Crystal is a dance. You work out your entry from shore, confident or terrified, but once in the tongue, like life, its easy to second guess yourself, get lost. Holes and rocks to either side of a narrow aisle, and you’re moving like a freight train. Black cliff of schist on the left, broken by great pink and white criss-crossing dikes echoing thunder, insidiously drawing the attention of the frail. Dip an oar here, adjust there, ready to move hard right to miss the dumping maw, a sure flip. Go there by mishap or misfortune and swim through unending waves, despairing of energy and air—or, for the really unlucky, over a calamity of boulders of every size and shape. Nail your run (so far), exultant but focused, and prepare to move hard left or right, sensing where the current is drawing, different every time. Fight that current with a predisposed bias, and Big Red, the largest and most conspicuous of the boulders, draws you towards her, an insistent lover. Laconic, veteran boatmen get awfully quiet in the eddy upstream. Consequences. First among equals. Okay, okay. I’m in the present already.
Stepping ashore, the ground sends tremors through our flip-flops again, running up our spines and into our numbed skulls. We are silent, and the passengers are now keenly aware. They can’t read rapids, but they can read us. I imagine hundred-ton boulders the size of houses, placed there by an incomprehensibly massive flood of mud and rock twenty years past, once again animate, now tumbling, colliding downstream. The air thumps, muffled bass drums throb the atmosphere. Oooh. My belly.
Camp—gone. Buried. We tie to the crag usually behind it, fasten our insignificant craft to its top. Tammies—tamarisk trees, foreign invaders from the Middle East but providers of shade and nesting nonetheless—wave like palms in a tempest far from shore, only their tips visible above the chocolate current. We sweat, but not from heat. We swing the rafts into the eddy behind the cliff, preparing to camp on the delta-top from which we usually enjoy a panoramic scout. We climb back aboard our boats to start unloading (finding it strangely comforting to leave the shuddering earth), but Suzanne has other ideas.
“Leave yoah boats alone.” We look up from the rigging, baffled.
“Y’all have to go see the size of this hole befo’ it gets too dahk. You just won’t b’leeeeve it!”
That’s it. Poor Suzy’s mind has finally snapped.
I am silently elected. She is, after all—though clearly deranged—my best friend. “Suzy. It’s okay. We’ll just de-rig and start camp going, and then we’ll go see the hole.”
She stamps her flop, hands on hips. I know this look.
“I ayem yoah trip leadah.” She’s seductive, smiling like a best friend, but with the stance of a killer. “Now you get down offa yoah boats right this very minute.”
Obedient, beaten curs, we crawl off our boats and follow her to the overlook.
The roar slams us in the face as we top the rise. The beast is at hand. Jaws drop—jaws that have seen some really big water all over the world. I urinate on a spindly desert trumpet at my feet, a gesture of coolness—fooling no one. Each of us is silent, looking deep into our souls, seeking courage for the morrow. Suzy smiles, in ownership of the moment, exultant. You have to admire her.
We turn our backs on our fate, eager to dull our senses, make camp. I mutter under my breath that we have to think of a way to describe the scale of things for later, when memories fade and stories get smirked at by guides who weren’t there but know better. We agree, after fruitless attempts at hyperbole, that you could chopper a locomotive over that hole, perpendicular to the current, lower it until its top was below and within the crest of the breaking wave, and no part of it—not the ends, not the bottom, not the sides—would touch water. No Shit, as we boatmen like to say.
After
dinner, pooped clients safely tucked in after their long hike down from the
rim, we stray over to the fire log and, one by one, absentmindedly pick up our
instruments. I pluck my mandolin from its rock perch, pulling the strap over my
shoulder in the flickering glow, mind drifting, tuning up. Joel meanders over,
opens up his banjo case, joins in. Moley wanders in with tequila, an offering,
leans over his fiddle. I’m not much of a drinker, easily getting smashed on
just three beers. This night, however, we indulge as loggers and whores might.
Not a word is spoken—no words needed. We play, at first softly,
introspectively, then, as the hours roll on, imperceptibly faster, louder,
unconsciously building to a crescendo of pent-up thrill and tension, youth and
destiny compelling us, song following song, into harmonic frenzy. Rhythms are
flawless, backups and solos tight, crisp. There is a drummer here, not human,
hammering the beat. Long after the ringtails have retired, we face each other
in a compact circle, combined repertoires driving us onwards, into the moon,
the cliffs, the water. In one, single, spontaneous moment, our desert jam
having feverishly built—note for note, decibel by decibel—a bridge between our
souls, and from there to something unnamable, we all stop, unbidden and
un-cued, on precisely the same chord. Brown-Eyed Girl, redux. The spectacle will echo amongst these
cliffs, mingling with Crystal’s thunder, long after civilization has ceased to
exist.
Eyes glazed, instruments laid to rest, utterly exhausted, alone and separate once more, we retire to our respective floating roosts.
