ERIC
It's mid-afternoon on a Thursday in early July, day one of my Grand Canyon Gay Rafting Adventure, and a long day it's been. Yesterday Tom welcomed us individually to the hotel in Vegas then hosted an evening meet-and-greet in the lounge. Tom is tour director, openly gay, about fifty, moderately overweight, friendly, soft-spoken and kind, his psoriasis partially hidden by long fine hair the color of tarnished bronze.
As we ate pizza and drank beer at our private table in back, near the pool, Tom asked us to introduce ourselves and explain why we'd signed up for this expedition. I forgot names as soon as they were spoken, absorbing instead the voices and faces of the other guys I'd be with for the next eight days.
When it was my turn, I withheld my primary motive, that in addition to seeing the Grand Canyon from the river and making new friends, I'm also hoping for raw sexual experience. (Between you and me, I've embraced my original attraction to guys for only the past few years, and gay men where I live, in a small coastal town in South Carolina, are hard to come by. Occasionally I get hard and come by myself.)
We all turned in early for today's 4 a.m. wake-up call, and by five like zombies we'd loaded our duffels into the belly of the bus, which was too large for so few guys. Most of us slept on the long drive northeast to the Utah-Arizona line, where we stopped at an isolated country store to stretch our legs, fill our lungs with dry piney air, take a leak, buy ice cream and pick up Cliff.
He stood at the front of the bus facing us to introduce himself, our gay skipper and Canyon guide. Now we were fully alert: Cliff is a handsome young buck, mid-thirties, who runs the river several times each summer then skis Aspen all winter. He has thinning flaxen hair, bright blue Scandinavian eyes and the body of a rock climber, which is how he got his nickname. Surely I wasn't the only passenger imagining him naked and fully erect.
For the next thirty minutes, Cliff walked down the aisle shaking hands and chatting with each of us, charming me out of my skin while creating professional distance between us. Finally, in a barren desert parking lot at Lee's Ferry the bus stopped beside the Colorado River where we transferred the contents of our duffels into the large dry bags Cliff provided.
Each man carried his gear down to the boat ramp where our guide's unpaid "swamper" smiled shaking hands before grabbing each dry bag. He stacked and tied the bags down across the middle of the thirty-seven-foot motorized raft outfitted with huge twin pontoons left over from World War II. Then Cliff called us closer into a semi-circle for an orientation session, but first introduced Eric, a recent graduate of Arizona State. We applauded. Eric demurred admitting he still hadn't found a real job. "What, this isn't real?" Cliff asked. "A job that pays real money," Eric corrected himself, laughing.
Disarmingly he added that he's straight, but gay-friendly, and our good natured booing and hissing made him laugh out loud again. He has cropped brown hair like an early British rocker, and doesn't seem to realize that, like Cliff, he's also very attractive: five-ten, distance-runner thin, perhaps a bit nervous and shy amid so much errant testosterone.
Indeed, Cliff sounded like everyone's older sister: "wear your life preservers at all times on the raft; drink so much water your urine runs clear, and urinate only into the river or one of the little plastic buckets I'll distribute at each campsite then empty your little plastic bucket into the river; if you need to piss from the raft, let me or Eric guide you into the engine well, hang on to something beside your penis to maintain your balance and don't piss all over the engine; also, don't push yourself too hard in this harsh climate; again, drink so much water your urine runs clear, 'cause if you start bitching, that means you're dehydrated, and nobody likes a bitch; always work as a team unloading and loading the raft for everyone's benefit; take turns carrying the 'honey pot' and use as little toilet paper as possible so we don't run out."
"And guys," Cliff continued, "as the river here is only forty-seven degrees, please don't fall in; but, if anyone does fall in, please don't laugh at his shrunken little cock when we pull him out, 'cause it could happen to you." We were laughing now. "Seriously," Cliff concluded, "welcome to the unbelievable Grand Canyon and have a fucking grand time!"
We applauded and cheered our guide and blushing swamper. Donning bright red life preservers, we hoisted ourselves up onto the raft and tentatively settled into three rows across the aluminum deck. Here we were, at the entrance to the Grand Canyon innocently pushing off from Lee's Ferry into the blue-green Colorado River. Unreal!
Measurable in hundreds of feet, the low canyon walls on both sides comprised multiple stacked layers of burnt-orange and rusty sandstone. Puffy white clouds in the cobalt Arizona sky reflected softly in the benign river. The raft's engine was barely audible. At the helm behind us Cliff and Eric were smiling. Our journey had begun.
But after only forty-five minutes Cliff brought us to shore for a lunch break, and things finally got interesting. We unloaded one of the large, heavy, unfolding aluminum tables on which guide and swamper prepared sandwiches. The rest of us stood around on the narrow sandbar talking, watching the river flow past when suddenly from the back of the pack Aussie bolted past us naked diving bare-assed into the river, surfacing breathlessly.
