Lava Falls

by Lucy Jane Bledsoe

  I had been sobbing into my pillow as Mac ran through the darkness, her stomach pumped, her lungs and legs no doubt aching. Mac survived.

  “What was the date?” I asked.

  Sylvia shook her head. “I don’t know. October something.”

  I knew. October 12: The end of Jesus. The same day I kicked Pastor Evans in the shin. Mac and I lost our faith on the exact same day. That was enormously comforting to me.

  “Where’d she go?” I asked. Maybe Pastor Evans felt beat by Mac, one upped, because no one ever mentioned her at church, at least not around me. He must have needed her gone.

  “All over. She tells wild stories from those years. Eventually she ended up here in Portland. She got a good job doing park maintenance for the city, until she hurt her back. Now she’s on disability.” Sylvia began twisting her hair again. “She’s okay. Nice little house in northeast.

  Single. Unless you count the three dogs and two cats.” She shrugged. “She drinks too much.” Then she laughed. “Mac dead? You couldn’t kill her with a lead pipe.”

  It felt good to laugh, and afterward we met eyes across the table, held each other that way. That felt good, too. Reckless good.

  When we said goodbye, we exchanged contact information and reconfirmed our intentions to get our programs together. I asked her for Mac’s address, too. After I wrote down the street and number, Sylvia leaned forward and kissed me on the mouth. Then she shrugged, as if she’d surprised herself, and walked away.

  In the morning I drove over to Mac’s house and parked in front. It was the sweetest place, the yard a tangle of squashes, lettuces, purple lobelia, and orange nasturtium. Three bird houses, homemade from the looks of them, hung from different low branches of a huge willow. The house was small and needed paint. A stone path led to the front door.

  How ludicrous we are at twelve years old, living our dreamlike lives, iconic moments looming. Floating in bubbles of silence. A few months after Mac’s hospitalization and disappearance, my family moved to another town in Oregon, and then again the following year, until eventually we landed in Portland, where my mother just died.

  Mac had survived and my mother was gone. The one truly gone. There are no words for a loss this big, against a backdrop this, in the end, small. I would perhaps spend another few decades trying to understand my new loss. I needed to go clean out my mother’s apartment.

  First I would return Mac’s book. I opened it up and reread her notes, beginning with Sylvia and ending with Jesus. I found a pen and wrote, at the bottom of the list, today’s date, followed by a colon. Then, Mac, Mac, Mac.

  I put the book in my back pocket, wondering if I would really relinquish it, and walked up the path to knock on her door.

  Lava Falls

  Night and day the river flows. If time is the mind of space, the River is the soul of the desert. Brave boatmen come, they go, they die, the voyage flows on forever. We are all canyoneers. We are all passengers on this little living mossy ship, this delicate dory sailing round the sun that humans call the Earth. Joy, shipmates, joy.

  Edward Abbey, Desert Solitaire

  Nearly a thousand years ago, Renny rose in the dark, before anyone else had awakened, and silently, quickly made her way to the canyon rim. The sky sparkled with cool starlight as the beginning of daylight tinged the eastern horizon. She let herself over the lip of the canyon wall.

  As Renny descended the cliff, her feet found tiny ledges and her hands grasped knobs of rock. She’d watched her brothers make the descent, studying their moves, memorizing the exact angle in the bend of their legs, their elbows. She’d listened to their concentrated breathing so she could replicate it, exactly.

  She didn’t dare look down, far below into the chasm where the muddy waters of the river flowed weak with drought. Up on the rim where they lived, the streams had been nearly dry for a few seasons, and there was no way to haul water from the big river up these cliffs. She’d thought they all ought to leave, find another home, even though the journey and search might be grueling.

  The elders criticized her for voicing any opinion at all, but she hadn’t been able to stop, and now that she had a child in her belly, her thoughts burst fuchsia and cerulean, as loud and bright as the pre-drought cacti blooms. She just couldn’t shut up. She guessed that someone had decided that a baby would be the solution to her.

  It didn’t matter anymore. She didn’t have to worry about talking too much. About the dry streambeds and empty bellies. The arguments over how best to survive. She and her child were leaving.

