| Wes Boyd's Spearfish Lake Tales Contemporary Mainstream Books and Serials Online |
|
| Wes Boyd's Spearfish Lake Tales Contemporary Mainstream Books and Serials Online |
Chapter 7
In spite of everything the weekend was too short. There was much to talk about with Pat and Rachel, but there was also much to do in the Canyon Tours shop, so early Monday morning Duane and Michelle were back in Flag, getting started on the rigging they still had to do. At first it was just the two of them, along with Jeff, as the other two leader teams along with Al and Karin had headed up to Lee’s Ferry to help see off the first trip of the season.
It was late in the afternoon before everyone made it back, and the other leader teams hemmed and hawed around, seeming to think that the day was pretty well shot in the butt for getting started on anything. Even so, everybody hung around the shop for a while helping Duane and Michelle as they piddled with this and that and caught up on the latest gossip – there hadn’t been enough time for all of it at the meeting the Friday before.
There was one piece of big news: back in Spearfish Lake, Nicole had had her baby early on Saturday morning, a little boy she and Randy had decided to name Brent Wayne, after his grandfather and great-grandfather. Both Karin and Crystal had talked to Randy, and everyone was doing fine. “I get the feeling he’s going to be quite the proud papa,” Karin grinned. “As much as I hate to say it, I think it’s going to be a while before we see him on the river again.”
“Better him than us,” Scooter said as she sat on the tube of an inflated raft watching Michelle fold and pack some tents. Since the washing machine in the shop wasn’t as large, there would be several loads of them that needed to be washed, inspected, repaired if necessary, and repacked. Most nights people just slept under the stars down in the Canyon since rain was a rarity, but it does happen and the tents were welcome on cold, windy nights. “At least it’s only another week and we’ll be on the river.”
“Yeah, and this one won’t be frozen,” Duane said from the workbench, where he had one of the propane stoves they used on the river scattered around in parts. Toward the end of the previous season it hadn’t been willing to simmer very well, and it was clear that it needed a thorough cleaning, something that had been put off until now. “I had to run the team quite a ways on the Yukon River, and it was like driving a dog team across a lake. It was about as different as you can get a river to be.”
“Sounds like you had fun, though,” Scooter smiled. Duane knew her very well; she’d been his trip leader back when they were both working on the Nantahala River in North Carolina, before either of them had come to the Grand Canyon. Then, she’d been his trip leader most of the time here for a couple years.
“Cold, but fun,” Duane said. “I have to admit that there were a lot of times that I found myself thinking about you guys down surfing in Costa Rica. If it works out, we might get to join you down there for a little next year.”
“Well, you’d be welcome, at least if we go again,” Jim replied. “That’s not a done deal, though. We’ve done it several years now, and it’s starting to get a little bit like ‘We’ve done that, let’s do something else.’ We spent some time talking about chartering a sailboat and going sailing somewhere again. Maybe the Bahamas like we did a couple years ago, maybe somewhere else. In any case, it’s most likely not going to be something that lasts all winter. We’re not real sure about what’s going to happen, and some of it could wind up being affected by whatever it is Crystal and Preach wind up doing.”
“Yeah,” Mary added. “It would help if they could make up their minds about it, but it’s still a little early in the process. We didn’t know anything about that deal until we made it back a month or so ago. I’ll tell you what, though – it sounds like a final fling to me.”
“Yeah, me too,” Scooter agreed. “It’s been pretty clear that the two of them were going to be turning straight on us before too much longer. That means that there aren’t going to be many more chances for big trips for them. The rest of us, we still have some time for it, so we might as well let them have their chance.”
“Just because they’re having to turn a little straight doesn’t mean they’re not going to get away,” Al pointed out. “Karin and I have been doing a pretty good job of it the last few years. I have to admit, though, that it’s getting to the point for me that two or three weeks away are enough, and then I want to be getting home for a while. I guess I’ve reached that point in my life. You get to the point where the familiar home and the comfortable bed have their points over seeing what’s around the next bend in the river. You kids are still young yet, you haven’t reached that point, but I’ll bet you’ve given it some thought every now and then.”
“Well, yeah,” Mary agreed. “But it’s not worth the effort when we spend six months a year and more on the river, with only a little time off between trips. But even then, it’s good to get back to the Girls’ House for a couple days. I can’t help but wonder how homey it’s going to seem for a week at a time next year.”
“Y-yeah, t-t-that’s b-b-been a pr-pr-pretty good d-d-deal,” Dave said. He usually didn’t talk much; he had a bad stutter, and normally let Mary do his talking for him. That was just fine; she was the kind of person who talked enough to make up for it.
