Down the Great Unknown (17 page)

The unexpected rescue lifted everyone's spirits. “Rejoicing that we had not lost her entirely,” as Howland put it, the men set to repairing the
Maid
. “She got one pretty severe thump in her stern, which stove a hole and made her leak badly,” Howland wrote, “but at noon we repaired that, and she is now as good as ever.”

They camped that night, June 16, at the mouth of a small brook and dared to hope that their fortunes had turned. “We hope and expect that the worst of this cañon is over,” Bradley wrote, “for the softer rock is getting near the water and the softer the rock the better the river generally.” They had been laboring through red sandstone but seemed to be coming to a section of white sandstone, which was more prone to crumble under the river's incessant assault and thus less likely to form formidable rapids.

Powell, always intrigued by geology, set off exploring. This was scenery on a grand scale, with “cliffs and crags and towers, a mile back, and two thousand feet overhead,” and a dozen mini-waterfalls cascading over the rocks, and pines and firs and aspens. High above the river, the cliffs were buff and vermilion and bathed in sunlight; far below, they were red and brown and deep in shadow. But the view was as dismaying as it was inspiring. “The light above, made more brilliant by the bright-tinted rocks, and the shadows below more gloomy by the somber hues of the brown walls, increase the apparent depths of the cañons, and it seems a long way up to the world of sunshine and open sky, and a long way down to the bottom of the cañon glooms.”

“Never before,” Powell continued, “have I received such an impression of the vast heights of these cañon walls.” But perched on an overlook halfway up to “the world of sunshine and open sky” and hopeful that the river would soon grow accommodating, Powell quickly brushed aside any dark thoughts. “We sit on some overhanging rocks, and enjoy the scene for a time, listening to the music of falling waters away up the cañons. We name this Rippling Brook.”

Despite Bradley's forecast to the contrary, the river the next day was nearly as unruly as ever. Fortunately, at least some of the rapids were manageable, a welcome change after days of lining and portaging with scarcely any progress to show for it. “Ran many little rappids,” Bradley wrote, and Sumner's slightly fuller account shows what the men were now prepared to consider “little.” At the first rapid of the day, for example, “the freight boats went through in good style, but the
Emma
, in running too near the east shore, got into a bad place and had a close collision, filling half full, but finally got out, all safe.” There followed a stretch of easy water, then a bad rapid that had to be lined, then another easy stretch, and finally a rapid with a drop of about 12 feet in a length of 150 feet. Two of the boats made it through cleanly, “but poor
Kitty's Sister
ran on a rock near the east side and loosened her head block and came down to the other boats
leaking badly.”

After pulling ashore for a slapdash recaulking of the
Kitty Clyde's Sister
(enough “to keep her afloat for a while”), they set out again. The
Emma Dean
, leading the way as usual, “got into a complete nest of whirlpools.” The
Emma
managed to free herself after a hard struggle, but it seemed too risky for the bigger boats. At the end of a long day, then, there was no choice but to line both the heavy boats past the rapid. When the tired crew finally made camp—and this on a day they all hailed as a welcome break from the rigors of the previous week—they had made about five miles.

The campsite was a pretty one, a little spot about a quarter of a mile long and fifty yards wide and thick with willows, cedars, pine trees, sagebrush, and grass. Just downstream was another rapid they would deal with in the morning, after a night's sleep. Everyone had taken special note of the trees and grass, not only as a welcome contrast with the endless vistas of bare rock but because they planned to use pitch from the pines to caulk the leaks in their boats. They had covered only a handful of miles, but the rocks had taken their toll and all the boats needed attention.

Hawkins, the cook, started a fire “in a nice little cove in the brush and rock” and began to prepare lunch. Powell ventured off to explore. The men unloaded the boats to dry out their gear. Suddenly a gust of wind swept up the river and sent embers everywhere. Hawkins had set up shop a little
too
near the brush. In an instant, the entire camp was aflame. Hemmed in by towering stone cliffs, the men could not run inland, so they raced for the boats.

