by Will Hobbs
A few seconds later I could finally see what all the commotion was about. At high water, the lion’s share of the current was racing under a low overhanging ledge on the right side. “Head-chopper!” Pug yelled back with all his might as he pointed to the hazard.
If I followed Troy’s lead, and tried to pull away from that overhang the way he was barely managing to do, I might not make it. If we got forced under that ledge, everything above the level of the tubes including us was going to be sheared off.
“I’m going to do that scoot again,” I warned Star. I picked the spot I was going to angle for, pivoted the raft, and started building up speed with the current.
It worked. I saw the horrific action of the whitewater on the ledge with my peripheral vision as we cleared it cleanly.
After that I used the Scoot, as I thought of it, at every possible opportunity, whether I really needed it or not, so I could keep practicing. I had a rush of hope that it might give me a fighting chance in some of the Big Drops, starting at Hance Rapid down at Mile 76. I realized that everything we’d seen, as enormous as the water had been, was going to pale compared to the Big Drops.
We made camp all the way down at Saddle Canyon, Mile 47. We’d put in a thirty-mile day, but we could have done more, the current was so fast. No sooner had we set up camp, the whole kitchen and all, than we heard a distinctive chop-chop-chop coming from up the Canyon. Troy craned his neck around to get a look. “Is that what I think it is?”
Rita jumped up, trying to spot the helicopter. “Are you sure you have a legal permit, Troy? Sure they aren’t after us?”
“Maybe they’re after you, Rita. Is there something you forgot to tell us about what you’ve been up to back in Zoo York?”
A few seconds later a helicopter marked NPS appeared.
“Neighborhood Pool Service?” Pug quipped.
The helicopter hovered several hundred feet above, and we saw a guy wearing a Park Service uniform, goggles, and an orange helmet lean out of the passenger window and take a good look at us.
Then he dropped something out of his window, right into camp. It landed about thirty feet away from us. The guy waved as Pug ran for it, and the helicopter sped away downstream.
It was a bag of rice, with a note inside. The note read, “63,000 RELEASED THIS MORNING. CAMP HIGH. BE CAREFUL.”
“Holy cow,” Rita said. “Is this a joke or something?”
Troy muttered grimly, “They didn’t look very much like comedians.”
“Look,” Pug said, pointing at the beach where we’d tied up the boats. The boats were floating fifteen feet offshore. We looked around at each other, and not a word further was spoken, not even a curse. Our fear was rising as fast as the water.
Chapter
10
There just wasn’t any higher ground to retreat to that was remotely level. We had to take down the camp, rig the rafts—it took an hour—and head downstream. We kept looking, but we couldn’t find anyplace campable. The camps marked on the map were all underwater.
With a pained smile, I remembered my father asking about the camp markers on the mile-by-mile map. He was thinking there’d be picnic tables and firepits and johns at those marked camps, like at Forest Service campgrounds. I explained that camp meant a small beach or any kind of level ground where you could set up your kitchen tables and tents. There were never any improvements. Once in a while the beach would be a couple hundred feet long. Mostly the shores were just rubble, so a marked camp was a prize and a thing of beauty.
It felt eerie still being on the river at dusk. We ran Nankoweap Rapid at Mile 52 almost in the dark. It had a hole in it that could have eaten Pittsburgh, but we heard it coming, kept hugging the right side, and avoided it cleanly. There were two high-water camps at Nankoweap, and fortunately one of them wasn’t taken. We all knew we had to pull together or this was going to turn ugly. Everybody pitched in putting the camp together in the dark.
Nobody grumbled, nobody cussed the Bureau of Reclamation, not even Troy. I was so proud of him. He was working on his head, no doubt about it. Pasta primavera with sun-dried tomatoes and garlic bread was served by lantern light at eleven P.M. Fortunately the wind wasn’t blowing sand around, so we could simply lay out our sleeping bags on the beach and forget about setting up tents. It was so much more comfortable to sleep in the open air, anyway, than in our tents.
