In the Heart of the Canyon (10 page)

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 at Mile 39.

“But fortunately the dam didn’t happen,” he said, “thanks to some heavy-duty ads by the Sierra Club.”

“David Brower, to be more accurate,” Mitchell noted.

“Who’s that?” Susan asked Jill, not wanting to publicize her lack of knowledge. But Mitchell overheard.

“Are you kidding? President of the Sierra Club? The man who sacrificed Glen Canyon? Though he was very contrite about it,” Mitchell said.

“He was indeed,” said JT, catching Abo’s eye.

“Said it was his biggest regret,” Mitchell continued. “I met David Brower once. Fairly intelligent guy. Look—is that it?”

Far up on the left, a miniature debris fan spilled out of a darkened cavity in the cliff.

“Hope no ones claustrophobic,” Mitchell joked.

They headed toward shore, and JT found himself wondering if he should simply let Mitchell take over this side excursion, since he knew so much about it. But his stubborn streak prevailed, and so, as they disembarked from the boats, he heard himself giving orders—telling Abo to stay at the boats with Ruth and Lloyd, reminding everyone else to clip their life jackets to something stable.

“Can the dog come?” Sam asked.

JT didn’t see a problem with this. “Here,” and he tossed Sam a short length of rope. “Make a leash.”

In single file they hiked up a path and headed into the tunnel, gingerly stepping over rocks and puddles and groping each other for balance. As it grew darker they slowed to a shuffle, their murmurs and laughter echoing off the dank walls. It smelled wet and tinny. They rounded a corner, and the last glint of daylight vanished; now there was just JT’s flashlight at the head of the line, bobbing in the darkness. The air was cool. Water dripped, unseen. Evelyn stumbled. Mitchell steadied her.

“Thank you,” Evelyn whispered.

“Why are we whispering?” whispered Peter.

Eventually JT stopped, and people gathered around as he beamed his flashlight up and pointed out the air shaft.

“Can everyone see?”

“Excuse me,” said Mitchell, “excuse me,” and he squeezed through the group to crouch and aim his camera straight up. (“Sure hope you’ll send me a copy of that,” Peter said.) The flash went off, startling everyone—including the dog, who wrenched free from Sam’s grasp and trotted back the way they’d come. By the time JT shone his flashlight in that direction, the dog had vanished.

“Oh, well,” said JT. “Not a big deal. But maybe we should all head back.”

“No, wait! Turn your flashlight off!” said Mitchell.

So JT took the time to switch off his flashlight, to give them a sense of total darkness. The air seemed inexplicably warmer, and with hushed murmurs they craned their necks this way and that.

“Okay,” said JT, “party’s over. Let’s get back before Ruth and Lloyd drink up all the beer.”

For some reason it seemed much shorter going out. The air warmed with each step, and there was the strange sensation of traveling from one time period to the next. Mitchell informed them that the Ebola virus originated in bat caves. JT told them this wasn’t a bat cave. Mitchell said you never knew about these things but hey, he wasn’t concerned. Eventually they turned a corner, and a circle of light appeared.

And with it, the unmistakable smell of skunk.

It rolled over them, thick and pungent, cloaking them in a toxic cloud. There were groans and cries, then pushing and shoving as they all spilled out into the hot white light. And there was the dog, lying on the path with his nose between his paws.

“You’re shittin’ me,” said JT.

Abo came running up the hillside.

“I couldn’t stop him!” he said breathlessly. “We were watching the skunk from the boat, we could just barely see it in the bushes and nobody was moving and Ruth was getting some great pictures and then the damn dog comes running and barking down the hill!”

“Sam, stop!” Jill said sharply.

Sam knelt in the gravel, ten feet from the dog.

JT scratched the back of his neck. He didn’t know what to say. He stared at the dog. He put his hands on his hips.

“Got tomato juice?” asked Peter.

“You damn dog,” JT said. “You goddamn dog.”

