Desolation Canyon

by Jonathan London

  DESOLATION CANYON

  Jonathan London

  Illustrated by

  Sean London

  Text © 2015 by Jonathan London

  Illustrations © 2015 by Sean London

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission of the publisher.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  London, Jonathan, 1947-

  Desolation Canyon / by Jonathan London ; illustrated by Sean London.

  pages cm

  Summary: Twelve-year-olds Aaron and Lisa, and sixteen-year-old bad-boy Cassidy, join their Army-buddy fathers on a float trip down Utah’s Green River, where they face terrible physical and mental challenges.

  ISBN 978-1-941821-29-9 (pbk.)

  ISBN 978-1-941821-55-8 (e-book)

  ISBN 978-1-941821-60-2 (hardbound)

  [1. Adventure and adventurers—Fiction. 2. White-water canoeing—Fiction. 3. Rafting (Sports)—Fiction. 4. Interpersonal relations—Fiction. 5. Green River (Wyo.-Utah)—Fiction.] I. London, Sean, illustrator. II. Title.

  PZ7.L8432Des 2015

  [Fic]—dc23

  2014025857

  Editor: Michelle McCann

  Designer: Vicki Knapton

  Published by WestWinds Press®

  An imprint of

  P.O. Box 56118

  Portland, Oregon 97238-6118

  503-254-5591

  www.graphicartsbooks.com

  For Roger, Lisa, Rowan, Dennis, Skip, Max, Steve, & Natalia—and the whole Mountain White Water gang—all friends of the Green River. And as always to my wife, sweet Maureen. With thanks to Avi. And with special thanks to my son Aaron, whose journal of our week on the Green River was invaluable; and to my son Sean, whose journal of another white-water rafting adventure we shared was also a revelation.

  —Jonathan London

  To Dad and Aaron, for blazing the trail, to my mom and my wife, Stephanie, for their love and support, and to Roger and Lisa, for all the adventures.

  —Sean London

  CONTENTS

  White Water!

  The Wild Bunch

  Rock Slide and High Side

  Wild Horses

  Nightmare Rock

  Rock Art and Rattlers

  Little Rock House Rapids

  The Outlaw Trail

  Water Babies

  The Blue Sky People

  The Disappearance

  The Search

  The Nightmare

  Canyon Spirits

  Over the Edge

  The Spirit Trail

  Runaway Raft!

  Rock Garden

  The Thunder Hole

  Racing for Rescue

  Time to Go!

  Olympic Champ

  Epilogue

  Discussion Questions

  CHAPTER ONE

  WHITE WATER!

  Cassidy lifted a huge stone on the clifftop high over my head. He glared down at me, laughed with crazy glee, and dropped it. I leaped away. The water burst white behind me, and I crashed into the river. A swirling dark hole funneled down, down, dragging me with it.

  Coyotes on the canyon rim woke me up—or was it Cassidy’s dad, Wild Man Willie, yowling, “Come ’n’ get it!”?

  Dad groaned, and I gazed at the ghosts of the nightmare still floating around inside our tent.

  “Come on, Aaron,” Dad muttered, and we crawled out of our tent and followed our noses.

  At the camp kitchen, I picked up an enamel plate from a stack, shoveled piles of food on it, and sat down on a stump. Still dazed by the dream, I dug into the pancakes and bacon and watched Wild Man Willie make a pot of coffee—army style. Big old coffeepot filled with boiling water and tons of coffee grounds. He took it by the handle and spun it round and round, like a windmill.

  “Separates the grounds from the coffee,” Willie growled. If that pot flew off the handle, someone could get killed.

  Dad told me that Willie had been a squad leader during Desert Storm, the first Iraq war, way back in 1991. Dad had met him and Roger the Rogue in the army, when they were all young. Now the three buddies were ex-soldiers, on one of their annual white-water rafting trips down wild rivers. This year it was the Green River in Desolation Canyon, deep in the Utah desert. Dad had told me it was one of the most remote places in the lower forty-eight states.

