River Thunder

by Will Hobbs

  I felt myself leaving the raft over the tarped load at the stern. My right hand, clutching desperately behind me, found a strap. In the violence of the water, my body was awash and flying, but I hung on with that one hand. Thrown back down on the load, I found myself flipped onto my stomach.

  My free hand found another strap. I’d ended up so far to the back of the raft, my lower legs were out in the river. I knew it was useless to try to climb back over the tarp and scramble for the oars. The boat was already brimful with water and would be impossible to row. If I stayed flat on my stomach, spread-eagled, I had a chance of staying aboard. It was like trying to hang on to the back of a sounding whale.

  The bow was pointing directly downriver, as if I were still rowing. I saw it rise up and up onto the first of the mountainous waves in the lower right side of the rapid. Looming high above, its curling crest broke on us. I thought for certain we would flip, but we wallowed through, partly from luck and partly due to the ponderous weight of the water in the raft. I caught a glimpse of Star and Adam floating around in the front of the raft but hanging on with death grips.

  We were deluged by torrents and more torrents. It felt like we were underwater, we were being pounded so heavily. Never had I even imagined whitewater on this scale. It was a force of nature all its own, it was a revelation.

  Two, three more of these mountains of water broke on us. The last one swept Star out of the raft. She’d floated over the top of the tube, but she was still hanging on. Adam was struggling to resist being floated out himself while working his way over to Star. He managed to haul her back in.

  It was only with Lava suddenly behind us and the boat spinning out of control in the whirlpools that I regained the oars. “Bail!” I yelled. With a glance downstream I saw Troy’s boat right side up. They were screaming at the top of their lungs and so were we.

  As soon as the motor rigs saw we were both upright, they took off. We fought for a mile or more to bail out the boats and get to shore. When we finally reached the shore and got the boats tied, we lost it. The six of us just outright lost it, screaming and hugging and falling down in the sand.

  Chapter

  26

  We camped within sight of Diamond Peak, a dramatic desert Matterhorn. The heights of the Canyon here are drawn far back from the margins of the river, opening up the sky. The vegetation is sparse, the rock scaly.

  We were camped at Mile 219, six miles short of the takeout, secure in the knowledge that we had survived. I sat by the river watching the first oranges and purples of the sunset reflect on all the dappled water pockets in a sand spit that reached far out into the river. The high water was finally on its way down.

  Pug was lit by a sudden inspiration. He thought we should all climb to the flat-topped promontory high above our camp and watch the sunset from up there. We dropped what we were doing and scrambled up the spine of the slope. We panted for breath as we raced the advance of the sunset.

  At a sort of collar under the cliffs of the promontory, we paused to recover from our climb before looking for a way up to the top. Most of us were bent over double and recharging our lungs. “Chuckwalla!” Adam cried.

  “Chuckwalla yourself,” Rita gasped.

  “No, a lizard, a huge fat guy like a dinosaur.”

  “I gotta see this.”

  “He ran behind this slab.”

  We crouched and followed Adam under the slab, which had come to rest like a gigantic lean-to against the cliff. I took off my straw hat so I could see better. The only light in there was indirect; our eyes were taking a minute to adjust.

  “Here he is.” Adam was pointing into a crevice between smaller slabs of broken rock. “He’s puffed himself up with air so you can’t pull him out.”

  “Not sure I’d want to,” Rita said. “He might take your finger off.”

  The huge brown lizard did have a prehistoric look to it.

  “Look,” Star said. “Look.”

  Star had found something else. In the deepest, lowest corner of the stone lean-to rested a large, perfect pottery jar. It had a delicate opening about three inches wide at its top.

  “Left by the Ancient Ones,” Star whispered. “Let’s just admire it. It’s a gift.”

  We all crowded in and crouched for a close-up look. It was colored a sort of burnished yellow, which was highlighted by the last rays of the sun sneaking through a fissure above us.

  I noticed the expression on Troy’s face. It wasn’t one I’d ever seen there before. A simple shade of joy.

