Glen Canyon Dam title
 
Navigate

Glen Canyon Dam Photo
Interview: Katie Lee

An actress and folk singer during the 1950s and '60s, Katie Lee started running the Colorado River nearly fifty years ago. She has recently published All My Rivers Are Gone, a book based on her journals, and has released collections of her music associated with the Colorado River.
KEN VERDOIA:
We need a starting point. So why don't we try to construct the starting point of when you first came to discover the Colorado River in general.

KATIE LEE:
Okay. I was an actress in Hollywood, went there in 1948 to become a star. Got there a little bit late in life. I was 33 years old, for goodness -- almost -- no, not quite that old. No. I was -- I was 29, I guess, when I went there. And then I decided that -- one night -- I went home to do a concert in Tucson, Arizona. And my friend, Tad Nichols, showed this incredible movie of a run down the Grand Canyon. And I just -- I just sat there, amid the babble of my guests, and I was floored. I said, "My God, those people have to be dead. And they're jumping up and down laughing. They're wringing out their clothes."

And he told me, he said, "You know, Katie, you've got to do this."

And I said, "How can I do that? I'm a starving little actress out there. That's five hundred for the upper half and five hundred for the lower. I can't -- I can't afford that."

Well, they called me one night about a month or two later, woke me up at 10:00 at night. Tad -- I rolled out of bed. And he said, "You want to go in the Grand Canyon?"

I said, "Ah, come on. You know I don't have that kind of money."

And he said, "No. Somebody has canceled. If you just come and bring the price of your food, fifty bucks, you can come and go down the Grand Canyon in the power boats."

And I said, "My God."

He said, "But you have to be in Flagstaff by 10:00 tomorrow morning."

I was there. And I went. And I just thought, "This is utterly incredible."

But the adrenalin rush was so great, so huge, and I was hanging on so tight. And you just -- we went down in eight days. I just didn't have a chance to take it all in. I didn't. It's a -- it's a wild, exhilarating and powerful experience. But it was too much. It -- my cup overfloweth. I couldn't -- I couldn't -- I couldn't -- I couldn't understand it.

And then Tad said, "Well, you ought to go on the Glen."

And the man who was running the powerboat was my chief boatman, and, of course, you're supposed to fall in love with your boatman, so I fell in love with my boatman. And sometimes, the reverse, and the boatman fell in love with me. And the next thing I knew, I was arranging trips for him next year, the following year in Glen Canyon. And on the San Juan. And that's how I got there.

And when I took a look at Glen Canyon, I went down in a rowboat, I had time to look around, I had time to look up and down and feel it. And I had time to touch the water. And it wasn't roiling and trying to kill me. And there I was in this incredible place. And the more I ran that river, the more the river got to know me. And that's the secret.

You have to give a little bit of yourself and much of your attention and a lot of your love to a place before it responds to you. And when I finally did that, there was myriver. And from then on, it was my river.

VERDOIA:
Help me better understand the notion of what you give, not just what you take, but what you give --

LEE:
It's a give. It's a give and take. You learn that in the theater. It's an empathetic thing. If you don't give to that audience, it's like a bouncing ball, and they don't respond back to you, you're not reaching them. You can feel that. It's in the air. And it was certainly in the air -- it was in the air and in the water and in the walls. I got so I'd talk to the walls. I'd get an answer. Not an echo, but an answer.

I used to sing down there at night and on the bars. That's one of the reasons -- the way they first got me there. They said, "You can come for your food, but you got to bring your guitar and sing for the passengers." So that's what I did at first. And then I always took my guitar.

And when we started doing our trips together in the Grand -- in the Glen Canyon, we called them the We Three Trips. That was just Tad Nichols, the photographer who got me there in the first place, and Frank Wright who was the owner of Mexican Hat Expeditions at the time, and myself. We called our trips the We Three Trips, and we went down to explore, because, on their commercial trips, they never had any time to do this. They never took the time to do it. They'd go to the same canyons that Norm Nevilles took all his passengers to way back from 1948 or '45, whenever he first started, and then they'd just do those same canyons over and over again. And I said, "Hey, we're going" --I'd go by these places and I'd say, "What's in there?" Frank would say, "I don't know. Never been there."

And I said, "Tad, what's in there?"

And he says, "I don't know."

I said, "You've never been there and you've been down this canyon how many times, Frank?" Well, he couldn't even name the times he'd been down there. I said, "We are going to go into those canyons." Those -- I would like to get a hold of the guy that started to call them "slots." Slots are in Las Vegas. They are -- they are fluted canyons, they are crevices, they are erotic sinuosities, they are anything but a slot. And they're only this wide sometimes.

