Nevada Barr - The Rope

“Kay,” Anna whispered. “Welcome to my world.”

Past the no-wake zone of the marina, Jenny opened the throttles. Twin Honda motors lifted the twenty-eight-foot Almar cuddy onto plane and exchanged its blunt-nosed sluggish push for an exhilarating rush. As she had for all the seasons and all the times she had emerged from Dangling Rope into the main body of the lake, Jenny experienced a sense of awe.

Engineers had thrust Lake Powell into this evolving, deformed, magnificent piece of the world. Man still fighting against Nature, and Nature would not lie down and die. She would rage down the Colorado and hurl herself at Man’s fabulous wall, scream, retreat, carve out canyons, and return to pile the debris at the foot of his dam.

When the canyons were flooded there had been angry outcries from those who loved the crooked desert channels with their stone arches, rainbow-hued walls, and wealth of history. Jenny would have loved them as well, but not the way she loved the lake, how it met the land, lifted her up, invited her to share secrets hidden for eons.

Uplake, where the water was close to five hundred feet deep, high on a cliff wall was the bottom of a ledge where a slab had fallen away. There, upside down, as if the creature had lived when there was no gravity, was a line of dinosaur prints, three-toed marks, walking into oblivion. Geologists surmised the fossils were hidden when the sediment flipped and heaved, then lay buried for millions of years, to be exposed when the slab fell away. For eons the tracks were lost halfway down a cliff a thousand feet high. With the lake, they could be seen with the naked eye. Backcountry purists suggested that if these sights weren’t earned by the labor of hiking in to them, they were undeserved, as if too many eyes sullied them.

That salon-tanned rich women and greedy developers vacationing somewhere they hadn’t ruined yet could see the dinosaur prints from the decks of their yachts didn’t bother Jenny one whit. Like luck, no matter how many people enjoyed beauty, one’s share of it was never diminished.

Of all the wonders the lake made accessible to the fat, the lazy, and the inebriated, Panther Canyon was Jenny’s favorite. A conscientious mother, Jenny would never admit as much in front of the other canyons.

Panther was one finger uplake from Dangling Rope. Like the rest of the water-filled crevices, it was a drainage for the Colorado Plateau. It also carried the brunt of the runoff from Fiftymile Mountain. Subsequently it was deeper and longer than most, snaking north and east for eleven miles.

Desert varnish painted the cliffs to either side of the channel, intricate designs in black and red, traceries that looked like the finest lace ever tatted, then slipped into the strong strokes of an irate painter with a burning vision of the universe, only to be offset by a whimsical natural cartoon resembling Snoopy or Betty Boop, or the abstract swish of a soaring bird.

The top of Panther’s walls were buff-colored sandstone, the middle red-gold Navajo sandstone, and, near the water, gray Cedar Mesa Sandstone: Cretaceous, Jurassic, and Triassic. Through the windscreen of her boat she could see two hundred and thirty million years into the past.

Jenny cut back the throttle as the channel grew slender, teal water glowing gold where shoulders of stone shrugged toward the surface, light playing from water to walls, sending darting, ephemeral fishes swimming toward the canyon rim. Panther Canyon didn’t so much end as unravel in ever smaller side canyons that twisted and shredded into the rock.

There was only one place boats could beach in Panther, and it was Jenny’s sacred place. Shortly before one of the unraveling threads thinned to a slot that would wedge a water snake, should it swim far enough, was a clamshell grotto fifty yards long, at least a hundred feet high at the top of the arch, and twenty-six yards deep. Fine white sand, mirroring the crescent shape of the roof, carpeted the floor.

The previous summer it was smooth and flat to where the wall curved down to meet the sand. Spring of 1995 had been wetter than usual. Flash floods roared down in grinding tides, resculpting the landscape. This summer, halfway between the shore and the back wall was a sandy shelf six feet high.

Sheltered from the elements—and too high for the graffiti vandals to reach—pictographs survived, paintings of strange creatures twice the size of human beings with diamond-shaped torsos, tiny heads, and stunted arms that stalked the imaginations of ancient artists. Three of them kept watch over the grotto.

This sacred grotto was Omaha Beach in Jenny’s war—a favorite camp, where people dumped excrement and trash and spray-painted graffiti on the walls. If she could not get visitors to realize that the destruction of this paradise would destroy the soul of humanity, she was doomed to failure in the lesser Edens.

Newer larger houseboats couldn’t negotiate Panther’s hairpin turns, so most of the traffic was limited to motorboats and Jet Skis. Like drive-by shooters, jet-skiers were hard to catch in the act. Usually she only found the poop they left behind. Chief Ranger Madden laughed when she’d asked if they could send it in for DNA testing and cross-check the results on the various law enforcement sites. She’d argued—futilely—that anyone who would defile the grotto had undoubtedly committed a slew of other crimes.

Motorboaters were not so elusive. Often they camped for several nights. About suppertime, when they would be “at home.” Jenny would drop in and educate them. If, when she returned the next morning, they had not learned their lessons, she would come to dinner a second time with Jim Levitt in all his law enforcement regalia and packing ticket book and ballpoint pen.

These were mere skirmishes. Party boats were where the battle line was drawn. Older smaller houseboats could access the grotto. Less expensive barges were often rented by the week by hordes of college kids out of Denver or Boulder, Salt Lake or Phoenix, and loaded with enough beer, drugs, and hormones to compromise the finest minds. These were barbarians sacking the city, infidels razing the mosque, heretics burning statues of Mary, Napoleon’s minions blowing the nose off the Sphinx.

Yesterday a party boat had taken over the grotto; a disgruntled boater told Jenny this when she visited his inferior camping spot. She hoped it wasn’t the one she’d seen at Dangling Rope. That one had at least forty kids mashed into it. Arms and legs were practically sticking out the windows.

One hairpin turn before the grotto, she throttled down to an idle and checked her watch: 10:00 A.M. Ten was the best time for contacts of this sort. Earlier and the students would be too close to comatose, later and they’d be popping beers. At 10:00 A.M. most of them were sleeping it off but, with the proper encouragement, could regain consciousness in time for a waste management class.

Nosing the throttle open a tad, she eased the boat around the last elbow of sandstone. The party boat was moored at the near end of the beach, two lines running to tie-down bolts pounded deep into the sand. The stern rail was gaudy with beach towels, a Hawaiian shirt, three pairs of swim trunks, and a brassiere that had once been a confection of black lace and satin but now resembled a roadkill crow.

Bodies were everywhere. The top deck of the houseboat was roasting them in the sun. Bare legs, feet, and a tangle of arms and heads were visible through the glass patio doors on the rear deck. Most of the fallen were on the beach. A naked couple lay curled back to back on an old square sleeping bag. A faded motif of cowboys spinning lariats telegraphed the loss of innocence. A boy in a Broncos T-shirt and tennis shoes without socks was spread-eagled on a red-and-white-checked tablecloth, shorts missing, shortcomings visible.