by Pam Houston
A long five minutes later, Jo reaches Mathilda, who has by now all but fallen on her side. The mud is still flowing, though more slowly, the clouds have lifted a little off the mountain, and I can see the giant slump block the slide has left behind.
Joe wraps one arm around Mathilda’s lowered neck, wields his hunting knife, and dives like a frogman down between her front legs. He emerges seconds later with the severed hobbles, takes an instant to grin at me through the rain, and then throws himself up on Mathilda’s back and speaks into her ear for a moment. There is another moment when the whole mud sculpture—man, horse, knife, and dangling hobbles—leans dangerously over the river. In the next moment Mathilda rights herself, and walks slowly, one sure hoof at a time, toward me through the mud.
31. Mount Shasta, California
Carmen gives me valor in a bottle. She says her mother has a special word for men like Ethan and I think it’s going to be something magical and Latin but the word turns out to be freeloader. And even though we have only just met, we drive up as far as the snow will allow us and shout what we want in a man at the mountain. My list has stuff like (1) Loves many things, and (3) Wants to have fun, and (7) Generous with time/money/spirit, and Carmen’s starts with (1) Compassion, and ends with (10) Self-love that is not self-absorption.
While we are at it we shout things we want besides a man, and I say a teaching job in Colorado, less back pain, and a trip to Antarctica and she says a walk-in closet, a half-ton pickup, and a babysitter I can trust.
Later at a bar full of guys in Carhartts with “Saturate Before Using” on the stereo, we meet up with two women who have both just returned from Burning Man. Ava, who wants to be beautiful and to stop eating fruit, calls Burning Man the worst four days of her life. It made her heart hurt, she says, all those people looking to fill a bottomless need. Sasha says it was the four most important days of her life, though both Carmen and I find her descriptions of the festival far more terrifying than Ava’s. Then we go home and watch the Dixie Chicks movie twice, all the way through without stopping.
I check my voice mail and Cinder has left a little song on it that goes, “How do you solve a problem like Fatimah?” and Nora has left a message that says, “I think Ethan missed out on a few of the simple things, like mercy,” and Practical Karen has left one that says, “Swear to God, if he isn’t out of there by the end of spring break I’m driving up and we’re going to the Target and getting a whole bunch of those big blue plastic containers and all his shit’s going out on the curb,” and I know they’re all trying to help me, but seriously, after four solid hours of Shut Up and Sing, Ethan couldn’t reengage my attention if he brought Harrison Ford home for a threesome.
At Crystal Lake the next morning, under the shadow of that giant white she-mountain, it is just a little too easy to tell Ava why she ought to stop dating the alcoholic. On the peak the wind is blowing up frozen clouds in the shape of Armageddon, though it is still as a church where we are standing, and warm.
I say, “I don’t know, I’m just feeling so . . .”
“Say it,” Carmen says, “Say it! Powerful.”
I had been trying to decide between directionless and untethered.
“Powerful,” I say, just as the wind reaches the surface of the lake.
32. Alsek Bay, Alaska
Day twelve of a fifteen-day trip down the Tatshenshini and Alsek Rivers. It has been 36 degrees and raining sideways since day three. On days one and two the sun was out and we sped along the silvery water that braided and rebraided itself so quickly and often it was almost like a video game trying to pick the right channel. Ten days later, to say we are wet and cold is the type of understatement that can get you killed on an extended outdoor adventure in hostile conditions, so I don’t.
Phil is coping with his discomfort (and Nancy’s relentless enthusiasm) by insisting we eat meals precisely on the following schedule: breakfast at seven, lunch not a minute after twelve, dinner at six. There are at least forty pounds of rice on this raft, oceans of instant mashed potatoes, and gallons of tuna and peanut butter, but Phil feels certain we are going to starve to death out here, and no amount of taking his hand and showing him the piles of food, or how far we have come, how few miles we have left to go, will convince him otherwise.
