When Nanci started running the river five years before, the Canyon Tours crews normally got off the river on Thursday, had all day Friday and Saturday morning off, and with that a time when they could do their running and buy personal items they would need on the river. They also got to spend a few relaxing hours in the Burro, which was generally accepted as the boatman’s bar in Flagstaff, mostly because it had a coin laundromat next door. On Saturday afternoon they purchased and packed groceries, and then rode the Canyon Tours bus out to Lee’s Ferry on Sunday afternoon. That gave them the evening and the next morning to rig for their river trip and have a leisurely riverside breakfast before the charter bus showed up with the customers.

Things slowly changed over the years. First, most of the teams started purchasing and packing groceries on Sunday mornings, which gave them all of Saturday off, although the White Team continued doing it the old way so they could go to church. Then, when a schedule change sometimes took away one of the off days on breaks, the company’s topside staff started buying and packing the groceries instead of the crews. That meant the teams started leaving the office very early on Monday mornings usually having just enough time to rig and load the rafts ready for the customers’ arrival. Once in a while it got a little rushed and hectic, but no one wanted to go back to the old way even though it would mean not having to get out of bed at three in the morning on Mondays. The same system worked for the Friday launches when Canyon Tours started doing them regularly.

Over the years they had learned that the first rig of the season always took longer, so they still left the day before on those trips, but the White Team was now on its second trip of the season, although Sarah and Nanci hadn’t been on the first. Nanci was somewhat more used to getting up very early than Sarah, who had difficulty getting up and running in the middle of the night, but Nanci knew she’d get used to it in time. Still, she was yawning and hardly awake when they got into Karin’s car for the short ride over to the office.

Fortunately, their gear had been packed the night before, what there was of it; each of them would have to get along with the gear in a medium-sized dry bag, a volume a little larger than a paper grocery bag. Sarah had been pretty close to unwilling to believe she could get along on that little, even though Nanci told her she’d done it for years. There were some tricks involved, among them the fact that they wouldn’t be wearing fresh clothes every day. “I know you don’t believe it,” Nanci told Sarah, “but one of the things you’re going to learn is how little you really need to be able to get along.”

One of the things that had been done to mitigate the early hour was to serve the crews breakfast at the shop. No fast-food breakfasts were available at that hour, so either Karin or Crystal fired up a gas range in the corner of the workroom out in the shop, and started frying sausage patties and eggs. A big coffee urn had been set up on a timer, so there was coffee already hot when they arrived. Nanci and Karin soon had big mugs of it going, and while Sarah had said she didn’t care for coffee, Nanci soon noticed that she had a mug of it too, although it was about half milk and sugar. “We’re going to make a coffee drinker out of you yet,” Nanci teased her.

“It tastes terrible,” Sarah wrinkled her nose, “but I need something to get me going at this hour of the morning.”

“See, you’re learning one of the facts of life on the river already.”

The rest of the team straggled in over the next few minutes. Dan and Angie arrived next; Dan would be driving the team, which included his wife, out to Lee’s Ferry. Shortly afterward Preach and Crystal showed up, with Crystal carrying Bucky in a baby carrier, sound asleep and likely to stay that way. Karin would watch over him while Crystal rode out to Lee’s Ferry as the Canyon Tours management representative, and to spend a little more time with Preach, of course. A few minutes later Kevin arrived, bringing Brett with him since the taciturn boatman had stayed with Kevin and his family over the break.

There were introductions all around for Sarah, although Brett was the only one of the crew she hadn’t previously met. Brett turned out to be just about as monosyllabic as Al and Karin had described him and the early hour didn’t make him any more loquacious.

While Karin and Crystal worked on breakfast, the rest of the crew turned to loading gear and supplies on the bus that would take them out to Lee’s Ferry, towing a big flatbed trailer loaded with rafts, which already had some of the regular gear they would want aboard. Some of the gear required maintenance or care between trips, but the turnaround crew had taken care of it. Sleeping bags, for instance, had to be laundered between trips, but the turnaround crew, consisting of some part-time high school students supervised by Dan had taken care of many of those items. Nanci explained to Sarah that most of the kids on the turnaround crew would be getting tryouts as swampers after school was out for the summer – it was beginning to be the first step on the Canyon Tours road for becoming boatmen.

