“Jack,” he said. “The water’s rising.”
I stood still and watched it for a moment. The clear water crawled slowly and surely up the sand. The water was rising.
“My patch isn’t dry. Load everything on the raft as it is.” I set the cooler and my pack on the upside-down raft and Glenna put her suitcase and Toby placed the sleeping bags and the loose stuff in a heap on the raft. She paused long enough to snap a few photographs of our disaster.
The water inched up, covering our feet, lifting at the raft.
“We’re going to get wet now, aren’t we?” Glenna said.
“Yes,” I said. “Just hold on to the raft and we’ll float it down to the gravel spit.” I pointed downstream two hundred yards.
“Why is the water rising?” Toby said, laying his pole onto our gear.
“Power for Los Angeles,” I told him.
“Some guy’s VCR timer just kicked in so he can record Divorce Court while he’s out playing tennis,” Glenna said. “This water is cold!”
Finally enough water crept under the raft to lift it free and we walked it down into the deeper water of the fresh, cold Green River. “Jack,” Glenna said, blaming me for hydroelectric power everywhere, “this fucking water is cold!”
“Just hold on,” I said to Toby as the water rose toward my chin. “This will be easy.”
That is when I saw the next thing, something over my shoulder, and I turned as a small yellow raft drifted swiftly by. There were four women crowded into it. They appeared to be naked.
AN HOUR LATER, we started again. We had clambered out of the river onto the gravel, unloaded the raft, and let the patch airdry for thirty minutes while Toby and I chose our next series of flies and Glenna, stripped down to her tank top and Levi’s, commenced drinking cans of lemon and cherry wine coolers. Then we turned the raft over again, reloaded it, and tenderly made into the river. I immediately pieced Toby’s fly rod together, attached the reel, and geared him up with a large Wooly Caddis, the kind of mothy thing that bred thickly on this part of the river. I clipped a bubble five feet from the fly so it would be easier, this early in the day, to handle. Sitting on the side of raft, I began to organize my tackle, and I had to consciously slow myself down. My blood was rich with the free feeling I always get on a river. The sunshine angled down with its first heat of the day on my forearms as I worked, and I realized that my life was a little messy, but for now I was free. It was okay. I was now afloat in a whole different way. It was a feeling a boy has. I smiled with a little rue. Even in a life that is totally waxed, there are still stupid pleasures. It was morning, and I smiled; come on, who hasn’t screwed up a life?
Toby had a sharp delivery on his cast, which we worked on for a while as the raft drifted along the smooth sunny river. He was still throwing the line, not punching it into place, but he mastered a kind of effective half-and-half with which he was able to set the fly in the swollen riffles about half the time. It was now late in the morning, but there was enough shade on the water that the fishing could still be good.
I started working the little nymph in the quiet shady pools against the mountain as we’d pass. Once, twice, drift, and back. I saw some sudden shadows and I was too quick on the one rise I had. Glenna was sitting on her awful suitcase, back against the raft tube, her arms folded, drinking her coolers, quiet as Sunday school behind her oversize dark glasses. From time to time I had to set my rod down and avert the canyon wall or a small boulder or two in the river with the paddle and center us again.
Then later in the morning Glenna took a series of photographs of Toby as he knelt and fly-cast from his end of the raft. She was able, in fact, to film his first fish, a nice twenty-inch rainbow trout which answered the caddis in an odd rocky shallow, coming out of the water to his tail, and Toby, without a scream or a giggle, worked the fish into the current and fifty yards later into our now hot boat. He was a keeper, and Toby said, finally letting his enthusiasm show, “The first one I caught from a raft, ever.” I killed the fish on my knee, showing Toby how to tap it smartly behind the cranium, and put him in my creel.
“It’s awfully good luck to have the first fish be a keeper,” I told him. “Now our nerves are down and we can be generous with the newcomers.” Even Glenna seemed pleased watching us, as if her expectations for this sojourn were somehow being met.
I thought about the article I would write. I could have written it without coming, really. I knew the Green by the back. I would talk about the regulations (flies and lures only—no bait); I would talk about the boat launch and the fluctuating river level; I would say take along a patch kit. I would not mention anything that happened next.