Down the Great Unknown (28 page)

On the evening of July 24, 1869, when another man might simply have flung himself on the ground in nervous exhaustion, Powell climbed a boulder near the river's edge and spent an hour gazing at the water in fascination. Watching the waves in the gathering darkness, he was still studying, still categorizing, still enthusiastic, above all, still curious. “The waves are rolling, with crests of foam so white they seem almost to give a light of their own. Near by, a chute of water strikes the foot of a great block of limestone, fifty feet high, and the waters pile up against it, and roll back. Where there are sunken rocks, the water heaps up in mounds, or even in cones. At a point where rocks come very near the surface, the water forms a chute above, strikes, and is shot up ten or fifteen feet, and piles back in gentle curves, as in a fountain.”

Decades later, when boatmen began to run rapids for sport, they would name the watery formations that Powell had identified and add others to the menagerie. Powell's crests of foam, for instance, capped tall, pyramid-shaped breaking waves that are now called haystacks. The water he saw piling up against the face of an enormous limestock boulder was a dramatic example of a pillow. The mounds or cones were mini-horizon lines where the river poured over a barely submerged rock and dropped abruptly into a hole. The ten- or fifteen-foot-tall fountain marked a spot where a stretch of particularly fast-moving water collided with a rock, forming what today's river runners call a rooster tail.

Powell had not found every entry that would someday have a place in a white-water glossary, but he had made a considerable start. A complete inventory could come later; the key accomplishment was sensing that there was system underlying what appeared to be chaos. A white-water Mendeleyev, Powell shared his Russian contemporary's yearning to uncover the natural world's hidden order and pattern. The difference was that Powell conducted his research not at a chemist's bench but at the bottom of a thousand-foot canyon.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

FLASH FLOOD

 

In years to come, many river runners would find themselves staring at the same waves that had commanded Powell's rapt attention. (“As soon as we had decided on a channel we would lose no time in getting back to our boats and running it,” wrote Emery Kolb, “for we could feel our courage oozing from our finger tips with each second's delay.”) The rapids in Cataract Canyon are numbered, and Powell had arrived at numbers 21, 22, and 23, the most feared of all. In recognition of their special status, they are also known as Big Drop 1, Big Drop 2, and Big Drop 3. The worst is Big Drop 3; its most harrowing feature, though it is the only path to salvation, is a smooth and skinny raceway that slithers between two enormous holes. Since the 1950s, it has been known as Satan's Gut.

On July 25, Powell and his men tried to run Big Drop 1. This was an uncharacteristic decision, and, it immediately became clear, an unwise one. “The
Emma Dean
is caught in a whirlpool, and set spinning about,” Powell wrote, “and it is with great difficulty we are able to get out of it, with the loss of an oar.” Chastened by the near-crisis, Powell insisted on returning to lining and portaging. For the rest of that long day, the men inched their way downstream. In Powell's account, there are none of his customary lyrical descriptions or upbeat pronouncements. “We camp on the right bank,” he wrote, “hungry and tired.”

Forty years would pass
before someone managed to run the Big Drops. The run is still intimidating today, especially in high water. When Cataract is in flood, boatmen can lose track of where they are. Unable to identify which rapid they are in, they careen along until they reach the Big Drops, which are unmistakable. No longer lost, they are in deep trouble nonetheless.

At flows higher than about forty thousand cubic feet a second, stopping between the Big Drops to scout and make plans becomes impossible, and the three rapids merge into one giant, interminable horror called simply Big Drop.

The first, and easiest, stretch features a series of giant standing waves that, if all goes well, should do no more than fill your boat. Then comes a series of unrunnable holes that must be dodged (in a boat quite likely hobbled by a load of water), and then, if the boat is still right side up,
another
set of towering waves. The only “choice” is to ride through these waves, but hidden among them is a joker—an “exploding” wave that breaks and crashes at irregular, unpredictable intervals. When this fickle beast seizes on a boat with the bad fortune to venture near at feeding time, the boat capsizes, regardless of its size. The boatman, in the meantime, has yet another task. At the same time as he is fighting through these waves, he must maneuver his way to the right, to avoid an enormous “pourover” hole that lies just beyond them.

