Lava Falls

by Lucy Jane Bledsoe

  She would never tell him, even then as a little girl, how that whitewater made her feel. Yes, fear, the most intense fear ever, but also thrill. Even then, in a little girl kind of way, she knew that she was her father’s daughter, that she was doomed to love a wilderness that many didn’t even know existed. She did rebel, but silently, in her own language, knowing that she was a salmon, not an otter, feeling the froth in her head, not her thighs. But her father’s brand of love was in her DNA and any real rebellion was impossible. He’d ruined her for life, bequeathing her his longing for transcendence, a longing that rendered regular experience dull. Anything short of endorphins-drenched joy made her impatient.

  She knew now at age forty-one that she was just like him. At least a lot like him. But that didn’t mean she didn’t still resent him for the inheritance. It didn’t mean that he wasn’t still an arrogant jerk. His own personal walls were as hard and magnificent as these canyon walls. Between them he let flow his own private Colorado, pure and fierce and guarded. Only for him.

  Which is what she should be focusing on, too. The river. Just the river. Always the river. She let her gaze travel as far as it would go downstream, and then climbed it up the northern cliffs. How did she even get here? Born into the late twentieth century, yet stuck like her father in this centuries-old rock sandwich. Time seemed to have entered its own whitewater rapid lately, the years surging, wrecking all the beaches and harbors, smashing boats against rocks. So much of this country’s wilderness was being destroyed, and so quickly, in the human desperation for resources. At least for the profits those resources delivered. Maybe that was why she’d agreed to this trip. Maybe spending two weeks in Earth’s deep history would be instructive.

  Ah, cut the drama. Face the truth. This wasn’t about Earth’s history. It was about her own history. That was why she was here, why she’d said yes to Marylou’s invitation.

  Exactly twenty-five years ago, Josie ran the Grand Canyon for the first time. It was far from her dad’s first time. He was one of the famed wooden dory rowers from the early days and had already navigated the big waters of the Colorado, and dozens of other rivers all over the West, many, many times. He outfitted her in her own rowboat, adult-sized this time, and he paddled a kayak. They launched, just the two of them, on her sixteenth birthday. She wasn’t afraid. Not anymore. Fear, she knew by then, was a luxury, and one she couldn’t afford, not with a dad like hers. He’d taught her that you took risks to get places you wanted to get to, and he applied that agenda to emotional, mental, and physical journeys. If you failed, you experienced pain. So what. Maybe, someday, you’d experience premature death.

  Not yet, not for Josie and not for him, either. He and her mom lived in their hippie abode, a ramshackle wooden dwelling, not unlike a tree house only it sat on the ground, with loads of skylights and flowering trees, in the hills above Berkeley. They drank copious red wine and played stringed instruments, and though both approached seventy, they still climbed mountains, though smaller ones, and ran rivers, albeit slower ones. Her father was a legend in his own circle. He didn’t even know there were other circles.

  Josie remembered every drop of time from those fast days during her first time on the river. She piloted her rowboat expertly through House Rock Rapid, the Roaring Twenties and Georgie Rapid, even Hance, Sockdolager, Horn Creek, and Hermit rapids. Her confidence soared, matching her father’s, as she pulled the long oars through the water, her legs stretched out in front of her, her back nearly resting on the rim of the stern before lunging forward with all her might for another stroke. At sixteen she’d bought into her father’s myth of invincibility. If possible, she had become even more arrogant than he was. A river running a fast life. Already.

  Then they came to Crystal Rapid just past Mile 98, one of the most feared and respected rapids in the canyon. In the whole damned country, for that matter. Two debris fans enter the river at that point, colliding and turning the flow into a massive, roiling chaos of giant waves. Her dad shot through in his kayak, expertly paddling like a fool through the ten-foot waves coming at him from all directions, whooping his childlike laughter of ecstasy.

  Josie waited upstream in her rowboat, pausing in the tongue of the rapid, the smooth green water that funnels into the whitewater. She heard his jubilant hollering, saw the red blades of his paddle flashing in and out of the white, and then saw him get spit out the bottom, still upright, always successful when he pitted himself against the elements.

