In the Heart of the Canyon - By Elisabeth Hyde Page 0,28

as me.)

Then there’s this guy Mitchell. Mitchell thinks he is a really Big Deal because he knows all about some guy who came down the river in a rowboat back in the 1800s. His wife is a teacher, and she needs to learn a little self-assertion if you ask me because Mitchell is always bossing her around. And he’s always taking pictures too! Like when we pulled into camp and everyone was supposed to help unload the boat—well, there’s Mitchell, taking pictures. (He took a picture of Ruth at breakfast, and Ruth said, and I quote, “I don’t take kindly to being photographed before noon, Mitchell.” Go Ruth.) When he isn’t taking pictures, he’s bragging about all the other adventure trips he’s taken. Like he’s climbed Mount Everest. Okay. So?

Finally there’s this guy Peter. He wears big baggy swim trunks and a Cincinnati Reds baseball hat, and the back of his neck is already sunburned. Why didn’t he read the packing list and bring a bigger hat? Before tonight I thought he was a prick. But then he came and sat with me and Mom at dinner. So maybe he’s not such a prick. Can’t really tell.

The guides are pretty cool. JT doesn’t talk much but he’s always got this kind of half smile on his face. Abo is the paddle captain. Definitely hot. Then there’s this woman Dixie—I want her body, I want her hair, I want her laugh, and she’ll just hang her butt off the boat and pee in the water with everyone looking!!!!! I could never do that!

Even if I wasn’t FAT.

DAY THREE

River Miles 30–47

Fence Fault to Saddle Canyon

15

Day Three

Miles 30–39

JT had hoped for an early start the next morning, but Ruth’s bandage had come loose in the night, and her wound was still raw and weeping. JT and Dixie washed it with boiled water, while Ruth looked on, grouchy that she was requiring so much attention.

“You have other things to do!” she exclaimed. “Let me take care of this! It’s just a cut!”

Just a cut? He wished. Ruth’s skin was thin, mottled with spidery veins. Wearing medical exam gloves, he dabbed on antibiotic ointment, spreading it all over the cut and up and down her leg. Dixie placed a large square of sterile gauze on it, JT taped it in place, and then they wrapped Ruth’s entire lower leg first in stretchy gauze and finally in an Ace bandage.

“We’ve only got four squares of this gauze left, you know,” Dixie said.

“How many rolls of stretchy gauze?”

“Six.”

“Shit. Well, ration it. I want you to wear your rain pants today,” JT told Ruth as he helped her up, “so that it stays dry.”

“Oh fine,” sighed Ruth.

“Can you put your weight on it?”

“Of course I can!”

JT and Dixie both waited, watching. Ruth planted her foot in the sand and bore her weight upon it. She looked at them triumphantly. “You see? It’s fine.”

It was nine o’clock before they finally glided out into the current. JT found his line of bubbles and let the river carry them along. They were in the shade, and the air was cool. For the next hour, they floated through quiet water, three tiny boats dwarfed by terra-cotta walls. Lush greenery cascaded down the cliffs in places. Sometimes the canyon walls were bleached and striated; other times they were deep red and streaked with black. Sometimes the rim was visible; other times it vanished as the cliffs folded in upon them.

Midmorning they stopped briefly at Redwall Cavern, a vast, clamshell amphitheater cutting into the cliff. As they disembarked, Mitchell was quick to inform them that back in 1869, John Wesley Powell had estimated it would hold fifty thousand people. (“An exaggeration, of course,” he conceded.) Some walked and some ran the long stretch of sheltered beach, and they all hallooed back into the throat. Everyone took pictures.

JT, however, didn’t want to linger; another rafting party was pulling in, and far upriver, the tiny lineup of kayakers was rounding the bend. “I say we do the dam site,” he told Abo and Dixie. “Maybe it’ll be less crowded.”

And so they loaded up and headed out into the deep green river again, flanked by vertical walls formed by an ancient seabed. JT had the three boats stay close together so he could brief them on the history of the plan to dam the Grand Canyon—how in the 1960s, the Bureau of Reclamation had gone so far as to drill a tunnel straight into the canyon wall