Ground Money (22 page)

“That’s a lot of water,” said Jo. “It’s scary.”

It was more water than Wager had ever ridden, and the channels between rocks seemed narrow, too. But there was no sense warning her against everything—she’d be worried enough. “The water’s only going about ten or eleven miles an hour.”

“It sure looks a lot faster.”

“That rough water over there is called an eddy fence. See how it fences the water and all the flotsam into the middle of the eddy?” This wasn’t horses, and Wager felt a little satisfaction at being able to tell Jo something for a change.

“All right! You two ready to raft?” Sidney, face shaded by a frayed straw hat, grinned broadly as he hopped from the spongy stern tube of the raft to the rowing frame strapped amidship. “Come on—the river’s waiting!”

They had placed the equipment in slings mounted on narrow frames that crossed the boat from one thick side tube to the other. Lashed tightly in place, the bags and boxes formed an uneven deck suspended above the boat’s rubberized floor. In the center, long oars dangling on each side of the rowing platform, Sidney would sit facing the bow. In slack water when he rowed the boat downstream, he would turn the craft around so it moved stern first. In rough water, he faced the bow downstream to see where it was going and pulled against the current in order to slow the craft and guide it through the chutes and rapids. Life jackets snugly on, oiled and creamed against the glare of sun from sky and water, Jo and Gabe were told once more how to float through rapids if they were tossed out, where to sit for the safest ride, to keep their life jackets on in any rough water, to move to the downstream side of the raft if they were about to collide with a boulder, never to get in the water between the raft and a rock, never to go in the water on the downstream side of the raft if possible, to swim sideways or dive down if sucked into a hole. And to have fun.

“OK—all set? You get to push us off, Gabe. Jo, you get right up there in the bow—OK, here we go—give it a shove, Gabe. All right, here we go!”

He pushed the heavy raft into the eddy and splashed through the mud to tumble over the sun-heated stern. Sidney motioned him forward with Jo, and the two of them settled on the thwart tube, Jo clutching tightly at the thin safety line that circled the raft. Underfoot, the cloth decking heaved and wobbled, nudging their canvas shoes with the river’s life; and in front, an unbroken wall of foam and plunging water, the main current began to pinch between ragged boulders black with spray.

“Wow, feel that!” Jo lurched as the raft walked across the choppy surface of the eddy fence.

Wager watched her face, enjoying the excitement that widened her eyes as the raft caught the main current and surged forward. Behind them, Sidney heaved back on the oars, braking against the current and jockeying to position the raft in the center of the tongue of water that drew in a wrinkled, glassy sheet between gigantic rocks.

“Here we go!”

His voice was barely heard above the roar of white water, and the raft lunged forward. Both Jo and Wager instinctively leaned back from the plunge down toward the foaming brown turbulence that tilted skyward to engulf them. The raft stabbed into the river and lurched upward, the bow scooping a cascade of icy brown water over them and knocking a shriek from Jo as she clung to the safety line with both hands. Then they saw only blue sky and the distant, calm rim of canyon walls as the bow swung upward and Sidney rowed hard. For a long, tense moment, the boat hung at a steep slant while he pushed on the oars. Then, sluggishly, the bow began to tilt down over the first foaming roller, faster and faster as the rest of the raft followed, until, with an elastic snap, it hit hard, jerking Wager off the thwart and almost over the bow before it surged up the next foam-crested mountain. Behind, he heard Sidney’s high-pitched howl of joy, and beside him, Jo, eyes and mouth round, gasped with cold and excitement and caught his eye and laughed loudly, her voice thin against the roar of water.

The next roller was smaller, the boat gliding smoothly over in a flexible undulation, and the waves gradually lessened until the raft offered a ripple of short, quick bumps and they glided onto a calm, deep section of the river that seemed as still as a pond.

“You like that?”

“Yes!” Jo took a deep breath and laughed again. “That was great!”

“I thought you didn’t like riding things you couldn’t control.”

“I didn’t think I did—but that was great!”

Sidney spun the boat around to show them the rapids they had just bounced down. “Take a look upstream.”

