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By Bob Payne
Too late to do anything about it, you learn that the local name for the
rapids ahead means "Where the Good Die Young."
You don't want to turn your head, don't want to take your eyes off the explosion of whitewater you are being swept toward. But you know from your guide's silence that he has either maneuvered your raft into precisely the right position for entry into the rapid, or what he sees ahead has left him too petrified to speak.
Your paddle is poised. Your toes are jammed so tightly into your foot straps that even Cinderella's stepsisters might have complained about the fit. But you don't notice because--you are determined to stay aboard and--this time--not end up on your back in the bottom of the raft with your feet pointing toward the sky.
"All forward," says your guide, who no matter what continent you are on is probably speaking with a southern California accent.
Four, six, maybe eight paddles dip in unison, the last time they will do so for a while. Funny, you think, you are trusting life and limb to a group of people who were strangers a couple of hours ago. Never before have you found yourself in such a situation. Which is why you truly do not know, were the worst to happen and everyone aboard were to be washed into the river, if your instinct would be to go to the aid of those strangers or your new $1,400 camcorder.
"Forward hard," says your guide. By now, you've learned to recognize the tone of voice as well as the commands. What he really means is that some of you are not paddling hard enough.
But you have no time to worry about that. No time to admire canyon walls or cascading waterfalls. No time to wonder what it will be like to camp in such wild country. No time to regret not having taken out more trip insurance.
You have no time because the river has you in its grip.
Down you rush, sweeping to one side of a boulder the size of a milk-bearing farm animal and slamming into a tumbling white foam that hits you like someone trying to clean out your nostrils with a fire hose.
"Forward HARD," commands your guide. What he really means is that you should be paddling for your lives. You are paddling for your life, but because your life seems to be taking a different direction than that of some of your companions, the raft doesn't get as far to the left or right as the guide knows is necessary. An enormous haystack of a wave so awe-inspiring that it could star in its own summer blockbuster movie rises up in front of you. The back of the raft dips under. The river is pouring in.
"High side, high side!" shouts your guide.
You see bodies hurling themselves at the nearly vertical wall of rubber and tied-down bundles of gear. You want to hurl yourself upward too, and not just because in the millisecond you have to devote to the subject you observe that one of the bundles holds your video camera.
But with your paddle long gone, with only one of your feet still secured in a strap, and with more of your body out of the raft than in, you are much too occupied with learning what it's like to be a sock in a washing machine.
Amid a roar of water so deafening that you can't tell your shout from your neighbor's, the raft stands nearly on its tail. It twists one way, then the other. But somehow it comes down right side up, and you find yourself downstream from the wave and, miraculously, still in the boat.
Others have not been so lucky. Behind you, a woman who you recollect from the van as having the bearing of an old-money, New England matriarch is struggling to pull herself back aboard. You reach down, grab her by the top of her life jacket, and dump her into the bottom of the raft like a sack of old money. You reach out again and snag a paddle and a tube of suntan lotion that have been holding their own in the race downstream.
Everybody is back aboard, and the only injury seems to be to a dentist from New Jersey, whose scraped knee has produced a modest amount of blood. But it's a badge of honor that, at this moment, he wouldn't trade for anything, not even the opportunity to do some dental work on his ex-wife's lawyer.
You are exhausted. You are exhilarated.
Knowing that the river grows less tempestuous from here on down, you raise a paddle-clenched fist and join the chorus of affirmative responses to the matriarch's unlikely shout: "Yee-hah!"
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Illustration by Jason Schneider
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