Brave the Wild River by Melissa L. Sevigny

Author:Melissa L. Sevigny
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 2023-04-13T00:00:00+00:00

CLOVER AND JOTTER had no time for philosophy. They had barely an hour to spend at Vasey’s Paradise. “We collected furiously,” Jotter wrote in her logbook, heedless of a light rain. Bell and Gibson, meanwhile, stripped down to shorts and showered beneath one of the waterfalls. By noon the men were waiting hungrily for lunch. Clover suggested mildly they get out the canned food and cold biscuits (left over from breakfast) and feed themselves. But when the two women finished putting up their samples in newspaper, they found the rest of their crew “waiting big-eyed & expectant under a rock.”

In a rare moment of impatience, Clover wrote, “We have spoiled them completely.”

They left Vasey’s Paradise and went on, deeper into the canyon. The walls rose in tiers, stretching back to a jagged skyline. High gaps on the cliffs looked like keyholes, and when the angle was just right, the sun’s rays fumbled through like a skeleton key turning in a lock. Their clothing grew disheveled, despite frequent use of Clover’s sewing kit. The women wore their overalls rolled up to the knees; the men had their shirttails untucked or wore no shirts at all. “We are wet all the time,” Clover wrote, “so the less on the better.” The river had dropped a good deal. All of them grew more comfortable with running rapids, and Nevills felt it necessary to try to scare them back into caution with horror stories of what lay around the next bend. This worked on Reed so well that he couldn’t sleep the night before they reached President Harding Rapid, until Clover calmly said, “I imagine when we get to them, they’ll just be another rapid.”

They were now more than forty miles downriver from Lee’s Ferry, and the plant life was changing as the climate grew hotter and drier. Honey mesquite (Prosopis juliflora) appeared, a shrubby tree with minuscule leaves and sweet-tasting beans tucked into rattling seedpods. The tough, teardrop-shaped seeds wouldn’t sprout unless they were battered by floodwaters or half-digested by an animal, thus ensuring they would spread far and wide. They were helped, too, by Native inhabitants of the canyon, who cut some trees for firewood but spared the ones with the sweetest-tasting beans; such management blurred the lines between the wild and the domestic.

Mesquite mingled on the talus with catclaw acacia (Acacia greggii), also called wait-a-minute bush, because of the way its curved thorns snatched at passersby. Strawberry hedgehog cacti (Echinocereus engelmannii) grew in thick rosettes straight out of the cliff walls, as if pinned up like wreaths. Prickly pears dangled long stringers of paddle-like leaves from the tops of boulders, Rapunzel-like, trying to escape their towers on ropes of knotted green hair. Prickly pear (also known by its Spanish name, nopal) has edible pads and fat, oval fruits, sweet to the taste, if one does not mind magenta-stained fingers and a sticker or two. Clover and Jotter had cataloged several species so far, some spineless but covered in tiny, near-invisible bristles, some with yellow flowers, others vivid cerise.

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