The next moments were chaos. The men tried, more or less simultaneously, to leap in the boats, tear off their burning clothes, smother the flames in their singed hair and beards, and grab the oars. Hawkins grabbed as much of the mess kit as he could carry (in case they could not make it back to camp) and ran for his boat. But the flames had gotten there first and had already burnt through the ropes he had tied up with. Leaping for the boat as it drifted away from the shore, Hawkins lost his balance and fell into ten feet of water. (As many a surprised swimmer has learned, in a big river a step off the beach can be like a step off a table.) He surfaced a moment later, empty-handed and sputtering, and swam after the boat. It was about thirty feet off, and Hall, at the oars, was doing his best to keep it in position upstream of the rapid. Hawkins dragged himself aboard, his clothes no longer aflame but the mess kit gone.

Hall and Hawkins and the others pulled back into shore a short distance downstream, but the wind had spread the fire there, too, and they had to pull away again. Now they found themselves caught in the current and racing headlong into a rapid that no one had scouted. At just this moment, Powell, climbing the cliffs above camp, looked down and saw the men in their boats. Unable to see the flames from where he stood, he watched in astonishment and perplexity as the boats ricocheted through the rapid, like drunks trying to navigate a revolving door.

All three boats made it through safely, the boats intact but the men in poor shape. “One of the crew came in hatless, another shirtless, a third without his pants, and a hole burned in the posterior portion of his drawers,” Oramel Howland reported with malicious good humor, “another with nothing but drawers and shirt, and still another had to pull off his handkerchief from his neck, which was all ablaze. With the loss of his eyelashes and brows, and a favorite moustache, and scorching of his ears, no other harm was done.”

Everyone clambered back over the rocks to camp to see what gear could be salvaged. Not much. Hawkins was the goat of the episode, but no one seemed much perturbed by the loss. “Our plates are gone; our spoons are gone; our knives and forks are gone,” Powell wrote, and then, uncharacteristically, he ventured a small joke: “ ‘Water catch 'em; h-e-a-p catch 'em.' ” Howland drew up a more detailed inventory. They had already lost a portion of the mess kit at Disaster Falls. Now the total that remained, for ten men, was: “One gold pan, used for making bread. One bake-oven, with broken lid. One camp-kettle, for making tea or coffee. One frying-pan. One large spoon and two tea spoons. Three tin plates and five bailing cups.” From here on, the bailing scoops would have to serve as coffee and tea mugs, one for every two men.

In addition, Howland noted, there was “one pick-ax and one shovel.” The last two items were reserved for special occasions. “When a pot of beans, which by the way is a luxury, is boiled in place of tea or coffee,” he explained, “our cook sometimes uses the latter article for a spoon, and the former to clean his teeth after our repast is over.”

These were hardy men, and they viewed setting themselves afire mainly as a comic interlude. Even Bradley—and it was the long-suffering Bradley whose prize mustache had gone up in flames and whose ears were scorched—seemed more irritated by the loss of the mess kit than by his own injuries. Sumner saw it all as capital fun. “Had supper,” he wrote, “and laughed for an hour over the ludicrous scene at the fire.”

After the grinding labor of portaging, the fire seemed not so much a near catastrophe as a sign that the men were untouchable. For the moment, at least, they felt invincible. They had survived the Civil War, they had survived Disaster Falls, they had survived the
Maid
's dash for freedom, and now they had survived a fire. Let the Green do its worst!

The next day found the river as high-spirited as the men. “Had a splendid ride of six miles,” Sumner noted, and Bradley celebrated “a run of almost railroad speed.” This railroad comparison was a favorite of all the men and one they apparently intended literally. Earlier in the trip, Powell had made the identical comparison, and Walter Powell would echo the same phrase later on. Once, when Oramel Howland's boat sped by the
Emma Dean
, which had already pulled to shore, “those in her said we passed them as rapidly as a railway train at its highest speed—sixty miles an hour . . . [and] this was slow to some rapids we have run since.”

This was off by more than a little. Even the fastest rivers are slow. In most places, the Green and the Colorado travel at only five or six miles an hour, a bit faster than a fast walker.
In the narrowest stretches
of the biggest rapids in the Grand Canyon, if the river is running at high volume the current might briefly touch thirty miles an hour. But, as a rule, the current in a world-class rapid is somewhere in the vicinity of twenty miles an hour. If there were a track alongside a rapid, a top sprinter could keep up with a boat for a short distance and a Sunday bicyclist could pass it without much trouble.

