told him he wanted to be a Canyon guide, just like him, Brett warned him.
“ ‘Get a job,’ I told him. ‘Get a retirement plan. Get medical insurance.’ I warned him for sure.”
The wisdom in those words, however, were swallowed by 225 miles of the same red walls and chocolate rapids that have fooled so many into believing that childhood really can last forever.
This is Devon’s third season on the Grand. His first rowing his own boat.
“My girlfriend,” Devon says, “hates my job.”

Much of Whale’s late childhood took place outside a sharecropper’s bedroom door in Twin Falls, Idaho. His mother was on the other side of that door. On the bed. Trying to sleep away another wave of depression.
“She would have good days and bad days, good months and bad months,” says Whale’s older sister Connie Hardy, who now works as a secretary to the registrar’s office at the College of Southern Idaho. “She didn’t want to go anywhere and didn’t want to do anything. She’d just sleep if we’d let her. When she got on medication, she would do better and she was one of the funnest people to be around. But we could kind of feel when it was coming back. We’d kind of tip-toe around to make things better for her.”
Curt was just an elementary schooler then. The last of three children raised on a bean, alfalfa, and grain farm. He was a jovial kid, a prankster, who sometimes took the mischief a bit too far. Like the night when he and a friend ran over their teachers’ mailboxes. Or when they spray-painted graffiti on the overpass. He loved to tube down the irrigation canal, go drag racing up Mirtau Road, and swim. He always had friends and he was always a big fella, a size that destined him for the center position on Hazelton’s Valley High football team and for one of the heavier weight classes on his school’s wrestling team. But he never took those athletic pursuits too seriously, not like his older brother, Larry, anyway, who was a star on all the teams he played on and a star pupil in all the classes he attended. As much as Curt’s parents and grandparents wanted him to be like Larry—hardworking and driven—he just wasn’t, says his sister-in-law Dorothea Hansen.

Curt was the kind of high school student who knew he could never survive in a college classroom. So he decided to survive in Vietnam instead. Months after graduating from high school in 1965, Curt signed up for the Army, flew to the rice patty and for the next four years, the friendly kid from southern Idaho aimed his machine gun from the door of an Airborne Division helicopter into the long, green Vietnamese grass swirling around below.
The next time Larry and Connie saw their kid brother was in 1969, after he’d returned from battle. He was a bit trimmer than when he had left four years earlier. And, says his brother, Larry, he was more withdrawn. 
“Curtis didn’t want to talk about it,” says his older sister Connie Hardy. “The only thing he ever told me was that he was a door gunner in a helicopter and ‘I know I killed people. We were instructed that if the grass moved, shoot it.’ ”
He worked the family farm for another year, milking and feeding cows, plowing fields, and wrenching on tractors. And then in March 1970, the promise of a river trip down the Grand seduced him to Lee’s Ferry for the first of what would become hundreds of times.

Lee’s Ferry is now 19 miles behind us. The clients are diligently unraveling their tarps, flopping down their sleeping bags. No need for tents out here, the guides insist. The bats eat up all the bugs while you sleep. The guides, meanwhile, are playing a game. They play it every evening, we’ll soon learn, once the cooking and the groover duty is about to begin. Someone grabs a bucket, the aluminum one that is wrapped in duct tape. Someone else draws a line in the sand. And then the guides congregate behind that line with their personal pairs of pliers. One by one, they study the bucket, measuring it for distance and span. And they toss their pliers.
It’s a primitive game, but it wields a lot of power. The loser, you see, cooks. And the loser is, by design, almost always a rookie. That’s because rookies throw first, followed by second-year guides, third-year guides and so on in that order until the most senior guide throws.
The last person to throw on this trip is Breck Poulson, 56. He invented this game before any of these guides had ever seen the Canyon. Since he first came here in 1973 as a swamper, he’s run the river 110 times, married thrice, quit good jobs twice, and dropped out of college once.
All of this, he blames on the Colorado, a river he figured he’d guide for two, maybe three years—max.
“I tried to do that,” he tells me.
But it kept sucking him back in.

