Take me to the river
And wash me down
Won’t you cleanse my soul?
Put my feet on the ground.

Al Green, gospel singer

he was headed toward the River that balmy spring morning, the only hiker to pass me on the trail in Havasu Canyon. There was a bounce in her step, purpose in her stride. She seemed more pilgrim than wanderer. Her specific destination, I learned afterwards, was the River itself. She wanted to put her hand in the Colorado River of all things.
Later that afternoon, at the mouth of Havasu Creek, where the news of her death spread in whispers among the returning boatmen and passengers, and then floated downstream as trips departed, I searched my memory for details. I had been ambling up creek, a laid-back boatman shepherding his flock of river folk on a stroll through a familiar landscape, when she whisked by me. With the entire day before me and no real destination, I could have been cited for loitering.
I would like to say that I remembered her face or afterwards that I learned her name. Neither is true. The harder I grasped for her specific features, only a few hours old, the more elusive they became. In the days following our less-than-brief encounter, her vague image began to bleed into the fabric of the river trip. Eventually she disappeared, or so I thought.
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At Mile 157, Havasu Canyon is an idyllic, seasonally overpopulated, ten-mile long side canyon in the heart of Grand Canyon. At Havasu Springs an underground river gushes forth, eventually plunges over three waterfalls—Navajo, Havasu, and Mooney Falls—and forms Havasu Creek. To wander along its string of turquoise pools, to seek refuge from the crowds in any of its numerous streamside hiding spots, to gawk at its brick-red, desert-varnished walls or to stand an arm length away at the bottom of one its cascading waterfalls with the ground rumbling and the mist rising, is to inhabit a hiker’s paradise. On some mornings the scent of honey and a coming storm mix in the air or a scale of water music plays counterpoint to birdsong. Where Grand Canyon offers symphonic awe and wonder, Havasu Canyon invites intimacy and the opportunity to relish rather than gasp before the transitory nature of one’s existence.
It is the home of the Havasupai, “people of the blue-green water.”
In days gone by, no river trip leader could pass by this premier attraction in good conscience unless he or she were willing to risk the disappointment (or ire?) of a river traveler who had heard, or worse read, about this riverside attraction. Thus, most of the foot traffic in Havasu is born on the Colorado itself. In peak season, the numbers are considerable; the outdoor sanctuary is full to overflowing then. Generally, the surge of hikers runs up canyon in the shadow-bearing morning and trickles down in the heat and dust of mid afternoon.
So my anonymous hiker was on her own as she made her way to the Colorado River. Likely as not, she had pitched her tent at the Supai Village campgrounds, eight, probably nine miles up canyon. To come as far she did when we passed one another, she would have gotten up early. She would also have been walking for at least two hours; I, on the other hand, had given fresh meaning to the term meandering. Indeed, though I had been on the trail for a half-hour or less, the distance traveled could have been measured in yards.
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The job of “running sweep” required that I trail behind our main body of hikers, going up canyon in the morning and coming down canyon in the afternoon. Already they had pooled into smaller groups based on some alchemy of individual pace, temperament, and destination. These reconstituted pods, I knew, would be spread along the trail for most of the day. My task was to keep an eye on their whereabouts, taking note on who and how many had stopped along the creek, who and how many had made a dash for the distant waterfalls. On any given Havasu hike it is also the sweep’s job to answer questions, wander freely, bandaged scrapes, keep time, lend a hand, voice encouragement, share water, roundup the stragglers, tell stories, and generally linger. It is an idler’s dream.
Two fundamental kinds of walkers tread the paths along Havasu Creek. At one end of the spectrum are those who mosey and never get anywhere and don’t care if they get fifty yards or five miles upstream. They are wonderfully purposeless, light-hearted day-trippers. Lacking in drive, determination or a destination, they sit in pools dangling their feet, speak in whispers, nap, read, allow dragonflies to land on their arms, or study the petals and stamen of the crimson monkey flower as if it were an entire garden. These are the English Romantic poet William Blake’s “eternity in a grain of sand” hikers. Recreational loiterers and malingerers, one and all. They move through time; space (i.e. scenery), while beautiful and obviously unavoidable, is secondary in their world. They do not march to a different drummer so much as tiptoe and weave.
