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Trek to the jaws of life
By Liesl Schillinger |
July 26, 2009, Sunday
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Print Edition
Print Edition
AHH, the great indoors! When you hear friends talk rapturously of their near-death experiences white-water rafting, you can't help wondering: why didn't they just stay home? The answer, possibly, is that nothing gives you (or rather, them) a better appreciation of life than putting it at senseless risk. But in her new novel, "In the Heart of the Canyon" -- an account of the incredible journey of three rafts full of thrill-seeking nature lovers and their guides, brought together for two weeks in the churning currents of the Grand Canyon -- Elisabeth Hyde shows that there are other reasons.
Back when the Rockies were mostly uncharted territory, it was a life-changing experience simply to show up there at all. In 1873, when a restless but very proper Englishwoman named Isabella Bird journeyed on horseback through the Colorado wilderness, she endured vile food, rough lodgings, uncouth frontiersmen, bucking horses, grizzly bears, ravenous vermin, rattlesnakes, cacti, wild gulches and "awful" torrents.
Her memoir, "A Lady's Life in the Rocky Mountains," enthralled armchair travelers in Britain and America. Today, in an age when Google Earth can zoom in on a mountain crag and Estes Park (untamed in Miss Bird's day) is platted as thoroughly as any subdivision, it's hard to track down fresh, life-renewing experience -- and harder still to locate terra that qualifies as nova. For the most part, the only new territory contemporary adventurers can conquer is interior.
Hyde is well qualified to guide her readers through this two-in-one journey. She is the author of four previous novels and is also a white-water rafter and exhilarated veteran of the process of "getting maytagged" -- being sucked down a whirlpool like a sock in a washing machine. Her prose is vigorous and natural, her perception subtle, her voice and those of her characters all-American. With speed, pragmatism and gusto, she introduces her ragtag cast.
There are four family groups: Susan, a trim, self-critical divorcee from Wisconsin, and her obese teenage daughter, Amy, whose arms stick out of her life jacket "like penguin wings;" a quarrelsome Utah couple and their rivalrous adolescent sons; a pigheaded historian who bosses both his wife and the canyon guides; and the Frankels, a pair of septuagenarians taking their beloved annual river trip for the last time.
Solo travelers have also joined the party: a smug mama's boy from Cincinnati whose girlfriend, a former Miss Ohio, recently dumped him, and a 50-year-old Harvard biology professor -- cast in the mold of Isabella Bird -- who commandeers the most picturesque spot at every campsite, blind to her selfishness, aware only of her loneliness, her thirst for beauty and her longing for pastimes more stimulating than "perusing catalogs and eating bagged salad."
Young or old, married or single, fractious or obedient, every rider on this floating convoy must submit to the authority of the three guides -- which puts them in the position of being de facto parents. JT, the burly, easygoing trip leader and father figure, who's made the river run 124 times, wonders if the 125th is one too many. Hunting down a stash of Cipro for a wounded raftmate he almost weeps in frustration.
Abo, a copacetic farm-boy-turned-paddle-captain, mostly manages to tune out the dysfunction, while lean, limber Dixie Ann Gillis adds to it, wearing faded red shorts and a tattered pink shirt (knotted enticingly above her bare midriff) that send the mama's boy into sweats having nothing to do with the 115-degree July heat.
The job of the guides is not only to steer the passengers safely through the "biggest white water on the continent" but to cook meals, calm tantrums and squabbles, and keep tabs on the singularly inconvenient mutt -- all the while generating enough Kodak memories to prevent the holidayers from demanding a refund. A river guide's work is never done.
While Hyde takes care to bring the scenery to life -- the "rich emerald green" of the water, the "thickets of wild grape" and the towering canyon walls of "glistening black schist, shot through with lightning forks of pink granite" -- her true artistry shows not in her landscapes but in her portraits. Each person on the trip is engaged in a voyage of self-discovery. With no escape from social interaction, no privacy and none of the distractions of the modern world's "engines and asphalt, clocks and credit cards and news reports that didn't really matter," they're forced to wrestle with their own thorny natures.
Hyde paddles us through their individual detours with a minimum of maytagging, letting us in on campsite talks and private reflections in which her characters open up to one another and to themselves.
