Ill-fated. That's what such trips were called, right? Whether on a river or the sea or a road or in the sky, a trip that went wrong was ill-fated. As if somebody, somehow, should have known better.
I leaned my forehead against the cold window and watched the river unroll below.
After Lee's, Wes pulled up to fly above the plateau, giving us a wide-screen view of the kinks and curls of the river as it carved across the reddish desert. And then up ahead, to the right, a riverside town came into view.
“Page, Arizona,” Wes said. “Glen Canyon Dam.”
I craned my neck for a look because Page, Arizona was—according to the trip permit—the residence of rafter Frank Hembry. The town was just downriver from the dam. No surprise that Hembry liked fishing, liked rafting. Page was, I figured, a four-hour drive to the site we were hunting.
And then Wes suddenly told us to hang on. He dove again, plunging the chopper down below the canyon walls, down to skim the river, and I thought wait a minute and then we rounded a bend and I saw the bridge ahead and beyond that the solid slab of concrete spanning the river, and I thought pull up Wes but he didn't, the crazy pilot kept going, on a collision course for the dam. It was hundreds of feet across and hundreds of feet high, filling the canyon. Nobody yelled. Everybody was frozen. Except for Wes, piloting us straight for those concave walls that seemed to welcome us like open arms. I let out a gasp. I wanted Neely to yank her cousin's ponytail instead of tapping his shoulder, to get him to yank on the stick to pull up, pull up, pull up.
He pulled up.
As we rose over the bridge to skim the top of the concrete behemoth, Neely said, “You trying to kill us, cousin?”
His answer came, harshly, in the headphones. “I hate that fucking dam.”
Edgar had swiveled to stare at Wes. Justin was shaking his head.
Walter snapped, “Don't do that again, Wes.”
Wes touched his ball cap, and then took us higher.
I'd caught my breath. I said, “Why do you hate it?”
“I'm a river runner. River ran wilder back in the pre-dambrian.”
It took me a moment. Pre-dambrian, rhymes with Precambrian. Very funny. The guy was crazy. And from what I'd seen, the water still got plenty wild downriver.
Upriver, ahead of us, the dammed-up water sprawled into a vast lake that zigged and zagged across the desert, narrowing here and there, branching into side streams and canyons.
“Lake Powell,” Wes said, with a touch of residual rancor.
Yeah. Okay. The lake was named after John Wesley Powell, so I'd read. Powell was the first white man to explore and map the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon. I'd read his biography—Down the Great Unknown. Apt name. He was a one-armed major who hadn't gotten enough action in the Civil War, who thirsted for more. He and his team found it, rafting into the Great Unknown. He was also a geologist who took the time to sample and map the jaw-dropping rocks of the Canyon. I wondered what Powell would think, now in the post-dambrian, about naming the corralled water after him? Not much, I suspected.
Down below, speed boats were darting about like water bugs.
“Getting that bathtub ring, Edgar?” Justin asked.
“Yup.” Edgar angled the camera.
A whitish band striped the base of the sandstone cliffs that bordered the lake. It was calcite—mineral salts evaporated from the water.
“Top of the stripe is the high water mark,” Justin said. “Lake's at half capacity.”
“Drought,” Neely said. “Overuse. Too many straws in the river.”
Okay, I thought, we're all copacetic again. Getting footage for the documentary. Flying at a sane altitude.
We came to the end of Lake Powell, although it was hard to differentiate that from the inflowing Colorado River. Where did the lake end and the river begin? Or vice-versa? No way to tell, from up here.
It became, simply, the river again.
It depended not just upon your field of view but also your frame of reference. What you wanted from it. A river-runner's thrill ride. A lifeline for parched desert lands.
Awhile later Wes said, simply, “Canyonlands,” and we looked down on rugged red-rock country, and we kept following the sinuous river, and then Wes said, “Moab,” still red-rock country, and then as we flew onward the landscape below turned whiter like bones in the sun.
Justin said, “Salt country.”
Yeah, it's in his binder. And now it was smeared down below, the brackish evaporites from ancient seas and lakes.
