Running Out of Air
July/August 2007

What some river rats will do for a thrill -- Fiction by Pam Houston

The next day, we all hit the rapids smiling. Thea and I strapped everything down twice, threw our shoulders into it and hauled on the straps, fastened each other’s life jackets, and pulled the buckles tight. The water was thick after last night’s thunderstorms, roiling, still the color of hot chocolate. I led us out among the tree limbs and the tires that the flood had brought down, wondered if the debris would give us any trouble, but forgot my worry instantly as I felt the tug of the V-slick in rapid 1. We rambled through several rapids in short order, me pulling hard on the oars, Thea bailing and watching for holes.

We got knocked around pretty good in 9, and we filled the boat in the upper reaches of 15, and in 19 I had to spin around backward to make the final cut. I was feeling a little outmuscled by the river, feeling like maybe it was trying to tell me something I ought to hear; but as we pulled over to scout Big Drop 1, we were still smiling and, thanks to the sun, almost dry. In Cataract Canyon the 60,000’s Big Drop 1 is huge, but not technical, and Thea and I eased through it with so much finesse it was a little scary, the water pounding all around us, my hands strong on the oars. Thea was ready to bail at any second, but we were so well lined up, so precise in our timing, and the river so good to us, we hardly took on enough water to make it worthwhile. We pulled to the side and watched Josh bring his big boat through the rapid. Then we walked downriver to look at Big Drops 2 and 3.

There was no way to stop between them. If you flipped in 2, you swam Satan’s Gut, sacrificed yourself to it like a kamikaze. I looked hard at the boat carnage that littered the sides of the canyon: broken oars, cracked water bottles, even rafts damaged so badly they were unsalvageable, their tubes split open on the toothy rocks, their frames twisted beyond repair. I knew the river was telling me not to run it. Not in that little boat, it said, not with only the two of you, not during the highest water in a decade, not when it was roaring past me, pounding in my ears, telling me no.

I watched Josh’s jaw twitch just slightly as he stared at the rapid, and I knew we wouldn’t have to portage. He was gonna go for it. And if he didn’t die taking his big boat through, he’d like nothing better than a second chance at it in mine. “I don’t want to run it,” I said, for the very first time in my boating career. “It’s too big for me.” Henry and Russell lowered their eyes, as if I’d just taken off my shirt. “It’s a piece of cake,” Josh said. “No problem. Why don’t you follow me this time, if you’re nervous. Then you don’t have to worry about where to be.” I looked at the big rock I’d seen from the airplane—the size of a seven-story apartment building—and at the torrent of water going over its top. “I don’t know,” Henry said. “It doesn’t look all that bad to me.”

“You take my boat through then, Henry,” I said, and he smacked me on the butt with his life jacket and turned to Josh, who shrugged. “It’s not a piece of cake,” Thea said. “It’s a son of a bitch, but I believe you can do it.” “Okay,” I said, tugging the straps on her life jacket down and tight, “then let’s just the hell go.” We agreed that we were going to try to enter the rapid just right of a medium-sized rock that was showing midstream, then we’d turn our noses to the right and keep pulling left and away from the seven-story rock, which we’d leave to our right as we entered the heart of the rapid.

Once through the biggest waves, we’d have to row like hell to get far enough back to the right again to be in position for Big Drop 3. I was worried about a funny little wave at the top of 2 on the right-hand side, a little curler that wouldn’t be big enough to flood my boat but might turn it sideways, and I needed to hit head-on every wave that came after it. Josh said that that wave was no problem—and it wasn’t for his boat and his big tubes—but I decided I was going to try to miss it by staying slightly to the right of wherever he went in. We pulled away from the bank, my heart beating so fast I could feel it there between my palms and the oar handles. I watched Josh tie his hat to his boat frame and take a last-minute drink of water.

“Watch the goddamn rapid,” I muttered, and finally he looked up. “Does he seem too far right to you?” Thea said, fear edging into her voice. “There’s no way to tell with him right in front of us,” I said. “We’ll just have to take him at his word.” It was right about then that, more than 30 yards to the left of us, I saw the funny little wave I had wanted to miss and then I saw Josh’s boat disappear, vertically, as if it had fallen over a cliff; I realized in that moment we were too far right, way too far right, and we were about to go straight down over the seven-story rock.

We would fall through the air off the face of that rock, land at the bottom of a seven-story waterfall, where there would be nothing but rocks and tree limbs and 60,000 feet per second of pounding whitewater that would shake us and crush us and hold us under until we drowned. I don’t know what I said to Thea in that moment as I made one last desperate effort, one hard long pull to the left. I don’t know if it was Oh shit or Did you see that? or just my usual Hang on! or if there was, in that moment between us, only a silent stony awe.

