| Wes Boyd's Spearfish Lake Tales Contemporary Mainstream Books and Serials Online |
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| Wes Boyd's Spearfish Lake Tales Contemporary Mainstream Books and Serials Online |
Chapter 20
When they’d made their first trip of the season in May there had occasionally been mornings when a jacket felt good on the river, but those days were long gone. It was hot in the Grand Canyon now, and Duane knew it would get hotter in the next few weeks. The days were routinely in the nineties and low hundreds for highs. The whole crew knew that in the next month or six weeks or so it would get worse than that.
Even at night it was hot; though people might get into sleeping bags in the cool of the early morning, and even pull them up part way, they were almost never zipped up. Some nights, Duane knew, about the only way to chill down enough to sleep comfortably was to wrap up in a sheet wet with river water. In the dry air of the Canyon the sheet soon dried out, but that trick helped take the edge off enough to drop off to sleep in the first place.
The only thing that made being in the Canyon at this time of year reasonable, Duane thought, was that the river was still cold. It was fed out of the bottom of Glen Canyon Dam upstream from Lee’s Ferry, and the water temperature there was usually around fifty, give or take a little, and not a lot more than that down at Diamond Creek. It was bracing to jump into for a cooling dip, and toward the middle of the day the potty and rest break stops usually involved a swim for most of the group to cool off.
Duane was of the opinion that the Arabs had it right about one thing: the way to beat the heat was to stay pretty close to fully dressed in clothes that would reflect the sun and ward off the rays beating down, but loose enough to let air circulate. He had a lightweight synthetic outfit that he wore sometimes, and sometimes just wore an equally lightweight martial arts gi. Either one seemed to do the job, and when he jumped into the river on one of the rest breaks it dried out about as well as a swimsuit would, although cooling him more from evaporation in the process. In the dry air nothing they wore would stay wet for very long, even if soaked down thoroughly beforehand.
However, Duane knew he was in the minority of opinion on what to wear. Many people on the trips, crew and customers alike, preferred the approach of dressing in as little as possible and slathering on the sunscreen to ward off the intense summer sun. Some days it seemed like everyone in the party but he and a couple diehards like him were wearing nothing but swimsuits. Some of the swimsuits on both men and women were downright daring, even to his rather liberal attitudes. “The hell of it is,” a boatman he had heard remark on a trip years before, “the people wearing the least usually seem to be the people who ought to be wearing a hell of a lot more.”
Like anywhere else the latter part of the afternoon was the hottest part of the day. Now campsites that would be shaded in the late afternoon and evening were at a premium; sometimes they’d go several extra miles to get a shady-side spot or a place with a lot of tamarisks to duck under.
Since this was a short trip they had to do things a little differently. This was not the first short trip Canyon Tours had run, although they hadn’t done a lot of them in the three years they’d been offered – this was about the fourteenth or fifteenth. The trip leaders were still working out their strategies on how to handle the trips that were of shorter duration than they’d been used to. As on the trips lasting longer, most people conceded that the upper half of the Canyon was a little more interesting and spectacular, so they tended to run a little slower than average through it, and pick up speed in the lower half. Since they had to run Upper Granite Gorge and Adrenaline Alley on about the same schedule due to the limited number of places to stay, their schedule there didn’t change much.
With some careful campsite selection and a little luck it was no great trick to cut a day out of the trip above Upper Granite Gorge, but that meant that three days would have to be made up below Crystal Rapids. That could make for some long days in the hot sun. The other approach was to cut out two full days of the first part of the trip so they wouldn’t have to run quite as hard in the second part.
The second approach was the one that Duane had more or less come to favor, although the jury was still out on that, as well. Before this run, he and Barbie had agreed to stop at Badger like normal – it was just too good and a convenient place for orientation and breaking in a new group of customers. After that, they’d run several miles past their normal second-night stop and find a site in one of the small but scenic camps along in the middle part of the Roaring Twenties, a group of rapids between twenty and thirty miles below Lee’s Ferry. The next day they’d run hard, down to Buck Farm Canyon or someplace along in there, where there were also a number of good campsites, then go on to Nankoweap the next day. From there they’d go straight to one of Duane’s favored sites near Nevills Rapids, then run Upper Granite Gorge and Adrenaline Alley in the normal way. That cut two days out of the front of the trip without it being too painful.