“Dave is right,” Mary agreed. “But I’ll tell you this much. If Crystal and Preach are going to be gone through much of the winter they’ll probably stick with the deal in the Girls’ House through next summer, but after that I’ll bet they’ll be looking for a place of their own. It’ll probably be a place that’s big enough for them to have kids. That’s means we’ll have to split the costs two ways instead of three, and that could put a different spin on things.”
“Might be, might not,” Al pointed out. “By then we’ll probably have at least one more leader team, and they might want to get involved in the deal. Duane, Michelle, you ever think about getting in on that deal?”
“Not really, with my folks living out in Grand Canyon Village,” Michelle pointed out. “It’s not like the rest of you who don’t have family in the general area. Yeah, we stay in the bunkhouse on occasion when we don’t want to drive four hours back and forth, but it’s no big deal.”
“Well, it’s not something we have to worry about for a while,” Mary sighed. “We’re looking a year or more down the road, and who knows what’s going to happen between now and then?”
“It’s not going to be a big deal if we wind up splitting it between the two couples,” Scooter pointed out. “Granted, if the four of us were to wind up spending the winter here, rather than in Costa Rica or something, it’s still more space than we have down there, or that we would have on most boats. And I don’t see us spending the winter around here anytime soon. Now Crystal and Preach after next winter, well, it wouldn’t surprise me to see them turn into real homebodies.”
“Yeah,” Jim agreed. “I think they’re getting close to that point in their lives.”
“I have to admit, I haven’t heard the squawking about it out of them that I was expecting,” Al smiled, “unlike the rest of the leader teams. I have real trouble imagining the rest of you settling down like that, at least anytime soon.”
All in all, the rigging work went pretty well. While Duane and Michelle didn’t have a printed list or schedule to work from, they knew what had to be done. By late Wednesday afternoon they figured they’d gained some ground on it, so knocked off a little early and went back out to Grand Canyon Village, where they could enjoy warm showers and a comfortable bed. It wasn’t all that cold in the shop and the bunkhouse – there was heat in there after all, considering the amount of work that had to be done in the winter months. Duane knew, from past experience, that it could be different, especially in the spring and fall, when the place wasn’t always heated and it could still sometimes get cold.
There was another good reason to head back out to Pat and Rachel’s house – a comfortable queen-sized bed where there was room for them to have a little fun. That was something that could only be accomplished with difficulty on the single-wide bunks in the bunkhouse, enough so that they’d taken a break from their bedtime activities. For some reason Michelle seemed to put more volume into their love-making activities when they were in her old room there than she did elsewhere. It was probably because she knew her parents were listening and wanted to show off, or at least so Duane figured, not that he minded as it made it more fun for him, too. He retained a little residual amazement that Pat and Rachel never said anything about it directly, other than to occasionally comment over breakfast that they’d had trouble getting to sleep the night before.
They took their time getting ready the next morning, then drove back down to Flagstaff for more rigging work. By now, Jim and Scooter were in the final phases of getting their trip set to launch, with Dave and Mary helping when they weren’t working on their own gear. There were a couple of others helping, and that made things go easier. On Thursday Barbie showed up, and the extra set of hands was welcome.
It was good to see Barbie again. She had come to the river about the same time as Duane, but without his rafting experience in the east, so she’d taken a while to get a raft of her own, although this would be her fourth summer with one. Barbie really did remind them a lot of Scooter, short, chunky, and muscular, although she was, in Duane’s unstated opinion, better looking overall and especially cuter in the face than the older rafter. She was good on the water and good with the customers; Duane had by now made up his mind that he was going to do what he could to get her ready to be a trip leader. Of the people Al was considering, in his opinion she was the one best suited for the job.
She’d spent the winter living with her parents, she reported, and putting up with them bugging her about going back to college, getting a real job, maybe finding a guy, and maybe even providing them some grandchildren in the process. “I don’t know why I bother, except for the fact that it’s cheap,” she said about the experience. “Maybe some winter I’ll have to take a run to Costa Rica with you guys just to get away from it.”
“Well, if we go again you’d be welcome,” Mary said. “It’s a more-the-merrier thing, except that the place we rent down there is a little on the cozy side.”
“I can do cozy, that’s no problem. At least it’s got to be better than my mother trying to set me up with some loser of a guy who wouldn’t know a river if he sat in one.”
