Down the Great Unknown by Edward Dolnick Page B

that Sumner would be able to maneuver her more easily, and then lined her past the upper rapid. Then it was up to Sumner. He managed to cut a diagonal path to the island. “Right skillfully he plies the oars,” Powell wrote, “and a few strokes set him on the island at the proper point.” Now the trick would be to get back across a river that was running “with the speed of a racehorse” while carrying three extra passengers and without getting swept into the rapid.
    Sumner and the other men dragged the boat upstream and then waded out with it as far as they could into the river. Three of them clambered aboard while the fourth stood perched on a rock, holding Emma ready. Then he pushed the boat’s nose into the current and flung himself aboard. Fearful that a false stroke meant “certain destruction,” Sumner instructed his passengers to lie flat on the bottom of the boat while he alone manned the oars. At one point, he struck a rock and the boat tipped up at a forty-five-degree angle, but it slid safely off. Pulled downstream by the current, Sumner and his three beat-up passengers made it back to shore a scant twenty-five yards above a madhouse of waves and foam. “We are as glad to shake hands with them,” Powell wrote, “as though they had been on a voyage around the world, and wrecked on a distant coast.”
    It had nearly been a calamity. Sumner was rarely one to exaggerate. (He disposed of his role in the rescue in a single sentence, in the third-person voice he used whenever he had pulled off anything especially difficult. “The trapper,” he wrote, “crossed over and brought them safely to shore on the east side.”) But not even he could deny the narrowness of the three men’s escape. Seneca Howland, Oramel’s nearly silent younger brother, had been the last to leap to the safety of the sandbar from the wreckage the men had ridden through the waves. “Had he stayed aboard another second,” Sumner wrote, “we would have lost as good and true a man as can be found in any place.”
    In another thirty feet, Sumner continued, “nothing could have saved them, as the river was turned into a perfect hell of waters that nothing could enter and live.” Certainly not the No Name . “The boat drifted into it and was instantly smashed to pieces,” Sumner wrote. “In half a second there was nothing but a dense foam, with a cloud of spray above it, to mark the spot.”
    After the rescue came the recriminations. What had gone wrong? First of all, the boatmen of the No Name had failed to allow for the speed and power of the current. On the first day of the trip, by this point almost an ancient memory, Hall and Hawkins had tried pulling to shore but started too late and missed the campsite by four hundred yards. It had been an embarrassing but harmless mistake, as if a skier on a slope too difficult for him had tried to pull to the side to stop but had badly overshot his destination. Now the Howlands and Goodman had made the same mistake, this time with a hungry rapid waiting to gnaw their bones.
    On a big river, things can go bad in a hurry; to react, rather than to anticipate, is almost always to respond too late. And the river was wild as well as swift. The rapids had come in such quick succession, Oramel Howland wrote, that there was no time to bail. At precisely the moment that quick responses were vital, the No Name had “so much water aboard,” Howland recalled, “as to make her nearly or quite unmanageable.” Howland would have been in grave difficulty even without a wave or two in his boat. With that extra weight, he had no chance. For a driver skidding across our demonic highway, it would be as if the power steering chose that moment to quit working.
    But why was the No Name caught by surprise? Powell’s plan, after all, called for him to precede the slower boats and signal them about what lay