Tandem Rowing: More than a River

By Susan Kees

From Wyoming to Mexico, an 1,800-mile adventure of a lifetime.
Marriage itself is a journey, but this couple also embarked on a 1,800-mile adventure from the headwaters of the Colorado River—its tributary, the Green River in Wyoming—to its terminus in Mexico's Sea of Cortez.
Author Susan Kees and her husband Bill made the trip after thirty years of marriage, as they were becoming grandparents. They traveled in a raft, a motorless watercraft with custom rigging and two sets of oars so that they could row in tandem.
Tandem Rowing is not just a travelogue but a reflection on life, aging, and relationships, and an intimate portrait of a river that pulses through the landscape like the heartbeat of the earth.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Sep 1, 2021
• ISBN: 9781098389987

Book preview

Title

COPYRIGHT ©2021 SUSAN KEES

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

ALL PHOTOS FROM AUTHOR UNLESS OTHERWISE NOTED

MAPS & BOOK DESIGN:

TOR ANDERSON / TRUENORTHDESIGNWORKS.COM

FRONT COVER PHOTO: ERIK FALLENIUS

ISBN: 978-1-0983899-8-7

DEDICATIONS:

TO BILL: your love and support has nurtured me for more than half a century. Thank you for bringing me beyond my comfort zone to enjoy incredible adventures I never imagined. This book wouldn't exist without you.

TO MY KIDS, THEIR MATES AND GRANDKIDS: you all keep me laughing and inspire me to sharpen my pencils. My life is enriched by each one of you.

THANKS TO:

■ Katie Lee, writer and river woman, for helping me get started.

■ Deb Dion, my dear daughter-in-law, for her insights and encouragements that kept me writing.

■ Bonnie Beach, whose grammar and syntax knowledge kept me from embarrassing myself.

■ Katie McCrimmon, for her kindness, advice and professionalism that carried me forward.

■ Tor Anderson, for his hard work, great maps and inspiration.

■ My dear friends and unnamed helpers.

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

PROLOGUE

STARTING

TIME OUT (FOR ME)

BACK IN THE CURRENT

LAKE POWELL

NOTHING COMPARES TO THE GRAND

LOWER GRAND

MOVING SOUTH

MOVING SLOWLY

MUDFLATS OF THE DELTA

EPILOGUE

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

INTRODUCTION

IN DREAMING ABOUT following John Wesley Powell’s river explorations, Bill saw himself drifting, carefree, a liberated lonesome cowboy, but then he actually wanted me to join him. And like so many adventures I’ve shared with Bill, this experience was out of my comfort zone. I questioned myself many times, but I didn’t regret a single step. I know it sounds corny, but the truth is that I love being with my husband.

Our river trip parallels our relationship. We’ve rowed through many rapids, bumped into boulders, bounced back, and come out in the current. As a psychotherapist, I wanted to write a self-help book for couples who seek harmony in long-term relationships and want to revive friendship, honesty, trust, comfort, spontaneity, and intimacy. I hope my book reflects that, and I truly believe that if one member of a couple doesn’t want to give up, there is hope.

It may be unusual for couples to stay married fifty years, but it has worked for us. The good thing about our long relationship is that we have had time to work out our differences, to learn to understand and accept each other, even when we disagreed.

Our adventure is outside the box, but it’s an example of how beneficial it can be to get out of the familiar and embrace the unknown. Get out of your comfort zone. Take a chance.

PROLOGUE

IN 2002, my husband and I rowed our 6 x 13^-foot rubber raft nearly 1,800 miles on the adventure of our lifetimes. We decided to raft from the headwaters of the Green River in Wyoming to the Sea of Cortez, where the Colorado River empties into Mexico. Our trip would take us through Wyoming, Arizona, California, Lake Powell (which was at its lowest level since its creation in 1963) and the Mexican Delta.

