The Emerald Mile: The Epic Story of the Fastest Ride in History Through the Heart of the Grand Canyon (51 page)

B
ack onshore, an oar guide by the name of Jeffe Aronson had taken up a rather dramatic position from which to observe Parmenter’s run. Together with a passenger named Richard Kocim, an electrical engineer from Chicago, Aronson had climbed down from the scouting terrace and positioned himself on a rounded boulder at shore level, directly across from the hydraulic jump.

This vantage was extremely noisy—the thunder of the explosion wave, less than fifteen yards away, was so loud that
they felt as if they were standing beneath the wing of a jumbo jet as the engines spooled up. To Kocim, it seemed an odd place to wait because they were completely cut off from the raft as it approached the entrance to the rapid. But Aronson knew that once Parmenter entered the tongue, they would have a perfect view of what unfolded.

The two men stood shoulder to shoulder for several long minutes. Then, silently and without warning, the silver-gray hulk of the raft made its appearance—at which point Aronson found himself doing a double take.

The raft wasn’t at all where he expected it to be. Instead of hugging the right shore with its bow plowing through the tops of the tamarisk trees, the boat was coasting far out in the middle of the river and pointed straight downstream. This made no sense to Aronson, who knew that unless Parmenter initiated a hard turn to the right and gunned his throttle all the way, the raft was in danger of being speared directly into the hole.

One second ticked past. Then another.

Aronson stared helplessly, waiting for the boatman to make his move. Finally, he turned toward Kocim and cupped his hand around the man’s ear.

Kocim, a keen amateur photographer, was carrying a Minolta SRT with a 200 mm lens.

“Do you have a fresh roll of film?” Aronson yelled.

Kocim nodded.

“See that pink dike off the wall?” shouted Aronson, pointing to a vein of Zoroaster granite running down the cliff on the far side of the river. “If they don’t turn before they pass that, it’s over.”

As he completed this statement, the boat slid past the marker—and in that moment Aronson did something he had never before done, an act so instinctive and so involuntary that he was barely aware of his own performance.

He raised his arms high into the air, opened his mouth, and began to scream.

A
lthough no one on the raft could hear Aronson, his scream marked the moment when Roberson reacted with explosiveness, pumping his right arm and pointing emphatically to the submerged tamarisk trees.
The gestures had only one possible meaning.

Get right now!

It was too late. With Roberson continuing to gesticulate, the raft raced down the tongue. By now Parmenter had canted his bow slightly to the right, but it made little difference. The full force of the river was working decisively against him.

“Oh, God,” Parmenter yelled at Roberson,
“we’re going to hit the hole!”

In the final seconds of their ride down the smooth surface of the tongue, they were moving so fast that the wind took the brim of Parmenter’s blue-and-white baseball cap and flipped it back on him.

The second the cap flipped up, they were slammed directly into the hole and the white wall of water stopped them cold.

F
rom the perspective of the passengers inside Parmenter’s raft, things suddenly became terribly confusing.

Lin Sultzer, who was positioned at the front, abruptly felt herself being catapulted through the air.

Mary Ann McNammee, who was sitting opposite Sultzer, felt a sharp pain in her left leg.

Sally Lonner, who was directly behind Sultzer, reeled as something hard—she had no idea what it was—struck her squarely in the face.
We’re going over
, thought Lonner as her glasses broke in two.

Amid this confusion, no one had a clear idea of what was happening to Bill and Ellen Wert. Several passengers later stated that instead of getting down as he was ordered,
Bill had stood up just prior to the moment of impact to get a quick snapshot of the rapid with his camera. Others insisted that nothing of the sort had happened—or, alternatively, that Wert had failed to get down in the first place because he had been unable to hear Roberson’s instructions.

In actual fact, no one in Parmenter’s motor rig had the faintest idea what was taking place.
Those details could only come from the shoreline, where Richard Kocim, who had the body of the Minolta glued to the front of his face and was shooting as fast as he could, was recording the most graphic series of stop-action white-water images ever captured on film—a step-by-step chronicle, in sixteen frames, of a four-ton raft being taken apart and consumed by the Colorado.

