of rope, and she told Matthew to let Sam wear one of his flip-flops, which Matthew refused to do out of brotherly concern for Sam wearing a sandal that would be half a size too big and might, just might cause him to trip; which caused Mark to cuff Matthew, and now things began to look very grim for the Compson family, until Evelyn finally drew JT aside and confided that she had an extra pair of Tevas that Sam could use, providing great relief to both Jill and Mark but causing Jill to secretly wonder why Evelyn hadn’t proffered the sandals until now.
All in all, not how JT would have chosen to spend his first morning in the Inner Gorge.
But JT was, in his core, an optimist by nature, and he reminded himself that a flip and a bit of squabbling was just that, nothing more. Things like this happened all the time. You couldn’t be a river guide and see the glass as half empty. Shit happened. It was part of the journey. And so when he felt they’d had enough time to warm up, he called everyone back to the boats, and they headed out once again.
For JT, it was simply yet another morning adventure on the river. But for the thinking travelers, something had shifted. As they floated deeper into the gorge, several of them experienced the sense that they were no longer on the same river—that the canyon, for all its beauty, had begun to menace in a way it hadn’t before. The current ran more swiftly, and the walls that towered above could have been forged from a different planet. Gone were the sunny stair-stepping sandstone cliffs; in their place rose more than five hunded vertical feet of glistening black schist, shot through with lightning forks of pink granite. It was dark down here, and it was violent too, and the violence had an inexplicable permanence to it, one that was going to take them some time, as novice travelers, to figure out.
In the meantime, all they could do was simply crane their necks in quiet wonder.
Deep in the Inner Gorge, Phantom Ranch announces itself with a necklace of red balls, strung like jewels across the river at Mile 87.5. This marks the gauging station, which is followed by a large boat beach. Usually crowded with both river runners and hikers, Phantom, like the Little Colorado, reminds you once again that your midsummer river trip is not the wilderness experience you’d anticipated last January back in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
JT had mixed feelings about Phantom. There was a small settlement a half mile up the trail, an outpost of an earlier era, with a general store, a post office, and a dining hall. It was nice to stop at Phantom and get news from other parties, collect whatever mail might be waiting, and find out if there were any surprises waiting for them downstream. And the passengers liked to visit the store, buy a trinket or two, and send a postcard marked “Mailed by Mule” from Phantom Ranch.
But the thing about Phantom was that there was a pay phone. This was of course a nice thing to come upon halfway through a trip, if you really needed to check in on something, but too many times JT had seen one of his passengers make a phone call and hear some bad but not devastating news (the cat vomiting blood, the neighbors house smoldering); and what could you do with news like that? Worry, that’s what you did, for that day and the next seven days, sharing your pall with everyone.
JT had talked about it at breakfast with Dixie and Abo, and although they would have in some sense preferred not to touch base with civilization, they had to stop if they were going to find somebody to take the dog off their hands.
“But we’re not going to linger,” JT had warned everyone during their daily briefing. “Half an hour, tops.”
Now, the red balls of the gauging station behind them, JT aimed his boat toward a wide expanse of sand ahead on river right. Phantom’s boat beach, as usual, resembled a crowded parking lot, with a long lineup of bulging rafts. Hot, weary hikers down from the South Rim cooled their feet in the icy shallows, while boatmen rearranged their gear, or bathed, or traded stories and information in front of the bulletin board.
JT beached his boat, hoping that someone here would be just the dog-loving hiker