by Edward Abbey
“Everybody down,” Smith orders. “Grab rope.”
In a frantic clamor of tumbled water, the mass of the river crashes upon the rubble of rock fanning out from the mouth of a side canyon—Badger. The deep and toneless vibration all around, a mist of spray floating on the air, little rainbows suspended in the sunlight.
Again they swing the craft about. Smith heaves mightily on his oar, taking the bow, and steers the boat straight onto the tongue of the rapids, the oil-smooth surge of the main current pouring like a torrent into the heart of the uproar. No need to cheat on this, a minor rapid; he’ll give his customers a thrill, their money’s worth, what they paid for.
A wave eight feet high looms above Smith, crouched in the bow. The wave stands there, waiting, does not move. (On the river, unlike the sea, the water moves; the waves remain in place.) The front end of the boat climbs the wave, pushed up by momentum and the weight behind. Smith hangs on to the lines. The tripartite boat almost folds back upon itself, then bends over the wave and slides down into the trough beyond, the middle and third parts following in like fashion. A wet and shining boulder stands dead ahead, directly in their course. The boat pauses before it. A ton of water, recoiling from the rock, crashes into the boat. Everyone is instantly soaked. The women scream with delight; even Doc Sarvis laughs. Smith hauls on his oar; the boat rolls off the boulder and careens like a roller coaster over the waves in the tail of the rapids, then slows in the steadier water below. Smith looks back. He has lost an oarsman. Where George Hayduke should have been the unmanned oar swings loosely in its lock.
There he comes. Hayduke in his orange life jacket bobs down the billows, grinning with ferocious determination, knees up under his chin, the fetal pose, using his feet and legs as shock absorbers, caroming off the rock. Instinctive and correct response. Has lost his hat. Makes no sound….
In the calmer water below the rapid they dragged him back aboard.
“Where you been?” Smith said.
Grinning, sputtering, Hayduke shook his head, popped the water from his ears and managed to look both fierce and sheepish. “Fucking river,” he muttered.
“You got to grab a line,” Smith said.
“I was holding onto the fucking oar. Jammed it on a rock and it hit me in the stomach.” Nervously he pawed his tangled mass of soaked hair. His hat, an old leather sombrero from Sonora, was floating on the waves, about to go down for the third time. They retrieved it with an oar.
The river bore them calmly on, through the plateau, into the Precambrian mantle of the earth, toward the lowlands, the delta and the Sea of Cortez, seven hundred miles away.
“Soap Crick Rapids next,” Smith said. And sure enough, they heard again the tumult of river and stone in conflict. Around the next bend.
“This is ridiculous,” Abbzug said privately to Doc. They sat hunched hard together with a wet poncho spread over their laps and legs. She was beaming with pleasure. Water dripped from the brim of her exaggerated hat. The doctor’s stogie burned bravely in the damp.
“Absolutely ridiculous,” he said. “How do you like our boatmen?”
“Weird; the tall one looks like Ichabod Ignatz; the short one looks like a bandit out of some old Mack Sennett movie.”
“Or Charon and Cerberus,” Doc said. “But try not to laugh; our lives rest in their uncertain hands.” And they laughed again.
All together now they plunged into another maelstrom, Grade 4 on the river runner’s chart. More gnashing river, heaving waves, the clash of elementals, the pure and brainless fury of tons of irresistible water crashing down upon tons of immovable limestone. They felt the shock, they heard the roar, saw foam and spray and rainbows floating on the mist as they rode through chaos into the clear. The adrenaline of adventure, without the time for dread, buoyed them high on the waves.
This was the forty-fifth trip down the Grand for Smith, and so far as he could measure, its pleasure was not staled by repetition. But then no two river trips were ever quite alike. The river, the canyon, the desert world was always changing, from moment to moment, from miracle to miracle, within the firm reality of mother earth. River, rock, sun, blood, hunger, wings, joy—this is the real, Smith would have said, if he’d wanted to. If he felt like it. All the rest is androgynous theosophy. All the rest is transcendental transvestite transactional scientology or whatever the fad of the day, the vogue of the week. As Doc would’ve said, if Smith had asked him. Ask the hawk. Ask the hungry lion lunging at the starving doe. They know.
