Stretching

Stretching Tearsheets

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He was tall–about 7’2,” hence the name: Stretch. And when he grabbed those rocks, I should have known something was about to go down, literally.For several years my two uncles, Rodney and Bob, and my father Steve had embarked on whitewater rafting tours, leaving me behind because I was “too young.” They always returned to society refreshed somehow in a way I couldn’t understand. This year, they had eschewed their unspoken protocol; my status was upgraded from “child” to “adult” (I was seventeen at the time), and I was invited to go along. “Jonathan, we’re going to Idaho,” Dad said.”Okay,” I said. My mental response was: Great. Potatoes and flatland, and we will be floating down a glass-still river and I’ll be bored. You finally ask me to go after two years, and it is to Idaho. What happened to going somewhere like the Grand Canyon?”Hells Canyon,” he said. Now we’re getting a little better. “The Snake River.” All right, you’ve got me. I’ll expect to meet Lucifer himself when we get to the river. It’s funny how the simple mention of an evil name drew me in instead of what God would hope. I was intrigued by the prospect of our family floating down the serpentine folds of a real-life river Styx, stumbling onto the very flame-kissed gates of Hades. In those weak moments of imagination, the sinuous flows of Satan seemed more interesting to me than God. I discovered later that Hells Canyon is the deepest river gorge in North America–some 8000 plus feet down–and I thought it would be cool to skim the underbelly of the earth. I’d pay the rowman; the toll would be a little piece of my soul in exchange for an eventful trip. I’d been stuck in the perceived pointless minutiae of high school for two years, and now I wanted to escape the city and see nature at whatever the cost–never mind that Dad was picking up the tab for this one. Bring it on.

FIRST ENCOUNTER

It started with this: Boise was beautiful. It sat in the pocket at the foot of mountains, with the prairie rolling away to the east. The land looked like a series of giant buttered rolls, as far as you could see. We arrived by jet in mid-July, and the temperature registered with sweat on every hair of my skin.

Uncles Rodney and Bob met us at the hotel in Boise. We would stay the night and then leave with rafts, supplies, and other adventure seekers in the morning. There were four guides–two women, two men–with four rafts. Three of them would hold travelers I had never met. We all sat around the hotel swimming pool for the trip briefing. That’s where I encountered Stretch.

I don’t remember his real name. He was enormous, and the epithet was completely appropriate; it summed him up. He looked as if he had been a normal-sized man once, but one whose limbs had been pulled taut on a medieval rack. The scary thing was, he looked like he had actually enjoyed it. Freckles had been sprinkled violently and profusely all over his skin–like God had sneezed them on–and his hair and full beard were the orange of the sun at dusk. He said he was a miner in Nevada, and when he told me this, I laughed it off. The mines in Nevada must have taller shafts than their eastern brethren. His family–four other men–had decided to raft the Snake”just ’cause.”

I thought to myself: Could it be any more perfect? If anyone could lead us into the Snake River, it would be this flame-headed, taut-skinned, obelisk man; a minion of the underground who works closer every day to the real Hell than any of us.

The guides gave us our gear–a watertight gunnysack, a tent, and an old, leakproof army ammo can–which we packed. The tent and my sleeping bag were stuffed into the gunnysack; suntan lotion, toothbrush, toothpaste, sunglasses in the ammo can. I went to bed.

The next morning we piled into the vans and headed toward the Snake, a four-hour drive.

By the time we got to the river, my preconceptions were already a little destroyed. Idaho is not all flat prairie land. We drove through crevasses and cracks and fissures and tunnels to arrive at the Hells Canyon Dam. The Snake River carves its way northward in an audacious exception to the most-rivers-flow-south rule, aiming toward the Colombia in the great American Northwest while straddling the border between Idaho and Oregon. If the panhandle of Idaho is like a neck, the Snake River is its jugular vein, coursing, pulsing wild but solid, carrying adventurers looking for a draught of clear lifeblood.

