Downriver Read online

  I looked up into Troy’s face. He was pretty unhappy, and he was signaling with his finger across the throat. I wasn’t answering my dad. I was so confused.

  “Jessie, I have confidence in you. I know you’ll do the right thing. Don’t make any choices you won’t want to live with, okay?”

  “Sure, Dad,” I sniffled. I wanted to speak, but I couldn’t. I wanted to say “I love you.” I felt like it might be the last chance, but I didn’t. I don’t know if I couldn’t, I only know I didn’t.

  “Jessie . . .”

  “I’ll be okay, Dad. Bye.” Quickly I hung up the phone.

  Troy and I didn’t talk about it. And I was too disoriented, too guilty, even to think about how pushy Troy had been. When I got back in the van, Rita said, with those beady black eyes, “So, who’d you call?”

  “My father, all right?”

  “Jessie didn’t say anything,” Troy explained as he started up the van.

  “So I coulda called my mother,” Rita wailed. “You guys are really considerate, you know that?”

  Adam laughed and said, “Notice who didn’t leave the keys in the ignition.”

  “Well, I feel a lot better,” I said.

  “How nice for you,” Heather snapped.

  About one in the morning, Troy pulled out onto a narrow bridge and slowed the van down. “Colorado River!” he sang out, and we all came lurching out of our sleep and looked down. Far below, the black surface of the river was reflecting starlight. Spooky.

  Past the bridge we came to a filling station and trading post that was all closed down for the night. “No more phone calls,” Troy announced decisively. Pug said we should break in for “supplies,” but everybody knew he was only talking. We turned down the road marked LEE’S FERRY. After a couple of miles, we passed some parking lots, a campground, and a ranger station. The road dead-ended at a wide concrete boat ramp at the river. There were a couple of cars in the lot there, some bathrooms, and good overhead light.

  “Nobody’s around,” Troy said. “Perfect. Okay, you guys, we know how to rig, just like we did at Westwater. Pump up the boats, rig frames, stow all the rocket boxes and dry bags, tie everything down. Dry bags in between the nets in the middle of the paddle raft, everything else on the oared raft. And whisper. Let’s see how fast we can get out of here and slide downstream.”

  Pug hadn’t been listening. Pointing over at a sign, he said, “Get a load of this: ‘Private boaters must register permit with the river ranger.’ What a laugh. Anybody see any river rangers?”

  We set to work. We rigged the boats. We were out of our minds with anticipation. Were we really going to do this? We weren’t just talking about it?

  Troy drove the van and the trailer into a dirt lot, then came back. We were dead tired. The first hint of dawn was starting to show, and still no river rangers, nobody at all.

  “We gotta get out of here,” Troy said.

  We hustled. It was all a blur, but finally the boats were rigged.

  “Hey, where’s Heather?” Rita said suddenly, and she wasn’t whispering.

  Everybody looked around, and the realization sunk in. “She split!” Rita said. “Heather split!”

  Of course, I thought. It makes perfect sense.

  “Run up to the john,” Troy ordered. “Check both of ’em.”

  Adam and Rita came running back. “Gone,” they said, breathing hard. “What do we do?”

  “Yeah,” Pug said, “what if she squeals?”

  Troy reached for his life jacket. “Forget it. So she squeals.”

  We moved toward the boats. One was a paddle raft, with all of our personal stuff in the dry bags, and one was the rowed raft with all the food and group gear. “Who’s rowing?” I asked. Al had rowed on the Westwater trip.

  “I am,” Troy answered. “Let’s get going!”

  “You got a river map, Troy?” Freddy asked.

  Troy waved his arms impatiently. His eyes were jumpy; I’d never seen him nervous like this before. “I got my Arizona road map,” he said. “It’s got the river on it.”

  He didn’t say it like a joke, that was the thing. Adam didn’t even make hay out of it, and he’d never been handed a better setup. This was the moment. We could’ve backed out right there. We all looked around at each other, and I bet we were all thinking the same thing. We didn’t really know what we were doing, yet we’d dared each other into this. If we backed down now, our self-respect was going to go down the tubes. We’d be totally whipped.

