he first step is the biggest. Sloshing through shockingly cold water onto the motorized raft at Lee¹s Ferry, thoughts of a quick call from the dilapidated pay phone may cross one¹s mind. After all, once you board and drift from shore, you are in a rare position in today¹s society: stuck. For good or ill, the next eight days and 225 miles are in many ways out of your control. Which is why you¹ve come.

Seven of us had planned this trip together; the other ten were unknown. From rafting years before, we¹d learned this was part of the delight: people you would normally never speak to, out of either intimidation or boredom, turn out to have fascinating things to say. So we pulled into the gentle jade current, ready to create a small but fully-functional organized floating community.

Dennis Harris, the boatman, is the Christopher Columbus, the town manager, the patriarch. Joking about how some people complain immediately upon discovering their welfare is in the hands of a man who hasn¹t cut his hair since the mid-¹80s, he handles the rudder without looking. Some 150 trips like this have given him all the confidence he needs to deliver us safely to Diamond Creek. Cynthia Billings is first mate and first lady‹as frisky and strong as a colt, with what my brother calls calico hair: auburn, honey, gold, cocoa, floating long and free between her visor and her sarong. She exudes enthusiasm; the smallest gesture on the part of a passenger, like filling a water bucket, is met with a heady, "You rock!" The rest of us are stories yet to be shared, first impressions that will be reinforced, and altered, at varying times during the week. Still with our cultural game faces, we start throwing out tentative disclosures like the first hesitant cards in a poker game. Someone is afraid the hikes will be too hard. Someone else is worried a cat back home in New York won¹t be fed. I brought a mirror.

Common wisdom holds that it takes three days to hit your stride on the River. On the ride up, four people have had four cellphones working. Gradually, the stake in the outside world falls away. But our second day, I find out my brother and I are both still mentally calculating miles: at the rate we¹re going, we don¹t have any built-in pad. We must make better time. Intellectually, we understand Dennis is aware of what must be done, but the deadline mentality we¹ve brought is not as easily packed away as my cute but tractionless boat shoes. Sunday, the third day, things are jelling. Carrying buckets down to the water for dishwashing, I realize I¹m smiling out of the pure pleasure of being in this place. Walking to the bank under an arch of tamarisk and willow branches, with the endless music of the Colorado, the preternaturally blue sky, and no responsibilities save returning with a full bucket, I am completely content. As much as I love my home and family, I am not often completely content doing morning dishes. I savor the feeling.

Maybe because I¹m now adapted, I become more curious about fellow passengers. We¹ve already taken my favorite hike; I¹ve dreamed about seeing Saddle Canyon again for 15 years. So it was startling to hear Cindy, a veterinarian from Alabama, say upon seeing the thin ribbon of silver falls at Saddle, ³We came all that way for this?² That evening at camp, I¹m spreading clean laundry on a rock (although clean is a relative term; a little Ivory soap and the 45 degree water, and you figure sun and scrubbing sand will do the rest) next to where Cindy is writing in a notebook. I ask if she journals; we begin to talk. She has endured the worst experience of her life only weeks ago. She and a companion were hit by a car; he may never recover fully. "I never want to go through anything like that again," she says.

That¹s when we hear the shout. I don¹t even know if it sounded like, "Help!" but we look at one another in alarm. As we move toward the beach, we see a man, floating down the river by the cliff wall loo yards away. Only his head is visible. Then he goes under. Dimly I recall having seen a man fishing off a rock ledge just up the river on that side. As we begin to digest what must have happened, Dennis and Cynthia have already leaped on the raft, untying as they go. Mike, a 22-year-old from Pennsylvania, and Paul, a New York television director who used to be a volunteer firefighter in Long Island, jump onto the raft as it pulls into the current. Cindy begins to shake. I pull her close and start to pray.

"Dear Lord, be with that man. Be with our crew, and help them do Your work here." We watch, riveted, with others from our group who had been drawn from camp activities. Dennis has headed downriver. "That guy is up here! He¹s going too far!" Cindy protests. I say the smartest thing I¹ll say the whole trip: "Dennis knows what he¹s doing."

