The Emerald Mile: The Epic Story of the Fastest Ride in History Through the Heart of the Grand Canyon (59 page)

A
s Grua and his companions maintained their rigid downstream stares, John Thomas found himself wrestling
with an entirely different tangle of conflicting impulses.

When the
Emerald Mile
first appeared around the bend, Thomas knew nothing about the speed run. (Word of the
Emerald Mile
’s illicit departure had been reported to the ranger at Lee’s Ferry, but by the time this news had reached the South Rim, Thomas was already aboard his chopper and headed for Crystal.) But in addition to being a ranger, Thomas was also a boatman who belonged to
the River Unit—which meant that the instant he spotted Grua and his companions, a little train of dominoes swiftly tipped over in his mind.

“I knew
exactly
who it was and what they were doing,” he would recall nearly thirty years later, chuckling at the memory.

He knew a few other things too, starting with how this stunt was going to put him into one hell of a fix. Which, in an unexpected twist, was now dovetailing with some rather complicated feelings that Thomas harbored about himself: who he was, what he did, and the place he occupied in the canyon.

Thomas’s time on the river had straddled the golden age of guiding, the period in which visitation had skyrocketed from a handful of eccentrics such as Martin Litton and Georgie White to tens of thousands of river vacationers. Thus he was old enough to remember the freedom that had prevailed in the canyon country before the hordes of tourists had started pouring in, back when a man could launch a boat and disappear downriver without having to ask for permission or wait in line, devoid of any constraints other than those imposed by the water and the rocks, an adventure in the best sense of the word. And as those days receded ever further into the rearview mirror, there were moments—right now being one of them—when Thomas was forced to wonder about it all.

In truth, no one who had tasted those liberties could look back on that time with anything other than a deep sense of longing. Like everyone else who had known the river during that era of innocence, Thomas mourned its passing and privately grieved that it would never return. Which is why part of him sometimes rebelled at the very restrictions he sought to enforce, if only because rules—even rules that were universally accepted as necessary and good—seemed to cut so directly against the spirit that the river had once embodied. This sense of loss now prompted Thomas to ponder a notion that was not merely unorthodox but, when viewed from a certain angle, downright subversive.

Was it possible, he wondered, that a measure of what had been lost—the thing that had once defined the essence of this place, the thing that was now in the process of disappearing forever—was
that very thing
perhaps being offered a chance to express itself one more time, fleetingly, irresponsibly, nobly, right here before him? And in light of that possibility,
Thomas wondered, where did his truest allegiances lie—with the duties that he was supposed to be performing as a uniformed employee of the Department of the Interior? Or to a sense of duty that had nothing whatsoever to do with the law?

Officially, of course, Thomas could in no way condone any of the nonsense that was about to take place, which was misguided on so many levels that he didn’t even know where to begin. This piece of performance art that Grua was trying to pull off was not only dangerous and irresponsible but just plain wrong. In addition to undermining the authority of the Park Service, dishonoring the
tragedy that had already taken place at Crystal, and setting an example that might be followed by others—which could lead to God only knew what kind of craziness—Grua’s stunt was an insult to the people up at the Glen Canyon Dam, who were even now desperately trying to prevent Lake Powell from blowing its gasket.

But setting all that aside for a moment, what did the man
behind
the badge actually think?

Well, as he stood on the deck of the motor rig and watched the
Emerald Mile
complete its approach, Thomas had to acknowledge that tremors of admiration and envy were pulsating through his entire body. Yes, this was scandalous and deplorable and unforgivably dumb. But at the same time, there was no way to deny that a speed run under these conditions took ferocious courage, a shining sense of vision, and a hellacious set of balls. And for that reason, his most visceral response to the quest unfolding before his eyes was pure and absolute. It was fricking
glorious
. Like anyone who had ever slid the blade of an oar into that magnificent ribbon of water, the only objection he could possibly have raised resided in Grua’s egregious failure to call him up and ask if he wanted to be part of the damn thing.

In light of those sentiments, Thomas had no interest in forcing the crew of the
Emerald Mile
to pull over. And thus his dilemma, rooted in the supremely inconvenient truth that his responsibilities and his feelings in this matter were irreconcilably opposed. What was called for, it seemed, was a miniature piece of Kabuki theater in which each party could adopt an attitude of imperious indifference and pretend to ignore the other. So what he did was this—

He simply walked away.

He turned his back on the river, stalked off the deck of the motor rig, and started climbing the hill in the direction of the scouting terrace to watch the run unfold.

A
s Thomas enacted this charade,
Grua was focusing on another ritual of his own—a liturgy reserved for the tops of the biggest rapids, one whose components lay halfway between a pilot’s preflight checklist and a Zen monk’s meditation mantra. Every boatman had one, and although the details varied, the basic outline was more or less the same.

