In the Heart of the Canyon (15 page)

T
he next day got off to a questionable start when the paddle boat flipped in Hance—this after a thorough scout above the rapid, with everyone climbing to a good lookout point and the guides gravely studying the hydraulics below, noting each rock, each hole, each pourover. Ultimately they decided on a left run, and JT ran it nice and clean and waited below. It was Abo who got into trouble. Piece of cake, Abo had been thinking, but while he was angling the paddle boat across the river to make that left run, a yellow jacket landed on his knee, and Abo, being allergic to bees, took one second to flick it away, one critical moment when he slackened the outward twist he’d been exerting on his paddle, allowing the boat to rotate five, maybe ten degrees to the right. That was enough. Instantly they found themselves being carried into the angry heart of Hance between two sharp pourovers, and even with Peter in front (all that heft, all that mass!), the boat reared up and flipped back, spilling Abo, Evelyn, Jill, Sam, Matthew, Mark, and Peter into the cold, surging waves.

As with most flips, there was no time for dismay; JT went straight into rescue mode, scanning the surface for life jackets. Within seconds, everyone popped up right next to the paddle boat—everyone but Peter, that is, Peter who couldn’t swim, and while the others (amid mass confusion) managed to haul themselves onto the slick upturned belly of the raft, JT watched—now with dismay—as Peter got swept down through the rest of Hance and straight into Son-of-Hance, a second wash cycle, as it were, and except for a foot that kept poking up here and there, JT saw no sign of the young man, which didn’t really concern him at first, but the seconds kept ticking by, so he was very, very glad when Peter finally resurfaced in the tailwaves, wearing the
stunned look of someone who’s fallen off a fifty-foot cliff and against all odds not only survived but found his skeletal system intact. JT rowed hard to intercept Peter before the river carried him even farther downstream to Sockdolager Rapid, and when he did haul the young man out of the water, it took a great deal of effort to convince a teeth-chattering Peter that he was still alive, that the life jacket had done its trick and the white light he’d seen while submerged was not the doorway to heaven but the color of the sky as viewed from inside a sea of bubbles by someone in a state of shock.

In the meantime, the paddle boat had roller-coasted upside down through Son-of-Hance, and now Abo was yelling to his five remaining passengers to help him, to stand up and grab hold of the flip line and
lean back—
nothing easy about this, convincing five people ranging in age from twelve to fifty, five people who’d just swum their first major rapid, to get up from where they were lying belly-down, clutching at anything; convincing them to stand up, grab the flip line that ran down the middle of the underbelly, and lean back toward the water. But—and this was what always got JT, how six-day novices could rise to the occasion—they did it, they right-sided the raft with enough time before Sockdolager to settle themselves into place, grab whatever paddles remained, and go.

Finally, below Sockdolager, they found a place to pull in. Cold, shivering, and still pumped with adrenaline, the swimmers peeled off their life jackets, breathlessly pacing and exchanging stories as they let the hot sun permeate as much epidermis as they were willing to expose. Peter was ecstatic, convinced that his survival was due to some innate ability to swim. It had been there all along, and he just hadn’t known it! Why, he’d just kicked and flailed and thus defied gravity—he
floated
, he didn’t
drown
, he could swim after all—and his mother was going to drop dead when she heard this, just drop dead!

“Do you realize how many lessons, how many swim camps, how many teachers practically tore my arms out of my sockets in an attempt to show me the Australian crawl?” he demanded. “Do you realize how I get sick to my stomach at the smell of chlorine? And here—here on the Colorado River, I can swim!” He arched his back to
the heavens and pounded on his chest. “DO YOU HEAR ME, MOM? I AM A
SWIMMER!”

