The Best Travel Writing 2011 - James O'Reilly [56]
On a sandy beach that evening I’m offered the camp throne, a reclining nylon chaise longue. My other chair, battered by the river, is missing an arm—we name it the John Wesley Powell because he’d lost his arm before his Canyon journey. I dig out the bottle of Herradura tequila I’ve brought for this night, passing it around the campfire circle for all to swig. The group presents me with a blueberry muffin cake baked in a Dutch oven, a large, covered cast-iron pot that’s set on coals for baking.
When I first considered a twenty-four-day Canyon trip, it seemed like a long time. At the halfway point, I feel time slipping away. There’s so much to see every day in the side canyons: the fern-shrouded waterfall at Elves Chasm where Kristen and others leap naked into the pool below, Blacktail Canyon with its magical concert-hall acoustics, and Deer Creek Falls, a thundering 100-foot-high cascade next to the river. I’m in no hurry to return home, but I am ready for some rest.
We take a layover day at Galloway Camp where we enjoy a warm solar shower (the water heated in a dark bag attached to a hose and shower head). A drove of about eight bighorn sheep stroll right through camp, scampering up an impossibly steep hillside as we approach. We wash our clothes in buckets of river water and drape them over the spindly desert trees.
I sink deeper into the Canyon’s natural rhythms. I put away my watch and tell time by the progression of Pleiades, the Big Dipper and Orion across the night sky. We’ve become a resourceful group—we fix broken chairs with extra straps, we patch boats if they spring a leak, and erect shelters with tarps and oars when it rains. I appreciate this sense of self-containment and the group’s confidence that we have the ability to handle almost anything that comes our way.
As we travel deeper into the crucible, past rock walls more than a billion years old, the Canyon gets steeper and narrower. Our sense of isolation intensifies. “It seems a long way up to the world of sunshine and open sky,” Powell wrote. And it is: in the heart of the Canyon the walls are 6,000 feet—more than a mile—high. The sun shines through the sharp, narrow slot for an hour or less each day this time of year; we warm up when the river bends to the south and catches the late autumn sun in the southern sky.
By late August of 1869, Powell’s crew had traveled for three months since beginning their journey at Green River City. By the time they reached the deepest part of the Grand Canyon, Powell wrote, their canvas tent was “useless,” their rubber ponchos lost, “more than half the party are without hats, not one of us has an entire suit of clothes, and we have not a blanket apiece.” When the rain pours down, “we sit up all night on the rocks shivering, and are more exhausted by the night’s discomfort than the day’s toil.”
At Ledges Camp we sleep comfortably atop Thermarest pads on shelves of shiny black gneiss. I fall asleep to a column of stars visible through the Canyon’s slot, the occasional meteor shining brilliantly for a flash before being consumed by Earth’s atmosphere. I dream of a tiger in a cage, so lonely it’s going crazy. It needs to roam. Then I dream of traveling across the U.S. entirely by water with my brother. Perhaps the inescapable Canyon is taking an emotional toll after all.
“Are we running Lava tomorrow?” Nathan, a wiry and strong former collegiate soccer player, shouts to our campfire circle. “Because if we are,” he announces as he puts down his beer, “I need to stop drinking right now!” A few miles downstream, Lava is the most intimidating rapid on the river, with a precipitous fifteen-foot drop that tumbles into a recirculating ledge hole and ferocious lateral waves that seem to upend boats for kicks.
The mood the next morning is serious, quiet. We tighten lines on the boats so if we flip we won’t lose our gear. Without a word we start stretching, we want to be limber, ready, in case we swim in the frothy madness. As we row downriver, the steep red walls widen slightly. Layers of basalt give