Rock Bottom (Em Hansen Mysteries)

by Sarah Andrews

  The group had gone primitive and were dancing and chanting around a fire that had been built to leap high. I supposed that their utterances were meant to sound like Indian chants. Some staggered, evidencing intake of strong spirits. “Grease bomb! Grease bomb! Grease bomb!” they grunted. One put on a pair of oven mitts and lifted a long pair of tongs high over his head as if enacting a great ritual. He made some noises, then marched over to a camp stove, where he used the tongs to lift a pint beer can the contents of which had been heated to smoking hot. He carried the can over to the fire pan and set it in the center of the open flames. The crowd let out a roar.

  “What’s in the can?” I wondered out loud.

  “Bacon grease,” said Fritz. “These wackos are going to light the whole beach on fire if they don’t watch out.” He chuckled.

  I glanced sideways at him. “So igniting the beach is a good thing?”

  “Their biggest problem is going to be cleaning up the sand afterward. That’s if they don’t manage to burn their own whiskers off.”

  “What the hell—?”

  He was grinning. “Just watch,” he whispered.

  Now the man who had set the can of grease into the fire picked up a long pole. In the light of the leaping flames I could see that a cup had been duct-taped to one end of it. The man marched to the river, dipped the cup into the water, and hup-hup-hupped it back up to the fire pit. As his mates brought their chant up to fever pitch, he swung the cup over the fire and decanted several ounces of the cold water into the can, atomizing a shot of roiling hot grease.

  As the atomized grease ignited, a ball of fire burst up over the pit. The crowd roared with approval.

  “How do you know these things?” I asked Fritz.

  “Boy Scouts was very educational,” he murmured.

  Another ball of fire bloomed, and another.

  “Let’s get out of here,” Fritz said, bending his great frame to slither off through the brush. He kept hold of my hand, drawing me after him.

  “Where are we going?” I asked, as I realized that he was not steering me back toward our camp.

  “I’m just trying to find the blanket I hid out here,” he said. “Ah,” he purred, “here it is, my love.”

  Finding privacy on a river trip is difficult, but entirely worth the effort.

  *

  In the morning, we had a leisurely breakfast of pancakes and bacon. It was our first rest day, so we all looked after homey rituals that involved heating a little water. Molly Chang and some of the other women and I found a private stretch of riverbank and took turns lathering our hair with castile soap and pouring water over a friend to rinse it off. We crouched over the river to scrub the rest of our parts, avoiding dipping into the bracing chill until we were so soapy that the idea finally appealed. After that, it was back to the tenting area for a clean pair of skivvies and shirt. My biggest problem was finding them in the deep darkness of my dry bag. Some dry bags opened end to end like a duffel, but the waterproof zippers made those bags expensive. I had opted for the type of bag that opened at one end and rolled and cinched shut, creating a waterproof seal through compression of the folds. Life on the river was simple but had its chores.

  Wink pulled a tool kit out of one of the covered compartments on his dory and proceeded to do a little maintenance. Julianne made a fuss out of offering assistance, so he handed her a paintbrush and a small can of paint and had her give the dory’s trim a fresh coat.

  “You don’t want me to paint over the name, do you?”

  “Yes, I do,” said Wink.

  “Oh, but I think Wave Slut is such a cute name. It’s kind of like me,” she said, tipping a hip toward him.

  Wink reached over and gave her bottom a pat. “I’ll repaint it later. I don’t have the right brush and paint along for that.”

  “Oh really, let’s leave it. It’s so cute.”

  Wink took the brush out of her hand, dipped it in the paint, and slapped it across the name, all but wiping it out with one stroke. Before handing the brush back to Julianne, he dabbed it to her nose. “Now you’re cute,” he said.

  She grabbed the brush and tried to hit him with it across the chops, but he grabbed her arm forcibly and said, “Hey, I just shaved!”

  With a bit of a jolt, I realized that this was true: For the first time since we had first seen Wink, he had actually bothered to shave. He had washed his hair, too, and had even combed it, slicking it back like he was trying out for a remake of a movie from the 1950s.