Before the trip Barbie and Duane had agreed to take his approach, just to see how well it worked. They were going to have to work out something – this was the last year they were going to be making the eighteen-day trips, after all. It wasn’t as if it couldn’t be done; after all, some companies ran twelve-day oar trips, and there were one or two that did them in ten, with the helicopter flyout from Whitmore. But trips that short were something that ran against the Canyon Tours grain; Al clearly preferred longer ones and told stories of the old days when occasionally they were out for four weeks, or even longer.
By about the second or third day all of the boatmen and most of the customers were wishing it was one of those ten-day trips. One night there was a rather theoretical sounding discussion around a fire that it could be done in eight with the helicopter flyout; both Brett and Andy had favorable things to say about the four-day motor-rig trips they’d both once run.
The discussion went right over the head of the target of it, one of the women customers on the trip. She was severely overweight, bitched and whined and pissed and moaned about everything, and did it in a loud voice that was irritating at first and got considerably more so as the trip went on. What’s more, she hardly ever stopped, and she got everyone’s nerves on edge early on.
To try and spread the pain they switched the woman and her husband around between the various rafts, which mean that the rest of the party could put some distance between themselves and the pest. That helped a little, but she managed to take a lot of the fun out of the trip for everyone else. By the time they were past Crystal, the boatmen – and even some of the customers – were referring to her out of her hearing as the “Bitch From Hell.”
One long, hot day on the lower part of the river things got out of hand. The Bitch From Hell was doing her usual complaining and whining when one of the other customers, a pretty quiet guy who hadn’t had much to say on the trip, finally snapped back at her. “Why don’t you just shut up and give it a rest for a while?” he roared. “Everyone on this trip is thoroughly aware that you’re unhappy, and all you’ve done is ruin the trip for the rest of us.”
That got her husband pissed off, and right then and there a fist fight all but broke out in the middle of the river. It would have broken out except for the fact that Eddie, who had been exiled to that raft due to his lack of seniority, got between the two considerably larger men and managed to get them settled down a little, though of course not exactly happy with each other. The two men were still not happy when the group got to the camp that afternoon, but they managed to stay away from each other enough to keep further friction from erupting, too.
However, the incident pretty much drew the line for the rest of the trip. The last few days no one would have much to do with the couple and treated them like pariahs. The next morning, Brett came to Barbie and Duane and volunteered to take the two for the rest of the trip, since he’d learned to tune her out a little – he was that kind of guy. There were only three in his raft from there down, and there tended to be quite a bit of separation between his boat and the rest of the group.
That repaired the aura of the trip a little, but it was still the worst trip Duane had endured in quite a while. They were all just about as happy as they could be to see the customer bus going up the hill at Diamond with the Bitch on board.
“Glad to have that one over with, folks,” Duane told the crew as they watched the bus leave. “Brett, I’m going to talk to Al and see if he can’t come up with a bonus for you putting up with that shit the last few days. That was sort of above and beyond, and all that. If he won’t, I will out of my own pocket.”
“I’ll pitch in,” Barbie agreed. “Nobody deserves that kind of treatment, and God knows why her husband puts up with it.”
Brett kind of hemmed and hawed around, and said that someone had to do it, which was about all he ever said about things.
“And while we’re at it,” Duane added, “Eddie, I already told you that you did good when you broke up that fight and kept those two from slugging it out in the middle of the river. I’m not the one to make the final decision, but I’ll give my best recommendation to Al. That was sort of above and beyond, too.”
“Let’s not be quite so damn quick about that,” Erika piped up. “Let’s see how he does at cleaning out the rocket boxes first.”
