Cliff diving into the Colorado River

After we repulsed the pirates on the Colorado River on the sixth day of our eight-day raft trip through the Grand Canyon, we celebrated by jumping into the river--from a cliff.

Lindsay showed us how to do it. (Left: This is how you leap off a cliff into the Colorado River. "Aaaaa Hoooo!" Slim Pickens.)

One of the school administrators went next. She liked it so much she did it again. And I think she did it again. And again. Woot. (Right: Thumbing her nose at danger.)

Here's the other school administrator taking the plunge. Tell me, could you ever imagine your school principal engaging in this kind of behavior? (Left: "Hey, what about Major Kong?" James Earl Jones.)





It was a long way down, but no one chickened out. (Right: It was at least 20 feet down into the river. Woo hoo!)

Dennis

Some of you might know that my life is a search for heroes. Here's one.

Dennis is a single guy who came on our eight-day Grand Canyon trip all by himself. In the original group of twenty-eight, only he and one other person came alone. That's gutsy.

He loved sitting in the front of the boat (First Chair) and absorbing the pounding waves that crashed over the boat in the rapids. We all huddled behind him as he blocked much of the cold, wet sheets of water that swept into the boat during those times.

He's a police dispatcher. He's also what I call an actor, and not a reactor. When bad things happen and something needs to be done, he materializes at the crisis point and helps out in a quiet, non-insistent way. He doesn't stand around on the sidelines wringing his hands when things go south in a hurry, wondering what to do. (Right: Dennis in the front of the boat, taking another one for the team.)

When one of our group went into extreme duress on the fourth day with apparent heart failure (tragically, she died), the guides and a few others did CPR on her for a long time. It was her only chance. We were at the bottom of the Grand Canyon working on a non-responsive person, and we were going to be at it until outside help arrived. (Miraculously, it did in about 50 minutes.) We were going to need to take turns spelling each other.

Dennis came to the working group quickly, and calmly offered his help. He succinctly told us what he was capable of. He knew CPR. (Do you?) We slid him onto chest compressions when I grew tired.

He worked doing that for a long time, performing it steadily and correctly. It's exhausting work if it goes on for an extended period. He was a godsend. When he became fatigued, he informed us and he was relieved. He then stood by, ready to go back in when necessary. That's the way it's supposed to go.

Dennis is a hero in my book.

Pirates on the river

Waterfight! Travis announced the upcoming ordeal. The crew in Lindsay's boat following us had hoisted their pirate's flag and were coming on.

(Above: These are the colors the other boat unfurled when they came after us.)

They had all the water guns. Water cannons would be a better description, yard-long hollow tubes filled with river water that fired high-pressure streams of water. But we had all the 5-gallon buckets.

"Don't fill them up too much," Travis commanded as he issued them. "You can't throw the water as far if they're too full." Travis had apparently repelled boarders before.

We loaded our water buckets and cleared the decks for combat. Four of our nine crewmembers were non-combatants, being the peaceful couple from the midwest and the two school administrators. The other boat had eight men with their blood lust up.

The fight was on. It was a running engagement. The trick is to be the lead boat, and to drop back to within grappling distance whenever it's strategic to do so. Steady streams from their water cannons soaked us. We heaved bucketfuls of water into their boat, scoring several direct hits. Most satisfying were the full facials.

The boats closed together again. I dipped a bucket into the water between the boats. A burly pirate from the other boat reached out and grabbed its handle. A hand-to-hand struggle ensued.

(Right: The crew of Lindsay's boat donned their battle dress and came after us. I grappled mano-a-mano with the blond pirate on the left.) We glared at each other from eighteen inches away as we fought for control of the bucket. Neither he nor I would let go. He almost pulled me into the river but somebody grabbed my ankles and kept me in our boat. Taking a trick I learned from watching hockey fights, I grabbed his lifejacket with my free hand and pulled it up over his head as far as it would go. We fought on, locked together. The boats separated. We both clung determinedly to the bucket handle as the gap between us widened. The river beckoned to us both.

He let go. The fight was over.

We decided we'd won. (Left: We had pirates aboard our boat too. That's me after six days on the river. Photo credit B.)

That night a pirate from the other boat who was well into his cups commented that he'd never seen the pirate I fought off bested before, going all the way back to our Swell Hall days. "You must be workin' out, man," he declared as he cracked open another one.

