In the Heart of the Canyon (2 page)

JT unlatched the ammo box by his feet and took out the passenger list and scanned the names and notes. They were supposed to have fourteen passengers on the trip, but at the last minute one couple had canceled, which meant he was going to have to juggle the seating arrangements to balance out the boats. There were two vegetarians, three “no dairy,” one “high craving for red meat.” Most had no rafting experience, which didn’t surprise him; but one couldn’t swim, which did. There were two kids, which pleased him; kids usually brought a goofy spirit absent in adults, who too easily fell victim to excessive reverence for natural wonders. He made a mental note to assign the boys a job—can-smasher, maybe—so they could feel useful and independent from their parents.

He continued scanning. There was a couple from Wyoming, named Mitchell and Lena; Lena, he noted, was allergic to peanuts, furry animals, grasses, and pollen. Well, hopefully she was bringing along a box of Benadryl and an EpiPen or two. There was a mother and daughter, Susan and Amy. The one who couldn’t swim was a young man from Ohio named Peter, age twenty-seven, traveling solo.

Noting Peter’s age, JT glanced up at Dixie, who was reknotting her sarong.
Don’t even think of it
, he heard himself telling Peter.
Don’t even try
.

That evening, as the sky grew dark, boaters from all the groups gathered together and passed around a bottle of whiskey, sharing old stories, inventing new ones. Around nine thirty, JT, who’d passed on the second round, returned to his raft. He brushed his teeth, then unrolled his sleeping bag across the long, flat meat cooler that spanned the center of his boat. Even though it was dark, the day’s heat continued to radiate off the canyon walls. JT strapped on his headlamp and sat down and carefully and methodically dried off his feet. He rubbed them well with bee balm, then pulled on a pair of clean socks to keep his skin from cracking. Finally he stretched out on top of his sleeping bag. He settled back and locked his hands behind his head and gazed up at the spattered current of stars above. A warm breeze fanned his
skin, and he picked out constellations: the Big Dipper, Cassiopeia, the busy little Pleiades.

Up on the beach, a burst of laughter erupted from the revelers, but by now his eyes had begun to twitch and blur. He fought to keep them open, to watch just a little bit more of the star show, but within minutes he was fast asleep.

T
he next morning JT woke up floating, as he did on every river trip. Fourth of July Launch day. The air was temperate, the sky a dark peacock blue. JT estimated it was about five o’clock. At some point during the night, he’d drawn up his sheet. Quietly now, he sat up and pulled on a T-shirt, climbed over his gear, and hopped out onto the beach. He lit the stove and started a pot of water boiling, and when it was ready he dumped a baggie of ground coffee directly into the water and gave it a stir. How good it smelled, this bare-bones coffee in the canyon!

By now Abo and Dixie were sitting up, yawning, fumbling for clothes. When the grounds had settled, JT filled three plastic mugs and brought them down to the water’s edge.

“Happy Fourth,” he murmured.

Abo took his cup without a word and closed his eyes and blew on it.

“Thank you thank you
thank
you,” said Dixie as he handed it to her. Her voice was soft, full of a sweetness and uncharacteristic fragility he tried to disdain but couldn’t. “How’d you sleep, JT?”

“Slept great.”

They sat very still and very quietly, taking in the shadowy blue-gray water, the silhouetted walls. A canyon wren called its plaintive cry, a long series of descending notes. A slight breeze lifted the hairs on his arms.

“I am so so glad,” Abo finally said, his voice deep and gravelly with sleep, “that I do not have to be nice to anyone right away.”

“How much of that whiskey did you have last night?” JT asked.

“What whiskey?”

JT left them and went to chat with the kayakers, who were straggling up the beach from their small camp just downstream. They were all related, it seemed: tall lanky brothers, along with their spouses and several children. JT asked them where they planned on camping that night; the key during these crowded summer months was for the different parties to stagger themselves that first night, so they wouldn’t be on top of one another the whole trip.

“Haven’t thought that far ahead,” said one of the brothers. Though he couldn’t have been more than forty, he had a full white beard. His name was Bud, and JT learned that they were all from Vancouver, where the temperature rarely rose above eighty degrees. Here, it was already close to a hundred. They were to be forgiven, he told himself, for not being the most organized group.

“Holler on the river if you need anything,” JT told them.

By seven o’clock, the sun was already up over the low hills to the east, and the motor people were scampering about on the fat tubes of their rig, tightening their gear, and some of the day fishermen had arrived and were messing with their tackle by the side of the river. By eight o’clock, JT and Abo and Dixie had finished breakfast, and for the next several hours, they tightened straps and crammed hatches and rearranged gear so that all boats would be more or less equally loaded. They clipped bail buckets into their boats. The sun grew hot, and their shoulders burned, so they covered up with long-sleeved shirts. They guzzled water from old orange juice jugs.

At ten thirty, JT was lashing an American flag to his rowing seat—it was, after all, the Fourth of July—when he looked up to see an old gray bus rocking its way down the hillside. A cloud of dust roiled up from behind. Dixie squinted.

“Time to rock and roll,” she said. “How’re you coming, Abo?”

Abo, whose sleeping pad held a chaotic jumble of clothing, books, giant squirt guns, and camera equipment, stood in the well of his boat, brushing his teeth in the hot sun. He spat into the water. “I’m almost
ready,” he said. “Hey, can either of you fit some of this stuff in your boat?”

“Hell no, babe,” Dixie replied. “You ready, JT?”

JT stood high on his boat and pissed a sparkling arc out into the river and wiggled himself back into his shorts.

“I’m ready,” he said, hopping off the boat onto the sand. “Lets run this river.”