Last night we camped on the long peninsula where the Tatshenshini River empties into Alsek Bay, which is not technically a bay, but a lake, ten miles in diameter, currentless and full of icebergs ranging in size from something we could stick in our Mojitos (if we had some), to the Sydney Opera House or the Denver International Airport, and that is only the part of the iceberg we can see. Two-thirds of the twenty-mile circumference of the lakeshore is buried under actively calving glaciers that pour from between the tall, craggy, cloud-swathed mountains, and the explosions when chunks the size of apartment buildings break off and hit the water sound like war all around us, though we are the only three people for hundreds of miles.
We shared the peninsula with a very large brown bear, close cousin to the grizz, but coastal, which in the local vernacular only means fewer plants and more meat. Not a single day of this trip has passed, in fact, when we haven’t encountered at least one brown bear, and on some days we have seen as many as five. There have been bears eating wild strawberries on the riverbanks as the current sweeps us past, bears running along the tundra, keeping pace with us to get a better look. On four separate occasions unspeakably huge boars have wandered past our camp to see what we were having for dinner, and the first thing we look for each morning are the size 15 triple-D paw prints that encircle our tents.
We fear for the cooler that we leave on the boat each night. We fear for the boat itself, should the bear decide to use his eight-inch claws to climb aboard. We fear for our lives enough to set up our kitchen tent a hundred yards from our sleeping tent, even though it means getting soaked to the bone every time we have to move between the two; enough to change our clothes before bed if we have spilled the slightest drop of lentil stew on them; enough to move camp entirely one night in the pitch dark and a driving horizontal freezing rain when we discovered we had set up within fifty yards of a fresh caribou carcass.
Give the bear the opportunity to make the right decision, has always been my philosophy, and so far it has worked, which is handy, because each time a bear has walked into camp just as we are about to sit down to a pot of something hot and good-smelling, and everybody’s eyes say, Now where’d we put that gun? the answer each time has been according to Murphy’s law of river rafting: Whatever you need is always in the bottom of the other boat box. Any one of those bears could have eaten two of us in the time it took the third one to dig the gun out. Which is why I didn’t want to bring a gun in the first place. But I did, because Phil asked me to.
What’s really going on here is that Nancy’s father was some big outdoorsman, and Phil is, on his best day, a good sport. The fact that he is one of America’s top leukemia specialists is more or less lost on Nancy because Phil doesn’t want to shoot skeet or climb Everest. It was Nancy who hired me to run this trip, and now Phil’s every third thought is, Please God don’t let me die out here, and because that is at least my every tenth thought, no matter where I am, I bought a Remington 30-06 shotgun and buried it under Nissin Top Ramen and toilet paper.
Today we are taking turns rowing across the still water of Alsek Lake, because rowing is the only way to stay a few degrees above hypothermic. Between ice, sky, and lake, every color of silver is represented here. The look on Phil’s face tells me he is willing all the icebergs within a hundred-yard radius not to roll over and crush us like grapes, while Nancy keeps insisting I row right up next to them so she can hop from boat to iceberg and pose for Phil’s camera.
Three days from now, when we get to the ironically named Dry Bay and receive word that the weather has grounded all flights out of Haines until four days hence at the earliest, Phil will get on the two-way radio and start begging any pilot within a thousand miles to brav
e the weather and come get us. He will say we are out of food, though it won’t be even close to true, and on top of all we have left, the local fisherman will have brought us four glistening Dolly Varden at least three pounds apiece, and a six-pack of Olympic to go with them.
Phil will finally talk a pilot from Yakutat into coming down the coast for us, and after he and Nancy leave on the first flight, a young brown bear, newly abandoned by his mother, will come to the wall tent, and we will play an ill-advised game of peek-a-boo, until I hear the pilot circling above us, returning from Yakutat for me and the gear.
33. Phonsavan, Laos
Lat takes me to Phonsavan, the Plain of Jars, the site of the Secret War, years of unreported bombings that followed the U.S. withdrawal from Vietnam. We dropped so much Agent Orange onto the Plain of Jars that what ought to be lush farmland has not yet even begun to recover, and the plain is pocked with bomb craters as far as the eye can see.
