Downriver Read online

  // 10

  We floated on, putting the miles behind us and quickly losing track of the days. I found myself thinking less and less of everything I’d left behind. Maybe it’s because you’re literally moving downstream, with no chance of going back. You realize, as the cliffs slide by, that the past really is gone forever.

  Clear blue skies, good company—this was the life. I was even learning how to row the boat. Troy wasn’t inclined to teach me, but he didn’t mind letting me get in some time on the oars. He’d stretch out and take catnaps while I experimented with turning the boat around, avoiding obstacles, and getting the boat to shore for landings. It was pretty different from the paddle raft.

  We floated by side canyon after side canyon. I could tell that Freddy, over on the other boat, was distressed. He would look longingly at the openings of those canyons, gleaming with polished rock and often running with clear water. He hated to see them slipping by. They looked so inviting, I wished I could explore them myself. From the rudder, Freddy looked back at them again and again between strokes, as if memorizing them for future reference.

  In camp we had our routines down pretty well. Much of the shore time was taken up with de-rigging the boats, hauling all the gear up the beach, setting up the kitchen, cooking, doing dishes, hauling the gear down the beach, and rigging the boats.

  There was always a little time, though, for goofing around or washing your clothes or doing whatever you wanted to do. Actually there was more free time for some than for others. Adam was usually off trying in vain to catch what he called the “Indy 500 Lizards,” while Pug was attending to his poison ivy in his own way, scraping the blisters open with the sharp edge of his buck knife. Troy would hang around the kitchen and provide charm. His freedom was part of his mystique as trip leader and captain of the gear boat.

  One morning we came to the biggest side canyon of them all, and there was no question about floating by this one. The stream issuing from it was robin’s-egg blue, a remarkable sight. No one had ever seen anything like it, except Troy, who mentioned to me that it reminded him of the ocean water in the Caribbean. We tied up our boats and wandered upstream along what we quickly named the River of Blue.

  Before long we discovered that the water was actually warm, in contrast to the freezing water of the Colorado, and we all went swimming. In between dips we sunbathed against the ready-made backrests at the foot of the cliffs. Somebody remembered that we’d left two feet of snow behind in Colorado, and it didn’t even seem possible, it was so warm here.

  Pug said, “We really miss Al bad. Troy, don’t you miss Al?”

  “Al who?”

  “Yeah, right . . .”

  Adam came walking by, in his bare feet as usual, and slowly made tracks across the cracked mudflat just upstream from us. The clay oozed up between his toes—a most delightful consistency. Before long he succumbed to gravity and sat there in the mud, reaching for gobs of it, which he proceeded to rub all over his body, even his face. Rita helped him out with his back, carefully applying the mud all around his eyes, and then heaped a cone of mud on top of his head. He had us in hysterics, as usual. Before long, all seven of us were sitting in a circle, encased in mud. “We’re the Mudheads,” I said. “The Mudheads Do the Grand Canyon.”

  Pug was maybe the most delighted of all. “I can’t feel my poison ivy! It doesn’t itch a bit!”

  It wasn’t long before Adam discovered, a little upstream, a section of the stream bank that was all clay. He sprinted back to the boats, returned with a bail bucket, and began madly splashing the incline with water. Then he ran up to the top of the bank and slid down it like a human otter, splashing into the blue stream. Everyone else joined in. “It doesn’t get any better than this!” Pug bellowed. “Say, Troy, no more miles today, okay? Let’s stay here.”

  “We did a lot of miles the last few days,” Troy said. “Fine with me.”

  Within a few minutes, Freddy was heading upstream. He waded across the River of Blue, and then started up the other side. I realized he was going to explore this side canyon, and I knew immediately that I wanted to go with him. “Hey, wait a minute, Freddy,” I called out. I dived into the warm blue water and came up stroking. As I walked through the shallows on the other side, I could see that Freddy was waiting for me and was looking a little puzzled. Troy called out, “Where you going, Jessie?”

  “Up the canyon with Freddy,” I called back. “Wanna come?”

  “How’re you going to beat this?”

  “I just want to see what there is to see.”