I went in one time that I could get my head through but I couldn't get my shoulders through and turn my body, so I had to back out. And it would be -- you could see light up almost a hundred feet and here I'm in this just almost like just -- just a creviced -- a ruffled crack. It's an -- there were incredible canyons like that. And I always liked that kind best, but the guys didn't like them because you'd have to swim sometimes many, many, many yards through these cold, cold serpentine pools. That does something to a man's ego and they didn't like that too much.

And, of course, we women, we have a lot more subcutaneous fat and all that. I understand the physics of this thing. But, anyway, those are my favorite.

Tad's favorite were these beautiful canyons that were wide, had trees in them and had many, many cottonwood trees and a marvelous trickling, talking little stream that would come down all day, all night and forever. They ran all the time. Hundred and twenty-five canyons, I would say that well over a hundred of them had constant running water in them.

VERDOIA:
Do you recall the day you first heard that plans were in the works for construction of the Glen Canyon Dam?

LEE:
I definitely recall hearing it and laughing my head off. I said, "Be serious. There's no way they're going to do that. That's an impossibility." Brushed it off. Absolutely just brushed it off. I said, "Oh, no, Jim. Come on. They're not going to do that."

He said, "Well, they're talking about it."

Go down, and we stopped at Arth Chaffin's little old ranch down there one day and Arth Chaffin is a kind of a guy who did an awful lot of gold mining. He had a whole bunch of claims in and out of the place. And Arth started to get worried. He said, "You know, the miners are all down here staking out their claims because they want recompense from the government, their uranium, before they dam the canyon and the water fills in here."

I said, "You're not serious."

He said, "Well, it's looking like that."

And I said, "But -- but -- but the government needs the uranium. Why would they drown this canyon? This is where it is."

And he said, "Government," and he raised his eyebrow. And I -- I gathered he didn't have much respect for that situation.

So I began to think about it. And then about the second year when we went down, we stopped at the dam site. I still didn't think much about it, because down in the Grand Canyon, they'd been monkeying around and marking up the walls down at Marble Canyon for many, many years, and they even had an elevator going up and down the wall, which I'd been up and down, and built a tunnel through there, testing and stuff like that, and nothing had ever happened. It was all abandoned.

We saw this diversion tunnel just a few -- 13 miles up above Lee's Ferry, and I went up and looked in this thing and I said, "My God, could that wreck-the-nation bureau be serious about this?" They were. And that's when I said, "Well, I have just found a place that could save my life, and some black-handed bureaucracy is already clawing to take it away from me."

VERDOIA:
So what did you do?

LEE:
Well, the first thing I did was write to Barry Goldwater, who was our senator at the time. I said -- you know, I wrote him a four-page, single-spaced letter. This is something anybody with smarts does not do. But Barry read it because Barry had been down this canyon. And I just figured, you know, "You're not going to -- you're not going to go for a thing like that."

I get two pages back. Yeah, he's going to not only go for it, he says, you know, "Arizona needs the water," all the wrong answers. And I thought, "My Lord, what am I into?" I am no -- I am so apolitical that I don't even, you know -- I know nothing about it. I don't even want to know. But I suddenly had to find out.

So I started writing to the people I thought would have anything to do with it. I wrote to the president -- I mean the head of the Park Service, I wrote to the Sierra Club, I wrote to the Explorer's Club, I talked to Doc Marsden, who I'd gotten to know, and -- and I wrote to the Parks Service, the Forest Service. I've got letters to senator, I wrote to the secretary of the interior. All of this, you know, to try to understand and to get them to understand, "Look you don't know what you're doing. This is -- this place -- this place is an Eden. There's no place like this on Earth. What are you doing this for?"

And I'd get back these standard answers: Arizona needs the water. The Upper Colorado River Compact Act, bla, bla, bla, bla. None of it made any sense to me what they were doing. And, at the same time, they were planning Flaming Gorge Dam and they were going to cork up the San Juan.

And I'm thinking, "Here's this whole heavenly place here in Southern Utah, and -- and they're going to destroy it. I don't know. So I started writing a book about this whole thing about 1964. I did my last Glen Canyon trip in '63 -- no, in -- in October of '62, and January 21st of 1963, they closed the diversion tunnels. And then I tried to write the story and I -- I don't know what I even named it at first. But I couldn't get that close to it. I began it as a novel with the three people who were the most involved. And it didn't work. It didn't work at all. I wrote it six or seven times. I put it out there for the publishers; they never wanted to touch it.

Finally, I showed it in 19 -- in the early '70's to Ed Abbey, and I said, "Ed, what am I going to do with this thing?" So I gave him this great big tome, about 400 pages. He read it and he came back, and he said, "Katie, for God's sake, why don't you just write off your journals? Why don't you just tell it like it was?" He said, "There's nothing you could invent that would be as glorious as what it was. Just tell it like..."

I said, "I can't sit around and write 'I, me, I me' all day long. I've got an ego, but it's not that kind."

And he said, "Well, that's what you better do." He said, "You wrote your 10,000 cattle book in the first person."

