Rock Bottom (Em Hansen Mysteries) Read online

  Skirts up and pants down,” Jerry added cheerfully.

  All hands helped bring elements of the kitchen up to the clearing we had chosen. A simple yet functional setup was devised using two lightweight folding aluminum tables, a pair of propane camp stoves, a fire pan, various utensils, and a sizable filter pump for creating potable water. A galvanized tub filled with river water served as a beer cooler. Food, plates, and flatware were brought up from the various stowage boxes and coolers on the rafts, and each of us was in charge of transporting his or her own folding camp chair, tent, and sleep gear.

  I helped Fritz and Brendan pitch the tent we would share for probably longer than would be quite comfortable for all of us, and, when Fritz had trouble driving in the tent stakes, I fetched my mineral hammer from my gear box on the raft and gave each a good whack.

  Molly Chang and Mungo were in charge of dinner that first night, and I could hear Mungo cussing as he dug through one of the giant coolers and rocket boxes that were lashed to the various rafts in search of fresh chicken and vegetables to make a big stir-fry, it being requisite to eat up whatever would spoil first. One of the other huge coolers had been taped shut to keep it cold as long as possible; it had been packed solid with frozen vacuum-packed meats and set in a walk-in freezer for a couple of days before we left Utah to get it as cold as possible and try to keep it that way for as long as possible. It had been something of a challenge to pack enough eats for sixteen people for twenty-one days, while keeping the menus simple enough that dinner could be tossed together within an hour in a high wind or downpour as necessary yet still sufficiently interesting that morale didn’t collapse by the end of the second week. It was a good thing no one needed me to manage that project; I would have packed those coolers solid with junk food.

  Bedding was another major challenge. There were two schools of thought here: tents and no tents. Those who wanted privacy—or such privacy as could be afforded when that many people are crammed together on a small beach—liked tents. Olaf Jones, who was at ease up to his gizzard in churning rapids, slept in a tent because he was totally paranoid while on land. Just say “Spider!” or, worse yet, “Scorpion!” and the man was gone. Even “Ants!” made him jump sideways. He didn’t like insects crawling on him while he slept, but he told me that the real reason he brought a tent was to keep himself separated from mice. “They all carry diseases like hantavirus. Little buggers crawl on you in the night if you sleep outside,” Olaf growled. “On an earlier river trip, one of those little sons of bitches bit me right on the nose, and I had to rim out and find a frikkin’ doc. And watch out for the skunks. They carry rabies. You gotta take care you don’t get rabies. Horrible way to go.”

  I said, “But you don’t mind the idea of drowning, or hitting your head on a rock.”

  “Water is clean,” he said, sweeping a hand across an imaginary surface. “Gives you a good bath.” Suddenly he grinned, showing me a gap where a tooth was missing. “You get water in places where you didn’t even know you had places!”

  Olaf was a safety kayaker, one of our crew of three. I was glad they were with us. It would be their job to zip about in the churning spume while the rafts shot through the whitewater so they could catch anyone who fell out of a raft, or catch everyone if the raft flipped. Kayaks were infinitely more maneuverable than rafts, which pretty much went only one way: downriver. A kayaker could hover and play in the water, go upriver if the gradient wasn’t too steep, and, Fritz had explained to me, he could “eddy out” along the side of a rapid and be right there to shoot out into the current to catch a “floater.” If I “went for a swim,” he assured me, one of the kayakers would be there “right quick” to give me an assist. In the unlikely event that this should happen, I should grab the safety strap at one end of the kayak and let him tow me back to my raft. I decided that I would hold on to the safety straps on our raft very tightly. A “swimmer” I was not. But this didn’t seem to worry Olaf.

  I looked out across the “clean” river. It looked like it was carrying one heck of a lot of sediment to me, but maybe that was just the geologist in me, and I was being a bit too literal about things.

  Molly’s stir-fry and Mungo’s dessert of fresh fruits with yogurt really hit the spot. Everything tasted better out of doors, and, per the dictates of our copy of the National Park Service’s Noncommercial River Trip Regulations, our bible for avoiding Trouble with the Man, we built a “warming and aesthetic fire” in our “metal fire pan measuring 300 square inches … The lip of the pan must be 3 inches high on all sides … [and] must be elevated using manufactured legs (not rocks, empty cans, etc.).” The upstream source of sediment had been cut off when the Glen Canyon Dam was built, so the river was now eroding the beaches faster than they were being built up, and likewise the cleansing high flood stages of the river were gone, so it was incumbent upon us to keep what beaches remained in as good shape as possible. They were a finite and dwindling resource. I could see how fragile the canyon was, and I appreciated the care taken by those who had gone before us to keep these campsites clean.

