by Will Hobbs
They buzzed us three times, and then they left.
“Heli-cop-ters,” Rita called them.
14 //
It was amazing how high our energy level shot up with the arrival of those helicopters. Our quiet, brooding camp came alive like a nest of fire ants stirred with a stick. Rita and Pug were still shaking their fists at the skies after the helicopters had disappeared downstream. Without anyone calling us together, we all congregated around Troy, and almost everybody was talking at once. “What now?” Rita insisted.
“Hold everything, and I’ll show you what,” Adam said. He darted away toward his tent, rifled through his dry bag for something, and dived inside the tent with it. A minute later he emerged a whirling ninja, triumphantly garbed in black, hooded and masked, and fought his way to us through imaginary assailants. I saw him wince in pain as he sprang from a boulder; he must have taken a hit from one of his many enemies. He even had a samurai sword slung around his back.
He circled us, jabbing and kicking, as we cracked up. Only the darting eyes of the ninja showed. Gone was the reassuring head of curly hair and the omnipresent grin that proclaimed Adam’s motto: “It’s all a game.”
Everybody was laughing, even Star, who was under a death sentence.
When Adam finally slowed to as near a standstill as he ever gets, Pug said, “Lemme see that thing,” and he pulled Adam’s sword from its scabbard. “Wait a minute,” he said, hugely disappointed. “It’s not real.”
Sure enough, it was a rubber sword.
The ninja said, “That’s in case I have to fall on it one day.”
“So, Adam,” I said, “you carried this outfit all the way down the river and waited until now to pull it out. That must have taken quite a bit of restraint.”
“Hey, they brought out the choppers. No more Mr. Nice Guy.”
“I love this,” Rita said. “If my friends in New York could see me now.”
We held a brief council of war. “If we don’t camp at a spot where they can land a helicopter,” Troy said, “how are they going to catch us?”
Back in our tent Star and I got dressed all over again after thinking how cold we’d been the day before. This time we started with our long johns. It’s always much colder out in the boats, over the water, than it is on shore. As we’d discovered the day before, when the sun isn’t shining it makes all the difference in the world. We struck the tent and packed our dry bags, leaving our yellow rain slickers out where we could get to them. I’d been thinking hard, and while I still had the chance I took hold of Star and looked her in the eye. “Star,” I said, “I’ve been remembering another one of your Tarot readings: a beautiful girl pouring water, in front of a ring of stars. I asked you what it meant, and you said ‘hope and inspiration.’ You promise me you’ll image that reading today, with all your heart?”
She seemed like she was going to cry. “I will, Jessie, I promise. Thanks.”
“Star, maybe I don’t take it as far as you do, but I really do believe in positive thinking. I could sure use a lot more of it myself.”
We looked up to see Adam, still in ninja regalia, limping over to us. “Jessie,” he said, “I have a little problem.” He leaned back and lifted the sole of his right foot, revealing a nasty puncture wound.
Star and I winced. He had a puncture under the arch, half the diameter of a dime.
“How’d you do it?” Star asked.
“Stepped on a little stick barely under the sand, is all I can figure.”
“While you were playing ninja. You came down pretty hard on that stick, I bet.”
“Sorry, Mama-san. I was a bad boy, eh?”
“You were a bad little ninja. Star, would you get the first aid kit? We better clean it up and try to bandage it, but it’s a shame we can’t keep it dry. It’ll be just about impossible for it to heal, being wet all the time.”
Our wounded ninja sighed. “Just another experience in life . . .”
“Well, if you don’t take care of it, we might have to amputate with that sword of yours.”
“I’ll be looking forward to that. I’ll have the foot bronzed as a memento of the trip.”
A half hour later we were on the river again. “Troy, no getting us wet today,” I joked.