“Yeah, at least my parents are pretty cool about it,” Michelle smiled. “Of course, they’ve been rafters, so they know what it’s like. Sometimes I think they’re a little sorry they had Mike and had to give up the river, because I think if they’d stayed with it they could have wound up like Al. They haven’t done a trip in a few years, and I think they’ve gotten used to it. I suppose I’d have them bugging me about grandchildren if it weren’t for the fact that Mike and Alana have already given them two, and at least they see Duane and me as a couple.”
“You guys thinking about getting married?” Barbie asked.
“I don’t think any more so than this time last year,” Michelle shrugged. “I mean, it’s pretty clear that it’s going to happen sometime, but we don’t see any need to rush into it. It’ll happen when it happens. Duane’s dad and stepmother seem to think pretty much the same thing, from what I can tell.”
“Well, maybe someday,” Barbie shrugged. “There are times I wouldn’t mind being married, but I want to stay with the river for at least a while longer, too. Who knows? Maybe someday I’ll go back and finish up college, and then it’s a possibility. After all, I dropped out of college because I was getting pretty tired of it and needed the break. I honestly don’t see spending the rest of my life single and running the river, but it’s too good a deal to pass up at this point in my life.”
“You ever think about going back to college?” Duane asked.
“Sometimes, especially when my mother is bugging me about turning straight,” she shrugged. “I think maybe over one of the long breaks this summer I might just head back over to the university and see how much hassle it’s going to be to finish up. If Al is real flush with rafters next fall, I might just take a swing at it in both the fall and spring terms, and they would get me pretty close to done, I think. At least that way I wouldn’t have that hanging over me.”
“From the way Al was talking last week, it doesn’t sound like he’s going to be real flush with rafters this fall,” Scooter observed.
“Well, good,” Barbie smiled. “That’s a relief. Maybe that means I can put off doing it for another year.”
Having Barbie to help them meant that they got that much more done, enough so that Duane and Michelle decided to take off late Saturday afternoon for another evening with her parents in Grand Canyon Village, and, of course, another evening of intense and noisy activity between the sheets. However, they got up very early on Sunday and drove back into Flagstaff, to help Scooter, Jim and the Red Team buy groceries and pack them up for three weeks on the river. Once everything was packed, they drove up to Lee’s Ferry to help out with the final rigging, like Scooter, Jim, Dave and Mary had done to get Crystal and Preach on the river the week before.
The first rig of the year was always a hassle; even experienced crew members often were new to each other and there was confusion about what went where and who did what. All of them were experienced enough to know that a lot of the confusion had been worked out by the second rig and for those afterward, even if a new crew member or two joined the crew as the result of a crew shuffle.
It was good to be back next to the river again; for Duane and Michelle, they hadn’t even seen it up close since the previous November. Although it would be another week before they were on the river on their own trip, just being there at Lee’s Ferry told them that the long winter was ending and things were getting back where they belonged in their lives. For all of them, things like dogsledding and surfing in Costa Rica were just activities to kill time over the winter, until their real lives could get back under way.
Things went pretty well this time, and well before dark they were up at the bar in Marble Canyon, having a few last drinks before the launch crew had to face customers the next day. Still, they knocked it off early, so they could unroll their sleeping bags and spend the night close to the river, where they belonged.
The next morning they were up in good time. Realistically, Duane, Michelle, and some of the others could have headed back the night before, but there was something of a tradition about seeing their friends off on their first launch of the season. They still felt a little guilty about not seeing Crystal and Preach off the week before. In the days before the short trips began two years before, it was rare for one leader team to see another one over the course of the season, and sometimes it didn’t happen at all. Even now, it didn’t happen very often, so the rare moments of friendship had to be taken advantage of.
The customer bus rolled in from Las Vegas on schedule, unloading a full group of customers who didn’t quite seem up to speed about what was going on, and a little amazed to see their woman trip leader smoking her cigar. Scooter didn’t actually smoke all that much, but it was something of a tradition for her to have one going when the customer bus rolled in, just to help establish her reputation if nothing else. It helped for Scooter and Jim to have the extra hands for fitting life jackets, helping the customers load their gear into dry bags and offer them a little assistance here and there.
They stood back and let Scooter deliver her orientation to the new customers, then helped get everyone on the rafts and shoved off onto the river. Then, there was nothing to do but stand back and watch the light blue rafts drift down the river to what for many of them would be the trip of a lifetime. As always, it was hard to stand on the shore and watch them go – but they took some solace that next week it would be them out there on the river.