Our put-in was just below the dam. The roar of the water was deafening. I stopped and stared at the water exiting the bottom of the dam, spewing through the turbines making power for a sizable chunk of the Northwest, and privately wished I could raft those rapids. I looked downriver and was saddened that I couldn’t see any rapids. I imagined myself rolling through Class 5 whitewater, foam in my mouth, tasting the river, oar in one hand, splitting the water trying to steer the boat, the other hand raised defiantly, cursing under my breath, hoping the adrenaline rush would never quit.

“Jonathan, let’s get in the boat.”

Stretch’s clan had bought the most alcohol I’ve ever seen. Earlier that morning, our two fifteen-passenger vans stopped in Payette to get supplies before arriving at the river. There were twenty travelers and four guides, a heck of a lot of food, and four big rafts lashed to the top of the vans. To me, it looked like we were toting the world’s biggest doughnuts down into the belly of Idaho. Maybe Lucifer needed a snack, and we adventure seekers were his appeasement.

Stretch’s family climbed out and went into the gas station. Dad hopped out and squeegeed the windshields of the vans.

“Why does Steve always do that?” Uncle Rodney asked. Dad was working hard at scraping a stubborn ex-mosquito off the glass.

“I don’t know,” I said. “Safety, maybe? I gotta pee.”

When I opened the door to the gas station, Stretch’s crew poured out toting what I thought was the equivalent of two kegs’ worth of alcohol. They had purchased five cases of Budweiser, several bottles of Wild Turkey, lots of Jack Daniel’s, and pretty much anything else containing sour mash, barley, or hops. They had bought the lot, and I did some frightening math. A cornucopia of booze divided by four people times three days of rafting equals a fun trip indeed. This would be one to remember, I thought. Something to tell the kids one day. Drunkards sloshing around the banks, the Devil swimming beneath them, laughing all the way to a capsized raft deflating over razor-sharp rocks.

CAMPSITE REVERIE

For the amount of alcohol they drank that first night, they didn’t make much sound. Tolerance is an amazing thing. However, I couldn’t quite get my mind around my fellow travelers wanting to forget this trip in a wallow of booze. I imagined them climbing out of the river at our take-out point at Pittsburgh Landing and laughing. Turning to me, Stretch might say, “What did we just do? Do you remember anything?”

“You didn’t miss much,” I’d say with a wry smile.

We had rafted about thirty miles downstream after the put-in, seen some baby rapids. I woke up to the sound of bacon crackling and the smell of freshly ground coffee. There is nothing quite like sipping coffee on the bank of a river, deep in the canyon, the cliff walls six hundred to a thousand feet above your head on both sides. You feel like you’re a part of it. The sleep in the tent had been peaceful, and breakfast tasted exquisite.

I sat in a folding chair beside the smoldering remains of a fire. Stretch’s crew had constructed it in the midst of last night’s silent reverie. I don’t know, maybe I had just been too tired to hear anything after the first day’s rowing; my city-boy muscles ached with the pain of oaring against nature’s flows.

I took a few more bites of my bagel. There was a rustle in the trees behind me, and through the brush came a deer. I couldn’t figure out where it had come from, because the bank we were on consisted of some sand, a few trees, and then cliffs rising almost as steeply as the towering walls of a Gothic cathedral. Out it came, straight through the campsite unafraid to the river. It was one of those pure moments, when time stops, the curtain parts just a little, and you can see the glory. This deer leaned its long, graceful neck into the frigid water for a few gulps of the blood of Idaho. When it righted its head, the golden brown of its dry fur had turned a sopping black. It turned, sniffing the air, then walked back through the camp into the brush and proceeded to climb at lateral angles. It zigzagged its way up over an outcropping, then disappeared. Where I lived in Tennessee, deer don’t do that. And neither does Satan.

My late-rising uncle came into the clearing.

“Man, you missed it,” was all I said.

