San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Adventure saga of two pioneering women willing to die for science
BRAVE THE WILD RIVER: THE UNTOLD STORY OF TWO WOMEN WHO MAPPED THE BOTANY OF THE GRAND CANYONA
On June 20, 1938, two women stood on the banks of Utah’s Green River. One was a 41-yearold University of Michigan botany professor named Elzada Clover. The other was her 24year-old graduate student, Lois Jotter. Together with a four-man crew, they were about to step into hand-built wooden boats and embark on a 600-mile, 43-day journey that would lead them down the Green to its confluence with the Colorado River, then down the Colorado through the Grand Canyon, all to complete a first-ever botanical survey of the rivers’ plant life. While they were at it, Clover and Jotter would become the first non-native women to float the canyon and survive.
This is the saga science writer Melissa J. Sevigny tells in “Brave the Wild River: The Untold Story of Two Women Who Mapped the Botany of the Grand Canyon.” Thrilling, expertly paced, warmhearted, it’s at once an adventure tale and a dual biography of two unusually determined, capable heroines.
“A mighty poor place for women” was the usual response to any suggestion that a woman might navigate the Colorado. With its roller-coaster rapids, its whirlpools, the tortuous path it cut beneath sheer canyon walls, the river was ranked among the most dangerous in the nation. Since John Wesley Powell first steered its length in 1869, only 50 men had duplicated his achievement. One woman had tried — Bessie Hyde, who vanished with her husband, Glen, on their 1928 honeymoon.
Elzada Clover was not deterred. Among the first American women to earn a doctorate in botany, she saw her plant survey as so scientifically vital to be worth any risk. She would, she said, rather die doing something exciting. She convinced Norman Nevills, an entrepreneurial Utah river veteran with dreams of turning river trips into a paying business, to build boats for her expedition and lead it. She convinced her friend and protege Jotter to join her.
Working primarily from Clover’s and Jotter’s letters and journals, Sevigny carries us along on a journey that ranges from exhilarating to terrifying. Pummeled by 15-foot-high rapids, Nevills’ wooden boats catapulted into the air, plunged back down into water, spun, capsized. Off-river safety was not guaranteed: Nevills was afraid of rattlesnakes, which was unfortunate
because the riverbanks often crawled with them. Throughout it all, Clover and Jotter kept their focus on their scientific mission, scrambling up cliffs to gather cactus and yucca and agave specimens they would laboriously press between sheets of newspapers and cinch between pieces of wood, keeping them safe for future cataloging.
Deftly sketched by Sevigny, Clover and Jotter emerge as contrasting but appealing river companions, Jotter bookish and quiet, Clover “a tall woman, active, robust, dramatic, daring, perhaps just a little bit wicked.” Fittingly for a book that celebrates botany, Sevigny’s descriptions of the desert plants the pair gather are lyrical and lovely. A yucca sends up “a maypole of pale flowers with as many
frills as a flamenco dancer’s dress.” A hedgehog cactus is “so covered in red-and-white stickers it looked like a firework in the process of exploding.”
As the boats wind their way down the river, Sevigny explores some of the issues that troubled the Colorado River Basin in 1938 and trouble it today. How much water can the Colorado supply to a rapidly growing region? What do white institutions like Grand Canyon National Park owe the native peoples like the Hualapai and Havasupai they too often disdained and displaced?
By the time the expedition entered the park, nerves were fraying and the group was late enough that the Coast Guard sent out a plane to see if they had drowned. They persevered.
As the river descended deeper into the canyon, Clover and Jotter continued to gather specimens, some of which would end up at the Smithsonian. Near the journey’s completion, Clover mused of the Colorado, “A great river with a hundred personalities, but it is not kind.” But when she returned to civilization, her first thought was when she might run the river again: “I’m so lonely for it now I can hardly stand it.” Readers may feel the same way when they finish the final pages of “Brave the Wild River” — grateful for the adventure, wistful it has come to an end.