Jen's Legacy.

When the wind died down of an evening, he could hear the river below him, and sometimes saw campfires at a distance where rafters travelled the river in stages.

When he rested, Royce could hear their voices carried on the still air and the sounds of them singing of an evening around their campfires of driftwood or dead timber, reverberating from the canyon walls, temporarily drowning out the steady, though faint noises of the many rapids.

They were far enough away that their noise didn’t bother him as much as it would have done if he were closer. He didn’t want the company of people. He ached for the company of just one person, but she wasn’t here.

He had it better than they did. He could see both the magnificence of the river in all of its detail from up here, and admire the vista surrounding him and out to the farthest purple-grey mountains, losing themselves in the haze of distance.

He could see for forty miles and more, up here in the dry desert air, and watch clouds and rainstorms scudding across the landscape, rarely reaching the ground, carried on channels of air, with the occasional lightning flash, but with nothing to hear, following it. Too far away.

If the evening was overcast and warm, he didn’t bother with his sleeping bag but found a sandy bed in some known and sought-out, sheltered spot, with scratches on some rock surface that he had made to mark his—their—passage, years before, and laid back against a boulder and just day-dreamed, as he looked at his cell phone, scrolling through the pictures and wondering what might have been had Jen survived that plane crash. But she hadn’t. He had. She was with him now, in all but actual physical presence.

At some of the designated lookout points with access from a road, or where a few of the riding adventures; wilderness trekking, were able to take riders from the rim down to the river where they could camp, before coming up again the next day, he could take a break, and buy a satisfying meal to make up for what he didn’t have, and to restock his supplies, but those places were behind him now.

People in those places were friendly to him, seeing a man who loved the countryside enough to walk it as the older pioneers had, and appreciated its wild seclusion as they did, and they were always ready to pass the time of day with snippets of news, or just idle chit chat, or humor, or the weather outlook—always the same up here; ‘dry’, ‘hot,’ but when the tourists began to arrive in their droves in cars and buses, the tenor of the conversation changed to being less friendly. It also became less peaceful for him, and he tended to back off and continue walking.

The native heritage of those around him was sometimes obvious in the facial features, the prominent nose of the Navajo, and sharp eyes that laid a man bare and drilled deep into his soul, finding him lacking in some way—‘not one of ours’—though saying nothing.

He had his course laid out, mostly from point to point on his map which he consulted before he set out, and each evening before the light became too indistinct, and staying close to the canyon rim where he could decide what he’d do for water; always a critical necessity. Rarely, he had to go down to the river and resupply there, then boiled it for tea, or added a couple of water-purification tablets, spending the occasional night by the river exactly as he and Jen had done, and in the same places, and where he could fish, usually without success now, as then.

There were few others like him, choosing such a strenuous course, and none that he had seen so far on this particular stretch.

No one hiked any distance these days. They took plane or helicopter-tours, or drove in, either along a park road or others maintained by the Indian tribes from their reservation land.

He heard them and saw them from time to time, but he was well away from them now. They had nothing in common with him, could not see or feel his pain, though once, he had been one of them; just as happy, and heedless of changes that could creep up out of nowhere so fast on a man, and had torn his life into little pieces and scattered it like paper fragments into the wind along that runway. He’d seen the photographs of that crash, but they never did let him see anything of Jen, and it still bothered him. Not knowing, was more painful than knowing.