DOWNRIVER ENCOUNTERS

We pulled off the river on the Oregon bank and schlepped our gear off the rafts for a lunchtime treat. By the time the guides had set up the buffet, our palates were ready for anything. I wanted some meat. There is a curious feeling one gets after strenuous exertion. The table before me was laden with glorious food that back in the city would have seemed humdrum and bland. There were three brown baguettes, crispy chips (tortilla and regular for the traditional traveler), a few bagels, lox, cream cheese, sandwich materials, and mounds of apples and bananas.

I took my peanut butter and jelly sandwich to the top of a boulder and conversed with my dad, Rodney and Bob. As I looked across the river to Idaho, I thought, life is good. Across the river, it was one hour later. Here I was on time, there I was too late. And that is a good thing, because I was about to see the show.

Stretch’s friends had rushed through the line and eaten quickly. Disregarding all childhood warnings by any of their mothers, all of them immediately dove into the river, laughing and wrestling. Moment by moment I watched it unfold:

Stretch sits on the bank, coolly calculating. He takes the last bite of a triple-decker sandwich laden with ham and cheese, mustard dripping off his yellow teeth. At the base of his folding chair is a red plastic gas can with the following inscription on both sides: XXX–Stretch’s Mix. He grabs it, pops off the lid, and pours a wash of brown God-knows-what down his gullet. I figure he had taken a little bit from everything in his family’s hoard of hooch. He wipes his mouth with his sleeve, reaches up, and pulls off his hat to reveal his bright orange hair. It’s playtime.

Stretch laughs at his friends as they romp in the 68-degree water. It’s 105 out; time for a swim. He walks up and down the bank, looking for something. The rocks increase in size as he approaches the river, and he spots one lying among the variations of granite, limestone, and sandstone. Stretch bends down and picks up a chunk of rock sixteen inches in diameter–a good fifty pounds, a small boulder really–with no effort. Lifting it into the crook of one arm, he bends over and one-hands another rock of equal size into his other crook like a skilled wide receiver. He turns and walks toward the river, arms akimbo. An inverted anchor with eyeballs.

Stretch goosesteps into the water, stones not slowing him for a moment. His body slides into the water straight up, like a shark’s fin, until all seven-plus feet are submerged. It doesn’t look like he stops to take a breath. What an unholy, yet hilarious, sight to see a man successfully pull off a reverse Jesus. Though Jesus walked on water, in Hells Canyon, beneath the Seven Devils Mountains, men sink straight to the bottom. Stretch is used to being under the earth, so why should water frighten him?

No sign of Stretch; it has been a minute at least. Either he knows how to breathe water, or the Snake has claimed his life. A floating friend treading water twenty feet from shore suddenly screams and disappears under the current. His head bobs up, then Stretch’s, and the entirety of our group shares a raucous guffaw. Stretch breathes in and laughs. We finish lunch and continue downriver. Later, when the river is still, we hop off the raft and float with nothing more than our life jackets to keep us buoyant. We look and feel like drifting leaves, our ebullient orange preservers clothing us in out-of-season manufactured autumnal glow.

After the serene floating, we rafted some of the biggest whitewater you’ve ever seen. The kind where the white foam of the river breaks against the sharp, jutting rocks, splitting the tranquil water. Our actual river time was split between rowing down the smooth river, pulling over to determine a rapid’s navigability, then, once we were ready, going through with all our might, never once giving thought to the consequences of shoving our fragile boat between the boulders.

We came to one rapid affectionately called the Green Room, where a sinkhole in the riverbed and two giant rocks created a wonderful thrill. The water gained tremendous speed as it curved around the rock formations, and then headed into a deep well of water. We hit it at full speed, hoping our velocity would carry us through.