Then why do rapids feel so fast? Sumner and Bradley and the others never knew the pleasure of zooming down the highway with the top down, but living in a faster world hasn't taken the thrill from river running. Take a race-car driver out from behind the wheel and push him into white water, and his heart, too, will try to thump its way out of his rib cage.

The key factors are acceleration, drop, and proximity—the river is mere feet away. (Subliminal thoughts of drowning may add a soupçon of nervous excitement, too.) The acceleration hits like a punch to the gut. In the Grand Canyon, for example, the Colorado River is essentially a series of relatively flat, slow-flowing ponds that spill over into steep, violent rapids. The water in a rapid may travel ten times faster than the water in the pond just upstream. The nearness of the water magnifies the feeling of speed. Psychologists talk about “
optic flow
”: Sled down a hill and the ground, only inches away, seems to fly by. Look out an airplane window at the ground thousands of feet below, and the plane seems to be crawling.

There is a moment of extraordinary tension in a boat poised at the top of a rapid. (“I believe I would have given everything I possessed to have been able to turn back,” admitted one novice somehow dragooned into running Hell's Half Mile in 1926, “but there was no turning back then.”) You hang there on the lip, irrevocably committed to the surging waters ahead but still inches beyond the rapid's grasp. The fascination is akin to what some people feel in looking over a balcony railing or a cliff edge and wondering what it would feel like to fall. An instant from now, you will know.

Until that moment, you can at least assure yourself that this is not really going to happen, that there is still a way out. You are leaning out over the balcony railing, it is true, but, after all, you are only
looking
.

And then the railing disappears.

When it comes to picturing a river's speed, our usual habits of thought mislead us. Because rapids throw problems at us by the second, not by the hour, talk of “miles per hour” gets us off on the wrong foot. Twenty miles per hour is a shade less than thirty feet per second, and this alternative way of putting it is far more relevant. At thirty feet a second, in a rapid marked by waves and whirlpools and glistening boulders, the pace seems breakneck.

And we tend to think of cars when we hear “miles per hour.” But a car is a heavy, sturdy cage with brakes and seat belts, and a road is broad and smooth. To get the feel of white water, come out from inside the car. Toss someone the keys and take a seat on the hood. Head down a tilted, twisted road studded with sharp-edged rocks and pocked with eight-foot holes. For best results, find a road that folds itself into ten-foot waves.

•      •      •

When Powell ran the Colorado, there was no such thing as river-running technique. He and his men had to invent their own. In two crucial ways, their tactics differed from those that all modern boatmen use. First, Powell's boats had two men at the oars. Today's boatmen are soloists. Second, Powell's crew ran the rapids “backward,” facing upstream and backing into the dangers lying in wait for them. Boatmen today do row “backward” in a river's flat, easy stretches, so that they can make good time in slow water, but they turn to face downstream when they come to a rapid. (Once in the rapid, there may be maneuvers that call for turning backward briefly, perhaps to spin away from a looming rock or a hole.)

The risk in running rapids backward is plain enough. Having two men at the oars, on the other hand, seems innocuous. The trouble came in putting the two together—Powell's men were rushing backward into trouble
and
there were two pairs of hands at the controls. Emergencies, even ones faced head-on, are not a time for discussion—imagine what would happen to a race car with two steering wheels and two drivers. In the case of a rowboat moving backward through a rapid, how would the two men know, for example, that
now
was the instant they both needed to pull as hard as they could on their right-hand oar?

But Powell had no choice in the matter. Heavy boats meant two-man teams. Hard-to-maneuver boats built for speed cannot dance a water ballet; they must blast their way through rapids as fast as they can go. The reason is that if a boat in a river is to maneuver through white water with any degree of success, there are only two choices: It must move either faster or slower than the current. If the boat simply moves at the river's speed, like a drifting stick, it will go where the river takes it. With boatmen rowing backward in hard-to-steer boats, Powell had to opt for speed, with all the risks that came with it.