Down the Great Unknown (10 page)

They knew enough to be wary, but not much more than that. Often, for example, the river pooled up quietly just above a rapid. That calm zone was safe, Powell noted, but “sometimes the water descends . . . from the broad, quiet spread above into the narrow, angry channel below, by a semicircular sag. Great care must be taken not to pass over the brink into this deceptive pit.”

The problem with Powell's rudimentary strategy—“If I can see a clear chute between the rocks,” he wrote, “away we go”—is that the chute rarely led all the way through a rapid. More often, it provided a glorious mini-ride that served as a shortcut to trouble, as if a magic carpet passed above a line of angry boulders only to drop its passengers into a whirlpool. And once into the heart of a rapid, all bets were off. “On the ocean, where waves are rhythmic, predictable, and usually from the same direction as the wind, there is time to anticipate and prepare . . . ,” observes Martin Litton, one of the towering figures in modern river running. “Not so in a rapid where—if you're in really big water—things are coming at you from all directions at once.”
*

But rapids were riddles formed of water, and any tentative conclusions the men reached in one rapid washed away in the next. Often the waves
did
come from every direction at once, for example, but at other times they lined up in perfect order, seemingly eternal. “The water of an ocean wave merely rises and falls,” Powell noted, so that the wave
form
moved toward shore but the water itself bobbed and sank in place. “But here,” he noted, transfixed, “the water of the wave passes on, while the form remains.” At Hermit Rapid in the Grand Canyon, for example, the waves stand in perfect rank, the first one some seven feet tall, then the second, third, and fourth each a bit taller in turn, and the fifth tallest of all, followed by a set of waves that diminish just as uniformly. Since each wave stays in place, a boatman surfing a river wave could theoretically stay poised in the same spot forever, freeze-framed in ecstasy as if on a Grecian urn. When the Colorado is running chocolate
brown, these standing waves look so much like abstract sculptures that it is hard to remember they are made of water. Touching one, it seems, would feel like patting a dolphin.

The men had learned at the outset that it was crucial to take waves head-on rather than sideways, but how to convince the waves to wait their turn? Let yourself turn sideways even for a moment, so that the river has the full length of the boat to attack, and it can flip you before you have time to curse.

A homemade experiment helps make the problem clear. Hold your hand out the window of a fast-moving car, palm toward your cheek, and notice that your hand slices through the wind effortlessly. Now abruptly rotate your hand so that the palm faces forward, as if you were a policeman signaling “Stop!” Suddenly the wind has something to hit, and it pummels your hand.

Try the same experiment while standing in shallow water in a fast river. Place a hand or a canoe paddle in line with the current, and the water flows smoothly around the obstacle. But turn the paddle so that it catches the current broadside, and the force can jolt you. Now try the same experiment with the canoe itself rather than with a mere paddle. Fasten your life jacket first.

Whether they wanted to or not, Powell and his men would become students of rapids. Lesson one was that rapids formed wherever the channel shrank in size. That happened where colossal chunks of rock broke off a cliff side and tumbled into the river or where giant loads of rocks and boulders swept down a side canyon and finally came to rest in the main channel. Suddenly squeezed into a small space but still retaining all its power, the pent-up river was transformed and newly dangerous, a tornado in a box.

All the trouble in rapids stems from one simple fact—unlike a wad of cotton, for instance, water cannot be compressed. Arnold Schwarzenegger could squeeze a water balloon until he was red-faced and gasping, and although he could change the balloon's shape—it might bulge
here
instead of
there—
he could not shrink its overall volume. Now think of a river. It flows at the same steady rate whether it is traveling through a broad valley or a skinny bottleneck. Suppose that rate is, say, one thousand cubic feet per second. All that means is that if someone could divert the river into a giant bathtub, it would fill a one-thousand-cubic-foot tub every second. But there
is
a tricky point. Whether the river channel is broad and deep or narrow and shallow, the river would fill the same one thousand-cubic-foot bathtub in a second. How can that be?

Since water cannot
squeeze in on itself, the only possibility is that the river speeds up whenever the channel contracts. This is the discovery that every delighted five-year-old makes when he learns to put his thumb partway across the end of a hose and spray his little brother. More to the point, it is the reason a placid, gently flowing, almost lakelike river transforms itself into a chaotic, churning nightmare when it squeezes through a narrow, rock-choked channel.

