"Rapids are basically energy dissipating devices." I read from one of the Grand Canyon books in the hall at Phantom Ranch while others wrote post cards. "The resting state of the river must be returned to." Well true enough. Can’t argue that. But likewise, if the sun is basically an energy generating device, then what of eclipses, of the hot breath of solar particles sucked and spun in our magnetic fields, of bright green photosynthesis, of rainfall and wind in a snapping sail and a condor floating on an updraft? Of fear and worship and warmth on a winter morning’s cheek? That this man’s science could drain all mystery and vitality from a thing alive astonished me. Perhaps he had only ever watched the rapids from shore.

We boarded the rafts and floated on the muddy current once again. At that moment when the current catches, it is as if the river is standing still and the earth around is drawing by. And as if to contradict the book, the river presents us with the rapid called Horn Creek. The entry wave rises in a viscous peak and curls outward in perfect symmetry. Like a ram’s horn seen from the front. Like the remarkable glyphs found in the Coso range. Like seeing the animal close and alive instead of distant. Like knowing fear instead of thinking, detached and wishful. The horn peaks and flows and stands alone as if frozen, but every moment a different creature. The water moving through it, yet always the same. Like us, the breath and sweat every instant an exchange with the world around us. Things alive.

Scientists could descend upon the scene to measure the flow and mark the depths. A perspiring grease-smudged man could turn a great creaking wheel in the grand dam 80 odd miles upriver and stop the flow for a time. Lasers could be lit. Rock shapes mapped. Equations derived which would closely predict the substance and the curves. Academic careers made, egos bruised, theses scrawled. Men have died over lesser things. The heating of the water charted versus cubic-foot-per-second flow. Sub-dissertations might be written on the air/water interface. A dash of chaos theory added to predict the knowable uncertainty of it all. Prediction is a sorcerers’ art, and in the practice of it there is the ignoring of that which may never happen, or at least never happen here in a place where some watch shorebound.

They would tell me it could not be that a patch of snow melted high in the San Juans formed the same constituents of the wave at the moment that I caught a glimpse of the unknowable essence of the river. The moment I knew love was lost. That many universes would need be lived before it might be allowed. The moment I feel its soft cushion under the craft. See the curl of the boatwoman’s fingers settle the boat just so. There is more to be known in a sudden sliding caress of raftfabric before the tumble and fall of the backsplash than in any study or analysis. The clatter and roar after the silent dimpled hiss of the shaped forewave. Here there is not dissipation, but perception. The rising breeze, the mesmerizing wave, the tilt and swallowing of the boat by water.

Rapids are a feast. A family of stone and water and light coming together for communion. Collection of sky, harvest of lightning, calling of streams, kneading of meanders, sprinkling of boulders. A shining platter of food elegantly displayed then consumed in bickering splash and turbulence. Like the storms from which they are born. Of chockstones and hydraulic jumps and eddies the same as clots in the glowing disk of stuff when our solar system was born. When our planet formed. Not a question of if or how, but more of a question of when and where. A question of place.

Water in canyons is about place. Elements brought together. Plateaus lifted and carved. Scenes in our life we pass like slotted side canyons unexplored. The river is persistence and inevitability. The rapids are the chance, the immediacy. The call to join and drift for a moment’s moment upon a high static crest before the chaos of time and desire and a frothing unknown future snatches us downriver. Those are the moments we long to fix in time, pinned like juniper snags on a high rim wall. The most beautiful are unforgivingly the most fleeting. We are granted but one birth, one first kiss, one promise before all births and kisses and promises mix and saturate in the unslowing flow of our lives. To precisely subdivide seconds in search of the figment of time when we became alive, when we knew love, when a pivotal word was spoken is as futile as deriving an equation for a rapid. We float upon the flow. We mark the places where we find beauty. We wish for that which may never happen and then chase the quick waters downcanyon where more rapids wait.