  He’d made himself pretty comfortable in the sun. “You go ahead,” he said. “Have a good time.”

  Freddy waited for me to catch up, but when I did, he wasn’t overjoyed. “I want to see how far I can go,” he said. “I’m going to go fast.”

  His dark eyes met mine for the briefest of moments, and then he looked away again. He wasn’t at all sure of me.

  “I’ll keep up,” I said. “I’d really like to go.”

  He shrugged, and we started up the River of Blue, relatively slowly at first, but ever quicker as Freddy saw I could keep up. Through boulder fields and across slickrock terraces, along bits of deer trails, across the stream again when we’d get cliffed out on one side: This was my kind of cross-country hiking. My dad and I used to do it all the time. A couple of times Freddy glanced back, and flashed a brief smile to see I was right with him. I could move almost as quietly as he. My father called it “the Zen of rock hopping.” The art is that you never think about it—you don’t plan your route in a conscious way. Your whole body is reacting to the ever-changing pattern of the landscape, and you just go with your body. If you’re into it just right, you can do outrageous feats, incredible jumps, pinpoint landings. Your timing is perfect. You’re as at home on the rocks as a mountain goat.

  A couple of miles up the canyon, I switched into another gear. Just for the fun of it, because I was feeling so good and Freddy’s stated objective was to see how far he could go, I broke into a jog and blew by him. Now it was my turn to pick the route, and I loved it. This was advanced Zen. I had to scan ahead for the best route while staying totally tuned in to my next few steps. We went flying up the canyon, and neither of us was breathing that hard.

  I kept running as I was passing a formation off on my left, but then I slowed when I realized what an odd and unlikely sight it was, even in these canyons where bizarre formations are commonplace: a dome of gold-brown mineral deposits, standing on its own in the flats beside the blue stream. Like a little volcano, I thought, only shaved off flat on the top.

  As Freddy caught up with me, I became aware that I had almost stepped on something startlingly strange and beautiful, and I stooped to pick it up. A pair of sticks, whittled smooth and stained blue, topped with a large feather and wrapped with handspun white yarn, securing sprigs of herbs, downy feathers, and a pointed bit of corn husk. A loose end of yarn held another, smaller feather and some pine needles. I was holding something fashioned by human hands, but seemingly of another age.

  “What in the world?” I wondered aloud. “Look, there’s more of them.”

  I gave the one in my hands to Freddy, whose eyes went from it to the dome, now shining strikingly orange in the shifting light. Preoccupied and confused, he walked quietly over to the mysterious formation and climbed to the top.

  I joined him up there, and found him sitting beside a small pool, a fountain bubbling golden water up from the earth. From the secret places, I thought. From another world.

  The amber stream trickled off the far side of the dome, and as I looked that way, my eye picked up feathers in the bushes here and there on the flats below, and then I saw more and more of the stick-pairs. “They’re all over,” I said. “Freddy, they’re all over.”

  I turned to Freddy, wanting him to stand up and see what I had discovered, when I found that tears were welling from his dark eyes. “What is it, Freddy?” I whispered. I sat down beside him and looked into the fountain
, but I couldn’t see the depths that he was seeing. “What is it?”

  “This is a shrine,” he said. “It’s called the sipapuni. And this is a paho,” he added, holding up the little bundle I’d almost stepped on. “A prayer stick.”

  “Shrine? Whose shrine?”

  “The Hopis. The Hopi Indians.” Freddy wiped his eyes, and shook his head. “I never thought about it coming down the river, never even remembered. I still wouldn’t have realized what this place was unless you’d seen this, and put it in my hand. Right here’s where the Hopis believe that the people came into this world—through the sipapuni. I grew up hearing about it—this is the one place my mother always wanted me and my father to see. He never got here to see it.”

  Freddy brushed more tears from his eyes. “And now, here I am.”

  “You’re a Hopi?”

  He sighed. “My mother is a Hopi. She’s gone back to Second Mesa now, in Arizona, but I’m not really from there. I wasn’t raised as a Hopi. My mother would tell me things, though. She told me about the sipapuni when I was little, and about some of the old stories and customs. There are lots of rituals . . . a lot with running great distances—she said I would like that part. Young men run across the desert to visit the sipapuni and leave pahos.”

