I tilt my head. “The ones you told everyone before we started? I already know those.” They’re written in my notebook along with the rest of my limited research.
“Clearly not, if you were about to take off your life jacket.”
“I wasn’t…” I cut myself off when her eyes flash with irritation. “Do you think I wasn’t listening to the rules?” When she shrugs, I list them off on my fingers. “Keep the life jacket on at all times. Keep my feet in front of me if I’m in the water. If the boat runs into a rock, move to the opposite side of the boat from the rock.”
“Wrong.” She accompanies the word with a jerk of the oar, splashing shockingly cold water all over me.
I gasp as the water trickles into my life jacket and down my chest. The temperature is supposed to be somewhere in the eighties today,not cold but not very hot either, and I was not prepared to discover the temperature of the river. Good thing I stashed my notebook in my waterproof bag an hour ago; that book is my life.
Donovan fights a smile. “If I say ‘high side’, which means we’ve washed into a rock, you’re supposed to gotothe rock.” She tucks the oar handles beneath her knees, then makes a fist with her hand. “This is a rock,” she says in a slow and clear tone, like she’s talking to a child.
“It looks very nice,” I grumble.
Ignoring me, she holds her other palm out face down and touches it to her fist. “If you move to the side of the boat that’s farthest from the rock, the weight is going to pull the boat that way while the current keeps pushing the boat into the rock, making it wrap around like this.” Her palm wraps around her fist. “And with this high of a water level, we’re not getting that boat back.”
It’s hard to imagine a boat this big—it has to be around sixteen feet long—getting stuck by a bit of water, but I’m not going to pretend I know better than someone who’s been doing this for half her life. My stomach twists in a knot as I imagine what she’s describing and how a wrong move could lead to disaster.Mywrong move.
I was wrong. I was wrong. I was—
“If you go to the side with the rock,” Donovan says, moving her hand back to a flat position and then tilting her palm away from her fist, “the current will work to our advantage and pull us away from the rock and back to a safe place.”
“Have you ever had to do that?” My voice wavers, and I clear my throat. Pretending there was something stuck there other than rising nerves and spiraling thoughts.
Donovan’s grin is wide as she frees the oars and resumes her methodic rowing. “In Lava Falls.”
The knot in my stomach doubles. I’ve spent far too much of my limited free time watching what people have dubbed “carnage videos”of that rapid on the Grand Canyon. That rapid is known as the biggest in the US, and just thinking about it makes me nervous.
“The look on your face worries me,” I admit.
Donovan’s laugh is clear and bright as she uses her oars to wiggle the boat back and forth, nearly knocking me off balance. “Would you relax, Riley? I made it out alive. You wanted to learn, so I’m teaching you.”
I resist the urge to roll my eyes. “What happened?”
“Lava Falls drops almost forty feet in less than three hundred yards, so it’s steep, fast, and brutal.” I really don’t think she should be grinning that way as she tells me this, but I’m not going to complain. She’stalking. “My grandpa was rowing, and he had everything lined up perfectly, skirting around the ledge hole just right.”
That’s the hole where boats tend to flip, if I remember right. I watched one video where the boat rotated fifteen times before the river finally spit it out, like it was in a washing machine.
“That first wave we hit was a doozy,” Donovan continues. “I was up front with Spencer, and for a second all I could see was the river because there was as much water inside the boat as there was outside. Couldn’t even see what I was sitting on. It was wave after wave, coming from all directions, but I thought we were doing okay until we reached The Cheese Grater.” Those last three words come out low and gravelly.
I roll my eyes, unable to stop myself from smiling. “You’re being a bit dramatic, Donovan.”
She exaggerates a gasp. “Me?Dramatic? Just listen to the story, Riley. We’re getting to the good part.”
“By all means, continue.”
Biting her lip, she studies me for a second, and I wonder what she sees. “We were almost at the bottom when Pops—my grandpa—yelled ‘high side,’ and since I paid attention to the rules, I knew to gettothe rock.”
I narrow my eyes at her but say nothing. Because she’s right. And I was wrong. When we get to shore, I’m going to write down the rules a few more times so they stick. I can’t afford to get any of this wrong.
“So,” she says, “I jumped over to Spencer’s side of the boat. Right to The Cheese Grater, which is an aptly named boulder of rough lava rock. The boat sank in that direction just enough for the current to catch the bottom of the boat and pull us out instead of trapping us and our gear, and we made it through mostly unscathed.
“Moral of the story, you need to take the rules to heart. You’re not going to have time to consult your notes when you’re face-to-face with whitewater.”
I ignore her jab about my notebook and focus on where this conversation started. “The last rule is to breathe when I see daylight.”
She snickers. “There are plenty more rules, but those are the important ones.”
“Breathe when I see daylight,” I repeat. “That one sounds pretty obvious. Not many people try to breathe underwater.”
