by Pete Hautman
“I don’t think so,” I said. We were standing at the edge looking down into the canyon.
“You don’t want to do it?”
“I just don’t think it could roll all the way to the river.” We could see a tiny section of the turquoise ribbon far below—the Colorado River. “That’d be more than ten miles. I don’t think it could go that far. There’s all kinds of places for it to get stuck.”
“Yeah, but it’s so big!” Tim said. “It would crash through anything!” He was in love with the idea of sending that rock over the edge.
Tim just didn’t comprehend the size of the canyon. Even with it spread out in front of him he didn’t understand how huge it was. That rock was no more than a mouse turd to the Grand Canyon.
But when Tim got an idea, he wouldn’t let go.
He found an old hydraulic jack in the transportation building and talked me into helping him haul it to the rim in a wheelbarrow. We wedged the jack down in that crack and started pumping. At first the rock wouldn’t budge. It must’ve weighed about fifty tons. But Tim got a long metal pipe and stuck it on the jack handle for leverage and ‘we both threw our weight against it. With a ragged groan, the rock moved about an inch.
“Yes!” Tim shouted, his face red with effort and excitement. We wedged some smaller rocks down into the crack to hold it, then repositioned the jack and went at it again.
We worked on that rock for three days. Every time we got stuck or busted a jack, Tim would find another one in an abandoned truck or car. And every time we were about to give up, that rock would move another quarter inch. The crack between the rock and the rim kept getting wider until it was big enough to crawl into. We had four jacks crammed down in there.
On the third day the rock shifted, only in the wrong direction. All four of the jacks got scrunched, and that rock just sat there laughing at us.
“That’s it,” I said, flinging the jack handle off the edge. “This is stupid “We heard the jack handle clang against the rocks a hundred feet below.
Tim stood there scowling.
“We can get more jacks in Tusayan,” he said. Tusayan was the town six miles to the south. No one lived there anymore, but it was full of old cars and trucks.
“I don’t want to go to Tusayan.” The place was creepy. The houses were full of skeletons. Last time I was there I saw a coyote with a bone in its mouth. I was pretty sure it was some little kid’s arm bone.
“Then I’ll go myself.”
“You’re stupid. This thing isn’t gonna move.” I jumped across the crack and stood on the rock. I stomped my feet on it; it felt solid as a fifty ton boulder. “This rock’s gonna be here for another million years,” I said.
That was when the earthquake hit. Except it wasn’t an earthquake at all, it was the rock moving, and I was standing on it. I saw Tim’s eyes go wide, and the sky seemed to tilt, and the air filled with thunder. I must’ve jumped, because the next thing I knew I was lying on my belly on the rim and the rock was sliding down the face of the cliff. Tim’s mouth was open and he was screaming or shouting but all I could hear was the grinding, booming, eardrum-shattering sound of the canyon giving up a chunk of its rim. Tim looked out over the edge to watch; I got on all fours and scrambled in the opposite direction. The roar continued for what seemed like forever. Sound waves echoed up from the canyon as the enormous boulder smashed smaller rocks and splintered trees.
As the sound faded I could hear Tim yelling, “Go! Go! Go!”
And then it was over, except for faint echoes returning from distant buttes.
Tim leaned so far out over the brink that I thought he would go next. “Cool!” he said.
• • •
Ten minutes later I was still shaking.
The rock never made it to the river. It had skidded down the face of the rim, tore a ragged path through a forest of stunted pinyon pine, oak, and juniper, crashed through a limestone ledge a few hundred feet below, cut a gouge through the layer of pale sandstone, and come to rest on a wide shelf about six hundred feet below us. On its way down, the rock had dislodged several of its smaller brothers, which continued to tumble and slide. The roar of the avalanche went on for half a minute, and the echoes for even longer.
I thought Tim would be disappointed that our big rock hadn’t reached the river, but instead he was inspired. All the way back to ElTovar he talked really fast. He knew where there was another rock, an even bigger one. Me, I could hardly talk. I’d almost gotten killed. Besides, the Grand Canyon was big enough. I didn’t want to make it any bigger.
