Water Shapes Everything: A Conversation on Western Rivers

Three writers who carry Western rivers in their blood talk about their boating lives, creative bents, and views of moving water.
 

Introduction

Growing up on wild water in the American West is an experience only a few can claim.

Those who have been fortunate enough to explore river canyons of the American Southwest with families and friends when we’re young know how much those experiences shape us. Being in the wild imprints on our creative and professional lives and on the choices we make.

Today, increasing aridity, legacy water projects, and a preponderance of political leaders out of touch with America’s water and land put those assets in great danger. Such threats come at a time when outdoor experiences are needed more than ever, for society’s good health, self esteem in kids and adults, and continued connection to planet Earth.

In this intergenerational conversation, three writers who carry Western rivers in their blood talk about their boating lives, creative bents, and views of moving water, in their earlier years and now. Zak Podmore, whitewater boater and award-winning journalist, joins us from Bluff, Utah. His books and articles attracted the notice of Rose McMackin, former whitewater guide, freelance journalist, and pop culture writer in Austin, Texas. She is also the daughter of our third guest, Becca Lawton, an author, fluvial geologist, and pioneering Grand Canyon boatwoman living in Northern California.

We’d witnessed a river being born and then we’d seen it die, and I wanted to find a way to tell that story.
 – Zak Podmore

Conversation

Becca Lawton: I’d love to start our conversation by sharing our backgrounds on and with water. Why don’t we all speak about how rivers drew us in and what role they play in our lives now?

Zak Podmore: Much like Rose, I grew up in a river-running family. Both of my parents were raft guides-turned-public school teachers in western Colorado, and every summer we’d do multi-day river trips, mostly in Utah’s canyon country. As a kid, I couldn’t get enough of those desert trips, and I guess I never outgrew it. I moved to a 250-person town in southeast Utah ten years ago, where I’ve worked as an editor for Canoe & Kayak magazine, a water and public lands reporter for The Salt Lake Tribune, and a river ranger on the San Juan River.

Rose, I understand you also grew up in boats? 

Rose McMackin: Yeah, I was very lucky to grow up going on multi-day river trips with my family. But, unlike you, Zak, I hated it as a kid—camping, rafting, anything outdoors or involving physical activity. I’ve always been a pretty life-of-the-mind kind of person, so I didn’t start to appreciate those trips until my late teens. It’s probably a little insufferable, but I was reading Ralph Waldo Emerson and Walden, and the transcendentalists kind of led me back toward nature by valuing it in a really intellectual way. I ended up working as a raft guide during my college summers and for a few years after, and it became this real freedom because not only did boats take me to these special, hard-to-access places, but that work also took me to new regions like Idaho and Utah and gave me a lot of independence.

In hindsight, Mom, I wish I’d been more receptive to letting you teach me to row!

Becca Lawton: Rose, we still have time to learn more from each other, as you have a ton of your own experience to share. Unlike both of you, I didn’t run rivers when I was a toddler and school-age kid, but I discovered them just out of high school. Then I got hooked, and when I guided on wild water, drew on my earlier experiences sailing dinghies on the West Coast. My folks and three siblings had explored most of the national parks and other public lands whenever we could. We frequented Borrego Springs in the Colorado Desert (part of the greater Sonoran) and just loved walking in the arroyos, oases, and bajadas that were home to birds, desert mammals like bighorn sheep, and the various cacti we found so intriguing.

Later when Rose and I boated with our extended family—who were rafters, kayakers, river guides, scientists, cartographers, and park rangers—we kept in touch with water despite my retirement from professional boating.

I’m curious, how did you each become writers whose muse is, at least in part, rivers and water?

Zak Podmore: The other day, I pulled out my first real river journal, and it’s still sitting on my desk. It contains daily entries from a four-month, 1,700-mile kayak trip I took in 2011, when a friend and I paddled from the source of the Green River in Wyoming to the former delta of the Colorado River in Mexico. We watched the river grow from a tiny, ice-lined mountain creek into the mighty Colorado that carved Grand Canyon. After we portaged around the Hoover Dam, we watched the river shrink back down to a stream before it dried up completely at the U.S.-Mexico border. I’d started that trip as a river runner fresh out of college, but by the time we reached the Gulf of California, I was starting to think of myself as something like a journalist. We’d witnessed a river being born and then we’d seen it die, and I wanted to find a way to tell that story. 

