Doug Woodward first descended the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon in 1970. His son, Forest, paddled North Carolina’s class three Nantahala Falls in a kayak when he was just six. Rivers run deep for these two men, and in 2013, when Forest had a chance to join a twenty-eight-day trip down the Colorado, the first person he asked to join him was Doug.
Every journey through the Grand Canyon is a narrative, but this one was particularly rich. Doug, now seventy-nine, is a legendary waterman who pioneered many of the Southeast’s whitewater runs in the 1950s at 1960s and performed river stunt work for Deliverance. He’s also a poet, who wrote poems for each of his children within days of their birth. To Forest, he panned “The Important Places,” which begins:
Child of mine, comeAs you grow in youth you will learnThe secret places…The cave behind the waterfall,The arms of the oak that you hold high,The stars so near on the desert ledge…the
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