Like any animal, creature, deity

From September 7-27 my parents were rafting the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon. I got a postcard from a mule on the 13th and other than a few texts from a strange alien number, I didn’t hear from them. I could only check the weather, pray to the river gods and hope for the best. Before they left they sent me these pictures. The mouth of the canyon they were going to enter. A datura flower. The water still before the sunlight breached the red walls.
It was strange not hearing from here for 3 weeks. In that time, we got a kitty and let it go. Pat got a job. I made a few friends. Went to baseball games. Found new restaurants. Fought. Made up. Things like life. But things she’s usually somewhat a part of (not the fighting/making up parts).
When I did finally hear from her, she told me one of their rafting friends broke 13 ribs, a femur, a hip and had to be helicoptered out of the canyon. She told me he sat low in the the front of an experienced rafter’s boat, got hit by a lateral wave and it shot him in the water between a rock and a thousand pound raft. He’s OK, but will need pretty extensive physical therapy. That same rapid punctured a hole through the tube of my parent’s boat. I don’t know if you’ve ever felt a rafting tube, but there are 2. An outer like a thick callus and an inner softer one. The rock punctured all the way through those layers like a stab wound. They had to patch it 4 times. 2 on the outer tube and 2 on the inner tube. But their boat never flipped. She said she swam once and my step-dad swam once, but they never flipped. This was their first big river, taking the oars themselves and powering through. She said before they left that she was nervous to row this monster and I told her (the expert that I am…) that she was not a wild rower, that she could read the water with the best of them, that rowing was about respect and the minute you lose respect for the river she’ll turn you into a rag or worse. But there are times, even those who respect her get hurt and for those times we are reminded that like any animal, creature, deity – she is wild.