Brave the Wild River Quotes

“Elzada Clover and Lois Jotter valued their curiosity about the world more than their presumed place within it. They go ahead and, like stars reflected on the river, show the way.”
― Melissa L. Sevigny, Brave the Wild River: The Untold Story of Two Women Who Mapped the Botany of the Grand Canyon

“But Holmstrom’s words stand out boldly from the rest, as if perhaps someone traced them afresh in the intervening years. They read: “To the girl who proved me badly mistaken.”
― Melissa L. Sevigny, Brave the Wild River: The Untold Story of Two Women Who Mapped the Botany of the Grand Canyon

“Our tools, Leopold proclaimed, “suffice to crack the atom, to command the tides. But they do not suffice for the oldest task in human history: to live on a piece of land without spoiling it.”
― Melissa L. Sevigny, Brave the Wild River: The Untold Story of Two Women Who Mapped the Botany of the Grand Canyon

“Wright may have been the first person within the Park Service to clearly articulate the idea that “unimpaired” meant keeping healthy, functioning ecosystems intact.”
― Melissa L. Sevigny, Brave the Wild River: The Untold Story of Two Women Who Mapped the Botany of the Grand Canyon

“What would have happened, I wondered, if Clover and Jotter never ran the river—if they had listened to the critics and doomsayers, or to their own doubts? They brought knowledge, energy, and passion to their botanical work, but also a new perspective. Before them, men had gone down the Colorado to sketch dams, plot railroads, dig gold, and daydream little Swiss chalets stuck up on the cliffs. They saw the river for what it could be, harnessed for human use. Clover and Jotter saw it as it was, a living system made up of flower, leaf, and thorn, lovely in its fierceness, worthy of study for its own sake. They knew every saltbush twig and stickery cactus was, in its own way, as much a marvel as Boulder Dam—shaped to survive against all the odds.

In the United States, half of all bachelor’s degrees in science, engineering, and mathematics go to women, yet these women go on to earn only 74 percent of a man’s salary in those fields. A recent study found that it will be another two decades before women and men publish papers at equal rates in the field of botany, a field traditionally welcoming to women. It may take four decades for chemistry, and three centuries for physics. Stereotypes linger of scientists as white-coated, wild-haired men, and they limit the ways in which young people envision their futures. In a famous, oft-replicated study, 70 percent of six-year-old girls, asked to draw a picture of a scientist, draw a woman, but only 25 percent do so at the age of sixteen.”
― Melissa L. Sevigny, Brave the Wild River: The Untold Story of Two Women Who Mapped the Botany of the Grand Canyon

“All the while, she taught her two children to love science and the outdoors, and quietly championed women’s equality. She was deeply concerned about people getting a good education in biology and botany. “I think my mother was way ahead of her time,” her son Victor remembered. “The river trip was just an example of that.”
― Melissa L. Sevigny, Brave the Wild River: The Untold Story of Two Women Who Mapped the Botany of the Grand Canyon

“I never truly understood those most trite words ‘My better half’ before,” she wrote to a friend.”
― Melissa L. Sevigny, Brave the Wild River: The Untold Story of Two Women Who Mapped the Botany of the Grand Canyon

“The Great Depression brought a spike in discrimination against women in the workforce, when fully half of U.S. states had laws against hiring married women.”
― Melissa L. Sevigny, Brave the Wild River: The Untold Story of Two Women Who Mapped the Botany of the Grand Canyon

“What does “wild” mean, anyway? Not untouched by human presence, for even the plants—especially the plants—show how the canyonland’s first inhabitants tended agave and prickly pear, coaxing them into new shapes. A wild place isn’t one unchanged by humans. It’s a place that changes us.”
― Melissa L. Sevigny, Brave the Wild River: The Untold Story of Two Women Who Mapped the Botany of the Grand Canyon

“Funny, so many people are waiting for a reward in heaven. I am very doubtful about heaven so like you I get my heaven as I go along." - Elzada Clover”
― Melissa L. Sevigny, Brave the Wild River: The Untold Story of Two Women Who Mapped the Botany of the Grand Canyon, Library Edition

“But cacti know the real trick. Sometime in the last 35 million years, they rolled up their primordial leaves into spines, the most daring fashion accessory of the season. Multipurpose, too: a useful defense against nibblers, and a kind of sunshade and air-conditioning system in one. In the absence of leaves, photosynthesis moved to the green, leathery skin. Here another innovation took place: cacti learned to keep their pores (known as stomata) closed during the day, to prevent moisture from siphoning away into the unforgiving sky. They open their pores only during the cool hours of the night, squirreling away pockets of carbon dioxide, and complete the task of making sugar during the day. They also store water under their waxy skins and quickly grow networks of tiny roots after rain to siphon up moisture. One good storm can sustain a cactus through several years of drought. For all this, cacti can be extravagant too, coming out in showy blossoms in shades of cerise, gold, and crimson as gaudy as any high school prom dress.

