Mariner’s Lingam
by Earl Perry
From Hidden Passage, the Journal of Glen Canyon Institute
Volume V
Charlie Eggert (The Major) was one of the last people
to traverse the Green-Colorado system, in 1955 and 1956, when it
still lived. He made two documentaries of the Hatch-Eggert expeditions
("Danger River" and "A Canyon Voyage"), from
which trips also came Cid Rickets Sumner's Traveler in the Wilderness.
As a primary source, as well as a fund of learning and tart opinions,
he has become a valued member of Clio, a river history listserver.
Teasing some of the younger members, he wrote about long-drowned
parts of Cataract:
"How many of you whipper-snappers have gotten your asses wet
in Mille Crag Bend?"
And I replied:
"Down around the far end of Mille Crag Bend, just as it
starts to straighten into Narrow Canyon, was a fast, smooth section, and
not too far from the left shore, a single pourover. I was inattentive,
and it had that mild look of a single hydraulic jump amidst all the
smoothness of the big golden river.
I rowed this way and that, and finally took the 4-man
airforce surplus raft over the top of it. That suckhole was small, but
like Mercutio's wound, it served. We bobbed about in the wash, wondering
why we didn't seem to be getting clear of it, noting we seemed to be
moving upstream, toward the low pourover, wondering idly what would
happen to us…
Not only did I get my ass wet at Mille Crag Bend, I
dumped a raft there. Late June 1964, probably 18 - 20,000 cfs. As the
reservoir was rising about 2 feet a day and was a little above the mouth
of the Dirty Devil, there were only a couple days left when I might have
"run" that reach again without capsizing, and effaced the blot from my
escutcheon. Now it will (probably) not have a chance to happen again in
this life.
"…Or seen a gigantic rattler at the mouth of Dark Canyon
when the mouth still met the river!"
Actually, it was a gigantic male collared lizard. We
were standing about in the river attire of those times: swimming trunks
or underwear irretrievably stained a rich red-copper by the river.
Dark Canyon Rapid was raging through the holes against
the right cliff, sweeping down in that long S-bend toward the canyon
wall at the bottom left, against which, at 50,000 cfs or so, it would
mount in a huge surging wave, and then spill away downstream toward Glen
Canyon. But what teenage boy could care about a rapid, when one of the
Crotaphytus species (C. collaris insularis bicinctores: the twin-belted
collared lizard of the interior1), was at hand?
I instantly captured the lizard and brandished it. Then
I made a bold, a dramatic, even an histrionic gesture with the hand
holding the huge lizard, sweeping it in a long flourishing arc down from
very near someone's face, where I had thrust it, to very near a pair of
desert-river-russet underwear. |
|
The mouth of the lizard did not meet the river, it met something else,
and bit firmly on the nearest surface, the tip of the penis of one, Joe
Mariner, which was but lightly and ineffectively armored by jockey
shorts. Startled, I lost my grip. More startled, Joe Mariner lost his
grip and began to make unmanly noises, leaping up and down with his new
penis extension whipping and snapping through the desert air.
Yet more startled still, the others present lost
themselves in an eruption of noisy rapture and stood about crowing until
Mariner and the lizard could bring themselves to part. Such was our
innocence that it would be literal decades before anyone would reflect
that this was undoubtedly the first, and perhaps the last and only,
occasion for Joe Mariner to have received "oral stimulation."
So I can answer (partly) "I have" to your question of
"How many of you whipper-snappers have gotten your asses wet in Mille
Crag Bend?" As for being a whipper-snapper at the mouth of Dark Canyon,
I wasn't one, but I was instrumental in helping Joe Mariner become one;
I claim the assist.
_________
1 The alert reader will infer that this
incident occurred before the advent of Laura Winslow. Once she entered
my life, there was a period of agonized ambivalence during which I tried
with a valiant but ultimate futility to maintain my fidelity to lizards.
Soon enough the scales tilted, and there she was, A Girl. Dark and
shining eyes, thick and luminous hair, pearl teeth, pink… To this day,
despite many mildly reproachful enticements from the reptiles and much
provocation from the heirs, assigns, and successors to Ms Winslow, I
have yet to return to my first love, amateur herpetology.
2 The Audubon Society Field Guide to
North American Reptiles and Amphibians, Bebler and King, Alfred A. Knopf
and Co., Third Printing, 1985, p. 506; said of C. c reticulatus, but it
could have been said with equal justice of C.c.i.b. |
