In minutes, the river narrowed by nearly a third of its width. Dense spruce replaced alder and ash; enormous walls of trees on both banks cut off the sunlight as impenetrably as if we were coursing down building-lined city streets. The corridor of light shone brilliantly down along the ribbon of the water, which had turned an eerie yellowish green as it rocketed over a garden of boulders as big as cars.
Rory’s words had hit their mark. Now when he called to us—which he did endlessly—we acted as one organism. A thrilling kind of grace. We passed rock formations that would have caused us to stop and stare in wonder if we weren’t hurtling by. Again and again, Rory steered us clear—barely—of stone carved into person-size bowls by waves that had curled up and licked back against themselves for untold millennia. As if cued by the water, the wind picked up and the river took to sharper turns. We’d no sooner fly around a bend than Rory would scream at us to row the opposite way. In fact, all of us were screaming pretty much all the time.
Immense stones sprang up in the uneven riverbed, forcing us to ride churning water that crashed through a series of chutes, each more terrifying than the last. The water changed constantly but was always the same. My senses flamed with readiness for any insanity that came at us next, fear a meaningless word I had no time for. We rode high up on a rock as big and long as a truck bed, stayed up there—balanced!—for several seconds until we slid sideways down into water so furious it created its own weather—a fine, stinging mist. We emerged from it. I had all my limbs. I believed in God. Time flew and it stopped, and I had no thoughts. Rory’s shouting was constant and nearly drowned out by the roar of the river, but the one time I turned back to look at him he was wild-eyed and laughing, his long, soaked dreads flying out behind him from under his helmet, his oar held up in the sky as in victory.
The boulders racing toward us grew fewer and smaller, but still the water moved with such urgency that relaxing one nerve was unthinkable. We rounded a curve and with no command from Rory—there was no time—we all ducked flat into the raft as we slipped under a fallen giant of a tree suspended only a few feet above the water. Our silence together felt more intimate than anything we’d said to each other thus far.
“Now that,” Rory said, resting his oar across his knees, “was fucking beautiful.”
We shared some genuine smiles and high fives, then quieted, watching. I was soaked to the skin—we all were—but the sun baked us dry where it hit us—mostly on our chests and arms. My feet stayed soaked in my gummy water shoes, and I could feel my helmet gluing my hair to my head, the strap chafing at my neck.
The river turned again, one bank suddenly bare of trees, just a field of stumps blackened as if by fire, and the water spread out into a pond that seemed to drop off in the distance. A few yards away, a ghostly gray heron, with one long leg disappeared in the muck and one bent backward, turned to look at us. Its reflection shimmered silver in the shallows. With heartbreaking grace, it lifted its prehistoric wings once and flapped, then twice; on the third flap it floated up and through sooty trees, long legs hanging down. The sky opened wide above us, a great blue eye.
“Everybody okay?” Rory said. We nodded, stunned and speechless. “Just so you know, you conquered the Tooth!” He looked at Pia. “Are you ready for more?”
“Bring it on!” She rowed steadily, eyes front.
“Everybody forward, let’s dig!” Rory whooped and stood up on the back of the raft, holding up his oar like a weapon. “Here we come, Hungry Motherfucker! Woohoo!”
Even the brief respite on the pond was enough to make me aware of the stiffness in my back, shoulders, and legs from holding on so hard in the rapids we’d just run. I tried to stretch a bit even as I paddled, watching as the narrow section of the pond that seemed to drop off to nothingness came closer and closer. As much as I’d been staring at it, I hadn’t yet realized that no bank was visible because there was no bank. Just a complete and total drop.
I think all of us—save Rory—would have pushed the stop button if we could have at the mouth of that thing. My breath left my body as I peered down at where the pond ended. A magnificent skull of rock appeared before us, so vast that all the volume of water in the pond thinned out to only a couple of inches deep. The forehead of the rock skull sloped steeply down, vanishing in a girdle of foam and a murky black pool.