I saw a big motor raft down there on the river, full of bare-chested guys, not one of them wearing his PFD. They looked up at our chopper. One raised a silver can in a toast. The others waved. I waved in reply. Not major party animals, but it got me wondering again if Reid's group had simply been fooling around, careless, forgetting their vests and, consequently, meeting tragedy.
“Hey.” Neely elbowed Justin and pointed out her window.
Justin leaned across her to look. “Edgar, get a closeup of the guy in the blue shorts.”
Edgar swiveled his camera.
I focused on the guy in the blue shorts. Mmmm-hmmm. Justin had a good eye.
Still, would it kill blue-shorts to wear his PFD? Guess it would. Give him an uneven tan. I took a closer look at the raft and noticed that the bow line was neatly secured. Right, even partiers rig their lines.
We passed over the raft and I saw, up ahead, a tributary river branching off the Colorado's main stem.
Wes said, “Here?”
I said, “Yeah.”
Wes banked hard to the right.
“The Dolores River,” Justin said. Before I could ask, he added, “It's in my binder.”
It was also bookmarked on my laptop. This tributary river was going to take us where we wanted to go.
Justin peered out his window. “I'd like footage. Wes, can we follow it?” He added, “And live.”
Wes chuckled and dropped the chopper down to skim the bluffs above the river. We followed the Dolores, low and slow, twisting and turning, Wes the hawk-winged pilot, leaving behind the crazy. We flew over mesas and hills and low canyons, passing across the invisible border from Utah into Colorado. Down below I saw white smears along the river banks, which I took to be gypsum. And then the river dug into a sandstone-walled gorge, and the water below grew wilder and two rafters were riding it, and the gorge squirreled back and forth, and Wes, bless him, didn't dive-bomb, just tracked the river until it abruptly exited the gorge into gentle hill country, which then gave onto a little basin.
The basin was a contained slice of land, perhaps five miles wide and twenty miles long. It was blockaded at the long ends by jagged snowclad mountains.
And now Wes banked sharply, and our view rotated, and we were looking straight ahead, up the valley. To our right and left, red mesas formed walls that rose, I'd think, at least a thousand feet, and ran the length of the valley. In the middle, the valley wrinkled up into low bluffs. The land itself looked mostly empty, a sagebrush-dotted basin greened here and there by crops. The river we'd been following bisected the valley, running across it to enter another canyon in the wall on the far side.
One would expect a rational river to travel down a valley's length. This one, though, had cut its ancient course before the valley was formed, and stubbornly continued to downcut its path throughout the ages.
Walter said, “This place fits Reid.”
Neely said, “How so?”
“The name. Paradox Valley.”
Yeah. The paradoxical course of the river had given the valley its name. Reid the geologist would understand the tectonic and erosional forces. Reid the man was nothing if not paradoxical.
Neely gave a laugh, throaty in my headphones. “Which is it, Walter? He's the victim? He's the hero?” She paused. “Maybe he's the villain.”
“Pay no attention, Walter,” Justin said. “She'll cast him as she needs him.”
As long as she didn't cast him as mysteriously risen from
the dead.
Walter did not comment.
Wes tipped the chopper's nose and we dropped down toward the scattered buildings that constituted a barely-there town.
“Bedrock,” Wes said. “End of the line.”
I wondered how Reid Lassen had found his way to this hidden little valley.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
I STOOD ON THE CLIFFTOP overlooking Paradox Valley.
The view was not as dramatic as from Wes's helicopter, but it was stationary.
It had taken us a half-hour roundabout drive from Bedrock via good and not-so-good roads and then a steep hike up to this mesa.
Neely had borrowed a four-wheel-drive SUV from the owner of the Bedrock Store. Before we'd left Grand Canyon Village, she'd Googled and found him, phoned him. Neely had done her Hollywood thing and promised to include a shot of the historic old building in her documentary. More to the point, she paid him two hundred bucks.
“So,” Neely said now, looking around the ridge, bare of anything but rock and soil and sagebrush, “where do we get the shark teeth?”
