One of the places where the Gold Team differed from some of the other Canyon Tours teams was the way they went down the river. On a couple of the teams, particularly Scooter’s, one of the more experienced boatmen always was in front, or “on point” in river parlance, while another of the more experienced ones was always in the back, or “on sweep.” Everyone else was expected to keep more or less in order.

On relatively simple flat water, Duane didn’t worry about it all that much, so long as all the rafts kept fairly close to each other. However, the team would revert to the common practice once they got to wilder water downstream. When that happened, either he or Michelle would take point so they’d be downstream of the rapids to catch anyone or anything that might get washed out of the raft in case of an accident. The other one would be in back, either for rescue or to help with any problems. Perhaps once a season, not even that, it was useful, but most of the time it was just a precaution.

At first the going was a little on the slow side; while there was some current it wasn’t all that forceful. There was one minor rapids, Paria Riffle, about a mile below the ramp at Lee’s Ferry, just rough enough to give the passengers a taste of what was to come and perhaps impart the lesson that Duane had meant what he’d said, since greater things lay ahead. The boatmen usually let the customers have the roughest possible ride through Paria, just to drive home the message.

Almost all Canyon Tours trips stopped for lunch at Cathedral Wash, not quite three miles below Lee’s Ferry; it was a little early for a stop but the best place within reach. By then, the customers would have a taste of being on the river, and they would be ready to learn more of what they had to know to continue.

It didn’t take long to get the necessary tables and food boxes out. Just to simplify things, it had been planned so that only two rafts would need their tarps cracked open. Lunch was simple, cold cuts for sandwiches, chips and soda; as soon as everyone had something in their hands, Duane found a handy rock and got serious about the orientation. This included more safety procedures, how some camp chores and other things would get done, a little interpretation about the geology, even some basics of how to handle body waste while on the trip. It took a while to get through everything and Duane was conscious of the need to not overdo it to the point where people would get bored and quit listening.

Of necessity the stop took longer than he would have liked, and by the time he was done talking everybody was ready to go. By then, the boatmen had reloaded all the lunch stuff and tied down the tarps, so it was mostly a case of everyone getting back on the rafts. Once again Duane counted noses – thirty again, a number he’d want to be sure he had every time they left a place – and they got on the river again.

They were technically in Marble Canyon, a forerunner to the big stuff downstream, but it was still pretty scenic if not up to the caliber of what they would be seeing in a couple days. It was still a slow float down river to the Navajo Bridges, a little more than a mile away. The seemingly impossibly fragile structures were high overhead, and Duane assured everybody that, except for a tiny bit around Phantom Ranch and airplanes flying overhead, it was the last sight of civilization they’d have for more than two weeks.

It was an easy float of about four more miles down to Badger Rapids, the first big one they’d see on the run; more importantly, it was also the site of the campgrounds the Canyon Tours trips liked to use the first night out. This early in the year, Duane preferred the one on river left, or the left bank as they faced downriver, since the warmth of the sun in the late afternoon would be welcome. When it got hotter, the shade on the other side would be even more welcome, but that was still a couple trips away. Once in a while they’d find both campsites already occupied, and there wasn’t much choice other than to drift on downstream another few miles to some somewhat-less-appealing campsites, two of which were on the small side for a group this big. Badger was much the preferred place to stop since there would be plenty of time for more orientation and just getting everyone in a proper state of mind. If they had to go on to Soap Creek or the others downstream there would be less of that valuable time available.

As luck had it, they found a private party already established in the river-left campsite, but Duane had no problems with using the one on river right. By then, and after a pretty exciting rapids, people were starting to get in the swing of things and were ready to learn more.

Duane kept the orientation to small pieces, starting with the comment that it would make everything go better if everyone worked together, and it would help people think that they were part of the trip, and not just along for the ride. He explained how they would form a “duffel line” to help unload the rafts and get things up on shore, and then he set everyone up in a demonstration; they would be loading and unloading this same way on every night stop they made on the river. He followed that by designating where things like the kitchen and the “rocket box” for solid waste would go. He explained that people were on their own for where they slept, but it probably wasn’t a good idea to be too near the kitchen or the rocket box most of the time. People were on their own about whether they wanted to use tents or not; Duane and Michelle rarely did, but he had her give a brief demonstration of how to set one up, just in case. There was plenty more to go over, and it made things go slowly; it would be simpler in future days.

