Buzz Holmstrom was one of the great river runners of our time, and his solo journey down the Grand Canyon deserves this wonderful chronicling. There's something very appealing about Buzz Holmstrom to which the authors, experienced river runners themselves, respond and convey in their affectionate, literate, and detailed writing. Plus the book is well-designed and handsome to look at, a beautiful job, a real class act.

Engrossing, exciting, grueling in parts, sometimes humorous, sometimes sweetly lyrical, it's the story of a man who was singular and funny, gifted and self-effacing. This book should be on the reading list of every boatman, every past or potential river trip passenger, and anyone interested in history of the West.

Flagstaff Live

We're centered not just in the same boat as Holmstrom, but in the same heart. He emerges as a hugely conscious man, expert in surviving in hard terrain and, more than anything, at steering his journey not against the river, but with it.

Sierra- the magazine of the Sierra Club

While the book has enough pourovers, crashing waves and keeper holes to satisfy the most ardent river runner, it also has a broader appeal. Besides being a story about river running, Holmstrom's life is a story of finding oneself and struggling with change.

Durango Cross Currents

This is the kind of story people should be reading. The format is appealing, it reads well, and brings back a host of memories about the physical settings wherein Buzz accomplished so much before his tragic end.
What a triple-threat collaboration!

David Lavender, Western historian

A snapshot of a bygone age, where all it takes to be a hero are a few planks of wood and elemental daring, and where satisfaction is found, like any good myth, in the wide-eyed telling of the tale.

Ithaca Journal

Welch, Dimock, Conley: boatmen, historians. They have the historical imagination and the river knowledge to vivify place and time, to judge in context, with expertise. Experts writing with precision and certainty (and where exacted by Holmstrom's death, with puzzlement and sorrow)

Earl Perry, author, Whitewater

The Doing of the Thing paints a fascinating picture of one of Oregon's most enigmatic outdoor heroes. Holmstrom's tale has been brought back to life.

The Oregonian

I've read The Doing of the Thing, cover to cover, and have thoroughly enjoyed it. A thoroughly absorbing book.

Colin Fletcher
author, River

 A unique look at the West through the eyes of an unsung hero. a thrilling adventurous biography that beams with the American spirit. A jaunty, bouncy ride.

The Book Reader

 The call of the current has never tugged at anyone more strongly than it did at Haldane "Buzz" Holmstrom, a service station attendant from the tiny town of Coquille in the Oregon Coast Range. The Doing of The Thing is a good Oregon story, one that has breathed new life into the legend of the man who was once Oregon's most-famous boatman.

The Eugene Register-Guard

 The book is a "Must Read" for all boatpeople, guides, history buffs, boat lovers, river runners, river lovers, and anyone else with a penchant for a good biography.

Boatman's Quarterly Review

 Buzz's story is eternal in that it has the ability-like all great stories-to remind us of ourselves.

Roderick Nash, author,
The Big Drops

 Readers of the Buzz Holmstrom biography will have their reward in the reading of the thing.

Verne Huser
Albuquerque Journal

Dimock: you have found for us a true American Hero. From dim obscurity to a detailed portrait, it is a story of a life we can be inspired by.

Steve Munsell, Prescott College Outdoor Program

 The Doing of the Thing paints a fascinating picture of one of Oregon's most enigmatic outdoor heroes. Holmstrom's tale has been brought back to life.

The Oregonian

 The Doing of the Thing is one of the most rewarding, complex, and heartbreaking trips you'll take.

Ithaca Times

 Extremely well written and a sets a major standard for what river histories should be and do. The awards are well deserved.

Robert Webb author, Grand Canyon, A Century of Change

 Readers who are expecting a book just about river running are in for a surprise. This story is much more than that. The Doing of the Thing brings into your life the story of a man you'd be proud to call a friend. His written thoughts paint clear pictures and impart the feeling of Western America in the 1930's, when the Southwest was still wild and adventure awaited the adventurer.

The Waiting List

 As told by three veteran whitewater guides the experience comes to life in confident and exciting detail great fun and written with near reverence for the man-a boatman's boatman simply brilliant.

The Unofficial Guide to the Colorado River in The Grand Canyon

 

The Doing of the Thing was a finalist for the 1999 Independent Publisher Book Awards, in the Biography Category. The IPPY is given annually, honoring the year's best independently published titles. All independent, university, small press, and self-publishers in North America are eligible to enter.

