The Emerald Mile: The Epic Story of the Fastest Ride in History Through the Heart of the Grand Canyon (60 page)

F
rom the shore, Thomas watched the dory bulldoze into the trough, strike the palisade of water, and begin clawing toward its crest. He could see Grua leaning forward, arms extended, pushing on his oar handles for all he was worth in the hope of gaining a few extra degrees of traction. He could see the shafts of the oars cambering under the strain, while far out at the ends, twin streams of water curled off the tip of each blade. And he could see something odd too. Because in that moment the man in the front of the boat, who was clad in a blue life vest, appeared to be doing something illogical—an act that seemed to fly in the face of the most basic survival instincts.

With the dory now tilted almost directly toward the sky, and with the crown of the wave looming an entire boat length above the tip of the bowpost, it made no sense for the man in the front—Wren—to be making any attempt at high-siding. His best option (his only option) was to treat his front footwell, the space beneath his seat where his legs rested, as a kind of foxhole. If he ducked down and curled himself into a ball, he might be able to shield himself from the cannonade of water that was about to erupt over the bow.

But as Thomas watched in disbelief, Wren did the opposite.

He sprang from his seat, lunged forward, and seized the gunwales on either side of the bow, anchoring himself to the front hatch so that his torso and head extended far out over the bowpost. With his hooked nose and hawkish face, Wren was now sticking off the front of the
Emerald Mile
like a chrome-plated swan on the hood of a runaway tractor trailer.

Wren’s primary hope was that the shift in his body weight might somehow help drive the boat through the top of the wall of water. But as Thomas could see, the forces arrayed against the dory—the height of the wave and the volume of water cascading off the top—were simply too powerful to counteract. What the ranger didn’t know, however, was that Wren was also hoping to tap into some currents of energy that transcended ordinary physics. If the mass and the density of the molecules in his body weren’t enough to do the job, then perhaps the cosmic scales could be tipped in the
Emerald Mile
’s favor by a
non
linear force—like, say, the terminal velocity of rectitude or the angular acceleration of dumb luck. Or maybe when the river gods saw him perched out there on the dashboard, they would fathom just how badly he
wanted
and
needed
the dory to get through.

What Wren was doing, in effect, was performing an act of supplication, a plea for hydraulic clemency, hoping the river might condescend to allow the
Emerald Mile
to surf through the chaos on the shining fortitude of her own righteousness.

No dice.

As the boat reached the top of the wave, she corkscrewed while simultaneously falling back on herself—an end-over-end flip with a twist. The maneuver was complex and double-barreled, the sort of performance one might expect if a strand of DNA were to go into a swoon. The kinetics struck Thomas, who now had a perfect view of the interior of the dory, with her three boatmen clinging like terror-stricken cats to the decking as she performed these dual rotations, as a kind of macabre ballet.

It was horrifying to witness, yet it possessed a mesmeric dimension of refinement and symmetry that Thomas would later describe as a kind of intricate gyre—a “pirouette.” But for Grua and his companions, it was brutal, blunt, and utterly perfunctory, as if Crystal had simply bent back its thumb and flicked them away like the cap on a bottle of beer.

“The flip was instantaneous—there was nothing rhythmic or graceful or easy about it at all—it was just
boom
,” recalled Petschek, who was instantly dumped into the river.

Grua was holding his oars as tightly as he could,
determined not to let go because they were the only thing that tied him to the boat. As the dory snapped upside down, they flew from his hands and he followed Petschek into the current.

As harsh as this treatment was for Petschek and Grua, it bore no comparison with the special punishment reserved for Wren.

In effect, the river was now wielding the
Emerald Mile
like a seventeen-foot-long sledgehammer, and the force of the entire boat, all eleven hundred pounds of her, was now concentrated in the bowpost. As she tipped and spun, her bow shot out of the water with astonishing speed. The head of that hammer swung fast and hard. Too fast and too hard for Wren to turn away or even flinch.

The bowpost drove upward into his face, smashing directly into his glabella, the part of the skull that sits between the eyebrows just above the top of the nose.

Then, like Petschek and Grua, he too was gone.

E
ach man now found himself at the mercy of the same hydrodynamics—the savage turbulence and the wrenching crosscurrents—that had dismantled Tour West’s four-ton motor rig twenty-four hours earlier. Grua got off the easiest. He felt himself pulled down hard and twirled like a baton, but the current swiftly spat him back to the surface. When he blinked the water from his eyes, he saw his upside-down boat, less than an arm’s length away. He seized hold,
then he turned his head toward the sound of some wet gurgles and spotted Petschek, bobbing just downstream about twenty feet away.

