The houseboat is 46 feet long and has everything we need, from the eight-foot cubic refrigerator/freezer to the outdoor gas grill to the microwave. It sleeps twelve and there are only seven of us. We power away from Wahweap Marina into Padre Bay, the wide channel that cuts right into the heart of Lake Powell.
Jay and I are surveying the scenery from the roof of the boat. He lives in Phoenix and happily predicts that his hometown, which he’ll never leave, will soon crack the top five in population of American cities. He told us about this place three months ago after he reserved the six-night excursion without telling us first.
“It’s pristine, dude,” he said. “Pure wilderness but with the best amenities you could ever imagine. You get out there on that lake and you might not see anyone else for days. And if you do, you just party with them.”
Mike and Marty are underneath us in the cabin, sorting through the case of 250 compact discs that Marty brought along “just to give us a good selection.” Both are from Beverly Hills, both drive their fathers’ throwaway foreign cars, and both are here on funds procured from “emergency” bank accounts set up by those fathers. They climb up to greet us and christen the trip by blasting Disc Two of Led Zeppelin’s “Physical Graffiti.” No one is complaining.
Jack, the son of religious Jewish parents who has never been outside his hometown of Tucson until today, is paying for this week with money earned tutoring high school kids in Spanish. I’m not sure where he is at the moment.
Jesse is from Pittsburgh and reminds us of it often. As soon as we boarded the boat, he said something about getting sun and found a cozy spot at the front of the boat, where he is now either tanning or sleeping.
And let’s not forget Cyril. Crazy Cyril Vienna, three years older than the rest of us. We met at Arizona after he transferred from the University of Hartford, where, if you believed everything he said, he dabbled in the Army, dabbled in the fire department, dabbled in the panties of about 150 gorgeous women, and dabbled in pieces of three years on the Grateful Dead tour. As of three weeks ago, Cyril didn’t have a cent to pay his way onto the lake, but he made some calls back to Hartford and found a way.
Four days before we pushed off the dock, he rented a Ford Tempo, drove down to a warehouse behind a taqueria in South Tucson and picked up five pounds of brown weed from a guy named Chuy for two grand. From there, he hopped on Interstate-10 and drove to Connecticut, stopping only for gas. When he pulled into Hartford, he tossed twenty Mountain Dew bottles full of piss into a dumpster, entered his buddy Rick’s apartment complex, and moved the one-pound bricks for a grand apiece.
He heated up a frozen burrito, took it with him and drove back, arriving about eight hours before our caravan departed from the meeting point of the McDonald’s on Flowing Wells. He said the lady at the Hertz counter looked at him a little strangely when she noticed that he had traveled about 4,800 miles in less than 80 hours, and yeah, he could probably use a little extra sleep tonight, but other than that, he felt great.
I feel pretty good, too. This morning we loaded up at the Price Club, jamming three coolers full of essentials — sleeves of frozen burgers, industrial-size stacks of processed cheese, buns, fixings, ice, eggs and bacon and more — to park on the deck alongside the keg of Heineken and the party-size bottles of Absolut, Jack Daniels and Canadian Club.
In Jay’s knapsack are the other essentials — a pound of Mexican weed, a sheet of LSD, and a quarter-pound of mushrooms that seem to be getting bluer by the minute. Six of us ate two grams apiece as we unloaded the goods from Jay’s pickup truck onto the boat about an hour ago. We figure they should be kicking in soon and we’ll peak by the time we’re steering off into the clear.
I think Jack is driving the boat. Someone is. I know that because it appears to be traveling in a straight line and in the right direction.
***
Unlike any of my buddies, I had already heard plenty about Lake Powell, and none of it was good. At the age of 11, I had gone from my suburban home in Long Island to a camp in New Mexico. It was a place where we didn’t have electricity in our bunks, we backpacked on thirty-mile hikes, we cooked our own meals over a campfire, we buried our own dung and we scrubbed our black pots and pans silver on the last day of the summer by using the red dirt that sat in clumps by the adobe Navajo hogan where the counselors played their guitars late into the night.
“It’s geologic time, flowing before your mind,” they sang. “John Wesley Powell rowing across the mighty Colorado River. Time and a river flowing. The story keeps on going.”
We heard all the legends about the elusive Glen Canyon. It was almost two hundred miles long, had almost a hundred tributaries marked by towering sandstone bluffs and buttes, and was considered by many to be even more spectacular than the one down river that they called Grand.
Powell, the one-armed Civil War major who had first charted the exploration of the Colorado and its canyons, named it, and the tattered copy of his landmark book Canyons of the Colorado that was passed on from Gulch bunk to bunk through generations of “trekkers,” including Kurt Vonnegut, was branded into our brains.
“On the walls, and back many miles into the country, numbers of monument-shaped buttes are observed,” they read us more than once. “So we have a curious ensemble of wonderful features — carved walls, royal arches, glens, alcove gulches, mounds and monuments. From which of these features shall we select a name? We decide to call it Glen Canyon.”
In 1955, the United States government decided to flood Glen Canyon. A dam was built in Page, Arizona, right by the Utah border, in the interest of electrical power and emerald lawns and swimming pools for upwardly mobile desert dwellers of the future.
By 1966, Glen Canyon was full, a gigantic municipal pool with turquoise water flowing at the base of cliffs that still rose hundreds of feet above the lake sheen that hid the submerged canyon floor another thousand feet below. Defenders of the American West such as writer Edward Abbey spent most of their days decrying this scourge of the landscape.