I was only in the Green Room for two seconds, maybe, but I saw. At the bottom of the depression, I had green water on all sides of me, at least six feet above my head. I was in a bowl of terror. It was great. I got a glimpse of what the Israelites must have felt like crossing the Red Sea. Then time slowed. I looked up and saw an eagle, maybe a large hawk, floating through the breeze with no effort. I had stopped rowing too and was letting nature guide me, my fate given up in sacrifice to the greater good. In sacrifice of living, truly living; a reveling in something that was bigger than me. This wouldn’t be the only time. In that instant, with the icy water splashing and soaking me, I remembered the deer.

“DON’T DO THAT”

Rowing, rowing, and more rowing. Then some more rowing. You had to pull and push to get where you wanted. The river would take you down, sure, but on its own terms. If not guided by our oars, the rafts would be dashed against the rocks and pop like golden kernels of superheated maize. This was made clear when my uncles went for a little swim when we pulled over to rest. They swam out too far and the river caught them. The Snake is a beast and will sweep you away in an instant. The problem is not that you can’t get to shore; it’s that if you float too far downriver, there might not be any shore to cling to. In many places, the cliffs dive straight into the water. Rodney and Bob made it, though.

They emerged from the river, spat up by nature, and filled with a newfound respect for it. The water broke in small waves at my feet, and I could feel the power of the Snake. Hell’s Canyon wanted me.

“Don’t do that,” was all I remember them saying.

GOD’S RIVER

We arrived in the middle of the day, our bones tired from all the rowing. As we pulled into the base camp for the night, the river’s ribbon of water reflected the bright afternoon sunlight and the chiseled walls of the towering canyon. I pulled my gear out of the raft and helped set up the tents. After a snack and a catnap in the shade of a brushy tree, someone said, “Let’s hike up there.” I followed the extended index finger to an outcropping of rock. “Up there” was about six hundred feet straight up, but I could see how the path winding away around the corner might lead there. A little exploring was in order.

A moment later, one of our guides was showing us the path leading into the brush. She said, “This’ll be a kick,” and we believed her. I grabbed my disposable camera, and half the group set out. The sunlight was well past midday, but the soft golden orb above the canyon wall left the impression we had a few hours to get up there and back before it got dangerous. The climb began to get steep. The guide told us the ranchers in the canyon used to drive cattle along these paths, and I thought: There’s barely enough room for me, how is a cow going to get through this? Our guide drove us on.

We left the safety of grass and brush and found ourselves moving among rocks. The strata were gorgeous in the orange glow of the sunlight. The sky was still blue, and several patches of cirrus had appeared high above us. The rocks constantly crunched under my feet. There was a point where the path was no wider than a sidewalk, with cliff straight above us and cliff beneath us. A cow? So she said.

We neared the end of the path, at least for the day’s journey, but the “view” she kept talking about was hidden. We had curved inward toward the canyon and were headed for another curve, this time to the left ahead of us, where I would see it. “It’s close,” she said.

We rounded the curve, and it was before me: beauty. Beauty is objective. It is discoverable. It is the glory of God. And it is found in Idaho. I praised God in that first instant, because there was nothing else to do save gaze in wonder.

Before me was twenty feet of flat rock outcropping, followed by a hundred miles of canyon–canyon I didn’t even know existed. At least I hadn’t felt its presence. I discovered that while traveling on the Snake, we were in the inner canyon of a much larger crevasse. (Where exactly and how exactly had Evel Knieval jumped this thing?) And I had thought the inner walls were massive. I now saw they were merely the embedded, lower v of a capital V that was twenty miles from tip to tip. The land looked like a giant brown blanket was snapped over the earth and allowed to come to rest in any formation it pleased. I was agog. There was the jagged. There was the smooth. There was grass, there was rock, there was river. There was force, there was calm. There was quiet. There was the handstamp of God.

When He was creating the earth, I like to think He cracked the edge of His hand across the surface and carved out places like this and named them sacred. I was on holy ground. We were looking back on the river we had already traveled. Like so many before us we had fought the currents, caught glimpses of beauty, but now we had seen the glory, the reason for it all. Here it was in your face, no questioning.