Buzz' story is eternal in that it has the ability--like all great stories--to remind us of ourselves. We forever row a psychological eddy line between giddy self-confidence and black insecurity. Moods pulse daily, even hourly. Men of Buzz' era had a hard time "opening up" to others. We still see this on the river and on the river of life--even among supposed pards and pals. What was the old Eagles' line about letting someone love you... and it did become too late for Buzz.

Roderick Nash
author of Wilderness in the American Mind

The grand saga of the American West and its rivers is populated with a number of seminal and semi-mythological characters, including, of course, Lewis and Clark, but also others; some notorious, brave, heroic and bold, some sniveling, cowardly and troublesome. Explorers, mountain men, soldiers, Indians, miners, exiles, outlaws, religious zealots, hunters and survivors, they all came; as transients, nomads, conquerors, seekers, dreamers--there is something about that expanse of landscape, the magnificence of its mountains and canyons, rivers and plateaus that has served as a setting for lives lived and deeds done on a grandiose scale. This is especially true, it seems, of those who run the rivers. From John Wesley Powell to present-day working guides who patiently and skillfully carry thousands of tourists safely through whitewater, these people are drawn to the rapids, the scenery, the ever-flowing current that they read like a language. For the early users of the rivers of the west, however, their obsession probably came from a basic desire to know, to find out what lay around the next bend, to test their rudimentary skills against the unknown.

In the 1930s one such pilgrim was an unassuming young man named "Buzz" Holmstrom, an Oregonian from a small river town who somehow, sort of by accident, became the first person to traverse alone the Green and Colorado rivers, from Wyoming to Lake Mead, eleven hundred miles. In a handmade wooden boat, with inadequate preparation and scanty supplies, he managed to row through dangerous, unfamiliar rapids and made it, alive, to where the Colorado met the rising waters of Lake Mead, at that time just beginning to become a reservoir. The journals he kept of the trip are authentic poetry, and also full of the kind of self-deprecating humor that apparently characterized this "humble gas station attendant" who was truly a unique individual. Sometimes I think that there are people who are born to do only one thing, and to do that thing so well it seems inevitable. Perhaps Buzz was one, for his destiny was apparently ruled by water and boats. A person who was instinctively liked by virtually everyone he met, he had reclusive inclinations too, and also yearned for romance. Contradictory, yes. Complicated, possibly suffering from depression, he tended to persevere to the point of physical agony, stoic and uncomplaining even in the face of extremes. A hero for any time, though he always denied any such appellation.

The story of his life, which starts with his forebears and ends with his untimely and mysterious death at age 37, has been assembled in a compelling and lucidly readable way by three authors, all boatmen, who finally took what had been the stuff of campfire legend and made it into a book. According to them, photocopies of Holmstrom's journals had been passed around for years, and tales were passed on from guide to guide; they felt that Buzz deserved more than to be just another tidbit for casual consumption. They took on the task of converting Holmstrom lore into a real biography; the results of their toil seem virtually seamless, filling in lots of details of his family, his parents, and his life, as ascertained from archival research and interviews with Holmstrom's brothers and sister and friends. There is adventure galore, interspersed with the mundane and everyday; trying to promote and capitalize on his solo Canyon trip in California; piloting a motorboat coast to coast from Oregon's Columbia River to New York's Hudson with Edith Clegg, an Englishwoman obsessed with Lewis and Clark--he helped her retrace their expedition, a journey of four months and twenty days (and even designed the boats). He joined the Navy in WWII and served as a carpenter, repairing PT boats; he surveyed for potential dam sites in the Grand Canyon and on other rivers, and even worked in mining as a "powder monkey." He came home periodically to Coquille to work in the gas station. Then, in 1946, something happened. During his last job, working for the Department of Defense on a Grande Ronde River survey in northeast Oregon, he died, shot to death. The authors take great pains to draw no firm conclusions about whether this was suicide, foul play or accident. Its a mystery that will never be solved.

The poignancy of the letters and journals quoted, conversations with friends and family, obvious inconsistencies and self-doubt as revealed therein all point to someone who was an embodiment of "waste of potential." He should have gone on to be a "grand old man of the river;" he could have lived, and written poetry, and fallen in love, and gotten married, and had children, and taught his children to build boats and run rivers, like so many of the dynasties of the river community. Sadly, for whatever reason, he never got the chance.

