After five days of Utah bike riding with my sister and family, Kathy and I went south while the rest headed back to Salt Lake City. The two of us landed on the North Rim of the Grand Canyon, peering down into the Colorado River, where we rafted last fall.
You can’t see the river from where we were on the North Rim, but the views were magnificent. We had a cabin on the rim at the end of the line; no other cabin crowding us on one side.
I spent a lot of time with feet up, gazing down into the canyon.
Speaking of gazing, don’t miss the Star Party that happens on the verandah of the Grand Canyon Lodge. The signs advertising it says it starts at 7:30 p.m. Maybe for other times of the year, but we were there when it did not get dark until after 9 p.m. In the darkness, we stumbled through many telescopes set up on the verandah until we found a telescope that had no opening to look through. Instead, it streamed a picture of the sky every 10 seconds, progressively showing the stars that came out as the night went on. The operator Air Drop’d one of the photos onto our cell phones. The focus in the middle of the photo is a galaxy, which I cannot name or remember. Let’s just say it is a Galaxy Far, Far Away.
If a guided rafting trip were a Las Vegas casino, the paddle boat would be the craps table. That’s the noisy hub in the center of the room where every winning number rolled is met with shouts, cheers and high fives. And with every rapids successfully passed, those in the paddle boat shout, cheer and raise their paddles in an elevated high five.
I spent 11 of 15 days in the paddle boat on a Colorado River rafting trip through the Grand Canyon in September and October of 2023 – from Lee’s Ferry to Diamond Creek. I spent the other days as a rider in the relative calm of oar boats, a guide pushing us downstream, answering questions on stream flow, the geology and history of the canyon – the sort of conversation you might have with a dealer and others sitting around a blackjack table.
And, if this were a Las Vegas casino, I would abide by the spoken rule that “what happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas.” But that was never said on our rafting trip so I feel free to tattle on the paddle boat.
The women on the trip outnumbered men, 2 to 1, counting the clients, the guides and the accompanying string quartet. So I was in the paddle boat some days with five strong women paddlers and a female guide, the strongest of us all. The conversations often were on the distaff side of things. On the second day, one of the women complained that the personal flotation device (PFD) felt more like a corset than a life preserver. Another brought up that she had been in a play (wedding or some other event) that required outdated female undergarments, including a corset. Someone had to put a leg up against her back to pull the laces tight enough, she said. That was too much for her and she preceded without the corset. She did mention that the corset pushed her boobs so high they looked like balloons. This led to a discussion on huge boobs. One said that her mom had huge breasts, and she prayed that she did not get them. Prayer answered. The corset rejector remembered her mother’s breasts as “humongous watermelons,” and she also prayed to not get them. Another prayer answered in part. Maybe cantaloupes or beefsteak tomatoes. Speculation surfaced on whether there is a goddess responsible for boob prayers.
The next day the conversation turned to menopause. I had little to say.
Neither did I participate in the effort to liven up the mnemonic device for remembering the layers of rocks that make up the Grand Canyon. Our crowd needed something more lively than, “Know Canyon History. See Rocks Made By Time.” Someone, maybe on one of the oar boats, or in another time and place, had a more sexy version: “Kissing Takes Commitment. However, Sex Requires More Breath (and) Tongue.” But our paddle boat had a haiku writer, who challenged us to write a bawdy mnemonic device in haiku (three lines, 17 syllables with first and last lines in five syllables and the last line related but coming from a different, and surprising, direction). By the end of the day, the boat had come up with “Kink Takes Commitment. Horny Sluts Really Mingle. Bootydelicious (Times? Thoughts? Tasks? My choice: Tits – which I did not say out loud.) A work in progress worthy of sleeping on it.
Next day, a paddler finished it this way: “Kink Takes Commitment. Horny Sluts Really Mingle. Bondage Titillates.” She credited that to “what I think about under the stars.”
Worth an elevated high five.
While I can remember the mnemonic devices, I cannot remember what they stood for. That’s like remembering “A Rat In The House May Eat The Ice Cream” or “George Eliot’s Old Grandfather Rode A Pig Home Yesterday,” but not remembering what they spelled.
If you have come this far, you might think I was hanging out with a rough crowd. However, we had conversations that could have been on an oar raft. Water politics on the Colorado River and when the seven states and 40 million people depending on it will reach an agreement to stop using more water than there is in the river. History and geology (and not just ribald mnemonic devices) of the canyon. Water levels. Down to 5,000 to 9,000 cubic feet per second as opposed to 18,000 to 20,000 earlier in the summer. More rocks but the calmer parts of river moving more slowly. Keep paddling to get to tonight’s camping spot before dark.
And we talked about the rapids.
Before each set of rapids, the guides would explain what to expect and how to get through them. My wife described those explanations as, “There’s a pour-over on the right, rocks on the left and a hole in the middle. We’ll try to get through it.”
The paddle boat guide had descriptive words for the rapids. Splashy, which could be applied to a rapid or a day: “Better wear your splash gear today.” Munchy. Crunchy. Munchy not as bad as crunchy, which is often on the top of a wave and you should paddle “forward fast.”
