Oral history interview with Paul Thevenin [includes transcript], July 31 and August 5, 1995.

              Steiger: And called and said, "Hey, we didn't make it." 
Thevenin: Yeah, had them pick 'em up there at the head of Havasu. 
Steiger: And Jack calls you and says, "Go get the boat." 
Thevenin: Yeah, it was a couple of weeks later. We left it down there for a while. 
Steiger: What year would that have been? 
Thevenin: Ahhhh, probably.... It predated the "J" rig, so it must have been.... Probably, I think it may have been 1967, the year that I was gone most of the summer and I just got back, I think. It was either 1966 or 1967. 
Quartaroli: Who was the kid that was with you? 
Thevenin: I don't even remember who the kid was. 
Quartaroli: Did he ever come back? 
Thevenin: I don't think he ever came back. I only had one other minor problem with him. We got down there to Diamond, and Bryce was picking us up at Diamond, and derigging the boat and rolling it up and go throw it on the trailer and it starts to sprinkle, and the kid says, "Oh, wonderful, I can get a shower." "Get to work, right now! Now! Now! Get the thing on the trailer!" "What, are you guys afraid of a little bit of rain?" "Yes!" (chuckles) And we got that thing thrown in the back of the trailer and headed up. And we got about a quarter of the way up and the water started getting higher and higher and higher in Diamond Creek, and we had me running in front of the left tire, we had this kid running in front of the right tire. And so if the water ever got above our knees, then Bryce would know he had to go to the left or to the right. So we were the fall guys so that the vehicle wouldn't fall, so we're running up ahead of the vehicle, if we step in a hole and we'd have to step to the side one way or the other to find out where the high ground was. So the kid learned why we were afraid of rain. 
Quartaroli: Was this with the Ford Galaxy? 
Thevenin: No, by this time we had yellow International Travelalls, and Bryce was driving the International Travelall up there with a small trailer behind it. See, there was some Indian up there, one of the Hualapais who had seen the water coming, he went for high ground, which was a sensible thing to do. But we're plowing through that thing, and he takes a look at us and said, "Well, white men can do it, so can we." He pulled down off that same hill and pulled in behind us, and without the weight that we had, he just started drifting down. So we grabbed a rope and tied it on the back of our trailer, ran down, tied it onto his bumper, so now Bryce was towing up the trailer and this other pickup, with me and this kid running out in front of the wheels. 
Steiger: Unbelievable! 
Thevenin: Made it to the top, though! I got up to the top, and it really cut loose up there. I had a convertible, and the top went completely, and you've seen in the cartoons where all of a sudden the guy opens his car door and the water pours out? (laughter) 
Steiger: That was it. 
Thevenin: That was it! (laughter) I opened that door and let the water out of my car. 
Steiger: And that was at the top of Havasu? 
Thevenin: That was at the top of.... I can't remember, I left the Park at Frazier Wells or something. No, not at Frazier. I was thinking I left the park over there at.... 
Quartaroli: Hualapai? 
Thevenin: No, Peach Springs. Left it parked under a tree at Peach Springs. 
Steiger: And hitched a ride into Havasu. Must have. 
Thevenin: Yeah, I left it there at Peach Springs, because I knew I was going to come out, and got a ride over to Frazier Wells, because I didn't leave it at Frazier Wells, I left it at Peach Springs, because I knew I was going to come out there, and got a ride over to Frazier Wells, and then the drop off. 
Steiger: So you drove out in your convertible with the oars. 
Thevenin: With the oars, yes. 
Steiger: So Amil and those guys must have turned the thirty-three right side up before they left. 
Thevenin: Yeah. 
Steiger: Incredible story. 
Thevenin: We'll have to check with Amil sometime to get the true account of exactly what happened on that thing. But that's close. 
Steiger: That is unbelievable. 
Thevenin: So that was fun in those days. 
Steiger: Oh my gosh! And so you guys didn't see anybody else the whole time? 
Thevenin: No. No, didn't see a single soul down there that whole time we were down there. But as long as we're talking about that and switching back to Lava again, one of the other unique things is back when we were still made out of wood frames, and I had this German on the trip that had always wanted to swim a rapid, and I kept telling him, "No, no, you can't swim rapids, no." And it was one of the dirty times of the Grand. The water was brown. And Henry went through -it was going to be a picture run -and Henry went through and had his people take pictures, got them set up in some position. "Hey, can we run back and ride through with Paul?" Well, our boats weren't terribly full, so Henry said, "Yeah, a couple of you can," and almost his whole boat came up -instead of taking pictures, came up and got on my boat, so I'm almost a double boatload. Park Service doesn't have to worry about this, this was before the days you put limits on how many people per boat. But I had a pretty full boat, and I went into that thing, and it was a pretty good run, except when I got to that hole at the very bottom, and the boat just went down into that thing, and the frame just buckled upwards, and being the two-by-twelves, the wood, they just snapped right in the middle. And then when we came out of it, then they went down, but now they were disconnected in the middle, and those floors just sort of flopped off to one side, and people started dropping off the boat. And this one German said, "Ah, I saw my chance, and so I did a back flip. I got down there, then I couldn't see, and I didn't know which way was up. I'll never swim a rapid again!" But we got that boat pulled into shore and those were the days when the Park Service was making us carry spare oars, even if we were going to do nothing but run motors. And so that time the oars did come in handy, because we used the oars to replace the two-by-twelves that went across. The one sad thing about it, this German also had a buddy who was a camera nut, and he asked if he could position himself down in my pit, so he could take action pictures of me and the grimaces. Well, one piece I left out of the story, ______ just rapid shooting, shot after shot after shot. Okay, one of the waves came up and just ripped the motor off the transom, and that's why I ended up in the hole down there, because the motor was gone, and so this whole time this guy is shooting, and I'm down there trying to grab ahold of the motor, because it's still running, it's on a safety rope. But it's running around underwater, and I'm afraid it's going to slice a tube, so I'm screaming at the people "Hold on!" "What are you doing on your knees?" "I'm looking for the motor!" And then we hit that hole down there and the front frame fell apart. So Lava and I have had a long history. 
Steiger: And here you are coming back for more. 
Thevenin: Here I come back for more. I remember the bravest thing I ever did once was when I was training a guy and I finally said, "Okay, you can run Lava." (chuckles) And I went all the way up to the front of the boat and sat there with my arms folded so I wouldn't.... 
Steiger: Shut your eyes. 
Thevenin: (chuckles) Yeah. (Steiger does camera/tape check.) Bad runs: you know, these are the things that stories are made of. I mean, the good runs don't make stories. I mean, the perfect runs through the Canyon, it's almost like, you know, this last trip I went down, the water level was so ideal my son was running his boat down through there, and you know, we tell these people about these rapids, and then we make these slick runs, and they almost look disappointed. You know, the stories don't come from the good runs. "I went down through Lava this time, and I entered on the left and went right past that rock and slid off into the tongue. And man, that was a real smooth run." I mean (chuckles) what kind of a story do you get out of that? 
Steiger: Well, it's funny to me. I mean, you know, just since I've been around, just since the early seventies, the technology has really evolved: the boats are ten times better, we know how to run the.... 
Thevenin: And in all honesty, the boatmen are a whole lot better. 
Steiger: Well, because we've had all this practice. But in a lot of ways, it isn't near the adventure ____________. 
Thevenin: Well Henry maintained he never hired me because of my boating ability. He hired me more for my entertainment factor. (all chuckle) 
Quartaroli: I was on a trip with Paul one time, and the people would say, "Paul, what's this one rated?" and he'd say, "Well, I don't know, what do you want? Do you want a five or do you want a ten?" And they'd all go, "Give us a ten!" So Paul would do his best to really bump up these rapids. "Give us a ten, Paul!" 
Thevenin: I want to say something here about the Hualapais, with their river trips. Those suckers do their best to give those people tens on that lower run. I mean, the way you give them a ten is you hit the biggest hole at full bore, and I see those guys in that lower end of the Canyon now, and that's what they do. They've only got those two tubes in the water, and they can really pick up the speed. They hit those things that are basically ones, and those people have water flying all over the place. Those guys can make an exciting trip out of those nothing rapids. 
Quartaroli: One of the best "seat of the pants" runs I ever saw -I don't know whether you remember this, Paul, or not -but in 1979 I'd started as a boatman, but I was swampin' that trip, and you were up at the top of Bedrock and the boat got a little too close to the wall on the left. At the top there's kind of a little point that sticks out. And you hit the stern of the boat, so it kicked the stern out and put the nose of the boat facing the left side down Bedrock. 
Thevenin: Yes? 
Quartaroli: You don't remember, but anyway I do, because this was a most amazing thing. So instead of trying to drive around to the right, Paul turned even further left and aimed for the left wall, put the bow of the boat into the left wall, it bounced around, did a three-sixty [360o turn] and went down the right side of Bedrock. 
Steiger: Now wait a minute. 
Quartaroli: He did a bank shot. It was amazing. Okay, he's looking down at the rapid, and the stern of the boat got too close to this little point of rock that sticks out on the left, so the stern bounced, which swung the stern to the right and the bow of the boat to the left, going right down that left channel. So instead of trying to turn right, and trying to drive around to the right side, he aimed even further left and bounced off the wall with the bow of the boat, the bow spun around back upstream, did a three-sixty, and down the right side, just like that's where he was supposed to have been. 
Steiger: And that's low water? 
Quartaroli: Well, it wasn't real great water. Well, I don't remember what the water was like, I was just amazed at the run, because I was just starting to run a boat. I'd run a half-a-dozen trips or something, and I had no idea what we were going to do. And when he pulled that act, God, that was a real clever move, I'd have never thought of that one. 
Thevenin: I'm not sure if it was thinking, or just reaction. 
Quartaroli: Well, whatever it was, it worked. 
Thevenin: I have been down the left side of that rock, though. 
Steiger: Yeah, you and everybody else. 
Thevenin: Well, I was waiting my turn one time, you know, just motoring upstream waiting for my turn, and as I was waiting for my turn, I suddenly saw smoke, and I said, "Well, that's the end of that!" The motor quit and I was steering down, and it just took me and it shot me right past the rock into the left side, shoved that boat right up -there's a little grotto right there, right at the top of it -shoved that boat in there, wedged it tight, so there I am on good solid rock, and I take the motor off, put the new motor on, get a couple of people on both sides of the boat to help shove the boat out into the current, they climbed on the boat, and we just went right down the left side, a beautiful run. (chuckles) But it just shoved my boat up there so hard I was pinned right in the rock and had good solid footing to change the motors. 
Steiger: I've seen a bunch of boats go left, I went left there one time. 
Thevenin: Well, it beats going up on the rock. 
Steiger: Yeah, beats turning over right there, that's for sure. 
Thevenin: I can remember one of my first runs, when we were doing the combination motor-rowing thing. Denny Prescott went into it, and I was hanging back for him to get through it, and I figured he was okay. He was at the point he was going to make it, and I hadn't realized he was going to make it up on top of the rock, and so I was already starting into it, and the current was too hard, and I spun the boat around a hundred eighty [180o turn] to try to motor back upstream, and I couldn't do it with the current, so I'm just running through that rapid, motoring upstream, and I'm going down there, just drifting with that current, and this is when we had the taildraggers, and so the motor's hanging out over the end of the boat, and I'm going there, as I come up on top of the water, this prop is just whipping around like mad about four inches away from Prescott's boat all the way down. (laughs) I figured if I lost four inches, that prop would have just sliced his boat to pieces, and shut me down. 