From this angle, the water stepped upward and showed the blurry dark shapes of rock that bulged the water into white tumult, the tongues of current knifing through gaps, the turbulent series of waves formed by the plummeting water. “That’s what we call a haystack—a bunch of waves as big as haystacks.” He pointed to the evenly spaced waves hovering below the main tongue they had ridden. “It’s not Snaggle Tooth, but in regular water it’s a good class-three rapids. In water this heavy, I bet it’s a four, easy.”

“Are there any more like that?” Jo asked.

“You want more already, do you?” said Wager.

“Yes!”

“Gabe, you got a real river rat there—I’ve had some people ask to get out right here. And some who got out back there when they didn’t want to.” He pointed to another tongue closer to the low bank of the stream. “We could have gone over there—that’s the easier way. But I figured you guys wanted a little excitement. Was I wrong?”

“You were right,” said Wager.

Sidney grinned. “Man versus the river—the ultimate challenge!” He lifted a white string sack from the deck behind him. “We got a lot of flat water now. Who wants to celebrate the first rapids with a beer or soda pop?”

“I’m too cold to drink anything.”

“The sun’ll warm you up. Another hour or so, it’ll feel good to go swimming.” He pointed out a pair of plastic bleach bottles with the tops cut out and tied by the handles to the raft. “Time to bail—all hands work on this voyage.”

On this stretch, the only sounds were an occasional bird squawk from the shrubs on the banks and the steady, slow splash of water scooped and dumped from the forward well. Sidney tossed the sack of drinks over the stern to drag in the cold water, and stilled the oars a few inches below the surface. “The current’s faster just below the top.” Occasionally, he gently nudged the craft back into the main flow of water, but for the most part they drifted and gazed at the silent cliffs and he answered their questions about the raft and the river. The raft was made of a bond of nylon and Hypalon, with about two pounds of air in each of several chambers—“That’s one of the valves there, that little round thing.” It was twelve by six feet—“We got some nine-footers, but that’s pretty small for the river right now. Anything bigger, like a sixteener, and we’d have trouble getting through some of the gaps.” And Sidney had been on this river for four years—“I started when I was thirteen, but last year was the first season I guided solo.”

The river’s name came from the Spanish explorers of the eighteenth century—“Escalante wandered all around this part of the county.” Most of the rock was sandstone alternating with beds of conglomerate—“I’m going to study geology in college”—and you could see bands of differing color from various mineral traces—“The red, that’s iron oxide, and the blue-green’s copper.” He also promised to show them some fossils in the cliffs down below. “We’ll have to walk a little ways, but it’s not bad.”

“Do you make this run a lot?” asked Wager.

“I wish I could, but there’s not that much business at this end. Ron handles the upper end—it’s a lot more dangerous. But sometimes I go two or three times a week.” He added, “Not often, though.”

“Do a lot of people run this section?”

“Independents, you mean? Some. Not as many as upstream in the canyon, but enough to get the ranchers mad when they start fires and leave their garbage all over the shore.” He hauled in the tow sack and opened an orange drink, offering it to Jo, who accepted this time. “They’re supposed to pack everything out, including sewage, but some don’t, and that causes trouble for everybody. Ron’s got a lease with the T Bar M to use their campsite, so we stop there whenever we want to. They charge for it, but that’s included in your price.”

“Do they make much money off that?”

He shook his head. “A few hundred dollars in a season, maybe. The real reason they do it is to keep us off the rest of the ranch. They just plain don’t like anybody landing anywhere else on their property.”

“What happens if you do?”

“They chase you off. They’ve chased people off in the dark—come down and made them pack up and raft on down in the dark. But it’s a lot better now with that campsite. I wish more of the ranchers would do that—it might help the tourist business around here.”

“Are there any plans for state parks along the river?” asked Jo.

“I don’t know. But that’s a good idea; rafting’s getting to be big business, and you need a state license and all now. Over in Utah along the Green and Yampa, they have campsites. Something’s going to have to be done here, too.”

