Sarah soon realized that Nanci wasn’t kidding about getting up early; there was barely a trace of light in the eastern sky when she felt her friend waking her. “The rule is that the first person to wake up gets everyone else up,” Nanci said as Sarah yawned and tried to face the grim reality of waking up. “I think Kevin must have kidney problems or something, because he always seems to have to get up to use the river about this time.”

“Does it have to be so early?”

“Pretty much yes, but you get used to it,” Nanci replied as Sarah unzipped her sleeping bag and sat upright. “It doesn’t matter quite as much this time of year, but when it gets warmer we’ll want to get as much done on the river as we can while it’s still relatively cool in the morning. Then we can sit around in the shade if we want to in the hottest part of the day.”

There was some getting organized and packing up the camp bags in the half-light of morning, but soon the rest of the camp was stirring, mostly because one of the crewmen had fired up a big, noisy propane stove to warm water for coffee. Coffee making on the trip was traditional, but primitive, nothing more than a pound can of coffee thrown into a Graniteware pot and boiled until a stone would float. That is, it would float if the stone was one of the pieces of pumice Kevin kept around as a standing joke for the customers. It was full of grounds, and had to be run through a sieve to remove some, but not all of them, but it sure was capable of waking people up in a hurry. Sarah could hardly stand the thought of it, but diluted with a little water and plenty of powdered milk and sugar it was at least drinkable, and it did wake her up in a hurry.

Getting breakfast, cleaning up, and loading the rafts took a couple hours, at least partly because some customers were slow getting around, but at one point Preach commented that they’d get the hang of it in a couple of days. Finally, the rafts were pretty well loaded. Then after Angie and Sarah tore down the rocket box and hand-wash system and packed them on the rafts, he called everyone together, made comments about things that could be done more efficiently in future mornings to get on the move a little better, and left it at that. “It should be a pretty interesting day today. There’s some neat stuff coming up, two, maybe three big rapids, depending on how far we get. One of them is a top ten for difficulty, at least in my book, so we’ll get out and take a look at it. We’ll take some breaks, a couple short hikes, and if we wind up tonight where I want to camp there’ll be a good longer one. Campsites down here are first come, first served, and if we get squeezed out of there, we’ll run on downstream for a ways and wind up where we wind up. We’ve got time enough to be a little flexible on this end.”

He continued for a few minutes, talking about the geology of the area, how rapids are formed, and a little bit of Canyon history: the next major rapids they came to was the last to be run on the river, but that one had tamed down over the years. From memory, he gave a short quotation from John Wesley Powell, the one-armed man who had first taken boats down the Canyon as a thought for the day, then said, “Everyone ready?” There was a chorus of affirmative responses, so he replied, “Well then, I guess we’d better have a short prayer, and then we’ll saddle up and ride. Reverend Chladek, why don’t you do the prayer again?”

Nanci gave a brief prayer, and they got on the river. It was the same group in the raft as the day before. “You know,” one of the women customers said to her, “I still can’t believe you’re a minister.”

“If it’s any help, the first time I ran this river five years ago it would have been even more unbelievable to me,” Nanci replied. “It’s some of that Canyon magic that Al talks about. Well, that and a liberal dose of God’s help. Considering the life I’d led before I came here, it’s so surprising that I can barely believe I’m the same person.”

“Are you planning on keeping on doing this?”

“No. Well, probably not. I’m not tied to the river the way Preach is, with my sister Crystal being his anchor. The odds are that this time next year I’ll be heading toward being the regular minister of a church somewhere, but I’ll miss doing this. It will have been a great summer job for six years, but I can see the time is coming to move on.”

As they drifted on down the river it was still cool, but it warmed up considerably as the day went on. They made a couple stops to stretch their legs, then stopped for lunch and a short hike. After lunch, the river began to change, as the walls grew higher. They looked to be a thousand feet high now, and the sky narrowed to a dark band of the deepest blue, as they were embraced by a world of rock and water. Even the flat water began to dance as the Colorado glided and swirled along the sculptured dark red sandstone walls jutting into the river.

Things went considerably more quickly when they pulled in to camp that evening, especially for Sarah; she was starting to get the hang of the really rather simple job. The customers were still coming together as a team, but the process was under way, and most people were learning each other’s names by now, and some of their idiosyncrasies. There were a couple of guys, for example, who were fairly heavy smokers, but they never smoked while on the water and always made a point of going well downwind of the rest of the group before lighting up. Most of the people on the trip hadn’t known each other before getting on the charter bus in Las Vegas, but it soon proved they had a number of things in common; before long they were becoming fast friends.