In Phonsavan, the cornerstones of the buildings are made from U.S. bomb casings. When you check into a hotel there, your key is attached to a small disabled grenade. In Vientiane, Lat showed me a pot—as big as a bathtub—that 200 Pathet Lao families cooked in as they hid from the bombers in a cave. The pot cracked right down the middle when U.S. jets fired rockets straight into the cave and killed all of the occupants, and now sits in front of the National Museum, “to remember” Lat said, quietly, as we stood in front of it.
“So, do the Laotians hate Americans?” I had asked this question many times during my weeks in Laos and had been responded to kindly in every case. They understood, Xai said in Luang Prabang, that I was a child at the time of the bombings, how could they possibly hate me? And even the bombers, said the owner of Tam Nat Lao, were acting on the orders of someone above them. Could they hate a man who was told to follow orders or die? When I asked Lat the same question he shook his head, pursed his lips. “You don’t understand,” he said. “We are Buddhists. For us, this life, it is nothing.”
When he drops me at my hotel in Phonsavan, Lat tells me not to let anybody in after the lights go off (the whole town is on a generator that is turned off between 10 p.m. and 6 a.m.). I don’t bother pointing out that my “room” is made out of bomb casings and palm fronds and that anyone who wants in can simply lift up a wall.
A local guide named Mr. Souvannaphouma takes me hiking out onto the plain the next morning. On a five-mile walk we pass seven thirty-year-old unexploded ordinances. He tells me they still do eighty amputations a week there, most of them the limbs of children. People from Europe, he says, mostly Danes and Swedes, send people to Laos to help clean it up. Americans have sent some money, he’s heard, but no personnel.
“So do the Laotians hate Americans?” I ask Mr. Souvannaphouma.
“Of course we do,” he says, his brown eyes steady on mine. “How might it be possible that we would not?”
34. Seattle, Washington
At the Boeing factory we stand on a catwalk, disassembled giants as far as the eye can see, while the guide tells us the story of the time a camera fell out of some tourist’s pocket and did $250,000 worth of damage to a 747’s wing.
“It’s all about tooling and jigs,” the guide says, a sentence I love the sound of even if I have no idea what it means. She has already made me put my pad and paper away—for security reasons—so I am trying to emblazon the figures she gives us onto my memory: this building is as big as 75 NFL football fields, 911 NBA basketball courts, this building is bigger than Disneyland itself. There are three million parts in a 777. The engine of a 747 is larger than a VW Bug. On the Quantas Aboriginal Art plane there are two thousand pounds of paint weight alone.
Earlier that afternoon, at the SAM sculpture garden, watching the neon Love & Loss ampersand turn and turn above the silvery water of Elliott Bay, I told Mackenzie I’d finally got Ethan out of my house and she told me about her new boyfriend.
“Well, the two best things about him,” she said, “is that he calls up to read me Alice Munro over the phone, and he knows how to use a trapeze.”
“You mean, like during sex?” I say.
“Anytime,” she says, shrugging.
One of the best things about hanging out with Mackenzie is that it’s okay to be sad. Today she’s sadder than me, but last year, when we met on the Oregon coast, and it rained sideways for three whole days, we were both so sad we became convinced that the hip coffee shop with the Thich Nhat Hanh bumper stickers was serving us decaf instead of regular, either on purpose or by mistake.
Directly below us is the brand-new 787, missing the back half of its body and tail. One can be ours for $168 million, the guide informs us, but even if we slapped the money down right now we couldn’t have one till 2015. The first eight will be strictly for testing, Air Nippon gets number 9. There are 684 currently on order, but number 685 is up for grabs.
The tour guide is getting a big kick out of herself. She says she doesn’t get paid very much to give these tours, but don’t tell Boeing that she would do them for free just to get out of the house and away from her retired husband. Yeah, we say, ha ha I’ll bet.
