Great Uncomformity
Always the water changed, but the river stood still.
—Richard Powers
It started with Robert. The night before we launched an unguided raft trip down the Grand Canyon, 12 friends and I ate dinner at a long, scarred table in a rustic roadhouse, and Robert was our waiter. Muscled and lean, goateed, eyebrows and earlobes well-pierced, he bragged about how he’d jumped off the 400-foot high Navajo Bridge over the Colorado River. As he served up platters of food, he described himself harnessed, one line taut, one line slack, to an elaborate rope-work none of us could understand, swinging from one end of the canyon rim to the other, until, at rest again and dangling, he’d jumared his way back up. This story, I thought over my plate of cooked vegetables splattered with melted cheese, exemplified the real West, the land of the complete make-over. Robert said he’d once worn a suit, worked for dot-coms, carried a brief case, but he’d walked away, southeast from there geographically, west in every other sense. As he darted around our table in his black T-shirt and baggy, low-slung jeans, the men stared at their plates and ignored him. “He’s a bullshitter,” Kevin muttered. Only the women met his dark eyes and laughed.
His heroics, his bravado, his pure physicality struck me oddly, as though they were things I was supposed to recognize, to remember. But I recognized none of his qualities in myself. I felt utterly disembodied that March, as though I’d sleepwalked to the banks of the Colorado River. The previous August, at age 44, my period had stopped. In December, I’d lost my father. In January, I’d toyed with the notion of having an extramarital affair. And a few weeks before all of those things, there’d been a trauma with my stepson that, looking back, seemed to intiate the cascade of events. I was a midlife accident waiting to happen; I was numb. Nevertheless, the next morning, at Lee’s Ferry, the trampled sandy beach below Glen Canyon Dam where trips launched, I worked hard, lugging gear to tethered rafts, counting life jackets, inflating kayaks with a plastic pump, running after tents and dry-bags tumbling upriver in afternoon gusts, trying to overcome my passivity. That afternoon, we pushed off from the bank into the the river’s relentless current.
Perched on top of the pile of dry-bags—blue, forest green and red—strapped tightly to the 20-foot raft, I craned my neck back as the water swept us under the Navajo Bridge. I thought I saw a figure standing on top of the Kaibab Limestone at the canyon’s rim, beside the girders. I yelled up, “Robert, is that you?” but the figure disappeared.
We drifted on by. Two yellow 20-foot oar-rafts; one yellow 18-footer; Bill’s smaller cataraft (bear-chewed, its dull red pontoons patched with gray goop); two inflatable kayaks, one sky-blue, one rubber duckie-yellow—our flotilla. Bill, the trip’s leader, had proposed we float the Colorado without maps or state-of-the-art gear, like one-armed Civil War veteran John Wesley Powell, thought to be the first white guy to explore its length in 1869, or like Ed Abbey, who’d floated the upper river just before it was drowned by Glen Canyon Dam with only a Tesoro road map, which was swept away in the first rapid. Despite Bill’s invocation of the spirits of Abbey and Powell (their hardcover accounts were packed in a leaky dry-bag Bill called “the library”), he’d been outvoted. We had waterproof books detailing camps, rapids and landmarks, river mile by river mile. An outfitter had packed our food into ammo boxes labeled for each day, complete with recipes. We did share one commonality with Powell’s crew of mountain men; we had plenty of outdoor experience, and some of us had rafted rivers, but not the Colorado, and no river as big or powerful, with as much water. The extent of our wisdom about its infamous rapids came from Irish Michael, who claimed he’d been down Lava Falls, the river’s most notorious challenge, a Class Nine, 20 times on Youtube. Thirteen amateurs: five middle-aged women, two teenaged girls, five middle-aged men, one teenaged boy.
I couldn’t even call myself amateur to a whitewater river. Not novice, not novitiate—I hadn’t come with the intention to learn anything about rafting, had come with no apparent intention, had come to please my husband Craig, and because that’s what outdoorsy people like me did, when they had the chance. Though I’m no thrill-seeker. I don’t even like amusement park rides or airplanes. I’d never asked, in the months preceding, just how much rafting experience the oarsmen—Kevin, Michael, Bill and Sky—had, or needed. (A lot, it turned out). I’d never read a book about the Grand Canyon (read Powell only after), never watched the rafting video our friend, a Colorado River guide, had loaned to us. After the invitation from Bill and his wife Jane, who’d finally, after 10 years waiting, been granted a permit to float the Colorado, I’d heard the same refrains over and over, once in a lifetime adventure, so lucky, one of life’s peak experiences, people always want to go back, such an honor to be asked. How could I not say yes? Besides, when I’d expressed misgivings privately to Craig, he’d cajoled me, which was not his usual style. It had been a rough year for us. He’d said floating the Colorado together was important to him, to our relationship. So I didn’t back out, even after watching the required instructional Park Service video at Bill and Jane’s house one night. It featured scenes of hot, overweight, middle-aged men on beach-chairs, spread-legged on a sandy bank, lifting brewskies to the camera, shaking fistfuls of gorp into their mouths. Keep up the hygiene! Or you’ll stink! Wash your hands! Sprinkle Clorox in the shitters (green ammo cans with detachable toilet-seat lids). Eat every 15 minutes! Watch out for red ants! Drink a gallon of water! Shake the scorpions out your shoes and sleeping bags! Learn the four-washtub dishwashing system! Bleach! Hand-sanitizer! Implying the thick, brown, roiling water flowing by the beach scenes was anything but pristine. The danger, the film’s narrator claimed, wasn’t whitewater, but dysentery, insect stings, snake bites, stumbles on rocks, falls into the river at night when peeing. I’d watched it all in a numbed-down state of bemused detachment. Who would want to do that?