On the other end of the spectrum are the fleet-footed athletes—trail cruisers, runners, joggers and fast walkers. Goal-orientated, racing past the visual, auditory and olfactory scenery as if they were in the Boston Marathon, they are enthralled with motion and distance. Time, for these bi-peds, is measured and treasured to the drumbeat of a march. Space is linear, at least on a spring morning in Havasu Canyon.
These mile-makers take pure physical pleasure in putting one foot in front of another, avoiding the cactus, finishing the task. They like the view from atop the ridge, the rhythm of movement, the blur of color and smell and sound, the place few get to. They do not ponder so much as interact with their environment. They play hard to earn their bounty. They don’t mind a smallish group, but prefer to travel in trios, pairs or solo.
Most hikers fall somewhere between these two bookends.
My mystery woman would have passed at least one of those small, destination-driven groups before we met.
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Long before I could see her, the pat-pat-pat of her footsteps signaled her presence. It was not the quick footfall of a runner but the steady rhythm of a sure-footed walker, someone in for the long haul. The sound grew, and soon enough a female figure was rounding a bend in the trail, perhaps three hundred yards away. Even though she seemed to be looking in my general direction, she showed no sign of noticing my presence. I might as well have been a lizard.
The trail had cut away from the creek, spilling out onto a wide bench of shadow land. Waist-high patches of grape ivy and hackberry bushes bordered this wide spot. The sun had only just tipped over the edge of the canyon wall and spilled onto the floor, pushing the shadows back up onto the north-facing wall. You could hear the trickle of Havasu Creek. It would be a warm day.

In my memory, she was of average height and build. I think she had brown hair, perhaps to her shoulder, but no more. Because it was typical, I am more certain of her outfit—a visor, loose fitting t-shirt, baggy shorts, small backpack. Her tennis shoes, I know, were soaking wet as were her drooping socks from wading through Havasu Creek. She left damp foot prints in the fine, red dust of the well-worn path.
The distance between us closed fast.
As my mystery walker neared, she gave the impression that she had no time to waste. To say we met, then, is a misnomer. There was no pause, no sign of an inclination to slow down on her part. The trail was wide enough that neither of us had to give way. She brushed by me like a fresh breeze. She was smiling. I suspect she had been all morning.
“How far to the river?” she asked eagerly without breaking stride, a little short of breath. She might have smelled of sage, sweat or suntan lotion.
“Mile, maybe a bit more,” I answered.
“Thanks!”
Then she was gone, swallowed up by the green grape ivy and the morning shadows.
A smile may be the ultimate reciprocal act. It can be an invitation as well as a request, a call for recognition or a cover for feelings best left unexpressed. In this case, I suspect my mystery walker’s beaming countenance was not only one of natural courtesy that she could not suppress, but also an overflow of the elation that she could not conceal. In hindsight, I am quite sure that she was beaming. That is the right word, I think. Beaming. It was far too early in the morning to behold a spell of bliss. And yet, if bliss is the experience of awe coupled with the experience of being connected to something greater than one self, than that is what I had witnessed briefly.
And though I occasionally entertain the idea that something about me was the cause of her smile, it is most unlikely. Of course I smiled back, unable to not return a walking woman’s smile, even if it had nothing to do with my presence.
The encounter was over before it began.
