In the Heart of the Canyon - By Elisabeth Hyde Page 0,10
sun burn so intensely. Not in Salt Lake City. Not in Phoenix. Not in Key West, where she’d grown up. It scorched her shoulders and made her skin feel painfully stretched. She splashed water on her arms, but the relief was fleeting, the water so cold that it too burned, and she regretted not wearing one of the long-sleeved shirts that she’d so adamantly insisted the boys wear, back at Lee’s Ferry. Sunscreen alone couldn’t possibly protect her skin, she thought.
Jill and her family were all riding in the paddle boat today, along with Mitchell and Lena from Wyoming. Jill hoped the boys were making a better impression today than they had the night before, at the orientation meeting. Over and over, she’d had to drag them away from the refreshment table and force them to introduce themselves to the other travelers. What kind of boys didn’t know how to make eye contact and greet someone by name? Her boys, that’s who.
Although why was she surprised? They hadn’t wanted to come in the first place. In fact, when they found out last spring that she’d planned this vacation, they’d made a big scene, claiming they couldn’t miss basketball camp. And she barely got any backup from Mark. “Shouldn’t you have checked with me before you paid the deposit?” he’d asked, right in front of the boys, giving them even more leverage. Eventually they negotiated a compromise, which included one week of private coaching, plus new video games for the eight-hour drive from Salt Lake City to Flagstaff—a drive that sorely tested everyone’s patience, so that by orientation time, Jill just wanted to retreat to a spa for the next two weeks. They had adjoining rooms, and well into the wee hours she could hear the boys jumping on the beds. Four times she had to knock on the wall and tell them to turn the television off. Twice she tried with Mark to have an orgasm. Twice she failed. When she got up in the middle of the night, she looked in the bathroom mirror and wondered how, in the span of thirteen short years, she’d come to look exactly like her own mother: pinch-lipped and stern, and utterly without humor.
But today, like Evelyn, Jill was feeling a distinct thrill as they headed out from Lee’s Ferry. In contrast to the oar boats, where the passengers could sit back and enjoy the ride while the guides did all the rowing, the paddle boat required work. The boat was set up for six paddlers, three on each side with a mountain of gear running down the middle. As paddle captain, Abo sat perched in the rear, ruddering the boat with his paddle, calling out commands.
Jill and Mark rode up front, the boys in the middle, Mitchell and Lena in the rear. As they left Lee’s Ferry, Abo had them practice their maneuvers a bit, the boat going in figure eights until he was convinced they understood his commands. Then they headed down the river for real. The sun grew hotter, the river greener, and she finally felt with deep conviction that the trip had truly begun. Already the canyon rim seemed to be in another world, a world full of engines and asphalt, clocks and credit cards and news reports that didn’t really matter.
After Navajo Bridge, the gorge began to deepen, with blotchy maroon cliffs rising straight out of the river. Jill found herself mesmerized by the bubbling current, by the little whirlpools that spun out from her paddle at the end of each stroke. At some point, she heard Abo telling a story about two young men who swam the canyon with nothing but a kickboard to hold a few supplies. Sam didn’t believe him and asked Jill if it was true.
“Honey, if the guide says it’s true, then it must be true,” Jill replied.
Other than that, she kept to herself, her senses tuned to the dry heat, the shimmering water, the brilliant blue sky, and the stark canyon walls. So lost was she that it came as a shock when Abo abruptly steered the boat toward the right side of the river, where JT had already beached his raft. “Looks like lunch, folks,” Abo told them, and Jill suddenly remembered that the last thing she’d eaten was a crumbly muffin from the hotel breakfast bar at five thirty that morning.
“Forward!” yelled Abo suddenly. “Come on, paddlers, we got a meal to prepare! Sam! Matthew! Lets see a little mojo