We especially talked about Horn Creek Rapids – after they fished us out of the river.
The rapids was 90 miles into our trip, and our guide said that rather than splitting the “horns” (rocks) we would go to one side of them. The rapid drops nine feet and is rated eight or nine in the Grand Canyon style, which would be a 4 or 4.5 for the rest of the rafting world. We went into the rapids pulling hard, made the first wave and met the second one.
Because of my hearing loss, I always sat at the back of the boat near the guide so I could hear her commands. So when the boat went vertical, I found myself lying on my back in the river, looking up through the waves, my head underwater and my feet still wedged in the boat. Deciding I needed to be in the boat or out, I pulled my feet out, or maybe the river did, sank and hit something, either the river bottom or another paddler, as all six of us went overboard. I floated to the top of the waves, trying to catch a breath between them until I reached calmer waters.
At that point, my plan was to float down the river until I found a sandy beach to wash up on. But by then, several boats were around the swimmers. The paddle boat went by, but I missed it. Could not get to the second one that went by. Then I saw an oar boat coming toward me with my wife sitting in the front, waving and shouting at me, something like, “Get your ass in here!”. So I started swimming toward her boat. The guide threw out a safety line, pulled me to the side of the raft, grabbed my PFD straps and lifted me in one-handed. Then they dumped all of us back in the paddle boat, and the all female crew (except for he/him me) kept going. The guide had remained in the boat.
“Once all of you left, the boat straightened out and zipped past the wave,” she said.
The river waterboarded and frisked me. Lost my new hat, my glasses, the Croakie attached, my Do-rag that I have had forever (“Ride It Like You Stole It”), my bandana out of my back pocket and my sunscreen from my front pocket. The part of my hearing aid that goes behind my ear was left tangling but the earpiece stayed stuck in my ear hole. Overnight in magic rice from the kitchen got it working again. Worst of all, according to the guides who told us what to do if we fell in the river, I lost my paddle. Fortunately, someone else found it and returned it to me.
That night in camp, I asked our guide what the official guides’ declaration was on our flipping. She said we were rowing strongly and the boat was on the path she wanted it to be. But it was a small boat versus a big wave. “A tsunami of a wave,” as she said.
A virtual “humongous watermelon” of a wave, munchy on the way up, crunchy on the top and very, very splashy.
A rare thing on our trip: Evenly split between the men and women.
Here is a video posted on YouTube of Horn Creek Rapids. I did not film this as I was too busy swimming.
These are the highlights from our 15-day rafting trip on the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon.
You should take a rafting trip through the Grand Canyon with an outfitting company that sends along a string quartet, a fellow U.S. Census worker told me in 2010. That went on the to-do list immediately, but it took several years for the trip to actually happen.
First, we had to find time for it. Kathy retired in 2014. I retired, went back to work, retired again, work again, retire again and so on until 2022. But during my 2018 retirement, we thought we had time for the Grand Canyon trip. We called Canyon Explorations/Expeditions in Flagstaff, AZ, and they said they’d put us on the waiting list.
So we got on the list. No go in 2018. Not in 2019. And then COVID came around in 2020 and 2021. No go those years.
But it was on for August 16, 2022, with four friends from Montana, until I came down with COVID the week before. I spread the disease to six other family members, including Kathy, within a week. No one wanted us on a 15-day rafting trip, and I was too addled to paddle. The Montana friends went, and Canyon Explorations/Expeditions found us a spot in 2023.
And we went. I loved every minute of it, even getting dumped out of the paddle boat in the Horn Creek Rapids. Kathy does not like sleeping on the ground but braved the rapids, a rattlesnake she discovered on the way to the “Groover” (the ammunition box with a toilet seat that served as the carry-away poop spot) and bugs, scorpions and my snoring.
The guides were informative, helpful and cheerful. The food they cooked was hearty and tasty. And the string quartet . . . outstanding. Led by Steve Bryant, who plays violin in the Seattle Symphony, the quartet played for us in side canyons, and once, even as we floated down the river, our rafts tied together.
Now, we are back in Seattle, thinking about what the next trip will be.
Trying hard, with little success, not to think of the timing of this COVID attack. Kathy and I went two and one half years into this pandemic without a whiff of COVID. Then a week before our rafting trip through the Grand Canyon on the Colorado River, I come down with COVID and spread it to seven of 10 family members. The only ones spared are two who have already had it and a 21-year-old who has a cold but refuses to test positive.
I also think about what would have happened if my first symptoms were a week later in Flagstaff.
Night 1: Feeling tired but it had been a long day with the orientation for the rafting trip.
2. Next morning: Some sniffles but nothing so serious that I could not get on the raft with the other 15 or so people who would be sailing down the Colorado.
Day 3 and Day 4: I would have spent these days sleeping, coughing and gulping down anything to sooth my sore throat. Muddy Colorado River water? Not a problem. Can I hang over the edge of the raft with my mouth open like whales sucking krill through their baleen?
Day 5: Guides would have pushed me overboard. If not. . .
Day 6: All guides, clients, orchestra sick in quarters. Section of river roped off to incoming rafters, who have to walk out of the canyon while the rest of us are left on our own to suffer.