Steiger: Oh man! (quick break, tape turned off and on) 
Thevenin: ... less than productive. 
Steiger: Well, you gotta admire him for going out there and settin' 'em all down. 
Thevenin: Who, Les? 
Steiger: Yeah. 
Thevenin: Oh, well, the thing is, you know, all the good maps are extensions of the Les Jones map, you know. 
Steiger: Yeah. _________________ this thing here. 
Thevenin: Belknap [phonetic spelling] took Les Jones' map and just cut it in pieces and made it into a book. And then Stevens [phonetic spelling] came along and took Belknap's book and added some more information to it. The good river maps are basically just an extension of what Jones did. Jones just put 'em on a roll, and the other guys said, "Hey, that's too unwieldy," and they just whacked 'em up into pieces. 
Steiger: But it's the same.... 
Thevenin: But it's the same philosophy. In fact, I almost failed a class in college once. A professor said -__________ elementary school -and he said, "Remember, north is always at the top of the map." And I said, "No it's not." And we'd had some other discussions before. He said, "I don't want to hear from you anymore." So I went home and brought in my river map. I said, "Here. Here's the top of the page, it's not north." He said, "This isn't a map." (chuckles) That was his solution. "North is always at the top of a map, this isn't a map." Academic intelligence and all that stuff. 
Steiger: A lot of people use them ____________. 
Thevenin: But he was one of the first guys. Les was to start bending maps so that the river ran top to bottom, or on his roll, side-to-side, no matter which way north was. 
But anyhow, now that we're back and before we get lost, there was one other thing I wanted to get on this tape, and that's the rebuttal to old Gloeckler and Winter. They didn't really tell the full story, on that trip they talked about on theirs. And I'm going to fill in some of the pieces, because this was in the early days when we were scratching, and I mentioned we took down YMCAs and Scout groups. 
Steiger: This is 1972? 
Thevenin: Yeah, or whenever it was, either 1972 or 1973, whatever Gloeckler said the date was. No, it had to be later than that, because it's when Gloeckler was leaving, so it was later. But we got in the mode of taking down all these youth groups at discount prices, and all these universities wanted discount prices, and this trip that Gloeckler and them were talking about on their thing, the University of California -I think it was Berkeley -wanted to go down, and they wanted to go at full price, full deluxe everything. And Henry gave us the order, he said, "Look, this group we need to -I want you to really impress this group." And Bill and Bruce mentioned some of the things about that trip, but I don't think that Bill mentioned that he was trip leader, and the night or a couple of days before the trip happened, we had our boats committed down there in the Canyon, and we're supposed to come off, and they had a flash flood. And so we didn't get the boats there and he points out the fact that the boats came around later, and they got started on the water at three o'clock in the afternoon and went down and camped at the Paria Beach and walked up for lunch the next day. 
Steiger: Oh, that was that trip. 
Thevenin: That trip. Well, this was the trip Henry said we want to impress them. Well, they only had four boats, we'd promised them five. And so we were trying to get the other boat out, so as soon as we dropped the four boats off.... And the thing is, this gal had told her people, "Now if you want to watch the fun, get up real early in the morning, go out and watch them rig the boats." Well, the guys were down there, and there were no boats to rig, and we came through with the boats later on, dumped the boats, ran up to Kanab, got the food, came back down, the guys had the boats blown up, we put them on the water and all that stuff, and said, "Okay, now there's only four boats, we're going to leave some of the stuff behind. We're on our way now to pick up the fifth boat, we'll get it on the water tomorrow, and it'll be right behind you and it'll catch you in a day." And then of course Gloeckler and them mentioned the water went out that night, the boats were on the beach, and they didn't actually get away until about three o'clock. Well, I came back, finally getting the boat, coming back, got there about four o'clock, and nobody told me they had just left an hour before. So we rigged that boat, put the gear on it, and all this other stuff, and told the guys to split. We kept two guys, Joe Greeno [phonetic spelling] and Shirl Nagle, and said, "Go catch 'em." And just as we're ready to launch, we suddenly find one of the passengers who for one reason or another -if you know Bart Henderson, you might ask Bart where the young lady was that she missed the trip that went the day before -but anyway, she suddenly said, "I'm with this trip and I didn't get on the boat." So we said, "Okay, now guys, take care of her" and all that sort of stuff, and it was about three days before that extra boat caught them. (uproarious laughter) 
Quartaroli: They only left two hours later! 
Thevenin: They only left two hours behind them, and they're on a single boat with one girl, and it took about three days to catch up with them. 
Okay, now the rest of the story that Bill and them told about: The trip goes on, and I go down there at the end of the trip to pick them up. And we're coming out of the Temple Bar in those days, and they're not in. And I come around, I'm supposed to meet them at ten o'clock, and I get there just a few minutes late, and no boats. I figured they're just a little bit behind schedule, and I wait around, wait around, they're not in, nothing, nothing. So finally about eleven, I started saying, "Gee, I'd better rent a little power boat." So I go make arrangements to get a boat and I say, "Well, we want to impress them, so I'll grab some sodas, so I'll have some nice cold soda, because it's probably been a long hot day on the lake." And so I grab a bunch of cans of soda and beer and stuff and put 'em in some ice chests and I get the boat loaded, and I'm just ready to take off, and the guy yells, "Hey, there's a phone call for you from Bill." And I said, "No, no, you mean it's for Bill." "No, I think it's for you from Bill." I said, "No, Bill's on this trip, it can't be. Well, I'll take it anyway, I'll take a message for Bill." So I go up there and I get on the phone, Bill says, "Hey, how'd the trip come out?" And I said, "Bill, where are you?" "I'm in Flagstaff, how'd the trip do?" I said, "No, Bill, you're the trip leader." He said, "I know, how'd the trip do?" I said, "Bill, the trip isn't here yet." He said, "No, you're kidding me. Where's the trip?" I said, "Bill, are you phoning from Separation?" because I remembered there used to be a phone at Separation. I said, "Are you stuck somewhere up canyon or something?" He said, "No, I'm in Flagstaff." I said, "C'mon Bill." He said, "How'd the trip do?" I said, "Bill, I haven't seen the trip." He said, "No, you're kidding me," I said, "No, I'm not kidding you, you're kidding me." Because I can't get it through my mind, because the trip's not out and Bill tells me he's in Flagstaff. And what had happened is, they were in the process of developing Relco, and part of the deal was, Gloeckler was going to stay with Henry and continue to run trips so there wouldn't be too much ill feeling. The other guys went over to run Relco, but they were having trouble with the contract. So Rick Hilshamer [phonetic spelling] come barrelling down Diamond Creek on a motorcycle and meets them there and says, "Bill, we need you in Flagstaff to sign the contracts." Well, Bill figures, "Well, I made it to Diamond Creek, there's really nothing left to worry about," so he turns the boat over to the other guys, and takes off on this motorcycle. Then he waits until about noon to call me and see how the trip was, and of course the trip should have been off by two hours, you know, and there's no trip. And he finally convinces me he's really in Flagstaff. And I said, "Bill, if you're serious, you're in Flagstaff, we're in big trouble." "Well, we can't be," he says, "I left them at Diamond and they were on schedule." So I said, "Well, Bill, I'll call you back later." So I go down to the boat, and I jump in the boat and just barely take off, and here comes a boat just around that bend. (big sigh of relief) "It's only one o'clock, they're three hours late, but they're here." And I go barrelling out with the boat figuring, "Well, I'll still go deliver the soda to them, good will stuff, you know." And I pull up the guys said, (gasping for breath) "Out of gas -boats -back there -haven't seen one -in over three miles." I said, "What do you mean you haven't seen the boats in three miles? He says, (gasping for breath) "They're running out of gas like mad up there. We're just getting in." I said, "What about __________________?" "Oh, we've been out all day." So I handed them some stuff and figured, "Well, I'd better zing on back in." So I ziggy back on in, get a bunch of gas cans, get more beer and soda, and figure, "Well, now by the time I go out, I'll see another boat," and sure enough, they were right. I got out around the bend, and there were no boats in sight. So I go barrelling on up the lake and I get to the next boat, and I finally see them and say, "Where are the other boats?" "One you can just see in the distance back there." So I gave them some gas and some beer and soda, went on to the other boat. They said, "Oh, we just ran out of gas." So I gave them some gas and some beer and soda. And I go up river and I find two more boats sitting together, they're both out of gas. And so I give them the beer and the gas and stuff, and I say, "Okay, there's one, two, three, four, five. That's all the boats." They said, "No, one more boat." I said, "No, there were only five boats." They said, "No, six." I said, "No, we started with four, the other boat caught up with you, that's five." "No, six." I said, "No, there can't be six boats." "Yeah, you remember we left a boat at Diamond? Well, two of the passengers wanted to see if they could run it out." (chuckles) And so they gave them the boat. The only problem is, the motor handle was broken off, and so they gave the guys a set of channel locks and vice grips, and so the one guy sat there on the floor, holding the motor and the gas thingy with the channel locks and the vice grips, and the other guy is standing up saying "left, right, left, right," telling him what to do. Now, the thing is, the one guy who seemed to be in charge had legally and officially changed his name to "Rain," and he wore a feather in his head. I'm not sure what held the feather in, but there was just his head and his hair and a feather. But his name was Rain, and as soon as I found out, when they told me, "Well, Rain has the boat." I said, "What do you mean, 'Rain has the boat'?" "Rain." I said, "What's Rain's name?" "Rain." So I thought, "Okay, we're in trouble." The other guy turned out to be.... Oh, at the beginning of the trip there was one guy who didn't come in with the people, he came in later, and he flew into Page, and he kept calling down about every hour, because he'd been told somebody would come meet him. "No, don't worry, the trip hasn't left yet." "Well, the trip was supposed to leave today." "Don't worry, the trip hasn't left yet, we'll be up to pick you up." Finally he got worried and he hitchhiked down from Page. Sure enough, he got down there before the trip left. Anyway, so he was the other one who volunteered. So we got two guys in this boat who are now out of gas, they have no way to control the boat, except for channel locks and vice grips, one of them whose name is Rain, and the other one's name is Bill Taylor. And Richard knows Bill. And Richard figured if any people could do this sort of thing, and still smile about it and have fun, he wanted to be a part of it. So Bill Taylor came back to be one of our top boatmen. 
But anyway, by the time we got all the people out of there, it was a hot day in Temple Bar, they had arranged for airplanes to pick them up to fly them to Vegas, the airplanes all left about two o'clock and left all the people behind. The people had left all their money in Las Vegas, no money for the motels there at Temple Bar. (chuckles) Henry said we should impress them, and I am positive to this day, between Gloeckler and me and everything else, those people have never forgotten their trip. (laughter) 
Steiger: They didn't come back. 
Thevenin: They came back, but they did not come back with WhiteWater. (laughter) 
Steiger: Oh man! 
Thevenin: So that's a couple more details, and I don't think Gloeckler mentioned the fact he left the trip at Diamond Creek. 
Steiger: No, he conveniently forgot about that one. And now, what was this guy Nagle? We'd better spell that. 
