by Will Hobbs
“You wouldn’t listen to Freddy,” I yelled at Troy, “because you always have to be in control. It’s exactly what you accused Al of—only it’s true of you, not him.”
He stared at me like he wanted to kill me, as we pulled Rita onto the paddle raft.
“That’s what it is with the maps too,” I kept on. “You want everybody looking at you, not some map. You don’t care about anybody but yourself. Look what you’ve done!”
“Jessie, you’re hysterical.” Troy turned his back on the paddle raft, on all of us.
I was trying to block it from my mind, but I couldn’t—the Death card, the Grim Reaper astride the white horse—I had to get past the thought of it and find Star. She’s all right, I told myself. We’ll find her.
The rain quit as suddenly as it had begun. Shivering, we made for a rocky shore and tied up, then mechanically began stowing things away on the boats. It had to be done. Nobody did any talking. Troy and Pug were sitting off by themselves and watching us work.
In a few minutes we were back on the river, floating somberly, shivering and brooding. Pug rode with Troy.
That’s when it happened—the miracle. That’s when we got let off the hook that we were sure to hang from for the rest of our lives. We heard a voice calling, then again, and there stood Star, knee-deep in water at the edge of a little beach, waving her arms. “Over here! Over here!”
We were so relieved we swarmed all over her, everyone all trying to hug her at once, except for Troy who was off to the side doing his best to look vindicated.
“Hope and inspiration, Jessie,” she whispered weakly. “I kept thinking I could choose to live, and I did.” I put my arms around her and walked her over to a spot where we could sit down. Rita brought over a sleeping bag to use like a blanket. Star was in a daze. Adam came over and sat by her. They had both been through it.
All of us were freezing. We broke out a stove and a propane bottle and fixed some hot coffee. We couldn’t get enough of it, especially Star. “Hey, Adam,” Rita hollered. “Got any jokes? Give us some shtick!”
“Actually, Rita, I’m wondering about something. . . .”
Adam reached into his soggy day pack and pulled out his blue soap dish. It was dripping water as he held it out. Adam unfastened the lid, and then carefully opened it from both sides. The scorpion was sloshing around in a quarter-inch of water, which Adam poured off. Back on dry plastic, the scorpion raised its tail and squared off. “Hardy little bugger,” Adam said.
Pug was looking over his shoulder. “Is he still alive? Let me see him.”
Adam snapped the lid shut and put the case back in his day pack. He was awfully subdued, and had been since the day before. I’m sure his shoulder was still plenty sore, and having to swim again this morning couldn’t have helped.
After changing into whatever dry clothes we could find, we got back on the river. We were almost as quiet as we’d been before finding Star. We broke out of the gorge as the clouds began to lift, and shafts of light illuminated the full width of the Grand Canyon, falling on temples, buttes, spires, and mesas floating like islands among dissolving and regathering clouds. In places we could see all the way from the river to the forest on the north rim, its tall trees cloaked with fresh snow.
Here was the Grand Canyon I’d always pictured, only glowing with more color than I could have imagined. Two rainbows appeared, seeming to draw their hues from the multicolored formations of stone, the gold clouds, purple clouds, and the blue sky. I was at the back of the boat, close to Freddy. I said, “It couldn’t be more different from this morning.”
He smiled and said, “Same old friends, the wind and the rain.”
Another world, I thought, Freddy really does live in another world.
• • •
We ran rapids all day, including three or four that we needed to scout. Early on, Troy and Pug blasted through one of these without scouting, and after that Troy was so far ahead we couldn’t even see him. We were on our own in the paddle raft, and we knew there’d be no one to rescue us if we had any trouble. I for one didn’t care that Troy had left us behind—I knew he wouldn’t be much help in an emergency anyway.
I caught myself starting to catalog all his faults, small and large. That I had been so impressed with him, I realized, probably says more about me than it does about him. It was so easy to just let him think for both of us. I guess I let those blue eyes get to me. Big mistake.
