Stories
If we could have gotten the Tacoma started, we would have tried something stupid. Flushed the fluids and gone as far as we could have, hoped like hell the thing would have gotten Kevan and Amanda back to Knoxville. We ran out of time. Didn’t have the resources or the hours to get the truck up off its knees. To drain the fuel system or replace the fried ECU.
We pulled Kevan’s Tacoma to Grand Junction and spent a day dissecting the interior. Letting the arid desert sop up the river water left in the cab. If the soaked seats and carpet were bad, the astonishing amount of sand stuffed everywhere was worse. The current had carried silt to every crevice, filled every cavity with heavy red grit. The passenger door was so full we couldn’t get it open at first. The hood had doubled in weight, its substructure now lined with 100 pounds of the stuff.
The river is deep and cold and moving fast, thick with sand and soil dredged from a hundred flash flood canyons. A 2,000-cubic-foot-per-second slurry of snowmelt and runoff boiling at its center. I'm standing barefoot on one muddy bank, a nylon sling over my naked shoulder, a thick steel tow cable knotted to one end. A hundred yards away, near the far side, two friends are stranded on the roof of a pickup. The water has risen in the six hours since the truck first attempted the ford, brown waves pushing over the hood, licking at the side mirrors, and pouring over the windowsills.
he weather was foul for hours.
The Rockies boast a fathomless blue sky this time of year, caught half in spring, still half in winter, but it vanished around noon. A thick mist wandered into the pines, first erasing the crisp white peaks on the horizon, then everything in between. Then came the rain and the thunder. Kiddo and I watched a sopping momma hawk huddle on a branch a few feet from our window, her grey feathers a manifestation of the low and booming clouds around her.
We camped at 8,700 feet in a wide, bare spot with a clear look at a line of white peaks to our east—the thin edge of the towering Rockies. Smack in the middle of a swath of mountain pine beetle devastation, the remains of gutted trees forking at the sky, or shattered on the ground around us. We watched clouds slide their shadows over the slopes before wandering off to the horizon.
There’s a fire glowing through the gaps in a tall stone ring, throwing light in uneven swells on the sand at our feet. An hour ago, we could see 50 miles to our east, the horizon framed by jagged red rock and a pair of snowy peaks. Now, it’s so dark we can’t see the truck from where we sit 10 feet away. It’s quiet. We’re quiet. We’ve had worse ends to better days.
Behind every business is a dumpster. The world is full of them, you learn. That's a good thing for us. We pack everything in, everything out. Every last shred of paper, every tin can, an astonishing number of diapers and wipes, food scraps. It all goes into a bag, and after a few days, the bag goes into an accommodating receptacle in whatever town we’re wandering through.
The paved route to the visitor’s center is closed. It will be for another month yet, but the tangle of forest roads that make their way to the rim are not. We crawled over the washboards and through axle-deep mud. Threw the truck in four-high and let it crawl its way through the nastiness, a sure and laden mule all the way up to 7,500 feet. Two and a half hours from pavement.
There’s a camera shop in Sedona that sells ridiculous hats and gemstones, T-shirts, postcards, local jewelry. Ceramics. Prints. Also cameras—beautiful lenses laid out on glass and brand-new bodies without so much as a click to their name. Tripods and lens covers, all waiting to help seize a lifetime of moments. It’s where we found Beth’s Mother’s Day gift: a Fuji Instax 300 Wide.
