On the Loose

In the summer of 1995, I nearly drowned without a lifejacket in Desolation Canyon. On a layover, I walked a few miles upstream to retrieve a shirt I had left behind at our previous camp.  Looking for the calmest water, I carefully waded out into the brown silty water at the top of a slow eddy and began to swim across the current to the far shore.  Freestyle became sidestroke and sidestroke became backstroke.  At one point, I realized that, instead of ferrying across at an angle, I was swimming directly upstream.  My cotton long sleeve shirt and pants and running shoes became heavier and heavier and I soon began to take on water.  I don’t remember how I made it to the opposite shore.  

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On the Loose

When the brothers Terry and Renny Russell launched on the Green River outside of the Uintah/Ouray Indian reservation in June of 1969, they knew next to nothing about what lay downstream.  There is little doubt that they were fully aware of Major John Wesley Powell’s expedition down the Green River exactly a hundred years before - each having voraciously plowed through the work of Western historians Bernard DeVoto and Wallace Stegner...So it’s not that there was no information to be had of what might be downstream per se, it's just that this was their style of adventure.  Terry had just turned 21 and graduated from UC-Berkeley.  Renny was 19.  The river trip was, as the Sierra Club’s David Brower put it, in celebration of the publication of their book On the Loose. 

Described as “An anthem for a generation”, On the Loose was published at a time when young Americans needed it most.  It was a time of Vietnam, Free Speech, and Civil Rights.  It offered inspiration and a path beyond the madness and into the wilderness and the unknown…

The book was a collection of wilderness photographs (Terry called them drug-store post card photos), short journal entries, and quotes from Aldo Leopold (I am glad I shall never be young without wild country to be young in.  Of what avail are forty freedoms without a blank space on the map?) to Steve McQueen (I’d rather wake up in the middle of nowhere than in any city on earth.)  It sold a gazillion copies.  
 

The book begins in the following way - 

Have you ever walked 34 miles on a straight-arrow dirt road in the desert with only a Tang-jar of some rusty water because you expected somebody who didn't come and then walked past your turnoff in the dark and had to sleep on a cattleguard?  Have you ever dropped your sleeping bag in the ocean by mistake?  Have you ever walked 50 miles? Or walked 41.3 miles with blisters for glory?  Have you ever fallen out of and under a boat in a rapid because the deck wasn’t tied on right?  
  
And so on.  

It finishes,

We've been learning to take care of ourselves in places where it really matters.  Crazy kids on the loose; but on the loose in the wilderness.  That makes all the difference.  
  
Terry Russell wrote this at age 17 in Berkeley, California in February of 1965.  They would find his limp and drowned body circling in an eddy just a quarter of the way through Desolation Canyon on the Green River just four years later.  After their boat flipped, Renny was forced to walk 70 miles to the nearest town, uncertain of the fate of his brother or of the flipped raft. 

It took Renny Russell nearly 40 years to return to Desolation Canyon and write his own book, Rock Me on the Water as a way to try to make sense of what had happened and why.  The book is beautiful and something of a catharsis for Renny.  But it was also cathartic for me.  

But there is something I struggle with.  Peppered throughout the writing in On the Loose are bits of foreshadowing.  And it fills me with sorrow to wonder, How could there have been any other outcome?  If not on the Green River, it would have been somewhere else, equally desolate, equally beautiful.   

~~~~~Part of it may be chalked up to youthful impulses, bravado, and feelings of immortality.  Renny remembers pre-adolescence in Rock Me on the Water:  

In the past year I had narrowly escaped death when my wagon sped out of control beneath the wheels of an oncoming car; had been swept out to sea in a riptide at Huntington Beach, broken my wrist in a fall, and had to be rescued in the dark when Terry and I rode our bikes for the horizon.  Caution was not yet a word offered to us in nature's “cunning alphabet”. 

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And in On the Loose itself:
  
Well, have we guys learned our lesson?

You bet we have.

Have we learned to eschew irresponsible outdoorsmanship, to ask advice, to take care and to plan fastidiously and to stay on the trail and to camp only in designated campgrounds and to inquire locally and take enough clothes and keep off the grass?

You bet we haven’t.

Unfastidious outdoorsmanship is the best kind.  

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Renny remembers scouting Steer Ridge rapid and returning to their boat:If there was a time to put on our life jackets, it was then.  If ever there was a time to pump up our under-inflated boat, it also was then.  But we didn’t.  The wheels of disaster were set in motion as I rowed toward the tongue of the rapid….A large wave crashed over us and the boat buckled, turning end over end.  

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In a sense, the timing of the publishing of Terry and Renny Russell’s book was ill-fated. There was no time for Renny to go back and write an Epilogue.  I have long wondered if the book would have become an anthem for a generation if, in that epilogue, Renny would have written something like this:

  Yes we were wild and On the Loose.  We played the guitar and sang, When I was young and reckless too, and I craved the reckless life….(traditional folk song).  But I would trade it all away if I could have my brother back.