Against the Current

If Hemingway had written a book about river guides, Martın Litton would have been the main character. He's gritty, he's anachronistic and he's been running the Colorado since the 1950s. More importantly, he's been an absolutist when it comes to protecting the Canyon a position that hasn't always been popular. Recently, on the dawn of his tenth decade, he made his final voyage down the river, and he let us tag along. "Well, I'm sorry I'm not deteriorating at the rate I'm supposed to," mutters Martin Litton, sitting on a sand beach on the floor of the Grand Canyon. It's unusual to see Colorado River travelers over the age of 80, but Martin rowed his own dory through the Canyon at the age of 82. Five years later he rowed most of the major rapids, including Lava Falls. On this trip, having mellowed the teensiest bit, he's sharing the oars with his sons Johnny and Don. Litton is now 90. Martin Litton is no stranger to the Grand Canyon. He first peered over the rim in 1939 on a weekend trip from the Wigwam Resort in Litchfield Park, where he was working as a publicity man. "It never occurred to me when I first looked over the edge that I'd ever go on the river. Nobody was going on the river then you might as well go to the North Pole." But in the early '50s, writing for the Los Angeles Times, he clambered down 2,000 feet of cinders to photograph Mexican Hat Expeditions negotiating Lava Falls. By 1955, he was rowing the Grand Canyon in a fiberglass cataract boat with P.T. "Pat" Reilly, an early river man. In 1962, Litton imported Oregon drift boats or dories to the Grand Canyon. In spite of the logistical advantages of inflatable boats, which already dominated whitewater travel, Litton opted for the elegant, if anachronistic, dory. "Well, there's a mystic thing about a dory, to those of us who know them," Litton says. "The dory is an ancient design; it goes back into antiquity. It has lines that belong on the water. I feel that anyone who looks at a dory and then has to ask why you use that, will never understand, no matter what kind of an answer you give."

By 1970, Litton, who never sought to become a professional boatman, had formed his own river company, Grand Canyon Dories, which was incorporated in 1971. "It was an accident," he claims. He'd been working as senior editor at Sunset magazine when, as former colleague Bob Wenkam remembers, "He finally said, 'I quit!' too loud in front of too many people." With his writing career at a standstill, Litton took to the river. Although many in the Grand Canyon know him for his magnificent dories, his true legacy is far greater. It's his lifelong leadership as an environmental champion that overshadows all else. Some even credit him although he stoutly denies it with saving the Grand Canyon.

This trip includes an eclectic mix: In addition to the three Littons, there are friends, fans, photographers and a few others along for the ride. Veteran doryman Andy Hutchinson revels in riding with Litton: "Just watching him at the oars... he's most poised when not actually rowing, but just sitting there, floating, telling stories. Then dropping into the big rapids of the gorge with Don at the oars, I'm just watching 'Dad' riding the stern hatch through the hugest of waves, like an old cowboy on his favorite pony."

I asked Litton how he came to his environmental ethic. He spoke of outings in the Sierras as a child, which led to later exploration on his own.

"I didn't like a lot of roads on the map. I wanted some empty space. I wanted a frontier, you know not just for adventure, but because that part of the world would be unmarked, wherever it might be. When you'd look at a map of the Mojave Desert and see these roads crisscrossing all over it to me that was terrible. And the idea that they'd be crossing the Sierras and chopping up the longest of all our wildernesses was anathema to me."

In college, Litton sharpened his pen and began his lifelong crusade. "I thought everybody ought to care about how beautiful the world was. And as far as I knew, everybody did. It never occurred to me to do anything except what you're impelled to do, feel, express." Perhaps he misread the mood of his fellow humans otherwise there'd be 300 million environmental zealots in the United States. No, Litton is unique, homegrown and original. And his ethic was there from the beginning.

Writing for Arizona Highways in the February 1948 issue, Litton cautioned about a new road into the Kofa MounOut that although the surrounding barren desert might make for great resort development, "instead, the bright lights after dark are the stars thousands of stars, big and little, like silver nuggets and silver dust strewn thickly over the black sky an inspiring sight best seen from a sleeping bag, with music provided by far-off coyotes."

Three years later, in the December issue of Arizona Highways, he described artist Jimmy Swinnerton's landscapes: "His subject is Nature; he makes no attempt to improve on it; it is all he needs and wants on his canvasses. Nature, where man has not interfered, is always sublime; mankind's interference is always crass and ugly." Onward Litton marched, launching battles from the L.A. Times, then Sunset, where he continually rankled his publisher as he craft-ed subtly persuasive stories against development, slipping in pictures of clear-cuts and four-lane roads ripping through the redwoods.

Feigning innocence, Martin asks, "Why would the public misinterpret my happy message and go into massive fits of outrage that are said to have led to the death of the freeway program in northwestern California and paved the way for the creation of Redwood National Park?" Why indeed. Dig very deeply into almost any environmental issue in the West and you'll run into Martin Litton. He was a warrior for the redwoods and a staunch defender of Sequoia and Kings Canyon national parks all in California. He's a veteran of many battles across the West some won, some lost. When the Bureau of Reclamation proposed damming the Green and Yampa rivers in the early 1950s, threatening to flood Dinosaur National Monument, Litton, still at the L.A. Times, was there.

