The Best Travel Writing 2011 Page 12

  The next morning, while I stand in the kitchen making coffee, I see the man who had sounded the alarm the day before loading his glass into the recycling containers in the street below. Or at least, it really looks like the man from the day before. Nibbling at my croissant, my heart is warmed, and I am moved to thank him again. Opening the top half of our Dutch door, I call out to him in bad French, “Je vivre!” An attempt at a little joke, calling out “I’m alive!” The man squints at me and stands up from his glass bottles. “Hallo! JE VIVRE!!!!!” I call again, thinking he hasn’t heard me. He nods vaguely, looking befuddled. I yell it again when he still doesn’t laugh. “Oui, d’accord…” he says uncertainly before he gets in his Peugeot and drives away. Standing in the doorway, I suddenly realize that it is not, in fact, the man from the day before. I laugh, and the laughter grows and radiates until there are tears in my eyes and I spend several minutes shaking with deep belly laughs in the kitchen. I cannot imagine what he and the other villagers he will undoubtedly gossip to must think of the American shouting from her front door that she’s alive, she’s alive, she’s alive!

  My mother’s house on the Haut de Fée has not had a house number since she and my aunt bought it in ruins years ago and restored it. So the mailman delivers my mail to the neighbors, knowing that in this small village, it will eventually make its way to me. But I want a mailbox. I want an address. So one weekend I go to the town hall to talk to the mayor. The town hall is only open from 9 to 10 A.M. on Saturdays. I wait in line behind farmers, and then it is my turn, and in broken French, I introduce myself and ask the mayor for a house number on the Haut de Fée. “We have no number,” I say. “La poste n’arrive pas.” He nods. He explains that nobody has lived in the little house for many decades, that it has never been assigned an address. He spreads out a blue parcel map of the village on his desk and points out that we are the only residence on that road besides the cemetery. He puts on his glasses and studies the map closely. Even numbers are on the left, odd numbers on the right. The cemetery is on the left. We are on the right, odd numbered. “O.K.,” he says finally, straightening and removing his glasses. Deal. We can have a house number. I smile, triumphant with my accomplishment. “Merci,” I say. “So, what number is our house?” He sticks his thumb in the air. “Numéro un.” Number one. We shake on it.

  Walking back up the faerie hill to the house that overlooks the village and the valley beyond, I feel strangely powerful in the realization that I can just walk into the mayor’s office and change the map. Who knew you could change the map? I feel the triumph of my small victories.

  After the winter, I return to California. The letters are there.

  Be a writer, they say.

  Mieke Eerkens was born in Los Angeles, California to Dutch parents and has spent her life divided between the United States and The Netherlands. She has a B.A. in English-Creative Writing from San Francisco State University, and an M.A. in English Literature from Leiden University in The Netherlands. For the last seven years, she lived in the San Francisco Bay Area, where she worked in Communications and Marketing for the nonprofit sector. She is currently delighted to be working on an MFA in Creative Writing at The University of Iowa.

  MICHAEL SHAPIRO

  Beneath the Rim

  Our boats are four in number. Three are built of oak, stanch and firm (with) water-tight cabin…. These will buoy the boats should the waves roll them over in rough water. The fourth is made of pine…built for fast rowing…. We take with us rations deemed sufficient to last for ten months.

  —John Wesley Powell, The Exploration of the Colorado River and Its Canyons

  WHAT A DIFFERENCE 140 YEARS MAKES, I THINK AS we pump up our inflatable Hypalon boats and fill our coolers at Lee’s Ferry on the eve of a 297-mile journey down the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon. John Wesley Powell’s rations on his 1869 expedition included flour for unleavened bread, bacon, dried apples, coffee, and whiskey. The basics. For our twenty-four-day trip, we pack pasta and pesto, fresh organic broccoli and carrots, homemade apple and pumpkin pies, and a whole turkey, frozen in a block of ice, for Thanksgiving two and a half weeks after our launch.

