Down to Bedrock with Kevin Fedarko
Transcript
Kevin Fedarko: The Canyon is, can be incredibly harsh and cruel and it's very difficult place to move through and it will strip away all of your, all of your arrogance, all of your preconceived ideas about who you are and what you think you have and how much you think you know. And it will leave you staring at what's left, which in my case was not a lot.
Jo Baird: Hi, I'm Jo. And today we have the honor of speaking with Kevin Fedarko. A renowned writer and adventurer whose work has captivated audiences with its vivid descriptions and immersive storytelling. Kevin is perhaps best known for his critically acclaimed book “The Emerald Mile,” which chronicles the daring journey of a small group of river runners through the Grand Canyon during a historic flood. Drawing on his background as a journalist and his deep connection to the region, Kevin's latest endeavor promises to take readers on another unforgettable journey. Set to be released in May, 2024. Kevin's new book, “A Walk in the Park” promises to be a captivating exploration of the natural world and human experience. Well, thank you so much for being here today, Kevin. Can you just briefly introduce yourself for us? Kevin: Sure. My name is Kevin Fedarko, and I make my living writing books, mostly about the Grand Canyon. Jo: OK. Thank you. And just to start off here, can you provide us with an overview of a walk in the park, your newest book and what inspired you to write it? Kevin: So this book chronicles a journey that I undertook. Back in 2015, so almost 10 years ago, with one of my best friends and also a kind of professional collaborator, a National Geographic photographer by the name of Pete McBride. And I latched onto this project when Pete came to me with an idea. The year before we launched, the idea was that it might be fun to set out, to walk the length of Grand Canyon National Park from Lee's Ferry in the East to the Grand Wash cliffs in the West. A journey that the Colorado River, it takes the Colorado River about 277 miles to travel, but the catch on this particular journey is that there is no trail in Grand Canyon National Park that will take you along the length of the park. And that in order to cover that distance, you need to wind into and back out of so many tributary canyons, and you need to climb up and down vertically between so many different layers of rock that that 277 mile journey that the river takes gets stretched to something between 600 and 750 miles, depending on the route that you are traveling. So Pete came to me with this idea, and Pete and I have a history of kind of collaborating on magazine projects that have taken us to some rather exotic parts of the world over the years. And what all of these stories have in common is that they're incredibly bad ideas concocted by Pete, which get us into an enormous amount of trouble. And you know, despite the trouble that we got into in a whole variety of places, from the Horn of Africa to the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to the Caucasus Mountains over the years. And even Everest Base Camp, nothing compared to the amount of, the difficulties that we encountered, the suffering that we endured and the embarrassment that was inflicted on us by the Grand Canyon over the course of this journey. So this book is a chronicle of that experience, the good, the bad and the ugly, all wrapped between two different covers. Jo: Yeah, and you've collaborated obviously with Pete McBride on a host of past projects. Can you share a little bit more about your dynamic and how your relationship evolved over the course of this traverse through the canyon? Kevin: As I alluded to a moment ago, it's a pretty dysfunctional relationship. If any of your listeners out there, happen to have a friendship that forms a part of their lives, and at the center of that friendship is the knowledge harbored by at least one of those people that maybe the friendship itself is not very good for them. That that characterizes what Pete and I have shared over the last 20 years. We have, I think it's probably, it's fair to say that all of the trouble that we've gotten into over the years in the course of doing these magazine assignments and then later the Grand Canyon really boils down to a kind of a hubris and an arrogance that we both, well, particularly Pete suffers from, to a lesser extent myself, in thinking that we have more ability and prowess and physical strength than we actually have. And that we can do these things and that that we set out to do, and not encounter too much in the way of problems. And so that level of confidence and hubris. I think is part and parcel of and lies at the core of everything that we have done. I would say that Pete brings more of this to the table than I do. I'm a -- in some ways we're not – we look similar, but we have a lot of differences in terms of our personalities. I'm a writer, I'm accustomed to working alone, I kind of embrace solitude. I'm somewhat socially dysfunctional and rather shy, and Pete is the opposite of all of those qualities. You know, Pete works in the medium of light as a photographer, and that's kind of a metaphor for who he is as a person. He's incredibly social. He loves to sort of flit around like a butterfly, just meeting new people and encountering new things. He embraces challenges and people and experiences in a way that I do not because he's an extrovert. And so it's the interplay and the dynamic and the tension between those two personalities, that kind of drives much of the interaction between us as we embark on these adventures. Jo: And I can fully appreciate the humbling aspects of the canyon that you touch on. I think everyone who has hiked and ventured into the canyon experiences that in some way, shape, or form. Can you tell me about what that process was like for you and how