I lied. It didn’t start with Robert. Things never start at their putative beginnings. My Colorado River trip didn’t start on river-day one. It started with a boy. A boy named Sheldon. Actually, it started with two boys. Sheldon and my stepson Lars. In late July, Sheldon died at a teenage gathering Lars held at his mom’s house while she was out of town. Many of the kids who showed up unexpectedly and en masse in the middle of that night were high on mushrooms and pot and booze, high on being 17, high off an evening of dancing at the outdoor benefit concert put on by the local radio station. These weren’t ne’er-do-wells; they were the brightest of his artistic, adventurous junior class. Lars had invited a few of them over after the concert, but 100 kids came, many strangers to Lars, gathered in via text-messaging gone viral. Here’s the rub. We knew Lars was out there. We knew his mom was on a horseback riding trip in the Wrangell Mountains, out of cell range. We knew. We allowed. A competitive swimmer and hard-core academic, Lars was a responsible 17-year-old, not a drinker, more often than not the bouncer or counselor or designated driver at teenage parties. We trusted him.
Nevertheless, I felt uneasy that night. Maybe it was the moon, a big ugly moon, red as a welt, ballooning up over town. At 11 p.m., I convinced Craig to call Lars, who said everything was fine, just a few friends over, the biggest drama being a fight between two girls over a guy. Shortly after our call, while we slept, around midnight, dozens more kids showed up at Lars’ gathering. One of those kids was Sheldon, a wild-haired, wild-spirited 19-year-old Lars hadn’t seen in years. Things got out of control, and Lars and his best friend tried to disperse the crowd. Lars drove two girls home. When he returned, four boys were carrying unconscious Sheldon down the driveway to meet the EMTs. Sheldon had shimmied up a pole from ground level to a second-story balcony attached to the front of the house. He’d climbed onto the deck and collapsed. Lars didn’t call us until 2 a.m., when the last kids were clearing out.
In hindsight, this is where it began. This was the first rapid. In a rapid, the oarsman maneuvers the raft so he’s facing forward, pointing straight down the tongue; then he works the oars as best as he can to avoid this rock, that hole, that hydraulic. But in an essential way, once he’s picked his line, it’s difficult to alter course. The raft is 20 feet long and weighs a ton. But the water weighs more. Thus, the raft is a beast to maneuver against the pressure of water accelerating along a 30-foot drop. And so it was, when our headlight beams caught Lars—standing in the driveway by the barn, both hands on top of his head as though he were being frisked—we couldn’t turn back from whatever was about to come out of his mouth. We stopped the car a few feet from him, and he walked to the driver’s side window. “Sheldon is dead,” he told Craig. Just like that, we were in, and running it.
A month later, at age 44, I stopped having my period. After 32 years of reliable, 28-day cycles, boom, done. Menopause. Somehow the big red moon seems connected to it. A few months after that, my father died. And in January, in an episode of acute sleepwalking, a kind of prelude to the Colorado River, I rendezvoued with a man—a writer I’d met at a conference the year before—in a New York City hotel bar, followed him up to his room, and when our strange, sex-charged but sexless encounter was through, I got into a taxi. Slipping into my own hotel bed, I expelled my relief in whispered prayers, thank god, thank god, thank god I didn’t sleep with him. Relieved, overjoyed even, to have exited unscathed, but left with the bigger question. What the hell am I doing?
That’s all hindsight. None of those events were on my mind as the Navajo Bridge slipped out of sight and, miles later, the first rapid, off Badger Creek, slipped in, its preamble a dull roar heard a long way before it was visible. As we approached we spotted tell-tales, white sprays leaping like ice-fish sporadically above the rapid’s lip, which appeared smooth from far away. We pulled over to river-left to scout, tied the rafts to branches and rocks, and followed other footprints in the sand to a vantage point along the rapid’s shoulder. We stared at the jumbled passage of the water, the long drop, the deceptively silky pillows signaling submerged rocks, the chaos of haystack waves. Our oarsmen read the river, pondered and discussed routes, but I paid little attention to what they said. I trudged back to the rafts behind the line of people, donned my raingear and lifevest as instructed, wedged myself into a small space in the stern of the raft, grasped two straps, ducked my head and closed my eyes.