  This was my first time white-water rafting. Willie’s son Cassidy, who was four years older than me, had gone on lots of rafting trips. And the only other kid, Roger’s daughter Lisa, had too. I was the only newbie on the trip. It was the first week of April, and like me, Lisa was missing a week of sixth grade to go rafting (and there were only seven weeks left when we got home!).

  “Where’s Cassidy?” asked Roger. His eyes twinkled above a wicked goatee. He shoved his long curly hair beneath his spotted red bandanna.

  “C-A-A-A-S-S-I-I-I-D-Y-Y-Y!” howled Wild Man Willie.

  Only the river called back, a quiet hiss.

  Willie dashed the last of his coffee into the sand and leaped barefoot through prickles and stones toward Cassidy’s tent. With his huge arms he heaved the back of the tent up and over and dumped Cassidy out the open door, still curled up in his boxers.

  Lisa laughed and covered her mouth.

  It felt a little weird seeing Cassidy there after just having a nightmare about him.

  Cassidy just lay there. One eye opened. Then the other.

  Then he rolled back into a handspring and landed like a cat in the warm sand.

  Lisa clapped. Something twisted in my heart. Here’s this girl—maybe the cutest girl I’ve ever seen, long and slender, with what looked like a permanent tan—flinging her black ponytail back and applauding Cassidy, a bad kid if there ever was one.

  Dad had told me all about him, warned me to watch out for him. Said he’d been in a juvenile detention center for bashing a man’s head with a baseball bat when he was only fourteen, two years older than I am now. Dad told me his mother had died when he was little and that Willie “had his hands full with this one.”

  Cassidy stood up and wiped sand from his body. He was burnt lobster red after spending all day yesterday in the hot sun. His muscles coiled like snakes as he brushed his body clean. His tattoos rippled. He was crawling with tattoos!

  “Let’s get this show on the road!” Willie said. “You missed breakfast.”

  “I ain’t hungry,” Cassidy said.

  “Now!” growled Willie.

  Cassidy picked up his sleeping bag and wrapped it around his head and body so only his eyes peered out. Lisa grinned.

  “Pronto!” Willie barked.

  Like yesterday—our first day on the river, after a night at the put-in at Sand Wash—it took about an hour to break camp, pump air into the three big inflatable rafts, strap down any gear that could bounce off in the rapids, and take off.

  Yesterday it was a slow, lazy river, with lots of hard rowing. Dad was teaching me how. These rafts had long oars instead of paddles, and you had to put your legs and back into each long pull. Like yesterday, here the river was flat. As I rowed there was plenty of time to gaze up at the high reddish-brown walls of the canyon, topped with magnificent buttes and towers.

  And there was plenty of time to get bored.

  As if reading my mind, Dad said, “You’re gonna love it today, kiddo. And by the end of the trip, you’re gonna learn to read the river like a pro.”

  Read the river? I wasn’t sure what that meant, but I figured I’d soon find out.

  The river started to get faster. It seemed to suck us along. I was facing backwar
ds at the oars, so I was forced to twist my neck around to see where I was going and what was coming.

  Then I heard it.

  “Listen,” Dad said.

  “What is it?” I asked.

  “White water!” he shouted.

  That’s when I felt the fear. Like a horse kicked me in the chest. I could feel a cold spray.

  Then, all of a sudden, the water was white, as if thousands of snowy rabbits were jumping all around us. My heart danced in my stomach.

  “You can do this, Aaron!” Dad said, “I really think you can do this!”

  But I didn’t think I could do this. I wanted to push the oars away. I wanted to jump out of my skin.

  I tried to row, but the water just shoved us wherever it wanted us to go. I could hardly keep the boat straight, let alone steer. I wrestled with the oars for a bit, then yelled, “YAAAAAAAAAH!”

  Finally, Dad tapped my shoulder. He was going to take over.

  As I stood up to let him take over, I lost my grip on the right oar and it ripped out of my hand. The handle conked me in the head.

  And my mind went black.

  CHAPTER TWO

  THE WILD BUNCH

  I was drowning.