While he and sometimes Michelle had been carrying out the orientation, the rest of the crew had gotten started on dinner in the kitchen area. After he’d gone over pretty much what he had to say for now, Duane told the folks to go start getting their own campsites set up, but to not wander too far off since it wouldn’t be long till dinner. If anyone wanted to help with meal prep, there would be things for them to do, and shortly there were some extra people lending a hand.

Dinner was halibut steaks, as was almost always the case for Canyon Tours the first night, as under river conditions, the halibut wouldn’t keep for long. It was a good dinner and everyone seemed satisfied. After that there was more orientation about dishwashing and the steps that had to be taken. Once that was done, though, Duane told people they were on their own, and that they could join in around the campfire a little later.

Driftwood fires were prohibited in the Canyon at that time of year, but then there was never a lot of driftwood to be found anyway. However, an evening campfire was always welcome, and every one of the rafts had small bundles of wood or compressed paper logs, enough to have fires most nights, all of them built in a firepan that was carried in one of the rafts. Duane felt that a fire the first night out was the most important of them, since it was an opportunity for a little more subtle orientation, along with a chance to find out a little more about each other. A good campfire was often the key to getting the trip off to a good start.

This evening, Duane started by lighting one of the compressed paper logs in the firepan. It didn’t make for a big fire, but it burned well and lasted a fairly long time. They didn’t want the evening to go late, anyway, since things would get under way early in the morning. Several of the customers were gathered around, just shooting the bull about one thing or another. Once Duane had the fire going OK he sat back on the sand to take it in. “It’s nice to have a fire again,” he remarked to Michelle, just loud enough that it was obviously not a private conversation.

“Yeah, it’s been a while,” she replied. “Didn’t you have them out on the trail a couple months ago?”

“Not really,” he shrugged, again being a little louder than necessary to get the attention of people farther away. “I’d occasionally find one going at a checkpoint, but it always seemed like I didn’t have the time to enjoy it, what with all the stuff that I had to do at checkpoints.”

“What trail were you on a couple months ago?” a customer asked. “It seems like it would have been pretty cold.”

“Well, it was,” Duane said like it was no big deal. “It was the Iditarod Trail in Alaska. Sometimes it got down to forty and fifty below.”

“The Iditarod?” another customer frowned. “Isn’t that where they run that big dogsled race from Anchorage to Nome?”

“It is,” Duane deadpanned. He and Michelle had previously worked out how he could set them up to tell this story. “I ran the race. It was a lot of fun, a real outdoor experience.”

“As cold as that, I’d guess that you have to be pretty crazy.”

“It’s a little out of the ordinary,” Duane conceded. “But the last three winters Michelle and I have been helping some friends of ours in Michigan train dogs for the race, and when the chance came to do it I wasn’t going to turn it down. It wasn’t a team of my own; it was the junior varsity dog team for Phil Wine, the guy we were working for. In a year or two, most of those dogs will be running on the main team with some real experience behind them.”

“What is it? A thousand miles or something like that?”

“Officially it’s a thousand forty-nine miles,” Duane told them. “In practice, it’s somewhere over eleven hundred, at least according to the GPS trip recorders some people have carried. Either way, it’s almost all through some pretty wild and untouched country. Let me tell you, Alaska is quite a place. It’s almost as nice as the Grand Canyon.”

“I didn’t realize dogs could go that far.”

“You’d be surprised what dogs can do. It took me a little over eleven days, but it’s been done in nine. Now, these aren’t your little furry rug rats that lay around the house. They’re racing dogs that have been bred and trained to do just what they do, and I think they do it pretty well. Yeah, it’s a long distance, but it’s like this river, you take it a day at a time. A few years ago I spent the summer hiking the length of the Appalachian Trail, Maine to Georgia. That’s over 2100 miles, and it took me from the first of May up into November. So really, the Iditarod seems a little on the short side to me, both time and distance.”

“You sure seem to get out and around,” another customer shook her head. “How long have you been on the river here?”

“This will be my sixth year here,” Duane told her. “But I was a raft guide in the east for three years before I did the trail. That was pretty different from here, it was all day trips, no overnighters, but it was still interesting, and I picked up a thing or two about rafts, so I was no stranger to them when I came here.”