you came to that humbling sense? What point in your journey, or if it was a continuous progression throughout the traverse for you? Kevin: Yeah, for sure. I mean, it probably starts with mentioning something briefly that we can go into in greater detail if you want later on in this conversation, but you know, I started this hike thinking that I knew more than I actually did about the canyon and the reason for that is that I many years ago wrote a book about the canyon. A book called “The Emerald Mile,” which chronicled a very different story. It was the story of three river guides who in the in the spring of 1983, put a little wooden Dory into the Colorado River at Lee's ferry with the intention of using a historic flood, an epic spring runoff to propel themselves through the canyon, to catapult themselves through the canyon so fast that they would hopefully break the standing speed record for the fastest boat ever to traverse the length of Grand Canyon. And the name of that boat was the Emerald Mile and the name of the book was taken from that boat. That book was researched over the course of a decade in which I kind of apprenticed myself as a river guide at the bottom of the canyon on the Colorado River, in order to kind of learn about the culture of river guiding, in order to absorb everything I could about that environment. For people who come to the canyon for the first time, what they typically do is they move to the rim of the canyon and they spend minutes, or hours, or sometimes days staring down into this abyss. Very few people actually venture down to the bottom of it. And so I wanted to tell the story of those people and I spent years learning about them and learning about the environment itself, the rock, the light, the hydrodynamics of the river itself. And I came out of that having written this like 416 page book, or whatever it was, convinced that I was kind of like an expert on Grand Canyon, you know? And I had sort of covered all the things that needed to be covered. I kind of thought of myself as a bit of a bad***. To be totally and bluntly honest about it all. And so when I agreed to do this hike with Pete, I didn't think it was going to be that big of a deal. I had done, you know, couple dozen river trips. I'd been through the canyon. I was familiar, I thought I was familiar with the basic frame and structure of the chasm itself. And I didn't think that it had all that much to teach me that was going to be new. And so that's really the sort of baseline fact that governed the start of this story. And to answer your question like I think within the first 48 hours, I was brought up face to face with the depth and density, and scope of my own ignorance. One of the things that Grand Canyon does to any, to all of us who are who are familiar with it, connected to it, and spent time in it, is it -- the place itself does what time has done to the rock. It abrades and strips away everything down to bedrock, and it leaves the canyon with this, it's a revelation of what lies at the base of, underneath all of the dirt and foliage and the tapestry of life that that covers you know the landscape in most other places. Well transfer that to a person. The canyon can be incredibly harsh and cruel and it's a very difficult place to move through and it will strip away all of your arrogance, all of your preconceived ideas about who you are, and what you think you have. And how much you think you know and it will leave you staring at what's left, which in my case was not a lot because I had so much to learn, not so much about the world of the river, at the bottom of the canyon, this ribbon of water that you know is responsible for having carved and polished and created and honed the canyon itself and the kind of the, the lush foliage that lines its banks on a very thin margin. What I needed to learn about was everything the wilderness of rock that extends from the edge of that riparian zone, all the way up through this, this kind of vertical wilderness of cliffs and ledges and side canyons between the edges of the Colorado River and the rims of the canyon. This is a place where very few people go because of what I mentioned a few moments ago. The fact that there is no trail on the north side of the canyon, on the south side of the canyon there's a trail for like 15% of the distance that you can take. Which will usher you along through this environment and the rest of it is just, it's a place that you have to sort of figure out how to move each and every step that you take. You have to think very carefully about, and that's the South side. The north side of the canyon, almost 95% of it has no trail. So this is the world that I realized within the first 48 hours of entering with a backpack on foot having left my boat behind that I was unprepared to enter, knew very little about, and was about to get an extended lesson in the complexity of during the course of this journey. Jo: So it sounds like you had been stripped and kind of had that bedrock moment as you speak of within 48 hours. What was the plan from there to reinvigorate the trip and continue on? What happened after that moment? Kevin: Well, you know, I'm embarrassed to say now like the initial plan -- I mean, in addition to Pete and I being pretty arrogant and suffering from quite a bit of hubris. I don't know if I can swear on this podcast, but we are capable of, we have a flair for quite a bit of bull**** and one of the things that we did was we talked a group of -- We're pretty good at fast talking -- And so we convinced a group of very, very experienced canyon hikers who were embarking on their own through-hike to let us tag along with them for what we thought would be the first segment of our hike. This is maybe a moment where I should just sort of explain an important difference. So if you're setting out to hike through Grand Canyon, you can