mr. hotpants rides again

In the summer of 2006 I was lucky enough to get out of New York and the coffee mines for a few weeks and row a baggage boat for Tour West, down the Colorado through the Grand Canyon, a charter trip that my parents had organized and my dad was leading. My bailer and sole passenger was my mom, who was working as our assistant on the trip, but my sister Adah furnished me with a bit of ‘tube garnish’ for the voyage in the form of Mr. Hotpants, who had once been part of a cake-decorating kit. Mr. Hotpants spent the entire trip lashed to the bow of my 18‘ Avon raft, and that’s how he liked it. For a guy who’d never known anything rougher than buttercream frosting, he sure turned out to have a thing for bondage. If you look closely at the photo below you can see him reclining on the bow, as jaunty as though the V-Wave of Lava Falls were just another piece of cake.

You won’t be able to make him out in the following photo, try as you might, for Mr. Hotpants was torpedoing deep through the V-Wave, whereas my bowsprit mother just managed to keep her head above water while high-siding (the crucial passenger participation technique in big water, where one throws one's weight toward the high side of the raft to help prevent a flip).

(photos: Joe Bennion)

After a ride like Lava Falls Mr. Hotpants was often found in a procumbent position: he’d been spanked. As you can see in the above photos we rode a silty river on that particular trip; the water was khaki at its clearest, and by the end of the 226-mile journey the abrasive action of the river had nearly scrubbed Mr. Hotpants’ pants clean off him.

The following summer I didn’t have any river trips, and Adah arrived in New York by train on the 4th of July, ready to learn how to make coffee and to read the currents that run through those deep urban canyons.

I gave Mr. Hotpants back to her, apologizing for the shameful state of his knickers, and he adorned the apartments we shared, first in Manhattan and then in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, where the cheery fellow assumed his supine position atop the cake-like marble mantel of the ornamental fireplace in Adah’s bedroom.

Speaking of cakes, Adah bakes them like nobody’s business, and for several years running in the mid-aughts she created two cakes per annum for my birthday parties (neither of us could settle on just one kind), celebrated at the Beresford with musician, barista and sundry civilian friends.

Cut cakes, like cut flowers, never last, and you can only high-side for so long in the City before you need to come up for air. I moved to France a year and a half ago, and Adah hung in on the barista circuit until this May, leaving New York on the transcontinental train and alighting in Utah just in time to go as an assistant on another of our parents’ Grand Canyon charter trips through Tour West.

She and I hadn’t spent quality--or quantity--time together for a couple of years, so I was delighted to have her as fellow crew,

and as tube garnish on a few of the big-rapids days.

(photos: Joe Bennion)

It was a very snowy and cold spring in the High West, and the turbines at Glen Canyon Dam above the Grand Canyon were spinning out as much water as they could possibly churn during our 15 days on the water. We were running on a steady 23-24,000 cubic feet/second as opposed to the flows of 6-13,000 cfs that I’ve been accustomed to over the past decade. Many of the rapids, like Granite (pictured above) became more straightforward in such big water--a bit washed out, if you will. Other rapids down there have sleeping monsters that wake at high water, like the Fifth Wave (aka Godzilla) in Hermit:

It looks like the boat’s going to pancake, or that at the very least I’m going out the side, but that’s actually the merciful route off the Fifth Wave (it’s the left face of that wave, not the right, that’s flipping boats at 24,000) and I held myself in by my calves (that was three weeks ago as I write this and the geometric bruises have faded but I still have a painful knot in my right calf) and got through with both oars in my hands, though the left one had been blasted out of the oarlock and was worse than useless.

(photos: Joe Bennion)

In flatwater stretches Adah and I lamented the fact that Mr. Hotpants was packed away in one of her boxes at home in Spring City, rather than out facing down the waves on my bow. This trip would have scrubbed every last shred of pants off him though, and the bow of my boat was already the scene of considerable wardrobe disintegration during Adrenaline Alley, or the big rapids of the Inner Granite Gorge. Adah’s Jackie O scarf was falling to tatters, which actually made it easier to secure it to her head.

And Mark’s straw hat came unbrimmed rapid by rapid until he resembled some fantastic high-siding manbeetle in Hermit, which was the last straw for the poor hat.

When the last of the tortured brim sloughed away we all thought the hat suited him much better.

Back to the subject of cakes. Dessert in the Grand Canyon can be as simple as dark chocolate squares pulled hard and cold from one of the 80-quart coolers that we boatmen sit on all day while rowing, or it can be an elaborate hazing ritual involving canned pears, Hershey syrup, whipped cream and peer pressure.

Often enough we bake up a dutch oven cake

especially if anybody is celebrating a birthday on the trip. On this last trip we had two birthdays, one of which was a surprise for us: Glade, a last-minute crew addition, celebrated a milestone in the Big Ditch. We only had one cake planned for that end of the trip, so Adah, as the birthday cake ringer on the team, stepped up to the plate and improvised with the ingredients on hand.

(photo: Joe Bennion)

A generous outpouring of gin and tonics from the clients ensured that this was the best birthday cake Glade had ever seen, even though it was not technically a cake but rather a sort of glorified, chocolate-studded rice pudding. I saved my portion for pre-Lava carbo-loading the next morning, at which point, however tasty, it was reminiscent of those oaten-bannock party favors of ritual sacrifice one finds in the stomachs of peat bog mummies.