  A pleasurable hubris coursed through her blood. She knew she was supposed to have carefully watched the route he took through the rapid, and also that it was her job to not just replicate what he did but to assess for herself whether it was the best way. Take into account her size, the kind of boat she piloted, the second by second changes in the water’s behavior. Rule number one of reading rivers was to not assume anyone, not even your legendary father, knew the best line to take. Anyhow, he paddled a kayak and she rowed a rowboat. All of this considering had to happen in an instant because the river ferried her boat along the tongue, into the V, and sucked her into the turbulence.

  A moment later, she was swimming. Or drowning. Water swamped her from above, from every direction, and she thrashed for air, drank too much river. She felt hands gripping her ankles, dragging her down to the river bed, more hands pinning her there on the bottom. She opened her eyes and saw the bubbles, the mud and rocks, and heard an eerie hissing. Whatever held her ankles let go and she got tumbled, as if in a massive washing machine, head over heels, snorting in water, the hissing morphing into a siren, a high-pitched scream in her ears. She thought it was the call of death.

  To this day, she doesn’t know if she lost consciousness. She just knows that, besides the hands pulling her under, there were two more hands, strong ones, grabbing the shoulder straps of her life jacket and hoisting her, like a dead river otter, onto the top of the kayak. Somehow her dad managed to paddle, with her draped across the bow, to an eddy at the side of the current. There he thumped her back and, she’ll never forget, said, “You lost the boat.”

  She flung herself off the deck of his kayak, well aware that she was committing herself back to the river, and thereby probably committing suicide—Tuna Creek Rapid was less than a mile downstream and she’d be swept into that liquid entropy—but she wanted only to get away from him. Hypothermic, exhausted, maybe already dead. Fine. That would teach him. The eddy was calm, however, and she only bobbed for a moment in the ice cold water before she swam a couple of strokes to the riverbank where she crawled out, sat on the rocks heaving for breath, and used every ounce of will she possessed to not cry. She did not cry.

  Her father dragged his kayak onto the rocks and fumbled in the hatch where he found a thermos. He poured her a cup of hot chocolate. Which she wanted to refuse but couldn’t. Then he dug back into the hatch and retrieved the bag of gorp, a disgusting mix of raisins, M&Ms, and peanuts, a concoction she’d always hated, and hated to this day. He’d insisted, though, throughout her childhood, on every wilderness trip, that she eat it. There had been some short trips where gorp was the only food they ate. That morning on the rocks just below Crystal Rapid, she threw back handfuls of the cloyingly dense fare, her survival instinct kicking in big time. Her body knew it needed calories, even if she thought, for a few minutes anyway, that she didn’t want to live.

  “You’re in luck,” her father commented. “Look.”

  Josie raised her eyes. He held her paddle aloft. “I grabbed it right before I grabbed you. I managed to toss it like a spear to shore. Brilliant!”

  She looked away.

  “The thing is,” he carried on.

  “I know,” she cried. “Whatever you do, don’t lose your paddle or your boat. I know.”

  He’d told her a thousand times: if a rapid flips you, you’re supposed to grab onto the boat. It might save your life in the immediate moment. But it will also greatly increase your chances of survival in the near future as you’ll need a boat, never mind the
supplies in the boat, to finish the trip.

  As if grabbing onto a boat that has flipped you in a rapid is even remotely possible. She squeezed her eyes shut, wanting to ward off the coming lecture on the best practices for doing just that, a lesson he’d given her many times already. But he surprised her by remaining quiet for a moment. Then he said, “Double lucky. The boat is just downstream, I can see it, in another eddy. Do you think you can swim to it?”

  Swim. The man was insane. She was so exhausted, she couldn’t even lift her arms. And she was seriously cold.

  “Or,” he said, his voice softening. “You could paddle the kayak and I could swim. Let’s do that.”

  Later that night at their campfire, he told her that she’d done well so far and that capsizing the boat was the best possible thing because now she wouldn’t be afraid of flipping. “There are only two kinds of boatmen,” he told her, the firelight accentuating the golden flecks in his devilish eyes. “Those who have flipped and those who will flip.” He used his bare hands to take the can of tinned beef stew from its place in the coals and, in a show of indulgence, wrapped his kerchief around the hot metal before handing it to her. “I’m proud of you, Josie.”

