There’s a rock.
A big rock.
The kind that if your house was under it when it fell from the cliffs above, your house would be no more. In fact, you could dig out the insides of said rock and make it into your house. If you were so inclined.
The river is a trickle. When the walls close in and the channel is narrow, it’s maybe waste deep. In most places, it’s ankle to knee on the International Water Level to Body Scale. The river flows easily along the side of the rock with the sound of a burbling brook and swiftness of tortoise. There is nothing about the river that you would describe as violent.
Yet, on top of that big rock about 15 feet up there is driftwood.
If this was an isolated piece of driftwood on an isolated big ass rock, you would assume it was put there by someone, not unlike myself, who was just passing through and thought, “You know what that rock needs? Driftwood.” But this isn’t an isolated rock or isolated driftwood. You can see the debris wrapped around the big Cottonwoods, jammed between two boulders well over your head and essentially everywhere it wouldn’t be unless at one point in the past a big wall of water came ripping down this canyon.
It’s cliché. You’ve heard this many times before or witnessed it first hand as you passed through. It is the desert river cliché. And of course, it’s cliché because it’s universal.
The meaning of life is to survive.
That’s it. It’s simple. The only reason you are alive is because you haven’t died. Everything else that is alive is in the same boat whether it’s the bacteria in your gut or the raven that just flow over head or the jack rabbit I always see cuz he’s my spirit animal. It’s all the same.
And before you get all uppity and think that there “has” to be more to it than that, just stop. The only reason you have time to even think about that shit is because our species has evolved past the moment to moment struggle of staying alive. Henceforth giving us too much time to think and creating this feeling that there is more to life than just living.
If you don’t believe me, get close to death. Get comfortable with the idea that what you are doing could kill you or that it has killed others in the past. Watch people around you struggle at the edge of life and death and fixate on those moments. Think about those that went before who started the journey and either didn’t make it or lost their people along the way. It’s simple. It’s brutal. It’s beautiful. It’s life and that is it.
The river splits. There is a big rock dividing the two channels. To the left it looks doable, but I can’t see around the corner. Shelby is leading and KB is coming up behind me. He goes right. I’m tempted to go left as I can see that the river is headed into a wall to the right. Shelby gets through no problem. I round the rock and attempt to dig in, but not being used to a canted paddle and I miss a stroke. The river is swift and I find myself against the wall.
To my surprise, I don’t flip immediately. I use my hands to start moving to the edge of the wall and hopefully down river. KB goes by just as the edge of my boat gets caught and I flip. I watch as my hat and glasses go under. My skirt pops and I am pushed into the wall. I use my hands and feet to push myself upward. Once, twice, my head breaches the surface allowing me to take a breath and the next push puts me on the beach about waste deep. I scramble to the edge of the river.
My paddle is gone. My boat is upside down still against the wall about 15 feet from where I can reach it. As I try to catch my breath and decide how I am going to get my boat and get downstream, KB’s head pops up around the corner and she screams my name in a way that I cannot describe. I assume she has been flipped and pulled under the wall and I am seeing her try to escape. I yell at her to go down stream, she disappears.
I’m more or less cut off from the world. Upstream is a giant wall. Downstream is the wall I flipped against with my boat bobbing against it. I contemplate jumping in and think better of it. I notice a scree field behind me and I hope it gets me around this wall so I can help KB. I run/climb up it as quickly as possible hoping that she is fine.
I breach the top and begin the descent to where I assumed her and Shelby were. I can’t see either of them. I run scared of what I will find at the bottom. I get to the beach and find both of them still trying to figure out what has happened to me. The adrenaline is off the charts.
The Alliance floated the Escalante 2 years ago. That trip quickly got stuck in the top 5 adventures of all time and we watched the gauges to see if/when we could sneak another float in. This year it wasn’t necessarily a Plan B, but it wasn’t the original plan for the weekend. It was perfect.
They say life is a journey. I would add that the journey is heading down a river. You don’t get to chose the pace, you have to go along with whatever the river dictates. Most of the time, we are just floating, using our paddle the minimum possible to keep the nose of the boat pointed downstream making small course corrections. Other times, we find ourselves upside down in a dark river with the only thing that can possibly matter is getting your head back above water.
And then there’s the sticks, on top of giant rocks on the river that make us wonder about what was, what is and where exactly we might be able to go on this river if the flows hit just right.
P. L. and R.
