by Will Hobbs
There was a level of tension here we’d never felt before, even though Freddy was trying to keep it low-key. Troy sure didn’t want to make another mistake like back at Storm King, when we followed him up the wrong route.
Freddy didn’t speak for a bit, then added, “And then what? What if both boats flip? That other bad rapid is only a mile downstream.”
“Al said it was a mile downstream,” Troy said, visibly offended. “That doesn’t mean it is.”
I thought, wait a minute, Troy, the mile-by-mile guide says it’s there too.
Freddy threw up his hands. “It’s just what I think. He knows some moves we don’t, and more about first aid and rescue. But if you want to try it without him, that’s okay with me too.”
“You just won’t help us with Al,” Pug sneered.
“That’s right,” Freddy said softly.
Troy hesitated, then said grudgingly, “We’ll let him on for this rapid, and then we’ll see. It’s probably not as bad down in the gorge as he said. We can pick when and where we want to ditch him.”
12 //
I stayed up reading by flashlight long after Star fell asleep. I was reading the mile-by-mile guide and learning about the Grand Canyon. The worst rapid we’d done so far was called House Rock, rated an 8, and I figured out it was the one where Troy stood his boat on end. Where the paddle raft flipped and Star took her bad swim was in the Roaring Twenties, which were 5’s, 6’s, and 7’s. Sockdolager, just two miles downstream from Hance, was an 8 or a 9, depending on water levels, and the string of names Al mentioned—Horn Creek, Granite, Hermit, Crystal, and Lava—were pretty much 9’s and 10’s, depending on the water levels.
Outside in the dark, the rapid thundered even louder than it had in the daytime. I was snug in my sleeping bag, but chills ran down my spine as I paged through photographs of overturned boats in waves bigger than any we’d seen yet, and photographs of boats wrapped around rocks in the middle of the current. I was happy that Freddy had had the courage to speak up about keeping Al on. We were bound to be safer—that was just common sense.
Common sense made me think of Adam. I could hardly believe how little of it he seemed to have. His routines were a delight, but was he for real? The scorpion sure was. I kept waiting to get a glimpse of another side of Adam, one when he wasn’t “onstage,” but so far he was all jokes and tricks.
I went back to reading about Major Powell and his men. In his journal Powell remarked how he and his men felt “like pigmies, running up and down the sands, or lost among the boulders.” I could relate to that. The guide said that three of Powell’s men lost hope and tried to hike out of the canyon. They never made it. The next party to try the canyon had two men drown fifteen miles below Lee’s Ferry.
In the morning we were subdued and tense. Waking up, I felt like I’d taken a pounding from the rapid already. We stood and listened as Al got us together up on the hill and pointed out our route through Hance. “You guys in the paddle raft, follow me close but not too close. Watch exactly where I enter at the top of the rapid. If you miss by even a foot or two, you’ll either wrap on a rock or be sucked into a big reversal.”
I glanced over to Troy. He hated this. He really hated it.
Al charted strategy for the rest of our moves all the way through the rapid. It was pretty complicated and would require perfect teamwork. I was going to be paddling along with the others, and so was Troy. Star was going to be Al’s passenger in the oared raft.
Al and I were off by ourselves, untying the boats from the small trees by the shore. “I always look around the base of these tammies before I put my hand in there,” he said. “Rattlesnake hangout. Probably hibernating already, but you never know.”
“What are ‘tammies’?” I asked him.
“Tamarisks—these overgrown bushes. They aren’t native to North America; they came from Egypt, and spread all over these desert rivers. Say, Jessie, I talked to your dad.”
My heart about stopped. “Yes . . .”
“He’s really worried.”
Good, I thought.
“He was thinking about coming along with me.”
I’m sure glad he didn’t, I thought. I could just picture that—everybody checking him out. I would have looked like an idiot. “So,” I said slowly, “is there a message or what?”
“Well, he’s terribly concerned about your safety, but he doesn’t want to tell you what to do—he wanted me to tell you he has faith in you.”
“Gee, thanks,” I said.
“Let’s get going,” Troy shouted nervously. “Remember, we got miles to cover.”
“I have faith in you too,” Al was saying.