“Yeah, right,” he answered absently. I knew he had a lot to think about. He hadn’t fully recovered from the day before, nor had I for that matter. I wished I had the guide, so I could read up some more on Granite Falls, Hermit, and Crystal. They were all highly rated Big Drops, and they were all coming up in short order just a few miles down. Granite and Hermit weren’t rated higher than 9, but Crystal, if I remembered right, was rated a 10 at all levels but one, and I couldn’t remember if that was at low or high water. Crystal, the guide said, was no more than a riffle until 1966. Then, in one event, the rapid was created overnight when the side canyon there flash flooded and created the most feared rapid on the river, along with the notorious Lava Falls.
As we approached a minor rapid, Troy hollered back, “Read ’n’ run!” and we started down the tongue as I prayed in vain for a dry ride. The first healthy wave put enough water in the boat to start my feet freezing. I bailed the bottom as dry as possible once we passed through the tailwaves, but the damage was done. Behind us the paddle raft made a flashy fashion statement in their yellow slickers. “Four yellow ducks led by a ninja,” I remarked to Troy.
Troy and I were also wearing our slickers. For the moment I felt warm, except for my feet. I wondered if Adam was already soaked. Maybe he can tolerate it, I thought—his fires are always burning so brightly, and paddling helps you to stay warm. I wondered if Freddy’s feet were cold.
“Troy,” I said, “do you think Al was in one of the helicopters?”
“Don’t know.”
“I was looking, but with their helmets I couldn’t tell.”
“Who cares about Al?”
“Did you ever think he would trick us like he did? I never thought of it for a second. Why did he even hike in at Hance? Why didn’t he hike in at Phantom?”
“He knew we’d scout Hance. He was afraid we’d blow by Phantom. He had to make sure we’d stop there.”
“Of course . . . But if he intended to stop us at Phantom, why didn’t he just talk with us about it and make a deal or whatever?”
Troy looked at me as if he couldn’t believe how naive I was. “Control,” he answered coldly. “It would’ve burned him to negotiate with us—the guy’s used to being a dictator. And Jessie, it really aggravates me to have you keep bringing Al up. Especially today. I wish you’d give it a rest.”
Troy had an ugly tone in his voice. I was about to suggest he lighten up, but then I realized for a moment what it must feel like to have Granite, Hermit, and Crystal in front of him. No wonder he was uptight.
Maybe the way Troy can row these huge rapids so well is subconscious, I thought. It must take total self-confidence, especially being so new at it. If you ever lost your nerve going into one of those Big Drops, you couldn’t function at all. Give him some support, I told myself. He’ll need it shortly.
I stood up to do some stretches. “We’re going to have a great day of river-running,” I said. “We’re still out here on our own, running the Grand Canyon and doing fine.”
A trace of a smile crossed his face, but the tension lingered.
A minute later he reached forward, clasped my shoulder, and gave me a strained smile. “Just go with the flow, okay, Jessie?”
We began to hear the hiss of a Big Drop downstream, and the current began to die out. Once again we found ourselves on one of those ominous stretches of slow water. “What’s with this lake?” Adam called, tongue in cheek.
“Granite Falls,” Rita announced, loudly naming the coming attraction. “Holy cow! I wonder why it’s called a falls?”
After a while, our boats rounded a bend together, and the Thunder turned up exponentially. Ahead of us, maybe two hundred yards down, was the brink. As we all started looking around f
or where to scout, Freddy said, “Helicopters.”
We heard nothing, but pretty quickly we saw what he was talking about: On the left side, where we would have to scout, the two helicopters were parked, and four men stood on a high point above the beach looking at us. I quickly reconfirmed that there was no chance for us to scout Granite Falls on the right side. It was all cliff over there. They’ve got us, I thought, almost relieved. They know we’ll have to scout Granite. Game’s over.
We moved toward river left, to keep the gathering current on the right from sweeping us toward the edge. Safely on still water between the current and the eddy moving back upstream, we could hover and consider our position. At first people were talking loudly, especially Pug and Rita, but Troy told us to keep our voices down—the men on the shore might be able to hear. “One of ’em’s Al,” Pug said in a stage whisper. “I’m sure of it.”
Troy said, “Let’s not think about them, let’s think about us. They don’t have us, you know. Only if we paddle in to that beach and give ourselves up. Is that where we want to be, five minutes from now? With them? Think about what fun that’s going to be, and think fast.”