The writer and boatman Pam Houston wrote a prize-winning short story that deals with running Cataract's rapids in flood, among other things. The white-water passages, Houston says, are not fiction at all but an exact depiction of a near-catastrophic trip of her own. Houston and her passenger made it through the towering waves of Big Drop 1 uneventfully and almost dry (unlike Powell). The trouble began at Big Drop 2, which has as its central feature a gigantic boulder that forms a pourover called Little Niagara.
*
“I was worried about a funny little wave at the top of 2 on the right-hand side,” Houston wrote, “a little curler that wouldn't be big enough to flood my boat but might turn it sideways, and I needed to hit every wave that came after it head on.”

She decided to miss the wave by scooting a bit to the right, wondered if she had overcompensated, and realized in one stomach-turning moment that

we
were
too far right, way too far right, and we were about to go straight down over the seven-story rock. We would fall through the air off the face of that rock, land at the bottom of a seven-story waterfall, where there would be nothing but rocks and tree limbs and sixty-some thousand feet per second of pounding white water which would shake us and crush us and hold us under until we drowned.

I don't know what I said to Thea [her passenger] in that moment, as I made one last desperate effort, one hard long pull to the left. I don't know if it was
Oh shit
or
Did you see that
or just my usual
Hang on
or if there was, in that moment between us, only a silent stony awe.

And as we went over the edge of the seven-story boulder down, down, into the snarling white hole, not only wide and deep and boat-stopping but corkscrew-shaped besides, time slowed down to another version of itself, started moving like rough-cut slow motion, one frame at a time in measured stops and starts. And of all the stops and starts I remember, all the frozen frames I will see in my head for as long as I live, as the boat fell through space, as it hit the corkscrew wave, as its nose began to rise again, the one I remember most clearly is this:

My hands are still on the oars and the water that has been so brown for days is suddenly as white as lightning. It is white, and it is alive and it is moving toward me from both sides, coming at me like two jagged white walls with only me in between them, and Thea is airborne, is sailing over my head, like a prayer.

Then everything went dark, and there was nothing around me but water and I was breathing it in, helpless to fight it as it wrapped itself around me and tossed me so hard I thought I would break before I drowned. Every third moment my foot or arm would catch a piece of Thea below me, or was it above me, somewhere beside me doing her own watery dance.

In 1969, Gaylord Staveley, a professional boatman with more than a dozen years' experience on the Colorado, decided to celebrate the centennial of Powell's 1869 expedition by retracing his journey (using modern river-running techniques and lighter, more maneuverable boats). Cataract Canyon provided the expedition's first real danger. Staveley's party made it safely by Big Drop 1, where Powell had run into a whirlpool, and by Big Drop 2, where Houston had plunged over a colossal boulder. Staveley scouted Big Drop 3 from shore while the others in his group ate breakfast. He returned without an appetite.

The rapid was formed by a kind of natural dam made “not of smooth concrete but of cruel, mighty rocks,” Staveley wrote. “The river above was nearly brought to a standstill by their close-set, steeply coursed arrangement from bank to bank. Then, when it finally pitched over the edge, the waiting rocks instantly tore it to shreds.” Ellsworth Kolb, the turn-of-the-century photographer and river runner, had blanched at the same sight. Worst of all, Kolb wrote, were the “jagged rocks, like the bared fangs of some dream-monster.”

Satan's Gut, gleaming and glossy as a scar, marked a boat-wide course between two “bottomless, thrashing abysses.” Staveley and his fellow boatmen stood above the rapid, trying to commit its features to memory. One man methodically threw pieces of driftwood into the maelstrom, one after the other and at various distances from shore, to see what became of them. Most swept over the edge and disappeared from sight. Only those pieces that went straight down Satan's Gut reappeared downstream. The visual cue to watch for, the boatmen decided, was a particular wave, about three feet long and six inches high, capped with white foam. The left side of that wave marked the entrance to Satan's Gut. Staveley took the first boat.