  Of all people, I grabbed my paddle and stepped into the paddle raft. Maybe I wanted to make up for the phone call, or for being the one who kept us from the top of Storm King Peak. “We’ll make it up as we go,” I said. “We can’t get lost—you just float downriver!”

  Star was right behind me. “I’m with Jessie,” she said.

  Troy was pleased. “We can scout the rapids as we come to ’em. Remember how good we were in Westwater.”

  “I want muh mother,” Pug sang, and everybody laughed.

  And then we were off, paddling for the current in the dawn, the ramp slipping away behind us. We paddled through a riffle, alongside a low cliff on the left, and passed into the rising walls of a canyon. With a look back I saw the water tower at the ranger station disappear. Troy rowed his boat alongside ours. Barely above us, bats were zooming at crazy angles. “Let’s put that bridge behind us before we stop,” Troy advised. “Well, guys, we’re really doing it, we’re pirating the Grand Canyon of the Colorado.”

  “Pirates o’ the Colorado!” Pug roared. He pulled out his buck knife—an item Al never knew about—and put it between his teeth.

  “Ninja Pirates!” Adam declared.

  Rita bounced up and down on the front of the raft. “Bring on the Grand Canyon—we’ll kick its butt!”

  And there was Freddy with a beautiful grin on his quiet face, his eyes drinking in the water, the walls, the bats, and the last reluctant stars.

  7 //

  We passed under the bridge, a graceful arch composed of hundreds of steel girders, towering above us in this world of stone and sky like a monumental work of art. There was an eerie quality about it, as if it were the vestige of an ancient civilization. No vehicles crossed it, no one stood at the rail and waved to us. The river tugged at us, and we bobbed along downstream. The bridge was receding, and the sight sent a thrill down my spine. Ahead, only rock, water, sky, and the unknown. In the next instant, the thrill turned to fear, and I wished myself up on that bridge looking down. What was I doing? Was I out of my mind?

  The canyon walls echoed the passage of a big truck. We all looked back. It was a beer truck.

  “Wish I had a rocket launcher,” Pug said wistfully.

  “Darn,” Adam said. “I knew we forgot something.”

  “I’d blast that truck right off the bridge and watch it fall all the way down to the river. Wouldn’t that be a beautiful sight?”

  It was touching to see Pug so affected by beauty.

  “We’d be pickin’ up beer all the way down the canyon,” Rita said.

  The current swept us around a little bend in the river, and the bridge was lost from view. It may as well have been hundreds of miles behind us.

  From somewhere along the shore came the most delightful birdsong I’d ever heard in my life, a series of lyrical whistles cascading in pitch and slowing as they fell. Star and I looked to each other. It was one of those moments you share with somebody, moments you never forget. She was so happy. Those green eyes were singing their own song.

  There the song came again, and again. “I wish I knew its name,” I said.

  “Canyon wren,” Freddy volunteered.

  “How do you know?” Pug asked.

  Freddy didn’t bother to answer, just paddled on, with his eyes on the cliffs high above. It was almost as if he were reading lines in a book, his concentration was so focused. A mile or so later, he cocked one ear downstream, and then the other. I couldn’t tell what he was hearing. Just then Troy
yelled over from his boat, “What’s that sound?”

  Troy seemed kind of spooked; I still couldn’t hear anything.

  “Listen,” he said. “Listen.”

  There was a background hum, or a vibration or something, coming from downstream.

  “An airplane,” Pug guessed.

  I glanced at Freddy and saw a quiet smile on his face.

  “Tape hiss,” Adam declared. “Canyon tape hiss.”

  Then it dawned on everybody at once. First rapid, of course. This was a white-water river, after all.

  We rounded a bend, and the sound wasn’t so subtle. “Tape roar is more like it,” I said.

  “River Thunder,” Adam named it. “Prepare to die, funhogs.”

  About three hundred yards downstream, the river seemed to end on its own horizon line. Past that spot the river wasn’t visible at all. It looked like we were approaching a waterfall. The current almost died out, and we had to paddle downstream toward that brink as if we were on a lake. The River Thunder grew louder and louder.