Halfway down, I opened them. I looked around. The boat buckled and bent over each wave but Kevin, our oarsman, held it true and straight. After we eddied out below the rapid, swung around to watch the others come down, we whoo-hooed just like the people in the Youtube video clips labeled “Carnage at Crystal” or “Disaster at Lava.” I held my breath when Michael’s boat turned sideways halfway down the rapid. Tygan, Kevin’s teenaged daughter, and her friend Andrea were perched on the cooler in front of Irish Michael, and they disappeared beneath a standing wave when the raft spun. “That was ugly,” Kevin quipped. When Irish Michael pulled into the eddy beside us, they were all dowsed, the wave’s curled hand having shoved its way down the collars of their raincoats. They were cold but exhilarated, laughing in their eyes.
So when we hit Soap Rapid next, I kept my eyes open and my head up, and, as though directed by a script, whooped all the way down, thought, this isn’t so bad. This could even be fun. And then, a couple days later, we came to House.
Back in Flagstaff, at the outfitters, after we’d been fitted for life jackets, after we’d collected our rented gear and loaded it into the back of Bill and Jane’s van, we’d met briefly with Donnie Dove, longtime river guide, who’d cautioned us about House and other tricky rapids. “Split the horns,” he’d advised our oarsmen about Horn Rapid, one of the Class 8’s after Phantom Ranch, a hundred miles downriver from Lee’s Ferry. He’d said, “Stay to the right in House. Stay away from the left wall. The entire river wants to take you there.” He’d said, “Watch out for that boulder in the middle of House Rock Rapid. I got pinned against it once, had to cut the bottom out of the raft to get free.” When I’d asked him about walking around Hance, the biggest rapid of the first ninety-mile section, he’d scoffed. “You’d be crazy to walk around Hance. Just hang on and enjoy the ride of your life.” I’d been told by our river guide friend I could walk around the big rapids if I wanted to, and like popping a Xanax before a turbulent flight, it had been all I’d needed to maintain my sleepwalking state of mind: docile, compliant. Looking at Donnie Dove, I hadn’t been able to gauge what his declaration really meant. Clearly, he couldn’t walk around a rapid, with his magnificent barrel belly. He’d huffed and puffed just trundling across the parking lot. But I’d also sensed that even if he were fit enough, Donnie Dove wouldn’t stoop to it. The idea was inconceivable. It was a goddamn whitewater river trip. People paid thousands precisely for the thrill of big rapids. His disgust with a fool who’d walk instead of ride would be so severe, he’d just leave the idiot behind to hike out of the canyon alone.
Our first mistake was a mix-up over names. We confused House Rapid with House Rock, further down the river. All of us had imbedded in our minds the image of Donnie Dove’s massive, blocky boulder in the middle of the river, marking the entrance to House Rock Rapid. Perhaps only I had embellished it with a big yellow raft plastered to the rock, Donnie Dove on his hands and knees slashing at the rubber floor with a dagger. So we didn’t recognize House when Kevin pulled us out of the current to an eddy at river-right, at my urging. The roar ahead of us was too loud for a riffle, I said. But Kevin and Craig didn’t believe we’d arrived at the big rapid yet. Where was the obstruction dubbed House Rock? When we scouted, there was no mistake; it had to be a significant rapid. Large standing waves collided with the sheer wall at river-left. Boils indicated deep holes at the base of the largest waves. River-right was a shallow rock pile. The other boats in our flotilla had pulled into the eddy on the opposite bank, the recommended side for scouting House. Kevin was reassured by what he saw. “Those waves don’t seem that big. Even if we bounced into them, they’d just spit us back out.”
“I have to go to the bathroom,” I said. Kevin looked at me, annoyed.
“You’ve got to be kidding me. Right now?”
“I’m not kidding.”
“Can’t you wait? This is not the time.”
“Okay, never mind,” I said, donning my life jacket.
We rowed to the left bank to let everyone know we were going first. I wedged myself in my usual spot in the back of the raft, behind the pile of dry-bags. Roxanne, Kevin’s girlfriend, sat on my lap. Craig perched on top of the dry-bags, gripping two straps in his hands. I watched as we slid down the glossy tongue, picking up momentum. I looked to the left shore to see Sky standing on the bank, nodding his head slowly, a grave but approving look on his face, giving us the thumb’s up. Tygan and Andrea were jogging along the shore to watch our run. Roxanne and I began the prescribed whooping when we left the tongue and entered the rapid.
