I missed my family deeply and wished they were here with me. School was in session, and it simply wasn’t practical for the kids to miss three weeks of classes, but I still felt pretty guilty for leaving them for weeks on end. Someday, I thought, I’ll bring them back here, to this magical place. In the meantime, I took a bit of comfort in getting birthday wishes from them.

33

Rising the next morning, I tried to force down some breakfast on a queasy stomach. My nerves were so raw by now, I was referring to breakfast as “bagels and bile” and “dry heaves and toast.” The day started with a long warm-up to Lava, a fourteen-mile flat-water paddle that gave me plenty of time to contemplate what lay ahead.

I tried to conjure up everything that Harlan had been telling me since we first launched, to keep my mind free from clutter and distractions, from doubt and fear, to be at peace with my decisions, and to channel the energy of the river. I tried to remove all the negative thoughts that enveloped my consciousness like silty water invading a clear stream.

About a half mile above Lava Falls, Harlan pointed out Vulcan’s Anvil, a fifty-foot plug of basalt, rising straight up out of the middle of the river. “It’s the cone of an extinct volcano,” he said, “the last remnant of that thousand-foot dam.”

One day the river will erode it all and take it downstream, too, I thought.

Harlan told me that the Hualapai and Paiute tribes believed their ancestors met at the top of the anvil to solve disputes. It was a sacred place for them, a center of energy and power.

“In the afternoon light,” Rob said, “it looks jet black.” I had Rob direct me over to it, and I paddled a symbolic circle around it. As I raised my open palm toward the rock, I could feel its heat, even from a few feet away.

With Lava now booming below us, we pulled over and went ashore to scout, scrambling over the time-hardened lava rocks, river right. Six years of training and 179 miles through the canyon had led me here. In a way I couldn’t believe it. The hour had arrived. We stood on an overlook above the rapid, and Harlan took my hand and pointed it across the river to Prospect Canyon, the source of the big boulders that had come down and constricted this section so dramatically. Below us, it sounded catastrophic, like a constant thunderclap, like a place where the earth was angry, roiling and erupting with a million tons of water instead of magma.

“Sounds big,” I forced the words out.

“It’s definitely big,” said Harlan, “but it’s just another rapid. Don’t go into this any differently than the others, like Upset. Remember what that felt like.”