Once the Red Team was out of sight, there was nothing to do but to hop back in Michelle’s Mustang and head back to Canyon Tours to get back to work on their own rigging. By this time, they were doing pretty well, and there was no question that they’d be ready when the time came – Crystal and Preach’s efforts back in the winter had made a huge difference for them. By Wednesday morning they had the gear about as well packed as it was going to get, and then there wasn’t a lot left to do but nervously fiddle with things that had already been fiddled with enough.
Brett and Terry weren’t due in until Saturday – they were both college students and had finals to contend with. After some discussion they agreed that Duane and Michelle would come in late Friday and head up to Lee’s Ferry to help Dave and Mary get on the river in the morning. After their friends launched, they would drive back to Flagstaff to have a meeting of the full crew and fiddle with any details that needed it. Since none of them had run with Terry before, Duane wanted to spend some time going over procedures with him, and there would be some final gear packing and the like that would need to be done.
Since they had a couple days to kill before the others showed up, they took Barbie out to Grand Canyon Village with them – she didn’t have much to do around Flagstaff, and there was an extra bedroom available at Pat and Rachel’s. For all the time Barbie had spent on the Colorado River in the Grand Canyon, she had never been to the South Rim, so Duane and Michelle took her around all the sights that afternoon. The Canyon looked very different from up there, and sometimes it was hard to believe it was the same place. Some of the inner gorge could be seen, but very little of the river itself.
Emotions ran a little bit higher early on Saturday afternoon after getting back from helping Dave and Mary launch. Back in Flagstaff, the time had come for the final preparations for the first trip of the season. Brett and Terry were waiting for them at the office when the three of them arrived; it was good to see them again.
Duane and Michelle knew Brett pretty well; he’d been on their crew the season before last. He was tall and lean, a good raft rower, one who’d come to Canyon Tours in the trade-around of trips with GCR. While he was good and dependable on the water, he was something of a loner and didn’t talk a lot, preferring to keep his thoughts to himself. That was all right in its place, but it sometimes added up to making the customers a little uncomfortable. Still, he was a known quantity, and Duane and Michelle were aware of his quirks, so it wasn’t a big problem.
The same couldn’t be said of Terry; he was pretty much an unknown quantity, at least to everyone else on the crew. He was about Duane’s size, although somewhat less muscled; he had long blond hair and already had a pretty good tan, which would be important out on the river in a few days. He had just finished up his freshman year of college at some school in California. This would be his first year with a raft of his own, although he’d been on the river under close supervision of other boatmen for a couple years now.
Scooter had picked him out on a trip several years before, when as a customer on the trip with his father and mother he had proved to be a good worker – especially when the kid on tryout as a prospective swamper was not. Curious, Scooter let him have some time at the sticks, both on flat water and in moderate rapids, and in spite of never having been on a raft before that trip, he’d shown that he had the touch. After that experience, and because he’d seemed to enjoy it so much, she’d pitched him, his folks, and Al about him becoming a swamper as a summer job after he graduated from high school. Everybody jumped on the idea with both feet, and he’d broken in as a swamper on Scooter’s crew the following year. While he was on the young side to be a boatman, Scooter had given him a hell of a good recommendation, and in fact had told Duane a few days before that given a little seasoning and experience he was going to be a great boatman.
In addition to Brett and Terry, they also had a swamper who probably would stay with the crew through the summer. She was a college student by the name of Erika Mowrer who had run with the Blue Team the year before after a tryout trip with Scooter and Jim on the Red Team. She’d also just finished her freshman year in college at the local Northern Arizona University. She was a good-looking dark-haired kid and relatively local, from Sedona. She acted rather ethereal, as befitted someone who came from a place with the New-Age reputation her home town had. Again, no one on the crew knew her at all, and while she hadn’t yet run a full season, Scooter and Jim gave her high marks, something they didn’t always do with young swampers, so she at least offered potential.
Still, it took a little more organizing and setting up the rafts to get everything ready, and along with that was a sort of an ongoing crew meeting at the same time, with Al spending part of the time with them talking about things like customer service and river safety. Finally, everything was about as done as could be, except for getting groceries the next day, so Duane and Michelle took everyone over to the Burro for burgers, beer in some cases, and more of just generally getting to know each other.
Then it was Sunday, and they had to get groceries. This had once been a Saturday chore until Scooter came to the conclusion that there was no point in wasting half of Saturday at it when it could be done early Sunday morning. It took a while to get everything packed and loaded onto the rafts and the crew bus. Finally, the time came when the crew, along with Jeff, Al, and Karin got on the bus and headed for Lee’s Ferry.
Only the river awaited them. This day had been a long time coming, and now it was their turn to get out on it.