And then we hit the first standing wave. We hit it on our port side. All the nights to follow, in the tent, when I closed my eyes, I would see it, a concave tower of green-brown water curling over our heads. I’d hear Kevin say, “Shit, we’re too far to the left.” But I couldn’t have heard him. Kevin’s voice would have been drowned out by the water’s churning. Besides, seconds after we hit the hydraulic, Kevin was being washed off the raft. And I don’t know if I saw it, that wave. The memory is limbic. I was engulfed in water. Every cell in my body believed the raft was going over, end over end, and I had to get away from it. We were going to flip. My mind dead, I was all body and animal instinct. My feet pushed off the floorboards. My hands unclenched. I launched myself backwards, away from the raft. All of it happened while I was submerged. When I surfaced, flailing in the rapid, I gasped before a big brown triangular wave with a white cowlick at its crest engulfed me again. Out the other side, I realized I was in the correct rapid-swimming position, feet-first, legs straight, on my back like a sea otter, paddling with my hands. My body had listened to our morning safety talk. But I couldn’t catch my breath. That’s when my mind came back on line. This is how you drown, it said.
But by that time, I was out of the hydraulics, the waves smaller. Still hyperventilating, I looked left for a place to swim to shore. When I looked right, there, in front of me, was the raft, and there was Craig crawling back onto it, and there was Roxanne, impossibly, still perched like a stone Buddha on the oarsman’s seat. I screamed Craig’s name, and, while Roxanne rowed toward an eddy, he turned, grabbed the blue and white stern line, undid its coils and threw it toward me. I flipped over onto my stomach and swam for it, hand over handed myself to the side of the raft, and grabbed a strap. I looked up at Craig, who asked, “Can you hang on while I help Kevin?” I begged him, “Please get me out of here.” He yanked me up by the back of the life vest and dumped me face-first on the pontoon, where I gasped like a landed fish, my breath tearing my throat raw, as he crawled over to haul Kevin back in. Once situated back on his cooler, Kevin oared us to shore, and there we waited for the others to make their run.
Maybe I should have felt exhilaration, then. Here it was, my resurrection in the mighty Colorado. Maybe I should have shouted, Halleluiah, I’ve just been reborn. The year of going under is officially over. I’m here on the raft, safe, we all made it, Lars is safe at home, Craig and I are together, everyone did what they were supposed to, and now we can tell the story around tonight’s campfire. Maybe my first thought should have been, Girl, you’ve faced down your fears. Now there’s nothing left. There are many ways I could have spun it. But crouched in my shaking body, I felt drained of power, incapable of spin. If this was rebirth, it was the real thing. Because face it, birth would feel nothing like resurrection. If we could remember, we’d say it felt like death. We were helpless and cold and wet. The light was too bright. We’d just been squeezed out of the neck of a pop bottle. There was an awful noise, and it was coming from us. The gasping bringing something jagged and harsh and terrible into our open mouths, shoving it down deep inside the core of us.
Everyone asked me why it hit me so hard, Sheldon’s death. As it turned out, the autopsy showed he was clean that night—no mushrooms, no booze, no chemicals of any kind, despite the speculations of cops quoted in the local paper, despite a rash of rumors attributing his death to everthing from suicide to a drunken fall. In actuality, he died of a brain seizure, the result of a previous injury. It was no one’s fault. At the memorial, his parents held me, and then they held Lars, and I felt what I can only describe as divine mercy flood through my body. I couldn’t explain to Craig or my stepkids or friends why I collapsed in the weeks following. Perhaps I’ll never know.
Here’s what I know. If there is resurrection in life, it looks like this. That awful night, at 2:30 a.m., Lars got into the car, and we drove up from the barn back to his mother’s house. Craig and I cleaned up the mess while Lars called the cops. “I have information about Sheldon. He was at my house,” he said. The cops said they’d call him back. They didn’t. Lars called again. “Kids here were using drugs,” he said. He gave them the names of kids in town who dealt. The cops took his statement, his phone number, but he didn’t hear from them again for weeks. We got home at sunrise, and Lars went straight to bed, and there he stayed, buried under his down comforter. Word of the event spread rapidly through our small town. Friends came by. Lars stayed put in the dark, mumbling responses without showing his face. Around dinnertime, Craig went in to tell him that he’d talked to Sheldon’s parents. They were worried about Lars. They were concerned about all the kids who’d been at the party. They didn’t blame Lars, or anyone else. Five minutes later, Lars walked into the kitchen, into his father’s arms. The next day, Craig left for a 10-day research trip to Prince William Sound. Lars’ mom was still unreachable in the Wrangell Mountains. The phone never stopped ringing. I felt like a shield, intercepting and deflecting incoming projectiles, mostly friendly or concerned, some just curious, a few accusatory, before they reached Lars.
The second day, Lars got up and attacked his room, emptying his closet and drawers, piling clothes on the floor to wash or give away. It scared me, but I went along with it, not knowing what else to do. I helped him strip his bed, stuffed the sheets in the washing machine. He took a shower, dressed, then lay on top of the bare mattress, his hands under his cheek.
