Charlie Blackmer
Features Editor

Photo by Brian Wise

There are always two stories to every tale.

The first is on the surface: the text on the page, the narrative being told. For author Kevin Fedarko, who spoke at CMU Thursday, April 17, it is the story he tells in his book “The Emerald Mile” of three men who defied authority and braved record runoff waters through the Grand Canyon in a handcrafted dory in 1983.

The second is the process, the story of the storyteller himself.

 

As a high school kid in southwestern Pennsylvania, Fedarko, now 48, pored over publications like Outside Magazine (where he would one day become a writer and editor). He was drawn to and impressed by a particular group of authors—Jon Krakauer, David Quammen, and Randy Wayne White—who were shaping stories in a way he hadn’t seen before.

“I didn’t understand at the time how revolutionary it was, but they were taking the principles of long-form journalism and narrative non-fiction and applying it to the world of adventure, outdoor recreation and the natural world,” Fedarko said.

“They were writing about the landscapes and the people who move through those landscapes in a way that I just found electrifying,” he said. “I saw that kind of work as a passport to adventure. I had a very glamorized, un-nuanced, naive view of just how cool that all was and how cool I thought I would be if I could become one of those people.”

Roughly 30 years later, with degrees in both political science and Russian literature, a fact-checking job at Time Magazine and an illustrious career at Outside Magazine behind him, Fedarko does indeed exist in the realm of master storytellers. He is quick to point out, however, “I realize I’m a lot less cool than I thought I would be. [Writing] is a lot more complicated and nuanced.”

Researching and writing “The Emerald Mile” took Fedarko the better part of 10 years and the process followed its own curved and twisting narrative arc.

Exposition

Fedarko was working as a baggage boatman for Grand Canyon Dories, rowing gear down the Colorado River on commercial trips. The days were long and the work was hard, but at dusk, when the sun and moon trade places in the sky, he and the other guides shed their boatmen skins and slipped into the roles of storytellers.

“Part of the fabric of your experience if you’re down in the canyon is that kind of oral storytelling that’s woven and braided through your evenings and nights as you journey from Lee’s Ferry to the Glen Canyon Dam,” he said.

“And all those stories kept coming back to the Emerald Mile and the run of 1983.”

Rising action 

“Originally, I thought I was just going to try to tell the story of the Emerald Mile (as the dory was named), of these three guys’ harebrained scheme to row a dory illegally down the Colorado River on the crest of this giant flood,” Fedarko said. “It was only after I started the research that I realized, ‘well, wait a second, this isn’t just one story.’”

Fedarko then began to unravel the two other threads stitching together what would become a three-part story. One was the experience of the “beleaguered engineers” at the Glen Canyon Dam who were fighting to control the swollen waters of the Colorado River following record snowmelt in 1983.

“Part of the way that they solved that crisis was that they just released everything they could, which made the speed run [of the Emerald Mile] possible, but it also created total havoc on the river.”

The raging waters caught dozens of commercially guided groups who were making their way down the river by surprise. Rigs flipped, many were injured and one man died. Fedarko realized the story of these people needed to be told just as badly as the stories of the Emerald Mile and the Glen Canyon Dam engineers.

“So I realized it wasn’t one story, it was three,” he said. “It had to be treated like a rope and braided together. That process was messy and unfolded very slowly over time.”

Climax

Fedarko was blessed during the research process with ample sources of information: personal interviews, detailed records from the Bureau of Reclamation and National Park Service, and oral histories preserved by the Arizona Humanities Council, to name a few.

“Every scrap of paper is like it’s made of gold,” he said. “Every little thing that you can possibly unearth becomes incredibly precious because it links you directly to something that happened 30 years ago.”

But there were a few key pieces that eluded him.

After the death and injuries caused by the 1983 runoff, National Park Service investigators interviewed all those involved and affected. Transcriptions and tapes of the interviews would have given Fedarko “direct access to actual language, to contemporary language at the time,” but the interviews were missing.

Fedarko filed three separate Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests to have the records unearthed by the NPS, only to be told that they “basically don’t exist.” An NPS research librarian (Kim Besom, who is acknowledged in Fedarko’s book) however took it upon herself to locate the interviews, which it turns out had been filed somewhere else.

Fedarko beamed to remember “the day that a three-pound packet arrived in the mail with all those case incident reports from the two days in which the speed run took place.”

Yet, another obstacle loomed before the writer.

“Initially when I began approaching Bureau of Reclamation people who were in charge of the dam [in 1983], I was met with an incredible amount of mistrust,” Fedarko said. “They thought I was this rabid environmentalist who was going to write this takedown of the Bureau.”

Fedarko had an especially difficult time convincing Tom Gamble, former operations manager of the Glen Canyon Dam, to agree to an interview.

“He emailed me and basically said, ‘You know, I think the book you’re writing, the project you’re engaging in is frivolous and disrespectful to the work that I and my colleagues did and I have no wish to participate on any level whatsoever.’ And I was just shattered,” Fedarko said.

The author composed a passionate email to Gamble, hoping to explain himself.

“I said that I didn’t think the project was frivolous and I thought the work he and his colleagues did at the Glen Canyon Dam was not only valuable but their story was too important to ignore. I needed to talk to him in order to be able to tell that story.”

And he did. The letter convinced Gamble, who invited Fedarko to his home in California, where the two worked together for two days.

Resolution?

“I would like people to walk away from the book with a sense of confusion, a sense of disorientation upon realizing that the author isn’t offering a definitive answer,” Fedarko said.

Throughout the research process, Fedarko was forced to closely examine one of the fundamental truths of contemporary life in the West.

“This isn’t just a supercharged adventure tale about three idiots in a rowboat,” he said. “This is the story about two sets of heroes, each of which belong to a subculture that is opposed to and hates the other: the river people and the dam people. They don’t talk the same language, they don’t share the same values, they occupy the same space and they loathe each other.”

“I ended up being forced, by the process itself and by the integrity of the process to tell each side each of those stories that are braided together in a manner that’s as objective and respectful as possible.”

cblackme@mavs.coloradomesa.edu