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.