CW 37: The Rock and the River

I wrote this today as part of my commitment to the Clarion West Write-a-thon. A dedication means that person sponsored it by donating to CW, and then provided me a writing prompt that sparked the piece. All the story slots are sold, but if you are enjoying the pieces, please consider a donation to show your support.

Here’s all the work of the 41 days. You’ll also find these pieces cross-posted at Sterling Editing as incentive for writers to practice their editing and story-building skills.

Enjoy.

---

The Rock and the River

For Jane Gladson. Thank you for your support of me and Clarion West.

It was good they got off the boats for lunch, because by then Betsy was within a twitch of tossing the Larson kid over the side, preferably straight into the vacuum suck of the rapids, still clutching his stupid phone, whining all the way about why didn’t they have 3G down heeeeere? Bets didn’t think anyone on the boat would miss him, including his parents, who had raised Ignoring The Adolescent to a fine art. Then she would only have to get the Anderson family and Encyclopedia Guy eaten by snakes. The rest of them could stay as long as they left her alone. And then maybe Bets could enjoy the Grand Fucking Canyon.

When she signed up for the river trip, she imagined a small group of other adults, people of calm competence and intellectual mien and passionate adventurous spirit. She didn’t expect three motorized rafts of competitively-sunglassed executives who took a quick look around as they set off, noted that the Grand Canyon had a lot of rocks, and then got down to the serious business of checking each other’s status in the real world and telling the driver how to steer. All except Encyclopedia Guy, who went into full-bore full-volume download mode on the specific amount of damage that badly-conceived government management policies were doing to the river and canyon and wildlife and downriver ecosystems. Why, it’s all dying right this second!

He didn’t seem to notice that she flinched. Bets settled her baseball cap and bandanna more firmly onto her bald head and tried not to waste too much time hating him.

Once they disembarked onto the beach, she joined the line of folks unloading food coolers and cookgear. Then one of the bluff VP-on-vacation types shouldered in and tried to take the cooler from her, saying, “That looks heavy, you just let me get that for you, honey. You go on and find a seat.”

Fine. Fuck him. Bets released her grip, and enjoyed his nearly-drop-it-on-his-foot surprise at how much it weighed. She was still stronger than she looked. But the pleasure didn’t last, and the sourness still sat like lemon on the back of her tongue; because what did it prove, except that she still needed desperately to be strong?

#

So she sat on the sand and watched the river, while the not-dying-right-this second crowd fetched and carried and set up tables under the instructions of the boat drivers. Behind her, the cheerful human chaos. Before her, the Colorado: green and serene, opaque in spite of the hard hot sun that lit the canyon walls in such sharp detail it almost hurt to look at them. But look she did: the ancient rock, the river humming to itself, rolling on and on, and it was almost like music, on and on, almost like voices, on and on and–

She came back to awareness between one blink and the next, and found a child sitting silent next to her. A girl of perhaps eleven or so, a small, compact person in a white t-shirt and jeans and well-worn hiking boots who turned and grinned and said, “You hear that?”

“Almost,” Bets said.

“Come and get it!” a woman announced from the table. It took Bets a while to unkink herself and stand; by the time she was on her feet, the girl was gone, presumably somewhere in the crowd around the table. Bets got herself a grilled salmon filet and a spoonful of rice salad, ignored Encyclopedia Guy’s lost-lamb look, and found herself a rock for one as close to the river as she could.

#

After lunch, everyone piled back into the boats, and for a while the Andersons insisted on giving everyone a move-by-move account of the season finale of Dancing with the Stars, and Bets found herself so angry she wanted to scream. Don’t waste my time! But eventually the food and the sun did their work; the chattery people relaxed into silence, the Larson boy gave up on the internet and fell asleep, and even Encylopedia Guy was content to sit and only mutter to himself occasionally. The canyon narrowed around them as the river carried them deeper in and deeper down. There were no more beaches; the walls rose straight from the river, so high now that the sun and sky seemed impossibly far away, as if Bets were looking at them through the wrong end of a telescope.

Deeper down. Deeper down. Moving faster now toward the rapids ahead, just a mile or two, soon now, where the river would dash itself against the rock and break and reform and break again, on and on.

But now they came around a bend, and the boatman slowed and steered them toward a place in the wall where the rock was black and dense. “Touch it,” the boatman said.

People hesitated: the boatman was holding the boat in place with a deft hand on the reverse throttle, but this close to the wall it was impossible to miss the muscle of the river underneath them, impossible not to know that it had carved these mile-high walls one molecule at a time with irresistable force and relentless will, and that it would go on doing so, on and on, on and on–

Bets felt a hand on her arm. The girl said, “Go on, touch it.”

“Where did you come from?” Bets said.

“I’ve been right here,” the girl said, and her eyes were the dense deep black of the rock, except there was light at their center like the light of the sun. She said, “Listen.”

The boatman was speaking again. “This layer of rock is two billion years old.”

Two billion years. Bets put her hand to her mouth.

Listen, the girl said again. And Bets listened with every fiber of her being as she reached out and touched two billion years of sunlight and shadow, of water and wind, two billion years of plants and small creatures and dinosaurs and people, all the things they were and said and did and felt, what they loved and feared and everything that gave them joy, two billion years of the river that she could hear so clearly now humming Life life life, life is the rock and the river and the sun, and we are going on and on and on.

The girl said, You hear that?

On and on and on. “Yes,” Bets said, and began to cry.