At 59, Bill’s hair was still dark. He looked younger than his years, but you wouldn’t guess how strong and capable he was. I frequently called him little guy. He was of slight build with skinny legs, jealous of my beefy thighs. My svelte blue-eyed, broad-shouldered husband was forever smiling.

This six-month river trip was his idea. Having retired at fifty-three from the construction and real estate business, he wanted to follow his dreams. I was supportive and yet a little jealous of the idea. He wanted to drift, explore, and understand the many dams’ impacts on the ecology of the Colorado, and our lost birds and dying fish. He wanted to know the river better, since it’s practically our backyard, and to see what it was like to live on the water, without having anything else to think about.

Bill was a wanderer, a modern-day mountain man who slept better outdoors on the hard ground than on our bed at home. He’d been a jack-of-all-trades: a handyman, waiter, school teacher, ditch digger, carpenter, contractor, and realtor. He did things the old-fashioned way—the hard way, with few comforts. In the early 1970s, rock climbing was his mistress, and the kids and I supported her.

Having been a technical rock climber, Bill was fastidious, something of a perfectionist, but preferred family life with three kids to adding notches to his first-ascent feats. Growing up with staunch German Catholic parents gave him the organizational skills to start Telluride’s Mountainfilm Festival with a friend. He could make an adventure out of anything, and it almost always ended up in fun. He’d been a runner, skier, mountaineer, rock climber, and river runner. These days, he’s a wanna-be surfer.

I had no intention of doing this trip. For me, the outdoors was something I had only read about until I moved with Bill and two kids under five to the then-undiscovered mountains of Telluride, Colorado. I grew up in the asphalt jungles of Los Angeles County. To me, an outdoor life was reading poetry on the lawn at UCLA or tanning at the beach, where I repeatedly strived for the perfect lobster look.

I had learned to follow my heart after Bill and I fell in love. We were on the road in 1971 when we drove into Telluride, a picturesque mountain town, at nearly 9,000 feet above sea level, where miners still lived in the valley. Only Main Street was paved and boarded up Victorian buildings lined the dirt streets. I was inspired by the romance of living in the mountains.

When the raft trip became a reality, I had just turned 60 and I wanted to keep my counseling practice alive, so I thought I’d drop in to visit Bill now and then as he rowed down these waterways. That way, we would at least keep our romance alive. Besides, being that far away on the river, out of communication, was unsettling to me, and, unlike my husband, who was a minimalist. I was something of a maximum-ist, a homebody who liked her comforts. I loved our raft and the trips we took, but I had many other interests.

I was a novel reader, a wanna-be Spanish speaker who kept journals and took classes online. I was an LPC (Licensed Professional Counselor) with a master’s degree, a Secondary Teaching Credential, a school counselor’s certification, and multiple other credentials. I was tall, unevenly proportioned, and a klutz with osteopenia, which is a lesser form of osteoporosis. I enjoyed camping and exercising outdoors, but my favorite place was home.

The kids were the center of our lives. When Bill and I first met, Scott was three and Lorraine was one. He fell in love with all three of us, and when Blake came along four years later, we had the perfect family of five.

We’d been married for thirty years, and much of that time had been a tough struggle. But by 2002, the kinks in our relationship had smoothed out. While I had given Bill my blessing to follow his dream, I was bothered that he wanted to be away for so long. Didn’t he care about our marriage? Maybe I should reconsider his invitation to join him. But was I up for 24/7 togetherness for six months? There would be no roof, no walls, no running water, no protection to get out of the wind, rain, or sun. From the source to the sea would be a big commitment, unlike anything we had ever done. And I really wasn’t sure who I was without teaching, counseling, or grandmothering, which I felt defined me.

We’d enjoyed rafting for the duration of our marriage. Our raft was our family vacation home, the mule that carried 500 pounds of food and provisions so we could be outdoors. We could row into places far from civilization with all the essentials needed to eat, sleep, and live comfortably packed in waterproof boxes. It was a lot of fun, but also a lot of work: packing and unpacking tents, sleeping gear, food, drinks and a portable toilet. Every day, we had to set up camp, make fires, cook and clean, then take it all down again, pack up and clean up. It all took time and energy.

