River

March 31, 1997
An incredible journey does not necessarily translate into an incredible read, as Fletcher's new book illustrates. The respected 74-year-old author (The Thousand Mile Summer and The Complete Walker) tackled 1700 miles of the Colorado River by raft and on foot, but his language doesn't match the grandeur of the journey. More than half of the book is not about the Colorado River at all, but about a tributary, the Green, where Fletcher begins his trip. Another difficulty is that he tries to combine an adventure narrative--the story of a man and a river over a period of six months--with a memoir. Although such a parallel construction is not impossible (for example, as in Doug Peacock's Grizzly Years, 1991), it requires a considerable amount of discipline and craft to achieve. The autobiography that Fletcher attempts is fascinating--the story of a man psychologically wounded during World War II who seeks lifelong refuge in nature and on solitary wilderness trips--but many of the passages read like hurried journal entries. Only in a few places does the prose shine with that old Fletcher radiance, as when the author describes his raft plunging through the dangerous rapids of the Grand Canyon. Still, although this uneven effort doesn't hold up to Fletcher's own earlier masterpiece on the Grand Canyon, The Man Who Walked Through Time (1968), it is a disappointment well worth pondering. Fletcher's journey is about making peace. In the end, as he rides out into the Gulf of California ("our salt-sea mother"), he concludes, "If that's how dying was--well, all right." Photos and maps.