do it in one of two ways. You can start at one end or the other and hike all the way through without stopping, and that is known as a continuous through-hike. There's another way of approaching it which is more like a puzzle and what you do is you hike the canyon in sections. Those sections can be very short or very long. They can take a couple of days, they can take three or four weeks, it doesn't matter. But when you're at the end of that section, you come out of the canyon, you rest, you reprovision, and then you go back in. And you string together a sectional-through-hike, like kind of like pearls on a necklace, if you can imagine that. So these hikers that we were tagging along with, we're doing a continuous through-hike, which is like an order of magnitude more difficult than a section-hike, and we just thought to ourselves, we thought, well, gosh, we can tag along with these guys for the first segment and we'll learn everything that we need to -- the few things that we don't know about, we'll just pick them up along the way. It'll be super easy and then we'll come out of the first section of the hike as like total experts. And also, Pete told me, we didn't even need to get in shape for the hike because the hike itself would be the thing that would get us in shape for the hike, and so at the end of this first section, we would emerge as like these bronzed Adonis-like you know through-hikers. What ended up happening is that we were spanked so hard that first section was supposed to be about 12 days, and it would take us all the way from Lee's Ferry to a really important crossroads inside the canyon that everybody who knows about the canyon reveres. This is the place where the largest tributary of the Colorado River inside Grand Canyon, the Little Colorado, meets and merges with the Colorado itself. It's a place known as the confluence and it's about 66-67 miles downstream from Lee's Ferry. 63 miles according to some people, and that was our goal. We were so inept that we only survived five days. Within five days, Pete had succumbed to a condition, a heat related condition, called hyponatremia, which is kind of the opposite of dehydration. Where you end up ingesting too much water instead of not enough and you throw off the balance of electrolytes inside of your bloodstream, you undergo muscle cramps. If it gets really bad, you slip into a coma and then you die. Meanwhile, my feet had deteriorated so bad and had so many blisters that it felt like I was stepping into a bucket of broken glass with each step that I was taking and on Pete's advice, I had wrapped my feet in duct tape. Applying the duct tape directly to the blisters to create like these duct tape booties, which were then creating a kind of like terrarium environment. Moist, warm, nurturing environment for bacteria and so my feet were literally rotting. We were in so much pain and we're holding back this team of through-hikers. This like crackerjack team of through-hikers that had this schedule that they had to stay on in order to achieve their dream. For which, by the way, they had been preparing for years like this is what you're supposed to do when you hike in Grand Canyon. You set out to learn about hiking slowly and increments and you devote years to doing small hikes and then more ambitious hikes and gradually you know, you learn about water, you learn about the different layers of rock. You learn about how to pack your pack. You learn about how much weight you need to carry. You learn about land navigation. You learn about where to camp and you acquire all that knowledge in increments, and then you apply it to a through-hike instead of what we did, which was just like -- It's the equivalent of like jumping to the front of the line when you're waiting in line to get through the front gate of the park on a hot summer day. We just figured we'd show up and jump the line and so six days after on the sixth day of our what we thought was going to be our initial segment of the hike and less than half the distance from Lee's Ferry to the confluence of the Lower Colorado and the Colorado rivers. We had to pull the ripcord and request an extraction from some friends who would who came in with some additional supplies and escorted us out of the canyon. We retreated back to Flagstaff with our tails between our legs. Word had already leaked out that these two wildly incompetent National Geographic journalists had failed on their initial bid to through-hike the canyon, and that was the reality that confronted us. At the at the very beginning of our project. Jo: So it seems like you relied heavily on the support network of friends, acquaintances along the way. Can you kind of explain more of how they helped you and Pete actually complete this traverse across the Canyon and in what ways they helped? Kevin: You know, that's such a great question because it touches on a truth that we were not aware of at the time but gradually came to learn about and appreciate. Which is that, you know, for many of us, when we think about wilderness and going into the wilderness for a whole variety of reasons that go back to like Henry David Thoreau, a lot of Americans like to imagine that they experience wilderness alone, solo. This is an American archetype to move into the wilderness as a lone, rugged individual, learn some lessons, overcome a set of challenges and emerge alone but enlightened from that experience. My experience in Grand Canyon is very different. My experience in Grand Canyon, one of the things that the canyon has taught me is that the canyon is so enormous, and so complex, and so formidable in terms of its harshness and its brutality and its ability to just, like, kill you within hours if you don't know what you're doing. That in order to move into it and through it successfully, most people don't do it alone. Most people do it either in the