  We scouted the rapid—thank goodness we scouted it. We didn’t know what it was called; its name wasn’t on our Arizona road map. We didn’t know how bad it was supposed to be, or how we were supposed to run it. I know how it looked: awful. It was all full of white water and studded with rocks, as the river narrowed and took a big fall. The main current led into waves bigger than any we’d seen in Westwater Canyon, but it seemed like the only way through was to go right into the big waves. To either side were boulders sticking up, and underneath them violent holes.

  Everybody was standing around pointing, shouting to be heard over the roar of the rapid. I was right next to Freddy. “How’d all those boulders get in the river?” I asked him. “Did they fall off the cliffs?”

  Freddy pointed out two side canyons, one entering the rapid on each side of the river. “I think they were washed out of those canyons. Flash floods.”

  I was amazed. The side canyons were bone dry. To think they could run with so much water as to carry down boulders as big as cars, and deposit them way out in the river . . .

  As we silently walked back to the boats, I felt the drums of doom in my ears. I looked upstream and wondered if we should give it all up. I thought about yelling out, calling for a conference.

  I said nothing. Mechanically I picked up my paddle as Star picked up hers. She was sort of looking to me for reassurance. Just down the shore Troy was stowing his bowline; then he nudged his boat offshore and started rowing for the current. Star and I hugged each other, then laughed nervously at the odd feel of bumping life jackets. Adam, I could see, was thinking of poking a little fun, but he was too nervous.

  “Let’s get with it, kiddies,” Troy called. “You gotta save me if I flip.”

  “I wish he wouldn’t say that,” Star fretted.

  “Let’s go!” Rita yelled. “Quit making such a big deal of this.”

  With our hearts jumping, we paddled out into the current, then slowly drifted toward the spot along the brink we’d picked. Ahead of us, Troy went over the edge and quickly disappeared. It was a heart-stopping sight.

  Then it was our turn.

  We picked up speed as the current flowed down the tongue. Into the valley of death, I thought, rowed the six hundred. And then we were into a churning fury of white water. Suddenly sideways in the big waves, the boat felt so unstable I thought we might tip over. I glanced to the very back of the boat, to see if Pug was ruddering with his paddle. He didn’t seem to know what he was doing. In fact he was doing the opposite of what he should have been and was causing us to get sideways.

  Fool’s luck: The rapid spit us out. We rode through the tailwaves, and then we were looking back up at the rapid, which looked like a staircase of white water. We were all cheering as we paddled our boat toward Troy’s, and the canyon walls echoed Pug’s war whoops. Troy was doing a victory dance atop the cooler, toward the front of his boat. “We can do this!” Troy yelled. “Perfect run! I hardly have any water to bail!” For the laid-back guy that he was, it was a major demonstration, and psyched us up still higher than we already were. Pug followed his captain’s lead and started dancing on the gear in the middle of our boat, until Rita yelled, “Hey, that’s our dry bags, you rhino! You’re going to crush all our stuff!”

  Pug looked bewildered, like a little boy chastised when he thought he was doing good. “Crush what? Like what?”

  “Cookies?” Adam suggested hopefully.

  Rita was standing up and had her hands on her hips. “Whaddaya want, a list of what’s in everybody’s dry bag? For Pete’s sake.”

  Pug slowly got off the gear. Confused, he didn’t know whether to attack or apologize.

  “Hey, guys,” Troy said. “Remember, we’re all in this together, and we’re awesome.”

  “Right on!” Pug agreed.

  The day was warming up. At last we were in the direct sunshine. Even though it was October, it was plenty warm, at least on those bends of the river that took the direct sun. Troy took off his shirt and started working on his tan. The rest of the guys followed suit.

  We landed for a pit stop. I found Troy and whispered to him about Pug, how he almost flipped us. “Maybe you should teach him,” I suggested, “or else somebody else can be the rudder.” Troy called Adam and Freddy over to talk, and I walked away. The guys were awfully macho about the rudder position. They assumed that none of the girls was strong enough to apply the torque necessary for a radical steering maneuver. Maybe I was, I thought, and Rita too. Heather for sure, with her wide shoulders, if she weren’t so afraid. It was almost a shock to realize Heather was no longer among us. A few hours downstream, and we might as well have known her in another lifetime. She’d stayed behind, and we’d entered a separate reality.