And as we went over the edge of the seven-story boulder, down, down, into the snarling white hole, not only wide and deep and boat-stopping but corkscrew-shaped besides, time slowed down to another version of itself, started moving like rough-cut slow motion, one frame at a time in measured stops and starts. And of all the stops and starts I remember, all the frozen frames I will see in my head for as long as I live, as the boat fell through space, as it hit the corkscrew wave, as its nose began to rise again, the one I remember most clearly is this: My hands are still on the oars, and the water that has been so brown for days is suddenly as white as lightning. It is white and it is alive and it is moving toward me from both sides, coming at me like two jagged white walls with only me in between them, and Thea is airborne, sailing backward, flying over my head like a prayer. Then everything went dark and there was nothing around me but water, and I was breathing it in, helpless to fight it as it wrapped itself around me and tossed me so hard I thought I would break before I drowned.

Every third moment my foot or arm would catch a piece of Thea below me—or was it above me? somewhere beside me?—doing her own watery dance. Then we popped up, both of us almost together, out of the back wave and moving by some miracle downstream. The boat popped up next to us, upside down and partly deflated, but I grabbed onto it, and so did Thea, and that’s when the truth about where we were got a hold of me and I screamed, though it was more of a yowl than a scream, an animal sound, the sound maybe of the river itself inside me. And though there were words involved, words that later we decided were “Heeeeeeelllllllppppppp uuuuuusssss!” it was some part of me I didn’t recognize that made that noise in the rapid, a part just scared enough and mad enough to turn into the face of the river and start fighting like hell for its life.

Thea’s eyes got big. “It’s okay,” she said. “Come here.” I smiled, a little embarrassed and human again, as if to say I was only kidding about the scream, and Thea laughed with me for a moment, though we both knew it had been the other voice that was the truest thing. The waves were getting smaller, pulling us under only every now and again, and I knew we were in the calmer water between 2 and 3. I got a glimpse of Josh’s boat, somehow still topside, Russell and Henry bailing like crazy, Josh’s face red and wild with fear. “Help us!” I screamed again, like a human being this time, and Josh’s eyes widened like his face was slapped and I knew that his boat was full of water, way too heavy to move and that he was as out of control as we were, and that Thea and I were going to have to face Satan’s Gut in our life jackets after all.

“Leave the boat and swim to the right!” Josh screamed. It took me a minute to realize he was right, to picture the way the rapids lined up when we scouted, to realize that the raft was headed straight into another rock fall, one that would snap our bodies like matchsticks before we had time to say casualties number six and seven, and that our only chance of surviving was to get hard and fast to the right. I took off swimming, hoping to God that Thea was behind me, but I got only about 10 strokes in when I saw Josh’s boat disappear sideways into the heart of the Gut, which meant that I was too far to the left of him, and Thea farther left still, maybe already in the rock garden, maybe dead on impact, maybe drowning in her own blood. This is the one that gets me, I thought as I rode the V-slick right into the heart of Satan’s Gut and all 20 feet of back wave crashed over my head.

The whitewater grabbed me for a minute and shook me hard, like an angry airport mother, and then just as roughly it spat me out, let me go. Wave after wave crashed over my head, but I knew I was past the Gut, so I just kept breathing every time I got near the surface, choking down water as often as air. My knee banged into a rock during one of the poundings, and I braced for the next rock, the bigger one that would smash my back or my spine, but it never came. Finally, the waves started getting smaller, so small that I could ride on top of them, and that’s when, in between them, I got a glimpse of Josh’s boat, still topside, and Thea inside it, safe. “Throw the rope!” Josh said to Russell, and he did throw it, but behind me and too far to the left. He pulled it in fast to throw it again, but by that time I was well past him, not very far from exhaustion, and headed for the entrance to rapid 23.

That’s when the water jug popped up beside me, and I grabbed for it, got it, and stuffed it between my knees. Rapid 23 isn’t big, unless it’s high water and you’re sitting not in a boat but on a 5-gallon jug. I gripped the jug between my thighs like it was the wildest horse I’d ever been on and rode the series of rollers down the middle, my head above water, my feet ready to fend off the rocks. Then the rapid was over, Josh was rowing toward me, and Russell had the throw rope in his hands again. This time he threw it well and I caught it, wrapping my hands around it tightly. Henry hauled me to the boat and then into it, and I found myself for a moment back under the water that filled it, clawing my way up Russell’s leg, trying just to get my head high enough to breathe.

“Grab that oar,” Josh shouted to Henry, and he did, and I saw that it was one of mine, floating nearby, and for the first time I wondered how the wreck of my boat would look. Josh got us to shore, and the three men went back to look for the boat while Thea and I coughed and sputtered and hugged and cried together there on the sand. The boys came back, lining my boat down the side of the river, one tube punctured and deflating badly, the spare oar gone to the bottom of the river, but other than that not too much the worse for wear. I looked for a minute toward the remaining rapids, zipped up my life jacket, and jumped in the boat. “Come on,” I said to Thea. “Let’s get through the rest of these mothers before we run out of air.”

Excerpted from the story “Cataract”, which originally appeared in the collection Waltzing the Cat (W. W. Norton, 1999).