The Emerald Mile: The Epic Story of the Fastest Ride in History Through the Heart of the Grand Canyon (64 page)

The dory sailed over each crest and throttled through each trough with the buoyancy of a bobbing apple. Up one and down the next, only to face another climb and another plunge that was as giddy as the last, until they had lost not only their count but also their fear and simply gave themselves over to the roaring joyousness of the motion, something so wild and free that it was worthy of Powell himself—a jubilant affirmation of the one-armed Major’s words when he described how his own wooden boats, 114 years earlier, had gone soaring over the waves like
“herds of startled deer bounding through forests beset with fallen timber.”

This was the thing itself—the reason they ran white water.

Halfway down the rapid, Wren turned around and pumped his fist.
“We’re not through yet,” barked Grua, torquing his oars to ensure that they hit the remaining haystacks on the point of the bow. But a few seconds later, they were bouncing merrily through the tail waves on the last of Lava’s expended energy.

The ride was so silken and smooth, so much like a dream, that when he spoke of it years later, Grua had completely forgotten who was at the oars.

“Rudi was in the driver’s seat,” he would declare to a friend. “He had a really nice run!”

It was now just after 7:20 p.m. Between them and their goal lay another ninety-nine miles of river, and another night of moonbeam-dodging in the dark.

And forever, beyond the mysterious river’s farthest shore, the great earth waited in the darkness, and was still. It waited there with the huge, attentive secrecy of night . . . and its wild, mysterious loveliness was more delicate than magic.

—T
HOMAS
W
OLFE
,
Of Time and the River

A
S
Grua and the crew pressed on, the angled evening light was now casting fantastic patterns across the honeycombed sections of the columnar basalt—black, hexagonal expanses of Miocene lava that were layered over the limestone on both sides of the river. The shadows were growing by the minute while the sun played hide-and-seek, dipping beneath a rise on the cliffs to the west, then reappearing briefly as the
Emerald Mile
rounded another turn. A few miles downstream from Lava Falls, the setting sun finally departed for good, and twilight closed in upon the river world.

The Colorado was trending west now and the canyon slowly widened and grew straighter. Thick groves of tamarisk trees created a dense band of vegetation, a continuous layer of green along both banks. The mouths of the tributaries down here were bigger and more generous. In general, everything seemed less constricted, less intense. And now there were camps on both sides of the shore, lit in the hot darkness by the orange flare of a kitchen lantern here, the blue glow of a gas stove there.

This was a special time to be on the water. The surface of the river was a
faint and shimmering lavender, and as night swept down the walls, the shadows gathered in layers, each denser than the last, until the abyss was smothered in darkness and the only thing visible was the sky, which was plunging toward a soothing and bottomless indigo. With moonrise more than an hour away, the only point of light above was Saturn, a pink pinprick off to the west that hung like a beacon on the stern of a ship.

Then the first stars began to frost the heavens.

They emerged slowly, popping out one by one, and then they all came in a rush, spilling out of the ether until the narrow ribbon of sky above was no longer speckled with isolated motes but was a milky torrent, alive with eddies and whirlpools, a millrace of planets and stars whose combined translucence defined the ragged line of the canyon’s twinned rims with such clarity, such crystalline precision, that anyone looking up could not help but gasp at what had been unveiled. Because there, six thousand feet above the dark and now invisible river, this torrent of winking lights in the heavens had formed a second river, a celestial estuary of starlight whose course and contour, each curve and camber, every bend and bowknot, perfectly mirrored the Colorado itself. A river so clear and transparent that the bright stones suspended within its currents could be seen with the naked eye, glittering with the traces of an incontestable radiance whose depth and distance and truth lay beyond the reaches of any terrestrial imagination.

The effect of this display might have been uplifting, perhaps even revelatory, if the crew of the
Emerald Mile
had not had far more pressing things to worry about,
chief among them the fact that they could no longer see where they were going. Without the moon, it was too dark to make out any features on the water, and all but impossible to separate the rocks from the river.

Time to break out the Q-Beams. While Petschek rowed, Grua flipped open the side hatch, connected the wires to the car battery, and flicked the switches. Then, aiming the powerful lights downstream, he methodically swept the beams from left to right and back again, casting across the water, picking out the hazards, and calling out corrections over his shoulder.

In this manner they slid past Whitmore Wash at Mile 187 and, just before 9:30 p.m., found themselves bearing down on Parashant Wash, a massive tributary canyon that enters at Mile 198, where the river curves leftward. Unbeknownst to the crew of the
Emerald Mile
, a second group of dories had nestled into the Parashant eddy and were preparing to bed down. This expedition was another of Litton’s commercial expeditions, currently spending its fifteenth night on the river.

The trip leader was one of the company’s more cerebral guides, a professor named Roderick Nash, whose writings included
Wilderness and the American Mind
,
a seminal history of environmentalism. Like their dory brethren fifty miles upstream, Nash and his crew had spent most of the previous week fighting to keep their boats together and upright while trying to decipher the testimony of the wreckage they passed and the warning notes that were periodically dropped from the Park Service helicopters. Now, standing in the darkness, Nash peered out and tried to make sense of what he was seeing.

Acres of current were out there, sliding past in an invisible rush. To the weary guide, the river had never looked so immense, so alive. And there was a boat too—probably an oar raft or a dory, judging by the speed and the silence of it, racing downstream while someone played a pair of searchlights back and forth. Nash’s first thought was that it was probably a ranger patrol searching for bodies or lost gear. But
several members of his crew speculated that it could be Kenton Grua. When they’d left the boathouse in Hurricane two weeks earlier, there had been talk about the Factor’s taking another crack at the speed record with Rudi and Wren. Could this be them?