Rose McMackin: I remember reading about your source-to-sea trip in my cubicle at my nine-to-five and fangirling about it. I remember being so envious because you seemed to have such a mature sense of purpose—how cool to hear that it was, in some ways, a becoming! And so fun to be in conversation now, all these years later.

But, oh man, I never have a good answer to this question. I have journals going back forever, and I was always blogging in some way or another, even when no one was reading it. I was just writing compulsively. And then the years I spent as a raft guide were just so vital. I was 22 and feeling everything really deeply, so it still feels like there’s a lot to mine there.

What I wanted to write about was the nomadism and immersion of river life, how water shapes everything in a guide’s life, and it took staying home long enough to do it.
 – Becca Lawton

Becca Lawton: A big yes to finding a way to tell the story, from mining our journals to getting back out there as much as possible. My life as a river writer started when I carried my almost-daily journaling habit, already established by high school, into my life on whitewater. For me guiding began with paddle captaining on rivers in California in 1973. Then I transferred with ARTA (American River Touring Association) to Utah’s rivers in Dinosaur and Canyonlands, as well as to Idaho’s Salmon and Selway, then with ARTA Southwest and AZRA (Arizona Raft Adventures) to Arizona and Grand Canyon.

Jensen, Utah, and Salt Lake City were my winter homes between summers in Flagstaff or on the South Rim. My winter jobs had to be both outdoor-oriented and come to an end by May each year, when river season rolled around again. So I was choosy in a very specific way.

And I was super peripatetic, as one New York editor described my life. A full-time home and the pursuit of writing books didn’t come until Rose was born. What I wanted to write about was the nomadism and immersion of river life, how water shapes everything in a guide’s life, and it took staying home long enough to do it.

Who would you say inspired your work, anyone at all, whether a writer in the wild or otherwise?

Zak Podmore: There are many, but when we’re talking about rivers, it’s always the Pulitzer Prize-finalist nature writer Ellen Meloy who comes to mind. I live just a few blocks from the house where Ellen wrote several of her excellent desert books, which contain some of the most incisive, lyrical, and hilarious descriptions of the landscape you’ll ever read. Her first book, Raven’s Exile, recounts a season on the Green River in Desolation Canyon, a place both of you know well, and Ellen blurbed your first book, Becca, before she died suddenly in 2004. Did you ever meet her?

Becca Lawton: I never did meet Ellen, but loved her work from the instant I first read it in Northern Lights—before she went on to incorporate those pieces into Raven’s Exile. She was so generous to blurb Reading Water without our paths ever having crossed, but clearly that was who she was—and still is to us. And of course her testimonial is poetic and deep.

I’d already transferred to the Grand Canyon by the time she and her husband Mark river-rangered on the Green. Although we may have just missed each other in Bluff or Moab or even at Lava Falls, say. She and I were like ships passing.

Other writers whose work influenced mine were Norman Maclean and Ed Abbey—who were haunted by waters and assaults on the desert. I love the historical fiction of Wallace Stegner and the details of lives on boats of Herman Melville. My parents and grandparents were fabulous epistolary writers whose voices directly shaped mine. Then, as I wrote books of my own, I found inspiration in the work of Gretel Ehrlich, Barbara Kingsolver, Mary Austin, and countless others.

How about you, Rose, writers who’ve influenced your work about water and rivers?

How might a young person’s sense of self-narrative override their natural survival instincts? Because that’s also whitewater kayaking.
 – Rose McMackin

Rose McMackin: He doesn’t write about rivers specifically, but I was very affected by the agitation and restlessness in Jon Krakauer’s books and essays. For me, he bridged something important about the cerebral and natural worlds. He’s obsessed with the question of “Why are we out here trying to have these extreme experiences?” in this very intellectual way. 