To my surprise, Troy invited me to take a walk after we finished the dishes. I was swaying on my feet, I was so tired. “It’s too late to crash early,” he said. “A little walk up the beach would help me clear out my head. Look how much moonlight there is—we wouldn’t even need flashlights.”
“I would if I could, but I can’t,” I told him. “I’m totally wasted.”
“Another night,” he said, touching my shoulder.
Oh great, I thought. What’s this about?
Don’t make too much of it, I tried to convince myself, too exhausted to care.
The next day I did the Scoot in Kwagunt, the first big rapid we came to. I did it again in Mile 60 Rapid just for practice. We stopped for lunch at a side stream, the Little Colorado. I had my own name for it from before, the River of Blue. The water was still the same heavenly robin’s egg blue, but there was so much more of it. The high water of the dark green Colorado was acting like a dam, backing up the Caribbean-like River of Blue. It looked like a turquoise lake.
During lunch Rita sidled over and whispered, “That thing you’re doing really bothers Troy.”
“What thing?” I whispered back, instantly feeling paranoid.
“That backwards thing. He keeps saying there’s no point to it.”
“You’re kidding.”
“Look, Jessie, we just don’t want to tick him off, okay? He’s been doing good.”
“I know,” I agreed. “But this is pretty strange, don’t you think?”
“I know it is. But I just hate to see him getting worked up. He watches every move you make—you know that, don’t you? And then he won’t drink water, so he’s getting these headaches. He’s been popping a lot of pain pills. All he’ll drink is a few cans of pop. Won’t wear a hat, either. He’s fryin’ his brains.”
Because it would ruin his hair, I was thinking, but I didn’t say it. Instead I told myself to quit thinking so tacky. “I guess we can’t make him do anything. Maybe he’ll figure it out on his own.”
“So?” she persisted. “You gonna help out here by not pushing his buttons?”
It struck me as strange that Rita of all people was bringing this up. Why was she worried about Troy’s state of mind? “With this water, I have to do what’s working for me,” I told her. “And that’s what I’m going to keep doing. This ain’t no disco, in case you haven’t noticed.”
Just as we were packing the remains of lunch away, another helicopter appeared from downstream and flew past us upriver. It was followed several minutes later by a second, and then by a third. We stayed and watched, hoping they would clue us in. For the next hour, there were helicopters passing back and forth so fast we lost track of how many were involved.
Rita seemed to think that if we cursed them loud enough, they’d get the message: namely, that we wanted some explanations.
Troy was muttering now about the Bureau of Wreck-the-Nation, and I couldn’t blame him. Enough was enough.
We didn’t get any explanations. All we got, with no way to come by information, was a rising flood of anxiety. I overheard Rita, around the corner and under the shade of a ledge, telling Pug about how we were getting close to the Inner Gorge and the Big Drops. “I know,” Pug said, “I keep looking at the map. I don’t even want to think about what this high water’s going to look like down in the gorge.”
“Bad luck,” Rita said. “Too bad this had to happen right when we’re down here. Troy’s lucky starting date wasn’t so lucky after all.”
“What’s going to happen?”
I heard her smack him and say, “We’re toast, big guy.”
&
nbsp; “I want muh muther!”
We proceeded downriver through surging rapids marked as riffles on the guide. Now that we were below the Little Colorado, we’d left Marble Canyon behind.
We got our first good look at the Grand Canyon around Mile 65. After the confinement of Marble Canyon, the world had suddenly opened up. We were looking at a wide-open postcard view of the upper reaches of the Grand Canyon. From the dark lava flows at river level, the alternating cliffs and slopes soared nearly five thousand feet up through most of the colors in the crayon box. Pug filed his protest about the high water by mooning the Desert View Watchtower, perched like an ancient ruin ten miles away on the rim.
As we were approaching Tanner Rapid, the current swept us close to the shore on the left, in advance of a big bend. Up ahead, perhaps two hundred yards downstream, we noticed someone sitting in the shade of a tamarisk along the shore. The person suddenly jumped up, perhaps when he saw us coming.
He started pulling something out of a red duffel. No boats to be seen, just this one guy. He must have hiked in, I thought.
