Now, down here at Lee's Ferry, all the rafts were snubbed up to the shore, ready to go. Trey really would rather have had Al running the recording raft, but he kept his reservations to himself; everyone else seemed confident that Michelle would do just fine with it. Back in Flagstaff, Al may have picked up some of Trey's reservations, though.

Michelle may have been an experienced boatman, but she sure didn't look like it. Trey had no problems with Crystal and Scooter running rafts; they were strong and rough, and you could pretty well look at them and see that they knew what they were doing. Even Karin, though the least experienced of the boatmen, had a quiet wisdom and confidence about her that was reassuring. But Michelle didn't have any of that in her image or projected demeanor and she knew it, which is why she refused to be a trip leader. The slender little blonde had a look and a build and an attitude about her that said she really should be in her high school cheerleading uniform or babbling about boys on the telephone. When Trey first met her at Pipe Creek the trip before, he'd guessed her to be about seventeen. She looked and acted like a typical teenage valley girl airhead, and the fact that she had braces and a serious bubble gum addiction problem didn't make her look any more competent.

But, the fact of the matter was that Michelle had run the Grand Canyon as a boatman even more than Scooter or Crystal, more than anyone else in the company except Al himself! Her parents had both been boatmen for Canyon Tours years before, and she'd made her first trip as a trainee swamper at the age of fifteen -- ten years before!

The day was heating up, now; the sun was getting higher in the sky. Crystal glanced at it for a moment -- she never wore a watch -- and commented, "Should be a while yet before they get here."

Trey sat back against the raft tube and said, "This group is coming in from Vegas, right?"

"Yeah," Crystal nodded. "It's a little easier on bus travel that way. We ran the last group out of Phoenix because we had several people coming out of there, and Jeff could pick them up with the crew bus and save a few bucks that way. You about ready, Trey?"

"I guess," he said. "Can't think of anything I've missed, but if I've missed anything important we could be screwed."

"Well, for practical purposes we are already," Crystal told him. "We couldn't get anything from Flag now." She smiled, and said. "One winter, I worked for a couple who runs dogsleds in the Iditarod. Josh and Tiffany -- Myleigh knows them -- they live up in Spearfish Lake. Tiffany's dad told me one time that the first year they did it, they got the truck all loaded up to head for Alaska, and Josh got out on the road. Ten minutes after he left, they discovered that he hadn't loaded up the dogsleds."

They all laughed at that. "Just a minor item," Trey grinned.

"Yeah," Crystal said. "Mike had to hop in his car and go chase Josh down. But you know, I never, ever start on one of these trips without thinking about that. You always get a little nervous right about now. Even Dad does, after all these years."

"I confess, I have been worried to some degree," Myleigh said. "I mean, of course we have just finished a trip, so I should know what to expect, and while I have some concerns, I feel this group is capable of handling them. But I admit to other worries."

"Blue Beauty?" Trey asked. "She's as safe as we can make her under the circumstances."

"It'll have to do," Crystal said. "Michelle, you know what I told you about that."

"I told you, Crystal," Michelle pouted. "Nothing's going to happen."

"It better damn well not," Crystal grinned. "I told you I wouldn't kill you if anything happens to that harp."

"No," Michelle grinned. "What you said is that you'd stake me out naked somewhere and leave me to let the ants and the sun do it. Crystal, you know me better than that. No cowboy stuff."

"There is that concern," Myleigh laughed. "However, after what Trey went through to find her after she was lost in January, if anything happened I suspect he might beat Crystal to it." She let out a sigh. "No, while Blue Beauty's safety does indeed concern me, I find myself worried that I may fail. I am placing a great deal upon a feeling that I am making the right moves, and Crystal, you and Al and Trey, along with Jennifer and Blake, have placed a great deal of faith in my vision. I pray that I do not disappoint you."

"You're not sure that it's going to work, then?" Michelle asked.

"I hope it will work," Myleigh said. "But I cannot be sure."

Trey shrugged. "Maybe you're picking up the nervousness that everyone gets right now," Trey said. "Could be that the Canyon is talking to you already. Crystal, we've got an hour at least, don't we?"

"Yeah, maybe more," she said. "What you got in mind?"

"Let's break out Blue Beauty and the recording equipment and set up right here. We could use a field rehearsal on how to set up and record efficiently, anyway. What do you think, Myleigh?"

