The Emerald Mile: The Epic Story of the Fastest Ride in History Through the Heart of the Grand Canyon (58 page)

Squeezed to less than half its width upstream, the current now began pushing against itself, and as the turbulence increased, so did its power. The water seethed and churned, folding back on itself and detonating with a ferocity that took the boatmen’s breath away. Now brute force, plus several additional seconds, were required to execute pivots that had been performed upstream with little more than a deft flick of an oar blade. Even the smallest mistake—striking a wave at slightly the wrong angle, allowing the dory to brush against an eddy fence—would
flip them over in a heartbeat. And added to the mix were a slew of new hydraulic features, particularly when it came to the big waves.

The size of some of those haystacks was shocking—almost twenty feet from trough to crest, dimensions normally found on the open ocean. But even more disconcerting was how squirrelly they were. The faces of the waves were rapidly changing direction, forcing the oarsman to make furious corrections to meet them squarely as they hit with staccato bursts from every direction:

Bam—a strike from the left—

—wham—a blow from the right—

—with two more ahead, no chance of correcting for both, and a third looming directly in the center just downstream—

—bam—

—wham—

—BAM!—

The dory reeled—they were about to go sideways and broach; but Wren and Petschek hurled their weight from one side to the next, then back again. The waves were coming in every direction, drenching them in sheets of water that were heavy, green, shockingly cold.

Wren shook his head to clear his eyes—he had an ice-cream headache, he was
totally
soaked, the water was freezing—but they were
upright
, they were
intact
, and they were washing into the tail waves, which were bottlenecked between two massive eddies reaching toward the center from opposite sides of the river.

Grua rode the rooster tail of current between them, threading perfectly, keeping them from slipping off. But then a whirlpool loomed. It was moving in their direction. He corrected again—cranking sharply, pulling with his right oar while pushing on the left—
pushing hard, ramming the oar handle into the pit of his shoulder as he shoved with a twisting motion that came from his entire torso
, and the dory snapped around, spinning 180 degrees in half a second, and as the boat finished the turn, Grua leaned far forward, dug his blades into the water and
exploded
, pulling on both oars, spearing the boat down the center of the river, splitting the smooth water between the vortex and the eddy fence and—
whoosh
—they were through, bobbing in the heaves of the spent rapid. But now Petschek, who was in the stern, was shouting directions about what lay ahead.

Grua listened but didn’t turn around. He could feel equal resistance with both oar blades, but now the right blade began to move easier. He was slipping toward the eddy so he took a second pull on the right, sending them back into
the main current, and snatched a quick glance over his shoulder—the river was bending ahead, he’d need to correct for that.

—
Boil
, shouted Petschek.
On your right!
—

Another correction.

—
Whirlpool
, cried Petschek.
On your left!
—

Another correction.

And
another.

And so it went. In this manner, they slammed through the rapids of the upper part of the gorge. Into Sockdolager and Grapevine and 83 Mile. Then past Zoroaster and 85 Mile and into Pipe Creek and the Devil’s Spittoon, a monstrous eddy along the outside end of a vicious series of S-curves. The rides were intense and brutal. But, by
God
, they were truly flying.

At Mile 90, they smashed through Horn Creek, and three miles downstream, they rammed past Granite, then started their approach toward Hermit, every boatman’s favorite, because it featured some of the largest and smoothest waves in the canyon, each more exhilarating than the next. Here they had their first unpleasant brush with another expedition.

It was a commercial oar-raft trip on its fifth day on the water and led by a guide named Jimmy Hendrick. One of the wilder characters in the canyon, Hendrick enjoyed shocking his passengers by catching a scorpion, tearing off the pincer, and popping the live creature into his mouth. He was leading his squadron out of the eddy at the top of Hermit, just as the
Emerald Mile
came tearing around the bend with Petschek at the oars. This meant that both boats would enter the tongue together, breaking the unwritten rule that forbade an upstream boatman from attempting to pass a downstream craft at the head of a rapid.

The offense was unintended, but Hendrick, who had no idea about the speed run and was baffled by the sudden intrusion of this rogue dory, was livid. As the rubber oar raft and the wooden dory rode side by side,
Hendrick pulled off an impressively coordinated feat, cranking on his oars and squaring his bow to meet the face of each oncoming wave while simultaneously hurling an uninterrupted stream of verbal abuse at Petschek. Up the face of one wave, down into the trough of the next, Hendrick damned the doryman for his outrageous boatmanship, his flaming incompetence, and his unpardonable lack of river etiquette.

This confrontation was completely at odds with the culture of the river, the sort of incident that, under normal circumstances, would require a pause for an apology to smooth things over. But right then, Petschek didn’t give a damn what Hendrick’s problem was. Like Grua and Wren, he was focused intently on the next big obstacle, the one they’d been dreading all night, which was just downstream and coming up fast.

Crystal.

J
ust before 9:00 a.m., John Thomas, the ranger stationed at Mile 98, caught sight of the first of the big motor rigs rounding the bend upstream. Gathering up his things, he clomped down the footpath to the little cove just above the rapid that formed a parking inlet.

Using his clipboard as a semaphore, Thomas waved the rig and a second one that was following it into the cove and grabbed hold of the bowline. Leaving the swamper to tie the boat off to the trunk of a tamarisk, he clambered on board to have a conference with the trip leader and lay down the rules. Then, together, he and the guides started organizing the walk-around.