As they went on down the river day after day, the scenery was new to most of the customers, and of course to Sarah. Each bend of the river opened new vistas and new wonders to see. Preach and the others passed along various bits of Canyon wisdom and lore. They made frequent stops, sometimes just to get out of the raft and stretch their legs for a few minutes, and perhaps to go upriver and down a ways for the sake of getting some relief. Occasionally they would make a longer stop, at a place like Redwall Cavern, a huge slot at the base of a high cliff with amazing acoustics. Occasionally they would make longer stops so customers could go on hikes, like at Nankoweap, where there were ancient Anasazi Indian granaries high on a hill overlooking the river, one of the postcard views of the Canyon.

Another time they stopped at the mouth of the Little Colorado River, which flowed turquoise-green. Everyone had been warned to have swimsuits on under their clothes, and they took a short hike up the side stream to swim in its warmer waters. They floated down the tiny rapids wearing PFDs upside down on their legs to protect their bottoms from the rocks only a few inches beneath the surface.

In their preparations for the summer, Nanci had advised Sarah to get several tankinis, two-piece swimsuits with tank tops; it was as close as they could get to a one-piece while still having the utility of a two-piece. Most days Nanci wore one as underwear, and Sarah took her cue from her friend. However, changing them daily meant that they were soon running out of clean ones. But Sarah noticed Nanci take a plastic bucket, which had a label that said it had once contained cake frosting, out of her raft. She filled the bucket partway with the cleanest water available at the time, put in their washing and a little biodegradable soap, then fastened the lid into place and just strapped it into the raft. The ride was rough enough the rest of the day that when they took the lid off and rinsed the clothes out in the cleanest available water they came out about as clean as taking them to a laundromat. They then hung them up to dry on the raft along with whatever else was available, and most days after that they had some laundry in the bucket as they went down the river. Only when the river was running exceptionally muddy did they skip washing clothes.

That was just one of any number of little tricks that Nanci and others taught Sarah about living on the river, and she soon learned that, though things were primitive, they could get along quite comfortably. Living like this for most of the summer seemed to be more and more of a possibility.

After a couple of days, Sarah wasn’t always riding with Nanci. Usually she rode with Kevin more than with the others, and almost always when she did he’d have her at the oars at least a little of the time. Sarah didn’t have the workout-trained muscles that Nanci had, so it was more than a little tiring at first, but she soon started to get the hang of things. Kevin proved again to be a kind and gentle soul, not exceptionally talkative or boisterous, but rather thoughtful. She learned that he had spent several years getting through college, mostly working his way through his schooling at the oars of a raft. He was somewhat older than she was, and had finally finished his secondary education degree the previous winter, after taking several spring and fall semesters off over the years in order to be on the river. He had finished his practice teaching, and was looking for a teaching job that would allow him to continue running the river in the summer; he wasn’t planning on giving up the river anytime soon.

She rode with Brett, too. Amazingly enough, he was pretty helpful in teaching her how to row a raft. She learned that he could pass on a great deal of information with “yup” and “nope,” and an occasional, “that’s good.” He was a nice enough guy, and she could see how his strong, silent image could be very appealing. What’s more, she could see how it was appealing to a couple of single women who happened to be on the trip, although both of them appeared to be considerably older than he was. Al’s and Karin’s comments about him up at the office before the trip started to make some sense.

She also spent time riding with Angie or Preach, and especially enjoyed the time she spent with him. He was a gentle guy, soft-spoken, and full of information about the Canyon. While never overbearing, it was always clear who was in charge of the trip. He never had to raise his voice, unless the person he was talking to was far away, but he spoke with words of authority when he had to.

In spite of how religious the crew was, it hardly ever showed very clearly. The only time that Preach and Nanci ever referred to each other as “Reverend” was when it was time for a brief prayer, and they didn’t often do it then. They passed the prayer duty around; even Brett occasionally took a turn, although his “Thank You Father for the bounty You have provided us,” was a long sermon for him. Some of the customers joined in from time to time, too.

They continued with the campfires every evening. Mostly they were just sitting around talking, but occasionally Preach or Angie would pull out a guitar and sing a casual song or two. A little to everyone’s amazement, Brett occasionally borrowed one of the guitars, and it proved that he knew several old-time cowboy songs and could sing them amazingly well, things like Back In The Saddle Again or Cool Water or Ghost Riders In The Sky. Even Nanci got involved one time; she took the guitar and sang, rather badly, I Want To Be A Cowboy’s Sweetheart. She said, truthfully, that she didn’t know much about the guitar, other than that one of the chords she knew was a C, and the other one wasn’t.

