Canyon Years 

There were sixteen of us, five of them good friends to me, the rest strangers. A few, in their younger days, had guided the river, and others had been boatmen on other rivers. One had walked the whole canyon, tip to tail. We were mostly in our early fifties, a dozen years older than when we’d last scored a private-trip permit to descend the Grand Canyon. Old! For some reason, I thought this meant we’d be taking it easy.

I had found a cheap wide-brimmed straw hat at a surf shop on Long Island. I’d been sweating the gear decisions in the months leading up to the trip, but this was one I thought I’d nailed. The new hat looked smart perched on the dry bag. At the put-in at Lees Ferry, it kept the bald spot cool, as we rigged the rafts amid the remnants of a lethal late-summer heat wave. The river was running low and uncommonly warm: seventy degrees. Presumably