Thevenin: Shirl Nagle, S-H-I-R-L, I think is the male spelling for Shirl, and Nagle was N-A-G-L-E. And Shirl lived in Boulder City. 
Quartaroli: Was he Henry's cousin or something? 
Thevenin: Who? 
Quartaroli: Shirl Nagle. 
Thevenin: I don't think he was related. 
Steiger: So those guys left with a pretty little lady that Bart.... Now, was Bart on that trip? 
Thevenin: No, Bart worked for Hatch. 
Steiger: Oh! So they left with a pretty little lady that had.... 
Thevenin: Gotten lost in the wrong river company. 
Steiger: Got lost with Bart. 
Thevenin: And we will not speculate any further in print. 
Steiger: Okay. 
Thevenin: We will not speculate why it took them three days to catch up, either. 
Steiger: Because they were an hour behind. (laughter) Those guys. So they continued to work for WhiteWater, even after. 
Quartaroli: Joe Greeno, he's a story in himself. 
Thevenin: Well, Shirl Nagle was a story in himself too. 
Quartaroli: I never knew Shirl. I met Joe Greeno. 
Thevenin: You never knew Shirl? He was the one that -he could go through more equipment faster than anybody else I ever knew. He went through three clutches on the truck in one summer. He went through his three motors between Lee's Ferry and Phantom Ranch, phoned for a motor -and he's a big kid, strong -he hiked up, they drove a motor around to him, and he carried the motor down on his shoulders to the boat. 
Steiger: Oh my God! From where?! 
Thevenin: From South Rim. 
Steiger: Oh my God. He carried the whole motor? 
Thevenin: He carried the motor down. 
Steiger: And this is how big of a motor? 
Thevenin: I think these were, we ran thirties [30 horsepower] then, yes. 
Steiger: That's a strong guy. 
Thevenin: Yes, he was. 
Steiger: That's unbelievable. Gloeckler said he had mentioned carrying lower units and stuff, but nobody ever said nothing about a whole motor. Man! 
Thevenin: ________ Gloeckler talk about the time he split his head open? I don't think he did. 
Steiger: No, he didn't talk about that. 
Thevenin: While the tape was off, Richard was talking about when did the jackasses come in? No, that wasn't Gloeckler. 
Quartaroli: That was Sam West? He worked for the Park, Lew, _______________________. 
Steiger: Sam West. He started out Sam Street. 
Quartaroli: I can never remember the combinations of it. Wasn't the story it was him.... 
Thevenin: You mean the story about him being called "Silent Sam"? 
Quartaroli: No, about him having his head cut open. 
Thevenin: No, it wasn't his head. As I remember, it was his throat. We carried the fifty-five-gallon drums of gas down, and as I remember, he got pitched onto the edge of that drum, right on his throat, and he only talked in a whisper for a while. 
Steiger: He was a wild character, I'll tell ya', in those days. I remember when he was Sam Street and he lived up in that cave, working for Tony. And then he worked for OARS for a long time. 
Thevenin: Then he became a Park Ranger. 
Steiger: Yeah. 
Thevenin: But anyway, the jackasses, you know, came after we moved the motors on the inside and there were a lot of rocks down there. Somebody came in with a jackass, and the first jackasses were direct acting. See, the ones most everybody uses now are the dual-acting ones, so when you pull up on the handle, the motor comes up through a set of scissor hinges. The old ones, it was just a pin, and when you wanted the motor to come out, you pushed the handle down, and it just like a teeter totter pushed the motor up out of the water. And then when you wanted to motor to go back down, you let go of the handle, or you let the handle come back up, and the motor would go down. And I think it was Mile 24½ or Mile 25 or somewhere right in that area, and the bad thing about those things is, when the river would kick the motor up, when the motor would get kicked up by the water, the handle would go down. And of course after you went over the bump, then the motor would drop back in the water and the handle would come up. And it was one of those actions there, the same time Gloeckler got pitched forward, while the jackass handle was down, and he was still going forward when the motor dropped back in the water, which brought the handle up, just split him open, right across the face of the skull up there. Just a solid blow. I mean, you hit a boatman in the head, you're basically alright. So about the same time, some gal had fallen off the frame and went in that little hole between the two frames, was down there in the tubes. And Gloeckler immediately realized he's got to get her up there, and of course he runs up to grab her out of the hole. He's bleeding like mad, because head wounds always bleed like mad, and so he's reaching down to pull her up, and his blood is now pouring down on top of her, and then the passengers get all excited, and they start crowding around -whenever you see blood, you know -they start crowding around, and Gloeckler's trying to get them to get back so he can get the girl up. He's finally shoving them, saying, "Get out of the way, it's my blood." He's shoving the passengers out of the way, finally drags the girl up, and she's afraid he's going to bleed and pass out. Of course we bring the other boats through, and there's Gloeckler bleeding like a stuck pig. By this time he has the girl up, so we pull over into the back-eddy there and take a look at the skull and figure all it is, is just the skin. So we start holding it closed and it quit bleeding, so we just sat on Gloeckler and took out the needle and thread we used on the boat and started sewing Gloeckler up, and he ran the rest of the trip. 
Steiger: There's a tough customer, that old Gloeckler. 
Thevenin: Boatmen have to be strong, not necessarily bright. 
Steiger: It's better if you're not too bright. 
Thevenin: Shall we digress and tell another story about not being too bright and tell about the Hatch boys when the trailer got a flat tire in the middle of the night? Those guys went to change it, they change it and they cursed those guys for putting the lug nuts on with the power hammers, and they strained and they groaned, and they finally got that stupid thing off, and slapped the new tire on, and went to put the lugs on, and the nuts slid right onto the lugs. They'd been left-handed threads, and those guys had undone every one of those things, stripped the threads all the way off of 'em. (laughter) 
Steiger: Oh man. 
Thevenin: So they just tied up that extra axle with baling wire or whatever they had, rolled on in on the other tire. That takes a strong man to strip all those threads off. 
Steiger: Stubborn. 
Thevenin: But yeah, boatmen can be that way. I think Winters even went down for the count. Talk about the time he went down, they were working late at night, and they were bringing up the lantern, and he dropped the lantern and the glass slashed his leg and they sat on him and sewed him up, and when his dad saw the stitches -dad was a doctor -he said, "Hm, good job, I'll leave those stitches the way they are." 
Steiger: I remember hearing that story. That was the trip Bart was on. They were a little late on that trip, too, I remember. Actually, Bart told me that story. I ended up writing that down. That's another one of those "trips from Hell." (aside about changing tape) This is the River Runners Oral History Project. This is Tape 3 of an interview that we're doing with Paul Thevenin. This is Lew Steiger and Richard Quartaroli is here too. And this is still 8-5-95. 
Steiger: Okay, we're back in business here. 
Thevenin: Okay, since we switched tapes, should we switch subjects? I was talking about one thing we probably ought to include was the advent of women, because I was around to watch that. 
Steiger: Yeah. 
Thevenin: When I came in the business, it was a man's world, except for Georgie, who had fought her way in, clawed her way in, got her way in, whatever you want to say, she was in. She didn't go through any women's lib club to get in, she got in by herself. But she didn't really make a lot of room for other women to come in behind her. And I can remember in the very early days, there were no women outside of Georgie. I think most of you guys know Connie, and was it Holly that was with her at the time? Do you remember Holly? 
Steiger: I remember Holly Mitchem. 
Thevenin: Was she a buddy of Connie's? 
Steiger: Yeah, and a girlfriend of Dennis Mitchem's, there at ARR. But I don't know that she.... 
Thevenin: I don't think she actually handled a boat, but she swamped for Connie. 
Steiger: She swamped a lot. 
Thevenin: And so I guess they kept pestering Fred Burke, and he finally said, "Okay, you can have a boat," and they didn't like the color of the boat, so I think they're the ones that started ARR having the boats that greenish-bluish color, because they didn't like the color of the boats. And Connie fought her way in. For those that don't know Connie, she's adept at river running, she's a pilot, she used to scare the hell out of people, thought it was nothing but fun to fly that little biplane of hers down over the highway, low to it, and meet some car coming head-on, and scare the daylights out of some car when he came up over a hill and saw he was face-to-face with a prop. 
One of the other gals I remember in the early days, Louise Hoagland who ended up running for ARTA, which became AZRA. She was a passenger of mine on a fourteen-day Sierra Club motor trip, where we cooked in the dark every night. She and her husband were supposed to come down, and the husband was a stockbroker, and the Stock Market was going berserk, so he just said, "You go down. I won't be able to concentrate and have fun." Half-way down [she said], "I'm going to make sure I get my husband down here next year," and then half-way down she suddenly shifted to "I'm going to get my husband to become a boatman." And I said, "Louise, you know a good self-respecting stock broker, you may get him down the river, but a river guide, no." And she kept talking about that all the way down the rest of the trip, how much fun it would be if her husband were a boatman too. I came back the next season and I'm down there rigging, and all of a sudden here comes this long, lanky gal running over, dragging somebody behind her, says, "Hi, Paul!" "Louise, you're back!" "Yeah, I brought Roger." "Oh, whose trip are you going down?" "Oh, we're boatmen." And I said, "What do you mean 'we're boatmen'?!" "Oh, we're both boatmen." And I said, "Noooo." I looked at him and I said, "Roger?" "Yeah." "You're the stock broker?" "Yeah, I was." I said, "What happened?" "Well, every night I came home for dinner, she had those stupid slides out and I kept telling her, 'Okay, dear, fine, fine, next year I'll go down the river. Fine, fine.' She kept brainwashing me, and then she found this ad for ARTA’s Boatmen School. And she wanted me to sign up, and I said, 'No, dear, I'll make a river trip, but no, I won't sign up.' Finally she kept nagging me, I said, 'Okay, fine, I'll go on vacation, we'll go to boating school.' I figured that'd be the end of it. Basically, it was -it was the end of it. I got down there, learned how much fun it was to be a boatman, so I told them [the brokerage house] goodbye, and we're boatmen. She's telling the truth." And so both Roger and Louise Hoagland became boatmen. 
And there were a bunch of other ones that came in that were.... But I was there, close to those two, when they came in. 
There was another gal that lives.... And I can't remember Liz's last name. Some of you probably remember her. 
Steiger: Liz Hymans. 
Thevenin: Was it Hymans? 
Steiger: Yeah. 
Thevenin: She came down and we were unloading stuff, and I will admit I had a little bit of the male attitude: WhiteWater stuff, as we mentioned, was a little on the heavy side, and that could be a slight understatement. And Liz came up and said, "I want to work for you guys." And I looked at her and I said, "Ma'am, a lot of our stuff is pretty heavy around here. It takes a lot of work and effort," and I put on that he-man role. She said, "Well, can I hand you something?" I said, "Yeah, hand me those motors over there," and she did and I thought, "Well, this is one gal I don't want to argue with." 
Steiger: That was Liz that did that? 
Thevenin: That was Liz. "Just hand me that motor up." I think it was only a twenty-five [horsepower] in those days, but just with one hand she reached down, grabbed the motor and handed it up to me on the trailer. And I said, "(clears throat) Yeah, but I don't think my boss is going to hire any women." And of course Henry, it was a long time before Henry even let women be authorized swampers. But Liz made me think right then and there that maybe saying our equipment was heavy wasn't going to be the proper excuse any longer. 
Steiger: Did you ever know Ellen Tibbetts? She rowed for the dories. 