Meanwhile, Sam and Matthew bragged that they had been the first to surface, and Mark secretly reveled in the fact that it had been mostly his and Abo’s strength that had righted the boat. Jill, for her part, couldn’t seem to warm up, and JT told her to put on a polypro, and she looked at him blankly and said, “What polypro?” and JT said, “The polypro top I told everyone to keep in their day bag, just in case,” and Jill wrenched her eyebrows, and JT sighed and went to his boat and dug in his own bag and lent her one of his. With the added warmth, things began to look up for Jill—that is, until she realized that Sam had lost one of his flip-flops during his swim, one of the ones that JT had fashioned the straps for out of a piece of rope, and she told Matthew to let Sam wear one
of his
flip-flops, which Matthew refused to do out of brotherly concern for Sam wearing a sandal that would be half a size too big and might, just
might
cause him to trip; which caused Mark to cuff Matthew, and now things began to look very grim for the Compson family, until Evelyn finally drew JT aside and confided that she had an extra pair of Tevas that Sam could use, providing great relief to both Jill and Mark but causing Jill to secretly wonder why Evelyn hadn’t proffered the sandals until now.

All in all,
not
how JT would have chosen to spend his first morning in the Inner Gorge.

But JT was, in his core, an optimist by nature, and he reminded himself that a flip and a bit of squabbling was just that, nothing more. Things like this happened all the time. You couldn’t be a river guide and see the glass as half empty. Shit happened. It was part of the journey. And so when he felt they’d had enough time to warm up, he called everyone back to the boats, and they headed out once again.

For JT, it was simply yet another morning adventure on the river. But for the thinking travelers, something had shifted. As they floated deeper into the gorge, several of them experienced the sense that they were no longer on the same river—that the canyon, for all its beauty, had begun to menace in a way it hadn’t before. The current ran more swiftly, and the walls that towered above could have been forged from
a different planet. Gone were the sunny stair-stepping sandstone cliffs; in their place rose more than five hunded vertical feet of glistening black schist, shot through with lightning forks of pink granite. It was dark down here, and it was violent too, and the violence had an inexplicable permanence to it, one that was going to take them some time, as novice travelers, to figure out.

In the meantime, all they could do was simply crane their necks in quiet wonder.

Deep in the Inner Gorge, Phantom Ranch announces itself with a necklace of red balls, strung like jewels across the river at Mile 87.5. This marks the gauging station, which is followed by a large boat beach. Usually crowded with both river runners and hikers, Phantom, like the Little Colorado, reminds you once again that your midsummer river trip is not the wilderness experience you’d anticipated last January back in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

JT had mixed feelings about Phantom. There was a small settlement a half mile up the trail, an outpost of an earlier era, with a general store, a post office, and a dining hall. It was nice to stop at Phantom and get news from other parties, collect whatever mail might be waiting, and find out if there were any surprises waiting for them downstream. And the passengers liked to visit the store, buy a trinket or two, and send a postcard marked “Mailed by Mule” from Phantom Ranch.

But the thing about Phantom was that there was a pay phone. This was of course a nice thing to come upon halfway through a trip, if you really needed to check in on something, but too many times JT had seen one of his passengers make a phone call and hear some bad but not devastating news (the cat vomiting blood, the neighbors house smoldering); and what could you do with news like that? Worry, that’s what you did, for that day and the next seven days, sharing your pall with everyone.

JT had talked about it at breakfast with Dixie and Abo, and although they would have in some sense preferred not to touch base with civilization, they had to stop if they were going to find somebody to take the dog off their hands.

“But we’re not going to linger,” JT had warned everyone during their daily briefing. “Half an hour, tops.”

Now, the red balls of the gauging station behind them, JT aimed his boat toward a wide expanse of sand ahead on river right. Phantom’s boat beach, as usual, resembled a crowded parking lot, with a long lineup of bulging rafts. Hot, weary hikers down from the South Rim cooled their feet in the icy shallows, while boatmen rearranged their gear, or bathed, or traded stories and information in front of the bulletin board.

JT beached his boat, hoping that someone here would be just the dog-loving hiker he needed.

“Go charm someone,” he told Dixie as he tied his rope. “Tell them the owners waiting up top.”

“You mean lie?”

“Someone’s waiting, somewhere,” JT said.