I wasn’t going to let him get to me. It came back fast, that sensation of hanging upside down and looking down a sheer wall for a thousand feet. I snapped, “I wish I could say the same about you.”
Then we pushed off. As we paddled through the slow water, following Al’s lead toward the edge of the drop, my heart was doing loops. Spumes of white water jetted up from below the brink. Al and Star dropped from sight. The Thunder was deafening—the adrenaline was flowing.
Then we squeezed between two huge boulders and slid over the edge. Our line was perfect and we escaped the two sucking holes on either side, underneath. From then on it wasn’t possible to follow Al’s lead; there was time only to react to what was happening. We banged off a rock and lost control, went up and over a tall wave, and free-fell into a hole. For five or ten seconds we were held there, surfing. Paddling was useless. We were spun sideways, the downstream side of the boat pitched up in the air, and I felt sure we were going to flip. Troy and I were trying to lunge toward that high side, but all we were doing was flailing.
I glanced back at Freddy and saw that same wild look in his eye that I remembered from Storm King, when my life was in his hands and he was up there on the other end of the rope. His jet-black hair was flying as water boiled all around us, and his dark face shone with that same feral joy and determination. The strength in his paddle, far beyond what you might guess could be marshaled by someone his size, was bracing the boat in the hole and preventing us from flipping. Finally the hole spit us out, and we pinballed through the rest of the rapid. We got sideways in the tailwaves once, but we were so heavy with water we didn’t flip.
Al was eddied out below. They’d taken so little water, Star was hardly bailing. We paddled alongside them and Rita reached out for the chicken line that circled their boat. She grabbed it and held the rafts together. Everybody was shouting, retelling our ride. I glanced back to Freddy, and our eyes met. I didn’t say anything, but I think he could tell I knew what he’d done and how much I thought of him.
For a minute, as we celebrated, it seemed as if Al was one of us. “That was a Big Drop,” he said. “Wild and crazy, eh?”
Somebody hollered, “Look at the walls!” We were in a dark gorge that bristled with thousands of sharp angles.
“The bowels of the earth,” Al declared, almost fondly. “The Inner Gorge. Vishnu schist, Brahma schist, Zoroaster granite—this stuff is two billion years old, half as old as the earth. It’s so old there’s only one-celled fossils in it.”
“Thanks for the geology lesson,” Troy said sarcastically.
“My pleasure, Troy. Sockdolager coming up. An old boxing term—it means a ‘knockout punch.’”
“Sock-doll-a-jer,” Freddy repeated.
We had no trouble with Sockdolager either, or Grapevine, which followed. Just terrific rides. I was happy to be back in the paddle raft, even if Troy wasn’t. I could tell it wasn’t only watching Al work the oars that was torturing Troy: It was the combination of Al having usurped the oars and Troy finding himself one of the crew on Freddy’s paddle raft. Troy had fallen from a great height to a lowly place.
In the calm water I got out the mile-by-mile guide and read all I could. It was amazing how much information was packed into its pages.
Troy said as we floated, and not very loud, “We need Al like
a fish needs a bicycle. We can do every rapid in this canyon without him.”
I started reading to him out of the guide, which annoyed him for some reason. He said, “Put that thing away, would you?”
I pretended I hadn’t heard that, and went back to reading silently. Troy was starting to get on my nerves again.
Al eddied out after a while and waited for us to catch up. I asked him about this Phantom Ranch about five miles down the river that was mentioned in the guide. “Do they really have a snack bar where you can get burgers and malts?” I asked.
That sure grabbed everyone by the ears.
“Yes, ma’am,” Al said, “Phantom Ranch. Only a ten-minute walk from the river, and the only piece of civilization in the entire canyon. From Phantom it’s only nine miles to the Park Headquarters up on the South Rim, in case anybody wants to run up for a steak dinner. There’s cabins at Phantom, a little post office, even a telephone.”
“I want to write a postcard to my mother,” Rita said. “I don’t want to talk to her, though—she’ll get hysterical.”
“Make sure you get your card hand-stamped,” Al told her. “The stamp says, ‘Carried Out by Mules from the Bottom of the Grand Canyon.’”
We were talking about blitzing full-speed ahead down to Phantom for lunch, but then Al had us stop and take a hike. “Clear Creek’s an amazing canyon. Easy walking, great waterfall.”