Thevenin: Ellen. I've probably met her. 
Steiger: If you met her, you would remember her. She's the one that always sticks out for me. Well, they kind of blew our cover, didn't they? (laughter) 
Thevenin: Yeah, you know, going from the old days where it was male-dominated, [to] the trip I went on just a week ago, the trip leader was a woman, and I was way down the line, because as far as with Grand Canyon Expeditions, even with all my years, I was junior man with GCE, and my son swamper and the other swamper had had six trips with GCE, so I went to bottom man on the barrel, taking orders from one of the women -it was Sally. So it was quite an experience to go full tilt where women were not accepted, to me having to take orders from the women. 
Steiger: So how was it? 
Thevenin: It was fantastic! And I mentioned a couple of times that boatmen today -and they are boatmen -I think Cosmopolitan came down and wanted to call them boatpeople, and they almost didn't get out of there with their lives. These women worked long and hard to become boatmen, and that's what they are. But it was great, and as I've said before, the younger generation, including the women, they know more about geology than I probably even want to know. They know more about the rivers and the rapids and what's going on with all that stuff. They have it all memorized. To me, running the river was always an experience, I never knew where the rapids were. I'd come around the bend and I'd ask one of my customers who had the map, "What's that one?" So it was always a new experience for me. I don't know whether it takes the fun out of it for these guys or not. It was a great experience. 
Steiger: Oh man, it was. I don't know where we're all going with it. I tell you, it's an interesting time. 
Thevenin: Unfortunately, we've had the battles.... Well, when we first came in, the Park Service, Forest Service, really had no jurisdiction, and suddenly they decided they had jurisdiction. Ahhh (big sigh), I think they have a tendency to forget I worked in Washington, D.C. for a while, and the thinking of public servants is they are not public servants, they're public masters, and they keep trying to inflict their philosophy on other people. And so sometimes it takes some real battles. Hopefully, the boating world will stick together, and with all the differences there are between motors and oars and new way and old way and whatever way it is, the one common enemy is that if the Park Service ever goes to a single concessionaire, and puts it up for bids strictly on money, that river running definitely will not be what it was, and it will not be for the better. So gotta convince public servants that they are public servants, not public masters. 
Steiger: That's a pretty good line. We're going to have to find a way to sneak that one into the bqr. (laughter) 
Quartaroli: That might be the title of _____________. 
Thevenin: Well, I can remember all those hearings they had -you probably heard in the past -Henry thought I was more fluent in speaking than he was, so I ended up going to probably more of those hearings than he did, and he'd fly me all over the country. And I can remember we went out to San Francisco, and we were supposed to speak in the order in which we appeared, and I was one of the first ones there and turned in my little card and a guy by the name of Steve Martin was the ranger who came from the Grand Canyon, knew me well, and as people would walk in, he'd make a very definite point of pointing at my card, and pointing at the fact that he was putting it on the bottom of the stack. And sure enough, some four hours later, when the judge who was conducting the hearing said, "Well, we just have one speaker left. Mr. Thevenin, I see that you have fourteen legal pages of rebuttal to this survey that we've done here, and the Park Service plans, so surely you don't want to speak." And I said, "Sir, I was one of the first ones here, and I do want to speak." He said, "Well, you've got it all in writing." I said, "Yeah, and that piece of writing will never see the light of day." He said, "Well, we've been giving people three minutes, but due to the fact that we're running short on time, could you cut it down to two minutes?" Now earlier in the evening, he had interrupted the hearing, somebody came and whispered in his hear, he closed the meeting down, said, "We're going to take a short break here, the TV crew is here, they want to come in and set up, so we'll take a break while they set up." They set up, he called the hearing back in session, he said, "We're now taking things out of order. They came here primarily to hear the Sierra Club." He asked for the Sierra Club representatives to come up and speak, and then he took a break and said, "Alright, now TV crew wants to be able to take down," and they went off and so the public hearing, as far as the TV went, was strictly a one-sided event. The hearings were basically a fraud. The one thing that saved us, probably at that stage of the game, and many of you probably do not like the gentleman who may have been the savior at that time, but the river operators were in a lawsuit with the park service. And President Reagan selected our lawyer to be the Secretary of the Interior. Some of you remember the name of James Watt. I do not think James Watt ever wanted the job, he did as much as he possibly could to antagonize the public to get thrown out, but the one thing he did do, while he was in, he sent a letter around, said, "You people will remember that you are the public servants. Those of you that cannot roll with this punch, had better go find a job somewhere else." And it was amazing, while he was in office, the difference of the attitude of the Park Service towards the boatmen. And it was much more conciliatory. Then of course Watt left and things went back the way they were, and we started taking orders again. 
Steiger: Oh, don't get me started on that! For years, I don't know, things were okay, and then man, there was a period of time in there where we sure got a bunch of rotten eggs in the Park -but don't get me started. So that San Francisco deal, that was the motor/rowing deal. 
Thevenin: Well, they tried to bill it that way to try to put a wedge between the boatmen, but after we started talking to, explaining to some of these guides who had never read it -I mean, that was a big problem, speaker after speaker after speaker got up and said, "This is wonderful. I haven't read it, but from what I've heard...." You know, they were only hearing certain things out of it. But the whole thing was a poorly written document, their figures were completely erroneous. They took the survey of the pollutants that were in the water from downriver, but they would not print the pollutants that were there at the dam, you know, to make a comparison. And we pointed this out, and they said, "We don't need to. We just know it's polluted downriver." And I maintained that most of the pollutants in the river were coming from the lake." And they said, "Well, we don't have any figures to prove that." And I said, "Why don't you take your little equipment up there and take those readings?" 
Steiger: Right below the dam. 
Thevenin: "And then tell us how much came in from the dam, to where you took them downriver." Because they were talking about oil spills and everything else, and I calculated from their figures the amount of oil that they anticipated was in the water from spills, that every motor outfit was pouring half their gasoline into the river to come up with figures that big. And I maintain that most of those figures were coming from gasoline and oil that were being spilled in the lake. Because, yeah, you do spill some gasoline, but the amount that they were coming up with would have had to been every guy pouring about half of his gasoline in the river. 
Steiger: I didn't realize that was a huge part of.... I sort of felt like the main concern was aesthetics. 
Thevenin: Well, yeah, it was partly aesthetics, but when you read the document, and this is what we did, we got some of the rowing guys to read the document, and then they got scared, because they realized what power it was going to give them [the Park Service] and they were going to be able to cut anybody off at any time they wanted. You know, when the thing first started, a lot of the rowing guys said, "Hey, great, we'll get rid of the motor jockeys and get rid of the noise." And then when we got them to read that stuff, a lot of them swung over to our side after they read that publication. 
Steiger: I worked for Fred, so I was biased, but I always felt.... And actually, I felt like, "Well, okay, if we had to row, that wouldn't be the end of the world." But what swung me was, I looked at the numbers and it just struck me, "Wait a minute, you guys are going to get rid of motors, and you're going to increase the numbers of people that are coming down here, tantamount to an increase." And I just thought, "That's not really doable. We're going to be stacked up everywhere if you do that." 
Thevenin: The thing is, for the rowing guys, when a motor trip goes by, it makes the noise of the motor, then it's gone. But if you put all those people on the water, and they're all launching at the same time, you're never going to have any privacy. 
Steiger: That's what I felt like. 
Thevenin: You're going to have those guys with you all the way down the river. 
Steiger: And not only that, but you're not going to have the flexibility, because if you're rowing, you really don't. I mean, you can go just so fast, and you're there. With a motor, if you have a long enough trip, or even if they're just different schedules, you can spread out a lot better. 
Thevenin: So the salvation is, the rowing guys and the motor guys are going to have to get together and come up with a common defense or they'll all be out of here. 
Steiger: Well, you know, it's funny, the new one, it really isn't. We're lining up here to have a battle right now, and I don't think it's really motors versus rowing right now. This next go-around which is coming is private versus commercial. 
Thevenin: Or single concessionaire versus the whole group. 
Steiger: Just by the way that the prospectus has been let out, you think? 
Thevenin: Well, this has been sort of the ulterior motive in the background, because they keep saying, "Other National Parks, we only have to deal with one concessionaire," which is true. And that's why you go to any of these other parks, you're paying five-and-a-half bucks for a hamburger. If you don't like the price, you can't go anywhere else. Here, if you don't like the price with one river company, you got seventeen others to go to. You don't like the style of one outfit, fine, you've got another style. But you go to the average National Park, and you've got no choice, you take what you've got. And then they [start] talking about all the scandals there are with these big concessionaires who keep playing with their books and paperwork and cheat the government out of money. Hell, the average boatman doesn't have enough brains to cheat the government, so they're probably getting their fairest deal out of the boatmen down here. When you start getting some multi-conglomerate company running something, they're going to hide everything in the paper. So it's really counterproductive, in more than one way. 
But should we get off that? We'll go on to something else. 
Steiger: Yeah. I'm trying to think.... 
Quartaroli: Well, another regulation, we've got the possible Coast Guard changes, instead of working with the Park on licensing and things like that. There was a Coast Guard move, twenty or twenty-five years ago. 
Thevenin: Twenty-five years ago. 
Quartaroli: You were around. 
Thevenin: Yeah, I was around for that. 
Quartaroli: Could you give us a little background? 
Thevenin: Yeah. First of all, we went with nobody regulating us, and then everybody wanting to get in the act, including the Coast Guard. I spent eight years in the Coast Guard, I went through the Academy and all that stuff. I was an officer, and I was in charge of enforcing all the regulations on ocean, the harbors, the navigable waters, and when the Coast Guard decided twenty-five years ago -no, it was more than twenty-five years ago, it must have been closer to thirty years ago -to step into this thing, they brought up basically the same test they gave guys that were running the motor trips down in San Francisco Harbor. You know, questions like, "What's the maximum capacity of the bilge before you have to have such-and-such?" The boatmen didn't know what a bilge was. By the time we started cutting bottoms out of our boats, we didn't have a bilge. And one of the questions I remember is, "If you are proceeding downriver in a fog and you hear a vessel blowing two blasts on his whistle, what do you do?" Well, I couldn't find the answer down there, but the obvious answer was, you stood on the bank and cheered the idiot on. I mean, if anybody's trying to go upriver in a fog! (chuckles) I don't know too many guys that went upriver in a boat. But I mean, these were the type of questions that were on there. They just grabbed the same test. 
The one organization that gave probably the more sensible test that I've seen of any of them, the State of Utah got pressured into it by the Legislature and I guess Ted Tuttle was the Head of the Recreation Department for the State of Utah, and Bob Anderson was the Head Boating Ranger, and they came to the river outfits and said, "We're going to have to license you guys. Would you get together with us and help us make up a test?" And so a bunch of us all sat together with the State of Utah and made up questions that we thought would be appropriate questions to ask the guy if he wanted a boating license. And then when there were differences of opinion, so it wouldn't be, "Well, I like to push and you like to pull, which is the best way?" We avoided all types of questions like that, and we'd go over all the questions, everybody would say, "Well, nah, I don't think that's a good answer, because I really prefer to do it this way, and I get by just as well." Then we'd throw that question out. And so by the time they got the test put together, it was questions about boating, and they were things that everybody agreed to, that this was something that people that were boating ought to know, and it wasn't a personal bias or personal preference on whether you were motor, whether you were oars, whether you were pushing, whether you pulled, whether you did a paddleboat or whatever it was, it had no bearing on that. It was just, you know, questions about the river and how to read the water, and things of that nature, and they put together that test. The only thing is, Tuttle and Anderson did, I think he promised every one of us we could have the number one license. 
