Natural Acts

by David Quammen

  Nobody knows. But three different hypotheses have been offered during the past century and a half, each bidding to explain it without recourse to miracles.

  John Wesley Powell, after his explorations of the canyon in 1869 and 1872, guessed that the river had etched its path first, along what was a natural declivity, and that the Kaibab Uplift had risen afterward, raising the land surface against the river’s flow like a loaf of bread being pushed into a band saw. Later research has discredited that guess by establishing that the river channel is more recent than the vaulting.

  A second hypothesis, which held sway in the 1960s, was that the river essentially backed its way through the high ground of the canyon’s middle reaches, by what geologists call “headward erosion.” When a lump of rock is dislodged from the brink of, say, Niagara Falls, dropping into the gorge below, the brink itself recedes upstream by an increment equal to the size of the lost lump. That’s headward erosion. The Canadian half of Niagara Falls, known as Horseshoe, is eroding headward at the speedy rate of about five feet per year. Moving just a fraction that fast, the Colorado might have eaten backward through the Kaibab Uplift in not many millions of years.

  A third hypothesis, articulated by a geologist named Ivo Lucchitta, suggests that the lower half of the Grand Canyon might well have been cut by headward erosion within only the past few million years, but that the upper half is much older. That upper half must have been carved (or at least begun) during a time when the Marble Platform itself was overlain with thick layers of Mesozoic rock, from which the river could find a downhill angle across the Kaibab Uplift. In this view, the river jumped over the mountain by way of a ramp, but the ramp has since disappeared. The upper layers of rock were stripped away (by some form of surface erosion) from the Marble Platform, leaving that area overshadowed by the Kaibab Uplift. But the uplift by then had a canyon sawn through it.

  On the afternoon of Day 8 we beach our boats at Phantom Ranch, one of very few sites within the canyon that connects by steep foot trails with the outside world. The little compound at Phantom includes a campground for hikers from the rims, a set of restrooms, a corral of horses, and a small store. It’s the only place where river travelers can buy a glass of cold lemonade, reexperience a flush toilet, and use a pay telephone. The date happens to be September 11, 2001. Mike makes the first call, to his wife, and returns with the day’s scarcely believable news.

  After a few more calls to loved ones on the outside, we drink our lemonades in silence and then return to the riverbank. We compare what we’ve heard and pool what we think we know: the World Trade Center leveled, the Pentagon hit, another plane downed near Pittsburgh (or was it Camp David?), perhaps two more hijacked airliners still unaccounted for, 30,000 to 50,000 people dead in Manhattan, which is being evacuated; the country is shut down, the military are on highest alert, and George Bush is aboard Air Force One, somewhere, headed for Nebraska. Nebraska, I say, that’s the underground nuclear command center, Cheyenne Mountain. Cheyenne Mountain is in Colorado, says Margie, who comes from Boulder. You’re right, I say. Wait, no, Nebraska is the headquarters of the Strategic Air Command. What’s going on? we all wonder. I’ve spoken only with my frail, cheerful, octogenarian parents in Minneapolis, mostly to confirm that they’re all right. They are—distraught at the news, like everyone, but not personally assailed by terrorists or sudden turns of ill health. You won’t see anything in the sky, says my mother, the planes are all grounded.

  We climb into our boats. The rafts pull out, surrendering swoon-like to the current, heading downstream for another ten days in the canyon under conditions of near-total isolation. The other kayakers peel away too, and I find myself alone on the beach. I hesitate. Is there any conceivable reason, I consider, why I should abort this journey and walk out of here? Is there anything useful I can do? Is there anywhere else, right now, I should be? Anywhere else I want to be?

  No. I signed on to this trip because I craved an exercise in detachment—from my own life as it has unfolded in recent years, and from the world. So here we are, I think, with an exercise in detachment far more dolorous than I’d foreseen. My sympathies to you, dead and grieving people; good luck, America. I paddle into the heavy current and let it swing me downstream.