  Powell, a geologist, explorer, and Civil War captain who lost most of one arm during the Battle of Shiloh, set out in 1869 with nine other men to attempt the first descent of the Colorado. Among Powell’s fleet were boats called Maid of the Canyon and No Name; the boat I’ll help steer down the river is the Black Pearl. We learn from Johnny Beers, of Canyon REO, the company renting us the boats, that the Black Pearl was recently washed out of a Canyon camp by a flash flood and floated forty miles downstream. When found, it was upright, a map book was still atop a cooler, Johnny said. An auspicious story, the kind of tale that whether true or embellished is calming on the eve of a river trip down one of the most ferocious whitewater rivers in the world. Much more reassuring than the blown-up photos on Canyon REO’s wall showing a 1983 fatal flip in Crystal rapids.

  Unlike most trips down the Canyon, we’re guiding ourselves rather than relying on a commercial outfitter. We have sixteen people in five boats; rowing is shared but each boat has a captain responsible for rigging and getting the raft safely through the most fearsome rapids. But no one in our group, other than me, has been down the Colorado through the Canyon before, and I’ve only done it once, twelve years ago at a different water level. It’s a river whose hydraulics are unlike any other, with pounding waves higher than our sixteen-foot boats are long, and sucking holes that can flip a raft and hold on to its passengers, recirculating boats and humans like a washing machine. It’s called getting Maytagged.

  As the sunset turns the canyon walls golden red, we finish packing our provisions. I wrap duct tape and cardboard around our bottles of tequila, gin, and Jack Daniel’s to protect our good soldiers from the rollicking rapids ahead. After sleeping fitfully through a frosty November night, our group leader Kristen, a twenty-six-year-old Outward Bound guide from Moab, Utah, calls us together and we meet with a Grand Canyon ranger. He makes sure we have all the necessary equipment: maps, ropes, and other safety gear, and a “groover” for human waste.

  Why is it called a groover? Back in the early days of whitewater rafting, the groover was nothing more than a large metal ammo box lined with a Hefty bag, so after sitting on it, rafters would have a long groove on each cheek and thigh. Modern groovers have toilet seats but the name has, well, stuck.

  After months of planning, preparing and provisioning, we’re off. The Canyon is wide at Lee’s Ferry, and the early afternoon sun illuminates the sculpted rust-colored walls. I share a boat with Owen, an Englishman in his early forties with a dry sense of humor who came to the western U.S. to teach snowboarding and do some tech work. Owen, our boat captain, takes the first pulls on the oars.

  The euphoria of the journey’s first moments, especially on a naturally flowing waterway, is palpable. We hear hoots and cheers from our companions upstream as we hit our first rapids. Powell had similar feelings of exultation when he navigated the first whitewater of his trip: “We thread the narrow passage with exhilarating velocity,” he wrote, “mounting the high waves, whose foaming crests dash over us, and plunging into the troughs, until we reach the quiet water below.”

  We wake before the sun tops the rim on Day 2 and see our fully laden boats on the beach, high and dry. The river has dropped precipitously, a result of timed releases followed by curtailed flows from the Glen Canyon Dam upstream. Without the dam we probably wouldn’t have enough water to be boating in November. But I’d trade that in a second to get rid of the blockage that inundated a canyon many believe was as beautiful as the Grand, but in a gentler, more seductive way. Former Sierra Club president David Brower called the 710-foot-high, 300-foot-wide dam “America’s most regretted environmental mistake.” The reservoir the dam created is called Lake Powell, which I’m certain would make old Captain Powell, who reveled in the beauty of this place, wince.

  We know that eventually the water will rise an
d allow us to get our boats back in the river, so we wait. “That’s what I like about there not being other groups around,” says Lynsey, an easygoing outdoor leader and flute player. “There’s no one to laugh at us,” she says. “We can laugh at ourselves.”

  The sun is going down and the shadows are settling in the canyon. The vermilion gleams and roseate hues, blending with the green and gray tints, are slowly changing to somber brown above, and black shadows are creeping over them below; and now it is a dark portal to a region of gloom—the gateway through which we are to enter on our voyage of exploration to-morrow. What shall we find?

  Powell’s description shows not just apprehension about the monstrous rapids he expected downriver, but his appreciation of the natural beauty of the Southwest. Unlike the dour explorers of his time, Powell appreciated the glory of the landscape.