company of others, or if they're not doing it in the company of others, they're doing it alone, they're doing it with knowledge that was acquired by others and shared with them and provided to them. Grand Canyon in many ways is not a solo experience. It is a recognition that there is a community of knowledge, and participation, and values that drives and sustains each person moving through that environment. And so what we discovered, Pete and I discovered, is that after we'd been spanked so badly on the first leg and we had to abandon the canyon and come out. And by the way, we came out thinking we were not going to go back. Like we came out so horrified by how hard it was and how badly we hurt that we were on the verge of calling up our editors in National Geographic back in Washington, DC, and basically saying like, look if you guys want this project to continue and this story, you're going to have to outsource it to like some college students or some rodents or some life form that's capable of moving through the canyon. The only reason that we didn't do that is because the through-hiking team that allowed us to accompany them. And by the way, were the only reason we could even make it for five days. You know, they like taught us so much and they helped us so much. And then in addition to that, when we exited the canyon, they used their DeLorme, a communications device, satellite communications device to reach out to their friends in Flagstaff who are part of a community of people who care about and are connected to Grand Canyon. And when these people learned that, you know, there were two journalists who were trying to make their way through the canyon to do a story for National Geographic. It was going to talk, among other things, about the threats that hang over the park, how fragile the park itself is and how important it is to preserve it. They kind of, like, rallied. And they made contact with us. They met with us. They listened to us tell them that we weren't going to go back. And then they told us the opposite, they said no, no, no, you are going back and you're going back with knowledge that we're going to give you. What they did was they essentially put us through like a hiking boot camp over a month and, you know, they redid our nutrition program. They dumped our packs out on my living room floor and threw a whole bunch of gear away. And then they gave us some more gear that was much lighter that we could use. They re-planned our route through the canyon. And then they appointed from among themselves, some people who are basically going to go in with us and be like babysitters and minders. To see us through the canyon, to kind of like pull us through the rest of the canyon like a locomotive pulls a caboose. All of which gets back to this point I was making a moment ago, and this long winded soliloquy I'm in the middle of right now, which is that in addition to like everybody who's hiking solo, you know, hiking on the shoulders of a body of knowledge that has been given to them by others. Our experience of the canyon, we experienced the heart of the canyon, the heart of the wilderness of the canyon, in the company of others. And we were brought face to face with something that I think is an important truth to acknowledge, not just about Grand Canyon, but all of our national parks, all of our public lands, all of the spaces that we own collectively as Americans and that we care about. In part because they belong to us and that we are responsible for as stewards. And that is that perhaps the only thing that's more fulfilling than doing this archetypal American solo journey of going in alone to wilderness is experiencing wilderness in the company of others. Experiencing the wilderness in the company of people we care about. What do we do with our National Parks? So many of us, we drive to them with our families. We take our kids into them. We're taken into them as kids by our parents. Sometimes our grandparents come along and what we do inside of these spaces is we experience wilderness, we're touched by beauty, but we are also given an opportunity by the natural world to strengthen the connections that bind us together as human beings. And this is an unrecognized and unacknowledged and under celebrated aspects of what our National Parks are, and the gifts that they hand to each and every citizen of this country. And so one of the gifts that canyon gave to Pete and I over the course, yes, extraordinarily difficult, but also very kind of revealing an important learning journey that we had was -- I mean it, it strengthened our friendship. We'd been together, we'd worked together for so many years, but we emerged, we went in as friends, we emerged as brothers and that is a story that I think almost everyone who comes to the canyon experiences, in one form or another. Jo: So your previous works have touched upon the rich history and cultural significance of the Grand Canyon, including the enduring presence of indigenous communities. Can you discuss for us how your new book specifically explores indigenous perspective of the land and how their voices and experiences are woven into the story itself? Kevin: Yeah, I can do that. And you know, I need to do what I just did. I need to do it all over again, which is to go back to this baseline of cluelessness and ignorance that I...that I had. At the start of this hike, despite having written an entire book about Grand Canyon, the book that I wrote before, as I said a moment ago, it was focused on the river. It was focused on the world of the river. It was focused on the culture of boating and river guiding. What I didn't mention is that one of the many, many things that that book did not touch on, or really involve much thought about was the history of Native Americans inside the canyon. I was mostly interested in, like, the history of white people and