At the rate she was traveling she would reach the Colorado River in fifteen, twenty minutes at the most. Since I had no destination, I would stop a half-dozen times, malingerer that I am, awash in the morning silence. I would chat with my passengers, soak in a pool, eat lunch, nap, spy on a dragonfly, ponder my good fortune, enjoy the fact of my temporal, deliciously animal existence. I would not return to Havasu Harbor until midafternoon, hours away. And then, and only then, would I learn that my mystery hiker was thirty-years-old, a divorced mother with an adopted child. She was on vacation from South Dakota, home of Mt. Rushmore and the Badlands. It was a thin profile for the woman soon to inhabit my imagination.
Indeed, she had been in a hurry. She had to be back at the Supai Village campgrounds to catch her ride to the airport or bus station before noon. So when she passed me she was on a roundtrip mission, a narrow, 20-mile loop. To see the River was one thing; to dip her hand in the River was quite another. Only with the touch could she then tell her child she had really been there.
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After she left me on the trail, she would have crossed Havasu Creek once or twice more, scrambled over travertine dams, encountered more hikers, stepped up her pace to avoid conversation when possible, her smile threatening to turn into a laugh. Or so I like to think. Finally she would have reached the cliffs above the harbor which was crowded with boats. She would have seen the River before she touched it.
As usual two or three boatmen, acting as harbor masters, sat on the floating armada of rubber and wood, messing about. She found her way down. Then she moved the last few feet to the river’s edge, her goal literally within reach. The limestone rock may have been wet where it meets the water; the river was running fast, high, brown that day. Pulling out of the harbor would require attention—stern-first, a ferry angle not too sharp or too broad, a sturdy downstream oar, the thin lynchpin holding the whole maneuver together.
At last she was in the presence of the Colorado, the River of her imagination and longing. Her holiday pilgrimage was nearly complete. Now she had only to kneel down to touch the water. Perhaps a boatman had spoken to her beforehand. It is not hard to imagine. Perhaps she told him she had hiked ten miles to touch the Colorado River when in fact she would have to hike another ten miles up canyon to complete her journey. That bit of information, plus her smile, would have caught any boatman’s attention. Perhaps one was watching as she bent to touch the water.
Abruptly, so the story later went, she slipped or fell into the water. Does it matter? Immediately she was swept downstream. People have slipped into the River before; people have been washed out of boats and picked up downstream. These things happen.
Before being pulled down beneath the water the first time, she screams for help. Already one of the boatmen is cutting loose a raft. They watch her head bob downstream, growing smaller by the second. Another boatman is at the oars of the first boat out. In seconds, he is off and away. He figures he can reach her before anything serious happens. He pulls downstream, bending the oars to ride the current. He looks over his shoulder, trying to keep an eye on her whereabouts. She has disappeared. Then she pops up. If he pulls harder surely he will catch up with her. But she is a hiker, without a lifejacket, not a river runner. He cannot outrace the River this day.
She disappears around the bend in the river. He will not see her again.
Her body will show up in a week, maybe ten days, depending on who you talk to.
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Over the years the figure on the trail has taken up residence in my imagination. Her presence reminds me of one of the shadow figures in the Indonesian art of “wayang kalut,” where puppets perform behind a screen illuminated by back light. She moves silently through my memory amidst a colorful, often noisy parade of river characters. She never speaks, nor does she interact. Of course, the harder I try to banish her from my private movie, the more she insists on showing up, the relative who comes for a week and stays forever.
Like a member of the audience watching the shadow figures of the puppet theater, I can see her form and movement but nothing more. So I must paste her silhouette with bits and pieces of description and narrative as best I can. She remains, however, essentially inscrutable and this, perhaps, is as it should be.
Because of her inscrutability, I have made her my Bearer of Canyon Mystery, the Carrier of the Unknown. In this matter she had no choice. It was chance that we passed one another on the trail that morning. She was simply another hiker. She could have avoided eye-contact; she could have kept her smile to herself, couldn’t she? And so I find myself, at odd moments and in periods of doubt, leaning on my memory of her. She is forever walking the red-dust, shadow-and-light trail in Havasu Canyon, determined to touch the Colorado River, a beatific smile on her face showing the way.

Vince Welch