Thus reasoneth Smith. Only a small businessman, to be sure. Never even went to college.
In the grand stillness between rapids, which was half the river and most of the time, Smith and Hayduke rested on their oars and let the song of a canyon wren—a clear glissando of semiquavers—mingle with the drip of waterdrops, the gurgle of eddies, the honk of herons, the rustle of lizards in the dust on shore. Between rapids, not silence but music and stillness. While the canyon walls rose slowly higher, 1000, 1500, 2000 feet, the river descending, and the shadows grew longer and the sun shy.
A chill from the depths crept over them.
“Time to make camp, folks,” Smith announced, sculling for shore. Hayduke pitched in. Close ahead, on the right bank, lay a slope of sand, fringed by thickets of coppery willow and stands of tamarisk with lavender plumes nodding in the breeze. Again they heard the call of a canyon wren, a little bird with a big mouth. But musical, musical. And the far-off roar of still another rapids, that sound like the continuous applause of an immense and tireless multitude. The grunt and breath of two men laboring, oars scraping. The quiet talk of the first-class passengers.
“Dig the scene, Doc.”
“No technical jargon, please. This is a holy place.”
“Yeah but where’s the Coke machine?”
“Please, I’m meditating.”
The bow grated on gravel. Hayduke, general swamper, coiled line in hand, splashed through ankle-deep water and tethered the boat to a stout clump of willows. All came ashore. Hayduke and Seldom passed each passenger his/her river bag, the rubberized dunnage, the little ammo boxes containing personal items. The passengers wandered off, Doc and Bonnie in one direction, the two women from San Diego in another.
Smith paused for a moment to watch the retreating figure of Ms. Abbzug.
“Now, ain’t she something?” he said. “Ain’t she really something?” He closed one eye, as if sighting down a rifle barrel. “Now that little girl is a real honey. Finger-lickin’ good.”
“Cunt is cunt,” said George Hayduke, philosopher, not bothering to look. “Do we unload all this stuff now?”
“Most of it. Lemme show you.”
They wrestled with the heavy baggage, the big ammo boxes full of food, the ice chest, the wooden box holding Seldom’s cooking pots, frypans, Dutch oven, grills, other hardware, and lugged it all onto the beach. Smith outlined an area on the sand as his kitchen where he set up the cookstove, his folding table, his pantry, the bar, the black olives and fried baby clams. He chipped off little chunks of ice for all the begging cups that would soon appear and poured a spot of rum for Hayduke and himself. The passengers were still back in the bushes, changing into dry clothing, fortifying themselves in private for the cool of the evening.
“Here’s to you, boatman,” Smith said.
“Hoa binh,” said Hayduke.
Smith built a fire of charcoal, peeled the butcher paper from the standard first-night entree—huge floppy steaks—and stacked them near the grill. Hayduke prepared the salad and, as he did so, chased the rum with his tenth can of beer since lunch.
“That stuff’ll give you kidney stones,” Smith said.
“Bullshit.”
“Kidney stones. I oughta know.”
“I been drinking beer all my life.”
“How old are you?”
“Twenty-five.”
“Kidney stones,” Smith said. “In about ten more years.”
“Bullshit.”
The pa
ssengers, dry and refurbished, came straggling in one at a time, the doctor first. He placed his tin cup on the bar, installed one miniature iceberg and poured himself a double shot from his bottle of Wild Turkey.
“It is a beauteous evening, calm and free,” he announced.
“That’s true,” Smith said.
“The holy time is quiet as a nun.”
“You said a mouthful, Doctor.”
“Call me Doc.”
“Okay, Doc.”
“Cheers.”
“Same to you, Doc,”
There was some further discussion of the ambience. Then of other matters. The girl came up, Abbzug, wearing long pants and a shaggy sweater. She had shed the big hat but even in twilight still wore the sunglasses. She gave a touch of tone to Marble Gorge.
Meanwhile the doctor was saying, “The reason there are so many people on the river these days is because there are too many people everywhere else.”
Bonnie shivered, slipping into the crook of his left arm. “Why don’t we build a fire?” she said.
