Down in the heart of the canyon, in the bone-baking heat, they put their lives on hold.
Most of the travelers had never experienced anything quite like it. Peter Kramer, whose year mapping the jungles of Central America included a monthlong stay in an unair-conditioned hospital with a fever of 104, found it impossible to suck down more than short little gasps of hot air. Evelyn Burns, professor of biology at Harvard University, spent the first day lecturing everyone about the tolerability of dry heat (105 in Arizona being nothing compared to 90 in Boston), then vomited five minutes into the first windstorm. Dr. and Mrs. Lloyd Frankel, river veterans, lay on their sleeping mats in stunned oblivion to the velvety orange wasps that scurried in blind circles on the hot sand between them. And Amy Van Doren, who unbeknownst to her mother had weighed in at 237 pounds on the hotel spa scale the night before the trip, rigorously shook the bottle of hot sauce over everything on her plate, for she knew that chile peppers made you sweat, which in turn would not only cool her off but enable her to lose a few pounds.
JT, the head guide, had seen it all before. This being his 125th trip down the Colorado River, he’d witnessed time and again the universal zombielike walk of his guests at the end of the day when they staggered up the beach in search of a campsite. He called it the Death Walk and always reminded his fellow guides not to expect much volunteer help in the first few days of any July trip, as guests acclimated to the suffocating conditions of the Grand Canyon. It was simply a matter of physiology: the human body wasn’t designed to go from a comfortable air-conditioned existence to the prehistoric inferno of canyon life in a day. When his heat-stomped campers marveled at his energy, he kept at what he was doing and raised an eyebrow and said, “You’ll adjust.”
JT was a man of few words.
At night it was so hot you slept without a blanket, or even a sheet, for well past midnight the winds continued to fan the heat off the sun-baked canyon walls. In early morning, as people shook out their clothes for scorpions, the air could feel temperate, and they might be fine in just a bathing suit; but as soon as the sun’s rays came barreling over the canyon walls, out came the long-sleeved cotton shirts, which got repeatedly dunked in the river, wrung out, and worn, soaked to chill, until sundown.
During the midday furnace, when even the guides crawled into whatever shade they could find and collectively dreamt of that first brisk morning in October when you could see your breath, JT himself would confront the heat head-on. Alone in his raft, he would kneel against the side tubes with his arms draped over the edge, staring in a kind of rapt hypnosis at the sheer walls across the river. Something in the flat midday light, he’d found, caused them to eventually start floating upstream, a mirage of the mind until he blinked, and then they would snap back into place until the next daze sent them floating upstream again. It was a game he played, a game he’d never reveal to anyone lest they think him soft, or spiritual, or just plain wacky.
But in fact he was all three. JT Maroney’s heart was in those walls, and had been since his first trip thirty-five years ago when someone handed him a life jacket and a paddle and said, “Are you coming or not?” It was in the polished maroon cliffs of Marble Canyon, the dusty tan layers of Coconino sandstone; it was embedded forever in the shimmering black walls of the Inner Gorge, Land of the Giants. It was in the scorpions and the velvet wasps and the stinging red ants that sent you running for a vial of ammonia; it was in the feathery tamarisk trees and the canyon wrens’ falling notes and the grumpy black-winged California condor he spotted without fail as they passed under Navajo Bridge the first day of every trip. It was in the tug of water around his ankle as he splashed about, rigging his boat; it was in the sunlit droplets that danced above the roar of big water.
Each trip changed him a little. This trip would change him a lot. It would change everyone, in ways no one could have anticipated.