The brown grasses rolled toward the peaks and still-higher peaks. Lifted high like penitent worshippers raising their arms toward the heavens, the cliffs rose into open sky. We stood there for a long time. The sun slipped past the western rim of the canyon, and we marveled as the cliffs transformed from gray to orange to lavender to gray again. I was staring into the Shangri-la of the Western Hemisphere.

One of Stretch’s friends carelessly tossed a stone off the cliff, disturbing the peace. My head was reeling, but he was staring straight down, watching a rock that had taken millennia to get to its resting place up here kerplunk into the waters below. I wondered what it would look like if the weight of the boulder he threw had unbalanced him and sent him over the edge. He was clearly not getting the same spiritual vibe. I shook my head and returned my focus to God’s handiwork, of which, admittedly, Stretch’s friend was a part.

I read once that Bhutan–where Shangri-la was thought to be located–is one of the last areas on earth still untouched, pristine in all its vistas; it is called a place where nature and people live in harmony. Untainted flora and unhunted fauna live among humans in a symbiosis unheard of in the developed world. The beauty there astounds all who see it. I fancied myself a monk, finding my peace and place in life hung in the air between God and the canyon floor; this would be my monastery, my quiet place to return to in the meditation of my memories. I felt small–compared to the earth. Not the bad kind of small, but rather the uncomfortable cleansing terror of something bigger. This was something good. If you’ve been to the Grand Canyon, you know what I mean. Any adventuresome thought of seeking Satan in Hells Canyon was erased immediately. God stood here among the humans, and His land remained defiant of any names they might impose.

Our guide told us this place was called Suicide Cliff, a name I’ve heard given to countless high rock formations. She said two lovers climbed up here to end it all because they loved each other and their feuding families couldn’t abide that. I put my own spin on it. I imagined them climbing up here, looking over the horizonless jagged grace before them and changing their minds. Filled with hope, they resolutely climbed out of the canyon, higher up until they had to go down again, running away to an exquisite existence. Passing cows all the way.

My father, uncles, and I stood with the vista behind us and asked our guide to snap a quick photo. The blurry image we got back made me wonder if I was the only person on the planet who could hold a camera still. But then, maybe that sacred place wasn’t supposed to be photographed. Its out-of-focus image registering on the silver halide crystals remains just one step short of blasphemy, all God afforded me of physical evidence of this place.

We struggled to find footholds as well as words to describe our experience. We climbed back down to camp. I climbed into my tent and fell asleep.

But God wasn’t done with me, not yet. A light clicked on over my tent’s window, trickling through the nylon screen. It woke me up. I thought my uncle was messing with me, as he’s apt to do sometimes, shining his flashlight in my face. But no one was there. I looked around; my father wasn’t in his sleeping bag.

The light was coming from the night sky. I left the tent, and I saw the moon hanging on the rim of the canyon. Imagine a nighttime sun, just dim enough to view without pain. Hundreds of miles from any city haze, it was perfectly clear. This night sky was alive. I looked closely and saw His face reflected there. There were millions of stars, so bright and so populous, I felt small again–this time, in view of the cosmos. At the same time I realized something: as God was laughing and hanging His ebony sheet, ensconcing the universe and only letting the full radiance of His glory shine through the little pinpricks in the fabric He designed, He was already thinking of me and including me here, at this place, at this time. A small piece of cosmos am I. It’s too enormous to get my mind around sometimes, but that night I stretched my mind, my being, enough to understand. I knew it right down to the core of my cellular structure, in my hidden places.

It was so bright I could walk without a flashlight. I found my dad and my uncles by the river. I put my arm around my father. He understood. My uncles prodded me in amazement, which is all one can do when there are no words. We basked in the experience. We all laughed. My status had been upgraded.

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Originally Published as “Rafting the Snake: Finding God in Idaho’s Hells Canyon” in the June 2004 issue of “The World and I.”  Tearsheet PDF Here
© Jonathan Grubbs