Kevin Fedarko > Quotes

“if there is a point to being in the canyon, it is not to rush but to linger, suspended in a blue-and-amber haze of in-between-ness, for as long as one possibly can. To float, to drift, savoring the pulse of the river on its odyssey through the canyon, and above all, to postpone the unwelcome and distinctly unpleasant moment when one is forced to reemerge and reenter the world beyond the rim-that is the paramount goal.”
― Kevin Fedarko, The Emerald Mile: The Epic Story of the Fastest Ride in History Through the Heart of the Grand Canyon

“But they have preserved an aspect of the American persona that is uniquely vital to the health of this republic. Among many other things, those dirtbag river runners uphold the virtue of disobedience: the principle that in a free society, defiance for its own sake sometimes carries value and meaning, if only because power in all of its forms—commercial, governmental, and moral—should not always and without question be handed what it demands.”
― Kevin Fedarko, The Emerald Mile: The Epic Story of the Fastest Ride in History Through the Heart of the Grand Canyon

“The English novelist J. B. Priestley once said that if he were an American, he would make the final test of whatever men chose to do in art, business, or politics a comparison with the Grand Canyon. He believed that whatever was false and ephemeral would be exposed for what it was when set against that mass of geology and light. Priestley was British, but he had placed his finger on an abiding American truth: the notion that the canyon stands as one of our most important touchstones—a kind of roofless tabernacle whose significance is both natural and national. It is our cathedral in the desert, and the word our is key because although the canyon belongs to the entire world, we, as Americans, belong particularly to it.”
― Kevin Fedarko, The Emerald Mile: The Epic Story of the Fastest Ride in History Through the Heart of the Grand Canyon

“He rowed them past the last of the stars. He rowed them clear of the night's embrace. He rowed them straight into and beyond the break of day. And somewhere along that stretch of river, he also rowed them across an invisible fault line, a seam on the American continent that separates the terrain where the ephemeral events of everyday reality unfold from a more rarefied and singular realm, the place where mythic and permanent journeys of the imagination, such as those of John Wesley Powell, reside - the place of legends.”
― Kevin Fedarko, The Emerald Mile: The Epic Story of the Fastest Ride in History Through the Heart of the Grand Canyon

“Thou shalt not” is soon forgotten, but “Once upon a time” lasts forever.”
― Kevin Fedarko, The Emerald Mile: The Epic Story of the Fastest Ride in History Through the Heart of the Grand Canyon

“The black stream, catching on a sunken rock,   Flung backward on itself in one white wave,     And the white water rode the black forever. —ROBERT FROST”
― Kevin Fedarko, The Emerald Mile: The Epic Story of the Fastest Ride in History Through the Heart of the Grand Canyon

“The mosaic is so rich and varied that a hiker who descends from the highest point on the North Rim to the lowest point inside the canyon will pass through a spectrum of life equivalent to moving from the cool boreal forests of subarctic Canada to the sunstruck deserts of Mexico that lie just above the Tropic of Cancer—thereby compressing a distribution of plants and animals that typically stretch over more than two thousand horizontal miles into a single vertical mile.”
― Kevin Fedarko, A Walk in the Park: The True Story of a Spectacular Misadventure in the Grand Canyon

“From every direction, the place is under assault—and unlike in the past, the adversary is not concentrated in a single force, such as the Bureau of Reclamation, but takes the form of separate outfits conducting smaller attacks that are, in many ways, far more insidious. From directly above, the air-tour industry has succeeded in scuttling all efforts to dial it back, most recently through the intervention of Arizona’s senators, John Kyl and John McCain, and is continuing to destroy one of the canyon’s greatest treasures, which is its silence. From the east has come a dramatic increase in uranium-mining claims, while the once remote and untrammeled country of the North Rim now suffers from an ever-growing influx of recreational ATVs. On the South Rim, an Italian real estate company recently secured approval for a massive development whose water demands are all but guaranteed to compromise many of the canyon’s springs, along with the oases that they nourish. Worst of all, the Navajo tribe is currently planning to cooperate in constructing a monstrous tramway to the bottom of the canyon, complete with a restaurant and a resort, at the confluence of the Little Colorado and the Colorado, the very spot where John Wesley Powell made his famous journal entry in the summer of 1869 about venturing “down the Great Unknown.” As vexing as all these things are, what Litton finds even more disheartening is the country’s failure to rally to the canyon’s defense—or for that matter, to the defense of its other imperiled natural wonders. The movement that he and David Brower helped build is not only in retreat but finds itself the target of bottomless contempt. On talk radio and cable TV, environmentalists are derided as “wackos” and “extremists.” The country has swung decisively toward something smaller and more selfish than what it once was, and in addition to ushering in a disdain for the notion that wilderness might have a value that extends beyond the metrics of economics or business, much of the nation ignorantly embraces the benefits of engineering and technology while simultaneously rejecting basic science.”
― Kevin Fedarko, The Emerald Mile: The Epic Story of the Fastest Ride in History Through the Heart of the Grand Canyon

