Review by Jeanne Englert
Boating – June 1995 – Colorado Central Magazine
Breaking Into the Current: Boatwomen of the Grand Canyon
By Louise Teal
Published in 1994
by The University of Arizona Press
ISBN 0-8165-1413-5
“YOU KNOW, I’ve done a lot, but there’s been nothing like holding those oars in my hands and putting my boat exactly where I wanted it. Nothing. I love reading water. It’s intellectually stimulating. People have no idea how much we row with our brains,” says Becca Lawton, one of the eleven women Louise Teal profiles in her book about pioneer boatwomen of the Grand Canyon.
Teal, herself a pioneer boatwoman and leader of the first all-women’s Grand Canyon trip, spent the better part of 1991 and 1992 interviewing over 40 women who worked as Grand Canyon commercial guides. Today about 16% of some 275 full-season guides in charge of boats are women. But, in 1974, when Teal started rowing, “You could count the women guides working for the 20 (Grand Canyon) companies on one hand.” She selected 11 who exemplified the struggles of the women who cracked an exclusive male profession.
Though Teal writes about the sexual bias these pioneer boatwomen struggled to overcome, she never gets feministically shrill about it. She tells how these women took a pejorative term — “boat hags” — and made it their own. (Perhaps we should take a tip from these gals and realize that “bitch” is a compliment when it comes from the Speaker of the House.)
Working initially as swampers (assistant motor boatmen) or cooks, taking training trips at their own expense, Teal’s boatwomen toted that barge, lifted that bale, proved they could handle outboard motors, and tackled the big rapids that even burly guys were scared to run. “They hired these inexperienced men who were strong, but I could row circles around them,” one says.
Not only did these boatwomen have to prove themselves to fellow boatmen and the companies who run the Grand Canyon, they had to deal with the Nervous Nellies. One of my favorite anecdotes — and the book is rife with them — is when this little guy, who’d been needling the boatwoman all day, watches as the brawny boatmen pull a hard right to avoid the big hole at House Rock rapid. Pectorals bulging, the guys struggle to put the boat’s snout into a line to avoid the hole, and the Nervous Nelly looks at the little gal, saying, “Honey, are you sure you can handle this?” Using the f-word, she told him where he could put himself.
For that and other stories, including the author’s own, in which the boat Teal is sleeping in comes loose from its moorings during a storm just two miles above the infamous Lava Falls at Mile 179, Breaking Into the Current is great reading for anyone, whether male or female, passenger or river guide, who has ever gone on a river trip. Or for anyone contemplating embarking on one, particularly in the Grand Canyon. And obviously for any woman who either has entered or wishes to enter a male-dominated profession.
FOR ME, it evoked fond memories of my first trip down the Dolores in 1979, a training trip, watching the “boatcrack” trainees — an even more pejorative term than “boat hags” — skillfully negotiate the big holes and snags of the aptly named Snaggletooth Rapid, and the trip down Cataract Canyon of the Colorado River when “boatcrack” Robin Fritch, now the owner of her own company on the Animas River, made a perfect run through Big Drop Rapid after one boatman got sucked into an eddy and another nearly flipped. “That woman knows how to read a river,” the company owner said.
And Teal’s story of running the high water of the Grand Canyon in 1983 when the Bureau of Reclamation nearly lost the Glen Canyon dam has fascinating details, such as National Park Service employees dropping warning notes, wrapped in plastic bags and weighted with rice or gravel from helicopters to groups in the canyon . They said things like, “63,000 released this morning — camp high — be careful.”
Teal’s pioneer boatwomen tend to grin or smile brightly; she seems allergic to using the word “said,” a mild annoyance. But she allows the interviews she conducts to flow, and defines terms like hole, eddy, and tongue of a rapid without interrupting the stories.
I just wish the University of Arizona Press hadn’t been so stingy by reproducing color-slide photos of the boatwomen profiled in fuzzy black-and-white photos. Most were taken when these women were on the river, which, if reproduced in color, would have added to our enjoyment in reading the book. These pioneer boatwomen of the Grand Canyon deserve better.
— Jeanne W. Englert