First, you cup your hand in the river and run the water over the back of your neck and face to reduce the shock of what’s coming. Then you spit into your palms and twirl your oar blades a time or two to make sure they’re rotating smoothly. Finally, you begin talking yourself into a special mental space where
you prepare for the threshold moment—the point where the world drops away, the jitters subside, and a cold resolve seizes the tissues of the chest and belly.

Grua drew several deep breaths and rolled his shoulders. The muscles in his arms and legs were now poised on a hair trigger, and his ears were cocked, tuned to the sharpened sound of the rapid, a roar that was no longer dulled by distance. He cast a quick glance toward the shore to gauge his speed, then snapped his gaze back to the current line, bending his mind to the task ahead, allowing his concentration to narrow to a tiny aperture that encompassed a few square yards of river and a frozen instant in time.

Listen. Stare. Breathe.

Just beyond the bowpost, he could discern the line where the river dropped off. Beyond that line, erratic bursts of spray were being hurled into the air by the invisible waves. And now, he waited for it.

At the top of every rapid, a moment comes when the topography of the water reveals itself. This happens in an instant; there is no preamble. One second you are approaching a flat horizon line; the next second, the contours and mysteries of what lies beyond are visible in all their fury. That final flash comes like a slap in the face, one whose sting is amplified by the knowledge that the choices you have made up to this point—your angle, your timing, your speed—are now set.

As he approached this moment, Grua processed a few last-second details. A wide slice of calmer water was sluicing past the right-hand shoreline—he could see that now. But that water was also shallow, studded with half-submerged boulders, and laced with broken tree limbs that stuck out like punji sticks.

“Do you think I should cut right?” Grua shouted over his shoulder, seeking confirmation from Petschek.

“You don’t have a chance of doing it,” cried Petschek. “Keep her straight!”

Then all three boatmen braced as the current seized the hull and slung them toward the biggest mess of white water that any Grand Canyon boatman, living or dead, had ever seen.

P
erched atop the scouting terrace, John Thomas had a full view of the scene, and as he watched it unfold, he was overcome by a growing sense of dread.

Instead of hugging the right-hand shoreline so closely that he was kissing the edge of the riverbank and swatting away the branches on the tamarisk trees, Grua was facing forward and coolly coasting along the shoulder of the lateral wave, a route that would bypass the escape lane and take them straight into the main hole.

The approach was so wrong, so misguided, so willfully self-destructive, that Thomas couldn’t quite believe his eyes.
“What the hell are you guys thinking?!” he wondered. “Why are you all the way out there?”

Then it hit him. Having sneaked onto the river without consulting anyone, Grua and his crew didn’t have the faintest clue as to what had taken place at Crystal during the previous thirty-six hours—and thus had no idea of the horror show in store for anyone who failed to spear through the lateral into the safety zone.

As Thomas watched them slide toward the maelstrom, he groaned inwardly with the knowledge that he had contributed to their error. Thanks to his decision to walk away, no one had told those clowns to get themselves to the right.

Now he had no choice but to stand on the terrace and watch, all the while
exclaiming to himself,
No, no, no, no!

P
etschek would never forget how it looked as they slid into Crystal’s maw and he got his first glimpse of the thing that rose beyond the hole.

“I remember looking downstream over the front of the boat, and there it was, a wall of water, absolutely vertical, that extended almost clear across the river,” he later recalled. “Between two and three stories high, I think. Just a white wall of boiling water. I remember it occurred to me that we were going to need an awful lot of luck to make it. . . . It was so much bigger than our little dory.”

The bottom face of the wall featured the kind of water that rivermen call glass. Smooth and unblemished, it rose cleanly for almost thirty feet, and within its whiteness was an aspect of deep green.

The top, however, was not glass. It was enraged and seething—a churning fury created by the wave’s breaking at its apex.

To the men inside the dory, it seemed as if the entire river were attempting to surge over that wall, then falling back upon itself to create an endless, recycling grinder. It looked like some kind of psychotic animal, a Leviathan trying to eat its own entrails.

There was no turning away from this monster, and as they slid into its lair, Grua found himself marveling at its terrifying splendor.

“It wasn’t a regular hole,” he would later declare.
“It was perfection in a hole.”

The very last bit of control that Grua still had in his hands was deciding precisely where and with what angle the
Emerald Mile
would strike.

Somewhere on that rampart of water, he was convinced, was a sweet spot, a keyhole no wider than the dory’s bowpost. There was no time to analyze where it might be hiding. But if he somehow managed to hit it exactly right, he just might find the seam in the cosmos and blast through to the other side.