had arrived and were messing with their tackle by the side of the river. By eight o’clock, JT and Abo and Dixie had finished breakfast, and for the next several hours, they tightened straps and crammed hatches and rearranged gear so that all boats would be more or less equally loaded. They clipped bail buckets into their boats. The sun grew hot, and their shoulders burned, so they covered up with long-sleeved shirts. They guzzled water from old orange juice jugs.
At ten thirty, JT was lashing an American flag to his rowing seat—it was, after all, the Fourth of July—when he looked up to see an old gray bus rocking its way down the hillside. A cloud of dust roiled up from behind. Dixie squinted.
“Time to rock and roll,” she said. “How’re you coming, Abo?”
Abo, whose sleeping pad held a chaotic jumble of clothing, books, giant squirt guns, and camera equipment, stood in the well of his boat, brushing his teeth in the hot sun. He spat into the water. “I’m almost ready,” he said. “Hey, can either of you fit some of this stuff in your boat?”
“Hell no, babe,” Dixie replied. “You ready, JT?”
JT stood high on his boat and pissed a sparkling arc out into the river and wiggled himself back into his shorts.
“I’m ready,” he said, hopping off the boat onto the sand. “Lets run this river.”
3
Day One
Lee’s Ferry
One by one, the guests staggered off the bus into the hot morning sun. Their clothes were clean, their hats straight, their skin pale and freshly shaved and smelling of sunscreen. Eager not only to be of use but also to make a good first impression on the guides, they swarmed the rear door of the bus, jostling to unload more than their fair share of gear. As best he could, JT matched people with the names on his list: Ruth and Lloyd Frankel, the old couple who’d been down the river more times than he could count; Peter Kramer from Cincinnati, who was doing much of the heavy lifting; the Compson parents, calling their two sons back from the river to help with the bags. The tall man with the flappy nomad hat must be the retiree from Wyoming, which would make the tiny woman with an identical hat his wife. There was the teenage girl, Amy—whoa, she was big—and the trim blond woman talking to her must be her mother.
There would be time for introductions later.
When the bus was empty and all the bags lay strewn about the beach, JT directed them to a heap of orange life jackets, and the three guides went around and checked their fittings, tugging on straps and yanking up shoulders to ensure things were sufficiently tight.
“I can’t breathe,” said the tiny woman.
“Good,” said JT with a chuckle.
Then he called everybody over into the shade of some tamarisk trees for his orientation talk. He introduced himself with the fact that this was his 125th trip down the river. “Kind of a milestone, I guess you’d say,” he said, glancing at the different faces. “But I’m as psyched now as I was on the first trip. I don’t think it’s possible for me to ever get tired of this place.”
As he spoke, a fat yellow bumblebee lazily buzzed its way into the circle, then hovered in front of JT’s face. JT grinned at the bee, and it scooted off.
“And its way more than running the rapids,” he said. “Its about hiking up into side canyons; its about condors and mile-high cliffs and wild watercress and—well, you’ll see what I mean.”
He went on to remind them that over the next two weeks, they’d be getting to know each other pretty well. “I like to think of it this way,” he said, hoping to instill good feelings at the outset. “There’s no such thing as a stranger, just people we haven’t met.”
At this, the Compson mother nudged the two boys, who scowled and edged away. JT suspected he might have just reiterated some earlier parental lecture about being open-minded and making new friends; probably the boys had taken one look at all the adults and assumed they were in for two weeks of heavy scolding.
Well. Wait until those boys saw how adults could behave, two days into a river trip.
He squatted down and unfolded a well-worn topographical map on the sand. The group moved in closer. Using a stick, JT pointed to the upper-right-hand corner of the map.
“So: We’re here at Lee’s Ferry,” he told