Not everyone came along. Troy and Pug said they weren’t interested and would rather hang out at the boats.
Clear Creek would have been pleasant if the sky hadn’t clouded over on us. Our feet were freezing as we walked up the shallow stream between the polished, narrow walls. I got to thinking it was a little strange that Al was taking the time for this hike, when he was so concerned about our dwindling food supply and all the river miles to come. The waterfall wasn’t nearly as close to the river as he’d suggested, but finally we made it.
If the sun had been shining, we could have followed Al’s lead and stood under the falls, letting the water massage our shoulders. But on a day like this you would have to be crazy, which is the diagnosis we gave Al for his condition. Star and I followed him around the side of the pool into the chilly grotto behind the falls. He didn’t seem to be suffering from the cold at all. “Maidenhair ferns,” Al said, pointing to the hanging greenery. What a lovely name, I thought. I caught Star’s eye, and we smiled as we shivered. It was a name that would fit into her Tarot world. Add sunlight, and this would be a place that should be pictured on one of her cards.
As we returned to the boats, I saw right away that Troy was pretty down. He and Pug had the lunch box out. “Hey, it’s way past lunchtime,” Troy grumbled. “Let’s eat. It would be stupid to wait until Phantom now.” Nobody spoke as we ate lightly from trail mix and dried apples. It was so strange having Al there with us. The whole feeling was different. It wasn’t our trip anymore—our trip was over. I understood Troy’s feelings. I felt sad for him, and for all of us.
We floated the narrow gorge between bristling black walls on down toward Phantom, and I paged through the mile-by-mile guide as a diversion. After a few miles Rita yelled and pointed, and I looked downstream to see a footbridge spanning the canyon. We beached just past it on the right side. There were no people or buildings around, only a trail sign for Phantom Ranch. We got out of the boats and stood around and stretched.
“So where are these cheeseburgers?” Pug said.
“I don’t care if we just ate,” Rita said. “I’m going to order two burgers and a malt.”
“I’d even eat a hamburger,” Star said. “Maybe two.”
Al was looking around as if he was looking for something, which surprised me. He was supposed to know where everything was.
Then everything started happening at once. A string of men came clattering across the footbridge. We looked up and saw uniforms—a whole lot of park rangers, and at least one policeman.
We looked to Al immediately. He was glancing from us to them and back again, and trying to think fast. It wasn’t hard to figure out what was happening: We’d been double-crossed. Al looked distressed—obviously there’d been some foul-up in his plans. The troops were late. “Trap!” Troy yelled. “We’ve been set up! Back in the boats, quick!”
Freddy, in a blur, was already untying our bowlines. Al was looking up the trail to see if his army was going to get to us in time. They were off the bridge and running full tilt now, but we were scrambling for our life jackets and jumping into the boats. Nobody was going to stop and debate about whether to give ourselves up. There’s nothing like being chased to make up your mind for you.
Al didn’t have that much he could do about it. Pug had already pulled his knife and was keeping Al at bay, covering our retreat like a genuine commando. After years of reading Soldier of Fortune, he was having his ultimate fantasy come to life. Adam, meanwhile, was circling Al in a gleeful dance, striking his ninja poses.
“You tricked us!” Rita screamed at Al, and then she added a string of New York’s best obscenities.
Troy was rowing away, and as Pug and Adam backed aboard, we paddled away too.
Al was reaching for our bowline, which was loose on the beach. I gave it a huge jerk and it snapped past his hands.
We were free. We caught the current as all those uniformed men came running down the trail and joined Al at the beach.
“You don’t have enough food!” Al shouted.
“Rice!” Rita yelled back. “Thanks for packing all the extra rice!”
“What if the weather turns bad? . . . Don’t do it!”
We didn’t care. We were pointing back at them and laughing.
// 13
Al and the park rangers and the police couldn’t chase us very far along the shore. The gorge soon constricted, and a minor rapid whisked us through jagged cliffs of fractured black rock rising vertically from the water on both sides. A glance back gave no hint of the beach at Phantom, the footbridge, or our would-be captors.
We couldn’t see up and out to the canyon above the gorge. It did feel, as Al suggested, as if we were in the bowels of the earth. We’d slipped the noose, but a look around at the menacing black rock provided no context for celebration; rather, it set us brooding on the consequences of our bolt for freedom and filled us with foreboding.
