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THE TIME I WAS BURNED BY LAVA
by Jim Snyder

Editors note: This is an account from Jim's squirt boat trip down the Grand Canyon in November of 1983

"Lava Falls" even sounds hot. It can burn anybody, but is particularly searing to those who ask for it. It exists as a riot of frenzied water, carniverous to the ultimate, deep beyond reckoning. Having the threads of your line unravel there can be as much fun as crawling around on the freeway in a straightjacket. What follows is my account of the one time I nearly gave it my all.

We approached this legend one beautiful sunny morning. As I climbed the scouting rocks on river right, my brother Jeff was preparing for his second run. The Colorado was running about 27,000 cfs and there was a huge hole at the top center of the rapid. The main portion of this hole was a monsterous pourover into an inhospitable holocaust of hydraulogy. As it extended towards river right it mellowed out into a twelve foot mountain of foam. There was a large gap to its right but nearly all this water rolled into a six or seven foot tube-like diagonal breaking wave. This was absolutely an inversion conversion, slam dunk into the turbo zone. I considered it a lesser option. In the distant horizon, just off the right shore, lurked a basalt black guardian of the underworld that would accept any form of ticket. It was all it could do to hold back a football field full of pulsing eddy power. A freight train of liquid madness rocketed past it into an insane war of one world which was beyond any concievable limit of torque. And then things cooled out for a while.

Jeff knew full well what he wanted to do. He figured bliss lay hidden in the inner recesses of the first monument to the fun god. He vanished with a calm abandon into the bubbly abundance of the wave-like section of the first hole. Several seconds later, he emerged upright from its downstream side about fifty feet to the right of where he first faded away. He ponderously paddled back to a line which circumvented the swirl-o-gram waiting as the last station on the ride. He missed the whirlpools by at least three feet. I was sure he was flirting too close with those dangerously abysmal suckholes. "That's exactly where I don't want to be", I said, voicing my reservations. He was too near to crossing the fine line between fun and the gun. I was going to play it safe, for this first run, and make sure I cleared well to the left of the jaws of death gnashing away at the bottom right. I knew what I wanted to do; it was so simple; stay smart, stay safe, stay strong and healthy, have fun, and stay away from trouble. Simple happens to be inversely proportional to easy.

I was abducted from reality in the same neighborhood that my brother had disappeared. My captors led me swiftly away to break my brain with shock therapy. I'm talking about major voltage of direct current getting loose in the tub; the kind of stuff your mother warned you about. Cloaked in fountainous foam, I reached tenatively for a low brace. I wanted to secure some stability for my exit. A strong forward stroke would've worked better. I cascaded down the back of the first dragon begging for my low brace to hold. It held all the way to the next machine. It put me in a weird situation. I froze in time as the world spun wickedly around my ears. Everybody else thought I did a complete barrel roll around the inside of the tube. My low brace was still there but I think some bad fish was gnawing on it because it wouldn't help at all. I remembered the whirlpool wildness waiting and wanted to at least have a chance to avoid it, so I opted for a quick roll. I rolled up instantly and just in time to get off two last strokes before it happened.

I fell over the shoulder of the guardian rock close enough to touch its crest with my paddle, as it was just washing over with enough water to let me by. I dropped eight feet over its backside and smacked into the eddy so hard I could hear my chest impact the green water. This tilted my boat at an angle where the falls of the eddy wall grabbed my stern and started piledriving me to oblivion. I could feel the underside of the eddy as I was attaining terminal velocity. I realized I was low on air and I was heading to a place where it was mighty scarce- the very bottom of the deepest ditch on the continent. My perdicament was bigger than life. It wasn't a dream. I was screaming towards sure death with my ability to hold my breath as my only escape. I've never been very good at holding my breath, especially under stress. My boat finally leveled out underwater and the real violence began as I was mashed between watery hands. Lava and I were about to redefine "crash and burn". My glasses were vibrating; suspended in currents which were trying to rip them off of my face. They were flapping around an inch or so away from my face so excitedly that my plastic nose piece was ripped off. My lifejacket unzipped at some point and my helmet was trying to leave so bad the chin strap was digging into my throat. I could feel the blades of my paddle flexing as I was mauled like a leaf in a tornado. I was so deep underwater there was a tremendous pressure on my ears which was dwarfed by the explosion of gnarl ripping me around like a rag doll. I gritted my teeth with sheer determination to just survive. I became aware that I was at the limit of my breath-holding abilities and still super deep under water- at least fifteen feet. I wanted out real bad. I contemplated getting out of my boat. The river howled with furious laughter. "Please do!" it said, "Which way would you like to swim and how hard?". I decide to stay with my boat for a while and see which way it wanted to go. It ocurred to me, then, that my boat knew a lot more about floating than I did. The torment was unrelenting. After being soundly thrashed by the upper portion of the rapid I was now spending the better part of a minute getting hammered like a square peg. I was crushed, chewed, gyrated, jammed, and basically put around badly. I wanted my mommy. This was truly profound thumpage. My boat finally shot through the surface into wonderful air. I had a lot of experience with whirlpools by then, from extensive training at "The Halls of Karma" on the New River. I knew it would be foolish to try to roll and breath; whirlpools never just leave you alone. True to form, I was completely engulfed in the encore performance of this gobbler. The second dose of humble was much harder to take. I was very disoriented and started to suspect that I was trapped in a hole-like structure at the upstream end of the eddy. The pressures were even more intense. I wanted to throw up but wanted to leave a pretty corpse too; what a dilema. My skirt finally popped and I really started to get depressed. It was time to quit. My boat surfaced level and upright with a perfect angle to exit the eddy and head for the left shore. The ordeal had paralyzed my chest muscles and I couldn't breath at all, even though I was in desperate need. I was crossing the river and trying to coax my chest into little baby breaths when I noticed I was heading for another eddy line. My boat was full of water and I still didn't have a decent breath. I felt a heavy mystery was at hand. If my boat sank, and it was already two feet under, I would not be able to endure another spin cycle. I would have to swim and I didn't have the energy or breath to survive something like that; I just didn't. I hated realizing that I may have survived the major Maytag to be finally killed by its little sister. My only glimmer of hope was to attain enough momentum to raise my bow to where it would present a climbing angle to the eddy currents and perhaps rise enough to stay near the surface. It worked. Boy, was I relieved.

Our celebration beer tasted great. I was wearing a smile a year long and Mississippi wide. No one knew what I had been through, except myself. It was indescribable and I didn't even want to try. The scariest part of the whole trip was this strange feeling that overtook me in the following hours. I had attained a Jeff-like awareness. If that's as bad as it gets- it's not so bad. What could get me worse than that. If I had survived that, I might be impervious, or invulnerable, or indestructable, or even immortal, or incoherrant, or something like that. I was ready to take on a tiger. I had been to the edge and held back from falling off. All that tooth gritting had surely sharpened them. I could probably even do it again; but hopefully not in this lifetime.

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