The Big Ditch
I’m laying naked on a filthy carpet, my leaky sink and overbearing refrigerator are oddly syncopated as they compete for my attention. I’m realizing that this is the first moment I’ve given myself to do nothing in months, but then I realize that I’m not actually doing nothing…
The wasp that’s been trapped in here with me since yesterday has decided to spend some time on my toe. I hope he’s had more than this moment to relax. My faithful squatters, the desert mice that I’ve been at war with for years, have thrown quite the soirée in my absence, the extravagance of which is evidenced by both the amount of feces I’ve had to sweep up and how many of their fallen comrades I’ve found while doing so. Sometimes I wonder who’s hosting who in this tiny desert Earthship.
It’s been eleven days since I traded the current of the Colorado river for the stagnant dirt that I call home, eleven days of relearning how to love being landlocked. I’m fortunate to live a life full of intense and immersive experiences, but this one feels different. This one feels harder to come back from.
“What can I even say about today?” I wrote halfway through the trip.
“They forgot to invent a word that describes what today was.”
Several weeks later, that day still defies definition.
35 days ago I stepped onto a raft for the first time and, along with 15 other degenerates, waved goodbye to Lee’s Ferry as we began the first of 24 days that we would spend drifting the 280 miles downstream through the Grand Canyon. Those 280 miles saw my comrades and I at our absolute best as we let go of our terrestrial selves and devolved into the mud-slathered heathens that would eventually crawl out of Lake Mead.
Bright-eyed and bewildered, perverse and profane, the people that we became while floating through the abyss were more born than forged, a raw and rowdy cohort of river creatures dripping with grit, glory, and gratitude. When we set out, I expected nothing but wildness and whimsy, the kind of rough and rugged experience that permeates all tales of the Wild West. As a solitary creature with more miles on my bones than most, I thought this was just another routine trip into the void but was, instead, met by a fascinating social experiment, a perfectly peopled product of cooperation and collusion.
It wasn’t long before I realized that what separates a trip from an expedition is its people. More alchemy than strategy, the human soup that we all found ourselves steeped in was far more important than any single piece of equipment that we did or did not have.
On our last night, we huddled around our trip leader’s raft dividing ice that we acquired from another group by trading propane we no longer needed. I cannot overstate the opulence of an ice-cold cocktail that late in the game. We held our glasses to the sky while our quietest and most experienced boatman cleared his throat to speak.
“We didn’t just make it here…” he started, looking around the circle into each of our eyes
“We made it here together, because no one can do this alone.”
He backed away, leaving room for everyone to speak, and we filled that circle with all the love that we found scattered in the creeks, canyons, and caves that we had explored while drifting downstream.
In that moment it had been weeks of relentless shenanigans and the most tender chaos, weeks of howling every chance we got and a revolving door of increasingly bizarre jokes, quips, and colloquialisms that only made sense to us.
We’d spent every day cooking and caring for one another, and every morning packing up our literal shit in ammo cans so we could move it downstream.
We had flipped a raft, lost all of our eggs to mold, and had a boatman with a freshly torn ligament in her foot.
We had celebrated two birthdays, an equinox, and, to our knowledge, the first official Grand Canyon Olympic Games.
We did all of this and more while being held in place by almost a mile of verticle red rock, all while the river roared beside us, interjecting itself into every thought, dream, and conversation.
On the tail end of one of the most rigorously human 280 miles of wilderness that most can hope to know, we found ourselves to be beautifully battered believers, stewards of a spark born in a small slice of paradise that few will ever know.
We were the flotsam…
We were the jetsam…
We were the upstream people turned downstream folk.
24 days at the bottom of the world, and each and every one of them was a damn good day to be us.
Endless thanks to the river and the folks that I shared it with.
Let’s move this kitchen downstream.