Time and the Rivers

"Big Drops," the authors explain in their introduction to this handsome book, "are big rapids, Whitewater, places where rivers go wild." The ten rapids described, all in the American West, all regularly run by sportsmen, are among the wildest in the world. Although boatmen may argue over the merits of the ten selections, the authors — both professors — have done their field work. In the course of 10,000 miles of recreational river-running, they have navigated, sometimes repeatedly, each Big Drop they write about, and their portrayals of rapids like Hell's Half Mile in the Canyon of Lodore on the Green River in Utah, or of Satan's Gut in Cataract Canyon on the Colorado, are charged with the excitement of having been there.

Although the chapters devoted to each rapid contain maps and vivid, detailed descriptions of navigational problems — each chapter is almost a guidebook in itself — the book does justice to its other objectives of recounting the natural and human history of some of the West's great rivers. The geological story is told, the history of exploration is reviewed, and the exploits of the early boatmen are recorded.

The authors point out that "the second generation of western boatmen, the men and women who followed the explorers and organized the first commercial operations, is also passing from the scene. Their stories exist in perishable form — in the talk of boatmen around campfires and in the bars of small western towns. It was time, we thought, to gather and preserve this history before it, too, disappeared down the stream of time."

The account is peppered with profiles of local rivermen and tales of famous river trips, and full of information about the sport of river-running. It explains how Nat Galloway turned the sport around by facing the bow of his rowboat into the current to run rivers stern first, and how Georgie White popularized the sport after World War II when she introduced surplus inflatable rubber rafts.

Running throughout the entire book is a deep current of concern for the future of wild rivers. The authors recount the numerous proposals for various dams — too often successful, in their opinion — and speculate about the prospects for the commercial taming of the dwindling miles of wilderness river that remain. They summarize the river conservation effort since the Hetch Hetchy struggle in the 1910s, but their concern extends beyond the threat of dams to the quality of recreational use. "It was a mistake to reduce national parks and monuments to amusement parks on the basis of some twisted definition of democracy," they claim. "As in the case of great art or music, only a minority might appreciate wild rivers, but that minority surely had a right to a small fraction of the American landscape."

If the prose occasionally gushes, the color photographs by John Blaustein are superb. The reader is persuaded not only of the power of wild rivers, but also of their vulnerability.

THE BIG DROPS:Ten Legendary RapidsBy Robert O. Collins '54and Roderick NashSierra Club, 1978. 256 pp. $18.50

An assistant editor of the ALUMNI MAGAZINE, Dan Nelson wrote about canoeing the St. JohnRiver in the September issue.