Gerald Callahan

River Odyssey is about time I’ve spent, mostly on the Colorado Plateau, looking for those gaps I mentioned, the spaces in the cheese of the world. The story isn’t finished, of course. Hardly any story ever is.
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The book became something else. Something with tree toads in it and the dark of the sky at night. Something that smelled like desert rain and wet creosote. Something necessary—for me, at least.
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Then, standing one afternoon in an ice-cold plunge pool deep in the Colorado Plateau, I got the idea of putting what I'd written into a book. A book in defense of all this—humanity, rivers, canyons, fear, depression, aging. But that isn’t what the book became.
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I made a decision. A decision to close some of those gaps. And I chose the river as a place to begin. Somewhere along the way I started writing the words down. And somewhere else along the way I realized I was doing more than just writing.
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And I realized the Colorado River was the first river I’d seen from both ends. But as quickly, I realized I knew nearly nothing about all that lay between where I stood and the place where the river died. There was a gap.
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A couple of years before, a friend and I had spent a winter week in San Felipe, near the northern end of the Sea of Cortez. As I stood there, on the La Poudre Pass Trail, I remembered the tidal flats at San Felipe spread like San Pasqual's apron across northern Mexico.
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It began five or six years ago among the peaks where the day’s first fire is dancing now. I was walking a trail once called the La Poudre Pass Trail, now called the Colorado River Trail. That trail follows the first seven or so miles of a growing stream that becomes the Colorado River.

Up there, among the frozen spires and crumbling stone, as each day begins the waters of this continent assemble. Then, carefully as Moses, they divide themselves into rivers. Rivers that will this day and on all others to come, change the lives of every living thing.
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That light begins nearly crimson, puddled among the ice fields and wind slab that drape the rigid tips of the winter Rockies. Then the day moves, gathering speed, down the 9,000-foot faces—red, to gold, to ice white—and finally spills out across the plains.
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Mostly the sky is dark, a wombful of stars. But east of here the cauldron’s lid has been lifted, and through the crack I can see the final flame. It will be months, though, before the warmth of that fire reaches me.
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It’s 5:30 on a Saturday morning, hard into the Colorado winter. An hour ago my feet felt like I imagine Maurice Herzog's feet must have felt up on Annapurna—just before most of his toes had to be removed.
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Every story must have a beginning. Whether or not a story has an ending is not so important. In fact, some of the best stories ever begun were completely spoiled by their ending. But a story must have a beginning. And though much has already happened, this is the beginning of this story.

I no longer remember when I first noticed. Perhaps it was on one of those nights I stole away from the world of people and swam in the tepid ink of a night sea. Perhaps it was an afternoon standing above the arch at Land’s End watching water turn desert stone into sand.
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As it rises, the canyon cuts more deeply into the stone, now five hundred, maybe a thousand feet below the sky-capped rim. As I sit, the sun on my back, a snake of contentment uncoils inside of me—an odd sense that, for this moment, it doesn’t matter, any of it.
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Colorado National Monument

And although it’s true that I rarely find what I imagined I wanted when I set out into the desert, I rarely return without something I needed—a stone, a bird’s song, a thought, a view deep into the meat of the earth, a single red blossom amid a sea of yellow stone.

Utah desert at sunrise

And above it all rise the hard blacks and brown and ochres of the high Utah desert—a broken place, and because it is broken a place where anything is possible.
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