This sophomoric episode had a very cathartic effect upon us after we had lost 10 of 28 passengers on the Grand Canyon trip due to the death of one of our members two days earlier. It pulled us out of our doldrums.

Last hours

She had never seemed well. Always quiet, she was pale and subdued. She was the very last of the group of twenty-eight that I got around to meeting. It turns out that I never got to meet her.

She was 65, the mother of three children. She had come on the eight-day Grand Canyon rafting trip with her husband of 48 years. They apparently were inseparable at home. Sweethearts since age 15, married at age 17, on the trip they were always curled up together at the back of the boat.

(We encountered beauty...) On the fourth day she was more languorous than ever. At the lunch break, we put ashore at a little side stream that emanated from a small waterfall 200 yards up the shallow, rock-strewn stream bed. Everyone waded up to it to stand under the warm plunging water.

I was last off the boat. I could see that she was having trouble getting up the stream bed. It was only ankle-deep to the left, but the bed sloped off very gradually to the right into chest-high still water. She seemed caught up in that gradual slope and couldn't get out of it. Further and further to the right she went as I came along, into deeper and deeper water. It was odd. Absolute safety in water only inches, not feet, deep lay a few centimeters to her left.

Suddenly she was in water up to her chest and she seemed flustered. I reached out a hand for her and brought her back to the shallow side. Her husband was twenty feet ahead, waiting for her. Neither one spoke a word to me.

Then she was having trouble manipulating the shallow part of the stream bed so I extended my hand again and guided her a few steps to her waiting husband. I went on ahead to partake in the cascading shower of the waterfall and when I returned, she was seated in six inches of water, resting, while her husband stood guard over her.

She died four hours later.

(...and danger on our journey.) Later I heard that reportedly, she had a bad heart. But she had undergone a battery of tests in preparation for the trip, a stress test, an MRI and others, and passed every one of them.

The Colorado River where it passes through the Grand Canyon, with its boiling rapids and broiling heat, is a harsh taskmaster.

You bet your life

Last month twenty-eight clients started an eight-day motorized boat trip covering 240 miles down the Grand Canyon. Eighteen finished it.

Twelve were in my group, all college roommates or friends of them, most of whom I hadn't seen in decades. Also coming were another group of eight, being three oilmen and their wives and family members, a police dispatcher, two school administrators traveling together, a Canadian, a married couple from the midwest and two business partners. One woman in the oilmen's group died the fourth day, of apparent heart failure. There were four boatmen and two rafts.

(Right: Boatmen Lindsay, Travis and Julie.) We literally entrusted our lives to the boatmen. In charge was Travis, a twenty-something professional boatman who grew up on the river and who goes on hikes and climbs mountains in the extreme wilderness of Alaska when he needs a break from the harsh rigors of crewing boats down the raging Colorado. He was in the lead boat, with Kelly as his crew.

Kelly is the boss's daughter. She wore skirts a lot, and I heard her father later describe her as a city girl, but she grew up around the boats and went on her first river trip at age eleven. She knew what she was doing.

(Right: Julie and Lindsay joined Barry, far left, and Andy, right, in songs on the second night.) Lindsay guided the second boat, with Julie as her crew. Lindsay is from Ohio and has a biology degree. She was a swimmer in school and has powerful shoulders and arms. She knows a lot about the river. Coolly capable, she was apparently tireless.

Julie hopes to captain her own boat next season. She's a darkly beautiful, capable woman, a force to be reckoned with. I never saw her back off from any task.

The last day, Barry and I tried to help Lindsay and Julie place the four detached and deflated outrigger pontoons onto the boats for their final travel into Lake Mead. There is some reason these oversized pontoons, which weigh over 100 pounds each, can't be sailed into the lake. We'd watched the two women hoist the first two pontoons up onto the first boat and wrestle them into place when we solicitously came to their assistance. The four of us made light work of heaving the third pontoon up onto the second boat. Leaving Lindsay and Julie to lock it down, Barry and I went to retrieve the last pontoon. We both lifted, grunted, and dropped the heavy object back onto the beach. "We better wait for the girls to help us," I told Barry.