They had to break into the lower reaches of the drop box to find the case of V8. One by one, JT popped open the cans and poured the juice into a bailing bucket, and with Abo holding the dog’s head and Peter grasping his hind end, JT doused the dog and massaged the V8 into his fur.

“I don’t think I’ve ever seen an animal look so absolutely pitiful,” Mitchell observed.

The bath did nothing for the stink, and JT silently chided himself.
Of course the dog would get spooked by the camera! Of course he would bolt! If he, JT, had thought to leave the dog with Abo in the first place, this never would have happened.

So much for thinking he could convince one of the motor trips to run the dog down to Phantom.

The delay held them up enough so that they were still at the dam site when the kayakers pulled in. Not surprisingly, they had a lot of questions about the dog, and JT wasn’t really in the mood to engage in a lengthy explanation. But the arrival of the kayakers presented an opportunity, for JT happened to notice that their youngest member, a girl of ten or eleven, was busting out of her life jacket.

“I’ve got something that might be a little more comfortable,” he said. “And yours might fit the dog a little better than the one he has. If you’re not attached to it, that is.”

The girl had indeed outgrown her life jacket, both physically and emotionally, it being bright green with dancing purple frogs. She wanted very much to trade—in fact, she wanted to take a picture of the dog wearing her old life jacket, but JT wasn’t going to put
any
life jacket on the dog until the dog had had a more thorough wash. He clipped it to the boat.

“Call the warehouse when you get out,” he told the man with the white beard. “I’ll mail this one back to you, if you want. What’s your name again?”

“Bud. How’s the tunnel?”

JT grinned. “Dark.”

As the kayakers straggled up the path to the tunnel, JT had a duplicitous thought. What if they simply rowed off without the dog? The kayakers seemed a good bunch; they’d find some way to fit him in their mule boat, and he, JT, could just play catch-me-if-you-can the rest of the trip.

Would that he could be so devious. Besides, Sam had in the meantime found a small towel with which to rub the dog dry, and he was paying special attention to his ears and the straggly beard; and it didn’t take much imagination for JT to know that Sam would never, ever let him get away with it.

M
aybe tonight, Susan thought as she helped unload the boats at the end of the day. Maybe tonight, instead of helping the guides prepare dinner, she and Amy could go sit on a rock, alone, and just
talk
.

Was that really so much to wish for?

Susan knew things could be strained between mothers and daughters, that the last person a seventeen-year-old girl wanted to talk to was her mother. And she knew that everything she herself said came out sounding just as lame as the things her own mother had said thirty years ago. But maybe down here on the river, Amy would open up. Because she felt like she knew so little about her daughter these days! Did Amy have friends—true friends, the kind who would lie for you? Or who would listen without arguing when you needed to say an awful truth out loud? Nobody ever came over to the house; nobody called to ask about a homework assignment. It broke her heart, particularly because back in high school she’d hung out with a big crowd; there were always parties and shenanigans and ditch-days, and she always had a boyfriend, except for two weeks before the start of her junior year. How could her daughter be so different? Where did she come from?

And how did she end up so …
large?

Exactly what I’ve been asking all this time
, said the Mother Bitch.

During these first three days, Susan had made an extra effort to give Amy the space she needed to get to know people on her own, so they could all see Amy as her own person and not merely Susan’s daughter. But she was also determined to take advantage of being
down here in the canyon, to perhaps pierce some of those heartbreaking barriers.

Maybe a little alcohol would help, Susan thought. And so late that afternoon, as soon as the boats were unloaded and Dixie had opened up the drink box, Susan retrieved her bladder of white wine and went off in search of Amy, whom she found at the water pump.

“No thanks,” Amy said, filling her bottle. “I’m going to wash my hair.”

“Maybe I should wash my hair too,” Susan said brightly.

“Whatever,” said Amy.