“Icewater, I guess you’re something of an outdoor nut. Any other big experiences?”

“Well, several other long hiking trips. A high school buddy of mine and I did eight hundred miles on the North Country Trail in Michigan to celebrate getting out of high school, but that was kind of a warm-up for what came afterwards. Back then I’d sort of planned on becoming a ranger for the National Park Service, but that never worked out. I’m just as happy about that, too. Like the boss says, you have to do this stuff while you can.”

“So you’ve done this trip a few times,” one of the customers who spoke earlier said. “How many times?”

“Well, this is number thirty-eight for me,” Duane said. “But I’m not counting swamper trips. Because of my experience back east, I was a boatman almost from the beginning. In a way, I’m kind of a newbie to the Canyon. Barbie has done more trips than I have, if you count her runs as a swamper. She actually started at this a year earlier than I did. Brett has more, but that’s because he worked for another company doing motor-rig trips for a couple years, and some of those people knock off up to twenty-five a year. And Michelle, Jeez, I don’t know. Something over a hundred and twenty, isn’t it, hon?”

“This will be number one twenty-three for me,” Michelle smiled. “Counting swamper trips, that is. As a boatman, a hundred and seven. That counts a few times when I did half trips added together to make one.”

“Michelle may not look like it,” Duane grinned. “But except for the boss, who’s been running this river since the early seventies, she’s the senior boatman in the company.”

“Michelle, you can’t be that old!” a woman spoke up.

“I’m a little older than I look,” Michelle smiled. “And I got started way early. See, my folks were boatmen back when Al got started with the company, and they, uh, used a little pressure on him to let me take a swamper tryout trip when I was fifteen. That’s younger than Al usually starts swampers; usually they have to be starting as high school seniors before they do a tryout trip. For example, Terry over there did sort of an unofficial tryout trip between his junior and senior years and then worked the following summer as a regular swamper. But anyway, after I did my tryout trip Al was short of swampers, and I’d done well enough that he let me stay on for the rest of the summer.”

“It still seems pretty young to be doing something like this,” the woman said.

“Well, yeah, for most kids it might be, but I was sort of brought up to it,” Michelle said. “We camped right here on my first trip after I graduated from high school back in 1993. I mean, we launched like the day after I graduated. I was still a swamper, and Ray Brockman was the leader, he’s been gone from the river for a long time, now. Al came along on the trip to sort of look things over, like he often does, except that time he was going as a boatman. Well, we got up in the morning and had breakfast. Afterwards, Al gathered everybody around and announced that it was my eighteenth birthday, and he said, ‘Michelle, you know what a birthday means, don’t you? Get over my knee.’”

Everyone laughed; they could tell what was coming.

“It wasn’t just a play spanking,” Michelle grinned. “I mean he really walloped my butt, and it hurt. Well, he got done, including the one to grow on, and then said, ‘Does your butt hurt too much to sit down?’ I told him I thought it did, but he said it was too bad, I was going to have to sit in a raft all day. Since I’d just turned eighteen and the insurance would now allow it, I was officially a boatman. And to make his point, he walked out up that canyon behind us. I didn’t care if my butt hurt after that or what. I was a boatman, and it was the best birthday present I’ve ever had. Being a boatman was all I ever wanted to do. I’ve been one ever since.”

“Didn’t you go back to college or something?” someone asked.

“Oh, I’d sort of planned to and my folks had leaned on me about it, but when fall rolled around Al was short on boatmen like he usually is that time of year, so I just sort of stayed with it. I was tired of sitting in classrooms anyway, I wanted to be more active. I mean, there I was in my dream job two days after I got out of high school, why would I want to do anything different? When the season finally ran out, I worked for my folks in their gift shop up in Grand Canyon Village for a couple winters, then little by little got to helping Al in the office over the next few winters. That got to the point where it was pretty close to full time off season. Then Duane and I got to hanging out, so the last three years we’ve been doing the dog training. That was two winters in Michigan and then last winter in Alaska.”

“How come you didn’t run the Iditarod, too?”

