Rory yelled over the water, “Wini, pull back! Backpaddle now!”
I did it but it felt wrong, as if I was just going with the river and what was the point of that? Pia and Rachel dug forward with everything they had while Sandra backpaddled with me. Our strokes felt uncoordinated and mindless, like we were all steering different rafts and Rory’s commands were gibberish. We found ourselves turning again until we raced sideways to the current, which began to push my side of the raft up and out of the water. Out of instinct I stood and heaved my body weight down on the hard rubber lip of the raft and watched Sandra do the same. Waves of cold water smacked our faces, washing over us, soaking us through.
We all cried out because what else could we do? We screamed out of fright but also a keen excitement—these were roller-coaster screams, zip-lining screams, taming-the-wild-Appaloosa screams; as out of control as we felt, we still had faith in Rory and his ability to harness the surging waters beneath us.
And then—bang!—we stopped, jammed sideways into a fallen tree, its long, heavy limbs combing the blue water that pulsed over them and muscled underneath, the raft shuddering and rippling as the river strong-armed us in place.
Rory leaned into the tree, one hand on a bright blue D ring. “Everybody all right?”
Stupefied, we all nodded. He vaulted out of the raft on the side closest to the bank and stood up. I was shocked to see the water was only waist-deep. Behind him the root system of the fallen tree loomed above us like a colossal black claw.
“Ladies,” he called to us over the noise of the river, “I’m not sure what happened here, but whatever it was, it can’t happen again, okay?”
We looked at him as if he were God.
“Actually, that’s not true. I know what happened. Sandra, what the hell were you doing back there?”
“I’m sorry,” she said, shivering. “I think I saw something.”
We all waited for her to elaborate. She didn’t.
“Like what?” he asked.
“A person or something.”
“Really.” Fear registered briefly on his face, followed by a look of impatience. “Nobody lives out here, trust me. Maybe it was a deer, or a juvenile moose, something like that?”
She gave her head a quick shake. “I don’t know. It was so fast. I could have been wrong, I guess.”
“How do you know nobody lives out here?” Rachel squinted in the glare, water beading on her lenses.
“We’re twenty-five, thirty-five miles from anything. We’ve got animals for company, that’s it.”
Pia looked at him, still visibly crushing. I started to wonder, Maybe she really does like the kid, in some kind of a real way, and vice versa. Hell, they both loved the outdoors; even beyond the sex there seemed to be a kind of sparkly repartee. Why was it so impossible for any of us to grant them the possibility that they might have something good going after all?
“I’m going to free us up from here,” Rory said. “Push us out. But you have to be ready. We’re about ten minutes from the Tooth. It’s our first white water, Class III, mostly, some II. It’s not our hardest today, but it’s not our easiest, because, guess what, I can’t arrange things in order of difficulty, ’cause this is nature. So I don’t care what you see, hear, feel, or whatever happens, you do what I say, when I say it, exactly how I say it. Are you with me? Are we good?”
We nodded, big-eyed.
“Now, I need someone to get in the water and help get us out of here.”
“I’ll do it,” I said, shocking myself.
My hands shook as I wedged my oar under the seat and dropped into the water, gasping at the cold as I found my footing and faced a slope of alluvial wash that had built up against the fallen trunk. Gravel, sand, and silt glittered pink in the sun. I stood behind Rory, placing my body between the raft and the tree as he painstakingly freed us. The river pulled and tugged at various parts of me, interested yet unconcerned with me, full of wild intent and various unknowable plans. I stood in it, enthralled, my flesh reveling in its thousand-year-old journeys and calls, wondering—if I stayed in long enough and listened hard enough—could I understand its river language, decipher the meaning of colder here and warmer there? Part of me never wanted to get out.
Rory and I turned the raft, maneuvering it to where, with one last push, it would be freed from the tree’s grip. He lifted himself back in, all grace and ease, before I tried to climb back over the side, cursing my weak upper body as I deadlifted myself to a certain pitiful point and hung there. Pia, Rachel, and Sandra leaned over to give me a hand and we shared a laugh—a momentary truce—before we took our places and were moving again.
16