We will neither tarry nor hurry,” Beck replied when Tilda asked about their schedule.
The three-and-a-half-hour hike out to Boucher was mostly along the Tonto Platform, which was the easiest of Canyon walking—except for the few places where it…wasn’t. Imogen was looking forward to getting out to Boucher and setting up their domicile for the next four nights. Even in the out-of-doors it felt good to have a familiar nest to return to; in a few hours, Boucher would be home.
They all appeared calm as they prepared for the day ahead, and Imogen was glad no one could see her as she felt inside: purple paisley. Hot and cold swirls, her blood zinging with jitters. She tried not to think about the Scary Spot, where their dad had once feared Beck might lose her life. At home she sometimes took a tiny dose of her tincture while readying to leave the house, but despite its low amount of THC she couldn’t risk being even a little foggy here. It was already easy to space out while walking, and she needed to be able to concentrate and not jeopardize her balance.
Two evenings before, Tilda had quite literally tiptoed around the packing operation, but that morning she embraced it—stuffing the sleeping bags one by one into their sacks before rolling up the mattress pads.
“Want me to take your picture? Before you pack up your camera?” Imogen asked her, conscientious now about practicing her peacekeeping skills.
“Sure!” Tilda handed her the camera, and posed, smiling. Imogen took a variety of shots—close-ups, and wider pictures that included the gear and landscape—and then handed it back.
“Thank you. I thought I’d photograph everything, but half the time I forget I even have it with me.”
Smiling, Imogen went down to the creek to top off their canteens, leaving Beck to finger-wash their breakfast dishes with splashes of boiled water. As Beck had instructed (or predicted) they neither hurried nor dallied, but soon were packed, their teeth brushed, sunscreen applied, and were ready to embark on the next leg of their journey. Anticipating a warm day on the Tonto, they wore windbreakers over short-sleeved shirts.
On their way out of Hermit Camp they passed the pit toilets and after a cumbersome dismounting of packs, they took turns having a last sit-downish pee.
“Adiós, civilization! Hasta la vista!” Tilda waved goodbye to the primitive restroom and off they went.
It was a lovely morning, the sky vivid and clear. They traveled in the formation they’d used the day before—Beck, then Tilda, then Imogen—and headed north to climb out of Hermit canyon. Just a few feet up from the creek and they were on the Tonto Platform, a five-hundred-foot-thick terrace of soft Bright Angel shale. It varied in width from a few miles across to a few feet, and the bottom edge stopped a thousand feet above the Colorado River.
For a good half mile their path was straight, and they all took advantage of the relative ease of the walk to keep their eyes on the landscape rather than their feet. It was effortless, with such surreal terrain, for Imogen to imagine she was on another planet, Mars perhaps—though the Canyon offered more in the way of color variation (and vegetation). Periodically washes came in on their left, plunging into Hermit canyon, which became continuously deeper on their right as they walked on. By the time they turned west, Hermit Creek lay in its gorge several hundred feet beneath them.
The Tonto Trail could become a drudgery, where Imogen felt like the trail went on and on and on and camp seemed hopelessly far away. So, beginning with her first trip when she was twelve, she used a mental trick to help her stay motivated. Shortly before that trip she’d read The Long Walk, written by Stephen King’s alter ego, Richard Bachman. She’d connected to the young people and their quest to be the sole survivor of a long walk, made nearly impossible by the promise of being shot in the back if they fell below a pace of four miles per hour. It was a grisly mantra to think about in such a heavenly place, but it had worked: four miles an hour or get shot in the back, four miles an hour or get shot in the back. Even when she was dead tired Imogen always made good time on the Tonto (though not at the pace of a fifteen-minute mile).
The mantra came back to her now, but instead of helping her pick up her pace it filled her vision with red. Juxtaposed against the golden leaves of a ginkgo tree. Or maybe it was a maple tree. A red maple. No. How had imagining a gun at her back ever made her walk faster? Hide. She shuttered the mantra and focused on the distant rock formations, the here, the now. With each breath she forced away old images—from a book, from life. Here, now: this was enough. This was everything.
Traveling within the Canyon meant a lot of ups and downs as they traversed inner canyons. Tilda had struggled with this notion of “inner canyons.” When the three of them had their first Skype planning session, Tilda had been confused that Boucher was their destination. “But I thought we were going to the Grand Canyon?” But any one of the inner canyons—created by creeks that fed into the Colorado River—might be a National Park of its own if it existed anywhere else. Imogen had been shocked when her dad had claimed that Hermit canyon was larger than all of Yosemite. When she explained it Tilda had just blinked and blinked, and Imogen saw her mentally picking up Yosemite, an invisible plastic model, and dropping it into place on the map laid out in front of her. So many things about the Canyon were difficult to describe; maybe that was the simple explanation for why Beck had disclosed to Tilda so relatively little.
Halfway between Hermit and Boucher lay Travertine canyon, which they crossed by descending partway into the dry creek bed and clambering back up the other side. Though the hiking had calmed her nerves to a degree, Imogen still couldn’t resolve the mystery of the theft; it blurred the division she’d created between her city life and her return to nature.
After navigating through Travertine, the next landmark on her mental map was the Foreboding Rockslide—which would mean they’d almost reached the section she’d been dreading. Beck might not have painted a full picture for Tilda, but Imogen’s dad had been more than happy to give her every brushstroke (though she came up with her own names).
She’d always been the sort who worried about losing control while walking across a bridge or standing at the high rail of a balcony and suddenly plunging herself into the void. It wasn’t a suicidal urge, but a fear of succumbing to a deadly impulse. She remembered a stretch of trail she’d crossed on her last trip with her sister, heading into Clear Creek canyon. There, the footing narrowed to just a few inches, angled at a downward slant across scree. It was like walking on broken M&M’s. If you started sliding on the slippery rock particles you’d just tumble on down, with no way to stop until you unspooled at the bottom a hundred and fifty feet below. Twenty-four-year-old Imogen had squelched her dark impulses and crossed with excessive care, firmly planting each step. Later, when she told her dad about the trip, he’d confirmed the peril of it: “Yup, woulda killed you, tumbling at a hundred miles an hour.”
The section heading out to Boucher sounded a bit different—not scree, but a passage right on the lip of a cliff. “Exposed,” as the mountain climbers would say. With an eight-hundred-foot drop-off. A never-recover-your-body sort of drop-off.
They’d been close to the edge of a bluff for quite a way, the empty space hovering just beyond Imogen’s line of sight as she kept her eyes on the ground. Movement made her look over and there was a raven, gliding over the chasm, nearly level with her. It was so close she could hear the air moving through its wings. She could have sworn the bird made eye contact with her before swooping away, and when she faced the trail again she spotted a rockslide ahead of them.
She paused for a second to confirm it was the Foreboding Rockslide, and the purple paisleys churning in her gut sparked into fireworks. Her father had described what to look for: a place where a large boulder had crashed down centuries before, stopping just inches from the cliff’s edge, blocking the trail (or so it looked).
Fuck.
Sure enough, Beck slowed down and waited for Tilda and Imogen to catch up.