A Grand Canyon Tapestry With Carole King

“Beautiful” at Field Of Dreams

By David Bolling

Martin Litton, the lionhearted leader of Grand Canyon Dories, a legendary river company that pioneered running rapid-worthy wooden boats through the Colorado River’s monster whitewater, was going to mark his 80th birthday by doing what he did best – row a dory down the river. I was invited.

It was April of 1997, a cold Spring had covered Arizona’s high desert in snow, and in Flagstaff – elevation about 7,000 feet – the participants were congregating in a motel lounge for a pre-trip evening meeting, with the snow outside drifting knee deep.

We were all present – some 18 of us – except for one missing member of the party.  Suddenly, a door opened, the conversation stopped, the room went briefly silent, and there was Carole King.

I had been told a mystery guest might be joining us. I had no idea who. Her presence was suddenly and deeply personal.

Traveling through Europe as part of a famous guru’s dog-and-pony show in 1971, I found myself in a romantic relationship cemented by, as much as anything, Carole’s recently-released Tapestry album, which we listened to on a cassette tape by the hour. I still have the tape (of course you do, says my wife) and the lyrics to “I Feel The Earth Move,” “You’ve Got a Friend,” “So Far Away,” “Will you Love Me Tomorrow,” “Where You Lead,” “Way Over Yonder” and, of course, “Beautiful,” defined and colored not just our relationship, but the country-by-country journey we took and, ultimately, my love’s sudden death in a small plane crash.

And here was Carole, whose songs were for so long the key to my heart. Tapestry has sold somewhere between 15 and 25 million albums, a comforting indicator of how many lives she’s touched.

A day after Flagstaff we were a small armada of rafts and wooden dories, enjoying the rare experience of putting on the river at the very base of the immense, cold, towering cement monolith of Glen Canyon Dam. An impressive and depressing obstacle to the Colorado River’s free flow that drowned the indescribable beauty of Glen Canyon, one of the most magical and least known natural treasures on Earth.

I had run the Colorado six times before – through Cataract Canyon above Lake Powell, and through Grand Canyon, below it, in kayaks and inflatable rafts, but I had never put in as early as April, and never in a wooden dory. The first night on the river, six miles below the dam, it snowed. I’d be hard pressed to count all the nights I’ve slept in the bottom of the Grand Canyon – sometimes through rain and thunder storms – but I had never before awakened to a tent embroidered with snow. We stood around the breakfast campfire in the rain that followed the snow, shivering in soggy clothes under a sullen grey sky. The next two days were wet and gloomy. Finally – I think it was day three – we were standing around another relentlessly damp morning campfire, Martin with his ever-present mug of fortified coffee, when Carole said she’d had enough of the rain, we should all join hands and sing a rain song to chase it away. So we did. I have no memory whatsoever of what we sang, but within a few hours the rain went away and it didn’t come back for a week.

If there was anyone in our group predisposed to believe in mystical magic, divine intervention or psychic juju, I wasn’t aware of it. But I’m sure we all believed Carole King was there-and-then wielding some supernatural music.

I’d love to say that we became best friends down in that mile-deep crack in the crust of the Earth. Didn’t happen – but I developed a healthy respect for her commitment and passion for protecting the environment, especially in the Grand Canyon, where assaults against nature have been, and continue to be, relentless. And it was soon clear that joining Martin Litton’s epochal, octogenarian float trip wasn’t just about epic whitewater adventure.

It has been suggested by many of his friends, and by some of his enemies, that, had it not been for Martin Litton, two dams would have been built smack in the middle of Grand Canyon, effectively turning the living river into a row of stagnant reservoirs.

The fight to save Grand Canyon was epic at a time when the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation and the Army Corps of Engineers had plans stacked like railroad ties to dam virtually every free-flowing Western river. Martin, who could be pugnacious and uncompromising, convinced David Brower – then the less confrontational head of the Sierra Club  – to wage all-out war against the Grand Canyon dams. The Sierra Club launched a nationwide campaign that prevailed, utilizing arguments like, “Why not flood the Sistine Chapel to get closer to the ceiling?” 

I knew Martin because we were both, at various times, journalists, and I had been head of a California river conservation nonprofit. But I had never boated with him before. So Martin and Carole together were like a gourmet environmental meal from The French Laundry. The cherry on the icing of this treat came at mile 33, at a bend in the river, where high flows laden with corrosive sand have, over millennia, scoured an immense cavern into the canyon’s sandstone wall big enough, exaggerated John Wesley Powell, to hold 50,000 people. There weren’t nearly that many of us, but if we could have sold tickets we would have filled the joint.

Because Carole with a guitar and a second guitarist, serenaded us for an hour, sitting in the sand and singing the entire Tapestry album. The cavern’s acoustics amplified the music, the notes drifting out across the Colorado River, there was not one dry eye in the audience, and I felt that, somehow, the two loose ends of a huge open circle in my life had finally closed.

Why am I writing about this now? Well, I think it’s a pretty decent story, but mainly because, as a 2014 birthday present, my wife (same wife) gave me a present to see “Beautiful: The Carole King Musical,” on Broadway. I sang and cried quietly all the way through that show too, and vowed, “I have to see this again.” So now, after running for 2,418 regular performances in New York, winning a Tony and an Emmy Award, “Beautiful” opens in Sonoma with Transcendence Theatre Company at Sonoma’s Field of Dreams August 7, through the 17th, each Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday. 

Hurry up and get a ticket, it’s going to sell out. Go to Transcendence Theatre Company online. And while you’re watching and singing and crying, thank Martin Litton for saving the Grand Canyon and bringing Carole King into the Colorado River’s embrace.

P.S. A little more magic: Martin Litton continued to row the Grand Canyon until he was 87, and he died 10 years later, at 97, almost exactly on the day I saw “Beautiful” on Broadway.