The dog-eared copy of Abbey’s Desert Solitaire that had been passed down to me by my counselor, Monty, had the following passage highlighted in orange: “The impounded waters form an artificial lake named Powell, supposedly to honor but actually to dishonor the memory, spirit and vision of Major John Wesley Powell, first American to make a systematic exploration of the Colorado River and its environs. Where he and his brave men once lined the rapids and glided through silent canyons two thousand feet deep the motorboats now smoke and whine, scumming the water with cigarette butts, beer cans and oil, dragging the water skiers on their endless rounds, clockwise.”
Monty had written his own protest song that summer. The chorus went, “Nuke Glen Canyon Dam. It’s ruining this whole land.”
As I’m remembering this, our boat keeps steaming along. I’m on the roof, looking out at a particularly large and imposing rock formation that Jay tells me is called Gunsight Butte. He says he’s heard there are good beaches near there, and we can find one tonight, since it’s still reachable by sunset.
Sounds good to me. The jumpy, tingly chaos of the mushrooms is filling my belly and head as Cyril rips off all his clothes, shouts “Grateful Nothin’!” to no one in particular, and jumps into the water, which they told us at the marina is about 57 degrees. He yelps like a coyote and manically swims back, hopping onto the deck with athletic aplomb and grabbing for a towel.
I laugh because I can’t do anything else. I am now stapled to the mat atop this festive flotilla. Jack and Mike are playing dominos. I can hear Jesse snoring from below.
***
Cyril and I have gone wandering together a lot at Lake Powell. Most mornings we’ve sat silently and stoned while floating through what looks like another planet — a heavily watered Mars with sheer stone walls jutting so high up to a perfect sky that you can only wonder what might have one day lived below.
Today, on an eighth of mushrooms apiece, we’re hiking above Mountain Sheep Canyon, looking down from a cornice onto our five compatriots, who are busy doing six-foot bong hits on top of our boat. The sunset is a lipstick smear of orange, brown, bright red, pink and purple, and we can trace the canyon almost all the way to its end by following the shimmering ribbon of darkening water.
“Look at the … colors,” he says, letting the last word devolve into a slur that emulates a dying tape recorder. We laugh and repeat it. “Look at the collllllllorrrrrrrrrs.” It will be a theme of this vacation, we’re sure.
He pulls out his most prized possession — the “chill-stick,” an aluminum-lined sheath that holds a half-dozen Bud Lights and keeps them perfectly cold . He slings it over his shoulder and runs further up an incline before deftly climbing to a sandstone seating area about forty feet above us and accessible only by sketchy, eroding footholds.
“Come on up and you get three of these beers,” he says, pulling a huge joint out of a pocket and lighting it. “Stay down there and I’ll smoke this whole thing by myself.”
It doesn’t take me long to join him. When I get up there, he pulls out a dropper bottle of acid and puts two doses on each of our hands. We lick them off.
Two hours later, we somehow find our way back to the boat, parked and anchored in a watery alcove. A few guys have plopped sleeping bags down on the beach and are sleeping. Cyril leads me to the roof, where he puts a live Dead tape into the boom box. As “Samson and Delilah” kicks in, he lights four cigarettes, handing me two.
“Do this,” he says, holding one in each hand and waving them around in patterns, like warning flags at the airport. Curling the burning sticks around to the beat of the music leaves traces of light all over the night — our own planetarium laser show. The three-hour concert plays out and we’re watching it all unfold under a tapestry of stars.
We haven’t seen another boat in four days.
***
The next morning is big for me. We’re on our way to Rainbow Bridge. I’ve heard about it since camp days. It’s the world’s largest span of rock, a national monument, and a wondrous formation of nature considered sacred by Native American tribes.
As we pull into Forbidden Canyon and make our way to the “courtesy dock,” we see at least fifteen other boats. On the two-mile hike to the bridge, we encounter at least fifty people. Many of them appear to be European tourists.
The bridge rises above all of us. We stay for a few minutes and head back, away from the throngs.
***
It’s our last evening, and we’ve drifted gently into a narrow, eerily quiet passageway deep in what they call Cathedral Canyon. The sheer walls around us resemble pink alabaster and go straight up and straight down, probably a thousand feet in both directions. Marty is playing Traffic’s “Hidden Treasure,” and it’s projecting all around us like an amphitheatre.
I jump in and swim toward a wall, freezing. I put my feet to the sandstone under the water and they slip directly down. Fifty years ago and 50,000 years ago, before this water was all the way up here, that wall could never have been reached by anything living. Maybe a lost hawk or confused eagle. Definitely not people.
Back in the cabin, I pull out my untouched journal and set to writing. I’m going to call it “Watermark,” and I’m going to write it about the travesty of human progress that I’ve been thrust into — the guilt I’m feeling as I carelessly frolic above America’s grandest graveyard.
Before I put pen to page I hear a commotion outside. Jay has piloted the boat into a tunnel of the canyon so narrow that we can’t get past it. The walls, now afire with red, kindled by the dying sun, are at least 800 feet above us on both sides but only about fifteen feet apart.
“Naked boat turn!” Cyril yells, tearing off his trunks and plunging into the water. I follow. So does Jay, then Jack, then Marty, then Mike, then Jesse. Seven dudes in the nude, turning a boat back around to face civilization once again.
We finish the keg at around 10 the next morning, before we even hit Padre Bay. We still have a few bottles of booze left that Jay stuffs into a sack along with his sleeping bag. The food will spoil soon, so we toss it off the back of the boat as interested geese appear and stick with us for our final fifteen-minute cruise. First the burgers, then the cheese slices.
***
Tom’s geologic time starts here …
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The West, youth and and the touching of something that had never been touched… sounds like Lewis and Clark
would have liked to have been there, Ken Kesey too.
Your stories always remind me to remember.
I think we may have crossed paths amid all the colors.
Sounds like a great time…if only I could have been there…Cyril is a MACHINE!