Steiger: Yeah, I remember. 
Thevenin: Or did I mention that earlier? 
Steiger: Yeah, you said and then you got there and.... 
Thevenin: Glade Ross [phonetic spelling] had already grabbed number one, and so they were all 0 0 1 and 0 0 2, and they handed me 0 0 3 and I said, "Gee, if I gotta be stuck with this, I can't be number one, make me Agent Double-Oh Seven." Now that was the only organization I know of that really came to the boating people and said, "Hey, we're going to start licensing you, would you help us come up with the test?" 
Steiger: Well, I don't know if we're going be able to whup [win against] these guys out of here, I think they're in here. The Coast Guard now, I think they're here. I think it remains to be seen what we're going to have to do, but I don't think we've got 'em.... 
Thevenin: ___________ the test I took this year with the Park Service really had nothing to do with boating, it was, "How well do you understand the regs of the Park Service? What temperature do you cook the food at, how cold the ice box has to be, what places are off limits?" One of the questions I missed, that really isn't a boatman's responsibility: "At what length does a boat not have to be licensed by the Coast Guard?" 
Steiger: That was on there, huh? 
Thevenin: That was on there. 
Steiger: What's the answer? 
Thevenin: Twelve-footer. I marked sixteen. But that's not one of the things that boatmen -maybe the owners need to know that, you know, but the boatman himself doesn't need to know whether his boat has to be licensed. There were some other -I forget, I missed three questions, but they were.... But the test was not really on being a boatman, the test was, How well could you read the Park Service regs and memorize them? And being a teacher for all these years, and of course it's not that different from the old regulations, so having been the Area Manager, where it was my responsibility to know the rules, it really wasn't that difficult for me to read it, review it, and remember it. 
Steiger: Well, best case scenario, I wonder what this thing is going to look like in another thirty years. 
Thevenin: Well, I may not be here to see it. 
Steiger: Who knows if any of us will be, for that matter. I just wonder, I look at how much it's -I look at all the changes since 1962, that's a heck of a lot of water under the bridge. 
Thevenin: Yup, and there's one more bridge. I will say that about the bridge, though, that bridge does not bother me. 
Steiger: The new bridge? 
Thevenin: Actually, there's two new bridges since 1962. 
Steiger: Yeah, the Gray Bridge and.... 
Thevenin: The double bridge down there -Navajo Bridge and the other one down there at Phantom. When I started running, the metal bridge.... In fact, the plan was, when they got that metal bridge in, they were going to tear the other one out. 
Steiger: The black bridge. 
Thevenin: Yeah. And then when they went to take the first mule ride across that bridge, the mules would not set foot on it. They just stopped and said, "We ain't goin'!" 
Steiger: I don't blame 'em, either. 
Quartaroli: That's interesting, I didn't realize they were going to take the black bridge out. 
Thevenin: Yeah, they only needed one bridge, but the mules wouldn't take it. 
Steiger: Good thing they left it up there. That's a typical government thing. But seriously, I wonder what's going to happen. I guess there's no telling. 
Thevenin: Well, like I say, people in there are going to have to make sure that they "read the water" carefully and see where those back-eddies in government are. The one thing about it is, eventually the politicians get replaced, but unfortunately, many of the career personnel stay on and on and on. 
Steiger: Yeah, except for.... Well, don't get me started. 
Quartaroli: I remember a little funny thing about regulations. They used to figure out boat capacity. Didn't they count the number of valves? 
Thevenin: Yeah, by the number of valves. The idea was that every compartment had a valve, and so that was the first, yeah. So it was easier on the rangers to count the valves, yeah. 
Quartaroli: But then when you had a trip that you had a few more people than you had boat capacity, ________________________. 
Thevenin: Yeah, that rule didn't stay very long, because it was one of the Hatch boatmen, the ranger came down and said, "I'm sorry, you have too many people for the number of valves." The boatman said, "No, don't you mean I don't have enough valves for the number of people?" (chuckles) And the ranger said, "Well, it's the same thing, isn't it?" The boatman said, "No," and opened up his can and very quickly cut a hole and threw in one of those Bridgeport valves, and said, "Now, do I have enough valves?" And because the regulations said, "valves/people...." So they decided they'd better come up with a different way of analyzing it. Yup, that did happen. 
Steiger: It seems like we're probably forgetting something, because every time I do one of these things, what we do is, I always think of the perfect question when everything's all packed up and we're driving down the road, or tomorrow or somewhere, it'll be like, "God, why didn't we ask about this, why didn't we ask about that?" 
Thevenin: Well, one quick thing that deals with this: The one time the Park Service, and the boating people, and the Bureau of Reclamation, and the Sierra Club, and Trout Unlimited -and I'm leaving out a bunch of names I know -about five years ago decided that we may not all agree with each other, but the one thing we did agree, is the news media really didn't know what they were talking about. And so we put on that media trip where I think Sobek's [phonetic spelling] WhiteWater -by that time Henry was out of it -but Sobek gave one of their boats, and was it AZRA gave one of them? 
Steiger: On the dam fight, yeah Brian went. 
Thevenin: Brian and I went down with.... I forget who the boatmen were. 
Quartaroli: 48 Hours? 
Thevenin: No, no, this was a media trip where we took all the newspapers and the magazines. We had U.S. News and World Report, we had I think Sports Illustrated, we had Rutgers Press, we had a whole bunch of things going down. And the guy who's now the Secretary of Interior, Bruce Babbitt, came down and made the speech at the dinner the night before, talking about how there were things that needed to be done down here. And the one thing that most of us agreed on, we needed the beaches back, and we needed this. So we agreed on a lot of things. We disagreed on some of the ways they were to be done, but it was interesting, at least that group of people got together on one thing, and that was to get the news media down to actually see it. It would be nice if we could all get together on a number of other things as well. 
Steiger: Like what? 
Thevenin: Maybe it would be nice if some of these guys would go down on a commercial trip. I can remember years ago, when I guess the first real Shigella scare came in, and of course immediately they wanted to blame it on the poor health standards of the river trips. But you know, if you've been doing things this way for years and years and years, and nobody gets sick, and then all of a sudden, it makes no difference which company it is, everybody's getting sick, it can't suddenly be the way we're doing the meals. They got some guy from Washington, D.C. out here with U.S. Public Health Service, and he was an expert, so they sent him down. And when he was giving his report, he said, "You know, I went down as a passenger on this trip, the boatmen were down there tinkering with their stupid motors, and they came up and started fixing dinner, they had grease on their hands and they whip out their knives and start cutting the food. I was appalled. With my training and my upbringing, I almost retched. It was just absolutely disgusting. But at the end of the trip, I realized nobody had gotten sick. I thought I'd better go down with another outfit. They can't all be this filthy. So I went down with another trip. It was really the same thing. I watched those guys clean their fingernails with their knives and then they'd cut the salad. You know, it was bad, but I didn't feel like retching. I'll go down again. You know, I need to have the first-hand experience. So I got on with one of the trips as a crew member, as a swamper. I made sure I did everything right, and the guys alongside me, but it began to hit me, nobody was getting sick. And I thought I'd better go down another trip. I suddenly found myself whipping my knife out of the scabbard and starting to cut the lettuce and tomatoes and stuff, and you're doing it too. (all chuckle) You know, in all those trips nobody got sick. I don't think it's the way the boatmen handle the food." Never heard from that guy again! (laughs) They shipped him to Siberia or somewhere. But to start off with, "it was abominable and it appalled me," and he ended up doing it the same way the boatmen did, and the final line was the same way every time. Nobody got sick. Now I agree, it's probably better we are washing our hands, and probably is better that we have all the soap containers and the dish washing and all that stuff, and I've got no objection to that. 
Steiger: Well, we're trying. I tell ya', they keep comin', though. The latest one is they want us to wear little plastic gloves on our hands when we're putting out the lunch. And anything that isn't cooked.... That's the next one that we gotta fight off. 
Thevenin: I think we may lose the wilderness experience with pink latex gloves. 
Steiger: Yeah, that's what it boils down to. 
Thevenin: Maybe the pink latex gloves when we play with the porta-potty, but not when we're playing with the sandwich meat. And I will say this, one thing that's come in that I was impressed by is these new water filter systems. Hey, man, you know it's no more “well, let's pull in at Vasey's, let's pull in at somewhere else,” and maybe if the water is running clear and dropping the alum and the lime in the water. Hey, these little suckers are fantastic. I don't know that they ought to be mandated, but I sure think they're great. 
Steiger: They're the happenin' thing. 
Quartaroli: They're a good addition. 
Thevenin: And I understand they kill almost everything. So the water that people are getting now is better than the water they're getting at home. 
Steiger: Well, what are we forgetting, guys? 
Thevenin: Well, let's see, How did I get out of the business? Well, I never did. 
Quartaroli: Never did, you just did a rowing trip. 
Thevenin: It's addictive. I did a rowing trip. I don't know whether we mentioned on the tape that this year we had the youngest and the oldest licensed boatmen on the river in the Thevenin family, old Art being a full-fledged boatman. You can be a boatman at eighteen, but I guess there aren't any eighteen- or nineteen-year-olds running this year, so Art at twenty is the youngest, and me at sixty-one, swinging those oars around. I don't know whether we talked about that trip or not, but after not rowing for twenty years and not rowing in the Grand Canyon in twenty-five years, it was a new learning experience. Like I say, most of the good stories come from the failures, and when I missed that rugged landing at Redwall.... (laughter) 
Quartaroli: That was the low point of the trip. 
Thevenin: I made it in though! I pulled the boat up as far as I could and rowed across the river like mad into the back-eddy on the other side, and rowed up the back-eddy and came back and made a try again, and remembered "no, no, it's the inside of the current line going upstream I want to ride, not the outside." So I found out I couldn't turn the little black handle on the oars the same way I did on the motor. It didn't read quite the same. But by the time the trip was over, I'd had a good trip, and the people were all right-side up, and I was not completely sore. 
Steiger: Well, looking back, do you have.... 
Thevenin: Do I have a big love, _______________. We won't mention their names, there were too many of them. We did mention the fact that I am a licensed masseur, and that was always one of the bonus features on the trips that I was on. But no, do I have any single happy memories? I think in the Grand Canyon, Lava and I have an ongoing love affair that is probably as sadistic/masochistic as they can ever be. Lava beats the daylights out of me, and I keep coming back. 
Probably my favorite river.... Did we get on the Idaho at all or not, on the Salmon River and all the hermits that were up there? Actually, in all honesty, probably my favorite river in the past -it's not the same nowadays -but the Forest Service has chased all the hermits off and they've done all sorts of things. The Main Salmon, I think, was a really underrated river, especially for giving people an outdoor experience, because you still had hermits up there at that time, and some of you.... Have you ever run the Salmon? 
Steiger: Yeah, just once. I only did it one time. 
Thevenin: Was Buckskin Bill still up there? Or is he now a legend? Buckskin Bill was a hermit on.... 
Steiger: He might have still been up there. I was up there in the late seventies. 