We put on the miles. The river was running a rich red with the flooding, and it was running high. We were back in the sunshine and feeling warmth in our bones again for the first time since we started into the gorge with Al, which seemed like another lifetime. A helicopter appeared, remaining fairly high up. As quickly as it had come, it disappeared. “They seem to be just keeping tabs,” I said. “Maybe counting heads after Crystal and the weather.”
Late in the day we found Troy and Pug at the mouth of a canyon where four boats were tied up at a small camp, with no people around. The canyon was discharging clear water into the red of the Colorado. The stream was the largest we’d seen since the River of Blue, and it ran pure and fast like a Rocky Mountain trout stream. Troy was acting pretty smug about it, as if he had personally discovered the good drinking water. I refrained from making any more remarks; I could see his giant ego wobbling on matchstick legs. We were thirsty, having avoided the sand-laden river water, and here was a stream the storm hadn’t muddied. We filled our water jugs.
“So what was keeping you guys?” Pug said.
“Yeah, right,” Rita shot back. “Thanks for watching out for us. What if we’d flipped?”
Troy said, “Put a sock in it, Rita. They can hear you back in New York.”
Rita went after him that quick, and I believe she would have done some damage if we hadn’t pulled her away.
“Lemme go!” she was yelling. “Think you can knock me in the river, do you? Watch it, Troy, just watch it.”
“Who do you think these boats belong to?” I asked, hoping to distract them from all the hassling.
It felt strange standing around these other boats and all this equipment that was attached to other people.
“Probably some people on a hike up the canyon,” Troy said.
Troy and Pug were anxious to put back on the river, but the rest of us, happy to be off the boats, were easing our backs and stretching our legs. Freddy and Star and I were talking about going for a little walk up the stream. Rita said she was too tired to walk, and Adam couldn’t; he was limping worse than before.
“Hey, we have a long way to go,” Troy said.
“We won’t be gone long,” I said. “No more than a half an hour.”
“A short hike,” Troy said sarcastically. “Seems like I’ve heard that one before.”
Star and Freddy and I walked along the stream until we came to a shelf of rock by a crystal pool, underneath a short waterfall. We took off our sneakers and rinsed our feet in the icy water, then lay back on the warm rock and basked in the sunshine. It felt so good. It was such a reprieve to be away from Pug and Troy, to try to forget for a few minutes that we weren’t okay anymore. I heard the song of the canyon wren, and tried to clear my mind of the anxiety, to focus only on the wren and the cascading stream, but I couldn’t.
Star and Freddy sat up. Maybe they couldn’t rest either. “Look at you,” Freddy said to Star. “Look at those muscles.” He playfully felt her bicep. “You’ve been getting stronger and stronger.”
Star was getting into it. “Maybe I have,” she said, as she flexed one arm, then the other. “I never thought I could do all this.”
“See, Star,” I said. “I was right. You are going to live to be an old lady—and probably a tough old one at that.”
We all got a kick out of picturing Star as this eccentric old lady, covered with beads and bandanas, friendship bracelets up and down her legs.
As we were laughing, we heard voices. Hikers soon appeared on their way back to their boats.
&n
bsp; A dozen or so men and women in their thirties and forties, they stopped to chat. They were so friendly and so normal, just like people from Boulder. What I couldn’t get over was, they looked so clean. And the amazing part was that they were on their twentieth day of a thirty-day trip. They’d been side-hiking every canyon they could, all the way down the river, and had already spent a night here. They told us that the hike they’d just made was the most wonderful of all. Four miles up the trail, they said, a river bursts out of the redwall limestone cliffs. “It’s the largest spring in the world,” a woman said. She was the one I’d been watching. A radiant person, sturdy, someone obviously at peace with herself and filled with the joy of it all.
“What’s it called?” I asked.
They seemed surprised that we didn’t know. “Thunder River,” she said. “If you guys can possibly manage the time, it really is one of the wonders of the world. Everywhere the mists from the falls touch, it’s an oasis—big cottonwood trees, vines, ferns. . . .”
Freddy was wide-eyed, taking it all in.
“We’re behind schedule,” I said. “But we’ll tell the rest of our group about it.”