The boat was too far away to call out, so no greetings were exchanged as the searchlights sluiced silently past, their beams planing across the surface of the water, then winked out and were gone. Whoever they were
and whatever their purpose, mused Nash, it must have been important enough to run some serious risks, considering what lay just a couple of miles downstream.

N
ash’s caution was well placed. The rapids in the lower part of the canyon weren’t nearly as big or as famous as those upstream, and for this reason, after Lava Falls, most river trips seemed to go flat in the eyes of the boatmen who love the big water. However, a couple of places between the bottom of Lava and Lake Mead presented genuine hazards, and one of the nastiest was at Mile 205, where the full force of the river banged into a promenade of basalt on the right side. An alert oarsman could avoid the worst of this rapid—which didn’t even have a name, just a number—by pulling sharply to the left, but his timing had to be good, and over the years a number of boats had come to grief on that headwall. The consequences of a miss were serious enough that veteran trip leaders passed around a little warning, one of those special river axioms, whenever they sensed that their crews were getting too cocky or too complacent:

“Watch out for 205—it’ll eat you alive.”

Grua and his crew were well aware that attempting 205 in the dark was a lousy idea, especially in their current condition. They had been rowing for twenty-one hours without a break, not counting the forty-five minutes that had been lost at Crystal. With the exception of wolfing down a few pieces of fruit and some soggy sandwiches, they had eaten almost nothing, and they
had barely slept—the turbulence and speed of the river having ruled out all but the briefest of catnaps in the bow or the stern. For whoever was in the cockpit, every stint at the oars seemed to last a little longer, and relief from it seemed to come a little later. The muscles in their shoulders and lower backs were cramped and twitching uncontrollably. Their thighs and forearms burned. Worst of all, their fingers never seemed to fully uncurl before the rotation came full circle and it was time to wrap their aching digits around the oar handles once more to resume rowing. All three boatmen had now burned through their reserves, yet with the return of darkness the need for constant, unstinting vigilance redoubled. Every second not spent pulling on the oars was devoted to intense concentration—peering, listening, muttering imprecations while trying to fathom what lay ahead, then high-siding explosively to restore the dory’s balance when the waves appeared.

Shortly after 10:00 p.m., they spotted a little peapod-shaped inlet on the right and decided to tuck in, tie off, and pause for a breather. Their plan was to nap for a single hour—just enough time to allow the moonlight to reach the water and illuminate the entrance to 205. They didn’t even bother to get out of the boat. Pulling out their wet sleeping bags, draping them over their bodies, they fell into a sleep as dense and dreamless as dolomite.

While they slept, the moonlight cascaded down the walls, splashed over the gunwales, and puddled on the decks of the dory. Luminous as a new pearl, it was bright enough to read a newspaper by, yet failed to wake them.

And so they slumbered on  . . .

 . . . past 11:00 p.m. . . .

 . . . then long past midnight, until—

Just before 1:00 a.m.,
Grua awoke with a start and sat up, staring at his watch in horror.

Jesus.

After everything they had endured—after the battles against the whirlpools and the haystacks on the first night, after the flip at Crystal, after their encounters with the helicopter and their desperate race to reach Lava—after all of that, a protracted boatmen’s siesta had placed the entire enterprise in jeopardy.

How could they have been so feckless? So
stupid
?

Grua roused his companions. There was no possible way to recover the lost time, but they had to cast off immediately, punch into the current, and get back in the game.

At 1:02 a.m. they relaunched, groggy with the kind of ruinous, bone-battered fatigue that arises when extreme exertion is followed by inadequate recovery. Grua was at the oars. Wren, still suffering from his injuries, slumped in the bow. Petschek took the stern and scouted downstream.

When they heard the roar of 205, Grua swung his bow downstream and pushed toward the left to avoid being caught between the main current and the headwall. They barreled past without incident, then resumed trading off the rowing duties every fifteen or twenty minutes as they surged through the lower reaches of the canyon. Past Granite Park, a spectacularly open area at Mile 209 with the widest, most generous skies in the entire canyon. Past Mile 217, where the Vishnu schist returned for the final time and, as the river entered the last of the three granite gorges, the walls turned vertical. There, the moonlight was cut off, plunging them back into darkness and forcing them once again to resort to the Q-Beams.

Slightly less than four hours later—at precisely 4:59 a.m.—they reached Separation Canyon at Mile 239, a key benchmark on any river journey. This was the point where three members of Powell’s crew had lost all hope and abandoned the expedition, hiking out of the canyon only to be taken prisoner and murdered. For the speed run too, Separation marked a kind of nadir, because it was here that the fire that had sustained them nearly went out.

By this point,
Wren had shut down. For seventeen hours, he had been sleepwalking through his duties, dulled by the unending throbbing from the blow he had sustained, until he had finally slumped into a kind of stuporous coma.

Now Grua followed suit.

Unlike Wren, he succumbed to no specific insult or injury, but simply to the cumulative weight of the burdens he had voluntarily assumed and carried, at first cheerfully and then, later, with a kind of iron-willed stoicism, until finally, here at Separation, the neurons in his brain and the fibers in his muscle tissue surrendered, waving a tattered white flag in the face of his exhaustion and fatigue.
Without a word, he passed the oars to Petschek, curled himself in the stern, and nodded off.