Rush by Phin Johnson: The Shocking Truth Behind the Secret Race Everyone’s Talking About
It is here and now the boy understands what people mean by the power of nature. Articles, TV broadcasts, and radio reports provide images and descriptions but there’s nothing quite like reality. The desert had been a place to play, to squeeze through narrow gaps, scramble up rocks, chase lizards. Yes the boy had been careful before, or at least careful enough to appease his parents, but he still didn’t see the desert as dangerous. But here and now, that changes. The boy is huddled under a small rock ledge a hundred feet up a steep, loose canyon bank. He is shivering as rain and hail intermixed come down but remains smiling, entertained by his parents and his best friend along with his mother. Cold and antsy, he wants to go, growing bored with talking and observing the small brown trickle in the creekbed beneath them. Then he hears the roaring. Two hundred yards ahead, the canyon turns a corner and narrows, the walls grow vertical and become only a few feet apart. The boy knew that he was not to go in there today. There was something with the weather, but he still wanted to. The roaring changes that. It starts dull, just a growl, but quickly grows until it is a train bearing down on his sheltering ledge. Then he sees the water. It explodes around the corner, chocolate-milk brown and frothy, at least six feet high and ten feet across, the front filled with logs and bushes. It is angry, wild and deadly, finally freed from its prior confines. The boy had seen branches caught 30 feet up in other canyons. He had never processed how they got there. He understands now.
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