  We sat around the fire telling stories about ourselves and earlier river trips, and those who weren’t yet acquainted began to get to know each other. Brendan was the only kid along, or should I say a kid on the cusp of young manhood. He was thirteen and his voice was cracking, though he hadn’t started his growth spurt yet. Olaf Jones, who at twenty-two was the next youngest person on the trip, had already developed a series of nicknames for Brendan, all focusing on his short stature: He called him “Low Pockets” and “Stump,” or just “Hey, Runt.”

  I looked around the fire, studying the groups that manned each boat. Fritz, Brendan, and I formed raft number one. Raft two was manned by Don and Jerry Rasmussen, the geologist/oil company office manager couple from Denver. They were experienced rafters, a couple of empty-nesters of advancing middle age who were gathering no moss. The plan had been for Tiny to share rowing their raft, but because he was not here, the safety kayakers had kindly offered to spell Don and Jerry at the oars, especially on long days when we might find ourselves rowing into the wind.

  The kayakers—Olaf Jones, Lloyd Oshiro, and Gary McClanahan—were a mixed bag of sinewy adrenaline junkies with ragged haircuts. We knew them from here and there. Olaf was one of those guys who lived for adventure and had no permanent address. Lloyd was a Ph.D. candidate currently studying with Molly, and Gary rode Harleys with Tiny when he wasn’t working on a highway crew somewhere.

  Raft three was Dell Oxley and Nancy Skinner, two friends of Tiny’s whom neither Fritz nor I had met before we all arrived at the put-in. Dell had a professorial air to him—I think he taught in a college somewhere—and Nancy was a bookkeeper for the navy who had taken early retirement. She had brought her knitting to the fireside and looked like life suited her just fine. Also on that raft was Danielle Burtis, a pal of Dell’s from somewhere in Florida who did something Floridian for a living.

  Raft four held Mungo Park, Molly Chang, and Julianne Wertz. Mungo was a big, hairy guy who was a physicist in real life, and Julianne was a young, unemployed schoolteacher who had always, always, always wanted to do something like this but could only afford to come on the first “half” of the expedition. She and Danielle would hike out the Bright Angel Trail from Phantom Ranch, and two others would take their places. The upper half of the river was actually more like the upper two-fifths; Phantom Ranch lay eighty-eight miles downriver from Lees Ferry, and our pull-out was at Diamond Creek, which was at mile 226. We planned to reach mile 88 on our tenth night and would camp at a site called Cremation.

  The canyon was full of quirky names, as Wink Oberley explained. “Batchit Cave is my personal favorite,” he said. “There’s an old story that Eddie McKee, who was park naturalist here back in the 1930s, took his lovely wife, Barbara, there during some of his fieldwork, and she said, ‘Why, there are nothing but unmarried men here; how nice that they’d name this place after what bachelors do,’ but she had it wrong! It got
that name because it was full of bat guano! Get it? Bat-shit!” He laughed like a machine gun, savoring his own joke.

  Julianne said, “Oh, Wink, you’re so funny!”

  Wink scanned our faces for additional appreciation.

  “What day do you think we’ll get to Nankoweap?” Don asked Fritz. “That’s such a spectacular site. We’ll overnight there, yes?”

  Fritz said, “Yes, in fact Tiny and I planned for two nights at Nankoweap. It’s such a big beach that it has several good campsites, so we won’t be putting anyone out by staying over. I’m personally looking forward to hiking up to the granaries with Brendan here.” He reached over and ruffled his son’s hair, and got a good-natured swat in reply. The kid never looked up from his pre-algebra homework, which he was doing by the light of his headlamp. In order to bring him along it had been necessary to pull Brendan out of school for a month. His eighth-grade teachers had cheerfully assigned independent study projects, delighted by the idea of how much the kid would learn on a trip like this. The math teacher had been the only hard-ass in the bunch.

  Wink cut back in. “It will be fun to run the rapids there several times if we want. I’m sure our kayakers here would let some of us big-boaters take a shot.” Ignoring surprised looks from Olaf and Lloyd, he reached a hand out to Julianne and stroked her forearm. “It’s just a three on a scale of ten. Good practice for you.”

