Chapter 39

May 21 - June 29, 2000

Grand Canyon, 2000: Summer Trips 3 & 4

Scooter was just a little skeptical at the loading Sunday morning when she met the two new swampers, both kids just out of high school, Hannah McCluskey and Wade Parker. Both were tall and thin, both rather quiet and serious; Scooter suspected these were the two kids she'd heard about before, who were pretty serious boyfriend and girlfriend, and wanted to run together.

"I don't know," she whispered to Crystal. "It looks like a strong wind would break them in half and blow them away."

"Dad says they're pretty good," Crystal whispered back. "Apparently they did a tryout trip with Bill last year, and he wanted to keep them for the rest of the summer."

"Let's hope he's right," Scooter shrugged, as she watched Hannah head for a loaded ice chest. It was one of the bigger ones, and Scooter knew it was pretty heavy. Hannah bent over, grabbed it, and threw it on her shoulder like she was a stevedore unloading sacks of spuds. Wade grabbed another one that was sitting next to it, and did much the same thing. "Shit," Scooter said in surprise, "Maybe we better check those coolers and make sure they're loaded."

"They were five minutes ago," Crystal said with just a touch of awe in her voice.

"Then holy shit!"

"Right!"

"Crystal," Hannah called once they'd set the ice chests in the bed of the pickup. "What do you want us to do next?"

"How about those food dryboxes over by the ice-room door?"

"Sure, no problem."

Scooter knew they weren't light either. If she hadn't seen what had just happened she would have bet that the tall, slender Wade and the downright spindly Hannah couldn't have handled one of them together. Scooter knew she could, but it was a damn struggle. But no, they each grabbed one, threw it on their shoulder and headed for the truck. Scooter had only seen one woman do that before. "Hannah," she called. "By any chance do you know Michelle Rawson?"

"She's my cousin," Hannah smiled as she turned to look at Scooter with the food drybox on her shoulder like it was nothing much.

"My God," Scooter shook her head. "You mean there's another one?"

"One what?"

"Do you chew bubble gum?"

"No, I don't like it. I never really learned how to blow bubbles like Michelle."

"Say no more," Scooter sighed. "I think you and Wade are going to work out just fine."

They were out on the river again on Monday with a full load of thirty-two. Though they were just about total beginners on the oars, both Wade and Hannah seemed to pick it up fairly well, and proved to be good workers. They didn't get all that much time at the sticks, because Crystal and Scooter were trying to bring Andy along. In a quiet discussion, the two of them decided that between them they'd give Andy the option to run all the big ones. He did all right, except for getting caught in a rogue eddy line in Sockdolager; the raft got spun around and bounced off one wall. While he was trying to get it straightened out again, it got caught by another eddy and bounded off a rock, finally getting flushed out the bottom backwards.

"Jeez," he said to Crystal, whose raft he was rowing. "Sorry I messed that up."

"Oh hell, it happens to all of us once in a while," Crystal told him. "I'm glad you didn't try to spin the thing in the middle of those back rollers. This thing is more stable endwise than it is sideways, after all. You kept your cool, Andy, that's the important part. It ain't how you handle things when they go right that counts, it's how you do when they go wrong. Let's see how you do in Grapevine."

Duane was running the trip competently in the gear boat, and there really wasn't much reason for comment on how well he did; just about from the beginning, it was understood he'd be carrying passengers the next trip. Although he was carrying a load of gear, it meant that the other rafts were more crowded with people than they'd been the last trip -- every raft carrying passengers except one had eight people on it, which wasn't undoable considering the slightly increased space but it seemed worse.

It was warmer yet that trip; several days were downright hot, and most days Scooter found herself rowing in her swimsuit part of the time, and there was one guy who seemed to take special interest in the way it looked on her. The next to the last day of the trip, at Parashant Wash again, although a little farther up in the bushes, she found out that he liked having the bikini off of her even more. That was fun, and it was just as well it had worked out on this trip, because she'd made up her mind she wasn't going to mess around with a customer on the trips she was leading.

The hot days also set off the most notable campfire story of the summer: it proved that a couple of the passengers, a man and his girlfriend, were seriously addicted to nude sunbathing. There was usually an outbreak of that on most trips, but most people who did it kept it on the discreet side, but these two didn't. That set off the righteous wrath of another couple on the trip, who were seriously offended by such a public display of immorality. It finally blew up one afternoon when both Scooter and Crystal had groups out on different hikes. But, if it had to happen it's just as well that it happened in camp when Glenn was keeping his eye on things. Both the couples were twice his age, but he took his religion even more seriously than the offended couple and they knew it. With that to work from, he mediated a deal: the nudists would at least try to stay out of sight, while the religious couple wouldn't go looking for them. He handled it with such aplomb that Crystal didn't even hear about it for a couple days. It would be unfair to say that the two couples were friends at the end of the trip, but they were on speaking terms, which under the circumstances Crystal thought was pretty good.

"Glenn," she happened to say to him one day towards the end of the trip, and not entirely teasing, "Are you sure you want to go back to college? You're making a great boatman of yourself."

"Yes, I need to go back to college," he said. "And while I've enjoyed being a boatman, this will almost certainly be my last summer, for two years at a minimum if not permanently."

"Why's that?"

"After I graduate, I'll be going off on a mission for two years. It's one of the tenets of the faith, and something I need to do, like Moslems are supposed to visit Mecca."

"We are going to miss you," she said honestly. "Glenn, I will make a point of telling Al that if you ever want to come back to make darn sure that he says yes."

"I appreciate the show of confidence, and your display of faith in me," he said. "But most likely, it's not going to happen."

Crystal and Scooter had pretty well figured that their team was going to be fairly stable through the rest of the summer. As it turned out, it was only fairly stable. When they got in, they discovered that there had been one of those things happen that shook everything up. The moves involved were complicated, and made more complicated by the fact that it was difficult to move between teams when the season was under way.

What happened was that a few days after Team 1 was under way, Karin got a call that Emily's mother was very ill and the opinion was that she needed to be home, and the sooner the better. Fortunately, they were still above Phantom and everyone still stopped to check the mail. Pretty quickly Emily was hiking up the Bright Angel; Karin met her at the top and she was off to Los Angeles. She'd called a few days before, and said that it didn't look likely that she'd be back for a month or more.