(Later, Paul puts it best: "Dennis read that river like a dime store novel." I hear Dennis describe to National Park Service investigators how he happened to be at the right place to rescue the man: "At that point, the current is along the right bank, then it cuts about a forty-five degree angle across, and swirls and eddies where we went. I knew I had to have passed him.") Sure enough, we see a burst of movement on the boat. "They¹ve got him!" someone yells. After starting to wonder if anyone could have survived this long in water so cold you get brain freeze washing your hair, we breathe a collective sigh of relief. We wait for the cough, the movement. Surely he will now say, "That was close!" and head back to his camp with a good story. But instead, the intense and driven gestures of cpr begin. We watch the force in Mike¹s muscles as he tries to get a heartbeat. We see the focus of every line in every body on that boat, as Dennis heads upstream. We have a veterinarian and a registered nurse at camp, he¹s remembered. Both Cindy and Patti are ready to climb on board before the boat even reaches our beach.

As anyone who has witnessed a car accident knows, waiting and watching feels horrible. We continue to pray, alone and in groups. ³God, I know You know what You¹re doing,² I say. "But if there¹s any wiggle room on this one, please bring him back. Please bring him back." The cpr continues as the boat angles back upriver, fighting the inexorable current with everything a talented boatman and a 30 horsepower motor can do. Dennis reaches the beach where the man had slipped off, and bounds up the rock cliff like a mountain goat, only holding his Irridium satellite phone. He¹s going to get help. Somewhere in here, members of the man¹s group arrive, down their beach across the river. Other guides start trying to reach a satellite with their emergency phones. On the boat, the relentless cpr doesn¹t flag or dim. It is heartbreaking to watch; obviously, they wouldn¹t be repeating the desperate exercise so long if they had been successful in bringing him back.

Around the time the helicopter came in, most of us were shifting our prayer. We began talking about how this would be a perfect place to die, if it were one¹s time. We wondered if the body on the boat was only a shell being watched by the person who had inhabited it, and if he felt compassion and tenderness for the crew of rescuers who were not giving up; who would not give up, this long and exhausting hour and more, until they could no longer reach him. First we heard the rotor blades of the chopper, then saw it swing into view downriver and head toward us, red lights flashing like a lighthouse in the gathering dark. It was an odd sensation, like stepping into an episode of ³m*a*s*h,² when "Incoming!" is a harbinger of hard things. The chopper pilot reached the bend in the river where Dennis had stopped the raft, and we presumed radio communication was going on while the pilot gauged wind gusts and the feasibility of landing; first by the raft, then on another beach across the river.

Like displaced children wanting to help their parents in a crisis our group had started potatoes baking, brought warm clothes down to the beach, and finished setting up tents. Then, from across the river, came a shout, "Clear the camp! The chopper needs to land!" We knew the rotors would create a tremendous updraft to suck anything not anchored down, so we tore to the edge of the campsite by the water. Tents and bags, already weighted down with rocks against the river wind, were hurled into the ridge of tamarisk trees. Later we found out we¹d broken lotion bottles, ruined possessions. But we battened down in the bushes and watched the helicopter slide and hover, seemingly dangerously close. The raft slid across the river, holding position against the current, and several from our group leaped forward to help carry the metal table that had become a gurney off the bobbing raft to the chopper.

My brother Lindsay was one of those. Later, he told me, "I¹ve never washed a dying man¹s blood off my hands before." And in the morning he showed me, down by the water, the marks left by the helicopter skids, still in the sand. There were a few drops of blood, but what Lindsay remembered later was a young willow, no more than a branch, starting to straighten again after being bent sideways by the helicopter. Death and life co-exist everywhere, but it¹s easier to see in the Canyon.

Those of us who seek nature sometimes want to be selective. We love the cold burst of rapids on warm days, but the day it hailed, we were less enthused. We want the rodeo ride down Hermit Rapid, but we don¹t want that same relentless current to be able to sweep a fishing man down the river. We want basic, elemental things like food cooked over coals and baths in the river, but we didn¹t sign on for the most elemental of all truths: everything and everyone alive, will at some moment cease to be so. We happened to be there for that moment in the life of Todd Strickland. We didn¹t know his name until later that evening. We didn¹t know he was a Tucson Police officer. We heard he loved to fish, and had a wife and two children. We wept, many of us. Some of those who had put their entire life force into trying to save him felt at moments that they had lost. They had achieved a pulse, had him warm, and breathing again briefly. But then, Cindy said, it was as if he just left.

