Snaggletooth - A Portage Too Far
By Bill Cross

No mother deserved this fate--not even mine. True, my mother did some unforgivable things to me as a child. Things that inspired permanent, smoldering resentment. Like the morning in sixth grade when she flagged down my school bus as it pulled away from the stop across from my house. At first all I heard was a woman's wild screaming--probably some incoherent street person, I thought, or a hysterical neighbor whose Terrier had just been flattened under our wheels. And then--oh the horror--my mother marched up the front steps of the bus carrying the brownbag lunch I had forgotten. She held it up like a dead rat for all to see, her eyes blazing with triumph. I died a thousand deaths when I saw her: she was wearing her pastel blue nightrobe with matching slippers and hair net.

But searing memories like these, even the burden of massive therapy bills as an adult, are hardly an excuse for drowning one's mother--which is essentially what I was doing at the moment. I could see her frail form huddled in the front of the raft, ducking to keep from being decapitated by the overhanging rocks. At the same time muddy, frigid water rose swiftly around her as our overloaded boat began to flood. The situation looked grim: in a moment she would either be beheaded or drowned.

I swear this was all unintentional, or at least it seemed unintentional--Freud would probably quibble with me on this point. This was supposed to be a family pleasure cruise down the Dolores River in southwestern Colorado, but my inexperience had turned it into a remake of The Poseidon Adventure. A whitewater rafting school the previous summer had given me just enough knowledge to be dangerous, and come spring I decided to treat my family to an introductory whitewater adventure--something with a little thrill, but no real risk. But finding the right river wasn't easy, because in those dark ages of river running (1979) boaters still hadn't discovered the printing press. With no guidebooks to aid my search, I simply thumbed through outfitters' catalogs until I found an enticing three-sentence description of an "intermediate run through spectacular desert canyons."

The canyons were indeed spectacular, but the Dolores was not even remotely intermediate. Granted, under normal conditions most of the rapids would rate Class III, but a record snowpack had transformed the river into a raging torrent of icy brown water. Our raft was a puny speck of flotsam, swept along like a dead cow in a flash flood.

Strike One: High Water.

Strike Two: Our Crew: Myself, my parents and my two sisters. Five was a pretty slim number to paddle our 16-foot raft. To make matters worse, two of us were not what you would call able-bodied: my father had the metabolism of a hyperactive squirrel and the physique of an anorexic; and my mother, though we told her otherwise, was a totally ineffectual paddler, in part due to her unnerving tendency to stop paddling at critical moments--just above a massive, knife-edged boulder, for example--to relate an amusing anecdote or point out an interesting bird. I tried to balance these twin parental handicaps by placing them on opposite sides of the raft, each assisted by one able-bodied sister. Meanwhile I sat in the stern yelling commands and pretending I knew what the hell I was doing.

Strike Three: Our Load. For a five-day outing we had packed enough baggage, food and sundries to outfit an Everest expedition. All this paraphernalia was piled amidships in a mountainous heap, making our overburdened raft sag like a swaybacked pack horse. Three Strikes and we were out. Way out. Custer's point-spread with the Sioux looked better than our odds against the rampaging Dolores. Yet in a surfeit of bad luck, we faced ...

Strike Four: Snaggletooth. Meanest rapid on the run. Normally a challenging Class IV, Snaggletooth was now a raging Class V gauntlet of towering waves and churning holes. Even my inexperienced eyes could plainly see that any attempt to run Snaggletooth in our overloaded ark would be promptly and unequivocally fatal. So we portaged--an experience only marginally preferable to drowning. For half a day we groaned and sweated like recruits at some malicious fat farm, struggling to lug our immense pile of gear around the rapid and then laboriously relash it to the raft.

I was just finishing retying the load when a guide from a commercial raft trip paused in his scouting of Snaggletooth and sauntered over with disturbing news: Snaggletooth was only the first hurdle. Directly downstream lay Cannonball Wall, a series of violent waves and fearsome holes plunging straight into a menacingly undercut rock wall. Anything that got sucked into the undercut would be pinned helplessly by savage currents, squashed to jelly by tons of water pressure.

Prudence clearly dictated a second portage around The Wall. But the portage around Snaggletooth had cost us the better part of a day and exhausted my family's waning reserves of strength and patience. So, turning a deaf ear to my better judgement, I committed my own flesh and blood to a watery doom.

We shoved off. The guide had cautioned me to skirt the initial holes and waves so that our boat would not swamp with water--because a swamped raft, he confided with a nervous snicker, wouldn't stand a snowball's chance in hell.

It took us precisely three seconds to swamp to the brim. We slammed into the first wave broadside, and from then on we were history, careening downriver sideways, our world flashing wildly from murky darkness to blinding sunlight as we were alternately smothered by tons of falling water, then lofted to the peaks of massive waves. Each time I tried to shout a command the Dolores rammed a quart of foamy brown snowmelt into my mouth. I felt like some team of sadistic nurses was giving me ice-cold enemas in every conceivable orifice at once. And all the while the river kept sucking us relentlessly to the right, straight into The Wall.

All efforts to escape our fate were in vain. My father, awash in an internal flood of adrenaline became a paddling fiend, his blade a blur as he lashed the water in a spasm of short, jerky strokes. But it was sound and fury signifying nothing, for though he huffed and puffed like a crazed steam engine, his paddle barely touched the water and he merely whipped the top couple of inches to froth. My sisters fought a gallant but losing battle against the Dolores. And my mother, paddling in the bow, did what she usually did: stopped paddling altogether and turned to face the rest of us, smiling reminiscently as though she had just been reminded of a story.

Suddenly, like an elephant at full gallop, we hit The Wall. Instead of being pinned against the undercut we were dragged along beneath it, trapped between a rushing sheet of roaring brown water and an angled roof of jagged red sandstone. The pocket of air in between rapidly narrowed as our raft slid deeper into the dark, wedge-shaped slot. The right bow--my mother's corner of the boat--was taking the worst of it, being stuffed like a sock into that crack of doom. Razor-sharp sandstone teeth tore at us from above, shearing gear off the top of the load. Our rapidly dwindling mountain of baggage was now the only thing keeping some clearance between the rocks and the river, the only thing standing between my mother and a watery grave.

It was a ghastly sight, almost as horrible as the image of Mom in her nightie at the front of the school bus. I was just beginning to ponder the karmic connection when, in a giant version of the Heimlich maneuver, the full force of the Dolores River in spring flood blasted us out the downstream end of the crack like a mangled piece of sirloin. In a flash of blessed sunshine we burst free! But lo, we had been changed mightily: our raft, so recently the picture of family fun, now emerged from Cannonball Wall as the Ghost Ship of the Dolores, trailing shards of gear and streamers of frayed rope.

We exchanged wide-eyed, ashen-faced looks--all except my father, still puffing and paddling like a madman. I surveyed the damage. Our vast mound of gear had been pruned a bit, but what the hell, we had plenty to spare. The important thing was we were alive and, aside from a few scrapes, unhurt. My mother frowned at me over her sunglasses with a quizzical, slightly suspicious look: "I assume that was unintentional?" she asked. "Hell yes!" I replied emphatically.

And that's the truth. It really was an accident. No matter what Herr Doktor Freud might say. Why would I try to drown my own mother? Just because she scarred me for life by parading around in front of my sixth-grade class in her nightgown? Listen buddy, sometimes a cigar is just a cigar: I may be neurotic, but I'm not crazy.

Snaggletooth - A Portage Too Far, Bill Cross.