Rock Bottom (Em Hansen Mysteries)

by Sarah Andrews

  Fritz moved in and broke up the tussle between river ranger and river trash by forcefully offering the man a hand to shake. Fritz is tall and muscular and knows how to be imposing when he has to be. “You must be George Oberley,” he said, like it was an order.

  “Wink.” The masher abruptly let go of the woman and lifted his sunglasses, squeezed one eye shut like that was real cute, then snapped that plastic visor back in place.

  “Wink,” said Fritz, his jaws tightening. “Nice of you to put in an appearance. So, you need some help launching that dory?”

  Wink’s face went slack. “For what? Hank can handle it.”

  Hank now had the trailer up past its axle in the water. He got out of the truck and waded around the dory undoing straps, and as the boat began to float up off the cradle, he paid out the bow line, letting the river take it down the beach a ways. It rode high in the water, its up-curved flanks almost begging the water to challenge it. When it looked like it was about to slam into the row of rafts, Hank gave the line a tug and pulled it neatly into place in the rank, then selected a rock to use as a crude anchor. He then immediately turned his back on the boat, stalked back over to his truck, reached into the bed, hauled out a large gear bag, which he dumped unceremoniously on the ramp. He next unlashed a pair of oars and dropped them next to the duffel so hard they bounced like pickup sticks, then he jumped back into the pickup, gunned the engine, and drove away.

  Wink gave him a merry wave. “You can pick it up the end of the month at Diamond Creek!”

  The driver of the truck extended one scrawny arm out the window and flipped him off.

  To anyone who might be listening, Wink said, “It’s a great boat. I’ve taken it down this river a hundred times. My friend here’s had it stored for me in Page while I’ve been at Princeton working on my Ph.D.” He emphasized the words “Princeton” and “Ph.D.,” just in case people were listening.

  I wasn’t quite sure how you can take a boat down a river a hundred times if you’ve only been down the river forty-two times, but mathematics seldom matches hyperbole.

  As if nothing odd had just occurred, the ranger hitched herself up all officious again and began ticking down her list of requirements, checking our life vests, the fire pan, the military surplus rocket boxes we would use to carry out our poop. She cast a gimlet eye on my rock hammer and asked Fritz, “You have a permit to collect rocks?”

  Fritz said, “No, and we know not to collect anything but memories. I use this for driving in tent stakes.”

  “Each boat has a spare life vest?”

  Brendan lifted up our spare.

  Wink stepped toward Brendan, snatched the vest out of his hands, and turned it over. “I see you’re renting your equipment. What a bunch of crap,” he said, then stuffed it back into Brendan’s hands and gave him a not entirely playful swat across the top of his head.

  Brendan clutched the life vest to his belly and shot a worried look at his father, who had his hands balled into fists and planted on his hips. And so began our trip down the Grand Canyon with the marvelous Wink Oberley.

  Notes of USNPS River Ranger Seth Farnsworth

  April 16, 3:30 P.M.

  Landed by helicopter above Lower Ledges Campsite and deployed Zodiac raft. While helicopter searched for missing man, I continued to Lower Ledges, river right mile 151.5, found party of 14 making sandwiches. All in a somber mood. Missing man had not been found.

  Trip leader Fritz Calder stated that he woke at 5:15 A.M. and all seemed normal in camp. Four rafts, one dory, and three kayaks were as left the night before, tied up riding the current at the bottom ledge of rock. Kayaker Olaf Jones slept in the middle raft, was unaware of the disappearance until informed by Calder. Kayaker Lloyd Oshiro slept on a ledge near the rafts and likewise noticed nothing amiss until morning. All others slept in tents or under the sky on camp mats up near the cliff base. Missing man last seen drinking alcoholic beverages at the campfire by oarsmen Mungo Park and Dell Oxley when they turned in at about 10:30 P.M.

  Calder stated that he started the stove for coffee and made a routine check of campsite. He noticed nothing amiss except that the campfire appeared to have been left to burn itself out rather than being properly extinguished. Assumed missing man was in tent belonging to Glenda Fittle.

  Glenda Fittle said no, she slept alone, had gone to her tent at 9:00 P.M., fell asleep immediately, did not notice she was alone until she woke in the morning.