"I confess I should feel better with my fingers on Blue Beauty's strings, just to test your assumption, if nothing else. And yes, we could use the setup practice."

"All right, let's do it," he said.

"Maybe you ought to go just a little upriver, to tone down the ramp noise a bit," Crystal suggested.

"Good idea," Trey said. "Michelle, let's get cracking on busting everything out."

A considerable amount of thought had gone into the gear and packing for hauling. There wasn't much that could be done to simplify the hauling of Blue Beauty, but much of the recording equipment had been mounted on a special pack frame that rode in a doubled drybag on the raft. On the pack were the microphones and cables that would be used in the field, and there were more spares on the raft. Michelle had already known that she was going to be helping with the carrying and setup, but a run-through gave them some chance to practice.

Fifteen minutes later, Trey was sitting in the sand beneath a tamarisk a short way up the landing. Myleigh was ten yards farther away, facing the river, not able to see him. Michelle and Crystal were with him, although sitting back behind. "Let's just sit here and get the levels right for a moment," he said, staring at the LEDs and switching between microphones that he could listen to in a small pair of headphones. He glanced out at Myleigh, who was holding the harp slack, just drinking in the place. "Just play when you're ready and forget I'm here," he said, hitting the "record" button.

The needles all seemed about right to him; he could hear mild sounds in his headphones as he switched between four microphones -- one set close to Myleigh, another on her collar, one farther away, one to Blue Beauty's sound pickup. Everything seemed good. He pulled a waterproof notebook from his pocket and made a quick note: "001 - Lee's Ferry, ambient."

They sat there silently, just watching, as he listened in the headphones. The #1 mike was picking up a nice whisper of the breeze in the tamarisks, sometimes rising, sometimes falling. #2 was picking up a little, nearly silent gurgle of river. He saw Myleigh look around, relaxed, trying to drink the scene in. Tentatively, she picked up Blue Beauty, but never quite got into playing position before setting her down. She sat there for a couple more minutes, silently, then pulled the harp into position with a determination that he could feel from yards away. Quickly, he pushed "stop" and then "record" again, just as her fingers touched the strings.

Again, he checked the recording -- everything was going fine. Myleigh played for several minutes. Through the headphones, sometimes he could detect that she was inspired, other times, she was reaching, but he could feel the anticipation and the nervousness in the music, the looking forward to what would come. He concentrated on the recording and what was coming through the headphones, and it wasn't until she set the harp down and stood up, having apparently played what she was expected to play, before he pushed "stop" and wrote in the notebook, "002 - Lee's Ferry, live."

* * *

"Trey, we're here," he heard Myleigh's voice through his slumber. Slowly, he came to, feeling her shake his shoulder. There was no way they could be back to Flagstaff yet!

Slowly Trey began to put things together. They were on the crew bus, and they hadn't even made it out to Route 66 from Diamond Creek when he'd felt sooo sleepy . . . he'd just close his eyes for a minute . . . but this was the lot in back of the Canyon Tours office, the warehouse was in front of them, and everyone else was off the bus except for Myleigh.

"Sorry," he mumbled. "Guess I must have dozed off, there."

"Do not feel ashamed," Myleigh laughed. "You were very inspirational indeed. In fact, I believe I slept most of the way back with my head on your shoulder. You make a most admirable pillow. But then, we have just cause to be tired."

Yes, they did, Trey thought. But if anyone else thought that the collection of recordings on the external hard drives and in the recorder memories were as good as he thought they were, it would be worth it.

Even on the first day, he'd recognized the wisdom of Al setting up the recording team to go on a separate raft. They'd run more or less independent of the main party, sometimes behind, sometimes ahead. Michelle and Crystal had agreed ahead of time that they'd run major rapids with the group. Sometimes it took a little shuffling, and they missed some places that it would have been nice to stop and record, but there were more opportunities for Myleigh to get Blue Beauty out than there had been on the wedding trip, and they'd made even more yet.

On several nights when the opportunity arose, Michelle landed the recording raft well separate from the main party but close enough to walk over to the main camp for breakfast and dinner. They camped separately so that Trey could attempt to record Myleigh playing at sunrise and sunset. Three different times, Myleigh had woken him up in the middle of the night with an overwhelming urge to play Blue Beauty, and some awesome recordings had resulted.