the history of boating inside the Grand Canyon that really started, at least the written part of that history, in the summer of 1869, with the legendary journey of John Wesley Powell and a crew of nine men in four wooden boats who completed the first traverse we had in written history of the Grand Canyon, which itself was part of a much larger boat journey that they were undertaking. It was a journey of exploration, if you define exploration as the series of encounters that the descendants of white Europeans had with a landscape they viewed as wilderness in the American West over the course of a couple of centuries. So I didn't really know much about or had thought very much about the Native American presence inside of Grand Canyon when we started this hike. One of the things that occurred over and over again over the course of the year that we spent moving from Lee's Ferry to Grand Wash Cliffs in segments with breaks in between is that as I mentioned a moment ago, we were concerned about and interested in learning about, and writing about, and covering for National Geographic, some threats that loomed over Grand Canyon. And what we began to realize over the course of this year was that each and everyone of these threats had a tribal component to it. Because, and the reason for that, is that it's really impossible to think about the landscape of the canyon itself and the history of that landscape without taking into account the fact that prior to the arrival of white European, of the descendants of white Europeans, this landscape was occupied by a matrix -- an incredibly rich matrix of tribal people. There are 11 Native American tribes whose ancestral lands either abut or lie directly inside of what is now Grand Canyon National Park. And when we created this national park, and other national parks, one of the things that we did at the time was we completely ignored the presence of these tribes, we told ourselves as Americans, we congratulated ourselves in creating a National Park system and having the sagacity and the wisdom as Americans to identify, and set aside, and put a fence around, and protect some of the most beautiful parts of this continent. And what we never bothered to do because we didn't value it at the time was to recognize the importance of these people. We actually disenfranchised them. We pushed them out of the parks, we exiled them from their own homes, and then we rewrote the history into what is kind of a fairy tale, really. At the heart of the story we tell ourselves about what our national parks are and how they came to be. And there are some wonderful aspects to that fairy tale. But there's a lie at the center of it. So in Grand Canyon, as I said a moment ago, there are these 11 Native American tribes. Each and every one of them was pushed out. Their histories were written out of the canyon. The thing that you begin to realize if you spend time in the canyon, and you begin to wrestle with issues that loom over the canyon, this sounds like such a obvious thing, but it came as a revelation to me when I learned it; These people who were part of the canyon in the distant past -- Who occupied this space literally for thousands of years prior to our arrival, and who were then pushed out, they are still here. They are still here, living in this space, connected to it and every aspect of it is, is still present in their culture, it's encoded in their language. It's encoded in their rituals, in their culture. And in their values. So all of the tribes: the Hualapai, Havasupai, the Zuni, the Hopi, the five bands of the Southern Paiute Tribe. I mean all of these people still have a deep and incredibly important connection to Grand Canyon and by virtue of the connection that goes back so far into the past, that white people like me find it difficult to even begin to imagine, they have things to teach us about this place. They have a body of knowledge about what it is, how it's laid out with the plants and the animals, the richness of the plants and animal life inside of it, how human beings might think about conducting themselves inside of this space in a responsible manner that is connected with thinking of themselves not as consumers, but as stewards of it. These people have things to share with us. That we would do well to listen to, that we could benefit from learning about. And so over the course of this journey, Pete and I had a series of encounters with Native Americans, with members of the Navajo tribe. The one tribe I just didn't mention a moment ago, whose lands abut the entire eastern portion of Grand Canyon. Encounters with the Havasupai Tribe at the very center of the canyon. With the Hualapai in the west. With representatives of the Zuni and some of the Southern Paiute bands and the Hopi. And these encounters first of all made us aware of all this stuff I just talked about a moment ago. The fact that these people have this incredibly important history that has gone unrecognized, that they are still here. And then they began to educate us and enrich our understanding of how to view threats that now loom over Grand Canyon National Park, many of them in the form of industrialized tourism. And industrial industrialized tourism like air tours in the in the western part of Grand Canyon or a proposal at the time to build a tramway from the eastern rim of Grand Canyon to the confluence of the Colorado and the Little Colorado rivers. This spot that I just mentioned a moment ago. Which I said was very important in everybody who is connected with the park, knows about and reveres. What I didn't mention is that place, that confluence of these two rivers, is viewed as sacred by each and everyone of these tribes in the canyon. And the idea of building a tramway capable of delivering 10,000 people per day, to a raised metal walkway, at the edge of the river that would lead to an observation