“And you really live by the river? What a jolly life!” “By it and with it and on it and in it,” said the Rat. . . . “It’s my world, and I don’t want any other. What it hasn’t got is not worth having, and what it doesn’t know is not worth knowing.” —KENNETH GRAHAME, The Wind in the Willows”
― Kevin Fedarko, The Emerald Mile: The Epic Story of the Fastest Ride in History Through the Heart of the Grand Canyon

“If you watch a man spend fifty years of his life on his knees in the darkness digging coal, my father could have told me, then you calibrate your blessings by a different set of metrics than most people.”
― Kevin Fedarko, A Walk in the Park: The True Story of a Spectacular Misadventure in the Grand Canyon

“A river so clear and transparent that the bright stones suspended within its currents could be seen with the naked eye, glittering with the traces of an incontestable radiance whose depth and distance and truth lay beyond the reaches of any terrestrial imagination.”
― Kevin Fedarko, The Emerald Mile: The Epic Story of the Fastest Ride in History Through the Heart of the Grand Canyon

“It’s sometimes surprising how people can open up when you demonstrate a willingness to listen to their stories with attentiveness and respect.”
― Kevin Fedarko, The Emerald Mile: The Epic Story of the Fastest Ride in History Through the Heart of the Grand Canyon

“back when humans must have lived in almost continuous humility and awe, transfixed by the inescapable sense of just how small and unimportant they were—little more than Tadpole Shrimp or Spadefoot Toads, creatures unburdened by delusions that the world could be sculpted to suit their ambitions and needs.”
― Kevin Fedarko, A Walk in the Park: The True Story of a Spectacular Misadventure in the Grand Canyon

“We’ve been friends for so long, I can’t remember which one of us is the bad influence.”
― Kevin Fedarko, A Walk in the Park: The True Story of a Spectacular Misadventure in the Grand Canyon

“The river’s isolation and secrecy, however, were only part of what made it superlative. There was also its vertical drop. The Colorado’s watershed encompasses a series of high-desert plateaus that stretch across the most austere and hostile quarter of the West, an area encompassing one-twelfth the landmass of the continental United States, whose breadth and average height are surpassed only by the highlands of Tibet. Each winter, storms lumbering across the Great Basin build up a thick snowpack along the crest of the mountains that line the perimeter of this plateau—an immense, sickle-shaped curve of peaks whose summits exceed fourteen thousand feet. As the snowmelt cascades off those summits during the spring and spills toward the Sea of Cortés, the water drops more than two and a half miles.

That amounts to eight vertical feet per horizontal mile, an angle that is thirty-two times steeper than that of the Mississippi. The grade is unequaled by any major waterway in the contiguous United States and very few long stretches of river beyond the Himalayas. (The Nile, in contrast, falls only six thousand feet in its entire four-thousand-mile trek to the Mediterranean.) Also unlike the Nile, whose discharge is generated primarily by rain, the engine that drives almost all of this activity is snow. This means that the bulk of the Colorado’s discharge tends to come down in one headlong rush.

Throughout the autumn and the winter, the river might trickle through the canyonlands of southern Utah at a mere three thousand cubic feet per second. With the melt-out in late May and early June, however, the river’s flow can undergo spectacular bursts of change. In the space of a week, the level can easily surge to 30,000 cfs, and a few days after that it can once again rocket up, surpassing 100,000 cfs. Few rivers on earth can match such manic swings from benign trickle to insane torrent. But the story doesn’t end there, because these savage transitions are exacerbated by yet another unusual phenomenon, one that is a direct outgrowth of the region’s unusual climate and terrain. On”
― Kevin Fedarko

“This was a sky belonging to a time that no longer exists—a sky that has never been seen, or even imagined, by most people living in such places as Boston or Dallas or Los Angeles. A sky whose wildness can call forth and amplify”
― Kevin Fedarko, A Walk in the Park: The True Story of a Spectacular Misadventure in the Grand Canyon

“Out there in the middle of the maelstrom the Eater awaits, heaving and gulping, its mouth like a giant clam’s . . . its mind a frenzy of beige-colored rapid foam. A horrifying uproar, all things considered. Imagine floating through that nonsense in a life jacket. —EDWARD ABBEY”
― Kevin Fedarko, The Emerald Mile: The Epic Story of the Fastest Ride in History Through the Heart of the Grand Canyon

“And Petschek had asked—because he was genuinely puzzled by this—why so many people, Americans especially, seemed to feel that happiness was an entitlement. By dint of his own experiences as a refugee and a wanderer, Petschek found the notion to be strangely naive and immature—especially here at the bottom of a chasm whose ramparts offered such irrefutable testimony not only to the smallness of human affairs but also to the universe’s implacable indifference to those hopes and longings.”
― Kevin Fedarko, The Emerald Mile: The Epic Story of the Fastest Ride in History Through the Heart of the Grand Canyon

“They were pilgrims because they had come to a holy place-a cathedral in the desert-in the hope of standing in the presence of something greater than themselves, something that would enable them to feel profoundly diminished and radically expanded in the same breath.”
― Kevin Fedarko, A Walk in the Park: The True Story of a Spectacular Misadventure in the Grand Canyon

