Washes
by Rachel M. Hanson
The word Nankoweap is Paiute and the phrase carries differing meanings, such as “place where people were killed” and “place that echoes.” Though there are different meanings for the word, the latter half “weap” does mean wash, which makes sense as there is a large one where Nankoweap Canyon meets the Grand Canyon on the north side. During spring rains and monsoon seasons, the wash floods with water urgently moving to join the Colorado River, as if desperate to feed the starving body the sediment it craves. This idea of water feeding water is why I like to think of this place as one that represents life at its best—the creek bed surrounded by Galleta plants cleaving to afternoon sun and the Rabbitfoot Grass pulling in water through its roots whenever it can, a subtle strength sprouting from the hard desert ground. In this ground, Desert Tobacco Flowers thrive and their sticky, dense-green leaves can comfort hurting bodies—easing the pain of soreness, bruises, and burns. Here too, the desert plays host to Ground Cherries that once provided additional food to the meager diets of desert dwellers.
I did a bit of reading on Nankoweap and discovered that the Ancestral Puebloans settled the fourteen-mile Nankoweap Canyon all the way down to the delta on the Colorado River around a thousand years ago. Archeologist Douglas W. Schwartz1 published his work on his findings of Nankoweap in January of 1963, the same month water officially became impounded behind the Glen Canyon Dam, making for a watery burial of the archeological sites and natural wonders of Glen Canyon and devastating the natural habitat below it. The river itself, now bridled as Lake Powell, named for John Wesley Powell, a man who is credited for being the first to explore the Colorado River in its entirety in 1869, and who warned against over development of the southwest. He would, undoubtedly, be mortified to see his name attached to a dead water lake. In his archeological report, Schwartz indicated that it was likely a young radical who was the first to break away from living on the rim to settle lower down in the Canyon, ready to combine the old ways of living with a new. Schwartz believed that it was the generations linked to this young radical who would become the stubborn family refusing to leave the area when so many other families did, staying on at least another fifty years. In the grand scheme of things that may not seem all that long, but back then a generation was measured by twenty-five years and a lifetime had an entirely different connotation. The people living in Nankoweap Canyon would have traveled as much as half a day to gather edible plants such as the Ground Cherry growing alongside the river and washes. Food did not come easy, and the crops the Puebloans grew on the delta likely produced little, but for generations these incredible people found a way to make a life in what now may seem like an unlikely place. This notion means something to me—making life in unexpected places.
* * *
When I try to write about my experiences on the river, I feel stuck in a way. It’s difficult to navigate my memories of all the years I’ve spent on the water, good and bad, while also trying to understand my impact on a place I love so much my body hurts with the ache of it. When I think of Nankoweap on the river now, I think of how heavily trafficked it is, how sought after for river trips. And I think of how it’s a lesser-hiked side of the Canyon because of the difficulty of the terrain. I sometimes sit on the back of my motor rig, which I drive through the Canyon way more often than I row an oar raft through, and think about the Canyon, the people I run with, and the strange waste that I’m a part of. In a place where people had short-lived lives because of the harsh environment we pamper people, many of whom really have no business being on the river. Motor trips make excess possible, and also make it possible to show people a part of the world they couldn’t otherwise see—people with disabilities, physical and psychological, who will and do gain a lot of good from being in the Canyon. Still, there are a fair amount of motor trips that are pretty much just booze cruises and the like, and I help make that possible for people, too. Oar trips aren’t really all that different, though they are a bit less luxurious, so to speak, and sometimes they attract a hardier clientele passionate about the Canyon.
On river trips we carry food in massive coolers and aluminum boxes strapped to our rigs— enough to last for a twelve-days on an oar trip, an amount that would have seemed extravagant for the Ancestral Puebloans. Like most guides, I don’t forget some of my first trips as a raft guide (oar and motor). I remember how scared I was, but still badly wanting to be good on the water—more than anything, I wanted to understand the river.