“The wilderness once offered men a plausible way of life,” the doctor said. “Now it functions as a psychiatric refuge. Soon there will be no wilderness.” He sipped at his bourbon and ice. “Soon there will be no place to go. Then the madness becomes universal.” Another thought. “And the universe goes mad.”
“We will,” Smith said to Abbzug. “After supper.”
“Call me Bonnie.”
“Miss Bonnie.”
“Miz Bonnie,” she corrected him.
“Jesus fucking Christ,” muttered Hayduke nearby, overhearing, and he snapped the cap from another can of Coors.
Abbzug cast a cold eye on Hayduke’s face, or what could be seen of it behind the black bangs and the bushy beard. An oaf, she thought. All hairiness is bestial, Arthur Schopenhauer thought. Hayduke caught her look, scowled. She turned back to the others.
“We are caught,” continued the good doctor, “in the iron treads of a technological juggernaut. A mindless machine. With a breeder reactor for a heart.”
“You said a mouthful, Doc,” says Seldom Seen Smith. He started on the steaks, laying them tenderly on the grill, above the glowing coals.
“A planetary industrialism”—the doctor ranted on—“growing like a cancer. Growth for the sake of growth. Power for the sake of power. I think I’ll have another bit of ice here.” (Clank!) “Have a touch of this, Captain Smith, it’ll gladden your heart, gild your liver and flower like a rose down in the compost of your bowels.”
“Don’t mind if I do, Doc.” But Smith wanted to know how a machine could “grow.” Doc explained; it wasn’t easy.
Smith’s two repeaters from San Diego emerged from the bushes, smiling; they had unrolled his sleeping bag between their own. One young woman carried a bottle. Something about a river trip always seems to promote the consumption of potable drugs. Except for Abbzug, who sucked from time to time on a little hand-rolled Zig-Zag cigarette pinched between her fastidious fingers. There was the smell of some kind of burning hemp in the air around her head. (Give a girl enough rope and she’ll smoke it.) The odor reminded Hayduke of dark days and darker nights. Muttering, he set the table, buffet-style, with the salad, the sourdough bread, corn on the cob, a stack of paper plates. Smith turned the steaks. Doc explained the world.
Hog-nosed bats flickered through the evening making radar noises, gulping bugs. Downriver the rapids waited, gnashing their teeth in a steady sullen uproar. High on the canyon rim a reck slipped or was dislodged by something, gave up its purchase anyway, and tumbled down from parapet to parapet, lost in the embrace of gravity, into the alchemy of change, one fragment in the universal flux, and crashed like a bomb into the river. Doc paused in mid-monologue; all listened for a moment to the dying reverberations.
“Grab a plate,” said Smith to his customers, “and load up.” There was no hesitation; he served the steaks. Last in line and disdaining a plate, Hay duke held out his G.I. canteen cup. Smith draped a giant steak over the cup, covering not only the cup but Hay duke’s hand, wrist and forearm.
“Eat,” said Smith.
“Sweet holy motherfuck,” said his boatman, reverently.
Smith kindled a campfire, now that his passengers and help were feeding, with driftwood from the beach. Then he heaped a plate for himself.
All eyes turned toward the fire as the darkness of the canyon gathered around them. Little blue and green flames licked and lapped at the river wood—sculptured chunks of yellow pine from the high country a hundred miles away, juniper, pinyon pine, cottonwood, well-polished sticks of redbud, hackberry and ash. Following the sparks upward they saw the stars turning on in staggered sequence—emeralds, sapphires, rubies, diamonds and opals scattered about the sky in a puzzling, random distribution. Far beyond those galloping galaxies, or perhaps all too present to be seen, lurked God. The gaseous vertebrate.
Supper finished, Smith brought out his musical instruments and played for the assembled company. He played his harmonica—what the vulgar call a “mouth organ”—his Jew’s harp, or what the B’nai B’rith calls a “mouth harp,” and his kazoo, which last, however, added little to anyone’s musical enrichment.