Thevenin: Ah, late seventies, I think he was gone by about that time. Anyway, Buckskin Bill was a guy who'd grown up in Oklahoma with Indian heritage, and the family felt that you ought to spend one year on Mother Nature before you became a man. And so he had gone to the university down there in Oklahoma. He was born there when it was Oklahoma Territory. He went to the University of Oklahoma, and he'd done some surveying work up in Idaho. He said, "This is where I'm going to chose to do my one year," and he hiked up the Salmon River and sat down on an old mining claim and lived up there for a year. When he came out, the Depression was on. He thought, "Man, it's tough out here. I had it great up there." And he went back up and said, "I'll stay up here until this thing blows over. And he didn't come out until World War II when they drafted him, and served as a bombardier on a flight crew. Then he went back in after World War II, and he was a unique guy, made all of his own guns, made all of his own knives, and made all of his own pots and pans, got the old drill stock and bored holes out of it, made riflings in it and everything. Just did everything by hand. A rather unique hermit, because old Fenstermaker and I pulled in there the first time because we were curious about this big pink building. He welcomed us with open arms, told us we could stop anytime. We used to bring the people down, all these people from the city, and they'd meet this real old hermit up there. All these things he could show them and tell them. 
And there was an old hermit up there by the name of Dan Carleson [phonetic spelling] who claimed that I ruined him. I was going downriver one time and in the early days we did anything to make money, and we were scratchin' for customers and Jack sent me down with a twenty-eight-footer with only two people -one on one end of the boat, and one on the other end of the boat because they didn't like each other. They met in Stanley and decided right then and there they didn't like each other, so they sat on opposite ends of the boat. They talked to me, but they wouldn't talk to each other. I'd talk to one, then I'd talk to the other. And I'm going down, and here's this guy stumbling down the rocks. It's getting late, I'm looking for a campsite. I yell over at the guy, "Hey, oldtimer, you need a ride somewhere?" He suddenly looks up at me and says, "What, what, what?" I said, "Do you need a ride?" "Where to?" I said, "I don't know, where you going? You're stumbling in the rocks." "I can make it." "I'm sure you can, but do you want a ride? The rocks are getting rough, and it's starting to get dark." "Well," he said (gruffly), "you wouldn't take my dog." "Yeah, I would." At that time I would have taken anybody to match with those two people. "What do you want to give me a ride for?" I said, "Well, it's getting dark, you're stumbling on the rocks, I don't want you messin' the rocks up." "Well, it is gettin' dark. Where are you camping?" I said, "Dillinger Creek." He said (gruffly), "Why you goin' to Dillinger Creek?" I said, "It's a great campsite, and it's just down around the bend." He said (gruffly), "I know where it is." I said, "Well, then do you want a ride down to Dillinger Creek?" He said (gruffly), "That's down across from where I live. You must know where I live." I said, "I don't know where you live. Do you want a ride or not? Get on the boat or don't." "My dog can really get on?" I said, "Yeah." So I finally got him on there, and all of sudden, these guys start asking questions, "What's he doing out there? Why's he there?" And he suddenly becomes sort of the expert, and he starts talking to these people. They started getting together so they can both ask questions. He's bringing my people together for me. We get down there, we drop him off, and he said (gruffly), "Drop me off here, I don't want you to know where I live." So I dropped him off, then I pulled across the river and camped. He said (gruffly), "Now don't you guys watch me." "Don't worry." So that's the last I saw of him. I thought he was out of the picture. So the next year I go up there, and one of the boaters up there -almost everybody ran the power boats, the jet boats -and Joe Scobel [phonetic spelling] says, "Hey, you know Dan Carleson?" I said, "Dan Carleson?" He said, "Yeah, he's a hermit, lives down there by Dillinger Creek." "Oh yeah, I know a guy. Yeah, Dan! Yeah, okay, I know who you're talking about." He says, "We haven't been able to get our boats down there so far this year. We can't get past those first set of rapids and get back upstream." I said, "Well, so what?" He said, "Well, the guy hasn't come in for his spring supplies yet, and we're worried." I said, "So?" He said, "Well you get down and you find him." "I don't know where he lives." He said, "I'll draw you a map." (chuckles) So I go tooling on down. He said, "By the way, if you find him dead, you gotta bury him." I said, "Fine," I'm a nice guy. And so I get down there, and I pull off and I leave my people. I said, "Stay here, fish, whatever you're going to do. Play in the water. I've got to make a little trip." And I walk up, follow this trail way up in the woods, and I go up, there's this guy sitting there, and I say, "Hey, Dan!" He whips around with his gun barrel, (gruffly) "What are you doin' here?" I said, "You're Dan Carleson, aren't you?" He said, "Yeah, what are you doin' here." I said, "I came to see if you were alive." "Why?" I said, "The guys up in Salmon are worried about you." "Why are they worried?" I said, "You didn't go out for spring supplies. They're worried. Do you have enough food?" "Yeah." I said, "Besides that, if you're dead, I've gotta bury you. So tell me you're alive so I can get out of here." (gruffly) "I'm alive. I don't care about those guys, they don't need to know anything, don't tell 'em." (laughter) I said, "Ah, they're worried about you." "Ah, don't need to worry about me." I said, "You got enough then?" He said, "Well, I'm out of tobacco. You have any tobacco?" I said, "I don't have any tobacco. You want me to bring you some next trip?" "Nah, I couldn't afford it." I said, "Well, you couldn't afford the tobacco?" "Nah, you guys charge too much for freight." I said, "We don't charge anything." He said, "Where you makin' your money?" I said, "I got a whole bunch of California people down there, they pay for me to come down the river. You want some tobacco, tell me, I'll bring it." "Well, that's all I need. How much you want me to give you?" I said, "When you get the tobacco, you pay for it." "Well, you ain't gonna charge me no freight?" I said, "No, I ain't gonna charge you any freight. I'll bring you the receipt from the store." "Well, alright, but don't tell them guys I'm alive." So down the river I go. I get back and Jack has changed the schedule and I've gotta stay in for a week, and so Fenstermaker's gonna go down. So I tell Fenstermaker how to find the guy's place, and give him the big can of Prince Albert and the little receipt attached to it. So Fenstermaker goes down, parks his people down at the bottom of the hill and he walks up. Carleson looks at him and says, "What are you doin' here?" "Paul couldn't make it, here's your tobacco." "You know where I live now." Art said, "Nah, I forgot already. You owe me $2.81." "Two eighty-one?!" "That's what the tobacco costs." "That's all tobacco costs. What about the freight bill?" "No freight." "You're as dumb as the other guy. You can't make a livin' on this river not chargin' for freight." "I got a whole freight full of California guys down there." "You too, huh?" "Yeah, we're makin' money off of California." "Well, you tell that Paul fellah that I want to talk to him." Art said, "Fine," goes on downriver. I come in the next week, "Hey," I said, "you needed tobacco, Art's trustworthy, he won't tell anybody, he didn't bring anybody up with him." He said, "Aw, two of you don't charge freight?" I said, "No." "Well, hell," he says, "the bears are eatin' the apples up here." I said, "The bears are eatin' the apples, so what?" He says, "Got a couple boxes of apples out here. Your people eat apples?" I said, "Probably." "You get these damned apples out of here, the bears are eatin' 'em." So I carried two boxes of apples down to the boat. He says, "Tell that Art guy to stop next time." So Art stops and he says, "Damn bears are gettin' in the cherries. Got two boxes of cherries." (all chuckle) So he stopped next time, we kept stoppin' and walkin' up there, leave our people down and walk up. He said, "Them people down there ever do any work?" I said, "Well, they don't have to." He said, "They willin' to do any work?" I said, "Yeah, why?" He says, "I didn't pick you any fruit this time." I said, "That's okay." "No, no, I want to get rid of the fruit. Get them folks up here." I said, "But Dan, you don't want people to know where you live." "Aw hell, you guys know where I live, I may as well let them know." And so I start hauling the people up there, and here's this guy, he starts talking to the people about this and that and everything, and the trees. See, somebody had gone in there to homestead and left this great orchard with apricots and apples and cherries and everything else. So all summer long, we stopped there, people would go up and pick fruit, we had fresh fruit for the whole trip, and go on out. 
Next year I'm comin' on down the river and one of the outfitters up there by the name of Smith, he had a base camp about fifteen miles downriver from the put-in, but way above Dillinger Creek. I'm going down, and we were not on the best of terms with the Idaho guides -we mentioned earlier about being in jail and stuff. The Smith boys were some of the ones who were after us for jail, and I'm passing Smith's place down there, and all of a sudden this guy is waving, a friendly smile, sreamin' at me, "Hey, Paul, come over!" He was in a little cook shack up there. So I think, "Well, this is an unusual greeting from the Smith camp," so I start pulling over, and here comes Dan Carleson out. I said, "Dan, what are you doing up here?" He said, "I'm cookin'!" I said, "You're cookin'?!" He said, "Yeah, I'm cookin' for Smith now." I said, "What about your place down below?" He said, "Oh, hell, you ruined me." I said, "I ruined you?!" He said, "Yeah, you brought all them damned people in all summer long, then fall came along, I relaxed, and finally glad to get away from all them people, and then come December and I got lonely, and January got lonelier. I remember old Smith had been after me to cook, and so I hiked up to Smith's camp and said, 'Hey, you still want me to cook?' He said, 'Yeah.' So now I see people every day. You ruined me as a hermit." (laughter) 
And there was another gal down there, Frances Zonmiller [phonetic spelling] who'd come. She'd been a telephone operator in New Jersey, and she came out West, couldn't find any man Back East that she liked. She walked in the bar in Riggins and said, "Okay, I'm out here to marry a guy. If there's a guy man enough to marry me, stand up." Old Zonmiller stood up and said, "Well, woman, I got a place upriver. Ain't very homey, but if you want to marry me, I'll take you up there." She married him and outlasted him and outlasted another husband. I remember I took a group of Girl Scouts from Newport Beach down there and took them out for a hike and we ran into Frances and here's this "gal of the woods," talking to all these girls. She didn't talk to very many people, she didn't like us guides [or guys?], we were a pain. But all of a sudden she saw these girls, she decided she wanted to talk to girls. She started talkin' and talkin' and talkin' and talkin', and tellin' tales. These kids were just all in awe. And it's gettin' dark. So finally I said, "I gotta get these girls back to camp." We come walkin' back into camp and the one leader is just irate, accusing me of all sorts of things. "Out there walking with those fourteen girls. I don't know what you did...." Don't worry, if I was with fourteen girls, I couldn't have done that much. And we brought them back, there was all these neat experiences up there, all these hermits up there, and other people that lived on the river and all sorts of stuff. 
Steiger: Are those guys still up there? 
Thevenin: No, the Forest Service up there tried to run them all out. Like I said, I ruined Carleson. Frances Zonmiller I think is still on hers. Hers was patented land. And Buckskin Bill is dead. And there was another guy by the name of Frank Lance [phonetic spelling] who lived down there, he's dead. His favorite activity at ninety was to hike out twice a year for supplies, get his supplies loaded, go in the bar and get drunk, get in a fight. Broke his jaw at ninety. Some guy got a blow through and broke his jaw at ninety years old. All these people would stop and visit down there on that river. So there were other rivers besides the Grand Canyon. 
Steiger: Yeah, well, it sounds like you knew a bunch of 'em. So you got all through Utah and all through California. 
