River Odyssey: A Story of the Colorado Plateau
Gerald N. Callahan’s collection of essays and poems is one story—an intimate story about human time and the Colorado Plateau. River Odyssey: A Story of the Colorado Plateau begins where the water begins, high in the Colorado Rockies, and it ends in a salt desert where all that remains is human garbage and human faith. This is a story about time alone and time on foot in the American west. It is about the land, and the river, and people. There are tales of tree frogs and boat burnings, Anasazi ruins and unforgiving canyons, rivers and ravens, cheating at cards, and raising children. And it is a story about the Colorado River—Lake Powell, the San Rafael Swell, Grand Canyon, Green River, Moab, and Mexico—a river that is older than men or women, a river that has forever changed the land. Above all else, this is a story of seven years of hiking the Colorado Plateau and how it changed one man when he couldn’t change himself.
And in the end, I found canyons and rivers that defied imagination, grottos of ferns and monkey flowers, riffles and warps written into the ossified breast of the earth, and the intricate ways of desert stone.