  All awake by 7:30. Search begun @ 7:45 A.M. At 8:30 A.M. Calder commenced attempts to reach Park Dispatch via sat phone to advise of possible drowning. Consensus is that missing man might have fallen into river, passing out while urinating.

  Fittle asserted that missing man had been “vibed out” of the trip, so I inspected the site for signs of a person having left the campsite by any means other than going into the river, but found no footprints, etc. Cliffs would be difficult if not impossible to scale and it’s a long way to nowhere up beyond the rim. Nearest side canyon this side of river is 150 Mile Canyon, a mile and a half upriver. Access would require at minimum very careful ledge walking, but in darkness? And again 150 Mile leads into the middle of nowhere. Nearest dowriver side canyon is Havasu, about 4 miles river left. Checked water temperature. Hypothermia would render anyone unconscious in half that distance.

  Inspected the missing man’s equipment, which seemed intact. It included:

  Paco Pad and sleeping bag

  PFD + spare

  hat

  1 pr. flip-flops

  small dry bag, containing:

  3 T-shirts

  1 pr. cargo shorts

  fleece jacket

  1 pr. athletic shoes

  small ziplock bag with toiletries

  paperback book (Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand)

  On questioning party members, it was surmised that the missing man had been barefoot in camp during the evening. He was not observed to have had any footwear or clothing or gear beyond an additional plaid shirt and cutoff camouflage pants worn last night in camp.

  I am inclined to agree that he fell into the river by mishap, and it follows from there that he is drowned. I advised the party that bodies without PFD usually sink and do not reemerge for 2–14 days, if ever.

  At 4:45 P.M. contacted NPS group working downstream to watch for a body and advised Calder’s party to remain at Ledges Camp a second night until a preliminary report is filed at HQ.

  APRIL 1: FINAL PREPARATIONS

  The waters of the Colorado River rise at the Continental Divide along the Rocky Mountains in northern Colorado above 10,000 feet elevation, joining sheet wash into rivulets and rivulets into a creek. As myriad tributaries add their strength the river grows, tumbling west-southwestward down and down to Grand Junction, a town so named because the upper stretch of the Colorado was, for a period of time, called the Grand River by Euro-Americans. Earlier human inhabitants of this continent had other names for it; the upper reaches of the drainage is Seedskeedee to the Crow Indians, and as its course flows through other tribal lands, it becomes Tó Nts’ósíkooh to the Navajo and ’Aha Kwahwat to the Mojave. At Grand Junction the river is joined by the Gunnison River, growing into a mighty force, then turns northwestward for a few dozen miles, crosses into Utah, and bends to the southwest. Below Moab, the Colorado joins hands with the Green River (which heads in Wyoming) and flows into what was once Glen Canyon and is now Lake Powell. The Spanish named the lower stretch Colorado, their word for red, because they found it choked with mud and sand that washes off the oxidized desert slickrock that reaches to its banks.

  I’ve seen photographs of the lovely twisting side canyons that fed into Glen Canyon, a vast fairyland of red rock smoothed into a symphony of compound curves by the load of abrasive silt, sand, rocks, and uprooted trees that were tumbled into the river by the purging rush of flash floods. Now all these sediments and flotsam—thirteen to twenty-seven tons per day depending on runoff—are captured by the lake, a great settling basin created by t
he construction of the Glen Canyon Dam, which was built in the dam-building heyday of the 1950s and ’60s to regulate the flow of the river and provide power generation and recreational opportunities for powerboaters and water-skiers. Both lake and water regulation were by-products of the United States’ poorly calculated water debt to other basin states, which brought the problem to the Bureau of Reclamation, a federal agency that existed to build dams and thus did so. The bureau reckoned it a “cash-register dam” that would help pay for other reclamation projects and extend the life of Hoover Dam downstream.

  Lees Ferry, where I now stood tightening cam straps that held our gear to our raft, is fifteen miles downriver from Glen Canyon Dam. I wore neoprene booties on my feet as I waded through the shallows around the raft, because while the river’s springtime temperatures used to rise quickly from winter’s thirty-two degrees Fahrenheit on the way to summer’s eighty, it now shot under the dam near the bottom of Lake Powell at forty-seven degrees, a temperature that delivered up rapid hypothermia for anyone who went swimming without a wet suit.

