When the cities cleared out this summer everybody went west to the wild country, and a lot of these people ran rivers.
Here's the next trip's itinerary from the point of view of the guide.Day One: Looking like beekeepers in floppy hats and mosquito netting, long pants and long sleeves, the urbanites will arrive at the put-in, arms full of the gear the guide's letter encouraged them to leave at home: one carefully washed and pressed T-shirt for each day, brand new Teva sandals, still hooked together with a small plastic twistee and, in the case of both the stockbroker and the literary agent, a tiny cellular phone.
Although the dermatologist from the
Twin Cities will assure them that after No. 15 it's all the same, they will each wear three bottles of sunscreen around their necks with numbers ranging from 24 to 65.
Given their choice, the women will all get into one boat, the men in another. The boats will maintain this junior high school dance configuration an astonishing 80 percent of the time.
The guide will name the ever-deepening rock layers in the canyon walls, explain the various stages of desert varnish, point out cacti and find a group of desert big-horn ewes and lambs.
The passengers will only want to know about the rapids: When will they get to them? How bad are they really? Is it true that last year somebody died?
Despite the heat, nobody will jump into
the water on the first day: There are too many clothes to be taken off and put on and they are afraid they'll look ungraceful trying to get back into the boat.
They will be ashen-faced and cotton-mouthed in the small opening rapids, where the guide will assure them she couldn't flip the boat, even if she tried.
By the time they get to camp, the acupuncturist, the infectious-disease specialist and the guy who will only say he's "in oil" will all be sunburned, and the ex-poet laureate of the United States will have been stung by a bee.
Three hats will have gone overboard, one pair of Tevas will have been left at the lunch spot, and at least one of the vegetarians will be hungry enough to eat meat.
Over dinner (orange roughy Mexicana, fresh asparagus, parsley new potatoes and Bear Lake raspberries with real whipped cream), they will each tell the story of the last time they slept on the ground.
The guide will look at the cloudless night sky and suggest sleeping under the stars. There will be urgent whispering about snakes, scorpions and rain. The tents will be pitched and before bed the guide will give a lesson about finding their way by constellation.
By day two they will all have realized several things: that they really have to go to the bathroom in something called a "rocket box," that there aren't any mosquitoes in the desert after all and that it probably would have been OK to sleep outside.
The beekeeping nets will be packed away and most people will have traded long pants for bathing suits, long-sleeve shirts for Bain de Soleil.
The clinical psychologist from Chicago will make the first splash, and before lunch everybody will have had a life-jacketed swim through a minor rapid.
They will have exhausted the surface information about each other's lives and will begin to ask questions about the things they see.
After dinner (barbecued chicken, fresh spinach, corn on the cob and pineapple upside-down cake) the ex-Flying Tiger will drink just enough rum to tell everyone about what happens when he travels in space and time.
By day three they will realize there is no point in trying to get their fingernails clean, that washing dishes is the best job (momentarily clean hands) and that closing up the toilet after everyone has finished is the worst.
They will realize that swimming in the silty river makes them feel a little dirtier than before they went in, that everybody's hair gets greasy in three days, but not equally, and the two Berkeley computer guys, unshaven, will start to wear bandannas around their heads and look like members of a gang.
The rapids will get bigger and bigger and they will realize that when the guide says she thinks they should zip up their life jackets for this one, she means it.
By this time everybody will know the difference between a cliff swallow and a sandpiper.
Geology will have stopped being just the title of one of the sections in the guidebook and will have started to mean time and wind and water; they will see it all there in the record rock.
They will notice the way the sunlight colors the canyon differently, every hour from the time it rises until the time it sets.
In the morning the talk will be about opera, deconstruction, monogamy; the time traveler will admit that the planetary federation on Venus was supporting Ross Perot.
By late afternoon they will have figured out that it's OK to be quiet and they will drift through miles of deepening canyon without a word, or cough or laugh.
Tonight there won't even be talk of setting up tents. The military policeman and the Hungarian film producer will begin a joyous, clandestine affair and will fool no one.
After dinner (linguine with clam sauce, salad, Dutch-oven brownies) they will show the guide which star points north.
On day four they will run the biggest rapid of the trip and something will happen to somebody that makes it seem to them all that they almost died.
What will follow this is a lot of serious discussion about making the most of their time, about how fragile they all are, about how being outside puts them in touch with some essential part of themselves.
They will start planning which river they want to float next year, they will speculate about what it would cost for a cabin and a couple of acres in the area, and when the guide tells them they will say, "Damn, I pay more than that to park my car."
By this time they are turning a nice rusty river color, they are forgetting, now, in the morning, to change into their carefully packed shirts.
It's hard to keep them in the boat, in and out like seals all day long, burned and peeling and burning again.
They will begin to say things like, "Coming out here has made me like myself again," and, "It's amazing how much living in the city makes you forget."
They will say, "This is so very beautiful"; they will say, "My God, the things I've missed."
By the fifth day they will start seeing literary shapes in the rock formations - there's Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, there's George Jetson's dog, Astro, there's Roddy McDowell as he appeared in "Planet of the Apes."
Fear long gone, they will whoop and holler in the rapids and say, "Wow! Please, can't we go back up and do that again?"
When they stop for the night the stockbroker, the shamanic healer and the actress will work together like a chain gang, unloading gear.
The psychologist and the computer brothers will have the kitchen assembled and the salad made before the guide finishes pumping the water out of her boat.
It's the last night on the river and they won't even be talking about showers anymore; they want, they will say, the trip to go on forever.
They will emerge from the canyon and arrive at the take-out by noon on the sixth day.
They will stand between the deflating boat and the running bus that will take them back to their rental cars like so many Persephones, the pomegranate bitten, each world beckoning, neither enough.
There will be more hugging than anyone would have anticipated after only five days.
The guide will thank them for their hard work and good company. She will tell them that nearly every wild river in the world is threatened by something: power plants, pollution, drought, development, irrigation, recreation, corruption, greed.
She will hope that they will carry whatever piece of themselves they found on the river back to the cities with them.
She will hope they will make decisions that will keep the rivers flowing for the time when they want to come again.
Pam Houston, a writer and river guide living in Utah, is author of "Cowboys Are My Weakness."
1992 The New York Times