  “This moment is a reflection of us,” Star said. “Here we are, all of us, whole and intact.”

  “Rhaat onnn!” Pug agreed.

  As we left the pot behind, I had the feeling that I’d be coming back to visit it again and again. I thought of my father. I wanted to take him through Crystal and Lava, take him to Thunder River, show him the Canyon, show him this pot.

  We found a way up the back side of the cliff, onto the top of the promontory. The sun, spoking shafts of light and color all across the Canyon, had waited for us to enjoy this last burst of splendor together. We were drawn immediately toward the edge, where we’d be able to look down on the river.

  There was our camp, far below. The Canyon Wren and the Hired Gun were rocking side by side in the eddy.

  Without anyone’s having suggested it, we were forming a circle, holding on to each other. We laughed, and we cried, knowing that our time together was coming to a close.

  Behind us now, the redwall of Marble Canyon, the turquoise waters of the River of Blue, the bristling drama of the dark Inner Gorge. Behind us, the cottonwood-lined climb to the stream that bursts from the depths of the earth and into the sky.

  All our rapids were run, one hundred and sixty of them. The roar of the River Thunder was receding into memory.

  Below us, the Colorado swept by in silent majesty.

  I was leaving the river knowing myself better than ever before. Perhaps that was the river’s gift to each of us. How can rock and light and moving water do this? That’s a mystery I could take a lifetime to explore.

  Author’s Note

  In writing River Thunder I’ve drawn heavily on my own experiences in the Grand Canyon, as I did in my earlier novel, Downriver. So far I’ve been fortunate enough to row my own raft down the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon ten times. My wife, Jean, and I usually put these trips together ourselves, traveling with only a few rafts and a group of four to eight friends. Once we did the trip solo, just the two of us with our one raft.

  For this story, I was attempting to recapture, in Jessie’s voice, the emotional quality of rowing the Canyon for the first time, as well as to re-create the conditions I’d encountered on my own first trip. Little did Jean and I know back in the summer of 1983, as we prepared for that first trip, that we were going to be involved in what would become a legendary event in the history of river running in the Grand Canyon—the high water of 1983, often referred to among longtime Grand Canyon boatmen as The Flood.

  For the first time since the completion of Glen Canyon Dam in 1963, the reservoir behind the dam, Lake Powell, was virtually filled to the brim. A catastrophic miscalculation of the winter snowpack and the spring runoff had resulted in more water’s coming into the reservoir than anticipated, and at a much faster rate. It became necessary to release water past the dam and into the Grand Canyon at levels no one had seen since the pre-dam era—all the way up to 92,000 cubic feet per second.

  Rafters on the river at that time had no idea how serious the emergency at the dam really was. The massive spillway tunnels that skirt the dam on either side were being put to use for the first time, and the concrete linings of the tunnels failed. The spillways began to run red as the rushing water carved immense cavities inside the cliffs. The Colorado River was threatening to find a route around the dam. It would cost more than thirty million dollars in the wake of this disaster to redesign the spillways and repair the damage. It had been a close call.

  I
t was a heady time for rafters, private and professional alike, who happened to be on the river. Helicopters were flying up and down the Canyon, dropping messages on unsuspecting boaters, warning them about the rising water and advising them to seek higher ground. Thirty-seven-foot motor rigs were flipping in rapids like Nankoweap that normally posed no threat. Smaller rafts, highly maneuverable, almost seemed to have the advantage. The dory speed run described in River Thunder is based very closely on the legendary run completed at that time that set a new rowing record for the Canyon: 36 hours, 38 minutes, and 29 seconds.

  On our ’83 trip, I was rowing a fifteen-foot raft, often through waves more than twenty feet high. On the day of our launch, the river was running 65,000 cubic feet per second. Our rafts were rowed by four men and one woman, only two of whom had rowed the Canyon before. We managed to complete the trip with only two flips among us, a result that gave me confidence that Jessie and Troy’s combined total of three flips in the novel was realistic.