This was done stepwise. In the first stage, the passengers were helped off the boat and sent on their march downstream in the direction of Thank God Eddy. As the passengers winded their way through the boulders of the little delta, the guides and the swampers tramped in single file up to the scouting terrace to discuss how to cheat the explosion wave.

Several minutes later, another expedition appeared, then a third, and before long the Crystal Creek delta was a hubbub of color and activity. A flotilla of nearly a dozen brightly colored rigs of all shapes and sizes was now wedged in the inlet—all rubber, not a dory among them. A smaller cluster of rigs was also gathered at the pickup eddy below the rapid. Between those two points, nearly a hundred passengers, all of whom were still wearing their orange life jackets, were scattered along the shore, picking their way among the bushes or perched like herons atop the boulders to watch their guides make their runs.

The boatmen did their best to hug the right-hand shore as closely as possible, even if this meant bouncing over a few of the submerged rocks or getting raked by the branches of a tamarisk. One or two of the boats lost their angle and flirted with the shoulder of the standing wave. But none of them got clobbered. Below the rapid, a couple of oar rafts were unable to break out of the main current, failed to make the pull-in above Thank God Eddy, and were carried off downriver. But the motor rigs gunned their engines, rammed the eddy at full throttle, and gathered up the stranded passengers, with the aim of transferring them back to their rafts downriver.

Nobody flipped. Nobody got hurt. No one was thrown overboard. As the runs were successfully completed, John Thomas found himself nodding in satisfaction. Everything was proceeding smoothly, exactly as planned.

Within half an hour the congestion had already started to ease, and only a handful of rigs were in the parking inlet. Then around nine thirty, Thomas climbed aboard one of the last of the big boats—a giant, thirty-seven-foot motor rig. He was walking down the diamond-plated aluminum deck to talk to
the guide when he glanced upriver and spotted something strange rounding the turn above the rapid.

It was a dory, a little Briggs boat, the first one of the day.

Her beryl-green hull and bright red gunnels seemed to shimmer in the morning air. She appeared to have a shallow draft—her hull was riding far too high in the water for her to be carrying much dunnage. And oddly, only three people were on board, all boatmen, judging by the colors of their life jackets.

Each man was staring rigidly downstream toward the entrance to the rapid, and Thomas could see that they were making no effort to pull in or slow down. Clearly, they had no intention of stopping.

Hell, they weren’t even going through the motions of pretending.

Do or do not. There is no try.

—Y
ODA

A
S
the
Emerald Mile
neared the top of Crystal and its crew was preparing to parse out their approach to the rapid, their attention was drawn to a scene on the right-hand shore—the boats bobbing in the cove, the guides clustered along the terrace, the swarm of passengers dotting the hillside, the shoreline, and every point in between.

Then they took a closer look at the big motor rig in the cove. Standing on the deck, clearly visible and facing directly toward them, was a man in a ranger’s uniform. He had a radio in one hand, a clipboard in the other, and he was shielding his eyes with the clipboard as he eyeballed the dory.

Wren, who was in the bow, spotted him first and snapped his head away immediately in order to break off any possible eye contact.

Eye contact was a bad idea.

Wren knew that if the ranger motioned for them to pull into the cove while they were looking directly at him, there would be no question that they had blatantly ignored the command, thereby compounding their sins. So, in the manner of a teenager hoping to coast past a policeman who has just watched him blaze through a stoplight, Wren kept his gaze pointed downstream and earnestly repeated to himself,
Don’t look at the ranger. . . . Don’t look at the ranger. . . . Don’t look at the ranger. . . .

All the while, of course, Wren was carefully examining the ranger out of the corner of his eye and asking himself, with equal earnestness,
What’s he thinking? What’s he doing with that clipboard? How much trouble are we in?

Directly behind Wren, Petschek and Grua were conducting an abridged form of the same debate.

“What do you think we should do if he waves us in?” asked Grua, who was once again at the oars.

“Wave back?” replied Petschek.

That had a nice ring to it. Petschek’s suggestion gave voice to the kind of brio that had launched this enterprise in the first place.
Inside his heart, however, each boatman knew perfectly well that the rationalizations upon which their entire escapade had been based were bogus. No permission, formal or informal, stated or implied, had ever been given for this venture. They also knew that the responsibility of the ranger on the motor rig was to report what was about to unfold directly to the superintendent. And they understood that in the eyes of a man like Richard Marks, this stunt of theirs would be deemed offensive and wrong, a flagrant bid to thumb their noses at the rangers and ridicule the law.

And so, as Grua and his crew skimmed across the final few yards that separated them from the top of the rapid, the tiny pieces of hope to which each of them had been clinging, the little lies they’d been telling themselves all night long about how it might be possible to skate through the canyon without anybody’s noticing and to keep this whole thing a secret—all of that blew away like the last leaves on the upper branches of a November cottonwood.

Yet delusion is a powerful thing. Which is why, there at the top of the rapid, in the moment of suspended composure before the river picked up speed and all hell started breaking loose, the three boatmen continued to fan the dying embers of their belief that, despite all evidence to the contrary, things might yet work out.

“We fantasized that it might be okay, but we kinda knew the truth too,” Grua would later tell a friend. “We knew we had God on our side, though.”