Like the trip before, Michelle had come to Diamond Creek for the takeout so the two of them could maximize their time together. Right at the first she told Duane that she had some news, but nothing that couldn’t wait until they were on the bus for the trip back to Flagstaff. As always it took a while to load up, but without quite the rush this time. Except for the time Duane was going to spend with Michelle while she was setting up groceries and supplies for the next trips by both the Blue team and Gold team, they would have a full three days off together. Thus it was a while before the two got settled into one of the seats of the bus, cuddled a little, and just enjoyed being together again – after this last trip and the Bitch from Hell, it seemed even better than ever. Finally, he asked, “So what’s the news you have for me?”
“Well, there are several things,” she said, a smile on her face. “The big thing is that we settled on a date for the wedding. Mom and Dad and I talked about it more than a little, and your folks were involved, too. We finally decided we ought to do it before I get too big.”
“I got the impression you were leaning that way,” he replied.
“Well, yeah,” she said. “But there were several other things we had to take into consideration. Anyway, that means that the only time Preach is going to be available when you’re here is the night of August 6, or the morning of August 7.”
“I’ll have a short break that weekend,” he protested. “And I’ll be launching the morning of August 7.”
“Well, yeah,” she said. “But that’s still the best time to do it and the only time we can and meet some restrictions. We kicked around doing it down at Lee’s, but Mom pointed out that you’d be thinking about rigging instead of a wedding. That got us to thinking that it didn’t have to be right by the river, after all. I mean, I’m trying to get away from that a little bit.”
“Yeah, I know, and I know it hasn’t been easy for you. So what’s the decision?”
“Dad came up with the idea,” she said. “Since time is tight, what’s wrong with getting married right up on the South Rim? We’re thinking of doing it early in the morning before the crowds show up, at some place like Yavapai Point. That’s only a little more than a mile from home.”
“Not a bad idea,” he said, impressed with the thought. The place had a tremendous view. “That’s prettier than any cathedral I know of.”
“I thought it was a hell of a good idea myself,” she smiled. “Anyway, if we do it early enough we can have a breakfast reception at the El Tovar Hotel, and then you, the team, and I can go straight down to Lee’s to get you on the river.”
“I don’t know about that part of it,” he protested. “We barely had enough time to do the rigging the last time. You may have smoothed out the procedure a little, but you haven’t gained that much time to spare.”
“Well, yeah,” she said. “But we kicked it around after you left the last trip. Not all the details have been worked out yet but they’re just little things. Right at the moment the outline of it is that while Crystal and Preach are going to be at the wedding, the rest of the White Team and a couple extra helpers are going to haul everything up to Lee’s and rig and load for you. If we run a little late, Kevin will meet the customer bus, do the check in, and give at least some of the orientation if he has to. I mean, it’s not the first time Al has screwed around with trip arrangements to fit a wedding into the schedule. This time is nowhere near as bad as the last time he did it.”
“Sounds OK,” he replied grudgingly. He’d been on that trip, and it had been why he had to hike out up the Bass Trail that time. “It ought to work, but damn it, that’s going to be one hell of a honeymoon, a mad drive from Grand Canyon Village to Lee’s Ferry so I can be gone for two weeks.”
“Well, yeah,” she agreed. “But if we’re going to have Preach do the wedding before the end of the season, that’s our only chance. We kicked around the idea of Kevin, the rest of the White Team and the pickups even taking the trip down to Badger. The Gold Team could hike in there the morning after the wedding, but we decided that too much could go wrong and the continuity of the trip would be broken up for the customers.”
“That’s all probably right,” he admitted, “but still, damn!”
“Yeah, I know what you mean,” she said. “But we’ve all thought about it more than you’ve had time to. Besides, you said to just tell you when, where, and what to wear. This is really the best option.”
“I know I told you that,” he said. “I’ll stay with it, but that’s what I get for being a wise ass.”
“We’ll just have to take a honeymoon some other time,” she sympathized. “To tell the truth, I think our folks are getting their heads together and planning on burping up for a trip to Hawaii after the baby comes. Maybe along about March or April, before the season opens but after I have a chance to get my figure back a little.”
“OK, I’m sold,” he smiled. “That puts a little different spin on things. And I don’t mean just because it’s Hawaii, either.”