  Julianne beamed. “Would you show me how, Wink? I’ve never been in a kayak.”

  He leaned closer to her and said, “There are a number of things I’d like to show you, honey.”

  Julianne raised her shoulders to her ears and tittered in glee, then threw back her head and stared at the sky. “Oh, aren’t the stars marvelous! The desert air! Oh! That one’s moving!”

  “That’s a satellite,” said Jerry.

  “Oh.”

  “Chariots of the astronaut gods,” said Mungo.

  “I tried out for the astronaut corps,” Wink informed us. “Interesting set of challenges, and I would have been available if they’d mounted an expedition to Mars. Think of that, the first geologist on Mars!”

  Fatigue suddenly weighed on me. “I’m going to find our tent and crawl inside it,” I announced. “See the rest of you in the A.M.”

  Fritz said, “I’ll be along in a bit.” He looked over at Brendan, who was still focused tightly on his homework. I felt bad that I’d missed that cue. Solidarity was important to thirteen-year-olds who were stuck doing pre-algebra in one of the most beautiful places on earth, especially those who were a long way from their mothers, whether they entirely got along with them or not. I was supposed to be standing in for her, and here I was thinking of no one but myself.

  Nancy Skinner stuffed her knitting into its carry bag and arched her back into a catlike stretch. “I’m right after you,” she said. “Nothing like fresh air and exercise to wear a woman out.”

  Wink stood up and made quite a display of stretching this way and that. “Well, I’m off to sleep on my dory,” he said. “The rest of you can shlep your gear up and down the beach if you like, but it’s a lot easier to sleep on my boat, and with the gentle movement of the water, I sleep like a baby.”

  Julianne said, “Oh, Wink, I’m so impressed with your simple ethic!”

  Mungo coughed like something had caught in his throat. People began to scatter.

  Before heading up to our tent I “used” the river. Wading into a private spot in the shallows, I dropped my shorts and crouched into the position. It was times like this that I envied men their plumbing, but pretty much the rest of the time I was fine with mine.

  As I walked up the path afterward toward our tent afterward, a spark flew up from the fire pan, and I followed it upward until it winked out of existence over my head, lost in the dazzling lights of the night sky. From the ridiculous to the sublime, the Grand Canyon has it all, I mused.

  Unfortunately, it all would prove to include trouble that would have us sleeping apart before we reached Diamond Creek.

  Notes of USNPS River Ranger Seth Farnsworth

  April 18, 10:00 A.M.

  I arrived at Whitmore Wash by helicopter. Noncommercial group led by Sherry Rhoades was packed and ready to leave site. Rhoades and party member Kathryn Davy showed me to the place along the riverbank upstream from the campsite where the body was found. Davy stated that she had been bird-watching and moved through the tamarisk to see what a group of turkey vultures were “finding so interesting.”

  The body was a white male, average height, husky build, dark hair. The birds had already been at his face, so immediate ID was not possible. It could be the one missing from the Calder party upriver. Calculating flow, the timing is about right. As to speculation that the victim drowned, something does not look right. Something about this corpse is not consistent with other remains I have examined.

  I released the Rhoades party to continue downriver and requested that Chief Ranger Gerald Weber notify the coroner and investigate the scene before corpse removal.

  APRIL 2: GEOLOGY LESSONS

  The middle of our first full day on the river, in a section of the canyon known as the Roaring Twenties, Julianne Wertz managed to flip Molly and Mungo’s raft in a “not very big” (Fritz’s words, not mine) rapid called Indian Dick. Mungo commented that “Dick” probably wasn’t the name of the Indian after whom this tumble of water was named, but rather a description of his sense of humor.

  Julianne was chagrined, though the incident wasn’t entirely her fault. Wink had assured her that she had the “stuff” to row a rapid. I felt sorriest for Molly, who got pretty cold swimming the raft to shore.

  Wink was helpful in getting the raft right side up. He knew what he was doing—where to place it relative to the current, how to rig the lines, who should push and who should pull—and we had things back in order in jig time. Julianne awarded him a big, lingering hug. Mungo cussed continually beneath his breath during these proceedings, and I heard him mutter the words “nookie motive” more than once. He didn’t have much trouble persuading Julianne to ride the next few miles downriver in the dory with the marvelous Mr. Oberley at the oars.

