The Best Travel Writing 2011 - James O'Reilly [53]
In the evenings, Powell’s party dispelled “the gloom of these great depths” by sharing Civil War stories around a campfire; many of his crew had fought in the conflict. Though we cook on propane stoves, we too build fires and share our “war stories” of prior river adventures, love gone awry and the misguided exploits of our youth. We brighten the cold, dark evenings with tiki torches and strands of battery-powered twinkly colored lights that we drape around our chairs, adding a note of festivity to our home for this one night.
And we sing songs like The Band’s “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down,” and Bob Dylan’s “Wagon Wheel,” tunes that would have been as timely and at home in the nineteenth century as they are in the twenty-first. Our voices are leavened by Lynsey’s plaintive flute and Kevin’s acoustic guitar, toted on the river in watertight cases. Kevin, who just completed college, is considering a career in outdoor education, like his older brother Steve, a trip leader for Outward Bound and one of our five boat captains.
Powell wrote that his men would occasionally “shout or discharge a pistol, to listen to the reverberations among the cliffs.” We blow off steam with pyrotechnics, setting an open can of collected bacon grease on a grill atop our campfire.
“Is everyone at least ten feet from the fire?” Steve shouts as he fetches water from the river. Neil, a mellow river ranger and one of our boat captains, says “No, they’re about two feet away.” Steve: “Then get the first aid kit!” Steve has attached a pail of water to ten-foot-long oar and moves toward the fire. Some in our group start chanting: “Ba-con bomb! Baaa-con bomb! Baaaaa-con bomb!” Steve yells at us to back away and pours the water into the can of bubbling bacon grease. It explodes, sending a plume of flame fifteen feet into the air, as we leap away and howl.
In November, only one group is allowed to start a trip down the Colorado each day, compared to five or six in midsummer. We have the glorious feeling of having the entire Canyon to ourselves. And while our coolers and bar are extravagantly stocked, we’ve made a point to leave behind most of modern society’s distractions. We don’t bring a boom box—our music is homegrown—and cell towers are beyond our reach. One concession is a satellite phone in case of emergency.
Powell’s party had its share of technical equipment too, most notably barometers for measuring altitude. Early in his exploration, before reaching the Grand Canyon, Powell’s boat No Name was dashed to pieces, its hull caught in a turbulent rapid. The crew survived, but Powell’s treasured barometers were in the stranded No Name. The captain sent two men into the river to rescue his instruments. “The boys set up a shout, and I join them,” Powell wrote, “pleased that they should be as glad as myself to save the instruments.” When the men returned, he saw they also salvaged a three-gallon keg of whiskey. “The last is what they were shouting about,” Powell noted dryly.
Drink is what we shout about when we reach camp the next afternoon. As the sun disappears it gets cool, so we attach a propane tank to a camp stove and make some hot buttered rum. Over a dinner of pesto pasta with spicy sausage, I consider how decadent our trip is compared to Powell’s expedition, whose members ate the same drab food every day and often huddled under cold, wet blankets. Until they lost blankets after one of their boats capsized, leaving some men shivering in the frigid night with nothing more than a canvas tarp to cover them.
We flick a Bic and have a cook fire, our waterproof sacks keep our compressible zero-degree sleeping bags dry, and our inflatable boats can navigate even the Canyon’s most ominous rapids, sparing us the torture of carrying boats over crumbly canyon walls around the biggest drops, as Powell’s party