“This is amazing!” I repeated all week.
Back in August, I decided to check off an item on my bucket list so exotic, it was a little unbelievable — I signed up for a six-day, 188-mile raft float down the rapids of the Colorado River, in the Grand Canyon. “Could be just an expensive ticket to Water World,” my friend warned. He was wrong.
We camped in cathedrals of rock and water, hiked up to billion-year gaps in the rock record, stared at canyon walls that stretched farther than we could see and up at the deep sky full of stars or lightning up the canyon, jumped into waterfalls, scrambled up precipitous trails, gratefully slept lulled by the nearby rushing water, and arose into sunrise. Eventually, one of the dry-humored Brits on the trip suggested that I could say “This is fantastic!” sometimes, but it never took. Amazing it was.
And there were the rapids of course, our sizable J-rigs plowing into walls of silt-laden, blessedly cool water slamming past and washing through us and everything we’d brought. I rode in the front on the first day, taking the full force of the water; but when I felt my fingers starting to loosen inadvertently, trying to hold onto the grab ropes, in what the guides described laughingly as “riffles,” I realized I was out of my depth, flatwater girl that I am. After that I spent a lot of time in the “chicken seat,” seeing all the rapids, but getting splashed by only the largest ones — oh yeah, Lava Falls still washed over me.
But the four girls, aged from 13 to 17, were the stars. I taught that age group, middle and high school, for a couple of decades, and I thought I knew them. In fact, I told one of the other adults, “girls that age don’t really get into dirt” early in the trip. He looked at me as if he thought I was a little crazy; it turned out he was father to two of them. And boy was I wrong!
The girls slithered up the slipperiest rocks in Elves Chasm to jump into the pool beneath. From the first day, they washed the decks down with bucketfuls of river water, bouncing sure-footed on surfaces that I still crawled on five days later. They were kind, friendly and respectful, finding my pair of lost sunglasses and singing along as I taught them all the words to “America the Beautiful” on talent night — after they showed they could limbo too! They all rode up front on the whole trip, of course, and the 13-year-old set up her family’s tent. Two were sailing instructors, one was planning to go to med school and move to a Spanish-speaking country — and once we’d had the conversation where she indicated her calculus class was kind of easy, and admitted her Boston rowing team had a winning record, I was convinced that this girl will.
The Taliban would never approve.
I grew up camping. My father made me help as he set up the family tent when I was 5; when I turned 18, my parents paid for an Outward Bound course that still, 50 years later, reminds me that, as Thoreau wrote, “In wildness is the preservation of the world.” As my teaching experience signified, not all girls are so lucky; despite that, as the mother of two sons, I’ve at times grown a little impatient with the emphasis on helping young women be comfortable in the wilderness that is so evident in current outdoor journalism. What about the boys, I’ve thought.
But that morning’s news — that the Taliban is prohibiting Afghan women from even visiting the country’s national parks — woke me to reality. The stunningly competent, adventurous, enthusiastic, joyful girls I met in the Grand Canyon are lucky, yes. But girls all over the planet, whatever their economic status, whatever language they speak, should be able to experience the rigors and wonders of the natural world.
And luck should have nothing to do with it.
Eva Syrovy was one of the 2010 class of Colorado Voices. An immigrant from Czechia, she is the mother of two sons, a retired teacher, and owner and resident of a 120-year-old house on Colorado Springs’ west side.