  “What about your father, Freddy?”

  “My father . . . he’s dead. He always said we should visit here one day. He felt sorry that his work took us away from my mother’s people. He was a Basque—from Spain.”

  “What did he do? How did he get to America?”

  “He was a sheepherder, the best.” Freddy chuckled a little, and then said, “They can’t get anybody to stay with the sheep over here, so the people who own the big flocks bring over Basques to do it.”

  Freddy looked at me for a second, wondering if he should go on, and then he did. “That high country above Al’s camp in Colorado, that’s right where we used to take our sheep. That’s where we always lived in the summers.”

  “When we were at our base camp, you were always taking off by yourself. Was that where you were going?”

  “Oh, there’s a little lake up there, just above timberline. We’d move the sheep around, but that was always our favorite camp. We lived in a big sheepherder tent, me and my mother and father, and we always had horses and dogs. In the winters we went down into New Mexico with the sheep.”

  “You were really close to your father?”

  Freddy nodded. In the quiet spell that followed he looked so sad and so alone. Finally he looked at me almost hopefully, and said, “Four years ago, he was killed by the police. It was all a big misunderstanding. He thought they were coming to take me away—there’d been talk about taking me to a boarding school. He picked up his rifle when they came. The police thought he was going to shoot. . . .”

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m really sorry.”

  A raven came in with thrashing wings and landed nearby.

  Freddy glanced at me as if recognizing for the first time who he was talking to, and he got up. He seemed embarrassed that he’d told me all this. He said, “We better get back.”

  “Freddy,” I couldn’t help asking, “how come you don’t live with your mother?”

  He hesitated, then began to speak again. “I tried . . . we went back to Second Mesa and lived with her family. But you can’t become a Hopi, you have to be born one, raised one. I got into a lot of trouble.”

  We left the sipapuni, and started back down the canyon. The sun was high up on the walls, and it was getting late. Even so, we didn’t run or even hustle. We walked very deliberately, Freddy in front and me behind. We didn’t talk. I’d felt close to him there at the shrine, but with every step back toward the others I felt the distance growing, until it was almost as great as before. My thoughts were jumbled with conflicting emotions. I was thinking about Freddy going back to that lake to remember his dad. I was thinking about me and my dad, even about me and Freddy.

  Back at camp everything felt different. It wasn’t just that the others weren’t still cavorting like otters; the whole mood had swung to the downside since we’d left them. I picked it up first off Rita and Pug—the cold wave was easy to notice. “What’s the matter?” I asked Rita. “Did something happen here?”

  “Nothing happened here,” she said sarcastically. “We’ve been sitting around for hours, that’s all. We could’ve been back on the river, and found a decent camp. Now we’ll have to camp here, on these ledges.”

  “Wait a minute,” I said. “Don’t I remember Pug saying, ‘No more miles,’ and Troy saying we’d camp here?”

  “We changed our minds,” Pug explained. “We wanted to get back on the river. But you weren’t around. Finally we had to give up and stay here.”

  I looked for Troy. He was lying back in the boatman’s seat on the gear boat. “I’m sorry we got our signals crossed,” I told him. “I thought we were camping here.”

  “No big deal,” he said unconvincingly. His blue eyes weren’t so warm. “I never thought you two would be gone long, that’s all. My mistake . . .”

  He seemed so disappointed in me. I could see now, it probably hadn’t taken that long before they’d played themselves out on the otter slide. “I’m sorry, Troy. I didn’t mean to create problems.”

  “Just think of the group, Jessie. That’s what I try to do.”

  I returned to my tent, and was happy to find Star inside. I asked her if she knew why the winds had changed.

  “It’s Troy,” she said. “He’s the Magician, a man of influence, for good or ill. I asked the cards.”

  “‘Magician’ . . . ‘man of influence’ . . . you asked a question about Troy, and that’s really what it said? How come you were asking about him?”

  “I’ve been thinking about him.”

  “He’s not in a very good mood,” I said. “I wonder what the real problem is.”

