| Travel Companions |
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The best travel companions can inform our route—and change our lives 
Illustration by Brian Cairns
Travel is amplified by a foil, a complement, a sensibility to play against. You need someone to confirm the bizarre or beautiful thing you’ve just witnessed—the flying fish that thunks you in the head, the greenish glow of fox fire on a black night. “Did I just see that?” you can ask your friend. “Yep,” he may say. “That shit just happened.” Of all the traveling buddies I’ve had over the years, the one I remember most fondly is a wise, dry-witted soul named Dugald Bremner. A dozen years ago I floated the Colorado in the Grand Canyon with Dugald in his dory, the Skagit. That week, the Bureau of Reclamation had released massive torrents from Glen Canyon Dam. For us this meant record high water and exhilarating hydraulics. A world-class boatman and travel photographer, Dugald was a legend in the rarefied world of the hardcore Canyon rats. Born in Scotland, he had longish hair, a sun-leathered face, and a Celtic twinkle in his sharp hazel eyes. He was a purist of the Canyon experience and treated his dory like a beautiful woman. “Ah, she’s graceful in repose,” he liked to say, in an exaggerated brogue, “but she stays high and dry in the heavy going.” Dugald told me, only half-facetiously, that he was a member of “the High Church of the River.” To watch him at the oars of the Skagit was like watching a gifted sprinter run or a great chef cook; it was the thing he was born to do. There was no wasted motion, no yahoo theatrics, no straining—just a sure, clean line through the water and a quiet measured, smile on his face. Whenever we approached a big hissing rapid, Dugald would sit up, attuned to every swirling detail, occasionally making the tiniest corrective flick of an oar tip. If I seemed apprehensive he would say, “It’s only water. It’s not like there’s going to be...snipers.” I became good friends with Dugald. Together we drained many bottles of expensive single-malt Scotch, a vice he introduced me to on the river. We traveled on several foreign assignments, including one to southern Mexico, where we rambled around the Maya ruins of Palenque, interviewed Mormon archaeologists, and got shaken down at a Zapatista roadblock by teenagers in ski masks. It was loads of fun—and that time there were snipers. Then I lost track of Dugald, as he went on increasingly ambitious photographic adventures to Turkistan, Kazakhstan, and Siberia. He made first descents of raging rivers. And his photography took off—his work was published in National Geographic and his fine-art images were in hot demand. One day in 1997 I got horrible news: Dugald, then 41 years old, had drowned in California’s American River. His kayak had jammed in a rocky crevice, and fellow paddlers were unable to free him. As he lost consciousness in the frigid stream, a friend held his hand until it grew slack. Some of the best kayakers in the world flew in to extract Dugald’s body. After the funeral, a few river rats spread his ashes in—where else?—the Grand Canyon. Nowadays a framed Dugald Bremner photograph hangs in my kitchen. It’s a breathtaking image of a Canyon dory packed with friends. The boat shimmers in a stray shaft of sunshine, but it appears vulnerable, about to be swallowed by a massive black shadow looming on the high rock walls of the Grand Canyon. When you get out on waters like the Colorado and drift deep in those ancient folds, there is something the guides call river time. It’s the sense that the clock is standing still, that the vexations of the “real” world have ceased to matter. With it comes the counter-awareness that our time is pitifully short, and we’d better spend every minute surrounding ourselves with good companions, losing ourselves in the immensity of great places. Dugald lived on river time. You can see it in that beautiful, haunting photograph: a radiant life coexisting with, indeed informed and enhanced by, the very shadow of death. Dugald knew what he loved—moving water to navigate, moving scenery to photograph—and he arranged his life around those objects of his affection. And he died as he had lived, kneeling in the church of the river, paddling in the company of friends.
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