Smarting at the rebuff, Susan wandered back to the patch of sand where she and Amy had dumped their gear. Their site tonight was disturbingly close to the groover, but by the time she’d gotten off the boat and shaken out the leg cramps and collected her things, all the other flat places were taken. Evelyn, she noticed, always managed to get one of the good spots; tonight, for instance, she’d pretty much dashed across the beach to claim a large flat area with a view, a space that would have been better suited to Jill and Mark and their two boys. Susan glanced over to the spot now; indeed, there was Evelyn, seated cross-legged on her white mat, reading her guidebook, drinking her cranberry juice.

Evelyn noticed Susan and promptly buried her nose in her book again. Susan knew that Evelyn suffered from shyness; she also knew that the nice thing to do would be to go over and offer her some wine. But she simply couldn’t bring herself to take the initiative with Evelyn, not right now. Evelyn was so stern, so serious; no doubt she would offer up her critical judgment on something that had happened that day—like how the boys had tried to destroy the lacy spiderwebs on the rock ceiling in the back of the cavern at Redwall. It wasn’t a very respectful thing to do; Susan wasn’t really defending them—but come on, they were kids.

And besides, Evelyn probably didn’t drink, or she would have brought something other than cranberry juice.

Upriver, there was a little cove where people were bathing. Susan
saw Amy trudging in that direction, carrying the quilted floral bag that Susan had bought her for the trip. Let her be, she thought, and she headed downstream, away from the busyness of the camp. The wet sand was studded with round pink rocks, and she found it hypnotic to look no farther than a foot or two ahead; she became so focused on this small task that she was startled to look up and see that she had walked right into Jill’s private meditation space.

“Sorry,” she whispered. She wanted to give this busy mother a little time to herself, but Jill glanced up with a serene smile. She sighed and stretched her legs out and wiggled her toes.

“Oh, you’re not disturbing me,” Jill replied. “The only people who could disturb me right now are the boys. Sit. Please.”

Susan sat down. The shoreline waters lapped softly at her feet; birds chirped and called from one cliff to the next.

“I was going to have some wine,” Susan said. “Do you want some?”

“No, thank you,” said Jill, which made Susan feel like an alcoholic. She should hang out more with the guides, who drank their fair share.

“You know what’s so great about this trip?” Jill said, after a while.

“What?”

“Not having to make any decisions. The kids say, ‘Can we jump off the boat?’ and I say, ‘I don’t know; ask the guides.’ They say, ‘Can we stand up during this rapid?’ and I say, ‘I don’t know; ask the guides.’ What a wonderful place to be,” Jill said, with the awe and gratitude of one who has been given very little in life.

“You know what I like?” Susan said.

“What?”

“Not cooking!”

“That too,” Jill agreed.

“And not going to the grocery store! My goal when I get home is to go once a week, and if we run out, dammit, we run out.”

Jill snorted. “The way my life goes, I’ll say I’m going to do that, but then the boys will have some project at school that requires jelly beans or marshmallows, and there I am, driving out to Costco.”

“Are you sure you don’t want some of this wine?”

Jill seemed to think about it for a moment. “All right,” she said.

Susan handed her the mug.

“Mark doesn’t drink,” said Jill, “so I try not to. But every now and then I like a little something.”

“With two boys like that, I’d be an alcoholic,” Susan declared. Instantly she regretted it.

“Mark’s Mormon,” Jill continued. “I’m not. I grew up Catholic. My father drank beer and my mother drank whiskey. When Mark and I got married, we had champagne at the reception but no open bar, and Mark and his parents were like, ‘Oh, everybody’s having just as good a time as they would if there was an open bar,’ and I’m like, ‘Lady, are you blind? My entire family’s out in the parking lot with their brown bags.’ What kind of wine is this?”

“Cheap wine.”

“Well, it’s very good,” said Jill. “You know what I think is funny?”

“What?”

“Watching Mitchell with the dog.”

They caught each other’s eye and laughed, like naughty girls.

“Isn’t he a piece of work,” Jill said.