Good question. Where do we find the bed of gypsum-veined Mancos Shale where Reid's fossil had once lived?
It did not jump out at me.
Indeed, the prevailing surficial rock here was a medium-grained tan sandstone—the Dakota, I expected, based on the geologic map I'd studied. And the Dakota was a welcome sight. Ages ago—when the sedimentary units of these shaly sandstone cliffs were laid down as shallow marine deposits—the Mancos topped the Dakota. But over time the Mancos, being a relatively soft shale, had been eroded away in many places.
We were hunting for a survivor, here. A soft gray beast hiding from the elements. Beneath an overhang, possibly. A shy outcrop.
The GPS coordinates on the fossil forum had led us to this particular patch of clifftop, but Walter and I were going to have to do the work, from here. No worries. It was a very small patch. I could get used to this—this narrowing of the 'hood so that we could then waltz in and do the easy bit.
Justin was paying the hunt no attention. He stood at the rim and stared down at the valley. Neely was scurrying around, checking on Walter, checking on me, nudging Edgar and his camera here and there.
Wes sat off by himself against a small boulder. He'd pulled his HGP ball cap low. Perhaps he was grabbing a snooze, after all that high-octane flying.
“Cassie.”
I turned from the view of the others to the view of Walter standing beneath a jutting rock overhang, peering into a hollow. I came up beside him and looked inside the cavity.
Neely and Edgar joined us, Edgar panning the cliff face and the hollow, catching Walter and me in his lens.
I wiped the hiking dust off my face and ran my fingers through my tangled hair. And then I put aside vanity and paid attention to the geology. The rocky walls of the hollow were a dove-gray shale, veined here and there with whitish stringers. I took a step inside and ran my fingernail across a stringer, and left a mark. Gypsum. Walter and I exchanged a nod. We still needed to do some sampling—we'd do a hand-lens comparison right here, with the dish of Hembry chips, and then back at the lab we'd do a deeper-eye comparison-scope analysis—but here and now this surely did look like the right place.
“Neely,” Walter said, “we'll need some working room in here. We'll give a shout if we find something.”
Edgar lowered the camera and nudged her, and they retreated.
Walter and I set to work.
He knelt to examine the shale debris on the floor. Although the hollow was sheltered, the rock was not immune to wind and rain erosion. The fissile shale had shed some of its skin, onto the floor.
I took the specimen dish from my pack, set it on the floor beside Walter, and plucked out the shark-tooth chip for my own hunt. My ID, back at the lab. My follow-through, here. I got my flashlight and started at the nearest wall. The light was dim in here, and the rock face uneven. Like the chips on the floor, the rock face was a weathered dove-ish gray. My hopes spiked when I spotted a shell-shaped blob that I tentatively ID'ed as the remains of a Cretaceous bivalve.
This cave was fossiliferous.
I continued, looking for more fossils, and more to the point, for hack jobs where somebody—well, Reid—had put a cold chisel to the rock to detach a fossil. Given that he'd posted his discovery on the forum a few years ago, I expected a weathered cut.
I found several, clustered in an offset spot on the wall, not apparent until one got close. The cut rock was weathered-looking gray but to be certain, I put on safety glasses and used my own hammer and chisel to pry off a bit of shale nearby, and secured it in a sample bag. My fresh-cut face showed dark gray. Same color as when I'd cut the end of a chip in the lab, to examine its fresh face. In both cases, the fresh-cut Mancos showed its dark-gray carbonaceous character. When it weathered, the Mancos turned lighter, because organic carbon gets broken down in an oxygen-rich environment.
It appeared that Reid had taken several specimens from this rock face. More shark teeth? Oysters? Some other ancient remains?
I was getting ahead of myself. First, see if the Hembry chip indeed originated here. I focused my light and tried to fit it to one of the cuts. Second time, I got my match. Like plugging a hole in a jigsaw puzzle.
I couldn't have asked for more.
And I had to wonder how Reid had made his way here. Not exactly easy to find. If one went hunting the notoriously fossiliferous Mancos, there were many places with a whole lot more Mancos. This little shy outlier? How had he come here?
“That it?”