We were moving his way fast. The hiker was whipping out some kind of black clothing and putting it on, trousers and a top. Black? In this heat?
Rita yelled back at us, “What’s the deal with this guy?”
Now he was putting on a mask, a black mask, and quickly reaching for something else in his bag.
A rubber sword.
He was dancing all around now, striking exaggerated martial arts poses. I saw a flash of red hair.
“That’s Adam!” Pug yelled.
“Holy cow,” Rita shouted. “I don’t believe this.”
“Interesting,” I heard Troy say.
Adam whipped off his mask as we jumped out of our rafts onto the bank. Same old Adam, big head of curly red hair, maybe a few more freckles than I remembered. “So the Funhogs thought they’d run the Big Ditch without me? What’s the deal?”
In the spirit of the moment, Rita jumped on him, like she was about six years old. “Man, am I glad to see you!” she exclaimed.
“I can tell, I can tell! Ninja attacked in Grand Canyon by girl in red bathing suit!”
Just to make sure he knew how happy she was, Rita kissed him on the cheek. Then she let him go and backed off, looking a little embarrassed by her outburst.
Adam had hugs for Star and me, and a handshake for Pug, whose face was lit with excitement. For Troy, standing by with the bowlines, Adam gave a neutral nod, that was all.
His face was more filled out. Now that I’d had a good look at him, it looked like he’d grown a couple of inches as well. He had more … bearing.
Adam was recovering his stride. “You got a little sun somewhere, Pug. What’d it do, burn off your baby fat?”
The Big Fella patted his stomach. “But I’m gaining it all back. We have food for an army on this trip!”
“So you guys can feed me? Good deal.”
Adam started whipping off his Ninja suit. “Man, this thing is insanely hot. I wanted to make sure you’d recognize me.”
He reached down by his duffel, grabbed an outlandish white baseball cap, and snugged it onto his head. It had a bill so long it might have shaded his navel, and a big cloth flap in the back to cover his neck. He struck a pose with his jaw in the air and said, “So how do I look, guys?”
Pug was trying not to laugh. “It takes a real man to wear a hat like that, Adam.”
Rita and Star and I couldn’t keep from laughing.
“Got it in Page yesterday. Sort of a Lawrence of Arabia model—they assured me it would be popular with the ladies. It’s just the thing for my skin cancer phobia, and in a pinch, it also serves as a tent.”
“It’s a fashion statement, all right,” Rita agreed.
“So …” Adam paused, looking us over. “How’s everything going down here? Star, did you see it in the tea leaves that I was coming? Jessie, how’re you doing with the raft?”
“Swimmingly,” I replied.
Adam’s quick. “You don’t mean …”
“House Rock.”
“Sounds like I came to the right place to indulge in a little whitewater excitement.”
Rita snorted. “Ha! Just so you know, we’re all going to die.”
“I see.… Well, now that we got that settled … How’s this guy doing on the oars?” He gave Troy a poke. “Nice shades, mate. And the diamond stud’s studly, too—it looks like you’ve gone Hollywood.”
“Good to see you, Adam.”
Rita waved her arms impatiently. “Let’s dispense with the chitchat. Tell us how you dropped out of the sky.”
“No parachute required,” he replied with a grin. “I started at dawn from the Watchtower, down the Tanner Trail. Hoofed it hard. I thought today would be the earliest you could get here, even on this flood. Cut it close even so—got here only an hour ago.”
“That’s not what I was getting at,” Rita protested. “You were working for Discovery Unlimited, remember?”
“Oh, that! Al let me come. I mean, after you called, Jessie, he could see I was eatin’ my heart out thinking about you guys. They got me covered back there. I think he thought you might be able to use some help, tryin’ to run this sucker on the flood and all.”
“Flood?” I asked. “They’re actually calling it a flood?”
“You wouldn’t believe it. This is national news! It’s on the radio all the time. Yesterday it was on the front page of USA Today with a photograph of the dam releasing all this water. I saw it for myself on the way down here. Talk about whitewater! It makes its own cloud, even a rainbow.”
“They got the spillways going, too?” Troy wondered.