  The people stored clay pots of seeds in caves partway down the cliff face, away from other animals and the hot sun. She wouldn’t take much, just enough to grind into meal for her journey, with some left over to plant at her new home. She pictured trees for shade, a stream for drinking and bathing and wetting the seeds. She’d supplement the seeds with pinyon nuts and grass rice. She’d snare rabbits and roast agave.

  Renny’s feet touched down on a narrow level ledge. She made it! She’d heard her brothers laugh at the jolt of safety they always felt when their feet reached the path. She allowed herself to let go of the rock face with one hand and spread her fingers across her belly, but she didn’t dare look down at the river still far below. Keeping one hand on the rock wall, she walked along the route until she came to the bridge.

  A rock slide had carved a gulley through the path. The distance across this breach, miniscule in comparison to the grand canyon, was only the length of a tall man’s body. Slim tree trunks had been lashed together and laid from one side to the other, the ends secured with piles of rock. The passage would be wobbly. She had to place her feet just so.

  Renny set a foot on the sticks, curling her toes around the wood. She took deep breaths as she crossed the bridge and reached the other side with just a couple of inhalations and exhalations.

  From there, she knew from careful listening, it wasn’t far to the granaries. When she reached the two caves in the side of the cliff, she climbed up and into the mouth of the first one. She entered the darkness by feel, on her hands and knees, the rocks cutting into her skin. Here she could sit, away from the drop-off, and rest. But she didn’t rest for long. Waving her arms in front of her, using her hands as eyes in the dark, she found the first pot. Reaching in, her hands sunk into the dry seeds. She let them run through her fingers several times before filling her pouch.

  She would have liked to rest longer inside the stony cavern, but she knew she had to start her climb back up to the rim before anyone noticed her gone. She stepped out of the mouth of the cave. The light of dawn pearled the sky, washing away the last stars. She’d hide the pouch of seeds, bury it in a shallow hole, until tomorrow night when she would leave for good.

  The river below, though diminished, still tore through the canyon. She could see it clearly now, the water an opaque, creamy brown, like a mother’s milk mixed with mashed beans. The streams up on the rim, back when they still flowed freely, did so clear as the sky. But the big river moved so fast, pitched downhill so steeply, that it scoured the earth away from its bed and churned mud into its flow, prompting her people to joke that the big river was just very wet mud.

  She crossed back over the bridge and scooted along the narrow ledge, her confidence blooming, until she couldn’t find the matrix of handholds and toeholds leading to the top. She’d studied the route from above, not from below. She’d not thought to stop on her way down, once she’d reached the path, to mark the climbing route. The rock wall above her, in every direction, looked sheer, impossible to scale.

  Sunlight now splashed against the top of the opposing canyon wall. She had to get back, couldn’t afford to be caught stealing from the cache. Renny picked the most likely spot and began climbing. Sweat drenched her face and neck as the heat of the morning intensified. Her breath came in gasps. She clung to the crumbs of rock.

  When she fell, the terror lasted for only a brief span of time, no longer than a scream, but it was the most intense fear p
ossible, tumbled with boulders and slammed by waves of whitewater, and bursting with love for the daughter growing inside her.

  Then the fear evaporated. And she began to dream.

  Well into the twenty-first century, six women gathered at Lees Ferry, packing up their two bright yellow inflatable oar boats in preparation for rafting through the Grand Canyon.

  Marylou, who’d organized this expedition, had flown into Flagstaff early that morning, looking down from her plane at the deep gash in the continent, glowing russet red in the morning sun, framed by two dams, the Glen Canyon upstream and the Hoover downstream. From so far above, the Glen Canyon Dam looked elegant, a pale slice of moon. Marylou knew this appearance of delicacy was deceptive. Holding back a river, and one so mighty as the Colorado, was a Herculean task, an undertaking that required outsized arrogance by the men who thought it possible. But, astonishingly, it was possible. Behind the dam wallowed the immense Lake Mead storing untold megawatts of energy for the hot, dry cities of the West. Sitting in her airplane seat, she’d laughed out loud at the breathtaking ambition of human beings.

