Ellen Meloy

Since we began to live in Desolation years ago, friends have said that if it were not for their children, professions, political activism, mortgages, debts to spouses of ex-choice, and bad knees, they would gladly do what we do. “We uphold the culture of our generation,” they tell us. “You and Mark live its dream side.” Their envy does not detect the physical costs of professional vagrancy. Far from armchairs, ceilings, sock drawers, and a street address, but within sight of the downslide toward retirement, we are out here dragging heavy rafts and sleeping on the ground, underpants full of sand. When others travel with us on a ranger patrol, at the end of the trip Mark always asks the rhetorical “Would you like to have my job?” “It has been really nice,” they answer, sprinting up the boat ramp to their Land Cruisers. 

You can recheck gear, tighten the last strap, wriggle down harder in your seat, and open and shut your fists on the oar grips, but there is the moment when pure river terror takes over and you yield to it with a great surge of love and terror. Wire Fence Rapid has a steep drop down a slender tongue of silk, a long, mirror-slick, mesmerizing sheen of descending water. A split second before the raft hits the five-foot wall of roiling lateral waves at the tongue’s tip, I am spellbound by an aromatic river of air curling above the water itself, a cool, stony, turbulent smell, the smell of rapids.

Grand Slam Canyon promises the Grand Canyon without the Grand Canyon’s pesky discomforts—its infernal heat, wind, roadlessness, and size that defies the three-day vacation, its cacti, lizards, snakes, biting insects, burro poop, boulders, rapids, the possibility of death. Amidst hundred-foot peaks, swimming pools, water slides, pueblos, and a replica of the Grand Canyon’s Havasu Falls, inside a climate-controlled, vented, pink womb of a dome, Grand Slam Canyon visitors will fly through rapids and waterfalls in a roller coaster. They will, as the woman on Desolation’s boat ramp once wondered about the Green River, take out at the same place they put in. The River made better than itself.