Back when I was working at a group home for the Deveruex Foundation the schedule was a week on and a week off. Staff slept there and took care of whatever it is that the clients needed but still the clients were high functioning and they all had day programs of some sort, meaning some had work and some went to “regular” special education classes at high school. Even though I had to be on-call during the day once they had breakfast I was basically able to do whatever I wanted during the hours of 9 to 3. Better still if I was to take a week off it would only be counted against my accrued vacation hours as a 40 hour work week, yet I would have three weeks off  because it would be the week before I was supposed to work, the week I was taking off and then the week after I would have worked. For some reason the admiration didn’t have that figured out well and since I had accrued a lot of vacation hours I was able to take all kinds of time off during that year I worked in that position.  And since that was the case I bought a self-contained van and instead of paying rent I basically lived out of that for most of that year. 

Lots of times I would pick a destination, like Wyoming, Oregon, Arizona, wherever… and just go. In this instance I had gone to Yosemite Park and I still had maybe 10 days left on my travel time and around 800 dollars (this being circa 1994 worth maybe more than now, I don’t know. But it seemed like plenty.) with the idea being to find a rafting company that might take me down the Colorado River through the grand canyon and I’ll subsist on beans or whatever is cheap. 

My journey brought me from Yosemite which is significant to the story because less than 10% of people visit the Grand Canyon from the North and none of the river rafting companies leave from there. I got a list of maybe 15 different companies that might provide me that service. But as it turned out it was the last days of the season so everything was booked and on top of that the trips were costing around $200 dollars per day. It turns out that the excursions cater to their customers by providing, for example, omelets as you want them, steaks, all the beer and other beverages a person might want, within reason. 

I had called all the numbers on the list and the last number I called said that they had 13 passengers on a 15 passenger raft that were going on a 4 day trip and that if I could get to the other side of the canyon and hike down to a place called Phantom Ranch that the guy would give me a deal at 200 dollars. The glitch was that I had to figure out how to get from Lake Mead, which was the end of the line, back to the South rim and to my vehicle. Of course I had no way of doing that. The guy on the phone told me to call him back in a couple of hours and when I did he had found me a chartered Cesena for 70 dollars. What a deal! 

From the north rim to the south rim is about a mile as the eagle flies, but since there are no spans across the canyon one needs to drive down to Lee’s Fairy SP? And back around a trip of 240 (?) miles. I had been told what to bring along for the trip, including a gallon of water for the hike down and to give myself several hours for the hike. Instead I got drunk on Tequila that night thinking that it was all downhill and maybe he thought I was an older guy. I’d be fine. I did have a gallon of water and some of the items that were suggested and I headed on down the Kebab Trail to Phantom Ranch. 

As I was trudging along there were these young men, maybe 14 to 19 years old, who were jogging sometimes and other times just walking very fast who would pass me. By that time I had worked with kids who had psychological and/or emotional challenges for a decade and there was a vibe I got from these guys that maybe there was something a little off about them and I started to wonder if they were the group that had chartered the trip. If they were then I knew that I would probably go into counselor mode automatically. 

When I did finally get close enough to the river to see some of these kids on a raft it had a banner across the pontoon that read “Adventures West” which was the company that I was going down river with. Oh well, I guess that’s how it is going to go then. When I got to the raft I made some kind of joke about rafting together in order to break the ice. One of them told me that there was another Adventures West raft around the bend. I went around the bend to find the other raft but nobody around. I took a seat and after a little while three people, two men and a woman probably in their mid 20’s to 30 years old came walking along and one of the guys said “you’re it.” I had no idea what he meant by that, or if I heard him correctly, so I asked where everybody was and he said “I told you, you’re it.” It turns out that the whole group cancelled for some reason that I never bothered asking about. And that group with the Provo Utah chamber of commerce. To be clear at that point in my life I am relatively certain that I would have had a much worse time with a group of business people, who, one would assume, would be of the Mormon persuasion. I found out later that what I attributed to the vibe I felt was that coming from these kids was that they were all fathered by the same man, a Mormon, or course and so that vibe I felt I will attribute to a limited gene pool. 

The Araft still had to be brought to Lake Mead to pack it out for the season so off we went, the “boatman” which is essentially the captain, the “swamper”, which is what the assistant is called and there was a young woman adventurer who was bumming a ride down river. At the first stop we pulled up to a little beach for breakfast where I sat down to read and they set up the whole breakfast spread for me. They asked what kind of omelet I wanted and did I went steak and potatoes with that? I was essentially catered to by these three people when all I ever expected when I first thought about going down river was to eat out of cans. At about the time when that they were cleaning up I made a point to tell them that this situation was out of whack, as I saw it, and perhaps we can just figure out how to do the rest of the trip as equals, or friends, going down river. That suggestion instantly changed the dynamic for us in a very good way. 

I have always been a thrill seeker and at that time in my life I was doing a lot of skydiving and really pushing the proverbial envelope when it came to risky endeavors. They had given me the requisite talk about safety, including what to do in the event that I end up in the water. But now that we were developing a friendship and I had made it clear that I was taking responsibility for whatever happened to me they got on board with my thrill-seeking efforts. Given the fact that rapids are rated from 1 to 5 for intensity and given the fact that this trip included two level 5 rapids, Hermit and Lava Falls, by name, the boatman and the swamper where highly skilled river rafters. Now that they had a thrill seeking crazy man who wanted nothing more than to see if they could give me the most exciting ride possible they would direct me, for example, to “for this one, go to the front of the right pontoon and find the rope there and hold on like you’re riding a bucking bronco.” I was slammed by 10 foot walls of water that would bend the pontoon back to a right angle, if not more. And I loved it! 

In addition to that kind of action they had a lot of extra time because they didn’t have 13 other people to cook, clean and otherwise cater to. As a result they brought me into a lot of side canyons where there were amazing waterfalls and places to swim. They showed me how to use the table tops as water skies and it was simply a wonderful time. We drank all of the beer that had been brought for 13 and then given some amount of searching and digging they found a beach where they had an “emergency” case of beer toward middle of the 3^rd day. 

Then, as we came to the end of the trip a helicopter landed on a natural ledge in the canyon, picked me up and flew me to this place where there was a building for me to catch a shower. Shortly after that the plane landed and I was given a few hours long low altitude flight that allowed me to see from the air the journey I had made down the river. It was wonderful, especially considering that this trip included seeing the Grand Canyon from the North Rim, then the South Rim, then a hike down into the canyon, a boat ride that was, for all practical purposes customized to me, then I flew back over it at low altitude on what was basically a personal sight-seeing tour from the air, and all for under 400 dollars!