It was late afternoon and the daylight was fading. Each of these October days was shorter than the one before, but this one, with the cloud cover, seemed to be closing by the minute. I was once again in the front of Troy’s boat, with the paddle raft floating right alongside us. Adam was holding on to our chicken line, keeping the two boats snugged together. The wind was blowing, our feet were blocks of ice in the cold water in the bottom of the boat, and everybody was pulling on sweaters, then rain slickers, to try to ward off the icy waves. “Holy cow!” Rita wailed. “I’ve never been this cold in my life!”
Rita let her teeth chatter so hard I thought they’d break. I was fretting, thinking how complaining might make her feel better, but it sure didn’t make the rest of us feel very good. I thought about telling her to cut it out, but I knew she’d yell at me no matter how I put it. I put my nose back in the mile-by-mile guide, that invaluable gift from our twice-former leader. And what a boon it would be, especially knowing the location of camps and rapids.
I read to everybody about what was coming up, namely Horn Creek Rapid, only two miles downstream. “What’s it rated?” everybody wanted to know. “How bad is it?”
Everybody wanted to know, I should have said, except Troy. He seemed pained; he had an attitude about that guide.
“Horn Creek’s an eight or a nine, except at low water,” I explained. “At low water it’s a ten. It says, ‘not recommended below ten thousand cubic feet per second.’ I guess that would make it into a ten-plus.”
“So how much water is ten thousand cubic feet per second?” Rita asked nervously, through her chattering teeth. “How much are we on now?”
“Well, there’s five feet
of bathtub ring on the shore,” I said. “The river’s not high, that’s for sure. The question is, how low is it?”
“I don’t know about the rest of you guys,” Adam said, “but I’m not fond of that ‘not recommended’ bit. . . . I mean, you don’t want to see me cry like a baby, do you? My feet are so cold as it is, they feel like they might break off. Wouldn’t this be a lovely evening for a swim?”
Star started to protest Adam’s pessimistic imagery, but he stopped her. “Star, don’t even say what I think you’re going to say—it’s bad luck to say something is bad luck. What do you guys say we think about camp?”
I looked to the map, and was happy to report that the guide listed a small camp above Horn Creek Rapid on the right. Everybody was relieved.
“We’ll take it,” Adam said. “Make a reservation. Give them Troy’s credit card number.”
That brought a smile to Troy’s face. “Fine with me,” he said.
I watched the right side for that camp, and then both banks, as we picked up the hiss of the River Thunder downstream. The cliffs continued to skyrocket out of the river on both sides, and there wasn’t a bit of sandy beach as far down as I could see into the twilight.
On and on we drifted, as the Thunder increased. “Hug the right side,” Troy told the others. “We can’t afford to miss that camp.”
“If there’s a place to perch, we’ll take it,” Rita agreed. “I’m scared. Let’s paddle upstream, guys. I changed my mind about calling my mother.”
Rita wasn’t the only one who was thinking about paddling upstream. I’d already considered it, and realized that paddling upstream here would be about as difficult as time travel. It’s a one-way river, I thought. Against this kind of current, we couldn’t gain twenty feet even if we threw all the gear out and all seven of us paddled like maniacs. Pulling the boats upstream along the shore was an impossibility as well. Given the cliffs, there was nowhere to walk.
The heartless river gods turned up their Thunder and turned down the daylight. Closer and closer we drifted toward the murky brink of Horn Creek Rapid, and still no camp, no beach, not even a sliver of sand. The cliffs stood back a bit on the right side, but the bank was steep and lined with boulders. What was wrong? Where was the camp that the guide promised? Could high water have washed it away? Maybe some things change from one year to the next. What did we know? I handed the guide to Troy and let him scour it too. This had to be a Big Drop, it had to be Horn Creek Rapid from the awful sound of it and the nearing horizon line on the water, the jets of white water spurting up from below. Everybody on the other boat was standing up and looking this way and that for the camp that wasn’t there. We shouted back and forth, and there was panic in our voices. “Where’s camp, Jessie?” Troy asked anxiously, as he tossed the guide back to me and pulled at the oars. “You said there was a camp.”