Clover and Jotter couldn’t have known all this (the details of cactus photosynthesis wouldn’t be worked out for decades). But in cataloging plants that thrived in extremes, they were adding to the general picture of evolution and adaptation, tracing the subtle threads of a tapestry that had been in the making for 3.5 billion years.”
― Melissa L. Sevigny, Brave the Wild River: The Untold Story of Two Women Who Mapped the Botany of the Grand Canyon

“We go on,” wrote Clover, “thru restless water between sheer walls of black to reddish basalt streaked with white marble.” It wasn’t truly marble, but thick ropes of Zoroaster Granite interlaced with dark schist formed 1.75 billion years ago when life on Earth had not progressed beyond a single cell. The ribbons of pale pinkish stone were once living magma in the veins of the earth, now hardened, folded, and warped by tectonic convulsions, brought into the sunlight by the thin knife of the Colorado River. These rocks were the roots of mountains that had long since eroded away.”
― Melissa L. Sevigny, Brave the Wild River: The Untold Story of Two Women Who Mapped the Botany of the Grand Canyon

“They passed the Confluence sometime that afternoon, where the Little Colorado River emerged from its own canyon on the left and bent around its delta to join the Colorado. The waves turned choppy and coffee-brown where the two rivers met. Tumbled stones, rounded by water, lay on the delta: azure and mauve, taupe and terracotta, some white and cracked like eggs ready to open, others like blunt black knives. The Confluence is a sacred place to the region’s tribes. Zuni send spiritual offerings down the Little Colorado to the Grand Canyon, the home of their ancestors. Hopis say nearby is the place of emergence, where all humankind climbed into this world, the Fourth World, through the hollow stem of a reed, and spread over the Earth, leaving footprints and broken pottery to mark their journeys. Hopi youth make a sacred pilgrimage to the Confluence to gather the salt that seeps out of the sandstone, pressed from an ancient sea and crystallized into gleaming stalagmites. They bring the salt back to the mesas east of the Grand Canyon, where, they say, their people settled at the center of the earth.”
― Melissa L. Sevigny, Brave the Wild River: The Untold Story of Two Women Who Mapped the Botany of the Grand Canyon

“Muav Limestone rose out of the river, gray and striated: a slip of time sending them back to the Cambrian Period, more than 500 million years before, when multicellular life began to flourish and struggle out of the fecund sea onto a barren shore. Bright Angel Shale appeared beneath it, crumbling horizontal layers of purple and green. It was now nearly impossible to climb from the river to the rim, but a crack in the sheer Redwall wedged with broken timbers showed where Ancestral Puebloans, long ago, built a precarious road. The crew floated below the open mouths of cliff dwellings and sifted through pebbles for arrowheads and sherds. Their fingers startled up tiny toads. Deer watched their passing from dark thickets of mesquite, ghosting away through the tight weave of spiny branches. Below the boats, the dark water concealed its secrets. Hard to believe, but there were fish in that river: fish with leathery skins and torpedo-shaped bodies evolved to withstand endless sandblasting, and monstrous minnows that grew to the length of a man and weighed one hundred pounds.”
― Melissa L. Sevigny, Brave the Wild River: The Untold Story of Two Women Who Mapped the Botany of the Grand Canyon

“Vasey’s Paradise was special. Above them, freshwater springs leapt out of the limestone and unraveled long, twisting ribbons. At a glance they could see the dominant species: Western redbud, scarlet monkeyflower, and “gobs” of poison ivy. Clear rivulets of water chattered and burbled from beneath this verdant tangle, licked with streamers of algae and moss and more beautifully arranged than any ornamental garden. Powell had looked at this spot with a geologist’s eyes, describing the sun-struck fountains as “a million brilliant gems,” but he named it after a botanist, George Vasey. Vasey never boated the Grand Canyon, nor saw the place that bore his name. Clover and Jotter were the first botanists to make a catalog of the plants there for Western science.”
― Melissa L. Sevigny, Brave the Wild River: The Untold Story of Two Women Who Mapped the Botany of the Grand Canyon

“She stood spellbound by the moonlight drifting down the cliffs, a play of silver light and deep shadow. Bell woke, too, and came to join her at the river’s edge. They stood silent beneath the cold glow of the stars, watching the nearest rapid curl and froth, playful as an otter. Finally Clover crawled back into her bedroll, feeling her air mattress deflate by slow inches (she’d lost the plug some time before). “The night was so beautiful that I couldn’t sleep,” she wrote in her journal. She had been warned about the Grand Canyon: its oppressive walls and gloomy crags, and how the sound of water striking rock preyed on travelers’ minds. She found, instead, a nameless beauty.”
― Melissa L. Sevigny, Brave the Wild River: The Untold Story of Two Women Who Mapped the Botany of the Grand Canyon