In 1980, Breck and his brother, Don, got to talking with Whale about a common subject: Leaving the Real World and returning to the Rim World, that forsaken place of time clocks, neck ties, and rush-hour traffic.
“ ‘You can’t be a river-runner your whole life,’ ” Breck recalls Whale telling them. “ ‘You gotta think about retirement. What are we going to do when we’re 40 and all we can do is boat down the river?’ ”
Whale was right, Don knew. So he quit, got a full-time job at a power plant, saved his money, and just last year, he retired. Breck kept guiding—but no longer would he work 10 trips per year. He’d guide two to three and spend the rest of his time learning the management side of the business.
It wasn’t the cleanest line to retirement, that’s for sure. But it kept him close to what mattered most to him.
“I guess,” he says, “time just got away from me.”
When I ask the other guides about their first trips down the Canyon, they each respond in a sentimental way, with a story that involves the same themes of persistence, serendipity, and passion that are inherent to any love story. It’s as if they are describing the moment they first laid eyes on their soul mates.
Breck describes it this way as well. But his words carry a little more angst in them, a little more emotion.
On this trip, I’ve watched him staring with the whole muster of his concentration on the most trivial of images: the oar lock on a nearby raft, the prop on his J-Rig, the blue and yellow flame in the Coleman stove.
After dinner on Day No. 2, I flop in a camp chair next to him intending to ask him why. The stars, by now, are showering the Canyon with light so bright you’d swear it was coming from some place divine. And this is the season of meteor showers. So every five minutes or so, a runaway comet streaks across the sky, leaving a fading tail of magic dust behind.
“I can’t believe how bright these stars are,” I say, as I dig my toes into the cool sand.
Breck is silent.
“Canyon Magic,” he finally says. “That’s why we call it Canyon Magic.”
We chat for a few more minutes, counting shooting stars and absorbing the glow of the galaxy before I finally ask him what he spends so much time looking at.
“I think about it,” he says. “I think about not coming down here and not running it again. I’m treating this one like it is my last one. So I look at the way the sun sets, at animals. At anything, I look at it closer. You never know with life what happens. One of these days, it’s time to hang up the lifejacket. I don’t know when that will be.”
Whale rarely wrote home. Once in a while he’d send a postcard. In all his time in the Canyon, his sister Connie says she remembers him calling just once: to invite her on a trip down the Grand, an invitation her work schedule forced her to reject.

His brother, Larry, says they’d see him once in a while. At Christmas, perhaps. And Thanksgiving. A few times, he went to the Wickham family reunion—his mom’s side—on Labor Day weekend.
But after arriving at Lee’s Ferry in 1970, the life of a Canyon guide quickly swallowed Whale. When he wasn’t guiding, he was skiing, partying, drinking booze, smoking pot, and getting fired. In the winters he’d groom the ski slopes of Arizona’s Snowbowl Resort. Sometimes on those late winter nights, he’d drive his friends up to the top of the runs in his groomer and let them ski in the light of his headlights, while he smoked dope, joking to his friends, “Every night, I’m the highest man in Arizona.”
After quitting the lifestyle cold turkey for a year or two on the family farm in the mid-’70s, Whale returned to Flagstaff and in 1981, he landed a job with HATCH, which at the time was the biggest outfitter on the Colorado. His first trip that summer was a two-boat expedition. The guide working alongside him was a man named Bob Grusey, who at 32 was two years younger than Whale.

Four presidential administrations later, Bob still looks like Hollywood’s stereotype of a rafting guide. Tanned to a Thanksgiving glaze, with deep wrinkles carved into his weathered face and a head full of graying curls, Bob props one knee on a thwart and one sun-browned hand on the prop’s handle as he powers the Hatch J-Rig full of ice boxes, dry bags, sleeping bags, and smiling passengers up to our camp.
This man, Brett Stark (pictured below) tells me, was Whale’s best friend. He knew him better than just about anybody. He partied almost as irresponsibly as Whale and ran trips for much longer. But now he has a wife—who in 1997 started as one of his passengers—a house on an acre in Tucson, and a job loading and unloading baggage onto U.S. Air planes and guiding those planes to the gates. In the mornings he takes a few pills: one for his high blood pressure and another for his high cholesterol. Four times a year, he drives the 400 miles to the Canyon, to guide 10-day motor trips. The job back home, he says, has been humbling. The new life, only bearable because of his wife, this trip, and the three others.
“If I could wish for anything, I’d wish I could be 28 and starting all over again,” he’ll tell me later. “We all had wonderfully extended childhoods. We were Pinocchio, Peter Pan all in one. We’d take grownups and turn them into kids again.”