Another one—again, it’s not a river book, it’s purely speculative dystopia—but I think about Stephen King’s The Long Walk often, in regard to whitewater culture. I think he wrote it as an allegory for the military, all these young people who sign up to do something dangerous because the potential consequences aren’t real to their still-developing brains. Like, how might a young person’s sense of self-narrative override their natural survival instincts? Because that’s also whitewater kayaking.

Becca Lawton: Great point. I love that view of our risky times outdoors and our processing them through words can be so endlessly fascinating. Zak, your latest book, Life After Dead Pool, goes in and out of two vastly different worlds—casinos in Las Vegas and expeditions on today’s Lake Powell, where the reservoir is rapidly shrinking behind Glen Canyon Dam.

The reservoir is facing a much different fate, isn’t it, than predicted by its progenitor, Bureau of Reclamation chief Floyd E. Dominy? Who, as John McPhee wrote in Encounters with the Archdruid, mocked David Brower for claiming the dam would silt in within decades. I certainly saw the sedimentation happening in the 1970s, but during your paddles, you’ve seen the “Dominy Formation” emerging in huge outcrops as the lake falls with increasing aridification.

Zak Podmore: The story of Glen Canyon—the so-called “place no one knew” that drowned under Lake Powell in 1963 and helped galvanize the modern environmental movement—is so well known in the river-running world that it’s almost a cliché to recount those battles. At least that’s how I thought about it when I went down Cataract Canyon a few years ago with a group of scientists, who were studying changes to Glen Canyon as Lake Powell reached record-low levels. At that time, I more or less agreed with Dominy’s assessment that the Glen Canyon Dam would be around for hundreds of years until Lake Powell completely filled in with silt. 

I no longer think that’s the most likely scenario. There is a mountain’s worth of mud already trapped in Lake Powell, but the dam’s days appear to be numbered, not because of the silt, but because of climate change. The reservoir hasn’t been full since 1999, and in recent years it has gotten so low that the dam is becoming a major headache for water managers. The dam’s not designed for sustained drought and there are growing concerns that it could impede water deliveries to the tens of millions of people who rely on the Colorado River in Arizona, Nevada, California, and Mexico. 

Counterintuitively, climate change-linked drought is now our best hope for restoring Glen Canyon. One hundred thousand acres of land and over a hundred miles of river canyon that were once flooded by Lake Powell have reemerged since 2000. The ecosystems are rebounding more quickly than anyone expected. Beavers have moved back into the side canyons. There are 60-foot-tall cottonwood trees growing up next to the remains of sunken jetboats. The story I tried to tell in the book was not about the canyon that was lost in the 1960s, but the story of a canyon being reborn. 

Becca, you covered a lot of these same themes—climate change, drought, and the resilience of rivers—in your most recent book of essays, The Oasis This Time.

Becca Lawton: Right, Zak, and thanks for seeing and highlighting the hope around Glen Canyon for us. Regarding climate change and water—as a kid, I felt connected to wild places, and falling for free-flowing rivers put me back there, and right on the front lines of change.

So I too turned to mining my river journals when I decided to write with commitment. Beginning with Reading Water and continuing to Oasis, I felt an urgency to share what I saw, first as a kid and then as a guide and scientist, in canyons and streams I was lucky to know.

Now I’m writing nonfiction about the singular experience of becoming a professional Grand Canyon guide in the 1970s and 80s, when few women were hired there. Georgie White pioneered the role in the 1950s, but considered herself an exception to the rule that women had no place on the river. In a way, token women like me on early crews may have shared her sentiment, because there were so few openings for us, and management spread us around—one fully qualified oarswoman launching at Lees Ferry per week for a while—so for years we often saw each other only back in Flagstaff.

And, Rose, I recently read your essay “Old Gods” in Phoebe Journal, about the Green River in Utah and your family of river-runners (which includes me). You weave the familiarity of extended family with SpaceX, a takeover of the world’s skies by folks like Elon Musk.

You write poignantly that the larger wilderness overhead is yours. That’s a moving moment. I’d love to hear your thoughts on other takeovers you’ve witnessed of memories you cherish.