By four in the morning, they had all finished their breakfasts, and with their coffee mugs refilled – including Sarah’s – they filed onto the bus for the two-hour ride out to the put-in at Lee’s Ferry. For years Canyon Tours had made the trips with an ancient short-bodied former school bus, but it had gotten increasingly decrepit as time went on, and a couple years previously it had been replaced with a newer full-sized bus, yet another veteran of many miles of hauling kids to school. It towed the raft trailer, saving the need for a second vehicle and driver, although Dan and Jeff, who traded off doing the put-ins and takeouts, complained that it was considerably more cumbersome than a pickup when it came to backing the rig up.

The crew and the riders spread out into the uncomfortable seats; most of them fell asleep in spite of the coffee they’d already downed. Both Sarah and Nanci were among them, and while they had both been over the road before – Nanci many times – at that hour of the morning it was still hard darkness and there wasn’t much to see besides vague shapes of cliffs and hills against the somewhat lighter sky.

Dawn was just starting to lighten the eastern sky when the bus went over the Navajo Bridge a few miles out from Lee’s Ferry. For those few awake on the bus – which may have only been Dan at that point – there was just a hint of the river below them as they crossed over it. Sarah and Nanci were among those asleep.

It was a little easier for the members of the White Team to wake up for the second time that morning, down in the parking lot right in front of the launch ramp, so it only took a few minutes for everyone to be up and running. With plenty of help from the mirrors on the bus and some guidance from the ground, Dan backed the rig up so the tail end of the trailer was just at the edge of the water. It was not a simple process, and was a little more frustrating to Dan since he was the only one of the bunch who was one to use language not necessarily appreciated by most of the members of the White Team. Fortunately he was the only one on the bus at the time and no one else could hear him very clearly.

Unloading the rafts stacked on the trailer was fairly simple. Since they were partially loaded they were too heavy to be manhandled – although it had been done at times with help from customers – but the trailer included a shear-legs crane arrangement and an electric winch that made the job go fairly easily. Each raft was lifted from the trailer and set into the water, then moved out of the way so the next one could be unloaded. Soon all five rafts were lined up with their noses up on the bank, seemingly eager to start yet another trip down the river through what the Canyon Tours brochure called, correctly, “the most awesome scenery on the face of the planet.”

Everybody there formed a “duffel line” to pass the many pieces of gear and food from the pile in the back of the bus and load them on the rafts. The trick there was to make sure the right mixture of gear went onto each raft; it would not do to have all the lightweight sleeping bags loaded on one raft while all the heavy food boxes were loaded on another. Sorting out which gear went onto which raft was a job usually delegated to the assistant trip leader, and it kept Kevin running back and forth for the half hour or so it took to get the bus unloaded. But it was something the members of the White Team had done many times before, and it was little different than what Canyon Tours teams had been doing for decades, so that simplified matters considerably.

The sun had been up for an hour when Dan finally pulled the bus and raft trailer away from the launch ramp and parked the rig in the parking lot. There was still work to do, but it could be done more leisurely now that the hard part was done. It was time for a break, and the crew gathered around an insulated urn of coffee that had been made back in the shop before they left, and was still comfortably warm enough to drink. There was also a box of day-old doughnuts Crystal had purchased at a bakery the day before, and while not particularly fresh they didn’t last long, either.

There wasn’t any place to sit around, so the noses of the rafts up on the shore had to be used, but nobody minded; they were considerably softer than the rocks they would be sitting on for the next two weeks. “So, Sarah,” Preach, the trip leader, said, “is anything making sense to you so far?”

“It seems to me that you have everything pretty well organized, but I don’t know how you manage to do it.”

“Well, practice is part of it,” Preach told her, “but the real key to it is teamwork, working together. We can all do pretty well at it since we’ve done it many times before, and you’re the only one here who’s new to it. One of the hassles we have on every trip, and I mean every trip is getting the customers into the same mindset. It’s a many-hands-make-light-work thing, and that means the customers as well as the crew. It usually takes four or five days before everybody gets with the program, but once they do, things go a lot easier. You’ll see what I mean as we get down the river. I know this is your first trip, so things will often seem a little bit confusing to you, but when we start the next trip a lot of it will be old hat to you.”

“I hope you’re right, but it all seems so new to me now.”

“If it’s any consolation, it was new to all of us at one time or another. If you think you’re finding it strange, you have no idea how strange Nanci felt five years ago. You at least have some idea of what you’re getting into from lots of talk, and I think it’s safe to say from having been there at the time that Nanci didn’t have a clue.”

“You’re right, Preach,” Nanci spoke up. “Everything was totally strange to me, but I also knew I didn’t have much choice, either.”

