February 4, 2000.
Roger Henderson from Flagstaff Arizona, died a few months ago. I didn’t know him, but I know some of his friends, and he seems to have been an interesting and honorable guy.
I read about Roger’s death in the Boatman’s Quarterly Review, the journal of Grand Canyon River Guides. GCRG is a non-profit association of river guides and other fans of Grand Canyon. Membership in GCRG is a good way to stay current on happenings in and around the Big Ditch.
In this electronic age, when glitzy graphics rule, and words often are seen as mere visual building blocks, the Boatman’s Quarterly Review is a genuine and highly successful literary effort.
The BQR is a simple, two-color publication featuring 20-odd pages of type, interspersed with occasional drawings and black and white photos. It works beautifully.
Something else the BQR does well is to lovingly and respectfully mourns the passing of friends.
Roger was a river guide, photographer, pilot, handyman, world traveler and free-thinker. He was interested in books, rivers, Alaska, story-telling, and Navajo culture. He had an eye for the ladies.
When he wasn’t guiding city people like me through Grand Canyon, he was hauling and selling firewood around Flagstaff, or helping the Navajo bury their dead. More about that later.
Roger was from Chicago. Back in the 1970s, he enrolled at Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff and never left town again, except to travel. Periodically, he escaped to Patagonia or Alaska to unwind.
Navajo medicine men called Roger “the ghostbuster.”
Navajos are mortally and unashamedly terrified of the dead. They fear death and ghosts to a spectacular degree. Navajos will not to venture out after dark, else they may fall victim to a skinwalker – the ghost of someone who died violently, or who was not laid to rest via a proper and timely ceremony.
Because Roger wasn’t an Indian, he had less to fear from malevolent spirits. He helped his Navajo friends by reburying the bones when heavy rains churned up an old Anasazi burial site.
The Navajo taught him how to protect himself from the dead by eating bitter herbs, and how to brush out his tracks as he walked backward from a burial. He had great respect for the Navajo people. He was honored to be a non-Navajo who understood the traditions.
Fifteen years ago, Roger learned that he had non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. The cancer was treated, and it went into remission.
He lived his life, survived three plane crashes, and was engaged to marry a lady from Tucson. But the cancer returned. He died late in 1999.
Roger once wrote home from Denali, “Alaska pulls me like nothing else does. The last of what is left that is wild, clean, open. A place of beauty without a drop of mercy.
“Our time is limited on this earth. We need to live in its magnificence.”
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