  As the day meandered through lunch and on into an otherwise lazy afternoon, Fritz and Brendan made plans to hike up to the ancient granaries above the camp, and invited me to join them. “You’ll love this,” Fritz told me. “We’ll need water bottles and a snack.”

  The path to the granaries led through the low trees and brush that grew at beach level up through sparser and sparser scrub as we climbed the ramp of alluvium that spread like an apron along the foot of the Redwall cliff. The river had cut down more than three hundred feet closer to sea level since the put-in at Lees Ferry, carving through the Muav Limestone and into the Bright Angel Shale below. The trail led us up from the shade of the trees at the riverside and out into the naked heat of the desert air and, as it grew steeper, began to switch back and forth up through the crumbling red desert soils. Fritz set a mercifully leisurely pace, stopping here and there to admire a wildflower so that those of us who were relatively short-legged could keep up with him.

  At one turn in the trail we came across Wink Oberley. He was standing still on the trail peering upriver, watching, looking for something in particular.

  “Have you lost your dentures?” Fritz asked.

  Wink kept his pose as if ignoring him, then abruptly swung toward him, flipped up his sunglasses, forced a smile, and said, “Oh, I get it. Flyboy talk for have I lost something. Very funny. Ha-ha.” He lowered his expensive sunglasses back into place and took a couple of steps past us, ending the interchange.

  I looked back at him from the next turn in the trail. Clearly, he was scanning the river for something. Or somebody. Just like on the day he arrived at the river, he was looking for something he expected to see. Why had this man chosen to come on the river with us? What was he up to? Tiny had said that Wink had taken great interest in the fact that Molly Chang, a geology department chair and thus a potential employer, would be on the trip, but so far he had chatted her up but not in earnest, and as far as I knew Molly didn’t have any jobs to offer.

  At the top of the trail the cliffs overhung a long, narrow shelf of rock. Tucked into this slot, a row of storage compartments had been built of the native stone. Fritz said, “The people who lived here then—around a thousand years ago—came to the Nankoweap delta to raise crops. Then, after harvesting, they stored some of the grain here.”

  “Where are their houses? Did the Flood wash them away?” Brendan inquired.

  Fritz shrugged his shoulders. “I don’t know. I suppose it’s a lot like farming by a river most anywhere: You have to consider that at times, the river is going to rise and come over the bank, maybe wash the dwellings away. Isn’t that right, Em?” he asked. “Em’s the geologist. Ask her.”

  Brendan turned a piercing gaze my way.

  I wanted to kick Fritz about then. I didn’t care how big a fight he had going with his ex-wife; it just wasn’t fair to divert all of these questions to me. “Well, it’s about as your dad says,” I said, buying time. “Early cultures had to deal with floods just like we do today, but they didn’t have all the machinery we have to build dams to try to control them. On the other hand, because they weren’t fighting nature, the rivers were free to carry in the annual layers of rich sediments and organic matter that made deltas like this one really good places to farm. The Egyptians had some of the richest soils for farming in the Mediterranean until they built the Aswan Dam and turned the lake it made into a settling basin.”

  “But some floods are a whole lot bigger,” said Brendan. “Like Noah’s
Flood.”

  I took a breath, let it out. “Sure, there are stories of huge floods in most so-called primitive cultures, and even today we have some that overwhelm our best predictions and planning. Like Hurricane Katrina and New Orleans, or … or sure, take for instance the stories of Noah’s Flood. Those floods were devastating, downright traumatic, and maybe the stories grew to fit the impacts of the events.”

  Brendan’s gaze shifted. He now studied my face as if I had become something abstract and poorly understood, like the granaries. “My mother says that God sent the Flood to punish us,” he said.

  Fritz’s eyelids slowly slid closed.