Click:
One of the first shots in Kocim’s series catches the nose of the thirty-three-foot rig as it vanishes into the face of the twenty-five-foot-high standing wave. At this moment no one, including Bill Wert, is standing up.

Click: The sixth photo captures the rig as the wave rolls it sideways.

Click: In the ninth picture, the entire raft is standing vertically on its left side tube and is about to go over.

Click: The tenth shot shows the side tubes flailing wildly and the metal frame contorting as the rig is viciously window-shaded, an act of astonishing violence in which a boat becomes entrained in the turbulence at the bottom of the hole and is rolled over and over.

But it is image number twelve that is perhaps the most remarkable.

Click: As the rig is torn to pieces, something in the middle of the boat—something that looks vaguely like a piece of ribbon—appears to be flapping in the air. This is one of main straps that are responsible for holding the entire boat together—a section of two-inch-wide nylon webbing whose breaking strength is rated at nearly six thousand pounds.

The instant that Kocim’s finger triggers the shutter, Crystal has snapped the webbing in two and is ripping the boat into pieces.

T
he sequence that Kocim recorded with his camera unfolded far too swiftly to register as discrete events in the mind of Jeffe Aronson, who was still standing with his arms upraised and his mouth open. In Aronson’s eyes, it simply looked as if the raft had become a piece of prey that was being devoured by a ravenous monster. Amid its feeding, however, Aronson discerned something unusual.

Even over the roar of the rapid and the wail that was emanating from deep inside him, he detected a sharp and percussive sound, almost like a gunshot. Only later, when he had seen the flapping piece of ribbon in Kocim’s twelfth photo, did Aronson realize that this was the moment the two-inch, six-thousand-pound webbing had parted.

As Parmenter’s rig was disemboweled, the boat disappeared beneath the surface of the river. While Kocim continued shooting, Aronson scanned the water for some sign of where it had gone.

For a moment, there was nothing. Then, just as abruptly as the raft had disappeared, a tangled mass of tubing was spat to the surface, churned around several more times, released from the hole, and cast contemptuously downstream.

And now Aronson noticed something else. All over the river, small black dots were popping to the surface, and each dot was surrounded by an orange-colored blob.

It took a moment for him to realize that these were the heads of the passengers and their life jackets. Some of those people appeared to be swimming hard for the shallows. The rest were simply fighting to stay afloat as they were hurtled downstream in the direction of the next rapid.

B
ack at the top of Crystal, Dave Stratton had no idea what had taken place. Having delayed his own departure by several minutes to allow Parmenter to make his run, Stratton was untying his lines when a sharp yell from shore pulled him up short.

“You just had a boat flip!” cried a raft guide named Suzanne Jordan, who was running toward him.
“You’ve got to get down and get your people!”

Stratton immediately ordered his passengers off the raft. As everyone scrambled back onshore, Walt Gallaher’s son Scott and his son-in-law, Bob Paparelli, turned to Stratton and said that they’d like to lend a hand. When Stratton asked if they were strong swimmers, both men nodded.

“Well, we may end up flipping too, possibly,” replied Stratton. “No guarantees.”

Both men nodded again. They were on board.

Accompanied by his two volunteers and a pair of swampers named Bob and Dave, Stratton backed his rig off the beach, eased the stern into the current, then pointed his nose toward the right shore and set up for his turnaround run.

The maneuver was flawless. As the boat neatly skirted the edge of the hole, a roar of elation rose above the thunder of the rapid as every single person on the scouting terrace, passengers and boatmen alike, cheered at the top of their lungs.

Stratton and his four-man rescue squadron were too preoccupied to notice the accolade. Long before they reached the tail waves at the bottom of the rapid, they were already spotting the survivors from Parmenter’s boat.

The first person they keyed into was Sally Lonner, who had pulled herself onto some rocks at the side of the river and was sitting with her head in her hands, her face covered in blood.