“Well, there was only one dog team available, and Duane was a little more into wanting to do it than I was, so it really wasn’t an issue. There’s a possibility that I’ll be doing it next winter, but it involves a decision from some other people Phil knows who want to do it, too, and with their seniority, they sort of have dibs on the spot if they decide they want to go. We probably won’t know for sure about a spot until next fall. Actually, I’d just as soon let Duane be known as the crazy dog musher. As far as I know, and I know a pretty good percentage of the boatmen from all the companies, he has the only Iditarod Finisher belt buckle in the Grand Canyon.”

“I’ve never heard of anyone else,” Duane admitted.

“So if you have so much experience in the Canyon,” one of the women asked, “why aren’t you the trip leader?”

“Mostly because I don’t want to be,” Michelle said. “Actually, I can explain it better if I talk about dog teams. It takes a lot of dogs to make up a dog team, and really, there’s only one or at the most two leaders at a time. There are swing dogs, which are sort of assistant leaders, and then there are the team dogs, which are happy to just contribute their share and wouldn’t do well as a leader at all. I don’t think of myself as a leader. I’d rather just be a team dog or maybe a swing dog. Believe me, I’ve been asked to be a leader several times, but I’ve always turned it down. I’d rather follow someone who’s naturally a good leader, someone like Duane. I can help him decide what to do with my broader experience, but the decision to do it or not is his. We make a good team, as long as he’s the leader.”

Many, perhaps most, Grand Canyon boatmen prefer to sleep right on their rafts, at least if weather conditions permit, which they usually do. Since they’d been together, Duane and Michelle had gotten away from that on many nights, since they preferred to zip their sleeping bags together even if they didn’t make love. They didn’t actually do that very often on a trip, and then only if they could be more isolated than normal, and with the mood on them. Usually they found as isolated and flat a spot as they could within easy reach of the kitchen so they’d be available when things got started early in the morning.

The fire had gone a little later than they’d planned, but not too much. They’d talked about themselves a little more than they would have done otherwise, but with good intention: to let the customers know something about their trip leaders. With the exception of some of the talk about the Iditarod, there was very little said that had not been said many times before to different groups. But that also served as a springboard to draw some stories out of the other team members, and out of some of the customers, some of whom had some pretty interesting outdoor experiences of their own. It looked like there were going to be more stories to be drawn out and told as the days passed.

Since some of the people in the camp were already asleep, they were as quiet as possible in going to bed themselves, again nothing new to them, and they had a lot of practice at it. It wasn’t long before they were snug in their sleeping bags, where they could share a few minutes of private discussion in whispers. “Looks like a pretty good group,” Duane said as she snuggled up close to him.

“Pretty good,” she agreed. “I’ve seen better at this point, but I’ve seen a lot worse. There’s only a couple of problems that I’ve seen, and they’re pretty mild. That one woman, Linda whatever, seems to be something of a libbie. She really took it personally that I wasn’t the trip leader instead of you.”

“Yeah, I think you’re going to get more of that crap out of her,” Duane agreed. “But that isn’t the first time we’ve seen it happen, and she’s not as obnoxious as some have been.”

“I’ll deal with it,” she said. “If nothing else, I’ll get her off to the side and set her straight. I don’t think it’s going to turn into a major issue, though. How about the crew?”

“Well, Brett is being Brett, we know how that works and it’s really not a problem. Erika and Terry seem to be sniffing around each other a little, but there isn’t anything going on there yet. I wouldn’t want to make any bets about what happens after two or three trips, though. They may catch on, and they may not be able to stand the sight of each other by that time. She’s a little New-Agey, sort of like Mary, and I don’t know how Terry is going to handle that.”

“It looks like just kid stuff at this point, and when you get down to it, they’re both still kids. We’ll have to keep an eye on it, though. It’s really no big deal. I’d say we were off to a pretty good start.”

“I think so, too,” he agreed. “It always takes a few days for people to get to pulling together, and we’re just getting into that process. It’ll shake out.”

“Yeah, you’re right. It’s nothing we haven’t dealt with before. I’ll tell you that it feels damn good to be back on the river again, where we belong. It makes the winters seem damn long sometimes, but finally we’re back to doing what we both really want to do. Now we just have to enjoy it, since it’s going to be winter again all too damn soon.”

“Me, too. You know, five years ago I wouldn’t have thought I would last this long here, but right now I can’t think of anything else I’d rather be doing.”

“Me, either. Like I said at the fire, running the river is all I ever wanted, and I hope it never changes.”

To be continued . . .

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