The Emerald Mile: The Epic Story of the Fastest Ride in History Through the Heart of the Grand Canyon (22 page)

For Twain, a river was a series of fluid riddles that could be unlocked and solved. And this was the task to which Litton and his crew would have to apply themselves if they were to have any hope of threading through the chain-linked sequence of maelstroms at the bottom of the canyon.

B
y the 1990s, all of the monster rapids had been exhaustively surveyed, mapped, and ranked according to a rather complicated scale, unique to the Grand Canyon,
composed of Arabic numerals ranging from 1 to 10 and spread across four different levels of water with pluses and minuses to connote gradations. In the early days, however, the maps were crude and the rankings had not yet been refined. But everybody agreed that roughly thirty rapids were more than capable of smashing your boat, ending your career, or killing you.

Badger, Soap Creek, House Rock, Unkar, and Dubendorff could all get you into serious trouble at low water. A couple of the Roaring Twenties, a series of ten back-to-back rapids between Mile 20 and Mile 29, could be especially nasty at high water (although one or two of them turned ugly at low water too). The same was true of another chain farther downstream, whose links were named after semiprecious stones—Agate, Sapphire, Turquoise, Ruby, Emerald, and Serpentine—and were thus collectively referred to as the Jewels. Grapevine, Zoroaster, Specter, and Granite Park were mostly benign, but each concealed a feature or two—a rock, a standing wave, a reversal—that could easily knock you into next week. A bright handful, such as Sockdolager, Hermit, and Upset, were mostly pure fun, but they would flip you in a second if you failed to maintain your angle. Hance, Granite, and Horn Creek were
complex and mercurial, while others—almost always Bedrock and invariably Lava Falls—were just plain vicious. Beyond the rapids themselves, the river also concealed a host of other obstacles, wicked spots whose names offered a sufficiently graphic warning of what they would do to you if you let them. The Fangs. Helicopter Eddy. The Green Guillotine. Forever Eddy. The Devil’s Spittoon.

No two of these challenges were alike, and when Litton’s crew came to realize that the linchpin of good boatmanship lay in fluency at reading water, they all became devoted scholars of current. The bulk of these studies took place when they anchored their boats at the top of a nasty stretch of the river, climbed to a vantage on the cliffs that afforded a comprehensive view, and sat down on the rocks to dissect the rapid with their eyeballs. At irregular intervals, one of them would stand up, pad back to their anchorage point, gather up an armload of driftwood, and start tossing it into the current. As the sticks hurtled downstream, the veil that concealed the matrix of white water was pulled back and the crew was able to take apart the features piece by piece, mapping them out in their minds. This they would do for hours, watching and waiting as each of them framed a plan. Then they would select another vantage that offered a slightly different angle and go through the whole exercise all over again. Finally, they would talk things over exhaustively, and when the talking was over, silence would set in as each boatman retreated into private space to memorize his run, codifying and rehearsing the sequence of moves he would make so that he would have something to hang on to when the chaos hit. When each man was satisfied, it was time to return to the boats and give the theories a try.

So they proceeded in this staccato fashion. Running, stopping to scout, then running a mile, or maybe ten, and stopping for another scout. Day after day, week after week, until they had floated through the Grand Wash Cliffs and arrived at Pierce Ferry, their takeout point on the eastern end of Lake Mead. Then they pulled the dories from the water, hauled them back to Hurricane for repairs, and made the long drive up to Lee’s Ferry to greet another group of clients and start the same journey all over again. Down the long length of the summer, past the equinox and deep into autumn, they wove their way through the labyrinth, pausing only for a hiatus in winter before once again rejoining the flow of the Colorado when the snows started to melt the following spring.

In tracing this route, they formed a community unlike any other, a brotherhood of boatmen bound by their love of the canyon, their infatuation with the dories, and above all, the witchery of white water. And somewhere in the midst of this circuit, the river came to lose the bilateral dimensions of a linear highway and was instead transformed into something that more closely resembled
an enchanted circle, an endless loop—not unlike the hydraulic jumps whose secrets they strove to unlock—that revolved back upon itself in a continuous swirl of wonder and madness.

T
o a doryman who applied himself to learning to read white water in this manner, each rapid, from the smallest riffle to the biggest hellbender, gradually came to develop a face, a personality, and a range of moods—and the key to unlocking those rapids’ riddles lay in finding one’s line. On any given day, for any given set of conditions, which could vary in accordance with the speed and level of the water, the strength and direction of the wind, the angle of the light, and a host of subtler variables, a path almost always led through the chaos, a ribbon of relatively smooth downstream current that would enable you to thread the gauntlet. Often, this line was extremely narrow, no more than a couple of feet. But if you could tease out its arc and then assemble the proper sequence of moves—skirting a rock here, kissing an eddy there—it was sometimes possible to skate through the entire mess as cleanly as a Cooper’s hawk cleaves the leafy canopy of a forest. It required a high degree of precision to pull that off consistently, however. And the challenge was further exacerbated in an unsettling but also thrilling way because the medium was fluid, always in flux, and therefore the line did not hold. Some days it would shift, occasionally it would dead-end, and every now and then the damn thing would disappear altogether.

