The Emerald Mile: The Epic Story of the Fastest Ride in History Through the Heart of the Grand Canyon (56 page)

Like all private boaters, Zemach and his companions had been forced to place their names on a ten-year waiting list to secure a coveted permit for their trip. Although they had shortcut the process by securing a canceled permit, the paperwork, the follow-up phone calls, the endless wrangles and delays, had been intensely tedious and annoying. Now, a trio of yahoos had jumped the queue and were poaching a trip while the river was closed.

Zemach didn’t have the faintest idea who these boatmen were or why they were launching under the cover of darkness on the near side of midnight. But what they were doing was evidently unlawful and wrong, and this was not something that he, Zemach, was prepared to overlook or ignore.

When morning arrived, he would find the ranger in charge at Lee’s Ferry and let him know exactly what had taken place.

M
eanwhile, the little crowd of river guides continued staring into the darkness. For a few seconds the
Emerald Mile
’s crescent-shaped silhouette was etched perfectly by the moonbeams coruscating like hammered silver in the current.

The light held the dory for a moment.

And then, just like that, she was gone, swallowed up by the canyon.

I.
Starting in 1976, in response to sanitation problems inside the canyon, Park Service regulations have required all river runners to “containerize” their human waste in rocket boxes and deposit the contents at a sewage-treatment facility at the end of their trip. The rule remains in effect to this day.

When the rapids are mentioned, I forget everything else.

They cast a spell on me. Let’s ride them all!

—G
EORGIE
W
HITE

Kenton Grua sets up to smash through the main wave in Crystal.

And in the great wink of the moon

the river blazed more brightly than elves’ gold.

—T
HOMAS
W
OLFE

D
URING
the early years of dory guiding, back when Martin Litton’s crew was still struggling to unlock the secrets of the river, it wasn’t unusual for one of the novice guides to commit a series of errors—flipping over and over again or hitting a long sequence of rocks—and find himself worrying that he might not have what it took to become a boatman. Under these circumstances, an older guide such as Kenton Grua or Regan Dale would often take the demoralized rookie aside and let him in on a little secret. If you truly want to learn to read white water, they would tell him, then study a rapid by moonlight. Moonbeams reverse the patterns of light and shadow, etching the surface and illuminating every facet and ripple in a way that daylight never can. Mysteries that are inscrutable at noon reveal themselves at midnight, enabling an oarsman not only to see the current but also to
understand
it—where it wanted to go, where it was actually headed, and why.

That was never more true than on a night like this, especially along the upper length of the canyon before the rims receded into the sky and the walls rose more than a mile above the surface of the river. In this initial stretch, as the Colorado began boring into the great dome of the Kaibab Plateau, the white radiance lit up the surface of the water, burnishing the complex matrix of lines
and waves, eddies and boils, with such clarity that even in those places where the river was blanketed by the deep pockets of shadow cast by the canyon walls—places where the moonbeams couldn’t reach the water—Grua and his crew avoided switching on their searchlight, preferring instead to ride the luminous night.

Four miles downstream from the ferry, they shot beneath the twin spans of the Navajo Bridge, the last place a vehicle could cross the Colorado for more than three hundred miles. The bridge, which arced 467 feet above the river, marked the threshold where the industrialized world receded for good and was overtaken by the primeval world at the bottom of the canyon.

Their calculus was straightforward. At 70,000 cfs, the current was already moving at roughly 6 mph. To have a shot at breaking the record, however, the boatmen would need to achieve a total speed of somewhere between 9 and 10 mph through ceaseless, furious rowing. In addition to the enormous physical demands this would place on them, it would leave absolutely no margin for error. Any loss of time for any reason—extracting themselves from an eddy, righting the boat after a flip, repairing a broken oar—would have to be made up with even more speed. In addition, they would have to keep an eye open for river patrols and do their best to avoid the rangers. A helicopter would be a bad sign, signaling detainment and possible arrest, with whatever consequences might follow.

How those constraints might add up was impossible to predict. Their aim was simply to keep the dory’s throttle wide open, especially during the daylight hours, when they would be surfing through the fastest segment in the Granite Gorge, which also contained most of the big white water. But first they would have to make it through this night—a challenge whose magnitude seemed to grow larger just beyond the bridge as the walls closed up and the cliffs began to ascend, bluntly foreclosing any possibility of retreat. From this point on, every stroke of their oars would usher them deeper into the earth, deeper into the past, and closer to the rapids that awaited them in the heart of the canyon.