“I bet we could find some dynamite someplace,” Tim said.
We were almost to the village when we ran into Uncle and Harryette. Uncle looked worried.
“Did you hear that?” Uncle asked.
“Yeah,” Tim said. “We were right by it. A huge avalanche!”
“Thank God! I thought for a second that the dam had gone.”
He was talking about the Glen Canyon Dam, one hundred miles upriver. Uncle was obsessed with the dam. If it ever failed, he liked to say, the river would rip the guts out of the canyon.
Uncle liked to worry about the canyon. He was a Grand Canyon National Park Ranger, the only one left alive. Even though nobody paid him or even knew he was alive—as far as we knew, the government didn’t exist anymore—he still wore his uniform. He figured the Canyon was his responsibility. You couldn’t so much as stomp on a tarantula without him blowing his stack.
“Show me,” he said.
Uh-oh, I thought. Harryette, silent as always, had a little smile on her face, like she knew what was coming. She thought it was funny whenever I got in trouble with Uncle.
She signed, What did you guys do?
Tim, who had picked up some sign language from Harryette, signed back: We made the canyon bigger.
Tim was always trying to impress my sister. He once told me he thought she was “a real looker.” Something he’d heard in a movie once. Personally, I couldn’t see it.
Since there was no way around it, Tim and I walked with Uncle and Harryette back to where we’d sent the rock on its journey. It took Uncle about two seconds to figure out that hunk of limestone hadn’t jumped off the rim on its own. He saw our footprints and the broken jacks on the rocks below. He turned to me and drew back his hand as if he was going to hit me.
I hoped he would. I hoped he’d hit me hard. If he smacked me a good one, that might be the end of it. But something in his eyes glittered and he lowered his hand.
“Charles Jacob Kane,” he said, shaking his head sadly, “you have disappointed me.”
I knew then that Tim and I were in for the most severe punishment imaginable.
We were going to have to listen to one of Uncle’s lectures.
Uncle was a man of few words—except when you got him started about the Canyon. For nine years, ever since Harryette and I had come to live with him, he’d been teaching us about the Grand Canyon. We knew the names of the rocks, the plants, the animals. We knew the life cycle of the desert tortoise, the safest way to descend a talus slope, and when to harvest the fruit of the banana yucca. It took three million years for the Colorado River to carve out the Canyon, and that was about how long Uncle would have kept talking about it if he didn’t have to eat and sleep.
This lecture started off with a detailed description of the damage we had done. Uncle went over the geological history of the rock we had moved, and of the older rocks below it. He talked about the trees and other plants that had been uprooted, shredded, and crushed. He told us how many hundreds of years it took a juniper tree to grow, and how many animals relied on the acorns from the little oaks, and how many decades it would be before the lichens we had scraped from the canyon wall could renew themselves.
We were sitting in the lobby of El Tovar, surrounded by the stuffed heads of dead animals: deer, javelina, elk, pronghorn, and an enormous moose we called Bullwinkle. Uncle paced back and forth in front of the dead fireplace, talking. I’d heard it all be
fore, but I knew that if I didn’t look like I was listening he would give me a whack on the head. A couple of times during his lecture he got so worked up he whacked me anyway, but not very hard, just a tap. Harryette, sitting off to the side, was reading a book and smiling. Every now and then she would catch my eye and make a silent joke with her hands. Look at the little glob of foam on Uncle’s lip. You think he’s got rabies? She was trying to make me laugh, so I’d get hit again. I bit my cheek, holding it back.
Uncle kept talking for more than an hour. He told us about how the Canyon had once been clean and pure, and then the Spaniards had come and gazed upon it with greedy eyes, and then John Wesley Powell had run the river from top to bottom, and then the miners had riddled the canyon walls with holes, and then the tourists had come with their gum wrappers and cigarette butts and beer cans, and then the dam had been built and the Canyon was all but destroyed. It was thoughtless people like us—he pointed at me and Tim—who had almost wrecked the most beautiful place on earth.
