Rediscovering Youth on the Colorado River | Short Film Showcase

[Music] When I was born in the summer of '86, my dad wrote me these words:

"The important places, child of mine, come as you grow. In youth you will learn the secret places: the cave behind the waterfall, the arms of the oak that hold you high, the stars so near on a desert ledge. The important places. And as with age, you choose your own way among the many faces of a busy world. May you always remember the path that leads back, back to the important places."

Dad for Forest, 1986.

Before we could walk, we learned to swim in the pond below the house, pushed back and forth between caring hands. Water was a constant. I heard that poem as a baby, even lived parts of it as a kid, and then forgot it completely as I moved away from the mountains to find my own path in a city far from those places Dad called important.

Then, the year Dad turned 70, I felt he stopped thinking about living. He was slowing visibly, and that scared the hell out of me, so I ignored it. I up a broken through my thin gray hair. I read that old man will see visions and young man will follow dreams, and I believed it. When I ready, I see you facing everything.

That same winter, I unearthed a box of old family books and found the poem again, "The important places." Flipping through Dad's old slides, it occurred to me that maybe, just maybe, if I can bring back together these two things that were young once: my father and the Colorado River, I can somehow travel back in time to learn something of who my father [Music] was.

When I was very young, the smaller rivers and creeks taught me a certain wisdom of flowing water, but they also gave me a sense of wonder: Where did you come from? Where are you going? The first time I heard of the Grand Canyon, I was probably 7 years old, and I looked at it through my aunt's stereoscopic slides. Over the years, I caught other glimpses. There was a magnetism there that drew me.

The first time I experienced the Colorado was flesh to flesh, inside my being. There was an awe that is indescribable. I never thought I would return. Return in 1970, Dad led his Explorer Scouts west from Maryland on a whitewater expedition that would culminate in a 10-day trip down the Colorado River.

Forty-three years later, I challenged him to go back to the river to do it again, but this time to bring me along. [Music]

We pushed our raft out of Lee's Ferry on November 12th, 2013. First stroke: How's it feel like coming [Music] back? With Dad grinning behind the oars, not just alive but living again the way I'd known him as a child.

Then something more, something deeper twinkled under his tired eyebrows—a spark of something I'd never seen before. Grand is not a descriptive enough adjective for the country that we're traveling through right now. Just looking ahead, seeing the sunlight penetrate that makes bend, everybody feels [Music].

Having never been to the canyon before, I had no idea what we would find, but secretly, I hoped we would find the missing part to the time machine I was building—the piece that would take me back to 1970 to know Dad as a young man and in that to learn something about myself.

The things that bring joy to my life have been with me a long time. As I've gotten older, sometimes it's difficult to do all the things that I did back then, but so far, it's been just a thrill, and there is a hell of a lot more to come downriver. You learn a lot about people on a 28-day trip.

There were 15 of us on six rafts and four kayaks. Dad looked on the river like an old friend—the rare kind where years passed, but the memories of one another remained vivid, picking up right where they left off. It brings back memories of all the kids getting in there—some who didn't want to get in there but got dragged in anyway. Good to be back [Music].

Here at night, as we sat around the fire, Dad told tales of his old friend, the river, and as shadows danced on the canyon walls above us, the line between then and now seemed to fade and flicker in the fire [Music] light. Each morning, I watched Dad struggle from his tent to move from the shore back into the current, back towards that important [Music] place.

In that movement, he comes alive. The closer he is to the river, the stronger the grip of his hands, the fuller his smile, and the deeper his breaths. For a moment, we both forget how old he [Music] is.

"Any last words for the camera before I put it away?"

"Holy [Music]..."

Sometimes we get stuck in eddies and in life currents that won't let us go in places we shouldn't be.

As we get older, we look at our parents, we wonder what they're doing. We think they’re losing it, but what I've realized is Dad never had it all figured out in the first place. As much as he's taught me and shown me how to live, he's still finding his path just the same as the rest of us, and that's okay because the joy is in the journey. No one has the answers, not even our parents.

In Dad's poem that he wrote 28 years ago, he said, "You always remember the path that leads you back to the important places." I don't know if he remembers those words as much as I do, but I realized on the Colorado River: whether you're young, old, or like me, somewhere in the middle, we can all use a little push from our friends or family as we find our way back, back to the important places.

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