"Are we leaving? I heard the helicopter."
Grant nodded. "Yeah. You ready?"
"Yeah. I guess."
Grant turned back to Charlie and shook his hand. "Nice working with you, Charlie. Hopefully we'll run into each other again sometime."
Charlie's lips moved, but he didn't say anything. He looked nervous, but realistically the hard part was behind him. Parker Dam's spillways would be at full capacity for the next sixty days. He'd settle in after a while. He'd have to. Looking at Charlie Jorgensen, Grant realized he kind of liked the guy, in spite of his weirdness.
Grant broke the handshake, patted Charlie on the shoulder to reassure him, then walked under the rotors toward the passenger seat of the helicopter. Right before he opened the door, he turned and pointed to Charlie. Grant motioned a phone at his ear and mouthed the words "call me."
Charlie nodded weakly.
Grant climbed in. Lloyd held out the headphones, which Grant pulled on. He saw that Agent Williams was doing the same.
"Are we waiting for your girl?" It was Lloyd's voice in the headphones.
"Yeah. She'll only be a minute."
They waited without talking. When the door opened and Shauna jumped in, the rotors had already begun to accelerate. She was still attaching her seat belt when the chopper lifted off.
As they rose quickly into the air, Grant noticed the water exiting the five spillways. The aerial view didn't do it justice. You had to be standing right next to it to get the real feeling for how much water was heading down the Colorado River.
Julie was ecstatic. Finally, a crew had arrived to clean the launch ramp. They brought five power washers, and had started scouring back and forth at the top of the ramp. The moss was washing right off, although many of the boaters were now considering that the power washers might have been the wrong approach. It seemed that after being exposed to the dry desert air through the night, then baked in the sun all morning, the moss could almost be swept off the ramp. But with a crew busy cleaning, nobody wanted to throw a wrench into the works for fear the effort would stop.
They had yet to see any equipment arrive that was capable of lifting the boats onto the trailers. The equipment was available in Page, as it was frequently used to move boats around in the repair lots. But the bridge across Glen Canyon was gone. The Crawfords had been surprised to find out that it had collapsed in the flood.
Paul pointed at the team of men power-washing above them on the ramp. "How much longer before you think we can load up?"
Greg shrugged. "It'll be a while." He motioned at the boats farther up the ramp. "We'll have to wait for all these guys to go first."
"Do we have a couple of hours?" Paul asked.
Greg nodded. "Sure. This will take a while. Why?"
Paul pointed in the direction of where the Glen Canyon Dam had been. "I thought maybe we could drive over and check it out. It's only a few miles."
Greg looked up at the men working. "I'd better stay here by the boat, but Julie'll probably want to go." He looked at her.
Julie nodded enthusiastically. She was dying to do something besides wait.
Paul waved at Julie and Erika. "Let's go, then."
A few minutes later they had made the hike up the ramp and climbed into Paul and Erika's SUV. It was a short drive to the highway, but the road was blocked as they neared the dam. Paul parked off the side of the road like many other vehicles, and the three of them jumped out and started walking. As they approached, the canyon opened and they could see more with each step. Another barrier had been set up to prohibit pedestrians. About 40 or 50 people were crowded along the barrier for a look.
Julie's eyes locked onto both ends of where the Glen Canyon Bridge had been the day before. The highway abruptly ended on both sides. It looked like an optical illusion for a road to just end like that.
Paul led them to the far right of the barrier so they could see better around the visitor center, which was partially obscuring their view of the dam. Like Julie had seen the night before, jagged concrete protruded from the sandstone walls where the dam had been. The water had dropped substantially since she and Greg had almost been sucked over the dam. Julie could see that the water flow had also decreased from the night before.
She looked upstream and saw the wet vertical rock canyons. She tried to imagine what Lake Powell must look like upstream. The large bodies of water like Padre Bay must be empty. She couldn't believe it. Lake Powell was gone, replaced by a narrow winding river.
CHAPTER 33
The helicopter followed the Colorado River downstream from the dam as it wound gracefully through jagged rock canyons. The river was lined with mobile homes, cabins, and houses, leaving almost no gaps. The few small spaces were filled with trees and other green vegetation. The river bottoms contrasted dramatically with the dry barren mountains just a hundred feet away.
The increased flow from all five spillways had upset the serenity. Many of the homes that bordered the river were partially underwater. Only a mile downstream from the dam, the river had torn out a row of mobile homes and piled them in a small park. Grant could still see the tops of a playground. From the air it was obvious the water flowed out of its banks, swirling around homes, through back yards, and even down a small street, the road only identifiable by the protruding mailboxes.
Normally the river ran turquoise and clean below the dam, but today was different. Garbage, papers, trashcans, clothes, and whatever else the river had encountered littered the surface of the water. In one place Grant saw something incredibly large rolling in the water downstream briefly before it sunk. Only afterwards did he realize it had been a car, a Volkswagen Beetle. It took a moment for his mind to assimilate it. Farther downstream, he saw two mobile homes in the middle of the river.
Grant saw many residents, standing, huddled together in groups at higher elevations on the shores. They all acted the same, standing stationary like zombies, staring at the destruction of their lives and property. At least they'd had the presence to hike a few feet up the hill and save themselves.
Grant heard a scream in his headphones.
"It's a body!" Shauna said, pointing ahead to the left of the chopper.
The corpse floated face down still fully clothed. The long-sleeved flannel shirt and the worn denims were still identifiable. The hair, which was either white, or more likely gray, gave Grant the impression that the unlucky victim was an old man.
Grant knew there were two types of drowning cases. One group resisted taking the water into their lungs until the very end, the carbon dioxide building up and increasing their panic level until they finally lost consciousness. When divers found this type of body, they were tense with eyes wide open and teeth clenched. The other type sucked in the water and tried to breath it. In these cases the panic was replaced with a calmness or state of well-being right before they died. These bodies were found relaxed with eyes closed, and sometimes with smiles on their faces.
Grant had read a study on the two types of drowning, where the hypothesis was verified by interviewing survivors, people who had drowned and were later revived. The ones that respired the water described the calmness that followed. More than one had used the words "this isn't that bad" in their descriptions.
Hopefully the old man floating face down on the Colorado River had ultimately breathed in the water. The fact that he was still floating was not a good sign. It could mean there was still air in his lungs.