It was a three-hour ride from Diamond Creek Wash back to Flagstaff, and of course the old school bus wasn’t exactly the most comfortable ride possible, although the seats were much softer than the rocks they’d used for sitting when on shore for the past two weeks. Amazingly enough, most of the crew managed to sleep through it, but not Sarah; this was new country to her, and she kept her eyes out the windows looking at the passing scenery, so different from what she’d gotten used to in her last two weeks in the Grand Canyon. Finally, the bus bounced into the parking lot behind the Canyon Tours office.

Even then, the work wasn’t done, but close to it. The rafts were left on the trailer for their next launch on Monday; one of them needed a little work, but it had been loaded on top so it could be worked on while still on the trailer. There were pieces of gear that needed cleaning and maintenance, and almost as soon as they were unloaded from the bus some of the high school kids who helped on the turnaround crew were busy loading sleeping bags into an industrial-sized washing machine.

Nanci hadn’t been kidding Sarah about cleaning the full rocket boxes; as they were taken off of the bus they were set on a four-wheeled cart. When it was full, Angie took Sarah around behind the shop to where there was a manhole for the city sewer, and showed her how to do it.

The job stunk; Sarah couldn’t believe how badly it stunk, especially with the rocket boxes that had been closed the longest. She couldn’t believe the gas mask that Angie offered would help that much, but the boatman insisted that she wear a breath mask and face shield to guard against splashes. “It could be worse,” Angie told her, “and it really will be later in the summer when some of these things have sat out in the heat and the sun for almost two weeks. I swear, I don’t know why they don’t explode from all the fermentation and stuff that goes on inside them. I mean, I was a chemistry major in college and I can’t imagine all the stuff that has to be happening in there.”

Dumping the rocket boxes wasn’t even the worst part; cleaning them up was. It stunk just as badly when they took a hose to them, which was why they wore the masks in the first place. In spite of being careful, there was always some loose gunk flying around, and getting hit by some of it couldn’t be avoided. Claiming seniority, Angie stood back and let Sarah take her chances with the worst of it; Sarah was soaked and spattered with pieces of unmentionable material before that part of the job was complete.

Finally, the rocket boxes were clean, although they still had to be washed with disinfectant before the job was done. It really hadn’t taken that long, but Sarah felt that it was the second longest hour that she had ever endured.

“There’s one good part about it,” Angie said. “After the next trip, we’ll probably have a tryout swamper along for most of the other trips of the summer. That means you’ll be senior to them, and they’ll be the ones who have to do it, although you’ll have to watch over them like I did you to teach them and make sure they get done right.”

“Thank goodness.”

“Just between you and me, how much they bitch about it is one of the tests that helps Al decide who he’s going to hire, so don’t let on to any of them about it.”

Sarah was grateful indeed for the shower in the office; she stripped off her outer clothes at the earliest possible instant, for once not really caring very much who was watching. She gave herself a good scrub, even though the shower was running cold – there was no hot water, and the shower actually was a hose and nozzle. The only clothes she had to put on were grubby from the river, but they seemed much better than the soaked and stinking things she’d just taken off. She couldn’t make up her mind whether to wash them or just throw them away, and the second choice was very appealing, although it would mean having to buy a new set of clothes for the river.

There were some other things that had to be done before they were ready to knock off for the day. “Well, that’s it,” Preach said finally. “Have a good break, and I’ll see everyone here at four AM on Monday morning, although if someone wants to show up on Sunday afternoon for an hour or two to get a head start on loading the gear, it would be appreciated. Nanci, Sarah, I need a word with you before you take off.”

Dan and Angie were soon gone, as were Kevin and Brett. “What is it, Preach?” Nanci asked.

“Jeff came to me while we were unloading,” he told them. “We’re going to be here on a Sunday, and you know what that means.”

“He needs someone to speak at the Fellowship,” Nanci nodded. “He always needs someone to speak at the Fellowship.”

“Yeah, that’s pretty true. Just to make life more fun, Karin tells me that Reverend Miller would like you to fill in for him at Hillside on Sunday.”

“I can’t turn him down,” Nanci sighed. “He’s done so much for me I’ll never be able to pay it all back. So that means that you’re going to be at the Fellowship, right?”

“Well yeah, although Crystal and I would just as soon have a little extra time to ourselves to make up for my being on the river when she found out she was pregnant again. So that leads to the question of whether Sarah might be willing to do it.”

