Reviews -- Canyon Interludes: Between White Water and Red Rock



	Canyon Interludes Between White Water and Red Rock

John F. Kennedy University Literary Review, Carl Putz
American literature has long been mesmerized by the desert. Many authors draw inspiration from nature in barren places, including Mary Austin who wrote at the turn of the century and Terry Tempest Williams who writes today. Paul Rea has recently joined their company, by sharing with us a set of essays that highlight the canyonlands, or "red-rock" country, in Southeastern Utah—Mormon and Anasazi country, dinosaur, rattlesnake, and coyote country.

Rea, an English professor and film critic, encounters the sublime in this desert landscape. "Luminous light, wild rivers, crystalline skies, expansive space, and gloriously exposed bedrock" enthuses the preface to Canyon Interludes. In thirteen chronicles Rea paints the wilderness as a garden, a texture of interacting life forms framed by rock and rivers—the Colorado, the Green, the Dolores—ribbons, lined with willow, cottonwood, box elder, that cut through ancient sandstones.

Beaver ply these rivers, cougars prowl their banks, hawks and nighthawks share the air with swarms of hungry gnats. Rea dwells upon these creatures, caught up in their pursuits. He observes them very closely—a water strider for instance, engaged in stop-and-go on the surface of an eddy. He steps back into natural history to explain their behavior—once standing on the surface tension, striders cannot sink—and to understand the relationships between the plants and rock formations that furnish their home. His prose frequently has the quality of well-informed "field notes." Usually this style illuminates; sometimes it distracts. However, the canyons do their work and as the book progresses, it fuses and gets lyrical.

Paul Rea reveals himself as one of us. He is sensual, an esthete, who is somewhat didactic in presenting his testimony on behalf of the wilderness. He carries small notepads to write down his impressions; he smarts whenever local ranchers deride environmentalists; he pokes fun at the Boy Scouts but accepts their gift of beer; he takes charge when running rapids, and gets into scrapes. Every essay gains its energy from the drama of an adventure: lost in a maze of canyons, exhausted in the heat, almost out of water, spooked by Indian ruins, almost swept away by a flash flood. Rea's "garden" works its magic (Rea's favorite word is "mesmerize") within a theater of hardship that calls for grit and know-how.

I think of the Christian ascetics early in the first millennium. Poor souls—did they experience a similar magic and reject it as bewitchment? Or were they drawn, perhaps in spite of themselves, by lights and colors and desert critters—by the holiness in nature? Beneath Rea's ecological message lies a deeper message: the primal world is woven with ordeals and revelations.

Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and the Environment, John Tallmadge
The canyon country of southern Utah is one of the most fascinating landscapes in North America, and after reading Paul Rea's eloquent book, it's easy to understand why. Rea serves up a feast of adventure leavened with sweeping landscape descriptions and spiced with the lore of human and natural history. He has traveled widely on both water and land, from the hiking trails of Zion, Dark Canyon, and Grand Gulch to the watery labyrinths of the Dolores, the Green, the Colorado, and the San Juan. This book is a lover's hymn to the canyon country; after reading it you may just want to lash a raft to the roof of your car and take off.

Rea is an avid river and desert rat with an unquenchable thirst for raw sensation: the chest-hammering thrill of big rapids, the scrape of sandstone against bare feet, the caress of a desert pool, the sharp-edged songs of birds or frogs, even the shivers aroused by Anasazi graves or ruins. He relishes every color, smell, taste, and feel, luscious or painful as each may be. His adventure writing, couched in dramatic present tense, moves fast and hot enough to make you sweat. The pace never slows, although Rea lightens things up with abundant short digressions on various creatures, plants, rock formations, and historic sites he encounters. The book is a primer on canyon natural history, though the facts are strung through each story like colored beads, rather than arranged systematically as in a field guide. Rea has clearly traveled as much in the library as on the land. His natural history writing deftly combines book learning with the fruits of direct observation in descriptions of uncommon eloquence, clarity, and grace.

Although each excursion is followed by a short "interlude" that meditates on some issue of aesthetic, ethical, scientific, or environmental concern, there is no overarching thesis or argument to this book. It does not tell a single story of growth and discovery, but rather presents a portfolio of journeys. In this respect it exemplifies a "practice of the wild." However, since Rea has opted for direct experience rather than reflection in telling these stories, one is left wishing for more of the wisdom and growth that his travels must have provided. There are hints, too, of complex and important human relationships unfolding in the background: friends, lovers, ancestors. All these make for an inner landscape as rich and intricate as any canyon. Perhaps his next book will venture into that wilderness as well.

Western American Literature, Verne Huser
Thirteen essays, a dozen short interludes, and a final lone rhapsody constitute Canyon Interludes, in which naturalist Paul W. Rea re-creates his hiking and river running experiences in the Four Corners states. Against a philosophical background that gives meaning to his exploits on the shoulders of the seasons, usually early spring, Rea takes us with him on his excursions: floating segments of the Colorado, Dolores, Green, and San Juan rivers; or hiking Canyonlands, Grand Gulch, Havasu Canyon, and Zion.

Either he enjoys antipodal rowing and empty-trail hiking, or spring break is the only time he's free enough to explore wilderness, for most of his trips occur in the off-season, especially during March and April. He bears lots of inclement weather—snowstorms, wind blasts, sleet, rain, hail, cold, and heat—along with flies, gnats, and mosquitoes as he runs the rivers of the Colorado Plateau and Dinosaur National Monument and hikes spectacular canyons in the region. He also endures rodent predation on his food supply and experiences close encounters with a mountain lion and with Anasazi spirits, both frightening and thrilling to him.