deck and a restaurant? That would serve hot dogs? Overlooking the confluence itself. That project represented an offense, a sacrilege in the eyes of some Native American tribes. Some members of Native American tribes that illuminated an entirely new way of thinking about the canyon and the space it contains for me and for Pete. So what I'm really saying in a super long-winded way is that the journey that we undertook was a education. It was a physical journey that involved moving like 650 or 750 miles from east to west, but it was also an intellectual and emotional, and if you'll forgive me for sounding a little bit woo woo here, a spiritual journey. That that journey paralleled the physical journey. And that was a journey of education and awareness and enrichment. Here's a metaphor for how to think about it. It's how I thought about it. The canyon itself is defined by these layers of rock, 26 of them that are stacked one on top of the other, and the oldest layers are at the bottom, and each layer as you go up is younger than the layer below it. It is a kind of a time machine. The canyon contains rock, an enormous amount of it, and distilled within the folds of rock laid out in layers is something, is what geologists call deep time. When you begin to -- when you reach the point where you begin to, really, your mind begins to wrap itself in, around, and embrace the connection between rock and time. You're moving towards a pretty rich understanding of an appreciation of Grand Canyon. Well, encountering the history of the tribes in the Grand Canyon, those tribes are just like those layers of rock. They add layers of richness and meaning to the physical environment and they take you to a different place mentally and spiritually, when you begin to allow your mind to open itself to that history. And perhaps the most marvelous part about it all, it's what I mentioned just a moment ago, by virtue of the fact that these people are still here. Your listeners who are listening to this podcast like they can have this experience. These people are here at Grand Canyon, inside of this park. They are selling their art in the form of jewelry and baskets and rugs that are representations of their culture. That contain knowledge and understanding of the canyon itself and you can have encounters with these people. You can meet with them. You can speak with them and you will come away from those encounters with a far more meaningful understanding of the space itself than you would have if you just stood at the edge of it and looked at the colors. I've completely lost track of what the question was. Jo: I do want to talk about another journey that we haven't touched on, which is the writing process for you. So this book seems to be a bit different than your previous in that you're writing it all in the first person. Can you talk about what that journey was like, writing it, and what you learned about yourself from that writing process and journey? Kevin: You know, that's a tough question and it touches on one of the kind of central challenges of this book. So I mentioned at the beginning part of this conversation, I'm kind of a, you know, instinctively shy person and an introvert and you know, most of my writing, a lot of it, not all of it, but a lot of it – and certainly the books that I've written have all been in what we call third person, right? It's the pronoun that you use when you're not referring to yourself, when you're focusing the spotlight on others. And I enjoy and feel comfortable telling the story of others, which is what I did in this book called The Emerald Mile. You know, it's a story that has nothing to do with me, except for the fact that I had to go into the canyon to kind of learn about it. But I actually took maybe an inordinate amount of pride in the fact that in that entire book, you know, I think I said a moment ago is 416 pages, the first person singular pronoun, the word I, occurs only once in the footnotes when I'm explaining how I had to meet one of the protagonists in the book. Otherwise, you will never find me anywhere in that book and I love that about it. What this this book, “A Walk in the Park” required me to do was to step out of my comfort zone. And you know, place myself at the center of the story. And in so doing, to speak and write with a level of honesty. Sometimes, brutal honesty about what – just what I've been doing in this conversation to talk about my shortcomings, my hubris, my arrogance, my propensity to take shortcuts, my failure to do enough homework. And the extent to which the canyon put me, and Pete, through an incredibly brutal and painful process of education. To use myself as a proxy for somebody being taught things by a place and the people whose history inside of that place extends far deeper into the past than my own history because I'm not from this part of the world. And so the process of writing this book involved peeling back layers of revelation, self revelation. I'm not sure I'm entirely comfortable revealing all the stuff about myself that I did in this book, and frankly, a lot of it is not very flattering. But that's one of the things that you do when you write nonfiction that has to include yourself. And it may be one reason why, you know, this is the 4th book that I've written. I wrote two books that were, I ghost wrote books for other people. I wrote a book touching on Grand Canyon about other people. This is the first book I've ever written about myself and it took it took one year to research and six to write. That's twice as long as any other book that I've ever written, and I think it's because I was struggling with all of this stuff and it wasn't fun. The only thing that was less pleasant and more brutal and more painful than the hike itself was the process of writing the damn book. Because I did not enjoy it, and I'm really glad that I'm at the