“How far is it to Lava Falls?” Freddy asked them.
They figured out pretty fast that we didn’t have a mile-by-mile guide. “We lost it in the river,” I explained.
As we walked back to the boats together, Freddy asked them how to run Lava.
“There won’t be enough water for the left run,” the woman told us. “You’ll have to run the right, and it’ll be wild. Most boats come through totally out of control, but right side up. Actually we’ve had a lot more trouble in Upset—most people do. On our last trip we flipped two out of our four boats in the big hole in Upset.”
“Upset,” I said faintly. “Nobody even told us about Upset.”
“You’ll get there tomorrow. We’ll give you one of our mile-by-mile guides so it doesn’t sneak up on you. It’s really long, and kind of on a turn. The big hole’s at the bottom. It definitely deserves a good scout.”
Back at the boats we joined the rest of our group. They were just hanging out, and to my surprise Troy and Pug didn’t look unhappy about waiting for us. The other group started putting on their life jackets and getting ready to go. The woman I liked so much brought over the river guide and said, “I can’t resist making one more suggestion. Don’t miss Havasu Creek if you can help it.”
The woman quickly flipped through the guide. “We’re at mile one thirty-four here—the mouth of Tapeats Creek. Upset’s at one fifty. Havasu Creek is at one fifty-seven. Hug the cliffs on the left as you’re getting close to Havasu. It’s so narrow at the bottom that you can slide right by it. As far as you want to hike up the creek, there’s one beautiful blue-green pool after another formed by natural travertine dams, and lots of waterfalls: Beaver, Mooney, Havasu. . . . Well, Havasu Falls is a bit far. It’s up near Supai, the Indian village.”
“Indian village?” Suddenly Troy was all ears. “Is there a road into there?”
“No, only mules and helicopters come into the village from the rim. And hikers, of course. Anyway if you got up the creek at least to Beaver Falls, it would be well worth it.”
We watched their boats round a bend and disappear. I thought Troy would be anxious to get back on the river, but he said he wanted to stay right where we were for a while. That was just fine with everybody else. Maybe he’s going to calm down, I thought.
// 16
Dinner that night was certainly less than gourmet—melted cheese over rice. As we ate, the tension seemed to lift a bit. Troy and Pug were feeling better, that was easy to see. They didn’t go so far as to offer to help with the dishes, but they did say a campfire would be nice, and started gathering driftwood. Pug was excited, like a little kid. “Let’s get lots of wood,” I heard him telling Troy. “Let’s have a real bonfire.”
Adam and I were doing the dishes. I was thinking how ironic it was that he was more helpful now that he was disabled than he’d been when he was healthy. He was getting around with a sturdy walking staff of tamarisk that he’d whittled with his pocket knife. “How’s the shoulder?” I asked him.
“Still hurts a lot—I can’t lift my arm up very high—but nothing like it did when it was dislocated. I mean, that was painful.”
“I bet it was.” I was thinking, this is the first real conversation we’ve had all the way down the river. I was thinking about comparing notes with him about Troy—things obviously weren’t the same between them, either—but I thought better of it. “Maybe we can take a look at your foot afterwards,” I suggested.
“I cleaned it and put that antibiotic stuff on while you were up the creek.”
“So how’s it look?”
“Fine,” he said, less than convincingly.
“You’re limping worse than before. Let me take another look at it.”
“Really, Jessie, I already cleaned it up.”
It’s getting infected, I thought. My dad’s like that; he doesn’t want you to know when he’s sick.
“I don’t want to have to amputate with that rubber sword.”
He smiled. “Lost it in Crystal.”
It got dark, and we were all sitting around the campfire. Pug looked like the proverbial cat that ate the canary, and after a while we found out why when he brought out a quart water bottle full of a golden liquid. “Look what that other group donated to us,” he said. “Tequila.”
“You’re kidding,” I objected. “You guys ripped them off?”
“Don’t get all excited, Jessie,” Troy said. “Just think of it as a gift. . . . Sort of like the river guide they gave us.”
“Who cares?” Rita said. “Let’s have a drink.”
