If you were me you might have done the same. The boys, every one of them cute in a raggedy duct tape patched Patagonia baggies with sun-bleached hair kinda way, and me (cute in my Patagonia baggies with sun-bleached ponytail out the back of my ball cap way) in our one big happy 277-mile river trip at a time life: days floating the river and hiking the side canyons, evenings with a night sky straight out of an Ansel Adams photo; every minute bookended by something to celebrate, and always something on hand for the celebration.
The work was, as my 1950’s dad would have fist pumped had fist pumping been a thing, a hell of a lot of work. At rig day we hefted coolers loaded with dry ice and frozen filet mignon, hoisted the welded steel frames atop the inflated rafts, hauled the camp toilets and wooden oars, all the gear we’d need to travel downriver for two weeks with twenty-four passengers and six crew. The motor-powered companies had winch booms on the backs of semi trucks: we had blood, sweat, a 1970s Ford Ranchero hauling a trailer, and sore backs. There were the towering cases of beer, the cooler stocked with nothing but ice for the crew brew (unbeknownst to our boss who thought it was food cooler resupply ice), side boxes of lunch bread cradling bottles. The craft beer pony kegs were for the clients: a simple and straightforward leading of our Teva-clad sheep to their no turning back wilderness adventure, hopefully minus any paperwork-creating slaughter, bribe.
They had no idea what was coming. We, on the other calloused hand, had memories of near-misses and rapids that can swallow 40-foot rafts. They: an understandably vague notion of a certain grandeur and a three-day stay in Vegas after the trip. We: stowed our sunglasses before big rapids, washed the gear and drove back to the put-in to do it all over again.
Naturally on the guides’ end there was stress, the kind that comes from having lives in your hands, the monsoon season flash floods ripping through camp, the boat sliced into smithereens the day the repair kit was already a half mile downstream. That kind of stress; wilderness adventure stress with only a line of sight radio system like some black and white movie Mayday Mayday plea for help when the science teacher from Des Moines toppled off a steep cliff, the gurgle and rasp of his breath a biology lesson dead giveaway to a life deflating in front of our eyes.
I was gifted a bottle of a very special (by the way the boys yahoo-ed about it whacking each other on the back) single malt, presented to me by the six Welsh dairy farmers who rode in my wee paddle boat, singing their songs, discussing cheese economics, and obeying every command I gave them. A paddle boat in Grand Canyon is like an R2 unit face-off with the Death Star. A grocery cart vs a freight train. A toddler’s tricycle steered into a tsunami. It was my thing, the asking for it and being handed the smallest boat, in not just our fleet, but on the entire river in those days. Other crews told me I was a badass. The owner of our company told me I was a reason clients stepped off the boats and signed up for another two weeks. I told myself it was how I could prove my place, amongst the grandness and testosterone, the bigness and hardness of it all, and keep my spot when the job hungry new boatmen circled the crew looking for a straggler to take down.
The paddle raft was sold in glossy photos and cheery exclamation points as the adventure boat. No weight from frames and gear like the passenger oar-powered boats to keep it wet side down, no leveraged push and pull from New Zealand ash oars designed to do their job against 30,000 cubic feet per second of water, no way for my trusting passengers to hold on: six folks each holding a plastic paddle, following my commands on when and exactly how to stroke, a white rubber Doughy charm in my lifejacket pocket bequeathed by the Pillsbury marketing exec that time I saved his life.
Does this seem dark? a tad foreboding? Does it beg the question why on earth someone would pay to take this kind of a trip, pay more to have the bejesus scared out of them when the air for breathing to water ratio is very much wrong, much less spend 19 years of their life doing it day in/day out?
Enter my little swiss miss helpers, those dusty packets I stashed for those days just as surely followed by those nights when the bottle clinking would echo across the camp, the crew attempting between swigs to out-bro each other with cries of Dude! I almost bit the big one! late into the night. Confession time: on hot desert nights I ate the powdered cocoa bliss with a spoon straight from the packet, shaking every last speck into my mouth and licking my chapped lips with my eyes closed. Two packets if I needed it. During cold early springs and the winter research trips that kept me employed and on the river year-round, I guzzled it by the thermos full. Between seasons on my drive home, home by then a nebulous destination meaning where I kept my stuff, I’d be crying miles beyond the shuttered Navajo trinket stands, one time stopping on the bridge I’d floated under trip after trip all summer. I finished the packet then shook the nothingness left of it over the green arm of river curving out of sight around the canyon wall. Ashes to ashes, dusty swiss miss to missing every thing about it.
The boys had Foster’s and the tequila some surfer hitching a ride had snuck in from MX, the two jars of moonshine from my my students in that North Georgia mountain town after the one winter I thought I’d give my college Lit degree a try, and my dad an answer to What are you going to do with your life?
Trip lead a crew of guys and one of them the world’s most daring kayakers? sure. Entertain the clients (metamorphic rocks? it’s all schist to me!), pointing out the peregrine falcon mid-soar snatching the white-throated swift against an ancestral cliff dwelling backdrop, the cacti with the fuzz that’s, ouch, not fuzz, while making them 100% confidant that a girl in a sarong with painted toenails knew what she was doing when she said follow me on a ledge so narrow we had to walk sideways: yes. Stitch up the guy with the split lip, console the baggage boat trainee who lost his only pair of shoes at the first lunch stop, can do. Miss a single minute of a life I never saw coming? no f-ing way.
I gave the boys the box with the bottle the high-fiving dairymen gave me, after hoisting me skyward; their homecoming queen, night eleven after that stupendous deep dive we made into the biggest rapid of the trip, the white explosion of water and airborne bodies resulting in one gent having his wetsuit booties yanked by Old Man River straight off his feet, all of us making it out alive and here to tell the tale: rydych chi'nanhygoel! You can say that again.
They loved it, they loved me, the canyon, the wildness; they loved life, and being alive, every scary and wild wet smack in the face bit of it.
I’ll drink to that.