“It does for me, too,” she snickered, picking up perfectly on his insinuation, probably because it appealed to her, too. “Crystal and Scooter and I went to Maui once, and we had a ball. Anyway, I’ll tell everyone you’re OK with the idea so we can go ahead and firm things up. There’s still quite a bit up in the air, so I can’t really tell you a lot more than that.”
Although this break was quite a bit more relaxed than the previous one, Michelle still had work to do to organize it fully, though Karin took pity on her and got the Blue Team headed for Lee’s on Saturday morning. That meant Duane and Michelle could sleep in instead of having to be on the road at three in the morning. They managed to have most of the day to themselves on Sunday, too.
It was just as well. On Monday they had to get up even earlier in the morning – one AM, for Pete’s sakes! That extra time was needed so they could go by the all-night supermarket in Flagstaff to pick up fresh produce for the trip, then get it packed before the rest of the team showed up. Michelle drove up to Lee’s in the Mustang, with Duane asleep beside her most of the way.
The team – except for Eddie, who wasn’t with them this time – was still pretty gun shy after putting up with the Bitch From Hell on the previous run. All of them hoped this trip would have a better group of customers and help get some of the bad taste of the previous two weeks out of their mouths.
Right at the beginning the prospects didn’t seem good. Once they got rigged, but before the customer bus showed up, one of the National Park Service rangers from Lee’s Ferry showed up to check them in for their trip. This was routine; it happened every trip, although most of the time the ranger just glanced at the manifest, counted the names, told a joke or two and gossiped a bit.
However, every now and then they got a serious going over with a safety equipment check and things like that. This time, for whatever reason, they drew one of the serious checks, apparently by a ranger who didn’t do the checkouts very often or had had too many hassles with private boater parties. Perhaps it was even a combination of both. In any case, he put them through the wringer, something that often happened with private trips but rarely with the commercials, who were supposed to know what they were doing. He didn’t find anything wrong, but not for the lack of trying, and the inspection only wound down as the customer bus was pulling in.
At least the customer group seemed pretty good during the initial orientation, and after the combination of the Bitch from Hell and the Park Service check they were glad to be out on the river where there was a chance of it being peaceful in spite of the rapids.
Even on the first day this proved to be a much better group of customers than the trip before. Though it was hot, things went smoothly with few problems. Once again, Duane was letting Barbie run the trip as a training exercise. A few times he threw around the idea of sticking Andy with the job later in the season, but reasoned that he probably ought to run the notion past Al first, just to be on the safe side.
On the first night out, Barbie and Duane got together for a beer away from the rest of the crew and the customers, like they had done several times on the last two trips. Duane had come to welcome those sessions; it wasn’t like having Michelle around, but at least he could clear his mind about things that were bothering him. However, they hadn’t talked about much since about the second half of the last trip, mostly because the Bitch From Hell had been drawing so much of their attention.
This time it was a little more laid back than previous sessions since Duane didn’t have much but routine problems on his mind. “I take it your break went pretty well,” Barbie observed.
“Yeah, pretty much,” he said. “There’s always going to be a few minor issues on a break, given the situation we have, but realistically, no big deal. Michelle seems to be handling the whole thing better than I expected her to. That means I’m handling them better, too.”
“I take it that you’re still considering leaving the river after this season.”
“Well, let’s not say considering, just that it’s an option sitting on the table,” he admitted. “Like I told you, what happens over the winter is going to have some bearing on it. I just don’t know.”
“What does Michelle think about that?”
“Same thing. She knows it’s an option too, but whether it’ll happen next winter is anybody’s guess. One of my big concerns is that I don’t want to rub her nose in the fact that I can be on the river and she can’t, so we really haven’t gotten into it very deeply. No point in raising that issue before its time.”
“So what’s she been doing besides setting up the trips?”
“Working in her folk’s gift store,” Duane said. “She seems to get along pretty well with it, but then, she was raised in the job and has been helping out there since she was a little kid.”
“That’s quite a store,” Barbie smiled. “I’ll bet they do a ton of business.”
“Oh, no shit they do, and you haven’t seen it in the summer. It can get to be wall-to-wall people in there, and some of them drop a ton of money. I’ve never heard it discussed in so many words, but I have to figure that her folks are doing pretty damn well with it. Some of the markups are incredible, so they have to be raking it in.”