I felt a yawn coming on, so I bit harder on my cheek. I must’ve made a face because Uncle stepped over and rapped the top of my head with his knuckle. What really fried me was that the whole thing had been Tim’s idea, and he never got hit once. At least not by Uncle. I looked at Harryette. She was watching me with her I-told-you-so smirk. I looked up at Bullwinkle the moose. He seemed to be smirking, too.
All that happened, I guess, about three years ago. Tim got me in plenty of trouble after that—like the time we got into Uncle’s wine supply—but the avalanche was the biggest and noisiest stunt we ever pulled.
Tim was trouble, but we always had fun.
HARRYETTE
TIM AND HAP HAD BEEN on a trading circuit for more than three months when Uncle got a call on his CB radio that they were back on the plateau and would be arriving in two days. I was eager to see Tim again. Except for Uncle and Harryette, I hadn’t seen another human being since March. But I was also a little nervous. Tim always showed up with stories of adventures and amazing sights, and I always felt like boring old Ceej, just sitting around Grand Canyon Village cutting wood and feeding the mules and losing games of gin rummy to my sister.
So I started thinking about ways I could impress him, and I came up with the idea of fresh fish. Except my idea wasn’t really about fish, it was about heading down the Bright Angel Trail. All the way to the river. Alone. Fishing was just the excuse, and the fish were how I’d prove that I’d done it.
The more I thought about it, the more I liked my idea. Tim and I had talked about riding down to the river, but we’d never done it. Uncle thought it would be too dangerous for a couple of irresponsible kids. The Bright Angel had once been a wide, well-maintained trail, but since the Flu it had fallen into disrepair. Several areas were washed out and hard to follow. I wasn’t worried, though. I’d explored the upper parts of the trail hundreds of times, and I’d ridden down to the river twice before with Uncle, so I knew what I was getting into. It was a long mule ride—a good three hours just to get down, and about five hours to climb back up, but I figured if I left early enough I’d have time to catch some trout and be back on the rim for dinner. Uncle might not even miss me. Or maybe he would, and I’d catch hell, but that didn’t seem important at the time. I imagined myself talking to Tim over a dinner of fried rainbow trout: “Yeah, I just figured I’d ride down the Bright Angel and snag a few.” Like it was nothing.
The predawn air was chilly, only a few degrees above freezing. It would be a lot warmer down in the canyon. I saddled Cecil. He had a mind of his own, but he was the younger and stronger of our two mules. I loaded the saddlebags with a pair of four-liter plastic water bags, a fishing rod, and a bag of pine nut-butter sandwiches. Cecil was too sleepy to make much of a fuss, but just to make sure he stayed quiet, I fed him a handful of dried apple rings. You wouldn’t think a mule would care what it ate, but Cecil had his favorites, and dried apples were at the top of his list. I led him out of the corral and walked him quietly past Kolb Studio to the trailhead.
Kolb Studio was a two-story wooden building pasted to the edge of the canyon like a glob of food stuck to the rim of a water glass. A few months earlier, on her nineteenth birthday, Harryette had moved out of her rooms in the El Tovar and into Kolb Studio. She said she needed a place of her own. Uncle had made no objection. He knew better. Harryette pretty much always got what she wanted.
The Bright Angel Trail passed directly below the studio. I walked Cecil the first few hundred yards. I didn’t want to wake up my sister. The last thing I wanted was for her to tell Uncle what I was doing. I waited until we were out of earshot before climbing onto the saddle. Cecil let out a sputter of protest and stamped his feet a few times. I leaned over his thick neck and fed him another apple ring, then urged him on down the trail.
The sky began to lighten in the east. The canyon spread out before me, filling my heart. I had lived on the rim half my life, and I’d been down in the canyon dozens of times, but the feeling of riding down into that enormous slash in the earth remained undiminished. Three hundred miles long and one mile deep, the Grand Canyon could make a grizzly bear feel tiny and insignificant. To enter the canyon was an act of faith. I had to trust the canyon, and myself, and Cecil the mule. If all three of us cooperated, I’d return to the rim alive. With fish.