“Can I talk to you?” I asked.
“Sure,” he said, his gray eyes large. I sat on a chair. Everything felt breakable, as if we were slide-stepping across a freshly frozen lake.
“Your feelings are yours. But there are some things that aren’t yours. I won’t let you have them. You’re not responsible. We’re responsible. Our job is to protect you from situations like this. We failed.”
“That’s stupid. You are not responsible. You can’t protect me. I’m glad you weren’t there. If you were there, you’d feel even more responsible. I know you. You’d take it all on.”
“But we’re the adults. We knew you were out there. We’re even more responsible because of that. You shouldn’t have had to handle that situation alone.”
“I wasn’t alone. And you’re not responsible. Don’t be a sheep.”
“A sheep?”
“You let yourself get led to slaughter. You take the blame, even if it isn’t yours.”
It went on like that.
“Would you be willing to talk to my therapist?”
“I don’t want to talk about it with anyone.”
“Will you just consider it? Think about it for the day.”
“Okay.”
That evening, he agreed to see her. The next morning, the third day, after breakfast, we drove to town, the first time we’d left the house since the morning after the party. Lars slipped a CD into the player. I expected Eminem, but it was a singer and song I’d never heard before. A strange, haunting, a cappella voice, weirdly distorted, piped to earth from somewhere far out in the universe sang: Where are we? What the hell is going on? The song pinned me to the car seat. I could only make out snippets of phrases. Spin me round again and rub my eyes, this can’t be happening...“This song says everything to me right now,” I said. He didn’t answer. A few minutes later, I dropped him off with the therapist. Again, that feeling of something delicate, breakable. This time, handing it over, that breakable something, putting it in her hands.
Jane found me standing by a boulder, a bundle of wet clothes in my arms. My entire body shuddered, despite the fact that earlier, on the raft, I’d stripped off my wet top layers and swaddled myself in Bill’s big green parka. “Let me help you,” she said, draping my orange long john shirt, my bra, my pile jacket, my raincoat, my socks, on the boulder and over the thorny branches of a nearby mesquite tree. Andrea and Tygan, the teens, walked up and hugged me.
“We’re glad you’re alive. We love you.” I started to cry. I followed them to their tent site, picked a flat spot in the sand nearby, began to set up our camp. Craig came over.
“Are you okay?” He was on kitchen duty, had to get dinner going. “You’ve got to get more clothes on. Then just get inside the sleeping bag until you’re warm. Are you going to be able to do this?”
“Yes,” I said. It took an hour. When I got into the tent, I was afraid to shut my eyes. Every time I did, I saw that wave. I felt the water drag me under.
That night, a storm moved in.
The next day, a wave swept Jenny off Sky’s raft in a routine Class 5 rapid, one of many in that 10-mile section of river known as the Roaring Twenties. It was a day of wind, gray skies, intermittent squalls of hail and sleet. We were all cold, and Bill kept suggesting we take a break, build a big fire, warm up and wait for better weather. Kevin was anxious to cover some distance now that we finally had faster water. Three days of upriver winds ahead of the storm and the slow currents of Marble Canyon had, up to now, slowed our progress to less than 10 miles a day. In the slow stretches between rapids, we argued about whose turn it was to row; it was the only way to generate heat in our bodies.
After we’d run the morning’s first rapid, we eddied out to act as safety boat for the others. “Someone’s in the water!” Kevin shouted as we watched Sky’s raft bound down. Kevin worked our raft back into the current at the bottom of the rapid to help. I watched Jenny’s head disappear beneath Sky’s raft as it sped along a cliff face, saw it pop up behind the raft and go under again.
I panicked, my voice shrill. “Fuck. Where is she?” Kevin oared hard toward the raft, now dangerously close to a rock, and I panicked about that, too.
“Eva,” Craig said. “Calm down. You’re not helping. You’ve got to chill out and stop trying to control everything.” Finally, Jenny surfaced, and her husband Paul reached down and pulled her into the raft.
Less than a mile downriver, we stopped for lunch. Jenny looked unperturbed, not even cold, as she ate her tortilla sandwich. There was no drama, no shuddering, no crying. She described her experience calmly. She’d had to employ the technique she’d described to us (but had never had to use before) the previous morning in our safety circle. Stuck beneath the raft, she’d walked her hands in a single direction until she came to an edge.
We made camp that night on a large sand beach strewn with boulders and driftwood, backed by a sheer cliff. Everyone was wet and hypothermic, so Bill built a huge fire. Light flickered high on the sandstone wall, reflecting heat back at us. The sleet had turned to intermittent rain. All day I’d felt the fever coming on, my body alternately hot then cold. Craig offered to take my camp duties if I set up the tent. “Just get into the sleeping bag,” he said. “Roxanne said she’ll come and do some acupuncture on you. I’ll bring you dinner later.” I picked a spot just above a beautiful side canyon opening to a stone grotto. I hoped we’d be above any flash flood that might come, and after I was done blowing up the sleeping pads and zipping the bags together, I wandered down to the kitchen site. Jenny, Paul and Craig were chopping vegetables and filling big pots with water. If I hadn’t seen it, I would never have guessed that, hours before, Jenny had been sucked under a raft in 47 degree water. “What are you doing?” Craig asked.