A
s Grua pulled and recovered, pulled and recovered, he paused at the end of every third or fourth stroke to steal a glance over his shoulder and peer downstream for the telltale blur of whiteness that would signal a rapid. In the moonlit stretches, he could discern the glimmer of the wave tops. But in the long reaches where everything went black, he was forced to rely on what he could feel—the subtle tremors that the river sent up through the blades and shafts of the oars into his fingers and hands, and from there to those places where his
knowledge of the river resided. As he felt his way downstream, the map of the canyon that he carried in his memory scrolled smoothly along the surface of his mind.

Meanwhile, Wren and Petschek were relying on a different set of sensory impressions to perform their job, the crucial task of high-siding. Drawing on their own innate feel for the river and its hydraulics, which they could sense by tuning their ears and by gripping the gunwales, they braced for each oncoming wave with a subtle lean of the shoulders here or there, and, when necessary, executing an explosive thrust of their torsos to maintain the boat’s equilibrium. Each move was coordinated at bow and stern, performed at precisely the right moment, with just the right amount of force to counteract the current and keep the dory upright. This work unfolded in wordless harmony as all three members of the crew moved together, enabling boat and crew to merge with the current in a kind of dance, a ballet, that became an expression of the river itself.

Such teamwork was possible because, among the three of them, they boasted more than forty years of experience on the Colorado, years that had imparted the sort of understanding that could not be replicated by other means, and which now compensated for the advantages that they lacked: the unbridled energy and the fast-twitch muscle fibers of twenty-one-year-olds. Their wisdom and their ability to orient themselves in relation to the geometry of the river corridor—to calibrate their progress, to ration their resources, to brace for what lay ahead—were critical to the pacing of a marathon such as this. Without those assets, they wouldn’t have stood a ghost of a chance. Yet, within the first hour, each man understood that although this storehouse of knowledge counted for quite a bit, it also amounted to nothing at all, because the river they were riding was something entirely new—a creature that did not resemble even the swollen torrent that they had encountered on their most recent trip, less than three weeks earlier. This was sobering and strange, but also deeply thrilling.

For more than twenty years, the boatmen of the Grand Canyon had lived and worked on a diminished Colorado, a river hobbled and constrained by a dam that most of them felt should never have been built. But now, with this flood, time had been reversed, and the past, for a brief and intoxicating moment, had switched places with the present. This was the Old Man himself, unbound, a thing of monstrous and terrible beauty. To be swept into its embrace, to race over its ancient bed of billion-year-old bedrock atop a watery crescendo that might never come down again, to contend with those challenges in the middle of the night while rowing faster than they ever had in their lives—that was a thing to marvel at, even more, perhaps, than the speed record itself.

In short, this was their only chance to meet the river that had flowed through
the dreams of John Wesley Powell. Like Powell and his crew had done more than a hundred years earlier, they were now rocketing into the Great Unknown.

A
s they shot downstream in the darkness, what they noticed first was how much had simply disappeared. In this upper stretch, virtually every major feature—the keeper holes, the crashing laterals, the ribbons of current twisting upon themselves beneath the surface—had been washed out by the discharges from the dam. This liquid express lane that was whisking them downstream had neutralized obstacles that could have presented nightmare challenges in the dark. Thus, for a few delicious moments along that upper stretch, they found themselves toying with the possibility that their ordeal might be less arduous than they had initially feared.

Was this going to be a cinch? Grua wondered.

The answer arrived shortly after 1:00 a.m., as they entered a necklace of nine chain-linked rapids known as the
Roaring Twenties and encountered the first of the bizarre hydraulics that would plague them for the rest of the trip. Here the eddy fences were massive, and the standing waves—which were supposed to be stationary—were milling on the surface of the river like a herd of coyote-spooked cattle, shifting position without warning, mindlessly colliding into one another or collapsing upon themselves with thunderous explosions. Trying to feel their way past these obstacles on the fly felt alien and surreal.
It also scared the dickens out of them.