  Her father was a legend. But he was old now. She’d been working as a river guide herself for nearly twenty years. She’d never intended that. She refused the cliché that she was trying to prove something, to herself or to her father, but she knew that was what it looked like. She’d meant to move on a long time ago. Maybe have kids. Or do something normal. But rivers, they were better than spouses, she couldn’t deny that. And maybe she’d one-upped her father by pronouncing them better even than kids. She hadn’t saddled herself as he’d done. She was free as an undammed river. Once you got used to that intoxicating connection, that oneness with something so wild and fierce, regular life paled.

  She knew from hours and hours of riverside conversations that this was true for all river guides. Even him. But he’d compromised.

  Not her.

  Sure, at some point, maybe at several points, you got to a place in your life where you thought you were done. Especially with this river. How many times did you have to prove to yourself that you could navigate the biggest water? But you weren’t done. You came back. Even if you stayed away for a long while, as Josie had now for several years, ever since the Park Service stopped patrolling and the culture in the river corridor went rogue. You came back.

  The truth was, when Marylou emailed her with the invitation, she wrote back yes within five minutes. “I just turned fifty,” the teacher had written. “I’m menopausal. My marriage has ended. The world is going to hell in a handbasket. I’m scared. We’re all scared. And somehow I’ve been thinking of you and your workshop. Survival, yes. But connecting with the true power on this planet, rock and water. You’re so matter-of-fact when you talk to the kids, but I feel your plain words as love. This is way too much personal information! Just this: I’m planning a Grand Canyon rafting trip. Please join us.”

  Josie knew Marylou relatively well, in a work kind of way, having done at least five workshops at the high school. She knew the woman was a lot crunchier than she was, loved kids and loved to sing. She admired Marylou’s practical approach to the national nightmare, meaning she taught high school, surely the most difficult job in existence, and one that required an inexplicable capacity for hope. Josie had said yes because, as different as they were, she trusted Marylou. And more, she couldn’t resist the siren song of the Grand Canyon.

  Josie hadn’t even asked who else was coming along. She just said yes—yes, yes, yes!—swamped by a longing to see the river again. She relished the idea of running the Colorado without responsibility, a private trip, one where she wasn’t accountable to anyone. No reports to write at trip’s end. No false politeness to a group of crass clients. No sixteen-hour work days, from morning coffee at five a.m. to bandaging strangers’ blisters at nine p.m. The Grand Canyon, the Colorado River, on her own terms.

  But she realized now, as they finished packing up the boats, that she’d been foolish. Of course she’d be guiding this trip. Josie had the most experience by far with her nine runs. And it wasn’t like she could just sit back and let people make stupid decisions. So not only would she be the de facto trip leader, she’d have to do the work without the acknowledgment, without the buy-in by the “clients,” and without the pay.

  An eerie stasis shimmered the hot air at Lees Ferry, the aura of the place so different from the last time Josie had been there. In the interim, the government had sold off so much public land to private mining interests. The Arizona uranium mines had devastated the water supplies for many of the native people living in the region and threatened to contaminate the water flowing into the Grand Canyon. The Park Service had been all but gutted, leaving a skeletal budget for only the most famous parks. Even at Lees Ferry’s parking lot, cracked pavement hosted weeds as tall as Josie herself. Graffiti covered the cinderblock walls of the restrooms and the locks on the doors had been broken, though no one would want to use the overflowing toilets anyway. There wasn’t a ranger in sight. Josie was eager to get going, to commit herself to the deep canyon where there would be no reminders of the nation spiraling out of the control. For the next two weeks, anyway, she’d be free. This was why she’d said yes.

  “You okay taking the helm of one boat?” Marylou asked, right on cue.

  Yeah. Sure. Of course.

  “We can take turns,” Marylou said, reading Josie’s face, “but for today, starting out, it’d be good if someone who knew what she was doing took charge.”

  Josie nodded.