Lava Falls is always my favorite rapid in the Grand Canyon, no matter the water level. It’s the biggest one down there, but at the same time it doesn’t require as many technical maneuvers as, say, Hance, Horn, Bedrock or Dubendorff at low water. It’s got the most spectacular scout on the right-hand side: you wend your way through columnar basalt to scrutinize the water and pick your line from high upon a great lava fang.

Entry--in exactly the right spot, and with the angle and momentum to punch through at that spot--is everything in Lava. After that all you can do is hang onto your oars and try to use them to keep the boat squared up to whatever you’re about to hit next. Failing that, well, just do what your passengers are doing: hang on and enjoy the bonus nasal enema. Lava never disappoints in the Big Ride department. To row it, even at a familiar and friendly water level, is to hook into the sort of adrenaline main-line that makes one forget hunger, thirst, pain or how badly one needed to take a crap at the scout. One might be bleeding from the leg or the arm after a successful run at Lava and not even notice it until a mile or two downstream. I’ve had my oh scheiße moments in Lava, to be sure.

(photos: Ed Marue)

(Miraculously a loose strap came to hand when I needed it and I stayed in the boat during the run pictured above, rowing baggage for Tour West in 2005.) But I’ve never flipped a boat there, touch wood. The topography of Lava is dominated by a magnificent gnasher called the Ledge Hole, which at any level is the single spot in all 280 miles of the river corridor that you most want to avoid. Here’s what Lava looks like at a relatively docile 6 or 7,000 cfs; the Ledge is all the crunchy white stuff on the left side of the channel.

At that level we run the tongue to the right of the Ledge, where the ride gets bigger and snarlier as the water gets higher on up to around 15,000 or 16,000 cfs, where the V-Wave is no longer the crotch of two lateral waves but two holes colliding, with such chaotic force that there’s no safe passage through them. That’s how I saw Lava last October, when we were supposed to have steady flows of around 8,000 cfs, but five days of rain and flash-floods from tributaries doubled the volume of the river. We scouted the right side of Lava, as usual, and stared for a half hour at the ugly beast, watching canoe-sized pieces of driftwood disappear into the Ledge without surfacing again. We boatmen were worried about our own abilities to stay in the boats through the right tongue--should we manage to keep them upright--let alone a few of our more elderly passengers. Part of me, the reckless fly-in-the-face-of-Lava part of me, wanted to see what would happen to me in there, how I would come out against water like that. However, that part of me had no trouble conceding to reason when our trip leader decided we would row back upstream and across the river to the nearest camp and wait for the water to come down.

(photo: Randy Rohrer)

At flows above 15,000 cfs we begin to look left, left of the Ledge Hole to the part of the channel that is a rock garden in lower water but presents a runnable tongue in high water. I hadn’t run left at Lava in well over a decade before this latest trip, and even back in the 90’s I never saw it quite so high. Normally the approach on Lava Lake is ominously calm and flat, until suddenly you hear the sound of the rapid over the dizzying sound of the cicadas. But in high water there is no Lava Lake, just a freight train of current moving toward the unseen Ledge Hole, and precise entry is even more difficult and essential than ever. Our trip leader Bruce explained the run clearly from the left-shore scout, and after a few minutes of careful study we were ready to run. (Any more than a few minutes at a big scout produces only diminishing returns where clarity is concerned, and increasing gastric unrest in response to the waters’ roiling.) I felt like a Lava virgin again, looking at a big and completely unfamiliar run. Adah and my mother were both high-siding with my dad, but the plucky folks in my boat had all reserved their spots there five days before, which warms the cockles of the heart and makes one feel as lucky-starred as though Mr. Hotpants himself were dangling there on the bow, unafraid to pass so close to the left edge of the Ledge that one is oarlock-deep in that Hole’s backside.

(photos: Joe Bennion)

It all happens damn fast in Lava (12 elastic seconds that stretch out impossibly and then thwack you like a belly-flop) but I believe, and the photos seem to say, that I was right where I wanted to be on entry, and I was possessed of both oars and facing downstream all the way through. My passengers were euphoric in the tailwaves and began clamoring to somehow run Lava again maybe ten more times--perhaps to avoid the immediate necessity of bailing out the boat, which was knee-deep in water. Needless to say, good runs in Lava and the impending end of the trip called for a party, for getting tricked out in our best thrift-store frippery and fake tattoos.

(photos: Joe Bennion)

Somewhere in all the celebration I mused to Adah that I’d soon be off for France again, to pass yet another birthday without a proper cake. Which isn’t to say that I’m complaining about French pastry at all, at all, but they don’t do the big Yank layer-cake that yields a doorstopper wedge on your plate, demanding to be chased with a pint of milk--those discrete blocks of cake and frosting like the stripes and panels of your own personal birthday-land flag. We had a few days all together in Spring City after the river trip and before I left for France, and Adah got busy and made a cake specially designed to comfort the soul of an American who’s expatriated herself to a place where the mountain roads might be paved with cheese and wine, but the peanut butter is uniformly scary: for example this African import, which sounds like something you’d use on diaper rash and is only slightly more edible than wood-filler.

Adah made a chocolate cake with peanut-butter cream-cheese frosting and a peanut-butter chocolate glaze, using Western Family Creamy, the yankest of possible Yank-butters.

She garnished the cake with fresh raspberries and our old friend Mr. Hotpants, whom providence placed at the top of the first box she opened to unpack.

Not much remains of his pants, especially after I was done with him (what's a girl supposed to do when there are no candles to blow?)

Mr. Notpants is looking forward to next year’s Lava run--come high water or low--to get spanky clean.