  We have rapids to run: Horn, Crystal, Serpentine, Bedrock, Upset, and other frivolous challenges to mortality. On the water, we think about the water. In camp, especially when the darkening sky fills with stars and remains peculiarly empty of airplanes, it’s different. We think about New York and beyond. We ponder the fact that we’re missing a slice of American history, never to be regained, synthesized, or duplicated. We relish unabashedly the simple joys of being together in this marvelous, wild, ancient place.

  Me, I’m glad also for the company of Auden. That evening I reread his poem titled “September 1, 1939.” With “clever hopes” expiring at the end of “a low dishonest decade,” says the poet,

  Waves of anger and fear

  Circulate over the bright

  And darkened lands of the earth,

  Obsessing our private lives;

  The unmentionable odour of death

  Offends the September night.

  It was written, of course, to mark the day Hitler invaded Poland. But the poem is wise beyond old news.

  I and the public know

  What all schoolchildren learn,

  Those to whom evil is done

  Do evil in return.

  We’ve camped just above a formidable rapid called Hermit, rated 8. All night, in wakeful moments, we hear its roar. We’re now on the threshold of the canyon’s more serious water—beginning with Hermit, then Crystal, then a string of other rapids, culminating next week in Lava Falls. At dawn on the morning after our stop at Phantom Ranch, the sky is red. I think: Sailors, take warning.

  Several days later, with Crystal safely behind us, we stop to hike up a side canyon called Matkatamiba, a tranquil afternoon’s interlude for stretching our legs and gawking at a different sort of scenery. Digressing to explore such byways—with their slots, waterfalls, secret chambers, and polished walls—is an important part of the Grand Canyon experience, a felicity that complements the big-river rush. We’ve already probed a nice selection: Shinumo Wash, Nautiloid Canyon, Elves Chasm, and the Tapeats Creek trail, which leads to a dramatic waterspout called Thunder River, blasting out of its hole midway down a great Redwall cliff. Matkatamiba Canyon is more graceful than any of them.

  We catch a blind eddy at its mouth, leave the boats, and ascend between walls of smoothly curvaceous blue-green limestone, our feet sloshing in clear, warmish water. In some spots the channel, buffed smooth, is only as wide as one human foot. We wade, clamber, and walk several hundred yards before the little canyon bends sharply and, there at its crook, opens out into a natural rotunda. Walls of red rock, hundreds of feet high and undercut with galleries, rise above; the little creek tumbles along its delicate path, across a floor that resembles artfully terraced slate; California red-buds and catclaw acacias, elegantly gnarled like bonsai, stand in patches of rocky soil, and across one spring-moistened slope drapes a profusion of wild grapevines, grasses, and maidenhair ferns, offering a counterpoint texture—cool and green—to all the warm, dry stone. At the center of this extraordinary space is an island of large boulders, like a dais. The whole layout seems to have been designed, perhaps by a subtle Japanese architect, for human ceremony.

  Someone says: This would be a great place to hear a concert. Someone else says: This would be a great place to get married. Alluding to a pair of our other kayaking chums, back in Montana, Rick says: “Ron and Carla did get married here.”

  Married here? It strikes me as an innocent, weird thought from a race of beings to which I don’t presently belong. I keep my mouth shut, remembering a December day eighteen years ago, when I myself and a wonderful, serious, joyous woman got married in a beautiful place—on the side of Kitt Peak, with a view of Baboquivari, sacred mountain of the Papago. Ultimately it didn’
t help.

  At the bottom of Upset rapid, stretching wide across the main flow, is a menacing hole. At the top, just beyond the tongue, is a seemingly innocuous diagonal wave, curling off the left wall. The tongue itself isn’t glassy and green, not today. Distant rainstorms somewhere upstream have brought a deluge of mocha silt, and the whole river has done a chameleon shift from olive to sullen brown. Even the whitecaps are no longer white. They look like fresh adobe.