  As the six women found seats in the two fully loaded oar boats, Josie took one last look at the father and daughter pair, also about to launch. The girl, she’d heard the name Brynn, somewhere in her thirties, placated her father, Howard, nodding at his ongoing discourse, pretending to listen. Josie detected an anger in the young woman’s body. Not on the surface, not even below the skin, but deeper, as if an organic rage inhabited her viscera, intensified their functions, resided patiently, waiting for release.

  Maybe Josie was projecting.

  “Good luck,” she said to the girl under her breath.

  Josie shoved her boat into the current and hopped on the stern tube, climbed over the cross tube, and took hold of the two long oars. She leaned all the way forward, let the skinny wooden blades drop into the water behind her, and began pulling. Marylou, who rowed the other boat, hailed Josie with a big full arm wave, and began singing, in her throaty but forceful alto, Libby Roderick’s “Low to the Ground.” The four passengers whooped their excitement.

  They were off.

  For the next two days, Laurie looked for the handsome professor and his student to no avail. Perhaps they were doing the trip in a more leisurely fashion so that Howard could show Brynn up-close-and-personal views of the rock. Laurie wouldn’t mind up-close-and-personal views of him. She could entertain herself with fantasies, in any case. She was deep into one of these, the professor and herself swimming au naturel in one of the river’s deep jade pools, the hot midday sun a luscious contrast to the icy water, when Maeve interrupted her musing with, “Oh, how I would love to have seen the river when it was wild and free.”

  Annoyed with the intrusion, Laurie eyed the older woman’s lumpy, veiny legs suspiciously, as if they spoke to Laurie’s own imminent demise. Laurie cared a lot about how she looked and prided herself on a healthy libido at fifty-two. She knew to not dress like a twenty-year-old, but she wouldn’t be caught dead in those homely shorts, balloony and a hideous mustard color. Maeve wore her smoke-colored, curly hair in the style of a mop and had a propensity to grin at nothing.

  Laurie knew it was shallow of her to be hypercritical of another woman’s physical presentation. But was it so wrong to take pride in one’s appearance? A good haircut went a long way toward mediating the effects of age.

  Laurie leaned over the boat’s inflated tube and dragged a hand in the water. “Feel
s pretty wild and free to me.”

  “Hardly,” Maeve countered. “Every drop is rationed. The dams have eliminated the great seasonal floods that once swept through the Grand Canyon.”

  Laurie let the older woman have the last word.

  But later that day, as they floated through a narrow and spectacular stretch of the Marble Canyon, Maeve felt it necessary to provide the history of the aborted Marble Canyon Dam. She pointed out the bore holes, which had been driven into the canyon walls, before environmentalists David Brower, Martin Litton, and others managed to stop the project.

  “Well, and they did stop it,” Laurie said, hoping to make the point that they should enjoy what had been saved rather than mourn what might have been lost.

  “The Marble Canyon Dam, yes,” Maeve said in her calm philosopher voice. “But of course the river is hardly free. Our entire trip is framed by—indeed, controlled by—the Glen Canyon Dam upstream and the Hoover Dam downstream.”

  “The dams were built,” Laurie snapped. “It’s done.”

  “You can’t just harness a river!”

  “Apparently you can.” Laurie was ashamed of herself for digging in.

  “One day,” Maeve replied, undaunted and unoffended by Laurie’s retorts, “the dams will crumble away. I wonder how many years from now. A hundred? Five thousand? We don’t know. But we do know, with certainty, that the dams imprisoning the Colorado River are just a blip on its history. The river will be free again one day.”

  “Yes.” Laurie forced herself to speak the conciliatory word.

  “Imagine,” Maeve said, in reference to who knew what, that goofy old lady’s smile on her face.

  Marylou, who rowed the boat in which Laurie and Maeve rode, launched into a lusty protest song about dams. She’d had this need to sing for as long as Laurie could remember. They’d been best friends since their mothers were in the PTA together, all the way through grammar and high school, despite the two years difference in their ages, and now their entire adulthood, and Laurie had come to admire her friend’s unwavering optimism. Even now, just a year after her husband had left her for another woman, completely shocking her heart, Marylou responded by organizing an epic journey and singing through the first couple of days.