  Running the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon is sometimes called the great American adventure. I hope that my depictions of the magic of moving water and life on the river will encourage readers to discover this adventure for themselves. River companies like my fictitious Canyon Magic take more than ten thousand people a year through the Canyon, and do it with a remarkable safety record. My mother went on a motorized trip with a professional company when she was seventy-three years old, and had the time of her life.

  About the Author

  Will Hobbs is the author of many award-winning novels for young adults, including Downriver, the companion to River Thunder. A graduate of Stanford University, he grew up in Alaska, Texas, and California. Will loves hiking and running rivers and has rowed his own whitewater raft down the Colorado through the Grand Canyon many times. He lives in the mountains outside Durango, Colorado, with his wife, Jean.

  Turn the page for more thrilling adventure in the companion novel Downriver.

  Winner of the California Young Reader Medal and the Colorado Blue Spruce Book Award

  “Exquisitely plotted, with nail biting suspense and excitement.”

  —School Library Journal

  0-440-22673-2

  On sale now from Laurel-Leaf Books

  Excerpt from Downriver by Will Hobbs

  Copyright © 1991 by Will Hobbs

  Published by Bantam Doubleday Dell Books for Young Readers

  a division of Random House, Inc.

  1540 Broadway, New York, New York 10036

  All rights reserved.

  1

  I STUMBLED ON A ROCK THAT WAS BARELY sticking up, my legs were that tired. Flailing for balance, with the pack working against me, I slipped in the mud and almost went down. I still couldn’t believe this was really happening. I couldn’t believe my dad had done this to me.

  For five days Al had been leading us into the most rugged corners of the San Juan Mountains in southwestern Colorado, coaxing and pushing us over the passes and into the peaks, through good weather and bad weather, mostly through bone-freezing rain and sleet. “October in the mountains,” Al said with a grin. “You live a whole lot closer to the edge.”

  The going was always either straight up or straight down—we rarely followed trails. There were eight of us, four guys and four girls including me, all serving nine weeks in this outdoor education school from hell. Al called his program Discovery Unlimited, but we called it Hoods in the Woods, the name we inherited from the previous waves of misfits who’d come through the place.

  Al kept us marching all day under heavy packs, grinding us down in preparation for … for what? He would never say when you asked him. He’d only reply with a wink or a knowing grin. Hike, freeze, starve, break out the ropes and carabiners and risk your life every day—for what?

  “Just a mile till camp, guys,” Al said. “Think about a sunny day.”

  I couldn’t. I could see nothing but the frightening dark tunnel that was my future. I saw no images there, no hopes, only blackness. All my happy images lay in the past, all the happy scenes with my dad when it was just the two of us. I tried to dwell on the good times as I walked, but those pictures, those voices, only intensified my feeling of loss and left me staring once again into that black tunnel.

  “How’s it going?” Suddenly Troy was walking at my side.

  “Okay, I guess.”

  “You don’t look so happy.”

  “I’m ready to be in camp. When Al says a mile, you know it’s two or three.”

  “It’s part of his charm.”

  We jumped a little creek and started up a steep slope. Soon neither of us had enough breath to speak, but thinking about Troy took my mind off me. He seemed much older than the rest of us, just from the way he carried himself. It was like he was sizing up this whole situation from the outside. I’d been wondering if he was going to be friendly, and now it seemed he was.

  Camp at last. I found a dry spot under a tree and eased my back against its trunk. Troy sought me out and sat cross-legged, up close. “Does the climbing scare you, Jessie?” He was looking at me with the calmest and clearest blue eyes I’d ever seen.

  “Yes,” I allowed, looking away.

  “I thought so.” He said it knowingly, in a way that promised help. When I looked back to his eyes, they kind of locked on to mine and wouldn’t let go. Apparently he never needed to blink, and he wasn’t going to look away. His eyes seemed to be challenging me to … to what?