This meant that one’s command of white water was slippery and elusive, could come and go without warning. Sometimes the river itself changed: a rapid that seemed benign and forgiving on one trip would turn dark and ugly a month later. Other times, the shift took place inside one’s head. It was not unusual to nail a difficult stretch of white water for a season or two, snapping off one flawless run after another, and then, for some unfathomable reason, find that you had lost your mastery. Then you would be consigned to flipping repeatedly or smashing against the rocks time and again until things shifted back into place and your mojo returned.

One insight the dorymen drew from this was that only a frog’s hair of difference separated a successful run from a complete cock-up, a space that was defined by a few inches of current or a quarter stroke of an oar. Which side of that gap you were on depended heavily on your skills and your competency, and the connection you had cultivated with your boat and the river. But it depended even more on something you had absolutely no control over. When it came to rapids and wooden dories,
an awful lot of luck was involved. The river was a beast that could be neither controlled nor tamed, only run with.
And to be allowed to run with the beast, you had to accept and embrace and ultimately find a way of celebrating its inscrutable, ungovernable, glorious wildness.

That didn’t, however, dissuade the dorymen from trying to figure out the key to the code. Their days and weeks unfolded, good or bad, in accordance with their skill at discerning those ephemeral lines, and so they discussed them endlessly. Hunched over their coffee in the mornings, gathered around the kitchen at night after the passengers had gone to bed, they compared notes, traded theories, attended to one another’s sermons. They choreographed wavy pieces of performance art in the air with their hands, and they scratched out elaborate diagrams in the wet sand with the tips of their fingers. Many of them also kept careful notes, filling up their maps and logbooks with checklists, reminders, admonitions, and curses. Immersed within the canyon’s hidden republic of white water, they struggled so obsessively to unravel its mysteries that it sometimes seemed as if nothing else mattered. At night, the rapids flowed through their dreams.

As their knowledge deepened, growing more detailed and intimate with each passing season, their verbal shorthand changed until they found themselves speaking a kind of secret language, all but unknowable to the passengers and the rookies, whose vocabulary was peppered with expressions that made no sense to people who could see only chaos when they gazed into the current. The dorymen knew that on the left side of Hance was a partially submerged sleeper, a boulder they called Whale Rock, which acted as a kind of hydraulic magnet, almost as if it had its own tractor beam that would pull you onto it and leave you marooned in the middle of the river. They reminded one another that Hermit boasted twelve separate haystacks, the biggest and loveliest of which was the sixth—but you had to hit it “dead-nuts square” or it would flip you end over end. They talked about how the right side of Sockdolager featured a pair of staggered crunchers that seemed impossible to split, but if you punched the first wave slightly off-center with the right side of your bow, its crest would knock you to the right and set you up perfectly for the second. At Upset, they understood that the key to skirting the giant hog trough at the bottom was to get on the inside ridge of the left lateral, then tell yourself that, even though it seemed as if the hand of God Himself was about to spear you into the left wall, the invisible ribbon of current would whisk you straight through the maelstrom and deliver you—soaked, safe, and happy—into the tail waves.

Because their lives spun around an axis of entropy, rituals and superstitions arose, and with these things came something that bordered on mysticism. They called the wind Mr. W because they believed that naming him out
loud would call him down to play havoc with their runs. They carried special charms—heart-shaped stones, girlfriends’ bracelets, clay amulets baked in midnight campfires—and rubbed their surfaces for good luck. They reminded one another constantly that each encounter carried the potential for both disaster and ecstasy. Some rapids could hurt you, some could drown you, and some could render you impotent with rage. There were rapids rich in gradation and texture, and rapids that were existentially wretched in the simplicity of their violence. There were rapids that you feared and rapids that you hated and rapids that you would be a fool to take for granted, even under the most benign conditions imaginable. But on those days of wonder, when the tumblers in the lock were oiled and turning flawlessly, any one of those rapids could also transport you into a dimension of pure, unadulterated joy that had no analogue in any other part of your life.

The taste of that joy was absolutely intoxicating, a kind of drug, and perhaps the most potent part of the charge lay in the irrevocability of the moment when you untied your boat, and you and your partners peeled out into the current above a rapid in a tight and graceful little arc like a formation of miniature fighter jets. For a minute or two, you would find yourself drifting on a flat and glassy cushion of serenity as the current slowly gathered its speed and heft beneath the bottom of your boat and you drifted toward this thing that waited, invisible, just beyond the horizon. It was silent during those minutes, the only sounds being the creak of your oars in their locks and the dipping of the blades as you made a few microadjustments in the hope of putting your hull squarely on the one tiny patch of current that would insert you through the keyhole in the cosmos. Then in the final seconds, you would start to hear the dull, thunderous roar, and you could see the little fistfuls of spray being flung high into the air.

This, perhaps, was the most riveting moment of all, because by now all of your decisions had been made—you had done your homework and sought a point of balance between instinct and analysis, listening to the data flowing from both your brain and your gut, and now you were well and truly committed. This thing you were running down had no brakes, no rewind, no possibility of a do-over. You would ride the surge of your adrenaline and surf the watery crescendo that was about to explode before you, and you would accept the consequences, good or bad, along with whatever gifts or punishments the river was prepared to dish out. There were lessons there, insights a man could put in his pocket and take out later, long after he was out of the canyon, tiny compass points to steer by during those seasons when the river that was your life turned turbulent and ugly. You could learn things about yourself that you
would never learn in civil society. And if you were lucky, you might navigate to a place that would enable you to glimpse, however obliquely, a bit of who you truly were.