“We’ll probably never see each other again,” Rita said. “And we were having such a good time. I don’t know about you guys, but I’m not ready to quit, no way. I don’t scare that easy.”
I started thinking about consequences. I’d thought about them before, but this was so immediate. What were they going to do with us if we gave ourselves up now? What were they going to do if we didn’t? “Maybe we should paddle in closer,” I said. “We could talk to them?”
I was thinking, maybe we could still cut a deal, but I didn’t say it.
Troy wasn’t too happy with me. “What about? Are we going to believe what they tell us? Remember how Al tricked us before? They’ll do whatever they’re going to do. And they’ll try to scare us about this rapid. They’ll say we can’t run it.”
“Live free or die,” Adam chanted. “Old Japanese saying.”
Pug declared, “I’m havin’ the best time of my life.”
“Can we run it?” I asked.
“Let’s ask Star,” Rita teased. “She can see the future. Star, what do you think? Do you see us flying out in the helicopters or floating out in the boats?”
“I don’t want to fly out in a helicopter,” Star said. I was amazed she knew her mind so well, but then, she was prepared to die. “I love the river, and I want to stay with the rest of you for as long as I can. But don’t do anything just because I say so.”
Troy was pleased. “Freddy, how ’bout you?”
Freddy said, “I don’t mind livin’ on rice. There’s a lot of canyon I haven’t seen yet.”
I remembered back to the van, when Troy had asked if we were up for the Grand Canyon. It had all hinged on Freddy. Once again, that seemed to be the case. I sensed how misleading it was to be asking Freddy—he was so different from the rest of us. Freddy was the only one, I knew now, the only one who had much of an idea in the first place what we might be getting into, and how bad it could get. He was raised out in the elements on the continental divide. I surveyed the lowering clouds. What about the rest of us? The clouds were darker than they’d been a half hour before. Freddy, I realized, was only speaking for himself; he’d never pretended otherwise. He was assuming that we all were looking out for ourselves. It was a scary thought.
“Let’s run it,” Freddy said. “It’s not a ten, anyway.”
Livin’ on rice, I thought, that’s us—livin’ on rice and adrenaline.
We circled back upstream on the eddy, and then made for the current that was flowing into the right side of the rapid. The men on the shore were waving their arms, beckoning for us to come in, but we were committed now to Granite Falls. I felt like a wildwoman. “Wil-der-ness ther-a-py!” I yelled at the top of my lungs. My heart was going berserk. Troy was standing up on his seat and scouting. The men were running for a vantage point close to the rapid, now that they could see we were going to run it.
Behind us Freddy was standing up on top of the load in the center of the paddle raft, but he wasn’t as close to the edge yet as we were.
“Good water down the right,” Troy hollered back. “Rocks center and left. Watch where I enter—stay off the cliff! Looks nasty!”
A second later I could see down the rapid as well. Nasty is right. We were heading for the gut of the rapid, a long dropping succession of enormous waves on a thin line between the rocks in the center and the side waves exploding off the cliff on the right. Over my shoulder I saw Troy in his glory, rowing the big water in the Grand Canyon of the Colorado, and rowing like he was born to it. “Downriver!” I yelled. I braced as torrents of white water poured over and into the boat, and I was instantly soaked to my skin. To the left, I saw Al’s face—all eyes—for the briefest of moments, a stone’s throw away.
My awareness turned to the cliffs on our right, too close I thought, rushing by so fast and so close I thought certain we’d be dashed against them. Whenever a wave recoiling off the cliff threatened to turn us over, I could feel the boat cock to face it, and we stayed upright. It was over fast. At the bottom we squeezed barely to the right of a hole that would have flipped us, and rode up and down the tall tailwaves.
I rejoiced to see that Freddy’s boat had come through as well, with no swimmers. Troy was standing and pointing back upstream, laughing. I spotted the four men, tiny figures now, atop boulders along the shore at the head of the rapid.