  “I’m doing okay so far.…”

  His eyes let me go. For now, I thought. I was fascinated by him. Someone was yelling that he was supposed to be one of the cooks. Troy reluctantly unwound his long legs and said, “Catch ya later.”

  We drew in close to the campfire that night, putting off as always the moment when we’d have to get into our freezing bags and face the shivering hours of the night. We knew Al would make his speech about the next day and of course he did, as he poked the fire. “We’ve got the climbing skills down now, guys—it’s time for a true test. After that we’ll head back to base camp for hot showers, real food, and our beds.”

  I pictured the little log cabin that I shared with Star, and how good it would be to stoke the potbellied stove until the stovepipe turned red. So what was this big test going to be?

  “Tomorrow,” Al announced, “you’re going to climb Storm King Peak, elevation thirteen thousand, seven hundred, fifty-two feet. And it’s no puppy. You’ll know you’ve accomplished something. We’ll draw straws this evening for climbing partners. Troy, you’re going to be the navigator—you haven’t led yet.”

  “Nothin’ against Troy,” Rita said in her nasal, right-at-you New York accent, “but if this Storm King is such a big deal, why not let Freddy lead? We know he’s good at it.”

  I glanced over at Freddy. The campfire light flickering on his deep brown skin, black eyes, and shaggy black hair revealed, as usual, nothing in the way of response. True, I thought, he’s capable, but he’s practically mute. I’d much rather follow Troy. I had reason to believe that Troy cared whether I lived or died.

  Al was shaking his head emphatically as he spread the topographic map out on the ground. “Troy will do just fine. He’s your leader for the climb. Star, you’re shivering—come into the light and warm yourself up. Folks, everybody needs to develop these skills, every one of you. Sometimes there isn’t going to be anybody else around.”

  “But we travel in a pack,” Adam pointed out with his trademark mischievous grin. Our redhead loved nothing better than sidetracking a conversation. “So whoever’s going to lead can study the map and the rest of us followers can go to bed.”

  “Seconded,” said Pug, the Big Fella, stretching one giant leg out toward the fire and nudging a piece of wood into its center.

  Al scratched behind an ear, amid the wiry gray hair that stuck out beneath his wool cap. He was rocking slightly on his haunches; he preferred to squat rather than pull up a log or a rock. He reminded me in his body language of an abor
igine or a tribesman from the Amazon, right out of one of the slide shows my dad used in his anthropology classes. “Sometimes,” Al said slowly, “sometimes self-reliance is the key to survival, but other times cooperation is. Let’s everybody study this map, and then tomorrow, on the mountain, we’ll pool our knowledge. Whenever somebody’s wondering if you’re doing the right thing, bring it up with Troy.”

  “What if the right thing, the way we figure it, would be to go into Silverton for burgers?” suggested Adam.

  Everyone had a smile or a laugh, including Al. With Adam, there was never anything at stake. He was so easy.

  I could sense Heather getting ready to object, and I braced myself for her voice, which I found jarring and oddly mismatched with her broad shoulders. When she thought something was unfair, which was most of the time, her voice rose even higher than its usual pitch and her speech came out squeaking and gasping, because she couldn’t talk and breathe at the same time when she was upset. “What I don’t get is, we can all cooperate on the climb, right, except for you, Al. You won’t help us at all, right?”

  “That’s what this is all about, Heather—you guys have the skills now. You make the decisions, you make the choices, you live by the consequences. You’ll be on your own. I’ll just tag along for the scenery.”

  Troy, I noticed, was attending to all this. Watching, listening, but withholding comment. Everybody was looking to him, including Al. Troy was a heavy, and everybody knew it. We were all wondering when he’d take Al on, but he was holding back.

  When Heather saw that Troy wasn’t going to respond, she said in that voice like an abused violin string, “You say we get to make the decisions, but really we’re just puppets, and you’re manipulating us. I don’t like your rules, Al. I can’t accept that you get to make them all up. Who gave you that right?”