The night before the last run, down the treacherous Lava Falls, JT gleefully terrifies his worn-out charges with tales of "near drownings and broken limbs and wooden dories getting ripped to splinters." Will these rafters survive? Probably. But reading "In the Heart of the Canyon," you realize that it's the everyday tumbles and snags encountered on dry land that most of us need help navigating. Do river guides make house calls?
Back when the Rockies were mostly uncharted territory, it was a life-changing experience simply to show up there at all. In 1873, when a restless but very proper Englishwoman named Isabella Bird journeyed on horseback through the Colorado wilderness, she endured vile food, rough lodgings, uncouth frontiersmen, bucking horses, grizzly bears, ravenous vermin, rattlesnakes, cacti, wild gulches and "awful" torrents.
Her memoir, "A Lady's Life in the Rocky Mountains," enthralled armchair travelers in Britain and America. Today, in an age when Google Earth can zoom in on a mountain crag and Estes Park (untamed in Miss Bird's day) is platted as thoroughly as any subdivision, it's hard to track down fresh, life-renewing experience -- and harder still to locate terra that qualifies as nova. For the most part, the only new territory contemporary adventurers can conquer is interior.
Hyde is well qualified to guide her readers through this two-in-one journey. She is the author of four previous novels and is also a white-water rafter and exhilarated veteran of the process of "getting maytagged" -- being sucked down a whirlpool like a sock in a washing machine. Her prose is vigorous and natural, her perception subtle, her voice and those of her characters all-American. With speed, pragmatism and gusto, she introduces her ragtag cast.
There are four family groups: Susan, a trim, self-critical divorcee from Wisconsin, and her obese teenage daughter, Amy, whose arms stick out of her life jacket "like penguin wings;" a quarrelsome Utah couple and their rivalrous adolescent sons; a pigheaded historian who bosses both his wife and the canyon guides; and the Frankels, a pair of septuagenarians taking their beloved annual river trip for the last time.
Solo travelers have also joined the party: a smug mama's boy from Cincinnati whose girlfriend, a former Miss Ohio, recently dumped him, and a 50-year-old Harvard biology professor -- cast in the mold of Isabella Bird -- who commandeers the most picturesque spot at every campsite, blind to her selfishness, aware only of her loneliness, her thirst for beauty and her longing for pastimes more stimulating than "perusing catalogs and eating bagged salad."
Young or old, married or single, fractious or obedient, every rider on this floating convoy must submit to the authority of the three guides -- which puts them in the position of being de facto parents. JT, the burly, easygoing trip leader and father figure, who's made the river run 124 times, wonders if the 125th is one too many. Hunting down a stash of Cipro for a wounded raftmate he almost weeps in frustration.
Abo, a copacetic farm-boy-turned-paddle-captain, mostly manages to tune out the dysfunction, while lean, limber Dixie Ann Gillis adds to it, wearing faded red shorts and a tattered pink shirt (knotted enticingly above her bare midriff) that send the mama's boy into sweats having nothing to do with the 115-degree July heat.
The job of the guides is not only to steer the passengers safely through the "biggest white water on the continent" but to cook meals, calm tantrums and squabbles, and keep tabs on the singularly inconvenient mutt -- all the while generating enough Kodak memories to prevent the holidayers from demanding a refund. A river guide's work is never done.
While Hyde takes care to bring the scenery to life -- the "rich emerald green" of the water, the "thickets of wild grape" and the towering canyon walls of "glistening black schist, shot through with lightning forks of pink granite" -- her true artistry shows not in her landscapes but in her portraits. Each person on the trip is engaged in a voyage of self-discovery. With no escape from social interaction, no privacy and none of the distractions of the modern world's "engines and asphalt, clocks and credit cards and news reports that didn't really matter," they're forced to wrestle with their own thorny natures.
Hyde paddles us through their individual detours with a minimum of maytagging, letting us in on campsite talks and private reflections in which her characters open up to one another and to themselves.
The night before the last run, down the treacherous Lava Falls, JT gleefully terrifies his worn-out charges with tales of "near drownings and broken limbs and wooden dories getting ripped to splinters." Will these rafters survive? Probably. But reading "In the Heart of the Canyon," you realize that it's the everyday tumbles and snags encountered on dry land that most of us need help navigating. Do river guides make house calls?
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