So Dixie went off in search of a willing, if gullible, hiker. Meanwhile, half their group headed up to the outpost. Jill and Mark both wanted the boys to send a postcard, but Sam knew his time with the dog was coming to an end and refused to leave; and since Jill and Mark couldn’t force Sam to go, they couldn’t force Matthew, either.

“Of course we wouldn’t dare lay down the law, would we,” said Mark. “Far be it from us to exercise our parental authority once in a while.”

Sam, in fact, began to engage the dog in an innocent chase game, ducking and darting, sending up soft sprays of sand. JT saw this as a good thing; potential rescuers would see Blender for the energetic hound he was, not some sick runt who’d collapse halfway up the trail. He even took Blender’s life jacket off, the better to display his freshly scrubbed coat. In fact, it wasn’t long before Dixie captured the interest of a ragtag couple laden with army-surplus gear—the neediest having the kindest of hearts, JT thought. He was all set to walk over and present them with a couple of trip vouchers, when the group who’d trekked up to the store returned with guilty looks on their faces.

“What’d you do, get ice cream?” JT asked.

“Who could resist?” said Mitchell. “You want me to go get you a Fudgsicle?”

“I’ll take a rain check,” JT said. “Any news from home?”

“The pay phone was out of order,” Mitchell reported.

“Darn,” said JT.

At the same time, Sam continued to entertain hikers with Blenders tricks. Matthew for his part was drawing an elaborate map in the sand with a stick, but nobody noticed. And so Matthew tried to get in on Sam’s game, waving the stick in front of the dogs face, then running a little, then waving the stick again. When Blender didn’t respond, Matthew dug in his pocket and found some cookie crumbs. These he held out to the dog. Blender trotted over, sniffed, licked the crumbs. Then he bounded back to Sam.

Who knew exactly what was going on in Matthew’s mind? For as long as he could remember, his younger brother had been getting more attention—ever since around the time of Matthew’s first birthday, when his gift, so to speak, was a red-faced yawling bundle who from the very start was entitled to more lap time than Matthew. This grabby, blind addition to his world, who stole his mother and kept her bedridden for what seemed like weeks on end, went on to draw better pictures and tell better jokes and end up with the more complicated Lego sets each Christmas.

In any event, while Sam was playing with Blender, Matthew went back to JT’s boat and opened up the food hatch and got out the peanut butter. He stuck his finger in the jar and smeared a large glob on the end of the stick. Then he took the stick back to where Sam and Blender were playing and held the stick in front of the dog’s nose.

This time Blender gave the stick his full attention. Matthew held it just out of reach, and then, when he knew the dog was thoroughly spellbound, he flung the stick as far as he possibly could out into the river and watched, wiping his hands on his shorts, as the dog bounded, sans life jacket, into the water.

At first it seemed like any other competition between two brothers, Sam outraged over the theft of attention, Matthew smug. As for the stick toss, at first it was just that, a dog chasing a stick into a friendly body of water. And Blender did indeed retrieve the stick, proudly dog-paddling back toward shore.

But the current at Phantom Ranch is swift and strong, and has swept more than its share of hikers to their deaths; and to both Sam and Matthew’s horror, suddenly Blender’s dog-paddling was doing him no good whatsoever, and his body disappeared, leaving only his head above water, his jaws locked around the stick as he sailed like a toy boat down toward the Gulf of Mexico.

Upon seeing the dog bounding into the river, JT tried to make an immediate dash for the water. However, in accordance with the laws of physics, coupled with the lack of traction, his sudden lunge forward sent his feet skidding out behind him in a violent spray of sand, which in turn sent him sprawling on his stomach. In the meantime, Dixie, with less weight and more forethought, made it to her boat before JT reached his. JT managed to hurl himself at her boat.

“Don’t lose him!” she yelled as he pushed them off.

To his left, steep dark walls loomed out of the water; to his right, the sandy boat beach tapered off. And about a hundred feet ahead of them was the dog, his head poking up out of the roiling surface, the stick firmly clamped between his jaws.