I also thought about whether we canceled our trip too early. What if we had kept pushing on to Flagstaff? No travel on Days 3 and 4 (see above) when I was the sickest and Kathy came down with her first symptoms. Then it would be Friday. We’d still have time to stretch our two-day trip to Flagstaff into four driving days. We’d arrive tired and coughing, but with enough cough syrup we might get on the trip. If the company asked us to show a negative COVID test, we were sunk – probably by the other clients who saw the worst coming their way.
I’ve been over this a couple hundred times, and eventually we did what was right: Canceled, infected our family (who took wonderful care of us), then started a slow trip back home. I’m testing negative, Kathy still positive. Mostly holed up in the truck, masked when not, eating outside or in our rooms like bums under a culvert.
View from our culvert
Also hard not to dial through everyone I met leading up to getting infected. Was it the person who sat behind us in the theater Friday night and coughed all through “Hamilton”? On the bus and light rail to my doctor’s appointment Friday morning? The clerks in the camera store where I bought three new memory cards and multiple batteries for the hundreds of pictures I was going to take in the canyon? The U-Haul clerks? Some wisp of air that had lost connection with whoever put it out there to travel up my nose. To them I say: May a bird of paradise fly up your nose, may an elephant caress you with his hose. Remember that song? Long-term memory is still intact. And I did fix my own car key (see post two back). I can read instructions. Wait. That’s new. My behavior has changed. A new COVID symptom?
I thought about burying the lede here, keeping the awful news behind other bad news, but then I thought I would never do that if I were getting paid to write this blog, So here is the awful news: Both Kathy and I have COVID, and we have canceled our 15-day trip rafting on the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon.
The trip started like all trips do: Why do these bad things happen now. And here comes the other bad news. We got to the U-Haul place to pick up the van we used to move Kathy’s grandson and girlfriend to California now that they have completed Seattle University. They said we have your reservation but you have to go to West Seattle to pick up the van. Since the West Seattle bridge cracked, West Seattle is in a place far, far away. The GPS route looks like red spaghetti with touches of gold and yellow. But we arrived, got the van and reversed the spaghetti route back for the first load of furniture.
We also discovered that the canopy latch on my truck was no longer latching. Why do these things happen on the first day of a trip.
Then came the call from the security system that the alarm had gone off at our house. That happens when you leave the front door wide open. Our son is staying at the house and corrected our hurried exit fallacies. We do this a thousand times and why did it have to happen now?
Kathy offered to buy us Dick’s hamburgers and left order them. We drove to Dick’s, and found Kathy complaining that the automatic truck key would no longer open the truck. Why do these things happen now? I dug out the old-fashioned metal key ensconced in the modern key, climbed into the unlocked canopy to dig out the extra key I had packed just in case a bunch of stuff might happen now. I can get the bad key fixed in Petaluma at a Ram dealership I have used before.
Off to Portland, loaded the second set of furniture and headed for Eugene. We went somewhere to eat, I ordered too much food but did not collapse into it. I ended up in the truck snoozing until others got done eating and drinking. Long drive in a big, unfamiliar van, but should that make me that tired?
Woke up Tuesday with a river pouring out of my head. Sneezing, dripping. Where did that all come from? A cold, I thought, let’s push on.
On to our regular lunch stop on our way to Sebastopol, CA — The Olive Pit in Corning, CA. You can tell the muffuletta sandwiches were good by the olive oil that dripped all over my cell phone camera lens. On to Forestville, CA, and the delivery of the furniture.
Great dinner by Grandpa and Grandma, and this may have been where I infected five people with COVID. Tried to get some social distance, but we were inside and I was still under some delusion that this was a cold, and nothing more.
A cold until I took a COVID test that night and the T strip came on, blinking and in enlarged red type saying, “What were you thinking?”
This is Day Four since I started symptoms. All five of us are in different rooms in three houses trying to isolate ourselves. Joe, who had COVID before, is delivering food and medicine to our doors. My meds are not Paxlovid, which reacts with Warfarin — doesn’t everything? I will not be getting a new key for the truck any time soon.
Canyon Explorations offered us three options: 1. Get to Flagstaff with no COVID symptoms and a negative COVID test on Aug. 15. That will not happen now. 2. Hike in on the Bright Angel trail with all your equipment and enjoy the rest of the trip down the river. A chance to infect another 16 people. Hiking now when I can barely walk to the bathroom six feet away does not sound like something we could do 10 days from now. 3. Reschedule.
We chose option 3. We are on the waiting list for 2023 and on board for 2024.
This has been a huge disappointment. I learned of this trip in 2010 while working for the Census Bureau. Raft down the Colorado through the Grand Canyon with a string quartet aboard to play each night. We got on the waiting list for 2018. Nothing available. Same in 2019. Yes, for 2020, which is when COVID first happened. Same with 2021. But on for 2022, if COVID did not happen now, which it did.
We are looking forward to a rafting trip through the Grand Canyon in 2022, and probably should not have read this. However, it is a reminder that there are heroes out there, that we should follow our guides (both on the river and off) and that nature is a very powerful thing.