“And Petschek had asked—because he was genuinely puzzled by this—why so many people, Americans especially, seemed to feel that happiness was an entitlement. By dint of his own experiences as a refugee and a wanderer, Petschek found the notion to be strangely naive and immature—especially here at the bottom of a chasm whose ramparts offered such irrefutable testimony not only to the smallness of human affairs but also to the universe’s implacable indifference to those hopes and longings. Yet”
― Kevin Fedarko, The Emerald Mile: The Epic Story of the Fastest Ride in History Through the Heart of the Grand Canyon

“In all, the ancestral lands of at least eleven prehistoric tribes either abutted or lay directly inside the canyon,”
― Kevin Fedarko, A Walk in the Park: The True Story of a Spectacular Misadventure in the Grand Canyon

“Cradled on the bed of that trailer was a small wooden dory. The boat’s profile was distinctive—an upturned prow that terminated in a sharp point, and a hull whose bottom was curved like the blade of a scimitar. Lashed to her decks were two sets of ten-foot oars hewn from straight-grained Oregon ash, and tucked into the footwell at the center of the boat lay a cable connecting a car battery to a pair of powerful search lamps, the kind of devices that jacklighters use when hunting deer in the dark. There was just enough light to make out her colors—a beryl-green hull and bright red gunwales. And if you looked closely, you could discern the black-and-gold lettering emblazoned along the right side of her bow that spelled her name: Emerald Mile.”
― Kevin Fedarko, The Emerald Mile: The Epic Story of the Fastest Ride in History Through the Heart of the Grand Canyon

“Beyond the rapids themselves, the river also concealed a host of other obstacles, wicked spots whose names offered a sufficiently graphic warning of what they would do to you if you let them. The Fangs. Helicopter Eddy. The Green Guillotine. Forever Eddy. The Devil’s Spittoon. No”
― Kevin Fedarko, The Emerald Mile: The Epic Story of the Fastest Ride in History Through the Heart of the Grand Canyon

“In the end, we were forced to concede that only one explanation made sense. The pelicans were simply besotted with whitewater—drawn to its beauty, captivated by its thrills, unable to break free of its joyous pull. Like us, they just couldn’t get enough of it. And like me, they apparently had no desire to fly back to wherever they had come from.”
― Kevin Fedarko, A Walk in the Park: The True Story of a Spectacular Misadventure in the Grand Canyon

“How would it feel, I wondered, to be part of an unbroken human lineage that anchored you to this ground as deeply as a field of century plants—and by virtue of those roots, to know that the land belonged to you, and you belonged to the land, in a way that white visitors such as us could only dimly perceive?”
― Kevin Fedarko, A Walk in the Park: The True Story of a Spectacular Misadventure in the Grand Canyon

“Even when nothing seemed to be going our way, he held fast to the belief that something absolutely marvelous lay hidden within the folds of each disaster, and that if we kept our wits and maintained our senses of humor, we would sooner or later be permitted to partake in the magic.”
― Kevin Fedarko, A Walk in the Park: The True Story of a Spectacular Misadventure in the Grand Canyon

“we had finally stumbled into a landscape that had stripped away the illusions we’d been peddling of ourselves as a pair of badasses to reveal who we truly were, which was nothing more than a couple of jackasses.”
― Kevin Fedarko, A Walk in the Park: The True Story of a Spectacular Misadventure in the Grand Canyon

“When you know there’s a good chance you’re going into the red room, you have to reach down and find a different place mentally,” he’d tell his squad.I “The thing that distinguishes successful athletes from everybody else is a realization that your limits are not necessarily where you think they are—and that your body is capable of doing more, often far more, than you expect it can.” Although Pete never really tried to make the downhill team, he absorbed many of these ideas, in particular the conviction that any challenge could successfully be met with the right combination of drive, grit, and sunny optimism—and if this proved insufficient, well, it was okay to just wing it.”
― Kevin Fedarko, A Walk in the Park: The True Story of a Spectacular Misadventure in the Grand Canyon

“The canyon and her dories embody and elusive riddle. It is a paradox rooted in the dream that many of us share of immersing ourselves so deeply, so inextricably, into a pocket of landscape, or a stretch of river - anything that seems to embody the wildness we have lost - that we may somehow take possession of those places and make them ours. Yet the truth, like an eddy, runs in the opposite direction.
In the end, it is they that claim us. And we who belong to them.”
― Kevin Fedarko, The Emerald Mile: The Epic Story of the Fastest Ride in History Through the Heart of the Grand Canyon

“The data are irrefutable: a hiker schlepping a fifty-eight-pound pack will expend roughly the same energy over ten miles as a hiker carrying a ten-pound pack will expend in thirty miles. When it comes to load carrying, location matters, too: weight on the feet—say, boots—requires between four and six times more energy to move than the same weight on one’s back.”
― Kevin Fedarko, A Walk in the Park: The True Story of a Spectacular Misadventure in the Grand Canyon