Thevenin: Up in Idaho, and then down in Mexico, Guatemala. Then we had not the river running operation, but a diving-snorkeling-island operation down off the coast of Belize. 
Steiger: That was Henry? 
Thevenin: That was Henry. That was fun. Yeah, people would go down there. It gets bad when you say, "Okay, folks, you gotta eat this lobster until it's all gone." And we had lobster fritters for breakfast, we had lobster sandwiches for lunch, we had lobster...." These guys were going out and bringing in lobster by the ton. We said, "Look, if you bring it in, you gotta eat it." So we were feeding them lobster three meals a day. And that's tough. 
Steiger: Wow, sounds like it's been a pretty good ride. When you teach, what subject do you teach? 
Thevenin: A little bit of river running, and I throw in some academics. (laughter) No, I try to keep the river running down to a minimum, but I do show them, the day before Christmas vacation, the day before Easter vacation, I show them one of those movies you were talking about. We do sneak river running in occasionally. The last part of my career was all math, and I've taught everything -cooking, English, social studies. Taught journalism. 
Steiger: And what years? Like high school kids? 
Thevenin: Yeah, mostly high school. I taught junior high and high school. I had an elementary credential, but I never did actually teach elementary. They looked at all the education I had and said, "Gee, we don't know what to give you," so they gave me a general credential, which licensed me to teach anything. 
Steiger: They don't make too many teachers like you. I wish I'd had somebody like that. 
Thevenin: Well, most of my kids indicated they found out having me for a teacher was a unique experience. Most of my administrators said dealing with me was a unique experience too. My one principal came in to me -brand new principal.... I always like to tell the kids ahead of time what they're gonna face. "And if you don't like what I'm gonna do in class, you can go run to your counselor, you cry a little bit, and you can get out." And so I was telling him some of the things I had done in the past to maintain discipline, and this new principal came over and said, "Mr. Thevenin, I received this phone call from a parent who's worried about her child being in there in your class. I'm sure there was some misunderstanding. She said something about her daughter came home saying that you'd thrown a kid through the door once?" I said, "No, sir, there was no misunderstanding." He said, "What?!" I said, "There was no misunderstanding. I'm sorry about it, I only meant to throw the kid up against the door. The hinges were weak or something, and the door went down. He and the door went into the next room." "I'm not sure I want to follow this up." (laughter) And he left. 
Steiger: And so that was the end of that. 
Thevenin: No, there were some other incidents that he worried about frequently. Some mother got intimidated one time and yanked her kid out of school and took her over for a while to a school in the neighboring town because I was such a tyrant. And the daughter finally convinced her mother she was sick and tired of going to that school in the other town and wanted back. So the mother said, "Well, alright," and the first thing she did was run to the counselor and say, "I want back in Thevenin's math class." Because I was outrageous. 
Steiger: Are you still active in the Church? 
Thevenin: Mormon Church? Yeah, most of the time. I'm on vacation now. 
Steiger: How do you reconcile that with all that geology stuff in the Canyon? 
Thevenin: What geology stuff? 
Steiger: You know, how old the rocks are and all that kind of stuff? 
Thevenin: You mean, on Sunday I should close my eyes and pretend the rocks don't exist, and on Monday through Saturday pretend God doesn't exist? 
Steiger: I'm just fishing for some kind of cosmic data. (chuckles) 
Thevenin: Some cosmic data. Well, let's put it this way: My degree was in science, engineering degree, and I've read the Bible very thoroughly, more than once. Now, there are a couple of things the average person hasn't done. The average Christian hasn't read the Bible, and the average scientist gets focused-in on only one phase of what he's studying. Now the Bible does not say how God made the earth. It says in the first day he did this, the second day he did that. So people take it literally. But what is a day? Like we're talking about in this "day" of river running. Are we talking about Saturday, August whatever it is. Fifth? Is that what today is? But is today's era of river running only today? Or is it the last twenty years? So what is today? Now, also, was the Bible written in English? And when was Genesis written? Who wrote Genesis? Do you know? 
Steiger: I have no idea. 
Thevenin: Moses. When did Moses come along? According to biblical history, about three thousand years after Genesis started. The Lord said, "Hey, Moses, nobody's gotten around to writing this stuff down, would you take a few notes here and start writing?" And so he wrote in one of the Aramaic languages, that got translated to something else, which got translated to something else, and I don't know whether you've done much with translation, but that's one of my assignments in the Church now, I'm with the Southeast Asian people, and I become more and more aware of the awkwardness of going from one language to another, and trying to make it make sense. 
But anyway, so as far as I'm concerned, the Bible doesn't say how God did it. God said "Let's do it." Now to me, if God is as smart as he his, he probably had a blueprint. In fact, if you read the Bible, you'll find Genesis 1 and Genesis 2 sort of tell the same story. But if you read between the lines, Genesis 1 is saying, "Let us go down and do," and Genesis 2 is saying, "And they did." So to me, Genesis 1 is the blueprint of what they planned to do, and the repetition in Genesis 2 is not a repetition, Genesis 2 is saying, "And then we went down and did it." Now also, you figure Genesis covers about a good three thousand years of history, and it covers it in (spurt!) that many pages. So the Bible is not a history of how the world was created, it's the history of who created the world. Now, are those rocks a billion years old? Welllll I don't know. When I went to school, they weren't a billion years old, they were only a few million years old. And then when I went to college, they were a few million years older. And now they're a few billion years. And the rocks haven't changed -the scale has changed. Now, how old are the rocks? I don't know, I haven't the vaguest idea, but I'm sure that the one that is now listed as 1.5 billion came into existence before the one that is 1 billion, which came into existence before the one that is 900 million. So I think the order is probably right. The dates, I don't know. There are some people that say a day with the Lord is like a thousand years. They unfortunately leave out the word "like." And they say a day with the Lord is a thousand years. So that means the world is.... And so in the six thousandth year, the Millennium will come, and so they're all looking for the Millennium and they climb up on a mountain and say, "Whoops, what happened? The Lord didn't come. He lied." Now the Lord didn't say he was going to come. He didn't say it was that date, somebody else said it was that date. 
So no, I don't have any trouble, because if I hear five geologists, I'm going to hear five different inter[pretations], unless they all schooled under the same guy. But you've got five geologists from different schools, you're going to get a different story on the Canyon, of how it happened. Which one happened? Maybe a combination of all five, maybe something totally different happened. I don't know, but it makes a good logical sequence. Darwin is one of my heroes. Darwin didn't say man came from monkey -somebody else said that from Darwin. Darwin said let's categorize all these things -single-celled animals, two-celled animals, birds, mammals, and all that stuff. He said, "Let's put 'em in categories." I think Darwin did a fantastic job. But Darwin also at the end before he died said, "My work should not be canonized. It is subject to review like any other scientific thing." And even more so, what the writers wrote about Darwin needs to be looked at with a jaundiced eye. So no. However, does that mean I don't believe in evolution? Nah. Because if you are an intelligent man, and you're building something, what would you build first? The simplest thing, and then go on to the more complex? Or are you going to start with the most complex and build down? Which way would you go? 
Steiger: I suppose I would start with the simple. 
Thevenin: Like a one-celled creature, and then put two cells together, put ten cells together. So the theory of evolution doesn't bother me, because if I were creating the earth, I'd start with the simple stuff, figure out how to make it work, and then put it all together. I don't believe, like many Christians do, in the abracadabra theory of religion, that God suddenly went out and said, (great exclamation of effort). I don't think he did that. The Bible doesn't say he did that. He said, "And God said, 'let there be man.'" But then what happens on a river trip? The boss comes to you and says, "And let there be a trip that leaves on August 12." Is that all that happens? No. You gotta pack the food, somebody's gotta book the customers before that. But all the boss says is, "There will be a trip August 12." Right? The Lord said, "Let there be...." And maybe somebody else got stuck with the work. 
So no, I have no trouble with the two of them. I don't believe as many Christians believe -I don't believe as many scientists believe. There's even doubt about a lot of your ion testing methods, you know, carbon 14. What's the whole philosophy behind carbon 14 testing? 
Steiger: Does it have to do with the half-life? 
Thevenin: Half-life of carbon 14. What is carbon 14? It's a radio-active carbon, right? 
Steiger: Okay. (laughter) 
Thevenin: Carbon 14 deteriorates to what? 
Quartaroli: Carbon 12 and something else. 
Thevenin: Carbon 12. Why does it deteriorate? Because it's unstable, right? And it has a predictable instability life, right? That's how you can come up with these half-lives and all that jazz. Now that's based upon the fact that the carbon 14 that we find floating around in the universe today has always been at that level. Now let's assume that there had been no volcanic reactions, no cataclysmic things, nothing. Let's assume that at one time there was no carbon 14. Then everything would have been carbon 12, right? Now if you pick up one of those things that has no carbon 14 in it, what do you assume now? That it's many billions of years old. 
Quartaroli: It's completely decayed down. 
Thevenin: Right. But possibly, there was no carbon 14 in. Now possibly, on the other hand, if there was a time where there was no carbon 14, the build-up of carbon 14 occurred as you had these gaseous explosions in outer space and your eruptions and things like this, and you know, things came together and you had your atomic collisions, and so carbon 14 was not always in the atmosphere as it is today. It built up. Then somewhere along the line, you got this line that if you assume it's the same, you have no carbon 14, you say it goes in a straight line right down to here. But if it's some other period of time, there wasn't that much carbon 14 in the air, then it didn't take that long to decay, so it's really that much younger. So even the carbon 14 thing is under scrutiny, that maybe somewhere along the line, instead of it being a straight line this way, it's a sort of a curve this way, as the build-up of carbon 14 came. So it may be a whole lot younger than we think. How much younger? Beats the heck out of me! Does the Bible tell us how old the world is? No, but there are Christians that'll tell you how old it is. But I don't know where they get it from. There are Mormons that'll tell you, "Yup, Kolob." You've heard of Kolob? You never heard of Kolob Canyon in Utah? Yeah. But Kolob is the star out there that's close to where Heaven is, where God is. Okay, fine, where is it? Mormons are ones who have a tendency to say this thousand year thing. Maybe it is, I don't know. 
Steiger: Well, it'll be interesting to see. 
Thevenin: Either that, or none of us will see it, maybe none of it exists. Maybe we'll all return to dust, and we won't see anything. 
Steiger: Well, if some of these guys are right... I think I'm going to Hell! (laughs) 
Thevenin: No, actually, in Mormon philosophy, Steiger, you cannot go to Hell. You're excluded, you're not allowed. Neither is Quartaroli. You see, Mormons have reserved Hell for themselves -only Mormons can go to Hell. 
Steiger: If you've been one and.... 
Thevenin: If you know the whole truth and then turn your back on it, then you can go to Hell. But since you haven't even accepted part of the truth, you can't turn your back on the whole truth. So I'm sorry, you're not allowed to go to Hell. No matter how hard you try, you can't go. 
Quartaroli: Is that the same for going to Heaven also? 
Thevenin: Oh yeah, the top Heaven. See, we don't believe in there's just either Heaven or Hell -there's these gradations in between. And there will be.... (whistles) To me, it doesn't make sense that the guy lives this much better, he suddenly goes to Heaven and gets everything, and this guy who's just maybe donated twenty-five cents less to Goodwill, and he goes to Hell. Nah. There's got to be sort of little steps, you know, little rewards, "A," "B," "C," "D," "F." 