Sarah shook her head. “Preach, I’ve only given a handful of services since I did the Christmas service there last winter. I mean, I could do it, I suppose, but I’d have to throw something together from scratch, and it also would mean that both you and Nanci wouldn’t be there.”

“So? I think you can do it. It doesn’t have to be a major sermon, just a friendly little teaching. I know you can do it and I think you’ll enjoy it. Maybe Crystal will be willing to go over to the Fellowship for an hour on Sunday morning, so it might well be that we’ll be there anyway.”

“I’ll help you pull something together if you need the help,” Nanci offered. “But you’re a Hickory Run student, you ought to be able to do it while you’re asleep.”

“All right,” Sarah agreed. “That first time was actually fun once my knees quit shaking.”

“Good enough. Let’s go find Jeff and give him the good news, and then Crystal and I will take the two of you to Al and Karin’s, where you can run the water heater cold.”

“Don’t think I’m not going to enjoy that,” Sarah shook her head. “The shower I had here might be just enough to hold me until I can get a real shower.”

“You’re lucky,” Nanci smiled. “Most of the time when I was doing the rocket boxes I was living at the Girls’ House with Crystal, and it only has a tiny water heater. I mean, I could barely get started before the hot water ran out, and Crystal had to wait for it to warm up again so she could get a shower herself. She usually wanted one about as badly as I did.”

“Back before we had the Girls’ House,” Crystal added from the front seat, “Scooter and I used to go to one of the motels out on the freeway, rent a room, and shower there. They have nice big water heaters and we could never run them cold, no matter how hard we tried.” She shook her head and went on, “Boy, have we ever come a long way since those days. I would never have believed some of the things that have happened in the eight years since I took my first trip down the river.”

A few minutes later they were at Al and Karin’s. Nanci knew enough to stay out of Sarah’s way as she headed to the shower. While she waited she took the time to call Reverend Miller at Hillside Methodist to work out the details for the Sunday service. It turned out he already had the service worked out and an outline of the sermon prepared, so it wouldn’t be any big deal for Nanci, although she knew she’d be sorry to miss seeing Sarah speak at the Fellowship.

It was a while before Al and Karin got home; they had things to do at the office, but Nanci got a small ham going for dinner while Sarah peeled potatoes and helped with other things. “It sure is nice to come home and find dinner ready,” Karin said. “Nanci, I miss that from when you were living here with us.”

“I guess it can’t be helped,” Nanci replied.

“So, Sarah,” Al asked, “how did your trip down the river go?”

“I think it went pretty well, and I think I learned a lot. And some of the views, I don’t see how you can survive among all that beauty.”

“It’s part of the reason we like swampers to have been down the river a few times before we turn them into boatmen,” Al grinned. “You get, well, I can’t say used to it, but you learn to operate in the middle of it, I guess. Are you ready to go again?”

“I need to get a few little things to restock my supply, and I wouldn’t mind another shower, but I could leave in the morning if I had to.”

“Sometimes it turns into that quick a turnaround, especially when we’re running with only two crews in the spring and fall, and it’s a pain in the neck for everyone involved, but the people who have to do it know how, so that helps. Anyway, I got to talk with Preach for a few minutes, and he tells me he thinks you did wonderfully for a first-trip swamper, so I guess you’ve got a job for the rest of the season.”

“Thank you, Al. It’s been a wonderful opportunity for me, and I also think you’re right. There is some magic operating down there in the Canyon. I think I could feel the effect it had on me, changing me in ways I hadn’t realized I could be changed. I’m looking forward to seeing how this all comes out.”

“You know, Sarah, I think I know you well enough that I’m looking forward to it, too.”

Friday and Saturday were days off, and Nanci and Sarah didn’t do much. They spent an hour or so shopping at a big box store, although what they left with could be carried off in one small plastic shopping bag each. Nanci stopped off at Hillside Methodist to get Reverend Miller’s notes for the Sunday service, and after they got back to Al and Karin’s Sarah worked on her notes for speaking at the Fellowship on Sunday.

Both of the Sunday services went well. Although Nanci couldn’t be there when Sarah spoke at the Fellowship, Preach reported afterward that her service had been better than he had been expecting. She was a warm and friendly speaker once she got her mind on it, and she had presented a very thoughtful sermon. Once again, the congregation at the Fellowship seemed to like her, and several people asked her to return again sometime. She said that she would only be available rarely, when she was off the river, but that she would be willing to speak again if asked.