  After we’ve scouted the rapid and picked routes for avoiding the hole, Mike takes a leftish line of entry and then, to his shock and ours, finds his raft lifted sideways by the upper wave, which tips him, flips him, as smoothly as a single-blade plow turning dirt. He and Margie, his passenger today, tumble through the air in what seems like choreographed, Hollywood-stunt slow motion. Then they endure the full rapid, dunked through the hole and swept along, trying to catch breaths and get hold of the overturned boat. By the time we reach them, they’re in calmer water but still fighting current and cold. Margie, swimming and gasping, grabs hold of my stern handle for a tow to the bank and then, as she climbs out into a jumble of boulders, nearly steps on a rattlesnake, which she hears rattling but can barely see, since her contacts have been splashed ajar. I return to help Rick and John, who are bulldozing the raft toward shore with their kayaks. We get it secured and then, twenty minutes later, with ten pairs of arms lifting and pushing, flipped back upright. The only loss is a lawn chair that wasn’t strapped down. Frustrated, embarrassed, Mike says: “I’m gonna take up bowling when I get back to Salt Lake.”

  The upset at Upset feels like a foreboding prelude. That night over dinner our talk turns with titillating grimness to Lava Falls, which we’ll face tomorrow. Bob recalls it vividly from twenty years ago. Steve mentions that the right-side line is difficult at low water, and low water is what we’ll have. The right side, Rick says, is always a gnarly run. Mike says: My boat needs more ballast; I’ll fill the empty carboys with river water. None of the rest of us has ever seen this storied drop. It’s a sinister place, with all that lava rock, says Rick. Chase, the thrill-hungry teenager, wants to make multiple runs, riding through on each raft and then running back up to jump aboard the next. Bob asks whether anybody’s got a pair of navy-surplus water wings that Chase can use to swim the rapid. Don’t put that idea in his head, says Cyndi, in her role not as TL but as Mom. You can talk about running Lava this way or that, Steve adds, but you don’t really know what you’re gonna do until you get there.

  Bedding down on the warm sand, I embrace a few resolute thoughts. No point wasting time or energy worrying about things in advance—especially not a mere rapid on a lovely river. If I happen to drown in Lava, which is highly unlikely but possible, it’s not important. If I embarrass myself, floundering, swimming for dear life and being rescued, that’s even less important. If I manage to slide through with aplomb, less important still. What’s important is not to have done Lava Falls but to do it. What matters is to enter the rapid and live its ten or twenty seconds of magisterial chaos as acutely as possible.

  I’m just not sensitive enough, I suppose, to be an angst-ridden person. I sleep soundly, and dream of pretty women and skiing.

  We hear it before we see it. Then there’s a horizon line, like beveled marble, where the whole river drops away invisibly. Just upstream of the suck, we pull in to scout.

  A high cliff of coal-dark basalt looms on the right, a cut-away section of what once was an igneous dam, showing fudgy swirls, puckers, and long rows of columnar basaltic crystals like grinning teeth. We climb. From above on a rocky trail, just the sort of perspective that always makes rapids look deceptively small, Lava looks big. It’s not so much a waterfall—despite the name, despite thirty-seven feet of sudden descent—as a raging cascade. Impassable rocks on the left, a hole on the right, a curling wave, another hole, hectic zones of disorderly froth, a big sloping rock at bottom right against which a person would not want to be pinned, and just beside that, another roiling hole, in front of which is a high, tumbling wave. “Busy” is the whitewater term. The right line does, as Rick warned, look uninviting. The left line doesn’t exit. There’s no sneak route. But there is an imaginable path, from upper right to lower left, nudging past the curlers, crossing a hurricane’s eye of relatively calm water, ferrying wide of the lower hole, that each of us commits to mind like a mantra. Then it’s back to the boats.

  Rick disappears over the horizon line. Bob follows. John signals me from shore: Okay, DQ, your turn. I can see almost nothing as I paddle down the approach tongue. My brain is vacant of any thought more profoundly speculative than Well, here I go. As the first waves hit, I hit back, with an aggressive right brace that seems to have been a bit too aggressive, because I find myself in midrapid with my head underwater on the right side. Not wanting to drop entirely upside down (and set up to roll, which would take time), I hold that position for a second or three, hoping that a random upswell might lift me; then, either with such a lift or without it (who knows, who remembers?), I manage to wiggle upright off my very deep brace, finding balance, finding air. I take a few strokes, gather a little momentum, in time to punch my head sideways through the lower wave and miss the hole. As easy as that, I’m in an eddy below, my body aflush with a wave of elated relief.