"Fuck!" he shouted, "blocks of ice, mates!" And mindful of Cliff's instructions, we only smiled at Aussie's anatomy as he ran up hugging himself from the river to higher ground shivering right beside me. Instinctively I reached down discreetly patting his chilled buttocks, but he only shuddered turning away. About forty, Aussie looks and acts somewhat younger. He's tan all over, average height with taut, sculpted muscles. He never combs his Just-For-Men dark brown hair. His long eyelashes look almost feminine when he smiles down self-consciously. I love his down-under accent.
Inspired by his fearless example, I turned to Tex-Mex asking if he'd take the plunge with me. Short, barrel-chested and hairy, the young teacher from El Paso shrugged saying what the hell. We both stepped out of our bathing suits, and Aussie joined our screaming charge back into the frigid river, all three of us surfacing instantly, hooting, scrambling back to shore, kicking water, laughing breathlessly, glancing down at the diminished sources of everyone's polite amusement.
Liberated, heroic, standing naked on display among the others, we three caught our breath as the warm desert air dried us in minutes. We pulled bathing suits back on to eat lunch, then everyone reloaded the raft and we returned to the river rippling and lapping over long shallow diagonal riffles. An hour later we pulled ashore to climb rocks up to a one-thousand-year-old Indian dwelling preserved on a plateau. When I pointed my camera at a boulder scratched with pictographs, Aussie suddenly appeared in the background smiling in my direction then just as quickly ducked out of the photo.
Now we've set up our first campsite below Badger Creek Rapids. All nine of us passengers and Tom are sitting in a cozy circle on those low folding beach chairs almost impossible to get up out of. Cold beer is gradually reviving us as Cliff and Eric begin preparing dinner in their "kitchen," both large folding aluminum tables placed perpendicular to each other, pots and pans stacked beneath and propane stove off to the side. A metal bin at the bottom of the raft will keep our food fresh and our beer cold for the next week.
We're all tired but well satisfied, bantering, wisecracking, laughing or, like me, just spacing out as I ponder an odd perception: after being on the raft for only a couple of hours today, the opposite shore seems to be slowly moving back upriver. (At sixty-four I'm apparently the oldest guy on this expedition and the only one taking notes, to shore up a faulty memory.)
Behind our campsite, a rocky plain softened by mesquite and coyote willow slopes up to a vertical wall already darkened by shadow. Across the choppy green river, we face a midrise sandstone cliff the color and texture of rare roast beef. A canyon wren, invisible, calls in plaintive notes descending. Is she lonely in the fading sunlight? Hot wind blows down from either side of the canyon, fine sand coating us, and everything. Why bathe? We might as well be camping in a brick oven.
After an early dinner, we retreat to the metal cots we'd set up after landing here. The cots are scattered across the campsite as if we all want some privacy, but not too much. (Cliff and Eric sleep on the raft.) Longing for companionship I lie back on my cot closest to the river, feeling conspicuous in black Polo briefs, listening to guys walk back and forth behind me.
"Love your undies, mate!" Aussie calls jogging past. Smiling to myself, I only raise one hand waving the flirt away. The sun sets prematurely, a horizontal shadow creeping slowly up the opposite cliff. Though exhausted I'm kept awake by small bats swirling among the night's early stars in the azure sky.
By day three I understand that the river and canyon change mile by mile as does my experience here. Yesterday, after bucking through steeper rapids, we stopped to inspect Redwall Cavern. From a distance it looked like a wide low gash in the pinkish-orange sandstone at a bend in the river, but as we approached shore and beached the raft, we all marveled at the cavern's immensity -- several thousand natives easily could have gathered underneath.
Everyone drifted toward the darker back of the cave until we could actually reach up and touch its cool ceiling. Standing beside Aussie I also placed my hand lightly around his waist, but he wordlessly stepped away. Had I been too forward? Am I trying too hard, hoping for too much? Maybe not: at our lunch stop an hour later, things again got interesting.
We pulled up on a large sandbar with a small hill in the middle. Guys milled around under the hot sun directly overhead, pissing in the river, sitting in the dappled shade of hackberry trees as Cliff and Eric fixed ham and cheese sandwiches. Behind me Ricardo and Carey trudged up the sandy hill in their bikinis, and I instinctively knew what I'd find if I followed.
Ricardo is a tall, handsome, Cuban-born dentist from Miami, with dark curly hair and the physique of an Olympic swimmer: wide shoulders, tapered back, thin waist and perfect little butt. Like me he's something of a show-off. He knows he's gorgeous (unlike me), but he also happens to be very engaging.