  I glanced up the beach to where Fritz stood with a beer in his hand, directing the final loading of the rafts. Fritz and Tiny liked to call themselves the April Fools Rafting and Drinking Society, a name they acquired when they first started rafting farther up the Colorado River near Moab. The guy who led those trips preferred spring over summer in the canyons because it’s not so beastly hot and not as overrun with touri, his faux Latin name for tourists. I don’t know the man’s real name, because they always just called him “the Gummer,” a tribute to his advanced age. The Gummer had taught them how to scout and row rapids without getting killed, so they thought they were hot shit and always told themselves they’d do the Grand together. Tiny tried for years to get them in on a private trip, and when that didn’t work they finally coughed up the money for a commercial trip. Tiny went commercially again the next year and the next, but by then Fritz was busy starting his aviation businesses—air charter and designing a new plane—and such expenditures of time and money weren’t an option. Tiny became so charged up by those commercial trips that he started applying again for a private permit, and it just happened to come together for him about the time Fritz announced that we were getting married, so like I said, he waited until our big day to make his really big announcement.

  I did enjoy the preparations for the river trip, and the idea of being around all that slick rock did please me. And I was glad Brendan could come, because he was of an age now when he needed to be out doing manly things with his dad rather than sitting home watching his mom paint her toenails and bitch about her second husband (okay, so she’s a dish and a rough act to follow and I have a little thing about that, but I’ve got to believe that Fritz chose me precisely because the epithet “princess” could never be applied to me). I was also glad that Fritz and Tiny had seen their way clear to let me invite along fellow geologist Molly Chang from the University of Utah. She was my main professor when I took my M.S. there. She said she’d come if this geologist with whom she’s doing a project could also come, a guy from Denver named Don Rasmussen. Don said he wouldn’t come without his wife, Jerry.

  So now I was getting to know Jerry a bit, visiting with her while we all finished rigging our rafts and most everyone else was busy running up and down the beach carrying gear.

  “So you and Fritz are newlyweds?” Jerry asked. “How lovely. This is a fine way to honeymoon.”

  “Mm-hm.”

  She dug into one of the big coolers that was strapped in behind the oarlocks on her raft and pulled out a couple of Sapporo beers. “We should have a toast. Here.” She handed me one.

  I popped the tab on the top of the thing and we clunked them together. “To marriage,” I said.

  “To marriage.” She took a nice long pull on her beer. “And to finding a good man, which makes it all worth it,” she added. She took another draw, and smacked her lips with satisfaction. “Don and I honeymooned while working for the Forest Service in a lookout tower up in Montana named Porphyry.”

  “Porphyry. Like the rock?”

  “Yes. It was built on a high peak that has an Eocene ignimbrite porphyry right at the surface.”

  “So are you a geologist, too?” I inquired.

  Another voice cut into the conversation: Wink Oberley, who sat stretched out across the aft seat of the Wave Slut with his feet up on the near gunwale. “Hey, those beers look pretty good there.”

  Jerry had her back to the dory and did not look around at him. To me she said, “I manage an office for an oil company.”

  Wink spoke again, louder. “You got a beer for this man?” When another ten seconds went by and she still had not replied, he swung one of his oars on its pivot and tapped the big round rubber flotation tube that ran all the way around her raft. He hit it just hard enough that the whole raft jiggled, bouncing her a bit. “Hey, lady! I’m sooo thirsty here!”

  Jerry was bent over from the hips, pulling hard on a cam strap. “I heard you,” she said evenly. “And as you can see, I’m sooo busy here.”

  “In that case, I can wait a bit,” he said, like he was doing her some kind of a favor. He yawned and stretched and gazed at her bottom. “It’s such a fine day, and the view just can’t be beat.”

  Without straightening up, Jerry said, “Oh, well, then, Dink, if you have all that free time, there’s plenty to do around here. There are provisions to be loaded into the fourth raft, and it would be just great if you’d fill those water jugs there. And when that’s done, you could ask Em here what sort of vegetables you could be prepping for dinner; you know, like some of those carrots Brendan loaded into your hold for you. I’m sure the deck of your dory would make a fine place to put a cutting board.”

