The Best Travel Writing 2011 - James O'Reilly [55]
After ten days I feel in tune with the cadences of the canyon, but our isolation is interrupted by a stop at Phantom Ranch near the bottom of the Bright Angel Trail. This is a popular lodge and campsite for those hiking deep into the Canyon, and it’s where we bid farewell to three members of our party, who hike out to return to commitments above the rim.
Though I’m tempted to eschew Phantom Ranch’s conveniences, I go to its pay phone for two reasons: to tell my girlfriend and mother that I’m having the time of my life, and because it’s my birthday and I want to hear the voices of my loved ones. It feels strange to touch a credit card and money. When an operator asks for my zip code to authorize the card, I can barely remember it. I reach my mother and she recounts the story she tells me every year: how at my first Thanksgiving, when I was a week old, I was placed on the table as the centerpiece and the turkey was bigger than me.
On the way back to the boats I catch the eye of a mule deer, a young buck who lets me get within a few feet of him. The deer doesn’t seem to fear people, perhaps because in this park deer can’t be hunted. I meet a couple of tourists from South Korea, who are astounded that we’re in the midst of a twenty-four-day voyage. The young woman touches my shoulder in farewell; it seems that a part of them wants to connect to our journey. We refill our big plastic water jugs and get back on the river.
There is a descent of perhaps seventy-five or eighty feet in a third of a mile, and the rushing waters break into great waves on the rocks and lash themselves into a mad, white foam. We step into our boats, push off, and away we go, first on smooth but swift water, then we strike a glassy wave and ride to its top, down again into the trough, up again on a high wave, and down and up on waves higher and still higher until we strike one just as it curls back, and a breaker rolls over our little boat. Still on we speed…until the little boat is caught in a whirlpool and spun around several times.
The Colorado welcomes us back with some of the most technical and scary rapids on the river. Most rivers have a rating scale of Class I (flat water) to Class VI (virtually unrunnable), but the Colorado is graded from one to ten. Today we have several Class 10 rapids, the first being Horn, a mess of towering waves, rocks, chutes, and holes. While Owen scouts, I put on my dry top with rubber neck and wrist gaskets to keep the water out. In the rapid we get knocked sideways, then slide backwards for a minute before Owen pulls the boat away from a gaping hole and into the calm water below.
Next is Granite. We spend more than half an hour scouting, searching for a route through it. As arduous as carrying the boats around the rapids would be, gazing at Granite almost makes me consider portaging. But that’s not an option. Steve, only twenty-four years old, has volunteered to be lead boat. A true outdoorsman, Steve has been nonchalant leading us through all the rapids during the past few days.
But Granite is different from what we’ve seen so far: it has more hazards than we can count. The only possible run is a thread-the-needle along the right wall: if you get too far left an angry set of waves will probably flip you, too far right and you’ll be slammed into the north wall. Steve’s eyes blaze with fierce determination as he enters the river. He eludes the biggest waves, pulls back hard on the oars to stay off the wall and he’s through. Up close, as we run it, Granite is faster and harder to read than from the river bank, and we get bounced around near the bottom, but with some strong, well-timed tugs on the oars, Owen pulls us to safety.
Hermit has a twenty-foot curling haystack wave in the center, is even bigger that Granite. But it’s a straight shot down the center. Just hit it hard and enjoy the ride. The wave is higher than our boat is long, but we keep the boat straight and have a clean roller-coaster run. We float to camp to the celebratory sounds of cheers and beers being popped. My birthday