Breaking Point

and burned skin.
    Farkus entered slowly, tentatively, cautious step by cautious step, until he was in to his knees.
    “Come on in,” Joe said. “It’s great.”
    “I can’t swim.”
    “It isn’t deep enough to drown. We’re both standing.”
    Farkus winced. “Any water is deep enough to drown.” With that, he stepped forward, slipped on a river rock, and flailed his arms and went under. He came up sputtering and cursing several feet downstream.
    —
    T HE THREE OF THEM stood in the river without speaking after that, each with his own thoughts. Joe let his body cool until he had goose bumps on his flesh. He looked straight up at the narrow opening of the canyon as if at another world. It was hell up there.
    Although it was mid-morning, the sky was dark and mottled. Tongues of flame slashed out from both sides of the canyon. Despite how far away they were from the top, ash fell softly around them to be carried downstream.
    Finally, Farkus said, “How long do we stay here before we climb out?”
    “We’re not climbing out,” Joe said. “That fire will be burning all around us for a long time.”
    “Then what do we do?” he said, a high note of panic in his voice. “Do we build a tepee and stay down here?”
    “We could borrow those poles up there,” Butch said as a joke, but Farkus didn’t smile. Joe noted that Butch’s mood had improved markedly since they’d found the water.
    Joe said, “The only thing we can do is go down the river.”
    “Have you ever been down it?” Farkus asked.
    Joe shook his head. The Twelve Sleep Wilderness Area had been so designated because the canyon and the river were nearly impenetrable. There were no roads in and very few trails. It was wild and steep and ancient and not navigable except by adventurers in kayaks in the early runoff season.
    “I’ve always wanted to see it, though,” Joe said.
    “There’s something wrong with you,” Farkus replied.
    Joe grinned. Marybeth had often said the same thing.
    —
    W ITH F ARKUS AND B UTCH clinging to a dry pileup of debris, Joe scouted downriver.
    There wasn’t enough water in the river to swim freely, and the canyon walls were so sheer they couldn’t walk more than a few feet on the dry bank. Going downstream was their only option, but there didn’t seem to be an easy or practical way to do it. Because of the pitch of the riverbed, Joe assumed the river conditions changed around every bend. There would be long, deep pools leading to furious rapids to stretches where it looked like a boulder field that just happened to have a river going through it.
    He stood knee-deep in an eddy with his hands on his hips, shaking his head.
    When he returned to the others and told them what he could see downriver, he stopped in mid-sentence.
    “What?” Farkus said. “What’s wrong?”
    “Nothing’s wrong,” Joe said, studying the debris pileup. For years, trees that had been dislodged upriver had been washed down during flood years and runoff months. The pile they were on was dense with interlocked driftwood that had been washed smooth and was pale white in color. It looked like some kind of boneyard. But simply because the pile was wood, Joe knew, didn’t mean it would float. Most of the lengths, he guessed, were fatally waterlogged.
    Butch seemed to read his mind and swiveled where he sat. He pointed at a broken tree trunk near the top of the pile that was eighteen inches in circumference and eight or nine feet long. It was high enough on the pile, Joe thought, that it might be a recent addition and wouldn’t be heavy with water. It looked stout enough to hold them all, and there were enough nubs on it where branches had once been that could serve as handgrips.
    “That just might be our boat,” Joe said.
    —
    I T TOOK NEARLY a half-hour to free the log from the pile because it was so entangled in the debris, but they finally were able to free it and roll it down the river. The log bobbed in the water and didn’t submerge, and Butch held it in place while Joe and Farkus reached around it and found places to hang on.
    The surface of the log was smooth and slick, the bark blasted off by scouring water, but it was dry and buoyant. On the count of three, they lifted their feet off the riverbed and pushed it out into the deepest part of the river.
    It floated.
    “This might just work if we can keep it pointed downriver,” Joe said. “If we let the back end swing around, we might get hung up on rocks or more debris.