“You bet they do. They’re blasting out of every orifice they got—the gates on the bottom of the dam, plus four huge nozzles shooting hundreds of feet into the river, plus the spillway tunnels, which they’ve never used before. The tunnels snake around the dam through the cliffs on both sides and blast into the river about a hundred yards below the dam. The whole thing is like special effects—too big to be real.”
“Pretty,” Troy said. “Real nice.”
“It seems the Bureau of Rec really messed up this spring when they should have been drawing the lake down. In May it kept snowing in the mountains, then it rained a bunch and melted the snow, then it got real hot suddenly … and all that water ran downhill a lot faster than the guys with the pencils had planned. The papers are saying they blew it because they were so gung ho on the lake getting totally full for the first time. Wanted to show off for the public. The Bureau is acting like it’s not that big a deal—they’re saying the releases are all within the design capacity of the dam, and all that.”
“Doesn’t sound like they’re thinking about us,” Rita pointed out.
“I hope you guys realize, you’re running this river during an historic event.”
“And you thought you’d join us?” Star teased.
Adam beamed that impish smile of his. “Tell you what I was wondering as I was hiking in this morning.… Am I the last guy riding into the Alamo?”
“Hey, thanks a lot!” Rita wailed.
Adam turned to Star. “Sorry about the negative imagery—I just couldn’t help it.”
“You’re going to be on my boat,” I warned him. “It’s definitely the thrill boat. I could use some more weight to keep the front end down, especially with the big stuff coming up. It’ll keep the raft more balanced.”
“ ‘Balance’ is the key word,” Star declared, green eyes sparkling. “That’s what we’re shootin’ for, all right.”
“Enough jawing!” Rita ordered. “Let’s go find camp. I feel like cooking supper. Oh, and let’s get a few things straight, new guy. Everything’s democratic on this trip except who’s head cook and who rows the boats. Also, the guys set up the john.”
Pug stroked his jaw. “I don’t mind doing it, but I don’t remember … ah … voting on that exactly, Rita.”
“Of course not! You’re already doing such a
great job filtering all our drinking water, I figure you might as well have it all. You’re City Services! You know, water and sewer. You guys are our janitors in shining armor, and believe me, we appreciate it.”
Troy, despite laying back, was hugely enjoying all of this. He looked genuinely happy despite the grim news. Like he recognized that Adam was the missing catalyst and now we were going to be okay.
“Oh, one more thing,” Rita announced. “We had a ceremony. We burned up last year. No talking about it. Fresh start.”
“What exactly did you burn?”
“Sticks.”
“Ah, sticks. I’m not sure I would part with one of those.” Adam looked around, and his eyes fell on his Ninja outfit. To our surprise he scooped it up and chucked it into the river. He was left with only his ridiculous rubber sword, which he brandished while tucking his free hand behind the small of his back. “I’m keeping this,” he declared theatrically. “In case things get rough.”
Chapter
11
I recognized the pinnacle peak coming up on the left, and the orange-red wall rising from the river on the right. We were approaching Hance, the first of the Big Drops.
Around the corner, the River Thunder ramped up and up. Adam gave us an expression of mock terror that was only half feigned.
On the left, a group of six rowed rafts, all yellow, had pulled out to scout. We knew we weren’t that close to the brink yet, maybe a quarter mile away, but we could see their boatmen up on the talus slope. They were pointing downstream. Yes, they were scouting, from that distance.
We pulled hard to get over there. We wouldn’t have known to pull out this soon.
Now I could see the lettering on the rafts. We’d caught up to Canyon Magic! I took another look. There was the pretty woman with the dark hair and the beat-up straw hat who’d led in House Rock, and there was the boatman, a Navajo or Hopi, I guessed, with the peroxide streak in his jet-black hair.
Troy and I tied up, then skirted the commercial passengers on the shore and climbed the slope where the guides were scouting. The youngest, with an earring and a bright red headband, was pointing out some feature in the rapid. His voice sounded nervous. Everyone looked so intense. I hadn’t looked downstream at the rapid yet, on purpose. My heart rate was off the charts as it was.