In the instant I could look down on the rapid before dropping in, I realized the water had carried my fourteen-hundred-pound boat a little differently than it had the arm-sized chunks of wood. With inches as important there as whole boatwidths would normally be, I was in the wrong place—we should be taking the middle of the wave instead of the left one-third! These realizations were projected against my stare down—down, down, down—into a monstrously thrashing void just three feet off my left stern quarter. There was, I know, one stroke, one deep, desperate holding stroke from my feet against the bulkhead up through pushing legs and taut stomach muscles and shoulders and elbows and then a prolongation of it by hauling the oars back just as far as I could lean. I may have gotten part of a second one like it. They would have been upstream strokes, weakening the right oarpull toward the end, to get both holding and right-quartering action. Satan's Gut was on my right, a half boatwidth away!

It will always be vivid, I think, the memory of that foam-filled abyss, and how we hung above it, and the stroke slowed us a little, and then a wondrous vagary of last-chance current skirting the brim to go down the Gut took us with it. We were in and then out of danger in perhaps five seconds.

For the Powell expedition, danger had become a traveling companion who showed no signs of leaving. Powell had portaged Big Drops 2 and 3, but the portages were dangerous and exhausting, the boats were leaking badly again, and the river was “still one foaming torrent” as far downstream as anyone could see.

Nor did trouble confine itself to the river. The cliffs and side canyons proved as life-threatening as the rapids. On July 26, after struggling by the Big Drops, Powell, Bradley, Seneca Howland, Hall, and Walter Powell set out up a side canyon, hoping to climb to the top and collect tree sap to caulk the boats. Eventually they found themselves in an enormous amphitheater topped with unclimbable walls. The men split up, each trying to find his own route to the top. Powell, characteristically, decided to spend the time hunting for fossils instead. Then, spotting a rock slide that seemed to offer a path up, he changed his mind and began climbing again. He emerged onto a narrow shelf, followed it a short distance, and found a narrow, vertical fissure leading up to another shelf perhaps forty feet higher on the cliff face.

“I have a barometer on my back, which rather impedes my climbing,” Powell wrote. “The walls of the fissure are of smooth limestone, offering neither foot nor hand hold. So I support myself by pressing my back against one wall and my knees against the other, and, in this way, lift my body, in a shuffling manner, a few inches at a time.” Powell crept upward about twenty-five feet, and then the fissure widened ever so slightly.

Unable to climb any higher (because he could not press his knees hard enough against the far wall to gain any purchase), Powell tried instead to retreat the way he had come. He found he could not move lower without falling. Unable to move higher or lower, he found he could at least move
horizontally
, into a kind of alcove. “So I struggle along sidewise, farther into the crevice, where it narrows. But by this time my muscles are exhausted, and I cannot climb longer; so I move still a little farther into the crevice, where it is so narrow and wedging that I can lie in it, and there I rest.”

After five or ten minutes gathering his strength, Powell crabbed his way sideways back to the main chimney. This time, he managed to make it upward past the wide spot in the fissure and finally emerged onto the upper shelf. After another hour's climbing, Powell struggled out onto the summit. On top at last, he could finally turn his attention to the point of this whole excursion, gathering resin from the piñon pines to seal up the leaks in the boats.

“But I have with me no means of carrying it down,” Powell realized. Considering that he had just risked his life precisely so that he could retrieve tree sap, this was a remarkable oversight. Powell tried, fruitlessly, to improvise. “The day is very hot, and my coat was left in camp, so I have no linings to tear out.” Then, finally, he had a brainstorm. “It occurs to me to cut off the sleeve of my shirt”—which was, as always, dangling uselessly—“tie it up at one end, and in this little sack I collect about a gallon of pitch.” A missing arm, to hear Powell tell it, seemed a stroke of fortune.

All that remained was to return to camp with the pitch. But few excursions that involved Powell were routine. Powell was a magnetic man, and, somehow, he was as adept at drawing trouble as he was at drawing people. Things happened when he was around.