Brett and Bob chat politely for a few minutes, talking about camp spots and clients, before Brett introduces me to Bob.
“This is Christian,” he says. “He wants to know about Whale.”
Bob studies me for a moment, then extends his hand.
Let me tell you about Whale, he says.
Bob had met Whale in 1979 at the Boatmen’s Bash in Flagstaff. The only details Bob remembered about Whale at the time was that he was a bit of a wallflower and that he was looking to get back into the real world of Grand Canyon guiding.
In the next nine years, the pair would work almost 30 trips together at Hatch and park their camper trailers next to each other at their employer’s warehouse. They shared a front lawn during that time. And quite often, Whale would snag the affections of a pretty young lady. Life was like that until one summer day in 1989, Whale received a letter from his employer.
“You’re lazy,” Bob recalls the letter saying. “Got stuck in Hance twice. You’re fired.”
It was harsh. But true. Whale had wrapped on the Rubber Magnet in the Canyon’s first Class X rapid two times while working for HATCH. On another occasion, he had sped into Lee’s Ferry with a flatbed trailer full of rafts and with a National Park Service ranger watching, he cut his corner too sharply, causing the trailer to rear up on two wheels, like a wild stallion, and buck off its cargo in one whoomph.
And, truth be told, he was lazy and getting lazier. He was chubby and getting fat. 
He’d always say, “I’m built for comfort and not speed” or “Bob, you do the backpackin’ and I’ll do the six-packin’.” It was funny, for sure, but not very useful.
“He’d have people bring food out to him while he sat on his raft,” Bob says.
By that point, Whale had worked for many of the Canyon’s outfitters and many of those outfitters had for one reason or another, fired him.
He should have been used to it, but receiving that letter from HATCH in 1989 cut a deep gash in Whale. Maybe because he knew those wonderful guiding days with his good friend and trailer neighbor were over.
For the next three years, Whale floundered around Flagstaff, begging for trips and bunking on his best friends’ couches. He drank and smoked Drum tobacco and pot. And listened to other people’s problems, prodding them on with gruffs from his deep, baritone voice.
“ ‘What’s wrong,’ he’d say,” Bob recalls. “He was never judgmental. He’d just listen to you. And you’d find yourself talking yourself out of your own problem. But whenever he had a problem, he’d keep it inside.”
He was, says Grand Canyon photographer Raechel Running, “the soft, safe place in the world of machismo.”
In 1990, he journeyed back to Valley High School for his 25th-year class reunion.
“Everybody had houses and children and jobs,” says his sister-in-law Dorothea Hansen. “And Curt didn’t have anything. He just felt like he hadn’t accomplished anything and he didn’t have anything and he was past the point in his life that he would.”

By October 1992, Whale’s demeanor was beginning to reflect the circumstances of his life: Homeless, girlfriendless and, with the exception of Grand Canyon guiding, skill-less. He had no permanent job, no savings, no medical insurance, and an ulcer that splattered blood into the sink when he coughed.
On top of it all, he was still trying to understand his mother’s suicide from a few years back.
On one of those October days, a fellow guide and close friend named Brian Dierker stopped by the house, where Whale had been couch-surfing and found Whale inside, on that couch, reading a book.
What the heck are you doin’ sitting inside on a beautiful day? Brian asked him.
“I’m just sitting around here waiting to die,” Whale told him.
Brian’s interpretation of that story was that Whale was just being Whale.
“Whale would sometimes say things just to get a reaction,” he says.
But when Bob heard that story, he got worried. Life, for his good friend, hadn’t been so charming lately. What Whale needed, Bob figured, heck what any human needs, is a permanent residence. A home.
He found one a few doors down Elm Street from Brian Dierker’s Humphrey’s Summit Ski Shop. It was a tiny place—only two bedrooms and a bath, maybe 800-square-feet or so. The floors leaned a bit. But rent was cheap—$400 a month. And it had a front porch that faced the southern sun. Bob didn’t even consult Whale before making the decision. And Whale didn’t wait a night—or for the two weeks the Dierkers said they’d need to repair it—before moving in with his sleeping bag and river gear.
They’d call it the Bob and Whale House.
It was the kind of place where parties just kind of appeared. And where the hosts were always willing.
“Those were happy years,” Bob says.
But very quickly, it all started to unravel.
Whale’s cousin went missing in the fall of 1994. When they found her Bronco, they found her body, inside with a hose carrying all that carbon monoxide into her lungs.
Concerned he might try something similar, Bob asked him.
“No,” Whale assured his roommate. “As far as I’m concerned, that is totally unacceptable behavior.”

A few months later, Whale was driving up Highway 180 to Snowbowl, to smoke some dope and groom some slopes. Along the way, a car slid on the ice and crashed into him, breaking his rib. Whale worked anyway, but the pain, Bob believes, distracted him from remembering to clean the marijuana stash out of that snowcat. He passed the first urine test, but when he refused to take the second one, Snowbowl fired him.
That, combined with the pain of his broken rib, shoved him out on a daily quest that started on his bed, then the couch and then the La-Z-Boy. All Whale seemed to want in that period, was a good, clean breath.
“I can take care of this real quick and easy,” Bob joked to his roommate. “One of these days, I’ll just get a couple of two-by-fours and slap them together while you’re sleeping. You’ll have a heart attack and that’ll be the end of it.”
“ ‘ No Bob,’ ” Bob recalls Whale responding, “ ‘When it’s time, I’ll just borrow your pistol and go out in the timber and take care of it myself.’ ”
Whale’s rib did heal enough so that by that summer, he was back to guiding. Moki Mac, the only outfitter in the Canyon that would still hire him, gave him four trips that summer.
On the last day of his third trip that year, a scorpion stung the 48-year-old, 230-pound Whale and made him so worthless during the mid-August clean-up day that followed, his boss, Claire Quist told him “ ‘If you can’t work any harder than this, you might as well take the next trip off,’ ” Bob says.
Whale wasn’t down on himself after that, as you might have expected. He saw the firing as a kick in the pants, a shove out the door. To get a job in the Rim World. To quit cigarettes and booze and pot. To pull himself out of this ruthless rut. And that’s what he decided to do.