Steiger: Well, we'll see. 
Thevenin: And this is all on tape, huh? You gonna give 'em Mormonism? 
Steiger: No, I'm thinking about our transcriptionist, she's gonna kill me! (laughter) But it's interesting to me. Okay, what are we forgetting for this interview? We're forgetting something. 
Thevenin: Now, I may go to Hell, so we'd better get that on tape. (laughter) 
Steiger: Okay, we got that one. We haven't heard any lightening bolts. So we're okay for today. 
Thevenin: No, my God is more a God of natural consequences. 
Steiger: Well, there's something out there, whatever you want to call it. I don't have a word for it. 
Thevenin: We'll let you use the word "God," we won't give you too bad a time. 
Let's see, what have we left out? We've got my beginning. Oh, have we covered my end? We have not covered my demise, have we? Okay, my final resting place is on my mantleplace at home already. My son has been actively engaged in pottery for the last number of years, which is one of his better grades in school, so he said, "Dad, what do you really want?" And I've been, in my church work, working with a whole lot of people that have been dying, and realizing that the morticians and the funeral parlors and the cemeteries are making a great deal of money out of all this. So I said, "Son, make me a little vase to put my body in, my last remains." So my thing is now sitting there on my mantlepiece. It's beautiful: on one side it has a nice picture of the Canyon, a scene; and on the other side there's a little gold placque that says, "Paul Thomas Thevenin" and gives the date of my birth and leaves a little place over there. So my urn is sitting there waiting for me. Now we have talked about, possibly, when that day comes, we'll seal the top of it, and we'll get one of these inner tubes from one of these wheelbarrow tires, and we'll wrap it around the urn, and we'll put a rope on it and drag it behind somebody's boat and see which rapid finally gets it. 
Quartaroli: Well, do you think it'll be Lava, or do you think it'll go before that? 
Steiger: Oh, undoubtedly. 
Thevenin: I think all the rest of the rapids will bow to Lava and say, "That's Lava's, we will leave it alone," and the boat will have a perfect run through every rapid, and when it gets to Lava, that's where it will happen. And my remains will be smashed to pieces and spread to the bottom of Lava, providing the Park Service doesn't forbid it. 
Steiger: Well, there's probably a way around that too. 
Thevenin: You mean, we just won't tell them? (laughter) But if any Park Service person reads this, let me give you a warning, whether there is a Heaven or Hell, and you stop my ashes from meeting up with Lava, I will come back. 
So now we've covered my beginning and we've covered my end. We just don't know when. However, I did think on that rowing trip, the ideal thing would be, as I went through Lava to make this absolutely perfect run, and have the passengers all turn to me to tell me how wonderful it was, and find me there dead at my oars. But it didn't happen. (laughter) 
Steiger: That'd be a good way to go. Well, señor, can you think of something we're forgetting? 
Quartaroli: No. 
Thevenin: You want any other names? Let's see, in the early days there was Sid Hudak.... 
Steiger: You gotta spell 'em. [Darned right! (Tr.)] 
Thevenin: S-I-D H-U-D-A-K, who started out as a very nice sweet kid on a youth trip, came up, became a river guide, and the last time I saw him was when I made my final trip down the Salmon River, and this scroungey old bum came running across over at me and says, "Paul! I haven't seen you in ages!" And his beard was down to his waist, and that was Sid Hudak. He'd come from a nice, good, clean, sweet family in Southern California, and was now a hermit up on the Salmon River. 
Steiger: Ruined him! 
Thevenin: Then there was Craig and Rick Preston, the Preston boys, who Craig learned from Bryce McKay -remember I think we talked about Bryce McKay losing his leg. Craig, on the night of graduation, got hit by a car and broke his leg, and he said, "There goes my season for the summer." He sat around the house for about a week and told his mother he was going nuts, and he just wanted to go out there and play around the warehouse. So after a little while he got tired of that, so without telling his mother, we got one of the big plastic garbage bags and tied it around his cast and tied it around his leg and shipped him down the river and had the passengers.... He'd say, "Okay, now we're in for the trip. If you guys will help me into the boat, we'll be on our way." And with that big cast, they had to help him into the boat and out of the boat. 
Steiger: But he rowed! 
Thevenin: But he rowed. 
Steiger: Oh man! 
Thevenin: With a cast on his leg and a big plastic bag around the cast to keep it dry. 
Steiger: We need to spell [his name]. 
Thevenin: Craig, C-R-A-I-G. 
Steiger: I think we got that one, but Bryce McKay. How's McKay spelled? 
Thevenin: Oh, like you'd spell McKay, M-C-K-A-Y. Part of the family pronounces it "Mackey," the other pronounces it "Makay." 
Quartaroli: Is Bryce related to Dave? 
[END AUDIO TAPE 3, SIDE B, BEGIN AUDIO TAPE 4, SIDE A] 
Steiger: Okay, this is Cassette #4. This is the River Runners Oral History Project. This is a continuation of an interview done with Paul Thevenin. Lew Steiger is the interviewer, we're doing it at the house of Richard Quartaroli. This is the last little piece of this interview. 
Thevenin: All the Hatches are related. Senator Hatch is related to.... But they don't even know where the tie-in is, last I heard. 
Let's see, who else haven't we talked about? Let's see.... But anyway, Rick Preston went to jail for Jack, and spent time in jail. Pete Gibbs, who when we were rowing down the river on the Yampa -did we talk about that one? And Warm Springs? 
Quartaroli: You talked about Warm Springs, how you flipped a boat there. 
Thevenin: Before it ever became.... Then we were down there in the flood stage, and Dennis Massey was in the Hatch boat, and I went around one side of Dennis and Pete Gibbs. We had two families that came on that trip, and we had a big boat, twenty-eight-footer with me in it, and Pete Gibbs in one of the ten-mans, and the women had gone to the beauty parlor the day before the trip to get ready for the trip so they'd be good for the pictures, and it rained, and that was the year that the thing flooded and Warm Springs became a real rapid. The women got out there and said, "Oh, nobody's going to ride in that little boat." I said, "Well, gee, we don't have enough room, we've got to have somebody [ride in that little boat]." So the two women rode in the little boat, and they couldn't stand it, so the next day they said, "No, everybody rides in the big boat." Pete Gibbs was a young, good-looking guy. He was part of Art Gallenson's crowd, and two teenage girls wanted to ride with Pete so badly, and I said, "Folks, there is absolutely nothing in this next ten-mile stretch. There's nothing. A boat could not go over anywhere around here. If the girls want to ride [with Pete] they'll be perfectly safe and we'll pick them up before we get to the first rapid." And little was I to know, that as I went around the front end of Massey's boat, and Pete and the girls went around the back end of Massey's boat, there was one little pile of water running over one little rock, and Pete flipped in it, and the women in my boat are having heart attacks. Massey takes his knees off his oars and goes to the back of his boat and pulls the girls on board. And the women said, "Oh, our babies are safe!" And I thought to myself, "Ma'am, if you knew Dennis Massey, you'd prefer to have your daughters in the water." But anyway, Massey was one of the early-day boatmen for Hatch. 
Let's see, did we talk about Pete Sunwald [phonetic spelling], who was one of my boatmen in the early days when he was a medical student? I came here to Kanab as Henry's manager and lo and behold the doctor in Kanab was Pete Sunwald. And you know something? The people in Kanab had never heard him talk about being a boatman! (chuckles) 
Steiger: Didn't let 'em know about that. 
Thevenin: You heard what happened when Western first moved into Fredonia, and one bishop in church got up and made the speech that "Brothers and Sisters, there's a new element moving into our society...." [He] went on and on about the evils _______. And he said, "It is reputed that they use women more often than most people use soap." And the guys down there said after church got out there was a constant stream of cars full of women just circling around the warehouse. (laughter) 
Steiger: Oh my God! 
Thevenin: So when Pete came down here to become a doctor and the attitude towards boatmen was that, he never let a soul down here know that he'd been a boatman. (chuckles) And I blew his cover. I said, "Well, you know Pete was a boatman of mine." "Doctor Sunwald was a boatman?!" So, you know, there was a time in life when it was not well to mention that. 
Let's see, who else? There were a bunch of other people in those early days that were part-timers. I remember Roger Upwald. I think he ran with Georgie and stuff, and he'd done a lot of running, but somehow I always ended up being senior boatman. When Warm Springs first came in, and Jack took a look at it and said, "Oh, gee, we're gonna have to take all the boats around." And Jack missed the landing at the other end and left Upwald and me to go back. Upwald was on a trip with Jack, and I was on a trip with Gibbs, and we didn't really trust Gibbs that much, he was fairly new. So with Jack going around the corner, missing the landing, couldn't get back up, Upwald and I are going back up, take the boats through, walk back up, take the boats through. And Upwald was a philosopher, and he said, "You know, Paul, the only problem is, these guys get slightly sideways. You keep that nose down, keep into the waves, every one of 'em straight, nose on, these boats cannot go over." 
Steiger: Ut-oh. 
Thevenin: And so we're putting in for the last two boats, and I'm about ready to push off, and Pete's about ready to push off, and "I think I'll wait up." Pete said, "Go ahead, you get out there." I said, "Well, alright." So I had this strange feeling that something was wrong. So I pulled out in the rapids and I go on through and I get down to the other end and I start to pull in, and people are starting to grab -I said, "No, leave my boat alone. Where's Sunwald?" "He's just putting in now." I said, "Leave my boat right here in the eddy, don't tie it up." They said, "Why?" And Upwald had more experience on the boats than I had, you know, and Upwald had been doing this whole philosophy bit on the way up there. And all of a sudden somebody screamed, "He's over!" And I looked, and there's Sunwald upside down, and people swimming like mad, and so I just start rowing like mad out there. And just as I get to the boat, Pete lets go of his boat, throws his arm up over my boat, the first words out of his mouth, he says, "They will too go end over end." (laughter) 
Steiger: This is Sunwald or Upwald? 
Thevenin: Upwald, Roger Upwald. I switched names -Roger Upwald. So one of the guys who was experienced and philosophized and we found out that sometimes philosophy and Mother Nature don't always go together. 
Steiger: I tell ya', it's uncanny how many times if you say something like that.... 
Quartaroli: It leads you right into it. 
Thevenin: But those were his first words -not "thank you, gee that was rough" -it was "they will too go end over end." 
Steiger: That's U-P-W-A-L-D. 
Thevenin: U-P-W-A-L-D, I think. So there were a bunch of guys who were part-timers who'd come out for a trip now and then and stuff like that. So there are a lot of names we're probably leaving out, somebody will be offended and all that stuff. 
Steiger: Oh, no. 
Thevenin: That's the way it goes. 
Steiger: The way these things go.... 
Thevenin: Some of them like Pete Sunwald will probably wish I had left his name out! 
Steiger: Well, you'd have to dig for it, because in writing something up, we're only going to get ten percent for a finished piece. That's the way that works. The rest of it lays there in the tape on the shelf, and maybe somebody someday comes and looks at the whole thing. But as far as what you have room to publish, it's kind of disgusting how much you have to walk away from. 
Thevenin: (mimicking old curmudgeon's voice) Well, then, children, I guess that's all for now, it's time for my nap. 
Steiger: Okay, we're winding her down. 
[END OF INTERVIEW]