  I was flailing and fighting and kicking and gagging. I tried to scream, but water filled my mouth. I couldn’t see a thing and my body was spinning round and round and bouncing, churning inside one of nature’s giant washing machines.

  Maytag! Maytag! rang through my head. Which way was up?

  I was terrified as I tumbled down the river, eyes closed, fighting for air, juggling snapshots of my short life.

  Suddenly, I was snatched up, as if by a giant eagle.

  Dad had grabbed me by my lifejacket and heaved me up. Next thing I knew, I was sprawled on the bottom of the raft, belching water.

  “What happened?” I spluttered.

  “You fell in. Are you okay?” Dad took off his straw hat, and the sun behind him made a halo around his bearded bony face, his nest of hair.

  My head was throbbing. I reached up and brushed the wet mop of hair aside and felt the golf ball poking up beneath the skin of my forehead.

  “You took a spill,” Dad said, and pulled me up beside him. “Nasty bump you got there, kiddo.” He smiled and adjusted the hawk feather in his hatband, and put his hat back on.

  We were floating lazily down another long, smooth stretch of river now. I looked around. There was Wild Man Willie, not twenty feet away, in the “kitchen boat,” where we kept all the food and cooking supplies. He was laughing like a loon. It was so embarrassing. I’d fallen in on my first rapid.

  “Took a nosedive on your first Class 3, huh, pard?” he said. “Thought your dad had caught him a big trout, the way you were flopping around in the bottom of that boat!”

  I didn’t say anything. What could I say?

  Beside him Cassidy just hunkered, grinning and shaking his head. “Hey, fool,” he said. “Better buckle your seat belt next time!” Har har.

  I looked away. Bully. He acted like the bullies at school. They liked to embarrass people, too.

  I was embarrassed plenty.

  Lisa was up ahead in the lead raft with her father, standing and staring at me. I couldn’t tell in the sun-glare if she was smiling or worried or what. I’m sure my face turned redder than the sun had already burned it.

  I rubbed my head again. And I rubbed my right shoulder, which felt like it had been yanked out of its socket.

  “On a scale of five,” Dad said, “Class 3 is just a taste of what’s to come downriver. There’s real fun to be had. But next time, if you can’t handle it—though I think you can—hang on to that oar till I can take over. Okay, kiddo?”

  Now you tell me, Dad, I wanted to say sarcastically. But I just sat there frozen, sunk into myself. If this was “just a taste of what’s to come,” I was in for it.

  I was still catching my breath—visualizing Cassidy ridiculing me—when I heard Roger holler, “Pull out!”

  Sitting around on a sandy beach, chowing down lunch, Cassidy spun his baseball cap backwards on his head and said, “Willie”—that’s what he called his dad—“What was that you were saying the other day about the Wild Bunch?”

  Willie crouched down in the sand before the three of us—Cassidy, Lisa, and me. In his floppy, battered hat, he looked like a short, powerful, crocodile wrestler with a big belly hard as iron.

  “I was saying how Butch Cassidy and his Wild Bunch used to use this here canyon—Desolation Canyon—for their escape routes after robbing banks back in the late eighteen hundreds.”

  “You mean like Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, right?”

  Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. I’d seen the DVD last summer with my dad. A good old movie with a bad ending, if I remembered right. Bad for the “heroes,” anyway. I think they both died in a shoot-out.

  “Not exactly like in the movies,” said Willie. “But legends about the Wild Bunch grew faster than desert flowers after a cloudburst. Law was always after them, and half the time folks were on the outlaws’ side. You wouldn’t want to get on their wrong side.”

  I snatched a look at Willie’s son, with his thick muscles and sinister tattoos. Same name. Was he named after Butch Cassidy? And does that make us part of the Wild Bunch in his twisted imagination?

  I didn’t feel like sitting around anymore. I hopped up and wandered over to the water’s edge. The Green River swirled lazily by.

  Suddenly, I was up in the air, then soaring out into the river. It was so cold and I was so surprised that I practically danced on the water. I didn’t even have time to yell.