“I feel like a slacker.”
“You’ll feel really bad if we have to call a helicopter to get you out of here, if you get pneumonia. Everyone understands.”
“And this is actually the last place we want a sick person to be, cooking food,” Jenny commented, appealing to group concerns. I climbed back up the dune to the tent, crawled into the sleeping bag and covered my head, let myself sink into the guilty pleasure of the heat my body pumped out like a stoked woodstove, and then let myself sink further, into my mind’s re-circulating hole. I curled up, arms around my knees, the proscribed position to encourage the river to spit a body out of a hole, but mine kept churning me around and around.
My father came to me then. My father comes to me at odd times. On airplanes (he was, like me, afraid to fly). When I’m working outside (he was, like me, a peasant at heart). The night after he died, I was getting wood from the stack at the side of my house, and I felt him nearby, a physical sensation of presence. I spoke out loud, sending my voice toward the woods. “This is what my life is like, Dad. It’s pretty good, isn’t it?”
He never witnessed that life, never came to Alaska, even for my wedding. In my fever, I called him up. It was inexplicable. An immigrant who’d settled near Buffalo, NY, a college librarian who’d never taken us camping, he couldn’t have imagined the Colorado River or what impulse would have brought me there. He was terrified of heights, of bad weather, of airplanes. He’d fought on the front lines in WWII, had been taken prisoner of war by the Russian Army, spent five years in displaced persons’ camps. He had no need for adventure on purpose. All my childhood, I’d known him as a frightened and violent alcoholic. “Look at me now, Dad.” I imagined him high in the ether, watching me get sucked under the water, watching me repeatedly swim through the rapid. Why did I keep doing this to myself? This is it, I thought. I want to be through with terror. The river had scared me like nothing else in my life. No, I thought. That’s not true. It had scared me like he had.
Sometime in the night, as the rain spattered the tent fly, my fever broke. It was strangely disappointing.
After an hour-long series of town-laps, I returned to the therapist’s office to pick up Lars. I walked in the door just as he was coming out of the consultation room. The first thing that struck me was how tall he was, taller than his father. “Hi, Eva,” he said. Something in the way he said my name implied the unsaid: I’m back. Lazarus. That’s when the second thing struck me: his gray eyes soft and open, the color high on his cheeks—a kind of radiance—his body lanky and relaxed. The look of release. “How’s it going?”
“Good,” he said, and I saw that he meant it.
“Things went well,” the therapist said. “Lars can tell you about it, if he wants.”
There it was, what I desired so badly, his resurrection. Lars walking out the door of the office, pulling the car keys from his coat pocket, bounding down the steps, out of the trauma, out of that rapid, into the rest of his life. That’s what it looked like to me. That’s what I needed to witness. I couldn’t do it, but he could. Refuse to fall into the same rapid twice. That’s the way I spun it. Only for Lars, it wasn’t true at all.
Anyway, the metaphor is an old, dull, sugar-coated saw. Life isn’t like that river. Lars, in the months that followed, disagreed vehemently with my spin. It didn’t feel like resurrection to him. He shoved Sheldon’s death behind him, literally. He moved to Anchorage for his senior year, entering a college preparatory program. If he left the rapid, he did it by way of a helicopter rescue flight. The memory of that night would haunt him for years. The river offers no resurrection either, no second chance, no absolution. You can’t swim against 10,000 cfs of water, a current of eight miles an hour, and make your way back. You can’t line the rafts upstream and do House Rapid again to get it right. I can’t shoulder my way against time, return to the night of the red moon, and make it come out differently for Lars or Sheldon. I can’t go back to that hotel lobby, find the man, and say “No thanks.” Always the water changes, keeps flowing, even when we don’t change. That familiar river of habit is strong. Lars swam his way to a state championship in breaststroke that fall. I focused on teaching my classes. But after my father died, my brain and body parted ways. My brain perched high above my body, my eye, like a raven’s, watched for what would happen next. My body, brainless, rode hapless as a twig some people throw into the tongue of a rapid to see where the current takes it, to see what the river’s tendency is.
And here’s where the metaphor, shoved one more inch, begins its final undoing. In fact, you can paddle upstream in a river, even at the highest flows. You just have to find the eddy line, use the current to ferry the raft across it, and break into the gentle and not-so gentle whirlpools and greasy water. And sometimes the current in the eddy will flow parallel and opposite the flow of the river, and it will take you back upstream with no effort at all.