  “You and Freddy, maybe?”

  “Just taking a hike?”

  “Oh, I think it’s great. I really like Freddy.”

  “I hate this. Things get so complicated. Let’s make dinner—maybe that will perk everybody up.”

  • • •

  As we were quietly preparing dinner, Adam came in with a plastic soap case and ceremoniously opened it up on the kitchen table for our inspection. Out crawled a yellowish scorpion, about two inches long and ready to do battle, with its stinger held high. Adam teased it with a straw. “Check out the claws! He’s like a little lobster!”

  Everyone else came around to see what the stir was about, and watched Adam’s finger-length straw fence with the scorpion among the onions I was dicing at the time. The chancy part was, the scorpion’s direction of travel was totally unpredictable. “Watch this,” Rita said. “Our ninja is about to get stung.”

  It was interesting, watching everybody’s reactions. It was good theater for everyone but Star. “Don’t say that,” she told Rita. “It’ll make it happen.”

  “Adam, lemme kill it for you,” Pug offered. “Let’s roast him in the flame.”

  “Hey, no way, big guy. I’m keepin’ him alive.”

  Adam proceeded to recapture the scorpion in his blue soap case. He snapped the lid shut and tucked the case into the back pocket of his jeans. “Old Japanese saying,” Adam said. “Live scorpion in pants make life interesting.”

  Troy said, “Don’t sit down, old buddy.”

  In the morning I was back on Troy’s boat, and it was easy to see we weren’t the same as before. I tried to work on it, with forced cheerfulness, but he was in a foul mood. It wasn’t hard to figure out that he was teaching me a lesson. The current picked up, and Troy worked the oars in lively water. He could pretend I wasn’t there. Over on the other boat, they were enjoying themselves, and I was feeling like the captain’s captive.

  We left the confines of the narrow canyon we’d been in since we started, and entered a new realm. Finally it looked like the Grand Canyon I’d seen in pictures. Suddenly we could see miles and mile
s ahead and all the way up through layers and layers of formations to what had to be the very rim in the distance. I wished I felt happier about it. But I was all preoccupied. Should I wait him out, try to reason with him, beg his forgiveness, or tell him off and get on the other boat?

  I heard my dad saying how I tend to see everything in extremes. “Everything is either wonderful or it’s ‘blown.’” Slow down, I told myself. Give it some time. Maybe Troy’s just having a bad day. After all, we have been together constantly for quite a while now. This is bound to happen.

  Before long we noticed a little knob on the rim, with a distinctly unnatural look to it. For miles we floated in that direction. In between rapids we kept looking up to that rim, as the knob gradually assumed the lines of a tall stone tower.

  “Hey,” Pug yelled, filled with sudden inspiration. “There’s probably tourists up in that tower checking us out with telescopes. Let’s moon ’em!” When nobody signed up, Pug declined to take on the job by himself. “No guts, no glory,” he grumbled.

  In the late afternoon, we lost sight of the tower. We figured we must be pretty close to it and about five thousand feet below. After a roller coaster ride that lasted for miles, the current almost died out, and Troy had to turn his back downstream and pull on the oars through the nearly dead water. We turned a corner, and the River Thunder turned up the loudest yet. “This has to be a big one,” Troy shouted back to the others. “We better scout it.”

  We made for a beach on the left just short of the brink of the rapid. The Thunder overwhelmed me and made me feel sick in the pit of my stomach and light-headed at the same time. Star and I were tying the bowlines to the bushy trees, and we could see we were both scared. We knew this one would be the worst yet. “What is it, a waterfall?” Star joked weakly.

  We joined the others for the scout as we all stumbled down the left side for a look. The rapid was strewn with boulders from one side of the river to the other. The white water continued as far as we could see, through a maze of rocks and holes. A real mess. It was a dramatic spot, with the roar of the rapid and a new formation of stone walls breaking out of the riverbed at a steep angle and heading skyward into a dark gorge. I felt sicker than ever. Finding a route down through the first drop was going to be hard enough, and then we’d have to make a series of moves more difficult than any we’d done yet, to make it through the obstacle course below.