Petschek had been pulled a bit farther beneath the surface, where he underwent the classic experience of feeling himself tumbled around like a load of laundry. But as with Grua, the river had released its grip after just a few seconds, permitting him to flounder toward the surface. A few hard strokes were enough to put him within reach of Grua’s extended foot and grab on.

Both men were now connected to the boat.

At that moment, their priority was to right the dory, get her oars into the water, and lever her into Thank God Eddy before the current swept them into Tuna, the next rapid below Crystal. There was no time for discussion, but none was needed—both men knew the drill.

Each grabbed a section of the chine and hauled himself onto the slippery bottom of the boat, where, together, they took hold of the flip line, the strip of one-inch nylon webbing that Grua had wrapped around the outside of the hull. One man loosened the buckles; the other gathered up the slack. Then they stood up side by side, bracing their feet against the chine, and started leaning backward, allowing their bodies to extend as far as possible out over the water.

For a long pause it seemed as if the hull would refuse to give. Then the suction released with a pop and the boat started its turn.

As the bottom angled into the air, Grua and Petschek leaned out farther and farther until their bodies were nearly horizontal. Their combined weight was barely sufficient, so the turn was agonizingly slow, but after a minute of grunting labor they were nearly there. They needed only another degree or two for the boat to pass beyond its tipping point and the job would be complete.

And then, without any warning—
snap.

As both men were dropped into the river with a splash, the hull retraced its arc and slammed back to its upside-down stance with a hollow
ka-THUNK.

Treading water for the second time, they stared at the ragged splice of nylon in their hands. Frayed by the edges of the chine, the flip line had broken in two. Once again, the
Emerald Mile
was surging downstream toward Tuna with its bottom facing the sky—and now the current was carrying them perilously close to the minefield of subsurface boulders along the right-hand shore.

Any second, both men knew, those rocks were going to start demolishing the interior of the boat. They simply
had
to get her righted—a task that would be fairly simple with Wren’s assistance. In a moment such as this, his help was critical.

Where the hell
was
he?

B
y some miracle, the concussive blow that Wren received from the bowpost had fallen short of knocking him unconscious. That was exceedingly lucky. If the impact had laid him out cold, he would probably have suffered the same fate as poor Bill Wert. Instead, Wren was fully cognizant when he hit the water.

His first move was to run his hand across his forehead and hold it up in front of his face to see if there was any blood.
“What a stupid thing to do!” he would mutter years later.
“I’m three feet underwater and I’m wiping my head to see if it’s bleeding. Of course I didn’t see any blood. And then I just got sucked down deep.”

“Going deep” is a horrifying ordeal, an involuntary trip to the nethermost recesses of the river, the absolute bottom of the canyon.

This, by its very nature, is a poorly understood place, where the topography and the hydraulics can vary so radically, even within the space of a few yards, that no two visits are ever the same. Those who have been pulled down and permitted to return have brought back conflicting testimony. Some say it is a watery version of being locked inside a sarcophagus. Others describe currents so vicious and feral that it feels like being caught in the belly of a cement mixer. Many insist it is completely silent, but others report hearing an eerie hissing sound, a sinister dirge that is apparently created by the suspended particles of sediment as they sluice downstream. If the canyon has a symphonic requiem, this is it.

Despite those differing accounts, almost everyone undergoes the same sequence of trials. First, pressure builds in the inner ears, similar to the pain that scuba divers suffer, which grows worse as one is pulled deeper. Next comes the cold, an icy grip that seems to grow more frigid the deeper one descends. But the most terrifying aspect of the trip is watching the light vanish. As one is sucked toward the bottom, the color of the water changes from foamy white to bright blue . . . then deep emerald . . . and, finally, absolute black.

Wren avoided this chromatic deliquescence because he had his eyes screwed shut as he was sucked deep. He could sense that the river meant business. It felt as if a gang of thugs had seized his body and were now ramming it toward the riverbed with the deliberate aim of drowning him. When he finally opened his eyes, it was pitch-black and he had no idea which way was up.

His plan was to follow accepted wisdom and curl himself into a ball while waiting for the current to release him. But after several long seconds he found himself running out of air, so he began a long and desperate crawl toward what he hoped was the surface.

At first, he was swimming in darkness, but as his strength ebbed he started to see signs of light—faint and tremulous and far above.

He kept swimming, despite how heavy his arms and legs had grown; he felt as if lead weights had been attached to his limbs. Finally, several seconds past the point where he thought he could not muster another stroke, his head broke the surface and he drew a ragged breath of air.

When he cleared his eyes and caught his bearings, he could see that he was in the middle of the river, racing downstream. Off to the right, he caught a glimpse of the dory, upside down, with Grua and Petschek clinging to the sides.

“Okay,” Wren told himself,
“get to the boat—
get to the boat.
”