  I thought sourly that Fritz’s reluctance to engage with such issues was one reason why his first marriage had broken up; in fact, a greater puzzle was that it had ever begun. And I was sick of her games. It wasn’t so much what she believed that bothered me, it was the way she used those beliefs to torment everyone around her. To punish us, not some people who lived a long time ago. Emphasis on the punishment, one big fat control game. The message was that everyone—including this wonderful young man, her son—should feel bad, and in the odd moments when we hadn’t screwed up in her eyes, we should be kept on tenter-hooks that our next screwup was only moments away.

  As I looked down the steep slope at the splendor of the canyon, at the rose pink walls of stone and the zigzagging strip of chocolate water below, I realized that I had the power in this moment to offer Brendan another way of thinking about himself, and that if I failed to use it, I would be derelict in my duty to him as a fellow human being. So I said, “Brendan, I don’t know much about that one particular flood they talk about in the Bible, and I don’t want to have a debate with your mother about it because for one thing, she isn’t here. I will say, however, that if you study geology you can find evidence of absolutely huge floods here and there, like the Channeled Scablands of Washington and Oregon, where water built up behind an ice dam during a glaciation and then let go all at once. Actually, it’s thought that this happened repeatedly, so in fact the effect was not just one huge rush of water but several, and there’s Lake Bonneville, and—”

  Brendan said, “You’re losing me, Em.”

  “My point is that floods aren’t unusual. There’s evidence of a lot of really big ones, and here in a place like this, flooding would happen almost every year. Local tribes have their own flood stories about the carving of the Grand Canyon. So they wouldn’t want to go to the trouble of building a permanent residence too awfully close to the river because it would just be swept away in the next spring flood. Like your dad said, it makes more sense to build up there on the Kaibab Plateau and then just come down here and camp seasonally in this warm place where there’s easy access to water, so you can grow your crops.”

  Brendan nodded. “Okay…”

  I let the bit about Noah rest. I considered saying something about the difference between Stone Age recountings of traumatic events and scientific examination of evidence, but I figured that it was tough enough that Brendan was stuck shuttling between a Bible-thumping ma, and a dad who didn’t want to talk about things. The poor kid didn’t need me putting any more bricks on his load.

  Brendan turned back to me and said, “So you believe a different story from what my mom says.”

  I ransacked my brain for an answer to his question, which hadn’t really even been stated as a question. Finally, I said, “As a scientist I try not to believe things per se, which means ‘in isolation.’ The idea of science is to gather a whole lot of evidence to try to find out what is so, to eliminate things that can be proven wrong and see what’s left. When you talk about religious beliefs, that’s a different thing altogether. Science and religion are like apples and oranges. Science tries to uncover physical laws, while religion deals with moral laws. Science examines physical, rational phenomena, while religion tries to cope with the unknowable.”

  “Mom says that if it’s written in the Bible, then it’s true.”

  For the moment, I let go of trying to be Brendan’s stepmother and just spoke to him as one human to another. “Okay then, take Noah’s Flood: That’s a story from the Bible, which is a book that was written down in bits and pieces a long time ago by a bunch of different people in languages that are no longer spoken. They are stories, and stories have a special place in our lives, and each their own purpose. Sometimes we tell a story to teach history, other times it’s to try to explain something, or maybe in the case of a flood big enough to drown most of your family and friends, you tell a story to try to cope with something horrifying and sad. What I’m trying to say is that I don’t want to argue with what your mother says, because I choose to stick with those few stories that I can read in this big book of rock that’s all around us. Though sometimes it’s darned hard to interpret. Like your mother’s Bible, this one was written a very long time ago, and no one alive today was there when it was happening, and some of the information has been lost.”

  “Mom says the Bible is the Word of God.”

  I felt my dander beginning to rise. “Well, and maybe it is! But for crap’s sake give me a chance here to tell you where I’m coming from!”

  Brendan turned away and stared at the ground.

