My sorority sister and I stared at the muddy trickle dribbling out of the culvert in which we planned to spend the night. Did the risk of a flash flood outweigh the danger of being eaten by coyotes? We’re going to die alone in the desert, I thought, and rush isn’t even over.
It was my second week of freshman year at a bucolic little liberal arts college in the New England tradition, located somewhat incongruously in the wheatfields of eastern Washington. The ivy on the old brick dorms had not yet turned fiery red, and my biggest problem was that it was still too hot for me to wear as many layers of different colored Izod shirts as fashion dictated. There was a three-way tie for second-biggest problem: The crushing disappointment of having to pledge my second-choice sorority, disgust at dorm food (“kibbles and bits”), and desire to clobber the boy across the hall who put his stereo speakers in the window and left The Knack’s “My Sharona” on auto-repeat at full volume for hours on end.
So when I found a mimeographed flyer for the annual school-sponsored float trip down the Deschutes River in the Central Oregon desert a few hours away from campus I jumped at the opportunity.
Dawn on Saturday morning found me, my sorority roommate, about 20 other students packed into two Econoline vans, each towing a trailer full of deflated 8-man rafts, foot pumps and paddles. As we barreled down the interstate toward the turnoff for the river, comparing notes on our suburban upbringings (someone had once suggested the school’s mascot be changed to “The Wasps”) re-enacting our favorite Monty Python sketches and munching cereal and muffins packed for us by the dorm kitchens, the sun rising behind us turned the scrublands gold and distant Mount Hood pink and purple.
We wound down a long decline into the river canyon, trailing cometary clouds of dust. We passed through the rough cow town of Maupin, feeling out of place as we drove by the battered pickup trucks and decaying mobile homes with dogs on long chains in the parched front yards.
We eventually reached the pull-out point, a wide spot in the road where the river flattened out a bit before plunging over the unraftable Shears Falls. At the other end of the parking area was a dusty encampment of sport fishemen living in grimy campers that appeared not to have known the kiss of Lysol since the Nixon Administration. As we prepared to leave one van behind so we could retrieve the other from the put-in point a dozen miles upstream, I could hear an early-season football game on a transistor radio. One fisherman sat outside his truck in an ancient aluminum folding chair whose plastic webbing was worn through to dangling shreds. Eyeing the gaggle of laughing, carefree college kids, he pulled a Marlborough from the half-empty pack, lit it in a cupped hand and turned his back on us to resume baiting his hook from a jar of bright yellow salmon eggs.
Momentarily taken aback from the show of disdain, I had a chilly realization that I was an awfully long way away from world in which I had woken up that morning. But the sharp, flinty smell of sage quickly overwhelmed the cigarette smoke, and we sped up the road in a hail of gravel to launch the rafts.
The trip down the river was a washing machine of cold water, hot canyon air and bright blue sky. The Deschutes is rough, but we were hardly descending the upper reaches of the Ganges or the Urubamba. The worst peril we faced was losing a hat or a bottle of sunscreen. On slow stretches we jumped into the icy water and swam alongside the rafts, clambering back in over the slippery hot rubber when new rapids approached.
One one stretch of whitewater a girl, much taller and blonder than I, who had pledged a higher-end sorority, slipped partly out of a raft and banged her knee hard on a rock. The raft captain, a grizzled veteran of 19 on his second trip, declared that she should be taken to a hospital in the small town of The Dalles near the mouth of the river when the trip was over.
The afternoon sun was sliding toward the canyon walls by the time we returned the pull-out point. Clouds of nighthawks had already emerged from their roosts in the cottonwood trees and were diving and swooping on their sharp-pointed wings after the last insects of the season. The fishermen were nowhere to be seen.
While the boys deflated the rafts on the beach, my roommate and I repaired to the bank of blue-walled portable toilet to change into dry clothes. When we stepped out, both vans were gone.
To be continued…
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