by Spencer Hyde
The heat of the morning pressed down upon me as I stepped from the pines and into the sunlight. I saw Shelby taking a video while doing yoga with Nash. It was a completely unexpected thing to see, and I wondered if both of them had let the apple butter slide completely off the biscuit. She had her phone set up on a log, recording their warrior poses. As odd as that was to see, what made me happy was seeing that Shelby wasn’t wearing a wig, but had a bandana wrapped around her head instead.
“You going to post that?” I asked as I walked past them.
“I run a fitness gram as well.”
“Wish I could double tap your forehead to give you a like right now.”
Shelby smiled and changed poses, and Nash followed suit, after nodding a good morning my way. I returned it half-heartedly.
“Where’s Wyatt?” I said, making my way to the fire, where Skye was checking on the fish.
“He’s over there.”
Wyatt was practicing throwing his hatchets into a log that had toppled from atop a boulder beneath a copse of trees that stood like sentinels, watching over the river.
“He was sketching earlier. He’s a true Renaissance man,” said Skye. “If only we’d known.”
“There are a lot of things I want to say that about,” I said. “If only I’d known. I want to see what’s in that book of his. I want him to tell me more about light in art. That sun is breathtaking. I don’t want to get all sentimental, but look at it.”
“I’m looking at what’s breathtaking,” he said, staring my way.
“Funny. I’m looking at the Skye. Too easy.”
I heard the slap of small waves against the rocks near the camp. Skye turned the fish, and I watched the embers wax and wane in the morning light.
“Here’s something weird I’ve been thinking about,” said Skye.
It was such an odd transition, I wasn’t sure how I was supposed to respond. “Okay?”
“I thought of it while fishing this morning.”
“Okay?”
“I don’t know. I guess I just think you need to rethink letting it run. That’s a phrase people throw around on the river, but I think you understand what I’m getting at.”
“Do I?”
“Look, I heard you guys talking when we were placing those stones. You can’t just stand next to Nash and hope people see the history and make the decision for you. You’ve gotta make a move. You can’t keep him on the line like that. You can’t let him run. You have to release him.”
The fishing terminology was something I connected with, and Skye knew it. And I knew I couldn’t leave Nash hanging for much longer without making a decision one way or another. Partial forgiveness or hinted-at forgiveness is not forgiveness at all.
“How would that work, then? If you were in my place?”
“I thought you knew how to fly-fish, Indiana. C’mon. Catch and release. All of Idaho would be ashamed to hear you ask that.”
“Once again, you’re a real sidesplitter this morning. I mean about the forgiveness part, the idea behind it all.”
“You ever been to Canada? That’s one place I’d like to go fly-fishing.”
“You ever stay on topic?” I said.
“Not if I can avoid it.”
“Avoid the topic or the staying-on-topic thing as a whole?”
“Canada. I avoid Canada,” he said.
“Too much niceness in one place?”
“Too much maple syrup in one place.”
“Stereotype much?” I said.
“I’m just wary of my sugar intake. I don’t think my pancreas could take it if I moved to Canada.”
“Why would you move to Canada?”
“Wow. Non sequitur much? I’m trying to talk about forgiveness, and letting it run, and catch and release.”
“I think I’ll go throw hatchets with Wyatt instead.”
He turned the fish over and checked with his knife to see if the meat was cooked through, the rows of white like snowdrifts in Victor on cold January mornings in the new sun.
“I’ve just heard life is better when you make peace.”
He said it so loudly I turned before making it all the way to Wyatt’s spot.
“Show Nash that you’re ready to let it go,” said Skye. “To show forgiveness. To show it’s over.”
A few minutes later, Skye leaned back and shouted that breakfast was ready, as he took the fish off the fire.
We all picked at the trout before us. I noted Shelby’s continued aversion to fish, and the way Nash only ate the eggs. I ate some of those as well. We had food, just not a lot of options.
“Won’t be but a few hours until we have some more food and we can let Skye off the hook.”
Nash’s attempt at a joke fell flat, though Skye gave him a courtesy laugh. Skye made big eyes at me after and smiled. He sat by me as we finished breakfast.
I thought of the options I had before me concerning the whole letting it run business and forgiveness.
1.Wait until the last day, and right before hopping into Grandpa’s car, shout “I forgive you!” and Nash would never really know who that was meant for or if he could forgive himself.
2.Tell Nash how much it hurts not having Mom around. Ask him what he misses about her. Remind him that she cared a great deal about their friendship, and that it was just an accident.
3.Bury one of Wyatt’s hatchets by the Snake River, after telling Nash it’s time to make peace.
4.Maintain the status quo, avoid 1 through 3, hurry off the water, and remind myself that I got to know Shelby and Wyatt and Skye on this trip, and that forgiveness wouldn’t bring Mom back anyway.
I landed somewhere between numbers 1 and 3, but I still wasn’t sure I could ever really stick to one option. Nash had already prepped the oars, and as we all loaded our gear and stepped into the boat, he gave us another speech about our PFDs and keeping our feet downriver and what it meant when he yelled “High side!”