Gradually the sand banks gave way to steeper and steeper rock; the water scoured all but the toughest shrubs from the tumbled boulders that began to face the stream. Wager could see high-water marks like smudged lines a few feet above the surface, and occasionally the ragged limbs of a submerged bush snagged the water into long streaks. Sidney rowed a little more often now, angling the craft across the current to the inside of curves and away from the rock cliffs that formed the outside banks. The current, he explained, was usually strongest on that side of a bend. It could bounce the raft against the wall, giving him no room for his oar and possibly wedging them under an overhang. “I saw that happen to some people two years ago right along here. Independents. One of them got a pretty bad head injury when he got caught between the raft and a hard place. All you have to do is stay on the inside, and you can eddy out whenever you want.” The sun, higher, weighed on their shoulders and made the raft’s skin sting with heat. Wager dipped a bandanna into the river and wrapped its coolness around his head under his hat; Jo rubbed another coat of zinc oxide on her nose. That and the pink smears of Labiosan already on her lips made her face glow in bright stripes.

“What are you laughing at?”

“Put a couple circles around your eyes and you could be a rodeo clown,” said Wager.

Jo reached over and wiped two large streaks across his cheeks, and he grappled her wiry arms. He lifted her, squealing—“Don’t—don’t!”—and they bounced across the tubes and plunged into the cold water

His life jacket popped him up into a spray from Jo’s hands as she splashed wildly at him. “You rat!”

Above them, Sidney laughed and kicked spray their way with an oar, and Wager and Jo, luxuriating in the coolness of the water, leaned back to float in their life jackets like two small satellites beside the gliding raft.

“You want to take it down the next rapids?” Sidney asked Wager. “They’re a class two—give you some good practice.”

They clambered in, the sun now feeling good on chilled, tight skin, and Wager traded seats with him. Sidney gave him a little instruction on how to row, and made Wager turn the raft this way and that using both oars. The craft moved sluggishly and it took him a while to anticipate its heavy reaction, but gradually he learned to guide it with a touch of the oars and to let the current do most of the work. When that happened, the raft seemed lighter and more responsive, and Wager found himself starting to read the water and to glide from one side of the current to the other as the river wound in tighter curves. Sidney, clinging to the tow sack line and drifting behind the boat, pulled himself over the stern and hauled the line in behind him.

“You want to get more to the inside so you can line up for the rapids—they’re around the next bend.”

Wager shoved the oars and the raft glided toward the slack, where an occasional deep boulder threw up a boil of smooth water and stole the power from his stroke.

“OK, Gabe, that’s good. Give it some backwater; you don’t want to get too far over. A little harder now … harder …”

The river swung past a prow of tall sandstone cliff that seemed narrow enough to topple over in the next wind, then it started to bend back on itself. The raft’s bow caught in the main current and swung sharply downstream, threatening to spin them sideways as they neared the hiss and rattle of the rapids; Wager heaved on the starboard oar and angled the craft toward the wide tongue of foam that tumbled in a long chute between boulders kicking a ragged wall of water on each side.

“Straight—keep it straight on—you’re doing good … keep it straight!”

With a surge, the raft had its own life, and Wager felt it join the river’s force as if to tell him how useless the oars and his puny strength were now; it jumped forward into the chute, and Wager jabbed at the heaving surface to keep the bow aimed down the center of the tongue. They neared a large mound of slick water, and Sidney yelled “Right—go right!” and he twisted the craft against the shove of tons of water as they shot in a sudden dive past a gigantic boulder that lay invisible from upstream. The raft tilted sideways up a shelf of smooth, foamless wave, and shouldered across the crest just below a large horseshoe of white spume that spilled upstream against the plunging current. Then they slid safely down the back of the wave into a long series of gentle ripples.

“OK! All right! Whoooo!” Sidney grinned and gave him a thumbs-up. “Man, what a hole!”

“What’s a hole?” asked Jo.

He pointed to the wide depression of water on the downstream side of the boulder. A standing wall of foaming brown spilled upriver to try to fill the vacuum. At its flickering edge where the hard-looking slick water dived beneath the foam, a shattered tree trunk tumbled and rolled, lunging to break free but pinned between the two forces. “Right there. Man, what a hole! I didn’t think it’d be that big—we’d be stuck there until the river dried up!”

Wager took a deep breath and shoved on the oars. Ahead, the valley widened as a large canyon opened in the left-hand wall, a broad alley between palisades that disappeared in distant heat haze. It formed a wide ledge of tree-and-brush-covered sand, and the river eased into ripples as the current, baffled by the shoaling bottom, twisted and started this way and that. Wager aimed for the deepest trace he could see against the sun’s glare. “I’d just as soon scout the next class two first.”