O
ne by one, the guests staggered off the bus into the hot morning sun. Their clothes were clean, their hats straight, their skin pale and freshly shaved and smelling of sunscreen. Eager not only to be of use but also to make a good first impression on the guides, they swarmed the rear door of the bus, jostling to unload more than their fair share of gear. As best he could, JT matched people with the names on his list: Ruth and Lloyd Frankel, the old couple who’d been down the river more times than he could count; Peter Kramer from Cincinnati, who was doing much of the heavy lifting; the Compson parents, calling their two sons back from the river to help with the bags. The tall man with the flappy nomad hat must be the retiree from Wyoming, which would make the tiny woman with an identical hat his wife. There was the teenage girl, Amy—whoa, she was big—and the trim blond woman talking to her must be her mother.

There would be time for introductions later.

When the bus was empty and all the bags lay strewn about the beach, JT directed them to a heap of orange life jackets, and the three guides went around and checked their fittings, tugging on straps and yanking up shoulders to ensure things were sufficiently tight.

“I can’t breathe,” said the tiny woman.

“Good,” said JT with a chuckle.

Then he called everybody over into the shade of some tamarisk trees for his orientation talk. He introduced himself with the fact that this was his 125th trip down the river. “Kind of a milestone, I guess you’d say,” he said, glancing at the different faces. “But I’m as psyched now as I was on the first trip. I don’t think it’s possible for me to ever get tired of this place.”

As he spoke, a fat yellow bumblebee lazily buzzed its way into the circle, then hovered in front of JT’s face. JT grinned at the bee, and it scooted off.

“And its way more than running the rapids,” he said. “Its about hiking up into side canyons; its about condors and mile-high cliffs and wild watercress and—well, you’ll see what I mean.”

He went on to remind them that over the next two weeks, they’d be getting to know each other pretty well. “I like to think of it this way,” he said, hoping to instill good feelings at the outset. “There’s no such thing as a stranger, just people we haven’t met.”

At this, the Compson mother nudged the two boys, who scowled and edged away. JT suspected he might have just reiterated some earlier parental lecture about being open-minded and making new friends; probably the boys had taken one look at all the adults and assumed they were in for two weeks of heavy scolding.

Well. Wait until those boys saw how adults could behave, two days into a river trip.

He squatted down and unfolded a well-worn topographical map on the sand. The group moved in closer. Using a stick, JT pointed to the upper-right-hand corner of the map.

“So: We’re here at Lee’s Ferry,” he told them, “and we’ve got two hundred and twenty-five miles between here and the takeout at Diamond Creek. Some days we’ll go ten miles, some days thirty; it’ll all depend on the day. The only thing I ask is that you be flexible. Plans change, depending on a lot of things.”

“I hope we’re going to stop at Havasu,” said the man from Wyoming. “Mitchell Boyer-Brandt,” he added, extending his hand.

“Is Havasu the place with the turquoise water?” the mother asked.

“And vines and ferns and waterfalls,” Mitchell said. “I’ve been waiting to go there since I was ten years old.”

JT did not want to get sidetracked. “Havasu’s beautiful,” he agreed, “although with fifty people on the trail, it can lose a bit of its charm. But I’ll do my best to stop there.” Carefully he folded up the map. “Now: I see you all have a life jacket. Number one safety rule is you have to wear it
all the time
when you’re on the river. No exceptions. When you
get off the boat, clip it to something on the boat or a bush, whatever, so it doesn’t blow away. Know what we call a passenger without a life jacket?”

There were nervous chuckles all around.

“A hiker,” JT said with another grin. “Rule number two: Know where we keep the first aid box and take care of any nicks and scrapes. Wash them well. Put on some ointment. Use a Band-Aid. One little cut can quickly get infected, which definitely can ruin a trip.”

“Are there rapids today?” one of the boys asked.

JT looked at the boy, who was squinting up at him. Then he looked at the boys brother. Both light-haired, freshly buzzed. JT wondered if he would be able to tell them apart.

“What’s your name?”

“Sam!”

“Put it here, Sam,” said JT, and they slapped palms. “There are most definitely rapids today, and I want to give a little demonstration so everyone knows what to do in case you end up in the water.”

“I sure hope
that
doesn’t happen!” exclaimed the young man from Cincinnati. “Seeing as I can’t swim.”

“Well, it probably won’t,” said JT. “But in case it does, here’s the routine. You might find yourself underwater for a few seconds, but I
guarantee
your life jacket will bring you back up. Once you’re up, look around. Chances are you’ll find yourself right beside the boat because the water’s taking you down at the same speed. So grab on. Pull yourself up.”

“What if you don’t come up?” asked Sam.

“You’ll come up,” JT assured him.

“But what if you get sucked into a whirlpool?”

“I’ll come get you myself, kiddo,” he said. “Now, if for some reason you’re
not
right beside the boat, you may have to swim on through the rest of the rapid. And then what you do is, it’s very simple, see, you put your feet out in front,” and he elevated one foot out in front of him and hopped a little for balance, “and kind of sit back, like this,” and he leaned back from the hips with his arms out to the sides, “and just float
on through the rest of the rapid, and we’ll pick you up down below. Very simple. Pay attention. If somebody’s waving at you to swim to the left, swim to the left.”

“What if you’re in a coma, though?” asked Sam.

“Oh, Sam,” his mother sighed.

“But if you’re in a coma, you can’t do very much.”

“Don’t be a dickhead,” said his brother.

“If you’re in a coma, I’ll take good care of you,” JT assured Sam. “All of us guides, we’re very good at taking care of people who are really hurt. But that’s not going to happen. If you fall out of the boat, you’re going to be just fine.”

“But this raises the question,” said Mitchell. “What happens if someone does get hurt?”

“We’ve got a satellite phone,” said JT. “Usually they can get us a helicopter within an hour.”