by John McPhee
The raft touches the riverbank. Sanderson gets out to inspect the rapid, and we go, too. We stand on a black ledge, in the roar of the torrent, and look at the water. It goes everywhere. From bank to bank, the river is filled with boulders, and the water smashes into them, sends up auroras of spray, curls thickly, and pounds straight down into bombcrater holes. It eddies into pockets of lethal calm and it doubles back to hit itself. Its valleys are deeper and its hills are higher than in any other rapid in North America. The drop is prodigious—twenty-six feet in a hundred yards—but that is only half the story. Prospect Creek, rising black-waited like a coal chute across the river, has shoved enough rock in here to stop six rivers, and this has produced the preëminent rapid of the Colorado.
When Dominy stepped up on the ledge and into the immediacy of Lava Falls, he shouted above the thunder, “Boy, that’s a son of a bitch! Look at those rocks! See that hole over there? Jesus! Look at that one!”
Brower said, “Look at the way the water swirls. It’s alive!”
The phys.-ed. teacher said, “Boy, that could tear the hell out of your bod.”
Brower said, “Few come, but thousands drown.”
Dominy said, “If I were Jerry, I’d go to the left and then try to move to the right.”
Lava protruded from the banks in jagged masses, particularly on the right, and there was a boulder there that looked like an axe blade. Brower said, “I’d go in on the right and out on the left.”
My own view was that the river would make all the decisions. I asked Sanderson how he planned to approach what we saw there.
“There’s only one way to do it,” he said. “We go to the right.”
The raft moved into the river slowly, and turned, and moved toward the low white wall. A hundred yards. Seventy-five yards. Fifty yards. It seems odd, but I did not notice until just then that Brower was on the raft. He was, in fact, beside me. His legs were braced, his hands were tight on a safety rope, and his Sierra Club cup was hooked in his belt. The tendons in his neck were taut. His chin was up. His eyes looked straight down the river. From a shirt pocket Dominy withdrew a cigar. He lighted it and took a voluminous drag. We had remaining about fifteen seconds of calm water. He said, “I might bite an inch off the end, but I doubt it.” Then we went into Lava Falls.
Water welled up like a cushion against the big boulder on the right, and the raft went straight into it, but the pillow of crashing water was so thick that it acted on the raft like a great rubber fender between a wharf and a ship. We slid off the rock and to the left—into the craterscape. The raft bent like a V, flipped open, and shuddered forward. The little outboard—it represented all the choice we had—cavitated, and screamed in the air. Water rose up in tons through the bottom of the raft. It came in from the left, the right, and above. It felt great. It covered us, pounded us, lifted us, and heaved us scudding to the base of the rapid.
For a moment, we sat quietly in the calm, looking back. Then Brower said, “The foot of Lava Falls would be two hundred and twenty-five feet beneath the surface of Lake Dominy.”
Dominy said nothing. He just sat there, drawing on a wet, dead cigar. Ten minutes later, however, in the dry and baking Arizona air, he struck a match and lighted the cigar again.
BY JOHN MCPHEE
Irons in the Fire
The Ransom of Russian Art
Assembling California
Looking for a Ship
The Control of Nature
Rising from the Plains
Table of Contents
La Place de la Concorde Suisse
In Suspect Terrain
Basin and Range
Giving Good Weight
Coming into the Country
The Survival of the Bark Canoe
Pieces of the Frame
The Curve of Binding Energy
The Deltoid Pumpkin Seed
Encounters with the Archdruid
The Crofter and the Laird
Levels of the Game
A Roomful of Hovings
The Pine Barrens
Oranges
The Headmaster
A Sense of Where You Are
The John McPhee Reader
The Second John McPhee Reader
Copyright © 1971 by John McPhee
All rights reserved
Published in 1971 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
18 West 18th Street, New York 10011
www.fsgbooks.com
Designed by Betty Crumley
eISBN 9780374708634
First eBook Edition : September 2011
First paperback edition, 1977
The text of this book originally appeared in The New Yorker, and was developed with the editorial counsel of William Shawn and Robert Bingham.
Library of Congress catalog card number: 71-154634
The cover painting is “The Hetch-Hetchy Valley, California,”
by Albert Bierstadt, ca. 1874-1880, reproduced in its entirety
below. Copyright © Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford. Bequest of Mrs.
Theodore Lyman in memory of her husband.