  It was about in this stretch of river that the Redwall Limestone first appeared. I pointed it out to Brendan, hoping that he would take an interest in the geology of the canyon and put it into one of his independent study reports, but so far he seemed more interested in rowing the raft. “It sure is red,” he said, trying to be polite.

  I told him, “The stone is actually gray, but it’s stained the same brickred as the strata above it; see? Iron oxide is easily mobilized and washed down over the face of the Redwall. And it does form a wall: Instead of the stair-step setbacks of the Supai Group strata above, this limestone forms a vertical cliff.”

  Looking bored, Brendan leaned over and dragged a hand in the water to watch the ripples.

  I tried another tack. “The Grand Canyon’s really neat because the river has cut through all three major kinds of rock: sedimentary, metamorphic, and igneous. These rocks here are all sedimentary, but we’ll get to the metamorphic and igneous rocks later on in the trip. Sedimentary rocks are kind of easy to read because they tend to form these nice broad layers. That’s because, well … they’re formed from sediments that fill in a … a basin, and…” I was quickly getting balled up in the jargon of geology, and Brendan wasn’t even bothering to look up. “What would you like to learn about these rocks?” I asked.

  Brendan rolled onto his back and stared up at the cliffs. “How’d they get there?” he asked.

  “That’s exactly the question geologists ask!” I replied. “And we’ve found a lot of answers. The rocks tell the story.” I gestured up the wall of the canyon, sweeping from river level to the sky. “One of the basic rules of geology is the Law of Superposition, which says that the layer on the bottom was laid down first, and over time each layer above was stacked on top, sequentially.

  “Well, duh,” said Brendan.

  I glanced at Fritz. He w
as concentrating on his rowing, diplomatically staying out of our conversation.

  I said, “Well, every once in a while you get faked out by a thrust fault, but generally that law holds true. The cool thing is that you can compare these ancient rocks to sediments you’d find in a tidal flat, say, or a riverbed, or a sand dune, and you can match them up. The Redwall Limestone, for instance, was deposited at the bottom of the ocean. As creatures that lived in the ocean died, their shells dropped to the bottom, building up a layer.”

  “I don’t see any shells,” said Brendan.

  “Neither do I, looking from the middle of the river here,” I agreed. “But remember the park ranger Don and Wink were talking about? Eddie McKee? Well, he studied those rocks for over fifty years, and he found plenty of fossils in them. He found corals, crinoids, foraminifera, brachiopods, trilobites, cephalopods—”

  “What are all of those?” asked Fritz, hinting that I should speak plain English around his son.

  “Well, corals you know about,” I said. “Crinoids are more commonly called sea lilies. The rest are various sea creatures both small and large that had shells made of calcium carbonate—a chemical that’s also known as lime, hence the name ‘limestone.’ Most of those shells are so tiny that they make up a sort of mush, but we’ll see lots of fossils on this trip. Nautiloids, trace fossils, there were also fish, and—”

  “We’re a long way from the ocean, Em,” Brendan said dubiously.

  “Yeah, but the Redwall here, it was deposited in an ocean, and the rocks are now thousands of feet above sea level! What do you suppose happened?”

  “You tell me,” he said, but when his father shot him a look, he added, “Please.”

  My head spun a bit as I tried to feature explaining the theory of plate tectonics to him with only words and hand gestures. I considered trying to impress him with the fact that marine shell fossils could also be found near the top of Everest, five miles above sea level. I could explain that the Indian subcontinent had come roaring up from down near Antarctica and slammed into Asia, heaving the strata up that high, but that opened a whole can of worms about plates of the earth’s crust moving around like sludge on the surface of a spherical pot of boiling oatmeal. “Let’s just stay with how the rocks were formed for now,” I said. “So, look at these gnarly layers just above the top of the Redwall Limestone. Those rocks are actually a stack of formations called the Supai Group, named after the town of Supai on the Havasupai Indian Reservation. McKee studied all of those layers and matched them to modern sediments he had looked at. When you get deep-sea creatures made of limestone, that’s one thing, but here he had fewer fossils to go by, so he had to look at the sizes of grains in the rock and how they were arranged. He found shallow marine, lagoon, and river sediments, and a few sand dunes. All of those rocks were formed in environments right near the ocean. So now you’ve got the Redwall, which was deposited at the bottom of the ocean, and the Supai, which was deposited in the band between shallow marine and the shoreline.”