Once Myleigh learned up at Lee's Ferry that the inspiration was still with her, she gained confidence. Trey had heard it all through the headphones when it was first recorded, but usually that evening he would run through most of the day's recordings, just to catalogue it as best he could. Not everything was perfect, of course; he had hours of recordings of Myleigh searching for a theme, stopping, trying again, sometimes with mediocre results, sometimes with memorable ones. Then, there were times that she'd sit down and start playing the instant he got the recorder on, and she went on faultlessly for twenty minutes or more.

Before many days passed, Myleigh, Michelle and Trey shook down into a team, and could be set up and recording within minutes of a landing, and off on the river again within minutes of finishing. Michelle had some interesting suggestions, and they tried some of them. They tried recording in the raft, just floating down easier stretches of river. Several times in longer but easier rapids, Trey set microphones up right on the raft and recorded the ambient sound of running the rapids, the roar of the water, the creak of the oars, the sounds of the raft and the waves slapping the tubes. The ride was usually rough enough that Myleigh wouldn't have been able to control the harp. She wouldn't have tried playing Blue Beauty in a rapids anyway, but at Michelle's suggestion they'd tried pulling into a quiet spot as soon as possible, setting up the main recorder, and letting Myleigh play to the recorded ambient sounds heard through headphones. There was no telling how that would come out -- it would take mixing beyond their on-river capability to find out -- but it had the makings of something interesting.

But sheer, uncontrollable, indescribable urge was part of the project too, and sometimes it led to strange things. On three different occasions, they'd been set up and recording when Myleigh stopped for no reason he could detect, peeled out of her clothes and started the recording over again in the nude. Under normal circumstances Trey would have had other ideas, and Myleigh had been a little embarrassed about it afterwards -- but it seemed to her at the time to be the right thing to do, so she'd done it.

There were times that Trey wished that he'd gotten a photo of those nude scenes, but he never did. He took plenty of other photos, though. Back when they'd been planning the trip he'd come to the realization that if this project did turn into an album, there would be the need of a cover photo, so he'd brought along over a dozen rolls of film and his old Nikon F2. Several times he tried for a shot of Myleigh, the Canyon, and Blue Beauty, sometimes just Blue Beauty and the Canyon, sometimes just the Canyon itself. He tried several different approaches, and hoped that something memorable -- and usable -- would result.

But that was just a sideline; the music was the thing. The whole experience was mystical; he felt he was watching something happening that he had no way of understanding, and a couple of times Michelle quietly commented the same thing to him. There was no understanding the inspiration, the creative urge that drove Myleigh, and she appeared to understand it no better than he or Michelle. "Sometimes I feel I am no less an instrument than Blue Beauty, and we are both being played by a greater power," she commented once.

The music that resulted, stored now on various drives -- well, some of it was awesome. Trey hadn't had the chance to really go over it, but at times he thought he could detect a unifying theme. But, it was a tremendous variety -- sometimes eerie, sometimes mystical, sometimes vibrant, sometimes grandiose, almost always loaded with wonder. Other than listening to the ambient sounds recorded in the rapids and accompanying them, Myleigh had listened to little of the recordings, not more than a few minutes' worth, protesting that she didn't wish to let the existing recordings affect the revelations that were coming to her as she played Blue Beauty.

Towards the end of the trip, the last couple of days, the intensity and the frequency of the recordings began to taper off. Probably exhaustion had something to do with it -- the three of them had put a lot of work into it -- but Myleigh seemed to feel the inspiration was, well, not more vague, but more that it had been completed. Still, there had been a final recording, on the banks of Diamond Creek where it came into the Colorado, made after the customer bus had left and the crew watched silently in the shade of the tamarisks. It was one of only a few times that the boatmen and swampers on the trip had been able to observe what was going on, and it was one of those times that Myleigh sat down and played a long piece without preparation or warmup, as if the inspiration that drove her had built up to a final piece of glory. Trey had been sweating it a little -- the external hard drives were all full by now, and the drive in the recorder was getting there. But when it was over with, he made yet another note in his notebook: "417. Diamond Creek -- live."

"Yeah, I guess we do have a reason to be tired," he said, reluctant to come fully awake. It felt too good to sleep.