“Sarah, you’ve heard Al talking about Canyon magic. I don’t know if I buy all his theories on it, but there’s no doubt some of it exists, and it did a bigger job on Nanci than anyone else I’ve ever seen. In fact, if you asked Al, he would probably make the same statement. She was about as green a newbie as anyone can be, and if she were to stay on the river after this summer she’d be in line to be a trip leader or assistant when an opening came up. We have had people promoted to both spots who have had less experience than she has, but the spots aren’t open right now and probably won’t be in the near future.”

The coffee urn was soon drained, and various crewmembers had to make the short hike to the restrooms partway across the parking lot to drain the results. “You’d better make use of them while you can,” Nanci told Sarah. “It’s the last time you’ll have the chance to use a restroom until we get back to Flagstaff in two weeks. It gets primitive after this.”

“I’m not that naïve,” she shrugged. “I lived with outhouses for the first eleven years of my life.”

“We won’t even have those,” Nanci smiled. “It gets even more primitive than that. It makes you appreciate the finer things in life, like walls and doors as well as flush toilets.”

There was still work to do. A line of medium-sized dry bags were laid out for the customers to use, along with a line of smaller dry bags called “day bags.” The medium-sized bags, called “night bags” would be kept under tarps on the rafts, so the customers wouldn’t be able to get to them during the day. The smaller day bags would be kept available for things that would be wanted during the day on the river, things like cameras, sunscreen, rain suits, and extra clothing.

Each of the boatmen turned to arranging the piles of gear on their rafts, with the heavier things kept toward the bottom of the rafts, unless they would be wanted during that day, like the things needed for lunch. Each of the boatmen had their own ideas of how they wanted items arranged, but there was less need to hurry, now; things were under control.

They had things pretty well done by the time the big charter bus from Las Vegas pulled in with the customers for the trip – twenty-four of them in all. Nanci and Sarah stayed back out of the way while Preach introduced himself, saying, “I’m going to be your trip leader on this trip down the Colorado River in the Grand Canyon. My name is Noah Whittaker, but I usually only hear my real first name about once every other week, if that often. I don’t think my wife has even used my real name in a couple of years. Everybody on the river has called me ‘Preach’ for years, mostly because before I became a boatman I was the youth pastor at Glen Hill Road Baptist Church in Chattanooga, Tennessee. So call me ‘Preach’ and you won’t confuse me.”

Preach went on to check everybody in, to make sure the names he had on the checklist he had from the office were the same as the people who were there. That was usually the case, but once in a while there was some confusion, one of the reasons that Crystal was there as the office representative.

Once the check-in was complete, Preach introduced the members of the crew. As usual for a “regular customer” trip he refrained from mentioning the fact that Nanci was also a minister, and that she and Sarah were students at Hickory Run Methodist Seminary, and that most of the White Team were pretty serious Christians. Those facts would come out soon enough, perhaps that evening at the first campfire, but it had been decided years before that it was a little intimidating to dump those facts on regular customers right at the beginning of the trip. It would be a little different when the Christian trips came along later in the season.

Preach also had the customers introduce themselves; it was unlikely that the crew members would remember all the customers at first, but in a few days everyone would know everybody else – it was part of the process of becoming a team working together.

With that done, Preach went on to start the real orientation for the trip. There were a number of things the customers needed to know, and they wouldn’t learn them all at once – the real orientation would go on in bits and pieces for the next day or so, and there would be additions and reiterations all the way down the river.

“We’re only going to run a few miles today, just to let you get used to being on the river,” he said. “First, your boatman is in charge of your raft. Listen to them. They know what they’re doing. You may not. As boatmen, we’re here to give you a good trip, but also a safe trip. There’s an accident every now and then, but it’s hardly ever that anyone gets hurt. In over forty years, Canyon Tours has never had a death on the river and we aren’t going to start now. Major rule: when you’re on the river in a raft you will wear your PFD at all times. ‘PFD’ stands for ‘Personal Flotation Device’ or life jacket. If I catch someone on the river without a PFD, you’re not going to like what I say and my having been a minister won’t slow me down. It’s not just our rule, it’s the insurance company’s rule, it’s a Grand Canyon National Park rule, and it’s the law. Period. End of discussion, OK?”

He continued on for a while, going over a number of points ranging from camp procedure to whitewater rescue. It was a lot to cover, and Preach knew it; he said he’d be going over many of the things again for several days until everybody got it through their skulls.