  Now at river’s edge, Marylou was the one with lit gray eyes and messy medium-length matching gray hair. A high school language arts teacher, fifty years old and freshly divorced, she’d convinced her daughter, Paige, twenty-one, a coffeehouse barista, to come along, as well as her best friend since childhood, Laurie, fifty-two, a psychotherapist. Thinking it’d be nice for Paige if there were at least one other young person, she’d also invited Kara, thirty-two, a favorite prior student who now worked as a firefighter in a small town in the Southwest. Maeve, seventy-three, a retired philosophy professor, had once, briefly, been married to Marylou’s father and was probably a bad idea, but the older woman had been insistent when she heard about the trip. And really, why not? Marylou hoped that twenty-three years down the road, she’d be fully recovered from the trauma of Joe leaving her and embarking on new adventures herself. Finally, Marylou had been delighted to get a yes from Josie, forty-one, a woman who did workshops on survival skills at the high school from time to time. A real coup, given that Josie worked as a river guide and had run the Grand Canyon several times.

  Marylou waved goodbye to the outfitter, a guy named Raymond, a member of the Hualapai tribe who owned the land at the takeout 226 miles downstream. Raymond had rented them the boats, as well as most of the gear, and would meet them at trip’s end. Then she put her hands on her hips and faced the river. The sound of Raymond’s truck rumbling back out the road to the highway faded and the swish of moving water came into the foreground of her consciousness. She smiled and congratulated herself on dreaming up—and fully executing!—this trip. She needed this big river, these good friends, so badly right now. How stupid of Joe to leave the sanctuary—at least she had thought of it as a sanctuary—of their home in this horrific moment in history, when the fabric of the entire country was being ripped apart, when everything they held dear was being dismantled. Then again, why should she expect his behavior to be logical? Nothing about human beings was logical. It might well have been his terror that caused him to bail. Oh, stop, she told herself. Trying to make sense of what Joe did, any thoughts of him at all, threatened to destroy her excitement about the next two weeks. So she hummed the Dixie Chicks’ “Wide Open Spaces” to keep him at bay.

  Laurie was the first of the six women to take an interest in the only other party at the Lees Ferry put-in. The man, somewhere in his young sixties, wore chocolate brown board shorts, a tan T-shirt, and bright blue Chacos on his feet. Flyaway wisps of graying hair barely covered his scalp and his bent wire-rim glasses sat askew on his face. The young woman had pink skin, freckled all over, and bright strawberry blond hair, knotted on top of her head. She wore big white plastic-framed sunglasses and a short flowered sundress. She moved like a cat, lithe and supple, with a purposeful intelligence. Even the way she strode to their pile of gear, pawing through it until she extracted two hats, embodied a double message, one of cute youth (the bare legs and twitchy butt, jaunty smile) and another of intention, maybe even calculation. She popped on an oversized straw cowboy hat, grinning under the shade of the wide brim, and handed him one of those goofy synthetic jobs with the skirt hanging from the back brim to protect his neck. She didn’t rub in, or even comment on, the sunscreen smeared unevenly all over his face, which suggested to Laurie that the pair didn’t know each other well. In fact, it became evident that he was a geology professor and she his student because as he worked the foot pump to inflate their raft, he began his field lectures, his arms waving toward the cliffs upstream. Laurie caught words like “Triassic” and “sandstone” and “Chinle Formation.” The blue casing of their rubber boat lofted a bit with each word.

  Laurie decided she didn’t much like the student. The young woman listened to her prof’s open air lecture with a cold concentration. The word shrewd might apply. It was as if she had an abundance of confidence that she kept under wraps. She was smart and cute, and she knew it, but for some reason protected the smart while flaunting the cute. Annoying. Of course Laurie couldn’t assess an IQ from afar, or any other personality traits for that matter, and yet you’d be surprised at how much about a person was obvious from minute one. She had to put those snap observations aside, always, in her work as a psychotherapist. But now she was on vacation. Couldn’t she just this once allow herself to make a slew of assumptions about this stranger couple? It was fun. She smiled at her freedom.