We were all, like, criminally negligent when it came to understanding his terminology, as evidenced by Skye and Shelby’s spill the day before, so we tried to pay closer attention.
Once we got on the river, I watched as the light reached over the canyon wall and continued on until a strong, orange light brooded over the water.
I noticed, in the distance, a swarm of clouds gathering. From my position, I could only see the heads of the clouds, but they were a full gray with silver linings and large silver bellies, and their massive, pillowy bodies looked as if they were resting on the rim of the canyon.
I heard the morning call of an eagle echoing over the water, and when I listened to the sound bounce back and hover over us, I thought about what it meant to see more than one thing in somebody else. People often find God in church or prayer or religious ceremonies or out in nature, but I seem to find spirituality, or whatever you want to call it, in other people. Like Skye.
The eagle’s cry also made me think of when my mother once hit the middle C of our piano and let the sound bounce around the room before saying, “Node.”
At first, I thought she’d said “Note,” and I didn’t know how to respond, but she explained that a node in a room is all about proper resonances of sound. Certain sounds in certain rooms fit perfectly together. Throw in a key, get a symphony back in return. I couldn’t help but wonder that morning if I was throwing out a key and letting it echo off the canyon walls only to get back a symphony from Skye sitting next to me. From the entire group, really. It’s like we’d spread out the weight of a lifetime of secrets we’d been hoarding, and we could now carry the load together, even if it meant carrying it on a death-noodle down a raging river.
“First up, we got Waterspout Rapids, team,” said Nash, his arms turning at odd angles as he sloped the raft past an eddy and into the faster-moving current, his arms like stork legs in motion. �
�They’ll wake you up, if the sun hasn’t already.”
“I want a pastry to wake me up. Not the sun,” I said.
“I want a cronut,” said Shelby.
“That sounds amazing,” said Wyatt.
“Maple syrup going to be at camp three?” said Skye.
“Or an ice-cream cone,” said Shelby.
“I’m not trying to be mean, Shelbs,” said Wyatt, “but can’t you have your mom or dad, like, Uber Eats in some pizza or something on a helicopter?”
“Right. I’ll just have them see which helicopters are in the area and on shift.”
“Thanks,” said Wyatt.
They’d completely derailed Nash’s instructions, but I was happy for the conversation. I felt like all my problems had found a new place to hide in the three sitting next to me. But that also made me worry that my problems would come rushing back the second we separated. We only had two days left on the water. For that, I was happy, because it meant only a few days left with Nash. But when I looked at the soft faces in the morning light and the way they all smiled at one another and the way we’d kind of become friends, it made me sad.
“We’ll have everything we need at the next camp,” said Nash. “Even pastries.”
A tongue of water sat fifty yards away, pulling surrounding water in briskly. The rapids loomed larger than any set we’d seen on the river so far. I was worried there was a waterfall on the other side of the two boulders staring my way, because of the noise echoing in the background. Where the currents meet in the river, it turns to color and sound and not much else above the roar of the water. Rhythm and bounce; shimmy and spray.
“Hold onto yourselves. This water is going to spray hard, and it won’t quit until we run this line. Some rocks will have pillows because of the way the water is collected, so be prepared to start and stop with each move. At the end, we’ll hit a massive hydraulic. This one is going to be really technical. I’m going to peel out of this eddy here when you all give me the go-ahead. I can’t go into this one without a thumbs-up from every one of you.”
Sometimes Nash said things like questions, as if he was unsure of the right line to take and was looking for the go-ahead from me in particular. He always looked my way, like maybe I could see the line better. That may have been true, considering I spent so much time on the Snake River.
Nash put his ponytail in a bun beneath his hat, which seemed odd, considering how wet we were going to get. Maybe it was some kind of nervous tic. Skye looked ready, but then Skye was the type of guy who could decide to do an ultramarathon without training a day in his life and still get, like, a really respectable time. But none of the rest of us were exceptionally athletic or overly attractive or anything. Okay, maybe Shelby and Wyatt were. I watched as Shelby readied herself, sitting up straighter, the bandana around her head catching dappled light. She was so pretty in that moment, even sans hair.
It was odd to be friends with someone like Shelby. She was so popular, and the way she looked, the way she commanded attention with her bright eyes, suggested she could leave us all behind in a moment and hop into another life without a second thought and be even more successful, even happier, even prettier. I wished I had that kind of poise.
I looked back at Nash as I gave my thumbs-up and saw some small emotion—annoyance or uncertainty or fear—flicker across his sunbaked, wrinkled face like a passing breeze, and then it was gone. There was some odd apprehension in the way he used his control hand to turn the oar and guide us to the rapids up ahead. And then he was peeling out from the eddy and leading the raft to the tongue, and I couldn’t do anything to stop what happened next.
What happened next: We dipped into the water sluicing between the boulders at the start of the rapids. The haystack waves were massive. They were so big that when we decelerated against the built-up upstream water, a standing wave was waiting for us when the raft dipped back into the faster waters.
