Looking Back on the First Days

As part of the continuing vagaries of this trip, it is 4 p.m. Arizona time.We are actually in the Utah stretch of Lake Powell but the whole lake just sticks to Arizona time to keep simpler.
We are  loving it here, despite the cranky generator on the house boat which keeps kicking out, most recently with what I considered an ominous amount of thumping.  This after Aramark, the concessionaire the National  Park Service has licensed to  operate house boats  on Lake Powell, sent an obliging guy named Chee (just like Officer Jim  Chee of the Navajo Tribal Police) who fixed it and the water supply; our drinking water shut down. Chee appears to be a solutiions guy and found air in a generator line, and also switched pumps for  the water. All worked, until he left.
Anyway, the generator won't start, the radio works only intermittently, although we did get Chee. Cell  phone service--forget it--they work intermettently  on the main channel (if you can see Navajo Mountain you might get a connection), but usually what you get are partial, tantalzingly cut off downloads  of emails you really don't  want to know about. Anyway, Chee knows the generator died again.
So,given the state of the generator, we  are drinking beer while it is cold.
        I had thought that a case of beer for three  adults for four nights was not enough, but Carrie felt that since it was supplemented by six bottles of white  wine and one bottle of red, it would be enough.
      She is probably right,  but fan as I am of "The Monkey Wrench Gang," I keep thinking of how George  Hayduke,  alias Rudolf the Red, ex Vietnam POW and quartermaster extraordinaire who once roamed this area (in fiction) would probably not  have agreed. Although he  would have bought Pabst Blue Ribbon,  not Pacifico,  and considered us all  a bunch of Sierra Club pansies. Although no one could consider Carrie a  pansy  and I suspect  Rudolf the Red would  not have either. And I belong to the Natural Resouce  Defense Center, not the Sierra Club.
    Enough  of Four Corners and Lake Powell literary ramblings.
    This is a pretty cool place even though I still  believe that the Sierra Club should have stuck to  its guns and called  in the votes it had in Congress (acccording to my  conversations via email with the Glen  Canyon Institute) and stopped the dam. Be that as it may, they  did not; the lake  is now nearly 50 years old (at least that is when the dam was finished, not sure when  the  lake filled but we heard it took  17 years).
Although it is lower now, 60 feet lower than last year, according to Chee. The output never  changes, but the input does and last winter  it was very dry. But cold, Chee said.
      But there is  still plenty of water and it gives you amazing perspective of one of the  most geologically incredible places on earth.