Occasionally at the campfires Preach or Nanci would talk for a bit. They could hardly be called religious teachings, although usually there was plenty of food for thought. There were occasionally some religious discussions with some of the customers, not around the campfire, but just sitting alongside the river or under a tamarisk tree in the warmth of an afternoon when nothing much was going on. Sarah got drawn into some of those, and was impressed with how understated the religious messages were, but at the same time how powerful they could be. They were thoughtful rather than polemic, and even some of the non-believers seemed to enjoy the discussions.

“We’ve learned that we have to tread pretty lightly,” Nanci told Sarah one evening as they settled down into their sleeping bags. “But that doesn’t mean that we have to avoid the topic entirely. It’ll be a lot different when we do the Christian trips.”

There were a couple of incidents on the first days of the trip, nothing terribly serious. One of the customers twisted an ankle while out on a hike and needed a lot of help getting back to camp, but soaking the ankle for a while and then having it wrapped in an elastic bandage kept him mobile while it healed. Another one got a sunburn from not paying attention to sunscreen; she wasn’t badly burned but was uncomfortable for a few days, even with the help of ointment, and looked a sight when her skin started to peel several days later. With her as an example, everyone paid more attention to sun protection.

Five days into the trip they reached Upper Granite Gorge, and two days of the most consistently bad rapids of the trip. A couple of them seemed unreal to Sarah, especially Hance, where the photo of Nanci’s raft rearing high on a wave had been taken a couple of years before. “I don’t believe this,” Sarah said as they stood at a viewpoint while the crew was scouting the rapids. “That looks really steep. We can actually do this, can’t we?”

“Optical illusion,” Angie pointed out. “The strata of the rocks alongside the river aren’t quite level, but your eye sees them as level. Believe me, it’s not as bad as it looks.”

By now Sarah had been down enough rapids to not be intimidated quite as badly by them. She wasn’t exactly blasé about them but she knew all of the boatmen had been down the river plenty of times, and had come to believe they knew what they were doing. The ride down Hance was far and away the roughest she’d experienced so far, and she got wet in spite of wearing a rain suit like the customers; the rain suits were meant to keep splash water from getting her soaked. “When it gets hot later in the summer, sometimes we won’t bother with the rain suits, even in places like Hance,” Nanci told the people riding her raft. “The cold water soaking you down is actually pretty refreshing.”

Hance was only one of several difficult rapids that day, and some of the others were nearly as bad. But in between them they had the sight of the fantastic schist rock formations, rocks so old as to defy the imagination, revealed by the river after millions of years of being buried.

Well after noon they stopped at the boatman’s beach at Phantom Ranch, the only sign of civilization they’d see between Navajo Bridge and the takeout a hundred and fifty miles farther on, and then it wasn’t much of a sign, just a couple of suspension footbridges. While the crew broke out lunch, Preach hiked up to the ranger station and the only telephone at the bottom of the Grand Canyon; it was normal procedure to stop and check in with the office, although there usually wasn’t much to discuss.

This time, there was. “Anything interesting from Topside?” Kevin asked as they were starting to pack things up after Preach made himself a quick sandwich.

“Nothing from the office,” he reported. “But I had a talk with Crystal. She had a doctor’s appointment this morning, and it turns out she’s pregnant again.”

“Hey, great,” Nanci smiled. “I know you guys wanted to keep your kids pretty close together in age.”

“This may be a little closer than we wanted,” Preach smiled. “She actually wanted to hold off another couple of months, but I guess the Lord had other ideas.”

“She told me she didn’t want to be heavily pregnant in the heat of the summer again,” Nanci commented. “It looks like she managed that all right.”

“Yeah, but now we have to come up with another name. It was hard enough to come up with Albert, not that we’ve ever actually called Bucky that.”

In an even better mood than before – and this was a group that always seemed to be in a good mood – they loaded up and got back on the river. They had to run another rough rapids a few miles farther on, but camped not long afterwards.

“We’ll do three big ones before lunch tomorrow morning,” Preach told the group around the campfire that evening. “The third one of them is Crystal, which is one of the two worst we’ll see on the whole trip. Then, we’ll have several easier days. We’ll be hitting rapids every day, and some of them will be tough ones, but the going gets easier from here on, and there will be something new and interesting to see each day.”