After several miles of flat water we neared Hermit, and the helicopters hovered above us. As it turned out, Hermit was easy to scout from the river. Troy stood up and yelled, “Read ’n’ run!” and that’s what we did, with a perfect run down a roller coaster of huge waves. Hermit wasn’t scary at all, just good clean fun, and we were sure enjoying having the audience. “Those guys are probably up there writing songs about us,” Adam said, as our boats floated side by side toward Crystal. “The legendary River Pirates—‘They never will scout and they never show fear.’”
We ran another rapid that we knew couldn’t be Crystal—Crystal was a 10. Then we floated again in tandem, holding the boats together. We began to hear thunder, rolling thunder, booming its way up the canyon from the blackening clouds downstream. As soon as the first lightning bolt struck, the helicopters turned and fled upriver. Pug launched imaginary rockets at the fleeing enemy, while Rita and Adam did a victory dance in the front of the paddle raft. Troy was laughing. “Looks like our friends can’t take a little weather.”
Looking downstream, I could see a wide band of quartz angling from the river and running skyward through the black rock of the gorge. The next moment I couldn’t see the bright band at all, or even the gorge. A dark wall of rain was marching up the canyon.
We couldn’t see Crystal when we got there, but we could sure hear it down around the bend, waiting in its lair and growling like all the monsters of mythology combined into one. We got out of the boats and stumbled around in the rain, a steady, heartless, bone-freezing rain. Our minds nearly numb, we made our way down a trail and across a little creek just beginning to turn from clear to muddy red, then picked our way through a field of slippery boulders to the shore of the river. Between us and the cliff wall opposite, the entire flow of the river was pinched into a narrow slot and dropping into a hole so large it seemed out of scale with all the others on the river. The speed and the ferocity of the water stunned me. This was a revelation.
“You could drop a school bus into that hole,” Adam said. “And look at the one right below it—nearly as bad!”
From the tops of boulders, we looked and pointed at the awful waves breaking upstream and back into the holes. Troy was talking about how to run it. I tried to picture the route he was describing, and couldn’t in my wildest dreams imagine the paddle raft being able to make the moves he was describing, not in this kind of water.
We stood there, Star and I, shivering and shaking and waiting. My feet ached from the cold.
Star’s hand went to the crystal that hung from her neck. I said, “Let me touch it too.”
Freddy wasn’t looking at the two huge holes right in front of us, he was looking downstream into the rain. Below the second hole the river widened out into two main channels with a mass of teeth in between—the tops of boulders sticking up from a submerged island.
“Look, Jessie!” Star said, and tugged at my arm. I looked back to the top of the rapid, and saw a red river overtaking the green one we had known. It was an uncanny sight. Just that quickly, the river had turned muddy red.
Freddy scrambled over to us, all happy through chattering teeth. “The Rio Colorado! ‘Colorado’ means red!”
Troy came over, and then everybody. “What do you think, Freddy?” Troy said. His face looked gaunt under that yellow hood, his blue eyes were blazing.
Everybody was watching Freddy. He shrugged. “Looks pretty bad to me.”
“But we can run it, right?”
“I’m not so sure.”
“Then let me show you the run.”
Troy explained his strategy, and Freddy listened. Then Freddy said, “I don’t think so. Water’s too strong, that hole’s too bad. The river’s real high right now—lots of power, lots of speed.”
Rita was twisting at the hips, hugging herself and blowing her breath into the rain. “So whadda we do, Freddy?”
Again, he shrugged. “There’s no reason we can’t carry everything around the right side.”
“You mean walk?” Troy said, unbelieving. “Portage? Look how far it is down there.”
“It’s a lot of work,” I said, trying to help out, “but we know we’ll get through it safe.”
He gave me a look, like he wanted to reach out and hit me. “I can’t believe this. Do you guys have any idea how much work that would be? Carrying all our stuff through this boulder field? Look, have we had any trouble so far? How many times have I flipped, tell me that. That’s right—zip, zero, nada. And I’m going to make it through this one too. Freddy, I can’t believe you. You guys have only flipped once, and that was on the first day. I mean, you ran Granite Falls without even looking at it. How do you explain that?”