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For The Love of Glen Canyon

Katie Lee releases two works - a book, <i>Glen Canyon Betrayed: A Sensuous Elegy</i>, and a DVD, <i>Love Song to Glen Canyon</i> - that resurrect the beating heart of Glen Canyon

By Jen Jackson

Found in: | Inside | Books |

Glen Canyon Betrayed: A Sensuous Elegy
by Katie Lee
Fretwater Press, 2006
$16.95 / 296 pages / Trade Paperback
To order, go to www.fretwater.com (credit cards accepted), or order from Katie (with check or money order), autographed & postpaid for $20, katydid@swiftwireless.com

Love Song to Glen Canyon
produced by Katie Lee
Katydid Books & Music, 2007
$20 postpaid / 30 minutes
To order, email braddimock@fretwater.com (credit cards accepted), or order from Katie (with check or money order), autographed & postpaid for $20, katydid@swiftwireless.com

Fifty years ago, Hollywood starlet Katie Lee fell hopelessly in love with Glen Canyon. Then followed the dam, the drowning of the river, and Katie's reservoir of grief. Yet, a passionate activism was born out of this loss, and now Katie continues to fight for the Glen's resurrection well into her ninth decade.

Katie's latest efforts - the DVD Love Song to Glen Canyon, and the book Glen Canyon Betrayed: A Sensuous Elegy - are a testament to the power of love, loss and hope, even after 40 years.

Love Song to Glen Canyon is a half-hour journey through the 10 magical years Katie enjoyed running the Glen before this idyllic and beloved landscape was drowned. The viewer runs the emotional rapids of 140 largely unpublished photos set to Katie's narrative and heartfelt music. The DVD is raw, stripped of pretense. The emotion in Katie's voice is authentic and moving.

In the final song on the DVD, "The River Dies," the magnitude of what's been lost is readily apparent, even to those who never knew Glen Canyon as it once was. Katie guides us through photos of the Escalante and San Juan rivers, Mystery and Lost Eden canyons. We see them through the eyes of her love - predam - and then through the eyes of her loss - post-flood. The song and images are equally painful. At song's end, Katie looks into the camera, and in one heart-wrenching moment, we know the true depth of her grief.

In the end, Love Song is not a monumental work of cinematography. It is simple - images flashing across the screen, a voice taking us through song and story - but in its simplicity and brevity lies its beauty. It is an authentic work of the heart.

Equally authentic and heartfelt is the DVD's companion piece, Glen Canyon Betrayed. Originally released in 1998 as All My Rivers Are Gone, the new incarnation is re-edited, redesigned, indexed, with new photos and an afterword. Although the book may seem old news to Katie Lee devotees, it is perfect timing for the work's rebirth and reintroduction, just as nature is gifting the Glen with the same.

In the book's new afterword, Katie acknowledges that the canyon's re-emergence is a complicated issue in this adventure-obsessed age, and an entirely different approach is needed if we are to avoid ruining it anew. Her perspective strikes at the root of the problem: "What really needs changing is us - not the canyons, not the legal status or accessibility, but us."

Though readers will find some pointed criticism of current land-management policies, today's hordes of irreverent thrill-seekers and the "Wreck-the-Nation Bureau," the book is largely a meditation on happier times along the Glen. It is a sweetly intoxicating read.

Glen Canyon Betrayed chronicles Katie's love affair with the canyon in exquisite detail, through journal notes, memory, and song. In a way, the book is a revival of a lost oral tradition, connecting many of us - through the lens of one woman's love - to a canyon we never knew, bringing its lessons to the surface. Katie recounts places before place-names and adventures before guidebooks - a world before everything came within easy reach of cell phones and satellites. She teaches us the importance of the mysteries we are quickly losing.

Katie writes, "If our need to know - to get to the end of every side canyon - had outstripped our desire to wonder and be amazed, we'd have left the Glen with no pounding heart for that place, and less desire to return and find out more."

Love Song to Glen Canyon and Glen Canyon Betrayed are complimentary works, each lending light and vibrancy to the other. Together, they help resurrect the beating heart of the Glen, if only momentarily through memory, music, and image.

Finally, perhaps the greatest message Katie leaves us with is this: "Let me urge you (no matter the odds) to seek out such a place. Why? Because you need it, whether you know it or not . . . . Keep it as long as possible and, like a loved one, cherish it, being aware that love is also pain, discovery, joy unrealized and - sooner or later - loss."

Katie's eloquent anger, her bedrock grief, her ever-present passion and sense of loss . . . this is our invitation and inspiration to take a risk - damn the consequences - and love so hard it hurts.

Jen Jackson writes from canyon country where she is engaged in her own love affair with the land.