On one of my first trips as an oar guide I worked with Emma, the only other boatwoman working at my company at the time—she’d started a few seasons after me. It was one of her first oar trips too, as our outfitter is primarily a motor company. The three other crew members were men, one of whom was particularly kind, though the same could not be said for the rest. Emma and I are very different people, and though we aren’t especially fond of one another, we both understand what it means to try to establish a place for ourselves in a profession historically dominated by men. It was not easy to carve out our places in the river world, and we mostly did it on separate trips, only working together a handful of times over the years. Still, I always think fondly back to this one morning on a trip, earlier in our river careers, that we spent together. It’s this memory that I try to focus on because I want to feel something positive about another woman whose struggles on the river I understood because a lot of them were much like my own.
On this particular morning, Emma and I are the first to rise—well before our passengers in camp begin to stir. We start the coals for the biscuits we intend to bake for breakfast, and when the rain starts to fall harder, we laugh for some reason. I remember feeling giddy as I put my rain coat on over my warmies, as we call them, and rain pants over my Carhartts. My fingertips are blue from cold and so are Emma’s, which I notice when we lift one of the aluminum camp tables and move it over the coals to protect them from the rain.
It’s mid-May and it’s been a wet spring—the plants have that fresh brightness to them, a light against the muted purple and green layers of the Tonto Group—the Muav Limestone and Bright Angel Shale. The night before, at dusk, coyotes sang, as if sending off the last bit of sun from the cliffs to welcome in the first wave of night air. In the morning they are silent while Emma and I move about our camp. It is one of the four Nankoweap camps, Little Nankoweap, no longer a place for radicals ready to take on hardship, but where, at least six months out of the year, paying customers set up tents and cots and sip cocktails while taking in the view and waiting for the guides to serve food.
The rain is coming down slow and steady, enticing people to stay tucked inside their bedrolls as Emma and I continue to stumble through the kitchen. The scent of rain mixed with western honey mesquite trees, dirt, and shale moves easily through the desert air, and a not-so-dense fog settles over the water. Our orange self-bailing boats are a bright contrast to the muddy beach and river and talus and cliff walls all around. In the distance, just out of sight and at the base of the Redwall limestone, granaries where the Ancestral Puebloans once stored their food peer over the river like ancient lookouts, though no one back then would imagine what the place would become: overrun with rubber boats and tourists.
Emma makes sure the coals burn true while I mix the biscuit batter, pre-packaged in some factory in the United States by a worker who probably earns minimum wage. I imagine the worker who put the dried batter inside the blue and white bag is a woman. I think about her work day, the monotony of it. I wonder if she feels the burden of mouths to feed. I wonder if she’s allowed to take bags of this batter home to those mouths depending on her, and I think of how so much of the food we pack and cook goes to waste on the river. For a moment, I look out on the water and the rock layers just above it; the Muav Limestone looks greener the longer the rain falls. I turn my eyes back to the batter, give it a few more stirs before setting it aside, knowing that much of it would go untouched at breakfast. Like so much of the food we serve on the river, there is often enough left over to feed a family or two. Better to pack too much than too little, we say whenever a passenger complains about the massive quantities we put before them. But I too am disturbed— we are a country that wastes, our ways unchanging even in the wild.
I oil a cast iron pot, set it over a low-lit flame on the propane camp stove and wait for it to get hot. After a few minutes, I fill the pot with the off-white mix—a bit of steam from the heat triggered from the cold batter emerges then dissipates. Today, when I recall all those ridiculous glamping meals on the river, I think of a story that broke last year about school children who couldn’t pay for their cafeteria lunches and were shamed by staff for it. School staff threw children’s hot meals in the trash in front of their classmates and gave them cold sandwiches, subsidized food, to replace hot meals now warming the garbage, feeling certain that this would teach the children not to take hot, non-subsidized food, in the future. I recall my own hungry childhood as I open two five-pound tubes of sausage and dump them in another pot to fry, knowing much of it will go uneaten.