Eliciting other spirits from his eclectic reading—those of Edward Abbey, John Burroughs, John C. Van Dyke, Nikos Kazantakis, Joseph Wood Krutch, D. H. Lawrence, Aldo Leopold, Thomas Merton, Everett Ruess, Paul Shepard, Wallace Stegner, Henry David Thoreau, and many more—he writes in their vein, or to put it another way, the spirit of their ideas flows in his, reinforcing them.

In his preface he finds kinship with writers who subject themselves "to the reality of a strange landscape" (I'm reminded of Ann Zwinger's concept that to write well, naturalists need to get cold, wet, and dirty). He says that his essays "attempt to advance this tradition of the humanist evolving into a naturalist, drawn to the desert like a moth to a sacred datura bloom" (xiii)—an apt image, it seems to me. The book is full of apt images such as "the Tinkerbell wings of damselflies," black thunderheads looking "like jellyfish with tentacles bowing beneath them," and "spring is a flirt."

Rea attacks everything most backpackers or river runners abhor: cattle tracks on the river bank and droppings along the trail and in the campsites, evidence of clearcutting and overgrazing, big dams and water waste, the Sagebrush Rebellion and the father of the Wise-Use Movement, loudmouth party animals in the wilderness (like the crude kayakers on the Dolores), thoughtless and inconsiderate outdoorsmen and -women. He uses his observations to explore issues and deplore losses, to discuss important matters such as endangered species, the need for diversity, and appropriate use of water.

He writes, for example, "While desert plants have evolved a great variety of ways to locate, conserve, and store water, we humans have not" (32). A modern Thoreau, he tries to help us learn lessons from nature. Still on the subject of water, so scarce in the desert landscape, he says, "The choice is clear: if we want the thrill of seeing otters, we'll have to stop watering so much hay and so many golf courses" (103). When overnight a spider builds a web on Rea's raft, then freezes in midweb at Rea's touch of the rope tethering the raft to shore, he takes another lesson from nature, observing, "Too often our lives become spider webs of precaution, attempts to register every threat through its subtle vibrations" (273). In other words, we live our lives too cautiously without testing our mettle against the natural world.

In the vein of Robert Frost, another New Englander, he observes, "Every way of relating to nature soon becomes a way of seeing," (117) and a little later, "I consider that regard for living beings increases the esteem we feel for ourselves" (130). Much later he tries to understand rural attitudes and to think like ranchers, who "have come to view the natural world in very utilitarian terms. Whereas they descend from settlers who sought to tame a wilderness and make a living, we recreationists seek wilderness in order to escape civilization and to learn more about ourselves" (228). He writes in one of his final essays that wilderness isn't just about preserving the howl of the coyote; it's about discovering the wilds within, both the howls and the giggles that society can squelch (239).

The central theme resounds in every piece, whether on the trail or on the river: we're screwing up the natural world; we need to become more aware of the cumulative impacts of our actions (or lack of actions). "We share breath with plants, imbibe the same water as animals, and carry much of the same genetic make-up... If we consider nature's own purposes, which ultimately include our own, it becomes apparent that diversity is crucial" (138).

We continue to destroy the diversity of the planet through our careless, thoughtless doings in a world becoming ever more enslaved to the twin powers of gain and greed. Yet, writes Rea, "Despite such deletions, even degradations, the Colorado Plateau remains an enormously enchanting region, a truly magical place that takes hold of the soul" (278). These are the last words of the final essay, leaving the reader to wonder if Rea sees any hope or merely suggests that we enjoy what's left, while we can.

In "Rhapsody," the short piece which wraps up the book, Rea muses, "A sandstone symphony plays music for my eyes, melodies I hear with my heart" as he rides his bike at dusk along the road in Zion and crashes to avoid colliding with a big buck—another way to kiss the earth, he concludes (279). We are left at least with personal hope if not with global answers.

Linda Conger, online review

Canyon Interludes will open your doors of perception into the unique ecosystem that lies deep down in the desert canyons “Between White Water and Red Rock.” River rafters and desert rats, as well as armchair naturalists, will be enchanted by Paul Rea’s colorful tapestry of towering canyon walls and his vivid descriptions of the flora and fauna that live between them, sustained by the same precious water whose relentless flow through the Southwest carved these mysterious crevices eons ago. A keen observer with an enviably broad knowledge of natural history and ecosystems, Rea engages all five senses to bring to life everything from the busy buzzing of a tiny insect to the vast expanses of geologic time. Rafting and rowing the serpentine flow, exploring the side canyons, following the Yampa and the Green, to “Chaos on the Colorado,” from “Grand Gulch” to the San Juan, from Grand Canyon to Havasu, floating Westwater, the Gray and Desolation, and the Dolores, it’s a rip-roaring ride. If you’ve ever been “Blissed and Blasted” on the river, and missed a few of the wonders of nature on the way, Canyon Interludes will fill in the missing pieces. Marvel at “wondrous touchstones” into the past in the Anansazi ruins and eerie petroglyphs in Grand Gulch. These Ancient Ones may have died out because they depleted their natural resource of firewood. More recently, the fragile ecosystem of the river canyons has been negatively impacted by 150 years of cattle grazing and the introduction of non-native plant species. Reflecting on the damage done, Rea makes a passionate plea to put more pressure on the “Bureau of Wreck-lamation” to finally bring the era of “sacred cows feeding at the public trough” to an end.