  “Wink,” he said, correcting her. He crunched his face into the old one-eye again, even though Jerry still kept her back to him and continued with her work. It occurred to me that she knew damned well that she had his name wrong. It occurred to me also that Jerry was one smart cookie. It occurred to me most of all that I was going to enjoy getting to know her.

  Wink stared at her back and her beer for a while longer, then got up and found his way out of his boat and down along the launch ramp, stopping to rummage through a box of stores for something to eat. He reminded me of a film I once saw of a rogue bear loose in a campsite where humans had unwittingly left food lying around. Grotesquely fascinated, I turned to adjust the oar on that side of our raft so I could watch him out of the corner of my eye. He found an orange, hefted it up and down a couple of times like a baseball, then gouged into it with his right forefinger to break through the peel, which he removed rather messily, setting off a spray of juice that splattered the front of his T-shirt. I gave him points for not dropping the peel onto the ground, but his progression along the ramp as he ripped juicy sections from the orange and stuffed them into his mouth suggested that the extent to which he was civilized was fragmental. He stopped at the bulletin board by the covered picnic area for a moment, read something that was posted there, gave the page a tap with his index finger and smiled, then continued down the ramp to a stretch where another group was beginning to inflate their rafts. He struck up a conversation, and in about a minute flat, he had a beer in his hand and began knocking it back like it was water, gassing away at that crew while they worked their pumps.

  Our rafts were sixteen-footers, each built like a giant squared-off inner tube with two inner cross tubes and a rubber floor. The tubes were about two feet in diameter, and the forward end was lifted in a prow to address the waves. The rafts were self-bailing, which meant that if they shipped water in the rapids it would drain away down through portals between the tubes and the flooring. There were D-rings welded at strategic points along the tubes so we could lash equipment to the rafts using one-inch-wide cam straps. It was not comforting to know that the reason all objects had to be lashed down was that these big wide monsters could easily flip in the rapids.

  Still working on the la
shings in her hold, Jerry said, “So I run the office for a small oil company, and I’m current president of the Denver Chapter of the Desk and Derrick Club, which is an association of people who do what I do.” She looked up at me and smiled pleasantly. “And I have little patience for those who can’t figure out how to keep themselves busy.” Her tone was light, matter-of-fact.

  “No pucky.”

  “No pucky whatsoever.”

  “He’s on the no-beer list.”

  “Who?”

  “Mr. Wave Slut here. It was one of my tasks to do the calculations on how much beer to bring, so Fritz gave me the list of who’s drinking and who isn’t. Tiny rigged it that way because the nondrinkers generally don’t want to subsidize the drinkers’ beer.”

  Now it was me that Jerry seemed not to hear. I supposed that she didn’t want to get any further into a three-cornered conversation or, worse yet, a whining fest about our resident mooch, so I let the point go, but the fact was that I thought it was damned rude for Mr. Oberley to sign up for no beer and then expect to get some. Had Jerry been willing to engage in this gossip, I might have told her also that I had overheard Fritz and Tiny discussing this issue, because the beer was the least of it. Wink, it seemed, did not wish to be charged for his portion of the permit, satellite phone rental, the shuttle that would move our vehicles down to Diamond Creek, or for any of the other bits of equipment and logistics that go into a river trip. Fritz had found himself in the middle of negotiations between Tiny and Wink, who seemed to think his expertise was of such value that he should perhaps not even pay for his share of the food. He claimed poverty. He was a graduate student with a family to feed, he told them, and while he was on the topic, he felt that we should all pitch in to buy him a plane ticket to get him out here from New Jersey. Fritz had pointed out to Tiny that it was a permit stipulation that costs be shared equally among participants, and said he sure didn’t want to have to explain to the others why they were having to pay an extra couple hundred dollars apiece to treat this unknown like a prince. There was plenty of river experience among the other participants, most of whom owned their own rafts and had been here before, so Tiny had begun to crumble a bit, admitting that he wasn’t sure why someone who had “humped his leg” to get onto the trip was now trying to get it for free.