Rapid Descent. Gwen Hunter
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it, and trucks to cart you out. We’ll have support people at each site by noon, but unless you get hurt, you’ll be carting your own boat and gear to the trucks. No princess rides today.” That got another laugh. Princess rides were raft trips with a pretty girl as one of the paddlers. She usually got to sit and look at scenery while the other rafters did all the work and the male guides ogled her.
“In the event that we don’t find Joe by two, we start a slower, more methodical search downstream from the confluence above the Double. The paddlers will rendezvous at Leatherwood at 6:00 p.m. There’ll be trucks at the takeout to haul your boats from the river upstream to the campsite at the confluence or back here to get your vehicles. We have permission to camp at the confluence for those interested.
“Hikers will meet up with a support team at 6:00 p.m. Same thing with regard to transportation.”
He looked around the gathered, meeting eyes. Making his most important point. “No fun and games today, people. No playing. Not until after Joe Stevens is found. Got it?”
A chorus of yips followed his question, and several boaters gave the Hawaiian “okay” sign of thumb and little finger in the air, the other fingers curled under, hand waggling. The hikers took off with long strides. The Ranger raft pushed off, into the sluggish current. The hardboat paddlers went to their kayaks and began the serious business of getting on the water. Those still onshore skirted themselves into their boats and slid into the water and under the old and new bridges.
Nell watched as they moved down the river and slowly out of sight. When they were gone, she surveyed the nearly empty lot. One of the two park guys pulled out, spinning gravel; the other one strode up to the second tier of parking.
Soon the rescue squad auxiliary organization would be bringing food for the searchers and organizing ways to make sure each hiker and boater had ample supplies of water and food. There would be coffee, doughnuts, trail mix, sandwiches, maybe some soup to ward off the chill at each support station. People who were willing to run errands. Medical personnel. News vans. But little of that would take place here. Most of it would be at Leatherwood at the bottom of the run, and at the two put-ins midway down.
Nell knew she would have to move soon to keep up with the search, and wondered if the RV could make it down the one-lane, steeply graded, sorta-maybe-could-be-a-road to the parking above the confluence near the Double Falls, or if it would be better to park at the top of the hill above the Narrows. Turning the RV around on any of the one-lane roads would be a bugger. The O & W would allow a turnaround, but if she met anyone coming, she would have to figure out how to back up. Maybe for a long way. She didn’t want to have to. That left Leatherwood or the confluence for her day camping.
The news van she had run from pulled into the lot and headed for the lone park ranger. And then there’ll be the press, she thought. Nell escaped to the RV and headed out.
Nell was parked at Leatherwood near two groups of day campers with rowdy preschoolers, and bored high schoolers and the lone support vehicle to arrive so far, a beat-up pickup truck. The truck bed contained extra paddles, rescue ropes, and a rescue stretcher, the kind shaped like a canoe, with flex security straps and tie-offs for hauling a wounded victim up a steep hill. An old man was sleeping in the cab, his head tilted back, mouth hanging open, hogwashers and a threadbare white T-shirt the only parts of him visible.
She turned to the water. The river was still high, rushing over the low bridge kept open by the park rangers to show campers and tourists where the original Leatherwood Ford used by colonists and by the Indians before them was. Cars and trucks no longer used the low bridge, not since the construction of a steel and concrete bridge. The newer bridge was normally some twenty-five feet above the river flow, but the distance was less today, with fresh, dark high-water marks two feet higher.
The storm that had turned the river into a raging torrent had come out of nowhere. In forty-eight hours the high water would all be gone. But for now, it was a foamy blur in her tears. Nell wanted to be out there with them, on the water, helping with the SAR, but she knew that with her head pounding and her vision not quite steady, she would become a liability to the water team. It was the first time since she was sixteen that she hadn’t been on the water during an S and R.
She sat at the small dining table, staring across at the seat Joe should have occupied. Like most married couples, they had each chosen a seat and stayed in it for meals. Joe sat with his back to the driver’s seat. Nell faced him. Now his seat was empty, but there was evidence of Joe everywhere. His map of the river was unfolded on the dinette seat, next to his beat-up copy of Southeastern White Water, the out-of-print kayakers’ bible. His second-best sunglasses were open on the dash, but had slid into the angle between windshield and dash. She hadn’t noticed them when she drove to the put-in.
Joe collected sunglasses like some people collected dishes or furniture. He owned several pair of the kind with yellow lenses that claim to give the wearer the sight of eagles, several more that were polarized, others that were cheap dollar-store glasses he didn’t mind losing. His current favorite pair was with him, wherever he was.
A John Deere hat hung from the hook over the door. His Jeep keys dangled from the key hook. A T-shirt drooped from the hook in the hallway. The sheet draped out from beneath the bed’s comforter, left there when she had made the bed, the morning they took to the water.
She looked at the radio, sitting on the table. Silent. Nothing was happening on the water. By way of the radio relay, Nell had learned that the boaters had made it over the Double Falls, and Elton and Mike had sent the faster kayakers out to the shorelines around the pool at its base. Elton had inspected the campsite where Nell had woken. Mike and his crew had tied off above the drop and were checking for signs of passage.
At loose ends, Nell stood and walked through the RV, their new “summer home,” occupied by them exactly three times before this trip. She studied the small space. Touched the towel hanging off the tiny oven. Lifted Joe’s T-shirt hanging on a hook in the hall and held it to her nose, then she wrapped the shirt around her neck for comfort. Tucked the sheet under the mattress. Smoothed Joe’s pillow.
The RV was too small and compact for a large family, but it was just right for them. The queen bed was in the back, with storage hidden behind tension doors that thumped shut like cupboards on an oceangoing boat, keeping the contents inside during rolls and pitches on the road. The special cabinets lined the walls at the ceiling all around, along the walls, and even under the bed and beneath the dinette couches.
There was a tiny kitchenette and a bathroom with a shower so small that Joe bumped his elbows when he washed his hair, thumping and banging like a bass drummer. The miniscule bathroom sink and formed-plastic toilet looked like something from a dollhouse.
The dinette was situated across from the efficiency-size appliances, a narrow table between two bench seats. Because she would be here awhile, Nell leveled the vehicle with the automatic levelers and activated the slide that extended the dinette section of the RV out nearly three feet, giving her floor space. If she wanted, she could move things around and make the dinette into a couch or turn it into an extra bed. She swiveled the driver’s and passenger’s seats around to face back, making a place for seating. Nell wanted the “after-search decompression” to take place here.
And if Joe needed medical attention, the floor space would let medics work on him if there was a delay with the ambulance from Oneida. The vision of Joe lying on the floor, bleeding, a compound arm fracture needing attention, was so strong she had to blink it away. The image was replaced with an image of her husband lying dead on the carpet, pale and bloodless and blue. Acid rose in her throat.
She made it to the bathroom and threw up the cereal she had managed to get down. Curled on the small floor of the bath, she gave in to a hard cry, the sound of her sobs louder than the screams of the preschoolers only feet away. When the emotional storm passed, she crawled to her knees and flushed, pushed to her feet and brushed her teeth. Wiping her chapped face, she stood in the center of their summer home, alone and with nothing to do.
She was frighteningly grateful when a knock on the door interrupted her. So grateful that when it was Claire, with the