Forty-five minutes after boarding the bus that would take them to the river, Marshall’s crew turned off the main road running through the valley and drove past a string of gaunt jack pine. Four-foot snowdrifts lapped at the sides of the bus. A bitter wind hurled shards of ice against the windows. To Carlyle’s right, thick sheets of water thundered down a steep concrete spillway into a cavernous, boulder-strewn gorge.
A Volvo salesman from Saratoga Springs, a guy who had looked worried all morning, stood up and walked over to Carlyle. “We’re really going to go out there with the weather like this?”
“We carry plenty of extra gear. Everything you’ll need if you get cold.”
“If we get cold?”
“I promise, you’ll have a great time.”
After his client backed off, Blake turned to Carlyle. “The guy seemed kind of nervous.”
“It’s a bad sign when they’re like that before a trip. Keep an eye on him.”
The bus, its wheels churning up snow and mud, rumbled past the dam.
Carlyle said, “Ryan wants you to back him up today.”
“You sure about that?”
“Absolutely. Now get ready. We’re almost there.”
When the bus came to a stop, the six guides, knowing they couldn’t let their clients stand around in the cold, rushed out the door. Munck mounted a ladder to the roof and began dropping the boats to outstretched arms.
Carlyle watched the guides corral their people into boats. It was all coming back to him, the excitement and the spectacle at the beginning of each trip, the waiting and the uncertainty, the expectation of what lay ahead.
Marshall shouted, “Come on. Move! We’ve got to get on this river while the sun’s still around.”
After the guides had lashed down their gear, Marshall told them to hoist the boats and move toward the path leading down to the Indian. Eight people, who looked like philosophy majors delivering a grand piano, slowly lugged Nash’s heavy raft down the mud-slicked trail.
“Anyone ask for a ride back to the lodge?” Carlyle asked Nash. Every week, after realizing they had four or five hours of isolation and misery ahead of them, one or two clients usually jumped ship.
“Not yet. But keep your eyes open.”
When all six rafts were lined up at the top of the slope, Marshall yelled, “Hop in, grab a paddle, and pray.”
The Volvo dealer grimaced. “What’s going on?”
“Do what he says,” Carlyle said. “Just get in your boat.”
When Marshall yelled, “Now!” Nash put his shoulder against the raft and pushed. They quickly gathered speed, and then began rushing down the trail toward the Indian.
During his rookie season a decade ago, one client told Carlyle, “That stunt on the hill made me think you were all a bunch of madmen.”
Using the rafts as bobsleds today was plain stupid. But every trip was a crapshoot. If you eliminated all risk, your clients got bored and didn’t sign up again. If you took too many chances, someone ended up in the river.
“I heard you talking to Marshall,” Nash said. “I wish Blake were at the three spot, where we all could watch him.”
“Marshall never listens to advice.” Although the guides were focused on the trip ahead of them, Sanders’s death could not have been far from their thoughts. Hernandez, who ran his mouth constantly, had been silent on the bus. Betts, more nervous than usual, had called his clients “stupid mules” on the way down to the basin. Even Nash, who was usually pretty calm, had been chewing on his emergency whistle all morning.
Two minutes after they reached the basin, Marshall’s guides began teaching their crews the skills they’d need to survive what lay ahead in the gorge.
As they moved out into the swift current pulling them downstream, Carlyle said to Nash, “Let’s keep a close eye on Blake.”
“You’re the boss,” Nash said. “That is, until Marshall tells us he’s had enough of you.”
As soon as Chris Blake’s blunt-nosed raft slid into the Indian, it began to pick up speed. He cut left to avoid two midstream boulders and began teaching his crew how to stay safe in a river running downhill like a herd of stallions. Blake loved this job. The river was one big adrenalin machine, a device designed to make his heart race.
Knowing that he could not take his eyes off the water, that tree roots, rocks, and granite outcrops could appear at any second, Blake tried to imagine what problems lay ahead of him. On his rookie trip, Marshall had said, “Don’t focus on what’s right in front of your boat. The horizon is your target. That’s where the danger is.”
Freezing spray coated Blake’s eyelids and lashed his face. The numbing cold had begun to penetrate his clothing and his fingers were beginning to cramp up. The Indian was supposed to be a brief overture to what lay ahead, but the early spring runoff this year had transformed the narrow, boulder-strewn current. In the lodge this morning, Betts, who knew that an inch or two of rain could alter a river in minutes, had called this part of their trip “difficult if you’re not careful, bloody murder if you not paying attention.”
Blake’s raft punched through Mixmaster and rushed downstream. For six or seven minutes—an eternity for those who’d never lived through it—his boat careened through Gooley Steps, a frenzied landscape filled with boulders and back-washing waves. As the Indian became steeper, it rumbled rather than screeched, a sign of its volume and speed. Sunlight streaming through the thick canopy of pines on both sides of the river alternately blinded and distracted the young guide.
Twenty minutes later, after a ride that left him stunned by the river’s power, Blake cut sharp left and followed Marshall into a large eddy above the confluence with the Hudson.
“You okay?” Marshall said.
Blake wasn’t about to admit that he was shocked at the monster the runoff had made of the river. “I’ve got a great crew. We’re fine.”
“Don’t get too
