Nell positioned her kayak for the Washing Machine. Her heart pounded with erratic fear that, until now, had never owned a place in her life. She studied the shoreline rocks. No sign of Joe.
He should have been back by now. He wasn’t. There was nothing on this earth that would have kept Joe away from her. That meant that he was in trouble. And there was no one to help him but her.
She paddled forward with smooth strokes, into the churning water.
3
Nell shot between the two rocks and bounced down the Washing Machine, her Pyrahna bounding along the wave trains. Each time the boat rebounded, the jarring baited her lungs, teasing at the need to cough. Her ribs lifted and lowered with each breath, every paddle stroke burning with pain. She had raced through less than half the train of rapids when the coughing started. By the time she was through them, she was coughing steadily, her chest muscles tortured. The wounds on both hands had broken open. Even in the cold, her grip on the paddle was slick with blood. Still no sign of Joe.
The El roared up ahead. There was no time to reconsider.
Hands white and aching, her lungs on fire, Nell lined up for the El, paddling hard, spearing the water with forward strokes, glancing right and left for Joe. Nothing. No sign. The current grabbed the boat and yanked her forward. She was slightly off center, river-right.
The fifty-yard approach to the El was through squirrelly water, a boater term meaning that the water danced in unexpected ways, throwing the kayak up and down, requiring her to lean hard left and right, rocking up with hips and thighs and feet with each stroke, bracing the paddle against the water to maintain boat stability.
Her breath was tight, the air cold and filled with river spray. Nell fought to relax, knowing that tension in a paddle stroke could change both her direction and speed, resulting in the kayak turtling over. If she flipped, weak as she was, she might not make the required Eskimo roll back upright. And a wet exit from the boat—pulling the skirt loose and swimming to the surface—might be deadly with water this big and this cold. Nell had never run the South Fork with water this high. She pushed that thought down deep and away.
The rock ledge of the El, with its swirling plunge, appeared, the water flow making it into a monstrous curl and drop. Her boat dipped into the hole just in front of the ledge. She dug in with steady forward strokes, pushing the boat toward the drop-off, her breath tight and painful, moving without her usual fluidity. The backward-moving water sucked the boat back upstream. She bobbed and paddled, leaning downstream, pushing with her feet against the bulkhead, trying to work through the current. This was the invisible danger. Holes would trap and suck down anything, paddles, boats, floating bodies, keeping them down and spewing them out later, at a time of their own choosing. And she was weak, her arms and shoulders burning with exhaustion. With a last desperate stroke, panting, coughing, she broke free of the hole.
Her boat went over the ledge. She boofed, wrenching up her legs and the bow of the kayak, paddling hard against the diagonal curler. In this huge flow the curler was a tube of water that tried to spin her sideways. She hit the bottom of the drop in a spray that drenched over her with icy water, burying the boat. She jerked her thighs up again, out of the tube, sliding to the surface. Instantly she maneuvered around rocks, through holes, paddling and coughing, her eyes blinded by spray. Another hole tried to drag her back and she leaned hard over the bow, using a variety of strokes, on instinct to keep the boat pointing downstream and moving forward. Rocks dodged up in front of her, invisible until the last instant, evil spirits from the deep, intent on her destruction.
A downed tree blocked the space between two boulders, creating a strainer dead ahead. Nell had a staggering vision of the strainer that had trapped her. Branches brown with death, interlaced, dragging in the water. She shoved the memory away and swept hard left, rotating her torso, guiding the boat obliquely against the current. The right side of the kayak slammed into the rock face and instantly the bow of the boat swirled around the pivot point. The boat shot hard river-right, right into another hole. At the last of her endurance, Nell gave a series of hard forward strokes and draw strokes. Pulled the Pyrahna into an eddy leading river-right. She compensated, braced and glided into still water.
She was coughing violently, fighting to paddle straight, to find the shore. The river bottom rose up, long and shallow, to a bank, and she thrust hard twice, to send the boat up the shore, beaching it firmly. Popping the skirt, she rolled the boat to the side and shimmied out. She lay on the rock-and-sand beach, coughing, the raw, wet sounds louder than the water.
Long minutes passed. Nell lay still, letting her body recover. Her head pounded, dizzy with the exertion. Her clothes were drenched to the skin and shivers shook her hard, even with the rashguard and polyester shirt she was wearing. At least she wasn’t wearing cotton. There was an old saying, Kotton Killz; the water-absorbing natural fiber would have left her dangerously hypothermic already. As it was, she deeply regretted the loss of the dry suit to keep her dry and warm.
She was sure her fever was higher. Did being wet and chilled to the bone counter the fever? She didn’t know, couldn’t remember if she ever knew.
Every muscle in her body ached. Every breath ached. Every heartbeat, cough, sigh, swallow and pulse of blood ached. The sun came out from behind a cloud and found her, bathing her in faint heat. She spread her fingers into the light. Shifted slightly until her legs were in the sun. Slowly, some of the pain began to seep away.
Without warning, Nell fell asleep.
When she woke, it was to a whirling world and a fleeting loss of memory, a disorienting series of sun-washed seconds, during which pain pulsed through her with the beat of her heart. Her eyes focused. She recognized the pattern of rocks in front of her nose. Gingerly, she rotated to face the sky, the helmet kinking her neck at an uncomfortable angle. Nausea roiled in her like gnarly water.
She was sick. Flu or pneumonia, or both. Could you have both? Shoving with her elbows, Nell rolled over and struggled upright to survey the landscape around her. She had survived the El. She was on the shore of the Long Pool. Tossed by the current, she was river-right, a convenience term used by river sports enthusiasts. In a world with boundaries composed only by the movement of water, right and left were always determined when facing downstream, so that river-right and river-left always meant the same thing. She looked around. No Joe. No emergency X on a shore. No beached boat, bright red in the sunlight.
On the far side of the pool was another level shoreline, longer and deeper than this one. That was where the emergency access trail was, arduous and steep. On this side of the pool there was an old railroad bed, stripped of wood and rails, a path now used by horseback riders and hikers and the occasional four-wheel-drive park rangers’ vehicle. It was possible that she could make it up to the gravel one-lane road and hike out. But it would take hours, longer than it would take to run the river.
She might get lucky and come across horseback riders who would give her a ride out. Or she could trudge for miles.
She studied the landscape. There was no sign of campers or hikers. No horse smell. Nell looked at her watch, gauging how much daylight she had left. She twisted to her feet with a groan that echoed over the rush of water.
She could ferry across to the other side of the pool. It wasn’t even hard to do in the Long Pool, the current was so slight. But the trail out on that side of the river was a strenuous climb, hard uphill to a jut of land called the Honey Creek Overlook. Then another hard, miles-long walk on secondary roads to Burnt Mill Bridge, the input where she and Joe had started out. Again, she might get lucky and meet another hiker. Or she might not.
Nell
