In the Heart of the Canyon - By Elisabeth Hyde Page 0,68
internalized the routines of life on the river, so those baffling challenges of the first few days—packing bags, loading and unloading—were now automatic. Expertise bred confidence, which in turn bred a collective good mood, no small factor on a river trip.
For another thing, after the Big Ones came a relatively gentle and magical stretch of the river, and JT made a point of letting them stop and play in the shady waterfalls and pools that were such a contrast to the harsh landscape of the last several days. The Compsons did indeed get a Christmas picture of all four in front of Shinumo Falls (a terrible photo though, wooden smiles, stick postures); farther down at Elves Chasm, the cool mossy rocks and trickling water soothed everyone’s nerves, still raw from the day before. The only moment of ill will came when Mitchell climbed up on a big boulder and dove into the pool below, reminding JT how quickly everything could change.
“I told you guys the first day, NO DIVING!” he exclaimed. “You want to crack your head open?”
(“Did you get a picture of me?” Mitchell asked Lena.)
But there were other, more unique twists of fate that were helping too. The Cipro seemed to be working, for starters. Evelyn stopped trying to be so useful all the time. And Mitchell’s dreaded camera ran out of memory, at least until the end of the day when he could retrieve the spare memory card from his overnight bag.
In any case, those two days went more smoothly than any since leaving Lee’s Ferry. Or so it seemed to JT. He’d done too many trips to read much into this and knew it portended nothing, really; but he definitely enjoyed the good luck that extended through Day Nine, especially when Mitchell figured he had more than enough liquor for the rest of the trip and offered gin and tonics to everyone who was of legal age. Also when Jill spoke a few words to Mark, which gave him hope that he wasn’t going to witness another marital bust-up on this trip. The most magical moment came just before bedtime, when Lloyd experienced a mysterious window of lucidity and told them all of early trips on the river, when they wore canvas sneakers and cutoffs, and there was no such thing as sunscreen, and Glen Canyon Dam hadn’t been built, and the water was warm and wild and the tamarisk hadn’t yet taken over the corridor and jets were nonexistent and at night, if it was cool, you could build a campfire and fall asleep to the snap of embers sparking up through the chimney of cliffs into the starry sky above.
Only Susan was having a hard time at this point. Although she appreciated the ease of routine, a certain weariness was creeping in. Dare she call it boredom? Sometimes the rapids all seemed alike; sometimes the canyon walls felt closed in. Was she the only one who was getting tired of all this beauty?
By now her wine tasted like plastic, and it was never cold enough. The coffee was muddy. And to be perfectly frank, she was tired of group camping. Everyone snored, it seemed, and the mats were so thin that every morning she woke up with sore shoulders and a knot in her neck and a pain in her lower back that didn’t disappear even after Dixie showed her how to stretch. There were scorpions to worry about, and red ants, and rattlesnakes.
She was dragging her overnight bag down to the boats that morning when the obvious occurred to her: There was an end to all this. Had she forgotten? In five days she’d emerge from the canyon heat and walk into an air-conditioned hotel room, with a pillow-top mattress and cool sheets and her own personal refrigerator. There would be a clean robe hanging in the closet, chilled wine in the little refrigerator. She would step into a hot shower, stand beneath the silt-free spray, and wash thirteen days’ worth of grit down the drain.
“How do the guides do it?” she asked Jill the next afternoon. They were riding in the back of Dixie’s boat, lounging with their feet up. Peter was rowing; Dixie herself was riding up front, advising Peter as needed.
“Do what?” asked Jill.
“Stay so enthusiastic! I can’t imagine making this trip twice, let alone a hundred and twenty-five times.”
“Oh, I could live down here,” Jill said. “No laundry, no grocery stores, no carpools …”