In the Heart of the Canyon - By Elisabeth Hyde Page 0,45
was enough. Instantly they found themselves being carried into the angry heart of Hance between two sharp pourovers, and even with Peter in front (all that heft, all that mass!), the boat reared up and flipped back, spilling Abo, Evelyn, Jill, Sam, Matthew, Mark, and Peter into the cold, surging waves.
As with most flips, there was no time for dismay; JT went straight into rescue mode, scanning the surface for life jackets. Within seconds, everyone popped up right next to the paddle boat—everyone but Peter, that is, Peter who couldn’t swim, and while the others (amid mass confusion) managed to haul themselves onto the slick upturned belly of the raft, JT watched—now with dismay—as Peter got swept down through the rest of Hance and straight into Son-of-Hance, a second wash cycle, as it were, and except for a foot that kept poking up here and there, JT saw no sign of the young man, which didn’t really concern him at first, but the seconds kept ticking by, so he was very, very glad when Peter finally resurfaced in the tailwaves, wearing the stunned look of someone who’s fallen off a fifty-foot cliff and against all odds not only survived but found his skeletal system intact. JT rowed hard to intercept Peter before the river carried him even farther downstream to Sockdolager Rapid, and when he did haul the young man out of the water, it took a great deal of effort to convince a teeth-chattering Peter that he was still alive, that the life jacket had done its trick and the white light he’d seen while submerged was not the doorway to heaven but the color of the sky as viewed from inside a sea of bubbles by someone in a state of shock.
In the meantime, the paddle boat had roller-coasted upside down through Son-of-Hance, and now Abo was yelling to his five remaining passengers to help him, to stand up and grab hold of the flip line and lean back—nothing easy about this, convincing five people ranging in age from twelve to fifty, five people who’d just swum their first major rapid, to get up from where they were lying belly-down, clutching at anything; convincing them to stand up, grab the flip line that ran down the middle of the underbelly, and lean back toward the water. But—and this was what always got JT, how six-day novices could rise to the occasion—they did it, they right-sided the raft with enough time before Sockdolager to settle themselves into place, grab whatever paddles remained, and go.
Finally, below Sockdolager, they found a place to pull in. Cold, shivering, and still pumped with adrenaline, the swimmers peeled off their life jackets, breathlessly pacing and exchanging stories as they let the hot sun permeate as much epidermis as they were willing to expose. Peter was ecstatic, convinced that his survival was due to some innate ability to swim. It had been there all along, and he just hadn’t known it! Why, he’d just kicked and flailed and thus defied gravity—he floated, he didn’t drown, he could swim after all—and his mother was going to drop dead when she heard this, just drop dead!
“Do you realize how many lessons, how many swim camps, how many teachers practically tore my arms out of my sockets in an attempt to show me the Australian crawl?” he demanded. “Do you realize how I get sick to my stomach at the smell of chlorine? And here—here on the Colorado River, I can swim!” He arched his back to the heavens and pounded on his chest. “DO YOU HEAR ME, MOM? I AM A SWIMMER!”
Meanwhile, Sam and Matthew bragged that they had been the first to surface, and Mark secretly reveled in the fact that it had been mostly his and Abo’s strength that had righted the boat. Jill, for her part, couldn’t seem to warm up, and JT told her to put on a polypro, and she looked at him blankly and said, “What polypro?” and JT said, “The polypro top I told everyone to keep in their day bag, just in case,” and Jill wrenched her eyebrows, and JT sighed and went to his boat and dug in his own bag and lent her one of his. With the added warmth, things began to look up for Jill—that is, until she realized that Sam had lost one of his flip-flops during his swim, one of the ones that JT had fashioned the straps for out of a piece