What I¹ve come to believe is this: our crew was not put there to save Todd Strickland¹s life. For reasons not clear from the underside of the tapestry, with all its knots and odd patterns, he was not to be brought back. I don¹t know his family, but I do know I would rather my brave and beloved father die in one of his favorite places than be needlessly gunned down by some punk with an attitude. I trust God more in the Canyon. Maybe because I¹m less insulated from His world there. The Park Service investigator told Dennis later, "He didn¹t die because of you guys; he had a chance of living because of you guys." At one point, the prayer seemed not to have worked, but I¹ve changed my mind on that. Todd Strickland might have died swallowed up in cold water; terrified and alone, thinking no one knew where he had gone. Instead, he was surrounded by people giving 100 percent of their physical and emotional selves to him, surrounding him with care and concern and tenderness. Maybe we couldn¹t pray him back to life, but maybe we could pray him to his next life held and touched and wanted. I hope so.

After the sound of the chopper had dimmed, the boat had been unloaded, tents had been pulled out of protesting stickers and branches, we passed a flask of Irish Mist (a gift from a Vietnam veteran) and had what I think of as a firebase. Circled in the dark, fortified by warmth, it¹s easier to talk. Cindy, who had said earlier she wasn¹t a spiritual person, belied those words describing how the lights off the rotor blades seemed like a halo. Those who had been on the raft shared the story with the rest of us. Those who had been on the beach vowed none of us would walk out of camp alone the rest of the trip, and anyone near the water would be in a life jacket. We kept that promise; a legacy of Todd Strickland. I believe future trips will have lives preserved because of him.

The next day we had to stop at Phantom Ranch. Drownings on the river shake up everyone whose work involves the Grand Canyon. Arizona Raft Adventures, our outfitter, connected Park Service interviewers to our group. Those involved wrote accounts; some answered questions. We knew by now the Strickland family¹s story took up where ours left off. We knew there would be a funeral deserving of a 20-year veteran of tpd. We didn¹t know how to tell his wife and children, "He didn¹t go alone. We didn¹t know him, but we cared about him so much it hurt."

People bond in trenches. River groups always get close, but this one goes bone deep. I will never stop marveling at how Dennis could know a thousand quarter-mile stretches as well as he knew that one, and be so instant in his response to the cry for help. I admire Cynthia¹s toned biceps even more from having seen them pounding for a pulse, long after giving up made sense. Paul, Patti, Cindy, Mike, were heroes out on that emergency clinic on pontoons. They did the Lord¹s work. I stand in wonder of all of them. None of that brings Todd Strickland back. But from the effort of the people, the beauty of the place, and the belief in the prayers, I think it wasn¹t meant to. He did not die alone. Those of us who were there will never forget him. People who were not there will be safer because of him. The next morning, I walked down to the river to splash off, and my first thought was to blame the water. But the Colorado isn¹t evil. It didn¹t do anything wrong. The result was tragic, but the process was as it should be. The river is still running.

I suspect Dennis and Cynthia were worried about how the group would react to what we¹d witnessed and done. Some could have wanted their mommies; complained the wilderness experience had been ruined; or simply been unable to coalesce what had happened. But we moved on. We didn¹t forget Todd Strickland. We continued to talk about him through our last day in the Canyon. We also savored our dinners, plunged into pools at the Havasu, and laughed when Lindsay or Paul or Matt made one of their matchless bon mots. We toasted our leaders the last night with admiration, respect and love. Many lives had been affected by the canyon. Sometimes, some end there. Among those who love the Grand Canyon, it is considered good fortune to die there, like Bert Loper, slumped over his oars in a rapid at age 80. Like others who have loved the river: agile photographers Emery and Ellsworth Kolb, explorer John Wesley Powell, intrepid Norm Nevills who instructed rowers, ³Face your danger!² Todd Strickland is not gone. Just gone on ahead. Ed Abbey wrote in The Hidden Canyon - A River Journey: ³Night and day, the river flows. If time is the mind of space, the Colorado is the soul of the desert. Brave boatmen come, they go, they die, the voyage flows on forever. We are all canyoneers. We are all passengers on this little, lining mossy ship, this delicate dory sailing round the sun that humans call the earth.² Joy, shipmates, joy!

Lisa Schnebly-Heidinger