And said, "I suppose you're all out reveling over just having heard our wonderful new president make a 13-minute inaugural speech without once mentioning the United States of America. [pause] The land we live on. [pause] The land, which made us rich. [pause] And which we're pouring, dumping down the drain." One more pause and Martin Litton finished what he'd called about and hung up.

In 1985, Litton was to speak to a group of river guides in Flagstaff. An environmental impact study was under way on the downstream effects of Glen Canyon Dam on the Grand Canyon ecosystem. Before Litton was to speak, former Arizona Governor Bruce Babbitt explained the multifaceted process, encouraging all sides to participate, to give and take. In a spirit of compromise, Babbitt said, we would arrive at a fair and just result.

Litton shambled to the podium and flung his prepared notes to the floor, muttering unintelligibly, glaring. "Compromise?" he bellowed. "Did he just say COMPROMISE? How the hell do you think we ended up with Glen Canyon Dam in the first place? We COMPROMISED!" He launched into an eloquent disquisition about following your heart, about fighting for what you believe, about never giving one bloody inch. He brought the crowd to its feet."

"If you start off with a willingness to compromise, you've given up, you've lost. Even though the final result, in most cases, is a compromise, it's a compromise that was reached between two sides, each of which was adamant, and was not going to give in. It was once said in a Sierra Club publication that the only way we'd ever accomplished anything was through compromise and accommodation. That's exactly the opposite of the truth. The only way the Sierra Club ever won anything was by refusing to compromise - Grand Canyon dams, Redwood National Park - you can go right back through the whole list. When we compromised, we lost."

To many especially to his opponents Litton's stance seems unrealistic. That doesn't bother him. "Never ask for what's reasonable," he says, "only for what's right." Nor do Litton's tactics always charm his opponents. "I believe in playing as dirty as they do, or worse," he says shamelessly. "If the end is a noble one, let the chips fall where they may. We certainly aren't sorry that we kept the dams out of the Grand Canyon, and if we lied to do it, fine." The cause trumps all, and the Grand Canyon is plenty noble.

"There are reasons why the river should be natural. One is the joy of running on a natural river, knowing you're as close to nature as you can be. And the other is whether we run it or not nature has its right. It has a right to be here, untrammeled, unfettered. Man doesn't have to screw everything up, and yet we go out of our way to do so. Greed is the motive, and it's important to frustrate greed. We're all greedy for one thing or another, but some of our desires are on a higher plane."

"We have no right to change this place. Do we have a right even to interrupt nature, even for a short time? To exterminate species? To kill the last fly? That's not really our right. We're the aberration on Earth humans are What's wrong with the world. And it shouldn't show down here [along the Colorado River].

"The best way for people to understand how important it is to have the bottom of the Grand Canyon preserved, and have its aquatic life saved, and its riparian zone with the beauty that's there, kept, is perhaps to have them on that river and let them feel the way it stirs and rumbles and moves you along at its own pace, and to sense the kind of life' the river has. It has a tremendous force and appeal that I can't describe.

"And the memory of the majesty of the Grand Canyon what it does to their lives to be away from their routines for a while even a short while. They begin to realize there's something more in the world than their tiny little bit of it. The experience has somehow opened their eyes to something bigger and greater in life. They understand the whole universe better because of having been in the Grand Canyon and isolated from other things and having time to think. A river trip has been called 'a voyage of life."

In Blacktail Canyon the group hikes up into the narrows. On a smooth gravel floor Litton stands, arms crossed, white hair waving crazily against the swirling, billion-and-a-half-year-old black schist. Overhead, Tapeats sandstone layers jut out, baffling the sounds, and deepening the reflected sunlight. Boatman Jeri Ledbetter plays her guitar to the rich acoustics. A small crowd of river and Canyon lovers watches silently as she sings a Dan Fogelberg classic: "The leader of the band is tired and his eyes are growing old. But his blood runs through my instrument, and his song is in my soul.

My life has been a poor attempt to imitate the man. I'm just a living legacy to the leader of the band."

Most 90-year-olds are not running the Grand Canyon, and most have left behind the battles of life for an armchair, a hospital bed, or a grassy plot. Although he sold his river company 20 years ago, Martin Litton still has too much to do. For the past two decades, his passion has been the great sequoia forests of California. Five years after all logging in Giant Sequoia National Monument was to have been stopped, it's still in high gear.

"Here we have our land - not privately owned - owned by us!" Litton says. "We should take care of it. We should make the rules. We need to get this place into the national park system. To have history look upon us not as destroyers, but as saviors of something we'd better act now."

It's hard to rest with the indefatigable Martin Litton still charging ahead. Winding up a phone call with him recently, I complimented his defiance, his stamina, his unwavering belief.

"Well," he said, "you've still got to try and save the Earth, even though we know it's hopeless - it's too late." He paused. "But that's when great, heroic things are done when you're going down with the ship."