A muttering sound ahead, beyond the next bend. Wordless voices grumbling in subterranean echo chambers. All boats put ashore on the right bank. Wally leads us, passengers and crew, up a path through the tamarisk jungle and onto a slide of volcanic boulders big as bungalows, high above the river. Lava Falls bellows in the sunlight. He stops. We stop. He waves us on. “Volunteers will assemble here,” he shouts, above the tumult from below. “After you’ve looked it over.”

We go on, all but the boatmen, who remain clustered around Wally, commencing their customary hopeless confabulations. The sad smiles, the weary head-shakings. Same old hype. I smile too, slinking away.

Chuckling, I join the sensible passengers, who gather in a safe shady place near the foot of the uproar. Breathing easily now, I watch these people ready their cameras. Comfortable, we consider the dancing falls, the caldron of colliding superwaves, the lava rocks like iron-blue bicuspids protruding from the foam—here, there, most everywhere, a fiendish distribution of dory-rending fangs. I study the channel on the far left: nothing but teeth. The “slot” in the middle: gone. Hah, I think, they’re going to have to run it on the right. Right up against this basalt boxcar I’m relaxing on. Well, serves them right for making such a big deal out of what’s advertised as a tax-deductible business trip.

Time passes. Can’t see the boatmen from here. I look back up at the “volunteers’” assembly point. Sure enough, a few suckers have showed up, seven or eight of them. And that tall girl in the big hat—my wife? It is my wife. Good Lord, what’s she doing there? You can’t take my wife. My suture to the future. Who’s going to care for me in my dotage, succor my senility? Impossible. They wouldn’t dare.

Not all the boatmen are in hiding. John Blaustein crouches on a rock nearby, staring up at the rapids, his battery of cameras dangling from his neck. Like me, he’s doing what we’re supposed to do: observe.

A red, white and yellow dory appears on the tongue upstream. The Tapestry Wall. There’s Captain Wally standing on his seat, one hand shielding his eyes. He looks pretty, all right, I’ll grant you that, heroic as hell. Two passengers with him, sunk deep in their seats, white knuckles clenched on the gunwales. Wally lowers himself into the cockpit, takes a firm grip on the oars. Here they come. They disappear. They emerge, streaming with water. Dive and disappear again. Dark forms barely visible through the foam. The boat rears up into sunlight. Wally has crabbed an oar, lost an oarlock. He’s in trouble. He’s struggling with something. They vanish again, under the waves, to reappear not twenty feet from where I sit, bearing hard upon this immovable barrier. The dory yaws to port, Wally is standing up, he’s only got one oar, looks like he’s trying to climb right out of the boat onto my rock. I’m about to offer a futile hand when I realize he’s climbing the high side, preventing the boat from capsizing. Cushioned by a roil of water, the boat and its three occupants rush past me, only inches from the iron rock. Who’s that lady in the stern, smiling bravely, waving one little brown paw at me? That’s no lady, that’s my life! Renée. The violent current bears them away, out of sight.