Bill and I had rowed a lot of miles on a lot of rivers together: the Middle Fork of the Salmon, the Main Fork of the Salmon, the San Juan, the San Miguel, the Arkansas, the Dolores, the Green, and the Colorado, amongst others. Neither rafting novices nor newlyweds, we’d enjoyed self-support and independent rafting trips for many years.

We had actually started tandem rowing with one set of oars, rowing into upstream winds, sitting side by side, each using one oar. That worked for a few years while we took turns rowing. In our early rafting years, I didn’t care that Bill rowed the raft and made all the decisions because I was busy with the kids. But as time passed and they grew, I wanted to row, too, so we took turns and discovered that neither of us liked being a passenger.

Then one time on the Colorado, in Big Drop 2 in Cataract Canyon, below Moab, Utah, which sits above Lake Powell, Bill was thrown out of the boat while rowing. When I turned around to say, Yikes, that was big! he was gone.

From the other side of the river, I heard him yell, Do something! and I climbed back to take his seat at the oars and rowed over to pick him up. From that moment on, I started learning to row, and loved it. That was when Bill built a dual-rowing frame, where we each had our own set of oars so we could row together. I sat in a seat on top of the cooler at the front with my oars and Bill sat behind me with his oars. His was the power seat. From my spot I could look into the gut of a hole and would get splashed in the face when we went into a rapid with our bow first. At times, one of us would fish, watch birds, or just relax. We rowed together because we each liked to row, and we liked being together—most of the time. We had a lot of power and could move quickly with our four oars in the water, but sometimes we clashed.

Rowing together was a challenge that most of our river friends wouldn’t even consider. We took turns rowing, but I wanted to learn more, so I started taking river trips without Bill to get my bearings without his coaching (which often turned into tears and anger). My first trip without him, I drank too much and walked off a fifteen-foot cliff in the middle of the night. I crushed my fifth thoracic vertebrae and compressed four others. But I was lucky: I could still walk.

Later, I proved to myself that I could row and take care of myself when I took multiple trips with friends without Bill, and eventually I rowed the first half of the Grand Canyon on my own. But when Bill came down to join me at Phantom Ranch, mile 87.5, about day 8, through a 225-mile, 21-day journey, I burst into tears. I preferred having my coach, my best friend, and my lover in the boat with me. What did I have to prove?

We often disagreed. Once, when rowing on the Middle Fork of the Salmon in Idaho, Bill yelled Spin right! to avoid a rock. I pulled my right oar back and rowed forward with my left. When we bounced off the rock, Bill said that spin right meant to pivot the stern, the back of the boat, forward, to the right. To me, that seemed like a left turn, which was completely the opposite.

That’s ridiculous, I said, thinking that even an idiot knew what spin right meant—to turn the front of the boat to the right. I knew about words. After all, I was once a high school English teacher. So we each made our case until we pulled ashore and asked our group how they would translate the spin right command. To our surprise, they were split down the middle: half agreed with me, the other half with Bill.

I thought about it for a year before I made up my mind to join Bill on his adventure. I loved the zen of rowing, synchronizing with the current, feeling my oars pull or push through the water, listening to them slap; the sound of water splashing, tumbling, dripping off my oars; the feel of the wind whipping against my face, and the power and harmony of rowing with my best friend, my husband.

I know of only one other person who has completed this 1,800-mile journey, and he motored across lakes. As far as I can determine, no one has rowed tandem nor done this trip the way we did.

In a world of electronics and overindulgences, our life on the river was a much-needed respite. We each have our own version of this remarkable six months, but this is my story, through my eyes, based on the journal I kept each day. I’ve left the research for experts, so don’t be confused by facts. This is a tale of two individuals, a couple married 32 years at that time, from a personal, unscientific, unprofessional outdoors-woman’s perspective.