  Laurie forgave the man his needlessly loud voice in favor of admiring his obvious passion. He gesticulated, expounded, his heart racing—this last part she guessed, of course, but what thrilled a geologist more than the Grand Canyon?

  “The Grand Canyon,” the man nearly shouted, “is neither the deepest nor the longest canyon on Earth, but what makes it magnificent is its extraordinarily intact geological history—its strata dating back more than 1.8 billion years with many intervening periods of geologic history represented in its exposed cliffs and slopes. Stacked in sequence! Ancient deserts, mountains, even seas. All in evidence right here in these cliffs.”

  His voice squeaked once or twice with excitement. In fact, the man was practically glowing. Who could blame Laurie for noticing that he was also quite fit for his age? His legs were muscled and his shoulders broad, as if he’d rowed many a mile and hefted thousands of ancient rocks. Even his stomach was flat, and Laurie rarely saw that on men of his years. She enjoyed the frisson of pleasure shivering up from her pelvis and into her breasts.

  Good for him, she rallied on silently, for mentoring a female grad student. It had to be difficult in geology, what many would consider a man’s field, even today, or especially today, in this so-called post-feminist era, where the obstacles women encountered were said to be imagined. Laurie knew differently from her clients, especially in traditionally male fields.

  Nothing lit Laurie’s erotic core more than personal passion, and his was evident. But equally appealing to her was evidence of just action. This man—she heard the young woman call him Howard—was opening the crown jewel of geological fieldwork, the Grand Canyon, to a female student. That was admirable. Laurie liked him very much. Since they were launching from Lees Ferry on the same day, their two expeditions would likely see more of each other along the journey. This too pleased Laurie.

  For the next two hours, she helped the other five women in her group pack up their two boats with the boxes and coolers of gear and food. She decided, while dragging two dry bags full of tents to the boats, that she’d concentrate on herself this trip. She didn’t have to take care of a soul. Her mother had died six months ago, after a long illness in Laurie’s spare bedroom; this loss prompted her to break up with Alan after a three-year tepid affair; and she wouldn’t have a single client for two weeks. Surely with six women there’d be drama. But it didn’t have to be her drama. She’d keep distance, keep quiet, open herself to the air and water and rock of the canyon. Think of herself for once. What a novel idea.

  Di
d that mean she was allowed to fantasize about the geologist or did it mean she should not fantasize about the geologist? She’d vowed, just last month, that she was done with men. Alan, after all, was handsome, gainfully employed, and loved the outdoors as much as she did. Giving him up was a big statement. In her younger years, he might have been more than enough. But she found his deafness (or did he choose not to listen?) beyond irksome, his two daughters insufferable, and in fact she never had loved him enough. He became a placeholder. A distraction while her mother died. What if she left that place open, let in the breeze of possibility, or simply filled the space with herself?

  Laurie caught the geologist’s eye and smiled. He turned away. Maybe he was married. All the better. She could flirt without consequences.

  Josie noticed the shrink—what was her name again?—staring at the couple also launching today and wondered if she too was irritated by his loud lecturing. He seemed to be shouting everything he knew about the geology of the region.

  “The upper part of the canyon is known as Marble Canyon. The rocks upstream from here, in Glen Canyon, belong to a much younger group. But ahead!” He clapped his hands, as if to summon the attention of everyone at Lees Ferry. “We’re going to see the great plunging fold called the East Kaibab Monocline, not to mention the Grand Canyon Supergroup and Great Unconformity.”

  Josie knew exactly why the guy annoyed her so much. He reminded her of her dad, him extemporizing, talking nonstop, his enthusiasms bigger, grander, louder, brighter than anyone else’s could ever be. And Josie, as a little girl, as a teenager even, trying to keep up, to understand his wild joy. When she was five years old, he built her a child-sized kayak and taught her to paddle on a trip down the Rogue River in Oregon. “You’re an otter!” he shouted from his own boat. “The kayak is an extension of your torso. Feel the water in your thighs. In your feet.” She wheeled the paddle, dipping the blades, for all she was worth through stretches of flat water until he decided she was skilled enough to try a small rapid. “You’re not afraid,” he told her. “Fear is impossible when you know how to read the river.”