Like the five-year-old with a hose, Powell understood perfectly well that a narrow channel meant fast, tumultuous water. The difference is that Powell was on the
receiving
end of the waterpower, like a ladybug caught in a hose's blast.

The problem for Powell and his crew of novices was that their experience in other domains, such as driving wagons, provided little guidance in river running. In similar fashion, beginners today often run into trouble because they assume that a boat on a river will behave like a car on a highway. But in crucial ways, rivers and highways are opposites.

On man-made roads, traffic speeds up on the straightest, broadest stretches and slows down where the road suddenly shrinks from six lanes to two. With rivers, as we have seen, the opposite applies. The more a river narrows, the faster it flows. To picture the plight of novices in white water, imagine a highway where drivers have only the most rudimentary control of their car's steering wheel, gas pedal, and brakes. Suppose, further, that each car's speed changes automatically and inevitably, depending on the road conditions. Picture, in particular, that the
worse
the road—the more suddenly it squeezes itself into a single lane with a cliff on one side and a sheer drop on the other—the
faster
each car hurtles along. On such a diabolical highway, we might begin to appreciate the special, unnerving qualities of white water.

In fact, it is worse than that. The speed of the current is not the greatest hazard in a rapid. Waves in a rapid ricochet off rocks and cliffs and collide with one another; water rushes over rocks and dives down into holes and moves
upstream
to fill in “empty” spaces behind obstacles. The problem is not that the current is moving so fast but that it is flowing in so many different directions at so many different speeds, downstream and upstream and even straight down toward the bottom of the river. Think of our diabolical highway again, and this time throw in not only a bottleneck but a hairpin curve and some potholes and patches of ice and broken-down cars abandoned in the middle of the road. If this highway behaved like a river, it would not only speed up as it narrowed but would form itself into a complex series of mini-roads, some heading straight into a ditch, others speeding toward junked cars or ice slicks or—perhaps—safety.

The rocks in the river, it should be noted, provide a double dose of danger. They
make
trouble, first of all, by choking the channel and providing the structures that create waves and falls and boat-sucking holes. But even in their passive role, as obstacles rather than as creators of chaos, rocks can be formidable. The risk, as Powell's men had already found, is in getting hung up sideways against a boulder, pinned against an unyielding obstacle by the concentrated force of a surging river. Here highway analogies fall short. Think instead of a python's prey, immobile in the giant snake's relentless coils, struggling fiercely but futilely against a vastly stronger opponent.

•      •      •

On June 7, Powell and some of the men climbed the cliffs to survey the new canyon. It was not an easy climb, for the rocks were split with dark, threatening fissures. The cliff top, which proved to be 2,085 feet above the river, provided a river view of some six or seven miles. From this vantage point, the Green looked small and harmless, almost inviting. On returning to the river, the men quickly found that rapids that looked easy from half a mile above were not so easy when seen from a bucking, tossing rowboat. Andy Hall, undaunted, dredged up from his memory a bit of English verse by Robert Southey about a waterfall's “Rising and leaping, / Sinking and creeping, / Swelling and sweeping,” and so on. The poem, which continued on in singsong fashion for another hundred-plus lines, was called “The Cataract of Lodore,” and Hall proposed the name Lodore for the canyon they were passing through. Sumner was not pleased—“the idea of diving into musty trash to find names for new
discoveries on a new continent is un-American, to say the least,” he grumbled—but Powell liked the name, and Lodore it is to this day.

On the following day, no one was reciting poetry. It brought, Sumner wrote, “as hard a day's work as I ever wish to see,” and it was as dangerous as it was difficult. The morning alone saw a dozen bad rapids to line and portage, each one seemingly worse than the ones before. The scenery, for those in the mood for sightseeing, was spectacular. The men stopped for lunch at the foot of a perpendicular, rose-colored wall some fifteen hundred feet high. At one o'clock, they started up again.