Myleigh wouldn't have it. "Now, stir about, my hero. We have things we must unload and move to the car, and I believe we owe Jennifer and Blake a phone call."

It couldn't be done right away -- there were things to do first, like unloading Blue Beauty and the recording equipment and their gear and moving it to the Neon and the Cougar that had sat baking in the late spring sun for three weeks. But, before long Trey and Myleigh were in the Canyon Tours office on the phone to Spearfish Lake.

"So, did you get something?" Jennifer asked as soon as Blake called her to the phone.

"Blue Beauty and I have been the vessels for a great deal of memorable music," Myleigh told her. "Trey will have to discuss the technical details."

"Got an awful lot," Trey reported. "About seventy hours' worth, to be exact. About 420 discrete tracks, most with four channels, sometimes as many as seven."

"Is it any good?" Jennifer asked.

"I haven't listened to all of it," Trey said. "There just hasn't been the time. I have listened to all the live cuts, except for a few that were spoiled during recording. I've checked the ambient stuff, but not listened to it all the way through. From what I can tell, the sound quality is excellent. I think the music is memorable, even unique, but I'm a little afraid to go much further than that. I don't really trust my own opinion."

"How much live harp music?" Blake asked.

"Hard to say," Trey said. "I didn't keep real close records, since there wasn't the time. Somewhere over forty hours, counting the spoils. There might be something in them that could be salvaged."

"Whoo-whee," Jennifer laughed. "That's going to be a heck of an editing job, even before you get to the mixing."

"I don't envy whoever gets stuck with that chore," Trey grinned. "Some of it is better than others, and I heard a few tracks that really impress me, but it all needs to be gone through pretty seriously."

"Myleigh," Jennifer asked. "Are you up to sorting the wheat from the chaff?"

"Perhaps," Myleigh said. "While I should be ready to lend an opinion and assistance, I somehow feel distant from the process. I should not want a piece that strikes me deeply, but that others think has only marginal merit to survive the process, I should think."

"Well, you'd have to have some input," Jennifer said. "Trey, how'd you like to take a swing at it?"

"I at least have some idea of where to start," he said. "But I just don't have access to equipment good enough to do the right job on it. The stuff we have at Marienthal is okay, but it's not really state of the art, if you know what I mean."

"You could come here and use ours," Blake suggested. "You've got a couple months, or a little more before you have to head back to school. Myleigh, you're still planning on coming up here as soon as you get done in Flagstaff, right?"

"Essentially, that is the case," she said. "I shall be several days in transit, and I should wish to stop in Kansas City for a couple days in order to deal with some domestic issues, paying bills and the like."

"That'd work pretty good, then," Blake said. "You'd be able to work with Trey on the recordings and with the group on Whispering Pines. Trey, you up for it?"

Trey thought hard for a moment. Oh, would he like to work on these recordings! He had a number of ideas of things that could be done with them, how they could be presented. Someone who hadn't been there and felt the magic under which they'd been made might not understand some of the issues involved. And, he'd been around Myleigh for most of the last six weeks, and he felt in his gut that she would need to have someone around who had shared the experience to be able to get the most out of them. Besides, if he stayed here they'd be apart for the next two months.

"I'll be honest," he said finally. "I would love nothing more than to work on editing and mixing this stuff. I think I can do it better than anyone else, because I was there when it was made. It's going to leave me on a real shoestring for cash the rest of the summer and next semester, since I'd have to give up my job to do it. And, I feel like I owe it to Al for cutting us so much slack to do these recordings at all. Really, it's going to have to be up to him. If he needs me to stay, I'll stay. But, if he says he doesn't have any problem with me taking off, yeah, I'm up for it."

"Couldn't ask for more," Jennifer said. "Myleigh has told us several times that one of the things that she respects you most for is the fact that you're an honorable person who's loyal to your commitments, so I don't think any of us could fault you for that."

"Tell you what," Blake suggested. "See if he'll let you skip a trip. That'll give you time enough to get up here, and we can spend a few days going through the recordings, all of us. If we all think there's something there, maybe you can stay over the rest of the summer and work on it. If not, then you've only lost one trip."

"Let me go talk to him," Trey said. "I know he's got one more swamper than he planned. He might go for it."

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