Wake up. Daydreaming. John has seated himself, the bow of the dory is sliding down the oily tongue of the rapid, holes and boils and haystack waves exploding all around us. John makes a perfect run straight down the middle. One icy wave reaches up and slaps me in the chest, drenches my belly. Cold! The shock of it. But we are through, easy, riding the choppy tailwaves of the rapid. John catches the bottom of the eddy on the right and with a few deft strokes brings our boat to the beach at the mouth of Badger Creek. The other boats join us. Boatmen and passengers clamber ashore. Here we’ll make camp for our first night on the river. True, we haven’t gone far, but then, we didn’t get started till noon.

Setting up camp for the night is a routine chore for the boatmen. All food supplies for the eighteen days, and personal belongings, are neatly packed into the watertight compartments below the decks of the boats. The large cans of food are packed first, their weight on the bottom of the boat adding stability for the rapids. Next go large waterproof containers with things like bread, eggs and flour, and army surplus rubber bags for clothing and sleeping gear. Cameras and small personal gear are carried in surplus ammunition cans.

Most of the passengers line up behind the boats to retrieve their rubber bags and immediately disperse up the beach to find a flat spot in the sand on which to set up their camps. There is an ample supply of semiprivate nooks and crannies among the tamarisk trees, so I see no reason to rush, and decide instead to have a cold beer.

One of the boatmen, the one they call Sharky, a fiercely bearded lad with burning blue eyes, is in charge of toilet facilities. In the old days passengers and crew simply dispersed to the bushes, women upstream, men downstream. Now that the Canyon is so popular, however, with some fifteen thousand souls per summer riding through, it has become necessary for sanitary and aesthetic reasons to make use of portable chemical toilets. Sharky is our porta-potty porter. He removes the unit from his boat and sets it up among the shady tamarisk far from the beach, in a spot with a pleasant view of the river and canyon walls. He is the kind who thinks of such things. Later, some of the passengers will wander around half the night hunting for it.

The boatmen set up the “stove”—a metal box, filled with dry driftwood and covered with a steel grate. The cooks begin at once preparing supper. Our cooks are two able and handsome young women named Jane and Kenly. Both are competent oarswomen as well, and can substitute for the boatmen if necessary.

Drinking water is taken right from the river, and chemically purified. If the water is extra muddy, lime and alum are added to settle it.

After dinner—pork chops, applesauce, salad, soup, peaches, coffee, tea, etc., the “etc.” in my case being a mug of Ron Rico 151—we are subjected to a lecture by Head Boatman Wally. Now that they’ve taken our money and gotten us down here beyond reach of civilization, he talks about the realities of Grand Canyon life: how to use the portable unit (no simple matter); about cactus, scorpions, centipedes and “buzzworms” (rattlesnakes); about loose rocks and broken bones, quicksand, whirlpools and asphyxiation, the remoteness of medical aid. Wally instructs us on what to do if a boat tips over, as it sometimes does; tells us the hazards of diving into the river and swimming in the current.