I am grateful for all Bill has taught and shared with me. Without him in my life, I would never have had the opportunity to even consider such a trip. Our life together has been an adventure that I never imagined, a romanticized Little House on the Prairie, but I would never have lived it without Bill.

Bill has thought about doing this trip for years. It’s one of those things on his list of dreams, and it seems the pieces have come together: he’s retired, still has some physical ability, loves to boat, and all his younger rock-climbing friends have to work. So he says, The hell with it. I’m gonna do it, if you give me the okay, which I do. The last thing I want to do is crush his dreams.

He wants to start at the real source, far above the lakes, before the snow melts and climb through a place called Knapsack Col, the actual headwaters of the Green River in the Wind River Range, the rugged mountains east of Jackson Hole, Wyoming. He plans to take four or five days to ski down to Green River Lakes where the navigable water of Green River starts. I’ll meet him at Green River Lakes.

We disagree about the food and gear we’ll take. I’m an overpacker: I like to have backup provisions. Bill only wants to carry the minimum. We disagree but, for the most part, our discussions are civil.

Although I had decided to go with him only for the first few weeks, the more I helped him prepare, the more interested I got. I love camping and rafting, and taking a break from my counseling business sounded better and better.

Curious to see the shrunken, saline-infested wetlands, which was, once upon a time, a paradise in the Mexican Delta, I spoke with Jose Campoy, director of La Cienega de Santa Clara, the largest surviving wetlands below the Mexican border. Dams and the absence of fresh water, agricultural tailwater, and floodwater have altered the ecosystem of the Delta. Leakage from canals and supplemental releases help these struggling wetlands to survive, with the brackish waters supporting its dwindling bird and fish habitats. A friend suggested I get in touch with Jose to learn about the logistics of rowing through the Delta, but Jose didn’t know anyone who had rowed a raft all the way to the Sea of Cortez. He doesn’t think it’s possible for us to make it through the Delta in our raft.

I imagine getting stuck in the Delta’s mudflats, slogging through knee-deep muck, being lost in the middle of nowhere, dying of thirst, or being killed by drug smugglers or other people trying to cross the border. I picture scenes from John Wesley Powell’s 1869 trip down the Green and Colorado Rivers: His men, experienced outdoorsmen, were afraid of drowning and starvation along with their ceaseless toil. I’ve read that the Delta’s vegetation has dried up; that it’s a virtual wasteland and that the Colorado River is but a trickle into the Sea of Cortez. I want to row that section with Bill, but will I persevere through extreme discomfort? I don’t know. I don’t want to make a commitment to finish, despite Bill’s urging.

Bill asks, Why do you want to go on this trip?

When I say, To be with you, he pauses, scowling.

Then he says, I want you to know it’ll be hard at times, and I hope you won’t quit because you don’t care if we get to the bottom, if we finish. Bill takes me in his arms and I kiss his cheek.

I really don’t share his fervent sense of mission about the trip. I know I’ll work hard and stay focused at the start, but I may not like it; I might want to go home.

FEBRUARY 2002: I dread this trip in some ways, and I feel like our lives are centered on what Bill wants to do. Sometimes he drives me nuts, creating an all-day job out of the simplest task. He does everything in twice as many steps as I would, but then, he is very thorough.

Likewise, on the river, he likes to drift while I like to row. How will we survive the endless hours of being together without a break? Can I really give up my comforts and simplify my life beyond anything I’ve ever done?

Our life has always been an adventure. I never even imagined doing the things I’ve already done with him: skiing the Haute Route, a hut to hut mountaineering route through the Swiss Alps, rowing our raft through the Grand Canyon fourteen times, and in high water through Cataract Canyon, below Moab, Utah, above Lake Powell, raising three kids with little more than a wood-burning stove.

Bill has taught me to chop and stack logs, start and keep a fire burning, live with the bare necessities, how to ski, camp, raft, and find