  Consider what his contemporary, Lt. Joseph Christmas Ives, who attempted to navigate the Colorado in 1857, said about the Grand Canyon and the river that runs through it: “The region…is altogether valueless. It can be approached only from the south, and after entering it there is nothing to do but leave. Ours has been the first, and will doubtless be the last, party of whites to visit this profitless locality. It seems intended by nature that the Colorado River…shall forever be unvisited and undisturbed.”

  Today several million people visit the Canyon each year and about a million of those hike into it, according to the National Park Service. About twenty thousand people raft the Colorado River each year, mostly on guided commercial trips. The figure would be far higher if the park didn’t restrict the number of boaters with a lottery permit system. Until a few years ago, there was a waiting list to get permits for noncommercial trips, like ours, down the Colorado. When the list stretched to more than twenty years it was phased out and replaced with the lottery system. If boaters can’t use a permit, they can cancel, which happens with some frequency for cold-season trips—that’s how we got our winning lottery ticket.

  On Day 2 we catch an eddy and pull over to scout House Rock Rapid, our first real test, seventeen miles down from the put-in (starting point) at Lee’s Ferry. To scout we hike above the rapid to see it. Unlike Powell, we have a detailed map that suggests routes through the rapids. But the river is ever changing. Boulders tumble into it and can make formerly safe routes hazardous; the powerful current can rearrange rocks, and a rapid can be easy at low water but frightening at higher flows—or vice versa. So we scout and understand the name of this rapid: the current plunges against a rock the size of a house, creating fearsome hydraulics.

  In the rapids a fast funnel of waves coerces our boat to the left, toward the canyon’s south wall. Lateral waves push the boat sideways. Owen pulls at the oars with all his strength—we get just right of two mammoth waves and a hole that could flip a boat. I peer into the churning maw of the rapid’s recirculating hole as we clear it, the dark waves crashing in upon themselves.

  We celebrate that evening at House Rock camp, just below the rapid, with gin-and-tonics and feast on fish tacos and fresh organic salad with goddess dressing. That evening I read of Powell’s reliance on “flour that has been wet and dried so many times that it is all musty and full of hard lumps.” Hanging off the side of each of our boats is a mesh bag filled with beer, staying cool and ready in the fifty-degree river water.

  The next morning we scramble up eggs with spinach and cheddar. I overhear Kevin, the youngest member of our group at twenty-two, say “I don’t need the hot cock this morning.” Startled, I see Victoria, a nurturing soul who’s become our camp mom, reach across the table, grab a bottle, and say, “I’ll take the hot cock anytime of day.” They’re talking about the Sriracha chili sauce, with its proud and upright rooster on the label.

  In the evenings, Powell’s party dispelled “the gloom of these great depths” by sharing Civil War stories around a campfire; many of his crew had fought in the conflict. Though we cook on propane stoves, we too build fires and share our “war stories” of prior river adventures, love gone awry and the misguided exploits of our youth. We brighten the cold, dark evenings with tiki torches and strands of battery-powered twinkly colored lights that we drape around our chairs, adding a note of festivity to our home for this one night.

  And we sing songs like The Band’s “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down,” and Bob Dylan’s “Wagon Wheel,” tunes that would have been as timely and at home in the nineteenth century as they are in the twenty-first. Our voices are leavened by Lynsey’s plaintive flute and Kevin’s acoustic guitar, toted on the river in watertight cases. Kevin, who just completed college, is considering a career in outdoor education, like his older brother Steve, a trip leader for Outward Bound and one of our five boat captains.

  Powell wrote that his men would occasionally “shout or discharge a pistol, to listen to the reverberations among the cliffs.” We blow off steam with pyrotechnics, setting an open can of collected bacon grease on a grill atop our campfire.