On day six of the river trip, the storm over and the earth dried out, we camped at Nankoweap for two nights, relaxing into our much-anticipated layover. In the morning, after breakfast duty, Craig and I draped all of our gear on the branches of a mesquite tree to air, put on sneakers, stuffed water bottles in our day-packs, and set off for a hike. We followed a well-worn trail up the wash. To either side, the ground was carpeted in grass so lush and green we got down on our knees, put our cheeks to the blades, which were crinkled from their recent unfolding, and gulped deep breaths of spring, a relief from the dryness of the canyon. Floods from the storm had greened the whole wash, and we were grateful. I was high. A day off the river. A day without rapids. A day without terror. A half-mile further, we caught up to Paul and Jenny, and chatted with them as the trail turned rocky, began its ascent to the remains of Anasazi granaries, black oblongs in the cliff face several hundred feet above. To float the Colorado with us, they’d left their young children with Jenny’s mother for three weeks. “Do you miss them?” I asked.
“Nope. Not yet.”
Jenny talked about her father. The day before we’d launched, he’d gone into intensive care. A lifelong functional alcoholic, his body was suddenly starved for booze. As she’d passed under the Navajo Bridge and into Marble Canyon, he’d lain strapped to his bed, riding the angry, frightening rapid of detox. We talked about our fears on the river—yes, Jenny had them too, despite the appearance of composure—and of everyone’s high stress levels. No one was equal, experience-wise, to the river. Along with intimidation at guiding a raft, Sky shouldered worries about his troubled son. Kevin felt responsible for Tygan and Andrea, his girlfriend, even Craig and me. “It asks for so much compassion, this river. I think about each one of us,” Paul said, “all the burdens people have brought onto the river, all of our pasts, even back to childhood. I get the feeling this river has carried a lot of things away.” Without warning, a sob rose up from inside me. Let that be true, I thought. Let the river carry these things away, finally.
But in the end, no river metaphor can hold, not even one as redemptive as that one. Nothing is equal to anything else. Nothing in our human hearts is equal to the Colorado River. But the desire for metaphor is organic, even if each metaphor turns out to be flawed when scrutinized. Like everything else we strive for—abiding love, inner peace, meaning—it contains an unconformity. A metaphor, like dogma, like theory, can be over-turned. Take Gary Snyder’s poem “Canyon Wren:”
Shooting the Hundred-Pace Rapids
Su Tung P’o saw, for a moment,
it all stand still.
“I stare at the water:
it moves with unspeakable slowness.”
* * * * *
After a long, hot hike several days and many rapids later, a small group of us waited under the shade of coyote willow and tamarisk for the others to pick us up in the rafts. While we dozed on the sand above the riverbank, invisible canyon wrens repeated their plaintive, descending statements, and Jane read aloud from her geology book, telling us the story of the canyon’s formation, everywhere apparent in the layer-cake rock strata of the cliffs. It was a story continuously elaborating as the river descended deeper into the earth, further and further back in geologic time. The names passed by me like fair-weather wind, catching briefly on branches, passing on: Kaibab Limestone, Toroweap and Cococino Sandstone, Hermit Shale, the Supai Group, Redwall Limestone, Bright Angel Shale, Tapeats Sandstone, Zoroaster Granite, Vishnu Schist. Undercutting the simple chronology was a feature first described in the Grand Canyon by John Wesley Powell, who, despite his missing arm, every chance he got (even when the expedition was perilously low on food and morale) hiked to the canyon rim and back in a day to study the geology and collect fossils and artifacts.
It’s called the Great Unconformity. Not just a missing page in a book, more like 50 pages torn out. Over a billion years of geologic history erased by erosion. It was clearly visible in the distinct boundary between Tapeats Sandstone, laid down in the Cambrian period, 550 million years ago, and the much older metamorphic layer of the canyon’s Inner Gorge, which we’d just entered—volcanic rock metamorphosed to schist and gneiss by burial and heat, dark slippery gray cliffs ribboned through with pink Zoroaster Granite, bits of which we’d pocketed on our hike. In places along the canyon, you can place your hand over the Great Unconformity, span that billion-year nothing between schist and sandstone. Since entering the steep-sided Inner Gorge, Bill had begun repeatedly singing a ditty in tribute: Vishnu Schist and wild country dancing, to the tune of some folk song.
I’d been drifting in and out of Jane’s geology lesson, but The Great Unconformity startled me. It was a satisfying flaw in the regularity of Grand Canyon geology depicted in her book, with its timeline that put the evolution of the gorge in the context of a single year, with humans appearing in the final minutes. It belied the classic illustration (similar to those cut-away diagrams of human skin you see in anatomy texts): each layer of time, each rock stratum, marked by its own color band: sandy to red to green to purple to pink to gray. And then there was unconformity. Surprise. Misbehavior. What Powell called “the Great Unknown.” If the coyote is the trickster of the animal world, the Great Unconformity is his geologic counterpart. According to writer Karl Kernyi, “Disorder belongs to the totality of life, and the spirit of disorder is the trickster. His function . . . is to add disorder to order and so make a whole, to render possible, within the fixed bounds of what is permitted, an experience of what is not permitted.”