“What makes you say that?”
“Well, you know about my dad and his knife making? This season they started selling some of Dad’s knives in the gift shop. They’re mostly collector’s items and are not cheap in his store back in Michigan. Most of them are even more expensive in the gift shop, but they’ve been moving them so well that they’ve had to reorder from Dad twice. I mean, I grew up around that business, and I still can’t imagine someone would buy a couple of eight hundred dollar knives as souvenirs, but there are definitely people who do it at the drop of a credit card. Needless to say, everyone is happy about the deal.”
“Wow. I guess a fool and his money are soon parted. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve seen the knife of your father’s that you show around, and it’s pretty neat, but I’m not in the market at that price.”
“Well, I wouldn’t be either,” Duane shrugged. “I can understand a collector or something, I think, but someone who wants to spend money because they’re on vacation? Takes all kinds, I guess. Like I said, Pat and Rachel have to be doing pretty well. They don’t act like they’ve got a pot load of money, but you can tell they’re not hurting.”
“Jeez, how do you get into a business like that?”
“It takes being in the right place at the right time, I guess,” Duane explained. “They were able to pick up the concession cheaply, oh hell, thirty years ago. It’s like the rafting companies, thirty years or so ago Al bought Canyon Tours for something like thirty-five grand if the stories he tells are right. Crystal tells me that he turned down five million here a while back, and I don’t mean reluctantly. I mean, it was ‘Don’t make me laugh.’ I guess the gift shop was the same kind of thing.”
“I’d heard that about Al and the company,” Barbie nodded. “I guess he wants to keep his finger in it for a while but let Crystal do the work while he still draws a check.”
“That’s what I’ve always understood,” Duane agreed. “And when you get right down to it, it’s a good deal all the way around for both of them.”
The discussion took off in other directions from there, but it left Duane mulling over a question that hadn’t crossed his mind before. He didn’t know Pat and Rachel’s age but knew it had to be getting close to sixty, if for no more reason than Michelle’s brother Michael was on the far side of thirty and he knew Pat and Rachel hadn’t been teenagers when he was born. He also knew that they were happy to have Michelle working in the shop with them again, and Rachel had hinted that she’d be welcome there full-time if things worked out that way. From what little Duane knew about Michael, he wanted to continue being a cop, and that was fine if it was what he wanted.
Duane thought he might be over-thinking things, putting something into place where nothing was there, but could Pat and Rachel have been waiting for Michelle to settle down a little before drawing her into the business, perhaps on a permanent basis?
It wasn’t impossible. Maybe Pat and Rachel hadn’t even consciously thought it out that far, but still one thing was clear: they wanted to slow down a little, do some traveling, and quit working really stupid hours. Could that mean anything for Michelle? For him? Duane didn’t think he’d be happy running a gift store, and doubted Michelle would, either. But Michelle had already reacted to the news of her pregnancy differently than he would have expected. To be honest, it wouldn’t have surprised him for her to have had an abortion and not even tell him about it – but that hadn’t happened. Since the option had been open to her, he realized that she’d made up her mind to have the baby even before she told him about it. Could it be that the baby was turning out to be a real excuse for her to mellow out and grow up?
Again, not impossible. She’d already mellowed out a lot from when he’d first known her. Back in those days she’d been known as “The Wild Woman of the Grand Canyon” and there had been some of that, but he really hadn’t seen much of it in the time he’d been with her. It had been a long time since he’d heard the term, except in telling tales of the old days. In fact, the last crazy episodes he’d remembered had been on that last sailing trip to the Bahamas, the one with Scooter, Jim, Mary, Dave, and Randy.
Cripe, had she actually settled down because of living with him, and was she in the process of settling down more? In a way it was welcome, if not what he expected.
The concept poked into his mind from time to time over the next week or so as they proceeded on down the Canyon. There wasn’t much he could do about it beyond that, and even later, when he got off the river and saw Michelle and her parents again, it wasn’t the kind of thing he could come out and ask. He might be able to ask the odd leading question or two and might even get a hint of an answer, but realized it would be something he would have to keep to himself.