Pug took out his big knife, stuck it between his teeth, and mumbled, “Hey, we’re River Pirates, remember?”
The bottle went around once, and then Troy remembered that we had a few limes in the bottom of the cooler. He brought them over all quartered on a dish, with a salt shaker in his hand. “Let’s do it up right,” he said, “like they do in Mexico.”
Passing the lime sections around, he said, “I’ll give you a demo.” He salted the crease between his left thumb and forefinger, then reached for the tequila. Everyone else was watching him. Mr. Personality, I thought. There’s nothing that makes him feel better than being the center of attention, calling all the shots. Now he’s reduced to calling tequila shots.
Troy licked his fist, took a swallow or two of tequila, and then quickly bit into the lime, grimacing with satisfaction.
“Just like they do in Mexico . . . ,” Adam repeated, as Troy passed him the bottle. Tilting the bottle toward us as he prepared to indulge, he said, “Salud, mis amigos—salud, pesetas y amor.”
I was surprised to hear Star’s voice from right beside me. “I didn’t know you spoke Spanish, Adam.”
“Accent wasn’t right,” Freddy said, “—sounded a little Japanese.” Everyone was certainly enjoying the break in the tension. It was great to be having a bit of fun again. Maybe there was still hope for us.
Adam bowed, and passed the bottle to Rita, who looked around and said, “You know, guys, we’re somethin’ else. Here we are way down the Grand Canyon. We may not have kicked its butt, but I still say, we’re kickin’ butt.”
“Rhaat onn!” Pug bellowed. “Pass the ammunition!”
“We’re doing great,” Troy said expansively. “We’re going all the way.”
“All the way to . . . where?” Star asked, wide-eyed. She took the bottle from Freddy and took two or three gulps before she started coughing, yet still managed to bite into the lime, only remembering afterwards about the salt and finishing up all out of order, to everyone’s appreciation.
Adam was cracking up.
Out of nowhere, Pug said, “There’s a deep pool just up the creek a little ways.”
Nobody knew what he was getting at. “So,” Rita said. “So what about it?”
“Well,” Pug hesitated. “I thought
maybe we . . . we could go skinny-dipping.”
He looked around with a big, sheepish smile on his face. “C’mon, you guys. The moon’s up and everything.”
Rita and I were cracking up. “In your dreams, Pug,” she told him. “In your dreams.”
“Seriously,” I heard Troy saying as the bottle came to me again, “it’s time to be thinking about what’s next.”
“Lava Falls,” I said. “That’s what’s next. It’s only forty-five miles away. We’re at one thirty-four, and Lava Falls is at mile one seventy-nine. What did Al call it . . . ‘the steepest navigable rapid in North America’?”
Quickly I licked up the salt, took a big swallow of tequila, and bit into the lime. Steam must have been escaping from my ears. Finally I was as warm as I could want to be, with the bonfire cooking me from the outside and the tequila from the inside.
As everybody was somberly considering those two words, “Lava Falls,” Troy waved his hands and said, “That’s not what I’m talking about. I mean, where next after the Grand Canyon?”
He’s got to be kidding, I thought.
“Paris?” Adam suggested quizzically. “Let’s all go to Paris together and speak French. Go to French restaurants, order right off the menu. Wear French clothes, drink French wine, drive French cars, smoke French cigarettes. Or maybe Greece—sail around the islands in a yacht, I’d like that.”
“Eating Greek food and speaking Greek,” Pug suggested.
Troy was chuckling too, with the official manner of a master of ceremonies. The bottle was making its fourth trip around. Troy said quickly, while Adam was poking the fire and Pug was finishing the bottle, “I’m talking Mexico. Now listen, everybody, we’ve had a few disagreements, but we’re awesome. All of us—I mean everybody.”
Troy, I thought, you are amazing. There you go with the eyes, even trying them on me again.
“Do you realize how close the Mexican border is? Jessie, Star . . . do you have any idea how nice it is down there in the winter? Rita, Freddy, Adam . . . do you have any idea of the rate of exchange—two thousand, three thousand pesos for one dollar! We could live like kings!”