“People said that if you traveled too deep into the chasm, you could look up at midday and see the stars. It was rumored that whole plateaus inside of the canyon had been cut off from the outside world for so long that primordial monsters still roamed there, relicts of a ferocious past. The few scientific expeditions that had ventured inside—a few by river, the others on foot—came out with more fancy than fact. They spoke of a fabulously rich silver mine that nobody could find, and herds of feral horses no bigger than coyotes. They told campfire stories of a Petrified Man whose form shone out clearly from the canyon wall—and why not? The sculpted stone, sometimes, did look like it was trying to form living shapes, fluted into scales or fur by the constant wear of water.”
― Melissa L. Sevigny, Brave the Wild River: The Untold Story of Two Women Who Mapped the Botany of the Grand Canyon

“The river has other, older names. Hualapai refer to the Colorado as a lifegiving spine, Paiute call it Water Deep in the Earth, and Navajo speak of the River of Never-Ending Life. The 246,000-square-mile watershed touches seven U.S. states, two Mexican provinces, and at least thirty Native nations. It encompasses 8 percent of the contiguous U.S. and glances through a dozen different ecosystems on its journey from mountains to sea, including pine forest, oak woodland, chaparral, and three types of desert: Great Basin, Sonoran, and Mojave.”
― Melissa L. Sevigny, Brave the Wild River: The Untold Story of Two Women Who Mapped the Botany of the Grand Canyon

“The San Juan River is one of four sacred rivers that encircle the Navajo homeland, along with the Colorado, the Little Colorado, and the Río Grande. Navajos call it Old Man River and tell stories of a man named the Dreamer who climbed into a hollow log and rode the San Juan to its confluence with the Colorado and then rafted the Grand Canyon, encountering monsters and gods along the way. Hopis tell a similar story, of a youth named Tiyo who traveled through the Grand Canyon in a sealed drum and voyaged all the way to the sea. Mojave, Cocopah, and other Indigenous peoples of the lower Colorado weave boats out of tule reeds. People of European descent had no such deep history of running the unruly rivers of the West. They thought it a sport for adventurers or fools.”
― Melissa L. Sevigny, Brave the Wild River: The Untold Story of Two Women Who Mapped the Botany of the Grand Canyon

“Its volume was unimpressive: a whole year’s worth of water flowing down the Colorado was what the Mississippi delivered to its delta in two normal weeks. The Colorado averaged a drop of nine feet a mile over its 1,450-mile length, and stretches of the river were nearly flat. It ought to have been the most ordinary river in the United States. But the Colorado was an unruly thing, governed by the mad rhythms of a desert climate. Surges of snowmelt, thick with mud, came down each spring, followed by torrents of storm water in summer.”
― Melissa L. Sevigny, Brave the Wild River: The Untold Story of Two Women Who Mapped the Botany of the Grand Canyon

“From above—though it would be decades, yet, before satellites and space travel would show the world this way—the Colorado River’s watershed looks like a ragged, many-veined leaf, its stem planted firmly in the Gulf of California. In a wetter climate it might be invisible, hidden by the canopies of trees and overhanging banks of flowers and ferns. But here, in the American Southwest, the river carves and folds the landscape around it as if water holds a weight not measured in ounces. Its headwaters begin in the Wind River Range of Wyoming, a jumbled stretch of the Rocky Mountains, where cold rivulets of snowmelt wake beneath ice each spring to surge into a thunderous rush and pour into the Green River. Jotter and her companions had floated a placid stretch of the Green, 120 miles through the red rock of Utah, where the river loops and doubles back like a dawdling tourist in no hurry to reach the next vista. Earlier that day, they had reached the confluence where the Green joined another tributary known, until not long before, as the Grand. It, too, draws its headwaters from Rocky Mountains west of the Continental Divide. The Grand was shorter than the Green, but it had won the affections of a Colorado congressman named Edward Taylor. In 1921 he successfully lobbied to rename the smaller tributary after its main channel: the Colorado River. “The Grand is the father and the Green the mother, and Colorado wants the name to follow the father,” Taylor said in his persuasive speech to the U.S. House of Representatives, adding as further evidence that the Grand was a much more treacherous river than the Green, killing anyone who tried to raft it.”
― Melissa L. Sevigny, Brave the Wild River: The Untold Story of Two Women Who Mapped the Botany of the Grand Canyon

“Clover and Jotter’s names are still remembered in the botany and river running communities. A hedgehog cactus with pink flowers and dense spines that grows in New Mexico is named Clover’s cactus (Sclerocactus cloverae); it’s now under consideration for endangered species protection. River rafters in Cataract Canyon, rediscovering places once buried beneath Lake Powell and now revealed by drought, informally call two side canyons Clover Canyon and Jotter Canyon, in a stretch of river known as Botany Aisle. Scientists raft the Grand Canyon every year, carrying a plant guide shaped in part by Clover and Jotter’s findings. Their story matters. It adds to the unfolding record of how life, human and nonhuman, finds ways to flourish even in the most unlikely of circumstances. Like others before them, Elzada Clover and Lois Jotter valued their curiosity about the world more than their presumed place within it. They go ahead and, like stars reflected on the river, show the way.”
― Melissa L. Sevigny, Brave the Wild River: The Untold Story of Two Women Who Mapped the Botany of the Grand Canyon