Rapid Descent. Gwen Hunter

of food and a huge foam cup of sweet tea. “Sit and eat. You look like shit,” he said.

      Nell choked in laughter with the same despairing tone her voice had held all day. She knew she sounded broken. Shattered. And that wasn’t fair to the people around her. They were fighting for Joe. If they found him, injured, in the most dangerous place possible, they would risk life and limb to save him. She owed it to them to be there for them tonight.

      She took a deep, steadying breath and drank a long draft of tea. It fell down her esophagus, cold and sweet. Hunger stirred, and her mouth watered at the scent of KFC. She took another breath, feeling it fill her lungs. The way she filled her lungs before a challenging run on a class IV and V river. Tears wanted to fall and she forced them down. Not tonight. Not in front of these people, her friends.

      Claire brought her a folding chair from storage in the RV undercarriage, and Mike placed it upwind of the fire. Turtle Tom put a log beside her and sat close, silent, eating. Harvey and RiverAnn sat across the fire, touching often. Stewart and Hamp, his Furman U. hat glowing in the firelight, sat near the keg. Natch.

      Someone brought out a guitar and several people started setting up tents. As on many such SARs, they were going to spend the night on the river.

      A woman Nell didn’t know brought her a sliver of coated, waterproofed neoprene. “It’s from your strainer,” she said, putting the two inch by quarter inch strip into Nell’s palm. Nell recognized the scrap from her dry suit and closed her fingers on it. She thanked the woman, blinking away tears. The guitarist started playing an old Doobie Brothers song. The smell of beer wafted on the air. In the background, the auxiliary-support women cleaned up the KFC boxes and closed the van, the doors loud in the night. The engine started and the van pulled out, lights bouncing into the trees, crawling the treacherous hill up out of the river gorge.

      Dark night fell and bright stars filled the sky between trees overhead. Two owls hooted back and forth. Sporadic conversation around the fire hit on politics and religion without creating a ruckus, then moved on to a fantasy series someone was reading. Eventually the talk turned to the searchers’ day, of what went wrong, of who had to swim because they couldn’t do an Eskimo roll, of the big water and the difficulty in taking the gnarly drops, of who built an altar of stones in Joe’s honor, of who had a new boat and how it reacted to the water. Of…of everything. The voices ran together in a smoky haze. Nell smelled marijuana, cigarettes, beer and chicken, and heard laughter and the occasional song and the rarer sound of two lovers in the night.