Smith and the doctor passed around the firewater. Abbzug, who did not as a rule drink booze, opened her medicine pouch, removed a Tampax tube, took out some weed and rolled a second little brown cigarette twisted shut at one end. She lit up and passed it around, but no one cared to smoke with her except a reluctant Hayduke and his memories.
“The pot revolution is over?” she said.
“All over,” Doc said. “Marijuana was never more than an active placebo anyway.”
“What nonsense.”
“An oral pacifier for colicky adolescents.”
“What utter rubbish.”
The conversation lagged. The two young women from San Diego (a suburb of Tijuana) sang a song called “Dead Skunk in the Middle of the Road.”
The entertainment palled. Fatigue like gravitation pulled at limbs and eyelids. As they had come so they departed, first Abbzug, then the two women from San Diego. The ladies first. Not because they were the weaker sex—they were not—but simply because they had more sense. Men on an outing feel obliged to stay up drinking to the vile and bilious end, jabbering, mumbling and maundering through the blear, to end up finally on hands and knees, puking on innocent sand, befouling God’s sweet earth. The manly tradition.
The three men hunched closer to the shrinking fire. The cold night crawled up their backs. They passed Smith’s bottle round and around. Then Doc’s bottle. Smith, Hayduke, Sarvis. The captain, the bum and the leech. Three wizards on a dead limb. A crafty intimacy crept upon them.
“You know, gentlemen,” the doctor said. “You know what I think we ought to do….”
Hayduke had been complaining about the new power lines he’d seen the day before on the desert. Smith had been moaning about the dam again, that dam which had plugged up Glen Canyon, the heart of his river, the river of his heart.
“You know what we ought to do,” the doctor said. “We ought to blow that dam to shitaree.” (A bit of Hayduke’s foul tongue had loosened his own.)
“How?” said Hayduke.
“That ain’t legal,” Smith said.
“You prayed for an earthquake, you said.”
“Yeah, but there ain’t no law agin that.”
“You were praying with malicious intent.”
“That’s true. I pray that way all the time.”
“Bent on mischief and the destruction of government property.”
“That’s right, Doc.”
“That’s a felony.”
“It ain’t just a misdemeanor?”
“It’s a felony.”
“How?” said Hayduke.
“How what?”
“How do we blow up the dam?”
“Which dam?”
“Any dam.”
“Now you’re talking,” Smith said. “But Glen Cany
on Dam first. I claim that one first.”
“I don’t know,” the doctor said. “You’re the demolitions expert.”
“I can take out a bridge for you,” Hayduke said, “if you get me enough dynamite. But I don’t know about Glen Canyon Dam. We’d need an atom bomb for that one.”
“I been thinking about that dam for a long time,” Smith said. “And I got a plan. We get three jumbo-size houseboats and some dolphins—”
“Hold it!” Doc said, holding up a big paw. A moment of silence. He looked around, into the darkness beyond the firelight. “Who knows what ears those shadows have.”
They looked. The flames of their little campfire cast a hesitant illumination upon the bush, the boat half grounded on the sandy beach, the rocks and pebbles, the pulse of the river. The women, all asleep, could not be seen.
“There ain’t nobody here but us bombers,” Smith said.
“Who can be sure? The State may have its sensors anywhere.”
“Naw,” Hayduke said. “They’re not bugging the canyons. Not yet anyhow. But who says we have to start with dams? There’s plenty of other work to do.”
“Good work,” the doctor said. “Good, wholesome, constructive work.”
“I hate that dam,” Smith said. “That dam flooded the most beautiful canyon in the world.”
“We know,” Hayduke said. “We feel the same way you do. But let’s think about easier things first. I’d like to knock down some of them power lines they’re stringing across the desert. And those new tin bridges up by Hite. And the goddamned road-building they’re doing all over the canyon country. We could put in a good year just taking the fucking goddamned bulldozers apart.”
“Hear, hear,” the doctor said. “And don’t forget the billboards. And the strip mines. And the pipelines. And the new railroad from Black Mesa to Page. And the coal-burning power plants. And the copper smelters. And the uranium mines. And the nuclear power plants. And the computer centers. And the land and cattle companies. And the wildlife poisoners. And the people who throw beer cans along the highways.”