I said, "I did?" You know, that's very funny, but I never thought about it. I was just not that close to the -- to the subject. I was writing about a lover who had been put in a wheelchair, who was immobile from here down, who had nothing but his strong shoulders showing up on top, who was dead and sitting there suffering. And I just couldn't do it.

I finally pulled it together and managed, just about the time Ed died, and I started writing it from the journals. And I did study it. I mean, I did -- I did -- I did.

VERDOIA:
I want to make sure that I really capture this. The way you characterized Glen Canyon.

LEE:
Well, it's just the way it felt to me. I -- I had this -- I had seen -- I watched the water come up. I actually went back. I don't know how I did that. I got a little runabout boat at -- and I called it Screwdriver. But it had a space between the d and the r, "screwed river." And I drove it all around -- I went down as far as my favorite canyons, which were down around Cathedral. And canyons that we'd named, Cathedral, Driftwood, Dangling Rope. I'm so sorry I named that canyon. Now it's a stinking marina.

Anyway, I went down and I watched the water slowly come up into these places that had meant so much to me. I did it for about three years and then I said -- you know, for maybe a week or two out of the year, and I said -- finally, it hit me when I got to Music Temple. Some idiot was shooting a gun in what was left of Music Temple, and I nearly lost my mind. If I could have gotten my hands on this idiot, I'd a killed him. And then I left. I never came back.

And as I left the place and took a last look at it, I turned around and I said, "Honey, you're in a wheelchair now and I don't want to come back and watch you die. Goodbye."

And I left and I didn't come back.

That's what I attempted to do in my book ("All My Rivers Are Gone"). I was able to finally get it down the way it affected me. It took me 34 years to get those words right. It took me a long time to learn how to write, to write my heart.

You know, people only write their hearts to true, true loved ones and they do it in letters, and that's about -- they aren't very often able to speak it out loud. And I got to the point, like you can see right now, I still can't do it. I -- I ain't acting. I just-- it just hurts. And there's nothing I can do about it. People say, "Oh, well, you're an emotional old lady." Bullshit. I'm not an emotional old lady; I'm a feeling person. I can feel it. I still feel -- I can still smell that river. I can smell that river at night sometimes and wake up in my dreams. It had a very, very definite earth smell, and there was nothing like it. And it was very strong on the upstream wind when the rivers were nice and silty.

I smelled it, I felt it, the wind and the breezes. And I heard it, the canyon wind, the frogs, the river. And I'd talk to the river and the river talked back. I got answers from that river. And I put them to use in my life.

VERDOIA:
You talked about what you could do. One thing that you did was use your gift for music to give voice to some of your sentiments. And one of them, is a song that you crafted called The Wreck-The-Nation Bureau.

LEE:
I've always called them the wreck-the-nation bureau. That's what they are. That song -- that song just popped out of me after I finally got the name that I wanted to call them. They'd been called the Burwreckers. And Tad used to call them -- I think he called them Burwreckers. But as for "reclamation," I keep waiting for them to reclaim something instead of revising it, reducing it, anything but reclaiming it, destroying it.

The song used to -- went: "Three jeers for the Wreck-The-Nation Bureau; freeloaders with souls so pure, Oh, wiped out the good Lord's work in six short years. They never saw the old Glen Canyon; just dammed it up while they were standing, At their drawing board with cotton in their ears. Oh, they gone to dam the frying pan; you're next, old roaring fork, And when they built Glen Canyon Dam, San Juan got a cork. No river's safe until these apes find something else to do. So have your fun in Cataract, 'cause after that, you're through."

VERDOIA:
Is it a mission for you to restore Glen Canyon?

LEE:
You know, it's funny, but that's -- you used that word, and I've never thought of it that way. And yet, I'm sure that's what I'm doing. I know that I have the wording, you know, the mission of the Glen Canyon Institute is to restore the river, a free-flowing river through a restored Glen Canyon. It's to -- that isn't exact wording. I -- I don't have it right here in front of me. I can get it. But a mission, my mission is to the river. I feel so personally involved with that place. Yes, I want people like David to be able to have a spot like that. But I'm familiar enough with the way the world is going to know that unless it is set aside as a very special place when the once and future Glen is finally back where people can run it as a river, unless it's made a sanctuary where we can have no racket, no noisy motors of any kind, no jet skis, nothing but the dripping of oars or somebody going down in on an air mattress, anything, I know it's going to have to be regulated. I understand all that. But the Glen was a place that does not react well to racket, to speed, to anything. It is a contemplative place.

And I think that we ought to have a spot like that left on the globe. Everything else has got a motorized something hither and yon, a trial bike, an anything. That place is to go through and be part of and not be abstracted by any kind of noise or motors, except just what's there already.

Click here to go to the top of the page

PBS Online | |  Glen Canyon: A Dam, Water and the West Homepage | |  KUED