After handling the raw meat, I wash my hands in river water and bleach at the hand wash station, the cold of it bringing back the blue to my fingers. I return to the kitchen hot zone and hold my hands near the cook flames before slipping on gray, river-worn oven mitts, the fabric wearing thin, not so protective, and pick up the cast iron pot, now full of biscuit batter, and quickly carry it to the coals. Emma uses tongs to place a dozen coals on top of the lid, rainwater dripping off the tip of her blond curls that protrude from underneath her beanie. We decide to tuck ourselves under the table next to the warmth of the coals and watch the water start to pour off cliff walls, not enough to turn the river a thick muddy, but enough to make a cloudy water. We sip hot cowboy coffee that Emma made in the dark while I was heating aluminum buckets full of river water to boil for the dish line.
“Did you hear the coyotes howling last night?” I ask.
“Yeah,” she says, “kept me awake for a while.”
I nod and look to the south side of the canyon on the riverbank, fairly sure that’s where the coyotes had been calling to one another for hours. Though we were just a short bend away from Nankoweap Rapid, the sound of the mile-long churning water hadn’t overshadowed the sounds of the coyotes talking amongst themselves. I’d tried to see them at dusk, hoping at least a few curious puppies might emerge from the tamarisk and shrub oaks before the light would be gone altogether. Not one showed itself. The darkness settled, the moon’s glow slight behind clouds biding their time to let loose rain. I must have listened to the pack for only a short while, my eyes always quick to grow heavy once I stretched out on the back of my boat, the river softly lapping alongside it, and the moonflowers coming to life just as I fell asleep. All year I look forward to sleeping on the river. It's the only place where I almost never dream of my siblings. The Canyon has a way of beating you up, but it is also a place of healing. For me, it is a place that offers the kind of sleep I can get nowhere else—a dreamless sleep.
We watched the rain fall from beneath the table for a while, neither one of us saying much of anything. At some point Emma got up to refill our mugs with coffee and I checked on the biscuits.
“Kinda thick bubbly like,” I say, and add more coals to the top of the Dutch.
“You’re too much of a watcher. Just let them bake,” she says, her irritation with me clear in her voice.
I shrug and say nothing back. We settle down under the table again and sleepily look at the boats, which look like a mini-circus, with floorless tents stretched over the boat frames, a single pole in the center of each. The other men have been sleeping through the rain or else just stay hunkered down in their sleeping bags for warmth. Eventually, Dave stirs and moans loudly about the cold and the wet. He whines for coffee, a not so subtle hint that he would like one of us to fetch him some. I dig a cigarette out of my jacket and light up, stay squatted under the table as I watch Dave slowly unzip his tent. A mug appears with another whine for “hot coffee.” Emma makes to go grab his mug, but I put my arm on hers and tell her to let him get his own shit. She shakes her head, eyebrows raised, lips taut, clearly not liking my suggestion though she eventually sits back down.
Then we watch Dave squirm out of his tent, run for the coffee, fill his mug and run back to his boat to hide from the rain.
“Maybe if he weren’t such an asshole I’d get him his coffee,” I say. “He can be okay sometimes—when he’s trying to hook up.”
“You didn’t?”
“Kinda.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know. Curiosity I guess. It was super uncomfortable—he tightens his lips into a taut line and then bumps them against yours, like a baby does or something—I dunno,” she laughs.
“Also, when he got handsy, he wasn’t like, actually using his hands.”
I look at Emma inquisitively, picturing Dave fist bumping her chest or thighs, trying to coordinate his moves as he tried to press purposely thinned lips at her face. I wonder if his body had come to carry his disdain for women like muscle memory, unable to let go of it even long enough to derive pleasure from a female body.
“He uses his finger—kind of curled up into a hook, ya know, like Mr. Burns on The Simpsons,” Emma continued, imitating the crooked finger of Mr. Burns and poking me with it.
I can’t help but laugh. Then there is silence. Neither one of us minds it. We sip coffee and watch the rain hit the river until a passenger approaches us, stumbling along the beach with an empty coffee mug, an unzipped rain jacket and forgotten hood lying loose against his back, revealing disheveled hair. I point to the coffee thermos on the serving table with a smile. The passenger half smiles back, grunts a little, then sleepily fills his mug. It’s going to be a long day.