The break wasn’t long enough, and it was too long. On Sunday afternoon Sarah and Nanci got on work clothes and went over to help load the bus for an hour or so, but they both felt a little at loose ends once that chore was done. Preach and Crystal invited them over to their house for the evening, and they spent some time sitting around talking and helping with Bucky.

It didn’t go late, and it couldn’t – everyone but Bucky had to be up in the wee small hours for the trip out to the river in the morning; the sun had hardly set when Nanci drove the Camry back to Al and Karin’s house. “You get so your body clock runs on river time,” she explained. “It’s not nine o’clock yet, and I don’t know how I’m keeping my eyes open, but there’s no way I could sleep past sunrise even if I’m at the house. We’ll be up at three in the morning, and I can remember times I wouldn’t even have gone to bed at that hour.”

Sure enough, when three in the morning rolled around it wasn’t anywhere near the struggle for Nanci to get Sarah up that it had been two and a half weeks before. She wasn’t exactly raring to go, but she wasn’t stumbling around like a groggy zombie, either. After breakfast and the final loading, they filed aboard the bus for the trip to Lee’s Ferry again.

It went a lot differently for Sarah this time, mostly because she’d done it before, and she could now be a real help at the unloading, rigging, and orientation of the passengers. This was another “regular” trip, so Preach didn’t say much about the religious nature of the crewmen. They got on the river in good order, with Sarah feeling that she’d learned a good deal since her last launch two and a half weeks before.

In some ways the trip was different from the previous one. In over two weeks they only stayed at the same camp site they’d used on the previous trip once; when she asked about that, Preach said he liked to mix things up a little so they didn’t get too routine for the crew. They stopped at many of the same spots, but not all of them, and made some stops at places they hadn’t been on the previous trip, too. There was plenty new to see, and Preach commented once that even Al thought that in approaching forty years on the river, he hadn’t seen all there was to see of the Canyon himself.

In one respect the trip didn’t go well. There was one customer, a middle-aged woman, who complained about absolutely everything. Nothing met her standards, nothing was good enough, nothing went the way she expected it to go. Everyone got very tired of her quickly, and while Sarah wouldn’t use the term publicly, she admitted to Nanci one evening after they’d gotten in their sleeping bags that the woman was a pain in the butt. Some of the customers weren’t as polite about it, and everyone wondered how her husband managed to put up with what appeared to be a constant thing both on and off the river. The only thing anyone could think of was that he must have been so used to it that he ignored it, but it took a lot of fun out of the trip for everyone else.

The only thing that made the trip with her halfway tolerable was that Brett went to Preach one morning and allowed as how he would be willing to take the woman and her husband in his raft the rest of the trip. Preach was glad to take him up on it, for he knew that Brett had the kind of personality that let such ranting roll off of him without taking any effect.

However, both Nanci and Sarah – and presumably the rest of the crew, although no one said anything about it – noticed that there was another woman on the trip, a single woman in a small group. She seemed to want to soothe Brett in the evenings after some of the ranting he had to put up with during the day, and no one on the crew doubted where that stood a good chance of going.

Even the stories around the campfire in the evenings were different, too – all of the crewmen admitted that they got tired of hearing the same old thing time after time. One night Preach told a story that Sarah had not previously heard, of the couple on the trip down the river during the World Trade Center attack who were informed that their son had probably perished in the incident. Since there was a spare boatman available, Preach volunteered to walk up the Bright Angel Trail with them, and then drive them to their home in Connecticut because there were no planes flying, or even helicopters to get them out of the Canyon. “They weren’t in the best of shape and I figured it would be after dark before we got up to the rim,” Preach explained. “Then the daily mule train from Phantom Ranch caught up with us. I explained to the leader what had happened, and a couple of guys slid off their mules and gave them to the couple.”

“I was on that crew, and so was Nanci,” Kevin explained. “What Preach won’t say is that he was far and away the best person on the crew to take them up to the rim and then on to their home. It was a perfect example of the kindness of strangers in time of need. When he got back to the Canyon, Preach brushed it off like it was no big deal, and I guess to him it wasn’t. It was just something that needed to be done, so he did it. It was a lesson that I don’t think I’ll ever forget.”

One evening just after turning in, Nanci and Sarah were talking in low tones, like they often did. “I know you’ve told me that Kevin is your best friend outside of your family,” Sarah commented. “But I’m a little surprised that you don’t have something going with him. I mean, he’s a really nice guy and not bad looking.”