  I felt mean for yelling, and stupid as hell, because I knew that the kid wasn’t trying to piss me off, he was just trying to deal with a big, whopping ambiguity that was making his young life messy. I said, “I’m sorry to get angry. It’s not your fault. The thing is, as a geologist I get this a lot, especially living in Utah, where about every other Mormon is a fundamentalist. There are folks who insist on arguing with me about these things, but you know what? The truth is just as important to me as it is to them. Science is all about trying to discover what is true while staying humble enough so you don’t jump to conclusions, so it kind of gets under my skin when someone…” I let it trail off and thought a moment. “Brendan, I am tempted to say, ‘You’re at an age when these questions start to come up,’ but I won’t. Because I’m here to tell you that they keep on coming up indefinitely unless you…” I almost said. Unless you acquire a rigidly held system of beliefs like your mother. It was incumbent on me not to load more fight onto this battleground. “You’re a smart person, Brendan. You’ll be okay.”

  Out of the corner of my eye, I could see that Fritz was staring at the broad palms of his hands, and that he was smiling.

  *

  Back at camp, Molly and Nancy were playing a portable game of Boggle, and Julianne was starting dinner. “Have you seen Wink?” she inquired.

  “No, I haven’t,” Fritz told her.

  “He’s supposed to help me,” she explained, in a tone that suggested that she was very eager that this should happen.

  “He’s down at the next campsite talking to another party,” said Brendan. “Those grease bombers from last night took off this morning, and now there’s another group there.”

  Never forget, I reminded myself: Nothing gets past this kid! Nothing!

  Just then Wink popped into the clearing from one of the trails that snaked through the tamarisk. With a flourish, he removed his sunglasses and closed on Julianne. “I am here to assist you, my sweet,” he told her.

  Julianne blushed prettily, and as Wink sidled up to the folding table where she stood, she curved her spine toward him, meeting his body with hers.

  Oh, so it’s gotten that far already, I noted, guessing that ol’ Wink wouldn’t be snoozing on his dory tonight.

  After dinner, folks pulled folding camp chairs up around the fire pit and swapped tales of rapids ridden on earlier trips and other adventures. It was a mellow evening under a night so black and an arch of stars so crisp that each satellite stood out clearly as it slid across the heavens. Jokes were told, a bottle of single-malt Scotch made a circuit, and Brendan did his math homework. I leaned back in my chair enjoying the stories and camaraderie.

  “This sure is nice tonight,” I said to Nancy Skinner, who was sitting next to me. “Folks are in great for
m.”

  Nancy snickered. “You mean because Wink has found his way somewhere else.”

  “Why would that make the difference?” I asked.

  “He interrupts the stories,” she said. “You know how it is: Some people tell stories to entertain, while others tell them to hear their own voice. I’ve noticed that each time someone starts a story he goes on the alert, not because he’s interested but because he’s cuing up one that’s meant to top it, and he’s just waiting for the guy to take a breath so he can barge in.” She shrugged her shoulders. “His stories are okay as far as they go, but I suspect they’re just that.”

  “Just what?”

  “Stories. What a liar the man is.”

  I was just opening my mouth to ask her to say more when our conversation was interrupted by an unusual sound: the singing of a hymn.

  Mungo Park roared, “What the fuck is that? We got angels landing on the beach?”

  Jerry said, “It’s probably that church group in the next campsite.”

  “Church group?” echoed Mungo. “What flavor?”

  “I don’t know,” said Danielle, “but did you catch the style? Lots of short haircuts on the men, woven cloth shirts rather than T-shirts, and not a pair of blue jeans in the place. And one chick was wearing high-heeled sandals!”

  Mungo elbowed Molly in the ribs. “You think it’s God’s Voice, that Young Earth group we heard about?”

  “Young what?” asked Dell.

  Molly raised one shoulder and dropped it. “A lot of Christian fundamentalist groups have a literal view of what the Bible says about Creation. Like it took six days roughly six thousand years ago to make all of this.”

  “Is that a fact?” asked Dell.

  Molly laughed. “Well, not if you ask me it isn’t. We’re down below the Redwall now, below the Temple Butte Formation and the Muav Limestone, and into the Bright Angel Shale. That’s Cambrian Period; you’re looking at strata that are over five hundred million years old, and by the time we get down to the Inner Gorge, we’ll be looking at granites and schists that formed almost two billion years ago.”