end of it. Jo: Oh my goodness, such a good answer. So you did mention how you aren’t from this part of the world being Northern Arizona, can you share with us how your background and upbringing influence your decision to not only move westward, but how that transition has shaped your perspective about writing and landscapes and cultures of the Western United States? Kevin: You know when I kind of imagined in my mind like the ideal person to write a couple of books about the Grand Canyon, one that profiles the river at the bottom and the other chronicles what feels like to move through the world of rock on foot. I kind of imagine that like the ideal person to write those books would be someone who was born here. Who in either the strict literal sense, or the metaphorical sense is indigenous to the land. Someone who's values and aesthetics and physical prowess, those were shaped by a relationship that began at birth and I'm the opposite of all of that. Like I grew up, I grew up in a place that's about as different from Grand Canyon and a National Park as you could possibly imagine. I grew up in the city of Pittsburgh in western Pennsylvania. One of, if not the most, industrialized landscapes in America. I grew up in a city whose name is synonymous with the manufacture and production of steel, and my family's tied to it. My grandfather spent his life in a coal mine, working at digging coal and later as an electrician in the mines that supplied the coal that fed the furnaces of Pittsburgh. And so when I grew up, I grew up in a landscape that had been transformed by and polluted by and tainted by, and changed irrevocably, and in some ways, forever by industry. And my impressions of what the world was were filtered through the prism of all of that. Now, this isn't to say that -- like western Pennsylvania prior to you know the 19th century was one of the most gorgeous landscapes on Earth, and parts of it are still very beautiful. But I grew up with a sense that I was living in a landscape that was defined by loss. And that there was a profound contradiction and difference between what that landscape= was and what it had once been, and that between those two points were a series of acts, sins if you will. That my forebears, including my grandfather, had committed against the natural world and the environment and the beauty that once defined western Pennsylvania. And when I started to read as a young man, I stumbled across the books of two authors who, oddly enough, grew up very close to where I originated. My family grew up on the eastern end of the metropolitan area of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. And less than a 15 minute drive from our house was the birth place of a writer by the name of Rachel Carson. And those of your listeners who are familiar with a book called “Silent Spring” will know that Rachel Carson during the 1960s, Rachel Carson really started the modern environmental movement with a set of books she wrote first about the oceans and then about pesticides and pollution that opened American’s eyes to the idea that in pursuing prosperity through industrialization, we were killing ourselves and the land we depended on. And her ideas were radical enough, and new enough, and courageous enough that they transformed the way that not everybody, but a good portion of the population, thought about that kind of stuff. And in the opposite direction from Rachel Carson's girlhood home, about 1/2 an hour's drive away from where I grew up is the birth place of a writer named Edward Abbey. And again, your listeners who are familiar with Edward Abbey will know that Edward Abbey grew up in Pennsylvania but came west. He embraced, celebrated, and became in some ways a spokesperson for some of the most gorgeous landscapes of the American Southwest. Unlike Rachel Carson, Edward Abbey's ideas have not aged well. Not all of them, but part of the weirdness of writing is that those ugly truths can kind of sometimes coexist within the same work. With beautiful writing about in Edward Abbey's case, landscape. And for those of us who were influenced by him early on in our lives. We have been faced with the task and the challenge of going through Abbey's writing like you might wander through an apple orchard and picking the fruit off the low hanging branches and leaving the rest of it behind. Anyhow, I grew up influenced by these two writers who wrote about and connected with and provided a frame for seeing and understanding land. And as a result of all of that, I realized at a certain point when I was in my late 20s or early 30s, working for a news magazine in New York City, that the life I was leading was not the life that I wanted to be leading. It was not the life I was meant to lead. It was not the life that was going to make me happy, and that if I wanted to explore those things, I was going to have to leave behind the landscape of the East and move West. And so I moved west to ostensibly to take a job with a magazine called Outside, which wrote about the outdoors, but really more than that, I wanted to be part of this place. I wanted to see it and smell it and touch it. I wanted to be touched by it. I wanted to spend enough time in it to see the seasons turn. And the years rotate and to start to read its history and get to the point where I felt like I might be able to say with a level of honesty that I understood it at certain level and then maybe to write about it. So that's all of what took me west and that kind of transformed the arc and the trajectory of my life. And it was further transformed when I, you know, had the stroke of luck or the misfortune, depending on how you want to look at it to see the Grand Canyon for the first time. Because what happened to me happens to many people who are struck by the Canyon. It sinks its teeth and its claws into you, and it refuses to let go and