“You know, it surprises me, too,” Nanci told her. “I have known Kevin since my first trip down the river, and we’ve always been on the same crew. I’ve told you before he played a key role in leading me to the Lord, and he sponsored me for membership at Hillside, among a lot of other things. Back when Crystal was the trip leader she always used to tease us that we were boyfriend and girlfriend, but we weren’t, and we never have been. I’ve thought about it and prayed about it a lot, and he has told me that he has too, and the only thing we can come up with is that the Lord doesn’t have plans for us to be together. So we’re good friends and I think we’ll be friends forever, but it doesn’t seem likely that we’ll ever be more than that.”

“That’s really a shame, you know. He seems to really be a nice guy.”

“Oh, he is,” Nanci agreed. “He’s going to make some woman a good husband someday, but we’ve come to understand that the woman isn’t going to be me. Probably it’s just as well. He’s a local guy, and he’s expecting to get a teaching job locally so he’ll probably be running the river for years yet, although probably just on the summer crews, and he’s probably the next person in line in the company to be a trip leader. There’s a real good chance that this will be my last summer on the river, and I could easily wind up with a church somewhere far away. That means that if we were to get together, one or the other of us would be dragged away from what the Lord wants us to do, and I think that may be why He doesn’t want us to get together.”

As on the trip before, Sarah had spent a lot of time on Kevin’s raft, with customers aboard, of course. He spent a lot of time teaching her the tricks of rowing a raft, and she was slowly building up her strength and stamina, although it would clearly be a long time before she was at his caliber in either department. That meant that she got to know him pretty well, too, and she liked what she saw. What’s more, she admitted it to Nanci. “I have to say that he’s got my curiosity up,” she said. “I’ve never given a lot of consideration to the idea of getting married, and with my parents you’ve got a pretty good idea of why. And then when my parents started dragging out the idea of Abe Bowman, I thought even less about it. But I have to say that Kevin is giving me second thoughts.”

“If you can get something going with him, it would be fine with me,” Nanci told her. “But I can tell you this: you’re going to have to move toward him as much as he’s going to have to move toward you. If it’s something the Lord wants, I expect He’ll open the door for you.”

After that Nanci couldn’t have said that the two of them were moving toward each other, although they seemed to spend a little more time with each other, and Kevin obviously didn’t mind. Although Nanci didn’t say anything, she felt it was just another step in Sarah’s discovery of herself; the worst that could happen was that she would have a little more idea of what a normal adult relationship was like. All she could do was to wait and see what would happen, while God and the magic of the Canyon did what they were going to do.

The trip was a little longer than the previous one; they floated right past Diamond Creek Wash with hardly a glance. In the past few years Canyon Tours had started running occasional trips clear down to Lake Mead, bypassing the very expensive takeout charges at Diamond Creek and going to a part of the Canyon that was notably less visited. In the middle of the morning on the last day of the trip, they were met below Separation Canyon by a fast flat-bottomed ferryboat that took the customers to their charter bus at South Cove. The rafts seemed quiet indeed as they floated on down the river without their new friends.

A couple hours after their friends left them on the ferryboat, there was the low rumble of outboard motors coming up behind them. Canyon Tours had an arrangement with another rafting company that ran motor rigs down the Canyon on a regular schedule, and the motor rigs would tow them on in to South Cove, although hours after the customers had gone. In this case, the motor rig customers had already been flown out of the Canyon by helicopter back up the river at Whitmore Wash. The big powered rigs had to run all the way to Lake Mead, because the semis used to haul them were too big for the rough road down Diamond Creek Wash.

They were out of all but the last dregs of the Grand Canyon by now, and the trip down the rest of the Canyon and across the lake was dull. Mostly the boatmen from both companies sat around on the bigger rafts and told Canyon stories and lies to each other to help the time pass.

Finally, as the day was winding down on Tuesday, the motor rigs towed them up to the landing where the familiar Canyon Tours bus and trailer were waiting. The loading went slower than normal since there were no customers to help, but finally it was done and they were aboard the bus for the long trip back to Flagstaff.

“It could have been a better trip,” Nanci summed up as they settled into their seats, “but it could have been a lot worse, too. The next trip will be the first of the Christian trips, and it’ll be a lot different. Maybe better, maybe worse, but different, that’s for sure.”

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