  Rob comments later that I had “an exciting run,” which is polite but not complimentary, and that he captured it all on video. TL herself will find irony in the fact that “the most conservative boater had the most exciting run,” with which I can’t argue. I’m content to know that, perhaps for the first time ever, W. H. Auden (or at least one of his books) has taken a kayak ride through Lava Falls.

  Meanwhile we wait vigilantly, Rick and Bob and I, bobbing like flotsam in the left lower eddy, for the others. As Mike’s blue raft slides neatly between the lower hole and the sloped rock, he pumps his fist with the joy of redemption. Diz, earnest Diz, forced to run last so that Mark can shoot him in action from Piglet’s bow, finds a nifty line, bringing all our remaining Pringles through safely.

  On the last evening, our seventeenth on the river, we celebrate with rum punch and begin regretting that the trip has passed so quickly. Like a blink. We’re in no great hurry to rejoin the world, however such as the world may now be. We’ve had almost no news, but within the past few days we’ve noticed planes reappearing in the sky, evidently on a route between Phoenix and Los Angeles. We can scarcely imagine, or care, what the men and women who sit behind television anchor desks have been saying. Our detachment from the events and aftermath of September 11 has been decreed by circumstance, enforced by isolation, bizarre, cold, not without deep sympathy, and salubrious. The loudest noise down here is the roar of water. Ravens, not newsmen, hover nearby like undertakers. The strata of rock and the silt in the river serve as reminders, thanks to James Hutton, that everything built will be ground down, and that all grinding provides new material for building. At least some of us feel that with enough food, enough river, we could continue indefinitely this mode of travel and life amid this amiable company. But there isn’t enough. Size is relative, like time, and in some ways the Grand Canyon is too small. The journey through it is nearly over, already.

  As for my personal supplies, I’ve finished Playfair’s Huttonian Theory, but there’s still plenty of unread Auden, partly because I’ve been revisiting favorites. I’ve joined him repeatedly, for instance, on that evening walk down Bristol Street, past the railway arch, from beneath which comes the voice, claiming:

  “I’ll love you, dear, I’ll love you

  Till China and Africa meet

  And the river jumps over the mountain

  And the salmon sing in the street.”

  After listening through further such promises of eternal devotion, the eavesdropping poet detects a counterpoint:

  But all the clocks in the city

  Began to whirr and chime:

  “O let not Time deceive you,

  You cannot conquer Time.

  “In the burr
ows of the Nightmare

  Where Justice naked is,

  Time watches from the shadow

  And coughs when you would kiss.”

  My hands ache in the night, pleasantly, from seventeen days of hard use. My shoulders are no worse than when I started. My body has found the river regimen agreeable and my brain has been drawn outside itself. I feel rinsed, peaceful, and whole. I know the end of the poem almost by heart:

  It was late, late in the evening,

  The lovers they were gone;

  The clocks had ceased their chiming

  And the deep river ran on.

  Next day, our last, we cover six miles of flat water. From the take-out beach at Diamond Creek, as we load our boats into a truck, I can hear the gentle growl of another rapid, just below, waiting to be run.

  The Post-Communist Wolf

  IT’S TWO HOURS AFTER SUNSET on this snow-clogged Romanian mountain, and in the headlight of a stalled snowmobile stand five worried people and two amused dogs. One of the dogs is a husky. Her name, Yukai, translates from a distant Indian language to mean “Northern Lights.” Her pale gray eyes glow coldly, like tiny winter moons. One of the worried people is me. My name translates from Norwegian to mean “cow man” or, less literally, “a cattle jockey who should have stayed in his paddock,” neither of which lends me any aura of masterly attunement to present circumstances. The temperature is falling.