  “Is everyone at least ten feet from the fire?” Steve shouts as he fetches water from the river. Neil, a mellow river ranger and one of our boat captains, says “No, they’re about two feet away.” Steve: “Then get the first aid kit!” Steve has attached a pail of water to ten-foot-long oar and moves toward the fire. Some in our group start chanting: “Ba-con bomb! Baaa-con bomb! Baaaaa-con bomb!” Steve yells at us to back away and pours the water into the can of bubbling bacon grease. It explodes, sending a plume of flame fifteen feet into the air, as we leap away and howl.

  In November, only one group is allowed to start a trip down the Colorado each day, compared to five or six in midsummer. We have the glorious feeling of having the entire Canyon to ourselves. And while our coolers and bar are extravagantly stocked, we’ve made a point to leave behind most of modern society’s distractions. We don’t bring a boom box—our music is homegrown—and cell towers are beyond our reach. One concession is a satellite phone in case of emergency.

  Powell’s party had its share of technical equipment too, most notably barometers for measuring altitude. Early in his exploration, before reaching the Grand Canyon, Powell’s boat No Name was dashed to pieces, its hull caught in a turbulent rapid. The crew survived, but Powell’s treasured barometers were in the stranded No Name. The captain sent two men into the river to rescue his instruments. “The boys set up a shout, and I join them,” Powell wrote, “pleased that they should be as glad as myself to save the instruments.” When the men returned, he saw they also salvaged a three-gallon keg of whiskey. “The last is what they were shouting about,” Powell noted dryly.

  Drink is what we shout about when we reach camp the next afternoon. As the sun disappears it gets cool, so we attach a propane tank to a camp stove and make some hot buttered rum. Over a dinner of pesto pasta with spicy sausage, I consider how decadent our trip is compared to Powell’s expedition, whose members ate the same drab food every day and often huddled under cold, wet blankets. Until they lost blankets after one of their boats capsized, leaving some men shivering in the frigid night with nothing more than a canvas tarp to cover them.

  We flick a Bic and have a cook fire, our waterproof sacks keep our compressible zero-degree sleeping bags dry, and our inflatable boats can navigate even the Canyon’s most ominous rapids, sparing us the torture of carrying boats over crumbly canyon walls around the biggest drops, as Powell’s party did.

  Yet we share Powell’s appreciation of the Canyon. We see the “cathedral-shaped” buttes, towering monuments, and “grandly arched” half-mile-high walls reflected in calm stretches of the river, and the polished ochre spires that tower above it all. Our spirits soar as we float through Marble Canyon, with its pink and purple hues and “saffron” tints.

  At a bend in the river, we find a deep oval opening scoured into the rock by millions of years of the river surging into it. Powell estimated that if it were a theater it could seat 50,000 people. Now called Redwall Cavern, it’s a perfect spot for an impromptu game of soccer, and we ex
haust ourselves chasing a ball over the sandy beach. A Frisbee gets pulled out and flung towards the water. We dive off the boats attempting to catch it, plunging into the chilly eddy like eager dogs.

  Just downstream we pull over to explore a delicate waterfall spraying from peach-colored rocks. Lush green vegetation surrounds the cascade; the sunshine lights up the misty veil with all the colors of the rainbow. Powell named this place Vasey’s Paradise for a botantist who had previously traveled with him through the Southwest. Downriver we hike into Nautiloid Canyon—I expect to see fossils of chambered nautiluses preserved in stone but we find evidence of yard-long creatures with tail fins for propulsion that I learn were ancestors of squid.

  Every day my sense of wonder grows. I appreciate the perfect balance of water, desert, cliff and sky, and find myself agreeing with desert gnostic Edward Abbey who wrote: “There is no shortage of water in the desert but exactly the right amount, a perfect ratio of water to rock, of water to sand, insuring that wide, free, open, generous spacing among plants and animals, homes and towns and cities, which makes the arid west so different from any other part of the nation. There is no lack of water here, unless you try to establish a city were no city should be.”

  We take a day off from paddling and spend a layover day at Nankoweap, the first place we’ll camp for two nights. High above us native peoples built granaries to store their grain. I hike a few hundred feet above the river to explore what appear to be windows in the Canyon walls. I sit alone among the ancient spirits and feel gratitude for this trip, the bounty in my life, and the now famous vista of the Canyon as it bends to the right and the river disappears from view.