The first hours of our descent were uneventful. The trail had washed out in a few places, but Cecil was surefooted, and with a little coaxing we made it past the bad spots. Soon the sun lit the top of Shiva Temple, the largest butte to the north, and then brightened the pointed, bone-colored summit of Shiva’s lesser neighbor, Isis Temple. As we approached Indian Garden, sunlight spread across the Tonto Platform, two miles away and five hundred feet below me. I could see the Tonto Trail, a ribbon of pale brown twisting and rippling across the soft gray-green of the platform. This was farther than I had ever come on my own. I stopped and unzipped my jacket; it was getting warmer. I felt exposed and vulnerable, but also energized and determined to complete my journey. I listened to the sound of wind on rock, and a faint hiss that may have come all the way from the river. I even heard the distant echo of Cecil’s hooves on rock—or was I hearing something else?
Turning in my saddle, I saw a mounted figure coming down the trail behind me. I knew who it was right away because the sun had risen just high enough to glance off the top of her bald head. Harryette. My stupid sister had saddled up Frosty, our other mule, and followed me.
She stopped about two hundred yards back and made a circle with her arms over her head, asking me if I was okay. Instead of returning the signal to let her know all was well, I turned my back and continued down the trail. Harryette had been telling me what to do my whole life, and I was sick of it.
This was supposed to be a solo journey. I didn’t ask for company.
Harryette followed me all the way to the river. I took the trail upstream, past the suspension bridge that crosses the river to Phantom Ranch, an old, abandoned tourist camp across the river. I’d been there once with Uncle, and I hadn’t liked it. According to Uncle, Phantom Ranch was named after a Havasupai ghost that had come up from the underworld. The Havasupai Indians were all dead now, so maybe there were a lot of their ghosts hanging out in the canyon, but we hadn’t seen any. It was spooky enough with all the collapsing stone buildings full of black widow spiders and rattlesnakes.
That same trip, Uncle and I had caught some trout just below the small rapids a few hundred yards upstream. I followed the trail to the rapids. They looked different. In fact, the whole river looked different. Instead of the rushing, noisy torrent I remembered, the river had become a quiet, burbling brook. The jumble of boulders that formed the rapids were sticking up out of the water, their sides slick with algae. I could have rock-hopped all the way across the river. Strange.
I walked Cecil upstream to a sand spit to let him drink, then tied him to a small tamarisk tree. Harryette watched me, shaking her head. She made a motion with her hands, telling me I
hadn’t tied him good enough. I ignored her. I didn’t need my sister telling me how to tie a knot. Ever since our parents died, she’d been bossing me around. I was sick of it. This one time I’d wanted to do something by myself and here she was, telling me how to tie up a mule. I unloaded the fishing rod and went hunting for bait.
The best bait for big trout, according to Uncle, was a live scorpion. I set about turning over rocks. There are a lot of scorpions in the canyon, and it only took a few minutes for me to find a big fat one. I held it down with my boot and used my pocket knife to lop off its stinger. A couple years ago I stepped on a scorpion with bare feet and I couldn’t walk for a week, so I didn’t feel too sorry for this one.
I stuck it on a hook, then walked downstream a few yards and threw the line out into a pool. Harryette tied Frosty to a mesquite tree, then came up and stood beside me. She was about two inches taller than me, but I was catching up fast.
The water is low, she signed. They must have closed the dam off up at Page.
“You’re ugly and bald,” I said.
Harryette just stood and frowned, watching my line where it entered the water. If she’d understood what I’d said she’d have thrown me right in the river. But there wasn’t much danger of that. Spoken words meant nothing to Harryette. She couldn’t understand me, and she couldn’t speak a word. Harryette was a Survivor.
Uncle is going to kill you, Harryette signed, standing in front of me so I could see her hands.