Walter was by my side, looking at the jigsaw fit.
“Looks like it,” I said. “How about the stuff on the floor? A match?”
“Looking like it.”
“I wonder why Reid took those.”
“Documentation,” Walter said. “Back in the day, we found a few fossils and Reid always took associated rock, to place the fossils in context.”
I nodded. We fell silent. At some other rock face, tracing some other evidence to its source, we would have high-fived. Here, now, the evidence carried too much baggage. Reid apparently gifting a cool fossil to his fishing buddy. Reid having ghosted his old friend. Return from the dead, find new friends.
“Yoo-hoo.”
We turned to see Neely silhouetted in the entrance to the little cave. I whispered to Walter, “I've got this.” I called to Neely, “We've got a match.” Walter had to leave the cave to make room for Neely and Edgar with his camera, and so it worked out, me holding the fossil rock chip to the cut mark while Edgar filmed, and Walter taking the time and space he needed outside.
“So?” Neely asked.
I said, “Preliminary, but looks like here's where Reid got his fossil.”
“And?”
I knew what she wanted—what does that tell us about the rafting incident? It sure wasn't part of Reid's geology lesson on the famous rock layers of the Grand Canyon. Show and tell, as he'd put it, casting himself as a champion of the river, of the Canyon. This place, this Paradox Valley, was on a tributary of the Colorado, and it was a good distance, as our hawk-skilled pilot flew, from the national park. What had the one place to do with the other?
I said, “Your guess is as good as mine.”
She said, “My guess involves somebody doing something they shouldn't.”
In truth, so did mine.
We left the cave, emerging into the bright sunlight. Squinting, then putting on shades again. Walter, I noticed, was sitting on a boulder, staring out at Paradox Valley. As was Justin, still at the edge of the cliff, but now taking cell-phone photos. For his binder, I figured. Wes still snoozed in the sun.
Neely said, “Nosh time, anybody?”
Everybody stirred.
She produced a small feast from her pack. She arranged it on a wide rock ledge. There were sliced oranges and currant-studded scones and onion bagels and cold-packed cream cheese and smoked salmon and, bless her, a thermos of coffee. There were insulated mugs
with the HGP logo and, I took note, compostable brown paper plates.
I helped myself and found a seat on the far end of the rock ledge. The sandstone was sun-warmed. I watched Walter fill his plate and his mug and return to his boulder. He raised his mug to me—he's fine, don't worry. I returned the gesture. The balm of the brew.
Edgar joined me, his plate full to the rim. “I just wanted to say... It's just that Neely likes to get a lot of footage to work with. Most of it never gets used.”
“So I might end up on the cutting-room floor?”
“No no, you looked really good, I just...”
I smiled. “It's fine, Edgar.”
He studied his plate of food. “She can be pushy, but she cares. And she's good. She got me my first job behind the camera. I met her on the Universal lot. I was making the rounds, looking for a break.” He pressed a slice of salmon into the cream cheese on his bagel. “She asked me to send her a pitch reel. I did but I thought nothing would come of it. Cassie, I was green. But she liked what I'd sent, and then she talked me up to everybody she knew. She knows a lot of people. I got a gig doing re-shoots on a picture that was in trouble—re-doing scenes. From there on, I had a career.” He spoke quickly, the words spilling out. Still speaking to the bagel. “I became a cinematographer, no less. That sounds showy but it means something. And then she got funding for this docu—with Justin Brice attached, I mean, he's good—and she called on me to lens it.”
I said, “She must think highly of your skills.”
He looked up. “I think so.”
“Clearly so.” I added, “You don't have to pitch her to me. I like her.”
“You didn't like the omelette.”
“Did you?”
“I like omelettes. Cheese, truffle, it's all good.” He shot me a grin. “Just leave out the zombies.”
I laughed.
We ate and talked horror movies until Justin called everybody over to the cliff edge.
“Next stop,” Justin said, pointing down.
I looked. There was the red-rock valley and the emerald crops and the green-gray river and, here and there, the white smears—the gypsum.
And then I noticed the facility.
River Run Page 7