We were soaked after pivoting around the first two boulders. The death-noodle was riding high on swells that seemed much larger than any we had previously encountered. Skye was whooping and hollering and screaming into the water as it crashed over us. Shelby had a huge smile, and even Wyatt was laughing. I was in the back and Nash was facing forward, so I couldn’t see his expression, but I heard him yell a couple of times.
Streaking rays of light blinded me at one point as I opened my eyes only to find the sun glaring off another swell about to wash over me. The raft decelerated as I shifted my body weight to anticipate the next dip, but I was off by a half-second, and the water knocked me off the raft and into the frothing white of the river.
“Grab a loop!” Nash shouted.
He turned to look at me, but the moment he looked away from the line, the raft wrapped around a boulder and then bounced backwards and dropped into a hole, only to rise immediately after at such a steep gradient that everyone toppled out, including Nash. I saw the bodies flail, and the oar missed me by inches as the water pulled me back under.
I was swallowing far too much water. I rose, and my throat stung as I sucked in air before dropping into another hole, knocking my knee against a boulder. I was aware enough to keep my feet downstream, but I didn’t know exactly where I was located on the river; I didn’t know which way to swim to avoid a strainer.
Two giant boulders were piled atop one another like unwieldy pancakes, and before I got sucked down once more, I saw ribbons of water snaking through small holes left by the gaps between the rocks. I kicked hard to avoid the narrowing window, but I couldn’t escape the pull. I thought of what Nash had said and tried to scrape my way to the surface and go over the strainer, but the pull was beyond my strength. My body was sucked into a hole the size of a doggy door, and I couldn’t wiggle free. My head was facing upriver, and I felt the pull of the downstream current on my feet on the other side of the strainer.
I knew I couldn’t hold my breath for much longer. My heart was pounding arrhythmically. My lungs felt like they might burst, like they were one of those homemade rockets where you hook the bottle up to a pipe and stomp on it and it shoots the thing into the air. I was drenched in adrenaline, even without the water pulling me in different directions and crushing my air source. Seconds masqueraded as hours.
Pure survival instinct kicked in. Perhaps that’s how my arms moved without receiving any signal from my brain, because my brain was shouting “Air!” and my heart felt like it was being pressed up against my chest by a semitruck. I wasn’t thinking about unclipping from my PFD, but that’s exactly what I did.
After researching what happened to Mom, I knew enough about strainers to know that going through is the only option. Nobody is strong enough to swim against the current pressing with so much force, so many pounds per square inch. Nothing short of an actual rocket could escape such brutal, unforgiving force.
With my PFD unclipped, I slid closer to the boulder and kicked my feet and knew that my last option was to release the rest of the air before I blacked out. I had to be as thin as possible in order to escape the tight window between the two boulders. Between a hard place and a hard place. A rock and a rock. So that’s exactly what I did.
All air out, all pull, all ferocity and instinct and gut-panic to survive. I yanked one arm through and felt the granite threaten to turn my arm into chum, but I kept going. I used that arm to pull and kept my other arm straight out in front of my face and wiggled out of my PFD. My entire body made it through the small opening in the strainer just in time for the no-air thing to take control, and I swallowed water as my body shot to the surface with the speed and pressure and wonderful force of the undercurrent of a rapid swell.
I emerged from the water sucking air and coughing simultaneously, and I saw the oar ten yards in front of me. Blood bloomed in the water next to my arm. I saw Wyatt pop up from the water as well, the expression on his face like an exclamation point of activated energy and panic and survi
val-instinct mode.
I turned my feet downstream and tried to get as much air as I could before I went under again. I attempted to spot any strainers or large limbs or boulders, but before I could reach a high-point to navigate, my foot hyperextended against a log and turned my body sideways, and my head connected with a boulder.
Everything went black.
EIGHT
When I woke, a good amount of blood had gathered and pulsed at the back of my head, and my body was still dripping water. I heard the rapids spray and roil and crash in the background. My side was raw and numb, and my right arm felt like it had been put through a potato slicer. A step away from death. That’s how close I’d been.
I turned from my side onto my back and felt an ease wash through me, momentarily, as I recognized the familiar weight of my mother’s ring on my chest.
Shelby was sitting next to me, soaked, her features shimmering in the afternoon light. A line of water slid down her bald scalp; I noticed she had a cut on her head and her bandana was gone. She shook her head back and forth like I do at home when I’m trying to get a TV remote to work, hoping it’s not the batteries. Her eyes slowly seemed to focus, and she saw me and gave a half-smile and then sat up straighter.
I breathed in through my nose and out through my mouth, trying to release some of the tension in my muscles, in my chest. My arms felt like they’d never been used, like they were unsure of how to press against the ground and lift me up into a sitting position. Every muscle in my body felt weak, like I’d been flexing everything for an entire day only to finally release into relaxation. But the day was only half-over, and I knew I’d need more energy.