  Before we got back on the boats, Troy called us all together. With a little stick he drew diagrams in the wet sand and calmly talked abstract strategy, nothing about how we actually did in that first rapid.

  Pug was taking it okay. He wasn’t being singled out. The only problem was, when it came to the ruddering part, Troy’s advice was so complicated I could barely follow it myself. I saw Pug nodding his head, but I had my doubts. Paddling is so instinctive: You’re reacting to ever-changing conditions, and you do things with your paddle without really thinking about it.

  When we got up and headed for the boats, I was sure everybody was thinking about who should rudder the paddle raft. Either Adam or Freddy would’ve been fine with me. They were great in Westwater. But as we were putting on our life jackets, Pug snatched up his paddle and practically jumped into the back of the boat. He had an awkward smile on his face. He knew we didn’t trust him, but at the same time he couldn’t help trying to prove himself.

  Around the bend, more River Thunder. Another mile or two down we scouted another rapid as big as the first. Maybe the waves were even taller. “Are you going to take him off the rudder?” I whispered to Troy.

  “Let’s see what happens.”

  What happened was the same thing as before. Only this time, when we went up onto a big wave sideways, I got thrown out. One instant I was paddling, trying to do what I could to straighten the boat, and the next I was suddenly in that freezing green and white water. It was an overwhelming shock to find myself outside the boat and in the river. It could have been a whole lot worse, though. Fortunately, as I was flying out I’d grabbed the chicken line that ran around the boat and was holding on for dear life. I was only out for a few seconds, as it turned out. Star, of all people, did exactly what Al had taught us to do. She reached over my back and grabbed the bottom of my life jacket in one hand, the shoulder of my jacket with the other, and pulled me back into the boat like a tuna fisherman pulling a big one out of the sea.

  We were both on the bottom of the front part of the boat, with our faces real close. Star was as surprised as I was. As the boat wallowed in the big waves I heard Freddy yell, “Adam—get in the back and rudder!” In the thick of that rapid, Freddy wasn’t
going to dance around Pug’s feelings.

  Adam brought us through the tailwaves right side up. Freddy said, “Good work, Jessie. You hung on to your paddle.”

  Sure enough, there it was in my hand.

  I glanced at Pug. His feelings were hurt, all right. And I didn’t care. He was glaring at Freddy like he wanted to strangle him.

  We bailed the boats out beneath the rapid, then had lunch on a long beach of pure white sand. I was sitting off by myself, on a big rock, trying to settle down. I was pretty shaken up after being in the river. It gave me pause to wonder what Heather went through when she was held under in the big hole in Skull and tumbled around and around. No wonder she bailed out on us. Was she the only one who knew what it was all about?

  Troy came over and sat with me. “All’s well that ends well,” he said.

  “Pug doesn’t know what he’s doing.”

  “I know. He’s in a funk too. He knows he’s out of that rudder spot, but I’d much rather have him feel bad about it than have him back there again.”

  “That’s for sure.”

  “It looks like he’s just gonna blame Freddy, and he never liked him anyway, so it’s all the same. Now are you okay, Jessie?”

  “Me? . . . Sure. I just don’t want to get back in that freezing water again, if I can help it. How come it’s so cold? It was almost warm at Westwater.”

  “I’ve been wondering about that too. I think it’s because of the dam. We started off not far below Glen Canyon Dam, according to the map. In the ocean, the deeper you dive, the colder the water is. I bet they let the water out of the bottom of the lake.”

  We rejoined the group. Rita and Pug really wanted to camp there on that beach. It was a tempting idea, and we started talking about collapsing right then and there. We were all exhausted, hadn’t really slept since we left Colorado about thirty hours before. “Can we?” Rita pleaded with Troy. “Can we?”

  Rita was sure Troy was going to say yes, but he didn’t. “Judging from the road map, it looks like there’s at least two hundred miles of river between Lee’s Ferry and Lake Mead. Ten days of food . . . We’ll have to cover over twenty miles a day.”