There are many ways to spin it. Many metaphors that could be invented. When something happens that contradicts the steady, eroding flow of our lives, we reach for them, those constructs, the way we reach for a throw-bag a friend, still safe on the raft, tosses to us. Even Gary Snyder, poet-spokesman for the wild, searched for such order: “...is art (also read ‘language’) a matter of discovering the grain of things, of uncovering the measured chaos that structures the natural world?”
I was plucked from House Rapid without a bruise or a scrape. Unlike the canyon, my childhood story you can’t read on my face, nor the story of my plunge into confusion after Sheldon’s death, how I stayed in the rapids long after Lars swam out. (And did he swim out? Does anyone?) And is my face different, now that my father’s dead? And am I a decent person, after having followed a near-stranger to his hotel room?
Those eight months in my life were a great unconformity: the place where the metaphor broke down. The blank spot in my journey. I thought I was through with drama, with risky behavior, but I was wrong. And in the end, why, like our hand, tries in vain to span that gap, between what we know and don’t about ourselves. And often it leads to justifications or lies or false promises or too-easy metaphors, those life-vests we think we need to survive.
In the tent that feverish night, my skin like a hot iron, my breath like scorching desert wind, I told myself I was through with rapids. I’d soon be 45. I told myself, even if I couldn’t detour away from all of life’s shocks, I could stop inviting frights and disasters. I could forego whitewater and small plane rides. And from this vantage, years later, a breast cancer diagnosis later, I still seek it: resurrection. But more than that, I seek narrative, with its predictable plot line: triggering event, crisis, epiphany, dénouement. The Colorado spit me out of an eight-month numbness. I’m conscious now, I told myself. I can think through my next move. This is my river story, and I’m sticking to it.
But the Colorado is wilder than any narrative, as John Wesley Powell found out. And there’s a part of me who stands apart from the narrative and self I’ve constructed. A wilder part. She compels me to watch the Youtube videos of boats flipping in Lava Falls. She stays up until 2 a.m. reading Powell’s hair-raising accounts of rapids she wanted to walk around: Sockdolager, Grapevine. She’s fascinated by the risk-takers and disobedient ones, those who enter the river without map or plan, those who sit on the bow of the raft, leaning into whitewater as it swallows them whole, by the ones who whoop and scream and trust for no good reason that they’ll come through.
At Sheldon’s memorial service, his parents showed a video clip of him on his 18th birthday, skydiving. The camera zoomed onto Sheldon’s face as the instructor strapped him in. His curly hair played around his forehead and cheeks in the wind from the open plane door. He looked straight at the camera, stuck out his tongue, shook his head like an animal. All bravado. He was so alive, so wild. But I recognized something else in his eyes. I recognized it because I know it well, and it was terror. And that small but rebel part of me, the one who stands apart, she recognized what overrode his terror and launched him out of the plane, into the sky.
She recognizes it in Lars, who doesn’t want her responsibility or protection. And she recognized it in that waiter, Robert. When he talked about jumping off the Navajo Bridge, his eyes flashed the same crazy way Sheldon’s did. He was scared but doing it anyway. He was hell-bent. I think about the stories he tells nightly to rafting parties, folks digging into giant plates of spaghetti at the long table in the middle of the roadhouse dining room. Some listen, some dismiss his banter. He hops around them, a human trickster, cross between coyote and geologic unconformity, balancing plates. Little do those diners know what the river has in mind. Some of the people at the table will fall out of rafts. Some of the people will churn in re-circulating holes and almost drown. Some of the people will discover fear like they’ve never known. Some will discover fear that’s very old. Some of the people will die on the river, like a man named Randall, whose raft flipped in Hance Rapid on St. Patrick’s Day, while we were scouting our way through the Roaring Twenties. When Robert tells them about jumping off the Navajo Bridge, some of the people will believe him, but most won’t. That unconforming part of me, little sister to Sheldon, to Powell, she can’t not believe him. She dreams about Robert harnessed and clipped to his two impossible lines, the rebel yell he hollers as he launches off the bridge rail and freefalls toward the Colorado River, the jolt as the line stops his plummet, the Superman arc his body makes, almost but not touching the canyon wall on the other side.
And she dreams about Sheldon, of the wild scared look in his wide-awake eyes.
Eva Saulitis' most recent book is Into Great Silence: A Memoir of Discovery and Loss Among Vanishing Orcas. A new poetry collection, Prayer in Wind, will be out in 2015. Her essays have appeared widely, most recently in Orion, OnEarth, Utne Reader, and Ecotone. A whale biologist as well as a creative writing professor, she teaches in the low-residency MFA program at the University of Alaska, and lives in Homer with her partner Craig.