Preach proved to be right. There were astonishing sights, little hikes in interesting places, and plenty of rapids to run. Several days later, they stopped at the mouth of Havasu Creek, which Sarah knew held special significance to Nanci. “This is where you hiked down to that time, right?” she asked her friend.

“Yes, nineteen miles one way,” Nanci said. “And it’s not an easy hike, especially in February, but it’s a very pretty one. But it was here, among other things, that I finally realized I needed to go to Hickory Run, which ultimately means I’ll probably be leaving the river.”

“I can see how it could be hard for you to give up,” Sarah said understandingly.

“Yes, this has been a very important place in my life,” Nanci sighed. “I don’t know if you can understand just how important. You’ll probably hear the story sooner or later, but this isn’t the time for it and I’m not in the mood to tell it right now anyway.”

A group of the customers took a hike of a mile or so up along the creek, and Sarah went along with them, to discover that the trail was rough and convoluted, and involved several deep creek crossings. She got wet up to her chest several times, and the only good thing that could be said was that her clothes dried out quickly in the warm, dry air.

One day flowed into the next as they proceeded on down the river. The next big challenge was Lava Falls, the next day. Some people called it the toughest rapids in the Canyon, but it was really only just one big drop with a lot of big backrollers behind it. It looked pretty scary to Sarah standing with the crew and some of the customers watching it, but once again she had to reason that every one of the crew had made this run many times before, so they had to know how to do it.

It wasn’t an easy run; although Sarah got soaked on the way down, it was a successful run in that all the rafts were upright when Lava spat them out at the bottom. “I think everybody sometimes seems to think that when Lava is past the trip is over with, but we still have a lot of river to run,” Preach commented.

Sarah still had in mind the discussion they’d had up at the office with Al and Karin about Brett. Sure enough, two nights before they were due to get off the river, he and one of the single customer women who had been nosing around him disappeared on a hike somewhere by themselves. While there was little said around the customers, the crew gave each other knowing glances and little grins. Then, he made a similar hike the next night with the other single woman.

“I’ll bet he doesn’t do that on the Christian trips,” Sarah giggled.

“Are you up for a real bet on that?” Nanci smiled. “I’ll give you the same deal as Al put to me. If he does it I’ll buy you a beer at the Burro, but you have to drink it.”

“Nanci, I’ve never had a beer in my life.”

“All the more reason,” Nanci laughed. “I’d even be willing to bet that the first thing you say after you taste it is ‘Eeeeeww!’”

The next day they reached Diamond Creek Wash, where a rough bulldozed road comes down to the river. It was the normal place for the Canyon Tours trips to take out, although in recent years some trips had been drifting past the place and were met by motor-powered rafts from another company for a long, slow tow to South Cove on Lake Mead.

There was nothing like the openness and space they’d enjoyed at Lee’s Ferry. In the days of the old bus a pickup truck had towed the raft trailer, and it had been just barely possible to turn the rig around, Nanci told Sarah and the people on her raft as they approached the landing. With the big bus the company now used, it was impossible. Dan or Jeff had to uncouple the trailer and turn it around by hand, sometimes with the help of the trailer’s battery-powered winch, then recouple before backing it down to the landing. “I’m told Dan’s language gets pretty rough when he has to do that,” she grinned. “And I guess I don’t blame him.”

But the bus was waiting with the trailer ready for them to load, and not unexpectedly Dan and Crystal were waiting for them. As soon as he had his raft up to shore, Preach scrambled out to give his wife a hug that had been deferred for over a week. While they shared a personal moment, Kevin got everyone started on a final duffel line, this time with the gear, empty food boxes, and full rocket boxes being loaded directly into the back of the bus.

The shear-legs crane made short work of loading the five rafts onto the trailer; barely was one loaded when another one was being pulled into place for the lift. Well under an hour since they arrived, the White Team was loaded and ready to go.

Everybody piled onto the bus; it was pretty crowded with thirty-two people and all that gear aboard. The crew let the customers have the seats while they found spots among the gear piled in the back, or stood up in places where they could hang on while the bus negotiated the rough road up to where they would meet a charter bus. There, they finally parted; the charter bus would take the customers on to Las Vegas, while the Canyon Tours bus would head back to Flagstaff. As they stood waving goodbye to new-found friends they would most likely never see again, Nanci turned to Sarah and asked, “Well, did you like it?”

“It was a lot more challenging and a lot more fun than I thought it would be, but I’m glad to know I can do it. When do we start again?”

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