  I stood up in the shallows and splashed back to shore, gasping, laughing or crying, I’m not sure which. Cassidy greeted me with a nasty grin, more like a sneer. He was missing a couple of teeth, which made him look even more menacing.

  He reached out and yanked me up on the bank. “Geez! Watch it!” I yelled. A knife of pain seared my sore shoulder. He was only sixteen years old, but he had arms like a WWE wrestler on TV, with tattoos of knives and snakes coiled around his arms and chest.

  “Guess you slipped, dude,” he said.

  “Yeah, whatever,” I said, rubbing my right shoulder. I didn’t know what to say. Everybody was looking at me.

  Lisa was looking at me.

  At school, I tried to ignore the bullies. Here, I couldn’t ignore Cassidy. I tried to hide my frustration and embarrassment.

  My dad walked over to Cassidy. “That was a little rough, don’t ya think?” He picked up a small flat stone and skipped it across the water.

  “Dude! What’s your problem?” snapped Cassidy.

  Dad was trying to stand up for me, but he was just embarrassing me even more. He stared hard at Cassidy for a moment, then strolled off, down along the river.

  Cassidy picked up a perfect skipping stone and fired it so hard it blurred across the water, bouncing six … seven … eight times.

  Wow, I said to myself. I picked up a skipping stone and flashed it sidearm across the water. A slash of pain shot up my shoulder. The rock bounced once, then plunked and sank out of sight. Great, I thought. Just great.

  Cassidy just grinned.

  The river was silent. I rubbed my shoulder and felt pretty dumb. Why couldn’t I be like Cassidy? But without all the macho and menace?

  Suddenly Willie (I guess to break the awkward silence) picked Cassidy up, swung him around, and tossed him out into the river. He screeched and landed with a splash.

  Then went under.

  But he didn’t pop back up like I had. After a few long moments, even I started to get a bad feeling. Did he get pulled downriver? Had he hit his head and gotten KOed by a boulder? Was he drowning?

  Before I could come up with more worst-case scenarios, Cassidy erupted from the water about one hundred feet downriver. Laughing. He was laughing like a monkey, splashing and jumping up and down. He jumped up and caught a low limb overhanging the water, swung like a chimpanzee, and flew off, back into
the river.

  Then he swam back to us and stomped up to shore.

  And came tearing straight at me.

  I tried to juke him, like in a football game.

  But at the last second he swerved and lifted his dad up in the air like a bodybuilder, and swung him high and hard out into the river. Willie made even a bigger splash than Cassidy had.

  He bounced back up from the bottom, and stared at Cassidy, murder in his eyes. Then he laughed, deep and hearty, and slashed the water with a powerful hand, spraying all of us standing on the shore. He yelled to Cassidy, “I’m comin’ to get ya!”

  “Really, old man?” said Cassidy. “Good luck with that!”

  Willie started wading in toward Cassidy, and at the same time, Roger yelled, “Yahoo!” and lurched toward Lisa to throw her in.

  She leaped away just in time, ran over and slapped my shoulder. “Race ya!” she yelled and took off down the beach. I took off after her.

  My river shoes squelched. I’m fast but she was faster. She tore down the beach like a cheetah and soon flew, on her long legs, around the bend and out of sight. This didn’t exactly help my self-esteem, but it was fun, and better than getting tossed in the river by Cassidy.

  I followed her to the end of the beach. Great chunks of stone littered the foot of the canyon walls. Up above, you could see dark caves in the red canyon rock. Lisa started up, angling up across the cliff face, finding handholds and footholds on every tiny ledge. I followed.

  “Watch out for mountain lions!” I hollered. Roger had warned us that there were cougars in this country. Lisa climbed like a wildcat, sending sharp little flecks of stone into my face and hair.

  By the time we reached the first cave, sweat stung my eyes. It’s always scary stepping into a dark place, but Lisa led the way. It was cool inside the darkness of the cave, and at first I was glad because it was scorching hot out. But soon an icy shiver ran up and down my spine, as much from the spookiness as the wet T-shirt clinging to me. We stood in the darkness for a while, rubbing the chill from our arms.

  “We shoulda brought a flashlight,” I said.