* * *
On the river, the wind has taught me to keep dried fruit or nuts nearby in the ammo can strapped at my feet when I’m pushing through a storm with gloved hands. Though there have been days when I’ve forgotten to tuck the snack bag into my ammo can above rapids, leaving the food drenched and inedible at the bottom. I feel guilty when I do this—for the waste of it, but try to make up for it by feeding the spoiled food to the river starving for every last nutrient it can get.
Even on calm days I keep food close—a trick I learned after one trip where, not even a half mile from Redwall Cavern, all of our boats were stuck in an eddy on the north side of the river for nearly an hour—around and around we went like an awkward merry-go-round of bumper cars. At one point when I loosened my grip on one of my oars it blew out of its oar lock, floated across the river to an eddy on the south side. I had to untie my spare from the side of my boat so I could keep working at pulling out of the eddy. By the time I made it back in the current and to Redwall Cavern, I was shaking with hunger. Now, I keep food close.
* * *
Like clockwork the rain starts up again after breakfast as we pack up the boats. The wind blows hard, making it difficult to pull away from shore and out of the eddy as the water bears down on the beach, slowly erasing signs of our presence. This is the third day the wind and rain has been with us. I do not have patience for the wind. Even off the river I can’t stand it—gentle breezes will send me indoors if they last too long. As I pull my oars against the wind that pushes me upstream, I look over my shoulder and try to stay in the current that will take my boat to the top of Nankoweap Rapid—it’s a mile long and curves around the bend and past the main Nankoweap camp. Emma is just in front of me, laughing as she too fights the wind. Every new gust triggers a fresh stream of laughter from the tiny blonde, and I know her blue eyes are set in determination, every muscle in her arms flexed as she pushes against the wind. Every new gust makes me rethink my life choices, mainly how it was I ever thought being a boatwoman was a good idea, and every peal of Emma’s laughter in the face of such shitty conditions makes me question her sanity just a little.
The Nankoweap wash begins to run muddy. I think that on the south side of the river the coyote pups are probably huddling to keep warm, the rain splashing in front of their den as their parents return with field mice crushed beneath their jowls, a fresh meal for their brood. Finally, there is a break in the wind and I’m able to enter the rapid. My boat moves swiftly with the current and down the mile-long rapid, and I catch my breath while scanning the vast beauty of this harsh place. I quickly forget all the reasons I should not have taken to river guiding. I rest my shoulders by tucking my oar handles beneath my thighs for a few moments. I look up at the Puebloans’ granaries about five hundred feet up from the river tucked at the base of the Redwall Limestone, now in full view. I tell my passengers how, about a thousand years ago, this was home for a people who farmed the delta and stored their seed for planting season in those granaries. Now, people hike up to see the granaries and take photos of the view, but even in the sixties, even before river trips were an everyday occurrence during the season, the trail to the granaries had been well traveled by many anxious to see ancient dwellings. The river is visible for miles from up there. It’s the most photographed spot in the Grand Canyon. A passenger sitting behind me says he’ll take my word for it, uninterested in making the trek. He asks if we’ll be seeing anything else with less of a climb and if we will be having sandwiches again for lunch today. I take a handful of apricots from my ammo can, already needing to replenish my energy after warring with the wind, and say nothing. I pretend that the roar of Nankoweap Rapid had made it so I couldn’t hear him.
1 Schwartz, Douglas W. “A Historical Analysis and Synthesis of Grand Canyon Archaeology.” American Antiquity, vol. 31, no. 4, 1966, pp. 469–484.
ABOUT THE CREATOR
Rachel M. Hanson is the author of The End of Tennessee: A Memoir (University of South Carolina Press, 2024). Her work can be found in Creative Nonfiction, The Iowa Review, Ninth Letter, North American Review, South Dakota Review, American Literary Review, and many other literary journals. She is an Assistant Professor of English at the University of North Carolina Asheville.