A Coot Floats Alongside The Steamboat
- Story Storage
- Apr 25
- 6 min read
A creative nonfiction travelogue
Despite the long highway up towards Tortilla Flat, the trip only starts when our car gets past Lost Dutchman, the state park. From that point north, there’s no illusion about exactly how wide the dirt Apache Trail is or how steep its drops are. Fifteen hundred feet from the top to the water. It’s a busy, early spring weekend. Two-car traffic is horrid and slow on a one-and-a-half-car road that bends one way, then the other, hugging the cliffside up to the lake. My fingers find a rattling capsule of anti-nausea pills from my pocket. I hold tight to my seatbelt with my other hand. The car passes a saguaro, standing but rotted to the spine, on our way into the dirt parking lot above the dock. No signal on the radio. We have about ninety minutes before dinner is served. Dinner is on a boat.
I am both hungry and thoroughly, desperately, not-hungry.
My dad and I get out of the car to meet up with my aunt and uncle, and my cousin and his wife and baby girl. We look down at our lake in the middle of a desert. A dead, hollow saguaro stands rotted to the spine. We stop at the dirt lot portables before we go down to the marina dock. It is not worth trying to fight with everyone else once the boat is underway. There’s also a fake boat wheel anchored into the ground for the tourist photo-op. We take the opportunity.
The real steamboat sits, tan hull with red trim. It’s a hot afternoon, but even still, the cold lake water is not inviting. There is already a long line on the dock waiting to board, disconnected from a longer line towards a desk to cash in “Steamboat Twilight Dinner Cruise” tickets we do not have yet. We do have a cooler of bottled water, which we open for the desk clerk to check as we buy tickets. No food allowed because dinner is served on the boat. When we have an assigned table, we join up with the dock snowbirds, mostly men with gray beards and sunglasses and women in wide-brimmed hats.
Ruddy greenish brown lake water pulls slow under the boat. There, close to the dock, a coot floats along. It’s a black waterbird, like a small duck. Most of the fish in the lake are largemouth bass, too big for a coot-sized bird, an appetizing size for a great blue heron that skirts along the surface in a flash. As we get on the boat, the giant wall-ish canyon surrounds us on every side except where the Salt River stretches further north. The coot does not wait for us to board. Neither do the few sunburned paddleboarders pushing past the dock, who thought they would get a cool March weekend out on the water but instead get clear, sweaty sunshine.
Once the boat finally starts moving past the fishy smell at the dock, we sit down. A dozen folding tables with black tablecloths line the inside of the boat. There are about that many on the upper deck, too, but I never see them. The small pitcher of ice water at each table is free and a beer cooler is seven dollars, so we stick with the ice water. It settles my stomach a little. I’m grateful for the ice, too, because I’m already sweating. Thirty minutes until dinner is served. A mountain goat skull with great curly horns hangs on the wall with the curving stairs up to the upper deck just outside. If the skull is fake, it is a good replica.
Now that we are moving, I can see the canyon itself a little better. The sheer, texture-less rock breaks up into small caves and corners before dropping down again, then slowing down gently enough for small green bushes to lay in the shade before the canyon falls back down into the river. Jetskiis approach from behind and disappear past the steamboat’s bow. Their wake doesn’t reach the boat. The captain explains over the intercom that the Salt River carved this canyon, much like but smaller than the Colorado on the Grand Canyon. Besides the occasional fish, small patches of burnt firewood and other trash litter the surface of the river. Yellow blooming trees, apparently palo verde and mesquite, also shake their leaves onto the water near the bank.
A kid leaning onto one of the windows claims to see the head and horns of a desert bighorn sheep peeking out from the canyon wall. Other families are similarly restless for the animals, when we see them. I do not turn my head quick enough to see it. Part of me is glad for not getting the whiplash.
Dinner. It smells wonderful and looks even better. Tri-tip and chicken thigh. Mashed potatoes and gravy and green beans. Side salad and biscuit. I want to eat, because we waited in line again just like with boarding, but my face is the color of a palo verde. I try to look out the window and not think about the food. Wake splashes back again the boat. I have half a mind to jump out of the boat, escape the food entirely, turn around and float back along the river with a stolen life jacket, dump the shoes that would inevitably drag me slower, until I get back to the dock. My dad would joke that he approves of this stunt only when I have no serious chance to actually do it.
The food is good. Anywhere else, I would say it is only okay. I have confidence that the food was not cooked any time lately, as in, near the time the steamboat started its engine for the evening. Kept warm, certainly. Prepared professionally, yes. In the same way that the lemonade at Phantom Ranch, the campsite at the bottom of the Grand Canyon, has the best lemonade in the world because by the time you drink it, you’ve had a muscle-gelatinizing hike down there and anything that isn’t stale, warm water from a bladder you’ve carried in your backpack for the past few days is a divine blessing, in this same way on this pretty but agonizingly hot spring afternoon out on the open river, steak that isn’t too chewy and mashed potatoes that aren’t too grainy and a side salad that looks green is good.
The little forkfuls that I nibble on, anyway.
Sunset turns the canyon gold and paints the clouds orange even as the sky gets bluer, darker. The canyon rocks turn into great big shadows. Some kayakers are on their way in for the evening. Gentle jazz music plays over the speakers. We are still on the water. But the tour is really over before we get back to the dock. Everyone is tired from the long afternoon in the sun and the food, even though we’ve been out for about two hours.
I smell popcorn from an old popcorn machine hidden away on the other side of a small bar. I don’t even visit the bar. Beyond the fact that it’s Lent, knowing that there is still the trip back into the dock and then a drive up a canyon coming soon, it’s just not worth it. My stomach can only take so much.
For dessert, everyone gets a small plate with a half-frozen slice of New York cheesecake and caramel sauce. If ever there was a time for sin and a sin for inviting, this is it. I feel my throat pulse. This will be a long drive back home. I only eat two slices. In between, I take another anti-nausea pill. Side effects include drowsiness. I will be lucky and sleep all the way back home.
The silhouette of a mountain goat munches on dry brambles up at the top of the canyon. My dad and I take some pictures. The day is done. In short, I survived.
Comments