Rose McMackin: I wrote that essay in about one pass right after getting off a Desolation Canyon trip on the Green that my cousin led. I was feeling this dual sense of accomplishment and loss at the realization that those trips we once did as a big family are now something we’re completely capable of doing on our own. At some point, we (kinda!) became the adults in the room. Of course, that’s not just a river narrative, but it felt overlaid by this grief that the backcountry itself is shrinking.

Earlier this year, President Donald Trump’s so-called “Big, Beautiful Bill” proposed to sell more than two million acres of public land to help close the budget gap and offset tax cuts for the wealthy. To me, that’s theft of an American birthright. And I also found myself preoccupied with the idea of that kind of “power” in contrast with the almost preternatural power of a parent who can seemingly fix anything—and row Lava Falls.

Zak Podmore: “Old Gods” is a wonderful essay, Rose. And in many of your other literary pieces, such as “Juice” or “Good with Dogs,” you set brief scenes in the landscape that contain deep emotional undercurrents. Unstrapping a kayak from a car evokes the strain in a relationship or a mid-swim nosebleed captures the awkwardness of teenage romance. Your mom’s river prowess is a recurring theme. In just a few dozen words, you’re able to connect a seemingly mundane moment in the outdoors to complex interpersonal themes. 

Rose McMackin: Thanks, Zak, that’s very kind! I really admire how you—and my mom, too—are able to write with such a grasp of the landscape and natural sciences, in part because my intelligence just has never bent that way. I love the natural world, but my mind seems to be eternally preoccupied with interpersonal dynamics.

Becca Lawton: That’s an amazing insight. I love the way you connect cultural views with outdoor themes and scenes, Rose. They give me a jolt of understanding I find unique and absorbing.

Zak, your dad makes a few vital appearances in Dead Pool, where we get to know his quiet competence in the context of a changing river—skills he clearly passed on to you. How do you feel those scenes on Lake Powell relate to Confluence, where you share the pain of huge loss in a way that also ties to land and water?

Zak Podmore: At a very personal level—at least in my own mind—the books mirror each other. Confluence explores how running rivers helped me come to terms with the loss of my mom, who died of cancer at the age of 53, and who brought my dad, my sister, and me on so many desert river trips. Life After Dead Pool is more journalistic, but it tracks how Glen Canyon, a place I considered dead, is already being resurrected. “Dead pool” refers to the point when a reservoir drops to the lowest outlets on a dam. But the lower Lake Powell gets, the more the Colorado River comes back to life. 

Rose McMackin: Reading Dead Pool, I was most struck by its optimism—it’s looking forward. So much of environmental writing is inevitably couched in grief, but Dead Pool felt like it invited me out of anger or despair into acceptance and all the possibilities of that stage.

Becca Lawton: I feel heartened in the same way, and I love hearing your perspectives. What’s next for each of you? For my part, I’m writing my boating memoir, probably for the same reason I kept notes all through guiding—to document that time on North American rivers. Dams were still going in, with less hope back then that they’d come down anytime soon, so I believed the amazing access and relatively uncaged feeling of making a river life would be fleeting. I also want to help write women into river literature; too often I’ve seen the pioneering women guides of my generation skipped over. So I’m interviewing some of my boatwomen colleagues, to share their experiences along with mine, and blogging at beccalawton.com. What are your upcoming projects?

Zak Podmore: I recently received Floyd Dominy’s 300-page FBI file through a FOIA (Freedom of Information Act) request, and I’m hoping to publish a piece on its contents. And I’m working on a new book proposal that will explore the proto-environmentalism of the New Deal era. To Rose’s point, I’m inspired by the conservationists who were able to build a vision for a better future amid the despair of the Great Depression, and I think they have some important lessons for us today.

Rose McMackin: Right now, I’m working on a collection of culture essays about the West, using film, literature, and music to try and get a better feel for what’s real and what’s a collective fantasy. I also write about country music, the ultimate modern mythology, at trucksongs.substack.com.

Becca Lawton: Fascinating stuff! A river runs through us, for which I’m grateful, and I look forward to seeing your outstanding work as you carry the torch forward.