Days later, he landed an interview with the city for a position driving a forklift, something his farming days had taught him well. But the tryout didn’t go so well. He was slow and clumsy.
And I don’t have time to teach you, the boss told him, handing him $20 for his trouble.
But he didn’t seek comfort in the bottle. And he tried his damnedest to stay away from those cigarettes and marijuana.
In a week, Whale knew his old buddies from his earlier guiding days would be gathering at the Wilderness World reunion, eager to talk about the misadventures of the past and the ambitions of the future. His family would be gathering up in Idaho as well, for the Wickham family reunion. Everybody would be so glad to see him. Everybody would be having so much fun.
But Whale had no intention of going to either one. 
Some time around 9 a.m. on September 1, 1995, Whale walked down to the Dierker brothers’ ski shop in the same purple sweats, purple T-shirt, and Teva flip flops that Grusey says he had been wearing for the last few weeks and told Brian he wanted to talk. 
Brian was on the phone at that moment, immersed in the pre-production of his new movie, talking to customers, and answering to the demands of his small business. He pulled the phone from his ear, covered up the receiver, and whispered to Whale: “I’ll be right over.”
“But I kept getting delayed,” he says.
Brian was walking toward Whale’s house some time later when he saw the white and brown Bronco disappear around the corner.
He had no idea what Whale’s intentions were or that Bob Grusey’s .38, that classic six-chamber revolver with the blue steel and walnut-colored handle was somewhere inside the Bronco.
Whale kept driving west until he found Forest Road 18, a dusty gravel road less than two miles off Interstate 40. He walked about 50 yards into the open Pinyon Pine forest before settling on a stump.
No one knows what he was thinking about in those last moments. Just that he was sober and his body landed face down in the dirt, his legs curled slightly toward his chest. The sheriff’s deputies would find $21 stashed in the glove compartment and another $5.89 worth of coins scattered amongst some garbage on the floor of that 1980 Bronco. They’d find a prescription for Zantac, his purple polar fleece, a bedroll, and river gear. And tucked deliberately beneath his denim cap, the sheriff’s deputies would find his passport. A few weeks later, while Bob was preparing Whale’s Bronco to sell, he’d find Whale’s paycheck, hidden and forgotten under the dash mat. Nearly a decade later, an old guide friend, Butch Hutton, found his wallet in a crease of his La-Z-Boy. But nobody ever found a suicide note.
At the memorial service, Whale’s closest friends and siblings scattered flowers and his ashes in the Colorado at Lee’s Ferry. They told stories about their dear friend, and they drank too much alcohol. It was the only way to honor the volatile life of Curtis Hansen. But a few of his closest friends weren’t content. The depression from which Whale suffered wasn’t isolated in just his heart. Most guides felt it every fall, when the season was over, or every few years, when they knew they ought to be moving on to more responsible tasks.
Something more than another party needed to come out of it, they decided. So they created the Whale Foundation, a non-profit that consolidates the donated care of medical doctors, psychiatrists, financial planners, and career-transition coaches to give counsel to Canyon guides. In 2007, 30 guides sought psychological reprieve from the foundation’s mental health service.
It’s a trend that doesn’t compute. Not, that is, until my last evening in the Canyon.
After spaghetti and meatballs, and lethargic talk of Capital Gains and HMOs, I wander down to the river and sit on the cool, wet sand.
On this last evening in the womb of the Grand Canyon, the sky and limestone walls that frame it are black as velvet, just as they were on the first night. The stars pierce through, like holes of possibility in the galaxy.
As the river crawls into the sand beneath my legs, I think about resuming my ordinary life starting the day after tomorrow; wearing shoes, holding a napkin as I eat, peeing into a urinal, the Skykomish on Saturdays, basketball or rock climbing on Sundays. I think about my wife and my daughter.
All the while, I’m trying my darnedest to do what Breck Poulson has been doing all along: Sear these stars into my memory. This murmur of conversations off in the distance; of fidgity rafts and the current gliding past my fingertips. This smell of muddy water and salty Tamarisk. This feeling of sand between my toes, grease in my hair, grit in my teeth, and the warm night wind breathing across my naked back.
I’m trying to remember it not just for tomorrow or for next week. But for my lifetime.
Because I don’t know if I’ll ever feel it again.