anyone who has worked at the park and spent 20 years or 40 years of their career here knows this to be true. And the canyon got its hooks into me. And I just...I can't imagine that this point ever not having it be part of my life in some way and part of the beauty of it is that like I can move now, and it'll still be a part of me, because that's what it does. It opens up a space inside of you. It creates a little like miniature Grand Canyon inside of you. Then it pours all these ideas into it. Some of them have to do with Native Americans. Some have to do with natural beauty. Some have had to do with, like, the joy of boating. And you carry that with you wherever you go. That's what landscapes do. That's what stories do. Again, I forgot what the question was. Jo: I think you nailed it. Thank you so much again for your time today. Finally, what is one thing you'd like visitors to know about the Grand Canyon? Kevin: Oh. You know, there are a bunch of things, but here's one that I feel is like really important that I would want to share with anybody who's coming to the canyon, and it doesn't matter if it's for the first time or for the 100th time. And it's something that's important to say in the context of all the blabbing I've been doing for the past hour. Especially blabbing about like this super long 750-mile journey, this place, this landscape, this iconic natural feature of the earth is so beautiful and so powerful you do not need to spend 14 months carrying a 50-pound backpack from one end to the other and suffering pretty much every step along the way. Nor do you need to spend two or three weeks inside of a boat, you know, moving through 160 or however many rapids there are at the bottom of the canyon to touch and be touched by the most extraordinary parts of this park. There are many places inside the canyon that are secret and hidden that have been gazed upon very infrequently by human beings. They're not any more special than what you can see from the rim of the canyon itself. One of the most profound and profoundly radical and most radically transformative things that you can do is to allow yourself to do more than what the average visitor does at the Grand Canyon. Jo, you can correct me if I'm wrong, but I think there's a study that's been done on how many minutes the average visitor spends at the rim of the Grand Canyon. And I think it's like 40 minutes. One of the most radical things you can do is as a visitor here is to expand that outward, move to the edge of the canyon. And allow yourself to be in its presence, move along the edge of the canyon. There is a paved pathway that runs along the rim of the canyon for I forget how many miles you can walk along it. You can roll your grandmother in a wheelchair qlong it. You can rent a bike and bike along it. You can experience sunrise and sunset and all the hours in between and what the canyon looks like under the light of the moon without ever stepping foot inside of it. Stepping foot inside, venturing down one of the trails is a beautiful and wonderful thing to do, but if you do not have time, you can still have an extraordinary experience here, and you can embrace that experience in the knowledge that the people who have gone deeper into the canyon, spent longer inside of the canyon, accomplished more impressive things in terms of athletics. They don't have any better experience than you do. That's how powerful and special this place is. And what it requires, however, is allowing yourself not just the time, but also the quietness of it. I think I'm going to say something else. It's important not just to be at the edge of the canyon, but to kind of step away from a large group, if you're with family or friends to move with them, but to do something that so many of us do not often enough, which is to stop talking. To ourselves and others, to stop listening to what we have to say. And to be silent enough to listen to what this thing spread out in front of you has to say and allow whatever message that might be to kind of loom up out of the canyon and wash over you. And I think that is something that I would just want to share as one of the most special parts of this place for somebody who's coming here. And again, if you're coming for the first time, allow yourselves that experience. If you're coming for the 100th time and you've never actually done that, conduct an experiment and embark on that experience and see what it does to you. So that would be the one thing that I would share about something super special about Grand Canyon. Jo: And if people want to find out more about you, your works, where can they go? Kevin: Oh, I'm in the process of building my website for the very first time, but by the time this podcast airs, I think it will be up and running kevinfarko.com and you will be able to find information on the books that I've written and lectures that I give and anything else that you might be interested in learning about. Jo: Great. Well, thank you so much for your time today. Kevin, we really appreciate it. Kevin: Thank you so much and thank you for your time. Jo: The Behind the Scenery Podcast is brought to you by the interpretation team at Grand Canyon National Park. We gratefully acknowledge the native peoples on whose ancestral homelands we gather, as well as the diverse and vibrant native communities who make their home here today.
"The Canyon can be incredibly harsh and cruel... It will strip away all of your arrogance, all of your preconceived ideas about who you are, and what you think you have, and how much you think you know. And it will leave you staring at what's left, which in my case was not a lot." In 2015 Kevin Fedarko and Pete McBride set out to hike the length of Grand Canyon. Find out what Kevin learned about himself, the Canyon, and the people who have lived here since time immemorial. Learn more at kevinfedarko.com