(Left: Julie and Lindsay kept order in the second boat.) Everybody in my group immediately fell in love with Lindsay and Julie, and took over boat two. I think the initial riders on boat one, who were even older than us, occasionally looked down their noses a little at the rowdy, boisterous passengers on boat two. I often went over to the first boat to balance things out. I liked the way Travis ran things.

Travis told good stories. Here are some examples.

A pirate encountered a shipmate he hadn't seen for awhile in a bar and saw that his friend was now sporting a pegleg, a hook, and an eyepatch. "What happened?" the first pirate cried.

"Arrgh. I be whaling in the Bering Sea when a killer whale jumped out of the ocean and into me boat and bit me leg off!"

"What happened to your hand?"

"Arrgh. I was in the Caribbean stealing coconuts from the natives when they caught me and cut off me hand for it!"

"And how did you lose your eye?"

"Arrgh. I was walking down the dock checking the position of the sun when a seagull flew over and shat in me eye!"

"And that put your eye out?"

"Well, it be the day after they replaced me missing hand with a hook."

Ha ha. Maybe you hadda be there. (Left: Travis reads a boatman's prayer before we shove off one morning.)

Travis told us about his recent ten-day solo backpacking trip in the Yukon. He ran into a grizzly and shinnied up a tree real fast to the top. The bear eyed him for awhile, then started shaking the base of the skinny pine tree for all she was worth. Back and forth the tree rocked while Travis hung on for dear life, being slung around like a slingshot. But the tree held and the bear ambled away.

Only to return presently with her cub. Now the two of them pushed and battered at the tree trunk, whipping Travis around ever more dangerously. But again the tree held and the grizzly and her cub ambled away.

Only to return a third time, this time with a beaver in tow.

Travis swears the story is true, except for the beaver part. (Above: My trip down the Grand Canyon was in many ways a cleansing experience for me.)

The Arizona-based outfit our group used had a friendly rivalry going with its main competitor, a Utah company. Hence we heard an occasional Mormon joke. We never thought of raiding the competitor's camp or trying to trade with them because they obviously wouldn't have had anything we wanted. They are tee-totalers, see?

Anyway, some Mormons are, or used to be, polygamists. Travis once uncorked a funny line when he said, "Brigham Young, more than just a funny name." Only he pronounced it, Bring 'em young.

It's a joke, folks. (Left: Kelly flashes her winning smile.)

Seriously though, despite his small wiry frame and wisp of hair under his lip and high voice and showy tattoos, no matter what the situation, Travis has you covered. You could bet your life on it.

What goes on on the river...

...stays on the river. (Mooning the competitor's boats.)

Getting over her

I hope no one on the packed jetliner saw me cry today. I was crying for her even though I barely knew her.

It was on Friday that she passed. She lay down nearby and never rose again. Summoned immediately, our response was swift. We worked on her for almost an hour, a tight circle of people kneeling clustered about her, working in tandem and issuing curt commands to each other which were instantly obeyed. But she didn't come back.

The trip member who had raised the alarm came up to me later that evening and rubbed my back briefly as I stood there glumly, and said we had done all we could in the circumstances. It felt so good to have a momentary physical connection with a living person. I inanely told her that coincidentally, I had taken a CPR course just six weeks ago. I earnestly told her how well everyone in the little group had performed.

On the plane ride back home five days later, as I was writing notes about that day, I became overwhelmed with the grief and disappointment of losing a fellow being. Of having someone die even as my hands were on her for almost an hour, beseeching her to hold on. When it was over, the living just got up and walked away and continued on with their lives.

I put down my pen, closed my notebook and my eyes, and leaned my head far back into my seat. I kept brushing those pesky tears off my cheeks as soon as they trickled down.

At that moment on the plane, I wanted someone I loved and who loved me that I could hold onto as I replayed it in my mind. I wanted to cry out my hurt and pain over the loss of another on a loved one's shoulder. But although I was soon to be home and my three adult sons live in town, they don't care for me nor speak to me. These self-absorbed young men are not persons I would ever look to for help. The rest of my family lives elsewhere.

I wish that lady had lived. I can still see her husband of 48 years, shock etched on his face, kneeling in the sand off to the side, holding her hand as we worked. Damn it all, we worked so long and hard and got such wonderful assistance from everybody there and we had no damn success.