This book should be on the reading list of every boatman, every past or potential river trip passenger, and anyone interested in history of the West. It should be part of the traveling library of every river company. Engrossing, exciting, grueling in parts, sometimes humorous, sometimes sweetly lyrical, it's the story of a man who was singular and funny, gifted and self-effacing, and who, the authors found out, is still missed by friends he left behind on the banks of the Grande Ronde River 52 years ago. It's not a bad legacy--an elderly friend once told me that the older he got, the more he realized that what really matters in life is the love of family and friends--everything else fades in comparison. Buzz Holmstrom's friends undoubtedly wish they'd had the chance to tell him what he meant to them.

Dolly Spalding
FLAGSTAFF LIVE, Northern Arizona's Entertainment Weekly,
October 15-21, 1998  

The bad rapid...Lava Cliff...that I had been looking for, nearly a thousand miles, with dread...I thought: once past there my reward will begin, but now everything ahead seems kind of empty and I find I have already had my reward, in the doing of the thing."

The words, as reverent as the man himself, were written by Buzz Holmstrom at his last camp on the Colorado River, a few miles upstream from the newly filling Lake Mead. Holmstrom, born Haldane Holmstrom in May 1909, at Schofield Creek, Ore., had just run the Colorado River alone, from Green River to the drowning lower canyon. He sat by his campfire, his hand-built boat moored to the desert shoreline and, in the flickering light, he wrote. As he had the whole long journey.

It is not surprising that Holmstrom was a strong writer. Writing and running rivers are kindred passions. We set out from shore, unknowing, at best remembering; we go into the tongue of unknown territory, words and rivers as impermanent as our hands on the oars, our fingers on the keys; we plunge into maniac water and emerge, breathless, grateful, astonished, the rapid behind us, the poem on the page; we circle for what seems eternity in eddies; spin trapped in keeper holes, wondering if the last good sentence we wrote was truly THE LAST.

Vince Welch and Brad Dimock are river-runners and they are fine writers. Welch recounts the first few decades of Holmstrom's near-frontier life, of his first trip down the Rogue River and his last incomplete trip on the Grande Ronde, where Buzz died mysteriously just past his 37th birthday. Welch's craft is strong. River runner or not, the reader flips with Buzz at Black Bar Falls, sits shivering at twilight on a boulder, swims the icy river, and tired and cold, goes on. As vividly as Welch catches these hard hours, he also shows Buzz' family life, the love between Buzz and his poet mother, the harder, more simple life of the western coast when roads were few, and work was even harder to find than roads.

Dimock centers us not just in the same boat as Buzz, but often in the same heart. By the time Holmstrom puts his hand-built boat into Green River, we like the young boatman. By the end of the voyage, we love him. He emerges, through Dimock's storytelling and excerpts of Buzz' journal, as a bright, hugely conscious man, expert at carpentry, rowing, survival in hard terrain and, more than anything, steering his journey not against the river, but with it.

In these days of obscenely expensive high-tech camping gear, climbers who brag of bagging routes, and backcountry packers packing cell phones and geo-positioning devices, Brad Dimock reveals to us, well-crafted sentence after sentence, a young man who knows how competent he is...and how small...

As I read Holmstrom's last Colorado journal entry, "The stars, the cliffs and canyons, the roar of the rapids, the moon, the uncertainty and worry, the relief when through each one...the campfires at night, the real respect of the river men I met and others..." I was haunted by the words of another young man, who hiked recently with a friend and me into opal twilight of Long Canyon. "Not bad," he said, "for a hike without an orgasm." He didn't mean sex. He meant no big scenic razzle dazzle, no 5.13 route, no fun fun fun.

Fretwater Press is the creation of Brad Dimock. "The Doing of the Thing" is its first book and it is not marked by any self-publication clumsiness. From the beautifully mysterious cover to the generous abundance of drawings and illustrations, to the maps and layout of the text, it is a joy to consider. If writing is, as Dimock's and Welch's skill would bear out, a river, then what "The Doing of the Thing" accomplishes is the restoration of the flow and the bringing to the surface of a fine human being.

Mary Sojourner
Arizona Daily Sun,
October 8, 1998