Finally, he said, “OK, I’m sure everybody is tired of hearing me talk. I’m even tired of talking. I’m going to assign each of you to a raft. We’ll probably do some switching around as we go down the river, but let’s stay like this for a couple days, until we get used to being out here.” He went down through the list, name by name, and had people gather by their assigned raft, telling the boatmen to take over the next part of the orientation.

Not to her surprise, Sarah was assigned to Nanci’s raft, although she already knew the two of them wouldn’t be together every day. “All right,” Nanci said. “If you didn’t catch it earlier, my name is Nanci, and I’ll be your boatman at least for the next couple of days. This is my sixth year on the river and I’m coming up on forty trips down the Canyon. It’s sort of a common wisdom that boatmen are at their wildest in their third year but grow out of it by their fifth year. I’m not the kind of person who pushes the limits, but we’ll have some fun. Sarah here will be our helper on this trip – we call them swampers – and this will be her first trip down the river so she’ll be learning about the river about as much as you are.”

The next few minutes were busy. Nanci directed people to get into their river clothes, mostly over in the restrooms, and reminded them that they were coming up on their last chance to use the facilities. “Use the phone there if you want to call someone,” she told everybody. “Cell phones won’t work down in the Canyon. There aren’t any towers.”

A number of people had brought beer with them, since Canyon Tours wasn’t licensed to sell or provide it. Nanci packed most of it in the bottom of the raft, but hung a burlap bag with some of it over the side of the raft to cool in the chilly river water, along with soft drinks the company had provided. The “drag bags” would provide cool drinks while on the water.

Once everyone had on the clothes they were going to wear on the river and were gathered around the raft, Nanci asked for the customer’s names once again. She wasn’t very good at remembering everybody from the introductions, and then got everyone started on packing their night bags and day bags, helping them out as needed. Each bag was numbered, and Nanci explained that each customer had a third bag, already aboard, with the same numbers that contained their sleeping bags and pads; these were called “camp bags.”

Once they had the dry bags packed, Nanci put them into place on the raft, then tied a tarp down over them along with the other gear on the raft. She helped everyone get fitted for PFDs; they would take a few spares with them, and there were others in extra large or small sizes on the Canyon Tours bus if needed. She also showed the customers how to attach their day bags to the raft so they wouldn’t get loose in case of a spill. It took a while, but after half an hour or so they were ready to go.

Things were getting to that point on the other rafts; the initial orientation and loading was always a little confusing for the crew and customers, but at least the crew had been through it before. “All right, one final thing before we get started,” Nanci said. “Normally, if you want to ride sitting on the gear pile or the raft tubes, that’s fine. But when we hit rapids, I’ll want you to be sitting down on the inside of the raft and hanging on to something. We call that position ‘down and in’ and we’ll hit a couple places today when I’ll have you down there. This isn’t a suggestion, it’s something I’ll have to have you do. When we hit a tough spot, I’ll tell you to help pull the drag bags in before we get there, and I’ll need your help with it. I know some of you have river guide books that tell you about the difficulty of each rapids, and they’re interesting and informative. But as far as I’m concerned, rapids come in four varieties of increasing difficulty: ‘no problem,’ ‘hang on,’ ‘down and in,’ and ‘get the drag bags in.’ Unless things go goofy, we’ll only be hitting one of the last kind today.”

They were almost ready to go, now. Preach and Angie took a last trip up to the rest rooms, and then made a quick stop out of sight from the rafts behind the bus. Nanci knew what that was all about – it was the last opportunity for Preach to kiss Crystal goodbye for a two-week separation, and the same was true for Angie and Dan.

“Sarah,” Nanci grinned. “Last chance to turn back. You still want to go?”

“I wouldn’t dare not go now,” she smiled back. She glanced down the river, then added, “I can’t wait to see what’s down there.”

“Good enough,” Nanci laughed. “This is going to work out just fine.”

By then Preach and Angie were back at their rafts. “Boatmen, everyone ready to go?” Preach called. He got affirmative replies from the other four rafts – only a “yup” from Brett, of course; Kevin had actually done most of his orientation for him – so then called out. “All right, everybody, let’s saddle up and ride.”

Dan and Crystal got in front of the first raft in line, which happened to be Kevin’s, and gave it a push, then Brett’s, and then Nanci and Sarah’s. After a pretty good heave, their raft was afloat. “Well, folks,” she said as she unlimbered the oars and helped back the raft out into the river, “I guess we’re going to go see what the Lord has been up to.”

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