White-Water Drama: Elisabeth Hyde’s “In the Heart of the Canyon”

By Guest Writer, 9-18-09

In the Heart of the Canyon
By Elisabeth Hyde
Knopf, 336 pages, $22.95

In her latest novel, In the Heart of the Canyon, Colorado-based writer Elisabeth Hyde (The Abortionist’s Daughter) churns out an adventurous narrative that rumbles along like a white-water rapid.  In it, fifteen different people pile into three rubber rafts to run the biggest, most bad-ass river of their lives: the Grand Canyon’s Colorado River.  And for the next thirteen days, their fates are intertwined as they navigate this remote landscape and confront the rocky confines of their personal lives along the way. 

Expert river guide JT Maroney might have shown up at Lee’s Ferry with some idea of what to expect from the days that would follow.  This is his 125th trip through the Grand Canyon, and even though some elements of the journey remain the same each time, he can’t predict the particular quirks that will show up along with his guests who arrive on Day One, with “their skin pale and freshly shaved and smelling of sunscreen.”

The singles are Evelyn, an uptight university professor; and Peter, a twenty-seven-year-old who crushes hopelessly on Dixie, the only female guide.  Dixie Ann Gillis, who sounds a bit like an outdoorsy Daisy Duke, wears short shorts and bares her midriff while wrangling rafts.  A guidance counselor and her overweight teenager Amy have traveled from Mequon, Wisconsin; and the Compsons, a family of four, from Salt Lake City. 

Ruth and Lloyd Frankel are veteran rafters from Illinois, but due to Lloyd’s developing Alzheimer’s, this is likely the inseparable pair’s last big river trip.  Mitchell Boyer-Brandt and his wife Lena are an older couple from Wyoming, with Mitchell taking the role of this trip’s annoying know-it-all. 

As if this host of interesting characters isn’t enough to sustain the book’s plot, Hyde creates suspense in other ways to keep the tension at a page-turning pace.  On the first night, JT finds a stray dog that the rafters adopt as their own, and other disasters such as a festering leg wound, marital tensions, and a teenager’s struggles with obesity threaten to thwart the sense of community that this group is trying to create. 

Hyde does a good job of turning the canyon itself into a character by offering vivid descriptions of this solitary and beautiful landscape.  In the calm night before his guests arrive, for instance, guide JT “settled back and locked his hands behind his head and gazed up at the spattered current of stars above.  A warm breeze fanned his skin, and he picked out constellations: the Big Dipper, Cassiopeia, the busy little Pleiades.” In visceral moments like these, readers will feel as though they, too, are running the Colorado alongside this motley crew of novice and veteran rafters. 

Although the physical difficulties of rafting through the Grand Canyon –sweltering summer heat, wild rapids, and rattlesnake scares—make the dangers of this trip palpable, the emotional terrain that each of these rafters confront is what makes their journey worthwhile.  The Utah couple argues over childrearing and then reconciles some of their longstanding differences.  A wife worries over her aging husband.  The overweight Amy reveals herself in personal journal entries laced throughout the book while her trim mother tries to bridge the gulf that exists between them. 

At the end of the journey, each of these people arrives in a personal place differing from his or her beginnings, and in this way Hyde has successfully shown the effect that total immersion in a place such as the Grand Canyon can have on the body, mind, and soul. 

This book’s author also knows a bit about total immersion in the Grand Canyon, as it was her swim on the Colorado River’s Deubendorff Rapid that inspired her to write In the Heart of the Canyon.  Hyde says that her experience getting “maytagged”—being sucked underwater with the spin force of a washer—exhilarated her as much as anything else up until that point in her life, and she started writing as soon as she was back on land. 

Hyde, the author of four previous novels, was in the middle of writing The Abortionist’s Daughter when she first returned from the Grand Canyon and waited to make it the subject of her next book.  She returned to the canyon as a guide’s assistant for a second trip, which enabled her to continue researching for In the Heart of the Canyon while cooking dinners and hauling baggage and setting up communal toilets. 

Hyde’s personal experience with the subject matter of this book shines through in her treatment of natural landscapes and group dynamics, but no matter how well she sets it up, this book’s surprise ending feels over the top.  What happens downstream doesn’t seem necessary to the book’s conclusion, as so much action and resolution has already occurred. 

Despite an ending that doesn’t quite fit, readers will find themselves still wanting more of this journey when everyone unloads on Day Thirteen at Diamond Creek.  Maybe guide JT, who “didn’t let himself get too sentimental at Diamond Creek,” has the right attitude about these kinds of journeys.  He tells himself that “the river would always be there…that he would always be back,” and I’m sure JT’s kind of thinking has inspired at least one or two out there to see if they can find a place on a Grand Canyon trip next summer. 

Traci J. Macnamara is a freelance writer whose writing has appeared in many magazines, journals and books, including Isotope and Backpacker.  She lives in Vail.