Cool, Calm & Contentious - Merrill Markoe [87]
When it was my turn, I intended to be brief and unobtrusive, since I was concerned about the reception I might get when the other women learned I was there to write about it all. That fear proved unfounded, but they did stare at me quizzically when I blurted out my anxiety about drowning in a flash flood.
“Did anyone else hear the wet weather travel advisory this morning on Fox?” I asked, trying not to sound too hystrical. Everyone looked at me blankly.
“Of course they’re not worried,” whispered Ashley, as we lined up to board the large white van that would carry us to our point of embarkation at the Gates of Lodore. “We’ve both seen this movie a million times. No one is ever worried.”
When we finally arrived at the “put-in” and each of us received our life vest, we were all asked to make a solemn pledge: “I, (state your name), promise that I will play an active role in my own rescue.” Ashley glared at me and cleared her throat. “I wonder in what percentage of cases that has ever been remotely effective?” she muttered.
Before we began the trip for real, we each had to choose from one of two rafting options: take the paddle boat, a smaller raft where everyone wore a helmet and helped to paddle, or be a helmetless freeloader on one of the larger orange rafts that carried the refrigeration chests and tents. The paddle boat seemed like a lot of work. Especially since I was already supposed to be taking the very notes that could be critical to an understanding of what happened when they were recovered next to my lifeless body at the scene of a rafting disaster. So I took a seat on the outside corner of one of the four big orange rafts.
Above us all, on a makeshift throne in the middle of everything, was river guide Ellie, a woman in her twenties, stunning in her perfect brush-cut hair, Star Trek sunglasses, and tiny black bikini. Ellie was manning the two and only oars from an elevated platform in the center of the raft.
“Ahem. Looks like we’re in good hands now that Paris Hilton is driving,” Ashley grumbled. But Ellie effortlessly maneuvered the enormous raft while simultaneously laughing and talking about her sunblock preferences. If I hadn’t witnessed it myself, I would have assumed that hers was a job that required a couple hundred pounds of muscle and a penis.
Our four-raft caravan glided calmly down the Green River between red-and-orange rock walls that dated back to the Precambrian period. Thousands of weather- and water-carved pastel arcs and layers of the earth’s crust now became visible, some turned vertical or at a forty-five-degree angle to the horizon. Nine separate oceans once filled this canyon and drained. There were rocks that looked like stacks of pancakes, ancient temples, cars of a frozen freight train …
“Okay, we’re coming up to Disaster Falls, a solid Class Three rapid,” announced river guide Gabby, twenty-four and sporting a belly ring in her caramel-colored, completely concave abdomen.
“Perfect,” said Ashley, looking ashen, “Disaster Falls. Let’s hope she’s being sarcastic.” But Gabby looked unperturbed on her raised seat high atop the lead raft. She was clearly the unchallenged queen of this group of river guides. Rapids, she explained, are rated I through VI, with VI being truly dangerous.
Ashley inhaled sharply and dug her fingernails into the palm of my hand as we both became aware of the roar of fast-moving water ahead. But Ellie slipped our raft between two large, jagged boulders like a Volkswagen Bug zipping past tollbooths. Soon we were bouncing so gently over the churning water, feeling its icy spray, that it was kind of a letdown when we arrived safely on the other side. At which point Ashley rolled her eyes, looked around for her jacket and her purse, freshened her lipstick, and disappeared.
The rest of us