In half a mile, they came to a maelstrom that earned Bradley's customary description as “the wildest rapid yet seen.” This time Sumner echoed him. They had reached “a terrible rapid,” he wrote, a place “where we could see nothing but spray and foam.” The lead boat, the
Emma Dean
, pulled safely to shore above the rapid.

So did the
Maid of the Cañon
. Powell began climbing the rocks along the shore to size up their predicament. Then he heard a shout—the Howland brothers and Frank Goodman, in the
No Name
, were speeding down the river in midstream, out of control and headed for the rapid. In the meantime, where was the
Sister
? Unable to help the
No Name
, Powell ran back upstream to try to warn the
Sister
to land. Racing along the rocks, shouting, waving, he saw nothing. Then, rounding a bend and pulling hard to shore and safety, there she was. Powell turned around yet again, chasing desperately back downstream in search of the
No Name
.

Where was she? The first part of the rapid was a drop of ten or twelve feet, which was bad but perhaps manageable, and then came a steep, boulder-strewn stretch of forty or fifty feet, beaten into foam and churned by whirlpools. Powell scrambled over the rocks and finally caught sight of the
No Name
, straining to pull toward shore. Suddenly she hit a rock, tipped alarmingly, and filled with water. The men lost their oars. Helpless, the three men sat while the boat raced sideways several yards, crashed into another rock, and broke in two. The three crew members—none of them in life jackets—struggled frantically toward the broken boat and grabbed on to a chunk of its bow in the surging waters. Down they drifted a few hundred yards into another rapid, this one, too, filled with huge boulders. Twice the men lost their grip on the fractured bow and sank into the water; twice they managed to struggle back again.

At one point, the river carried them near a sandbar, almost a mini-island, in midstream. Oramel Howland made a leap, found himself momentarily protected from the current by a rock, and dragged himself ashore. Frank Goodman tried the same move but vanished into the river. One hundred feet downstream, Seneca Howland leaped and pulled himself onto the same sandbar.

Goodman reappeared a few seconds later, clinging to a barrel-sized rock in the middle of the torrent, gagging on river water, and calling for help. Oramel Howland found a branch that had washed up onto the sandbar. Wading into the river as near Goodman as he dared, he extended the branch toward him. Goodman let go of his rock, dove for the branch, and Howland pulled him to safety. “And now the three men are on an island,” Powell wrote, “with a swift, dangerous river on either side, and a fall below.”

Worse yet, the river was rising. “Our position on the bar soon began to look serious,” noted Oramel Howland, a hard man to rattle. It fell to Sumner to rescue Howland and his fellow castaways. The men unloaded the
Emma Dean
, so that Sumner would be able to maneuver her more easily, and then lined her past the upper rapid. Then it was up to Sumner. He managed to cut a diagonal path to the island. “Right skillfully he plies the oars,” Powell wrote, “and a few strokes set him on the island at the proper point.” Now the trick would be to get back across a river that was running “with the speed of a racehorse” while carrying three extra passengers and without getting swept into the rapid.

Sumner and the other men dragged the boat upstream and then waded out with it as far as they could into the river. Three of them clambered aboard while the fourth stood perched on a rock, holding
Emma
ready. Then he pushed the boat's nose into the current and flung himself aboard. Fearful that a false stroke meant “certain destruction,” Sumner instructed his passengers to lie flat on the bottom of the boat while he alone manned the oars. At one point, he struck a rock and the boat tipped up at a forty-five-degree angle, but it slid safely off. Pulled downstream by the current, Sumner and his three beat-up passengers made it back to shore a scant twenty-five yards above a madhouse of waves and foam. “We are as glad to shake hands with them,” Powell wrote, “as though they had been on a voyage around the world, and wrecked on a distant coast.”

It had nearly been a calamity. Sumner was rarely one to exaggerate. (He disposed of his role in the rescue in a single sentence, in the third-person voice he used whenever he had pulled off anything especially difficult. “The trapper,” he wrote, “crossed over and brought them safely to shore on the east side.”) But not even he could deny the narrowness of the three men's escape. Seneca Howland, Oramel's nearly silent younger brother, had been the last to leap to the safety of the sandbar from the wreckage the men had ridden through the waves. “Had he stayed aboard another second,” Sumner wrote, “we would have lost as good and true a man as can be found in any place.”