Boeing has twenty-seven thousand employees, she tells us, and thirty-nine test pilots. Of the thirty-nine, five are women. I can’t tell by her voice whether she thinks this is too many or too few but her tone is laced with some opinion. She tells us that when a plane is ready to be towed out of the hangar, they always do it at three in the morning, when the spectacle is less likely to cause a car accident because of gawkers on the road. It is perfectly clear how she feels about the gawkers.
We watch electronic arms carry fiberglass, jiggle levers, tighten screws. Given that Boeing is the largest employer in Washington State, there are an alarmingly few human beings in the giant building.
When the shamans in the Brazilian rainforests drink ayahuasca the plants and animals talk to them, and they go back to the village to sing the songs that tell the story of what the animals have told them. Then the weaver women weave their songs into patterns in the fabric, and the singers know how to read the cloth, so they return to the jungle with the cloth and sing the animals’ own songs back to them.
Mackenzie leans so far over the railing her long long hair almost touches the tail of the Dreamliner. She says, “It’s just like building a whale.”
35. Salida, Colorado
Marshall Pass, hiking with Samuel Carter, an almost-blind almost-date on a warm spring day. He tells me about his ex-wife, who set the world record for the number of female parachutists jumping in tandem. When he says, twenty-four, thirty-six, forty-two, I think measurements, picture Barbie in reverse, but he’s talking about women, lots of women, leaping out of an airplane, joining hands, and making concentric circles in the sky.
Fenton the dog scares up a fawn and it starts screaming like a tortured baby for its mother, but all’s well that ends well, as doe and fawn go hurtling down the mountain together and Fenton runs back to us to make sure we are duly impressed.
After the hike, as we walk around Salida, people are extra extra friendly. In Creede, on the rare occasion a black man comes to town, people usually think he is a member of the Denver Broncos, even if he is five foot three and 125 pounds.
Samuel and I go to dinner at a sweet place with lace curtains—we’ve been talking for hours—when all of sudden I worry that too many of the stories I’m telling involve African-Americans. First there is getting to meet Toni Morrison, because I tell that story to anyone I want to like me, and I was just at the Aspen Music Fest, where Wynton Marsalis came with his whole twenty-one-piece jazz band from Lincoln Center in their smart black suits, along with twelve drummers from Ghana in traditional robes with their talking drums—the great big ones they have to climb ladders to play, the ones you feel reverberating in your breastbone. And when Wynton stood there creating the fusion—you didn’t even have to think about it—you could just feel the whole history of music in your body, and how could you not want to talk about that? Then there was also Habib Kote, t
elling stories with his sweet guitar, inviting us all to Timbuktu, and his translator from Cameroon with his bookish glasses. And Joan Armatrading, late night, playing the old songs, the sound of her voice and what it did inside me making me think that maybe I’m not as open to love with my whole heart these days as I once was, and how maybe that’s a good thing and maybe it’s not. Telling those stories also makes a certain kind of sense. But then we move on to fantasy football, and who comes up but Randy Moss (my perennial problem player) and Shawn Alexander (who has won me two Super Bowls), and Samuel can only be thinking, Doesn’t this chick even see other white people out in the world?
36. Luang Prabang, Laos
In Luang Prabang, the holiest city in Laos, pastel temples rise out of Mekong River mist, children carry fresh bouquets of frangipani blossoms, and women get up at dawn every morning to stand on street corners and spoon rice into the begging bowls of monks clad in robes of maroon and saffron, who walk the streets in a tradition of generosity centuries old. Here, dawn happens at the same time every morning, we are that close to the equator. Life clusters around the temples and the river, where there is always someone bathing, washing clothes, or tending the tiny gardens that spring up from every bank.
Xai and I climb wooden stairs to temple after temple and stand before giant golden Buddhas who are reclining, sitting, standing, some of them so tall we only come to their knees. Monks of all ages tend the altars, bringing oranges, incense, silver chalices of water and wine. They tell me to write down something I wish for and leave the scrap of paper among the offerings. I start with stop hunger and make peace, but in the next temple Xai says, something for yourself, as if he’s been reading over my shoulder, so I write, speak French fluently, and in the next temple more dogs and friends, less work, and in the last one, For god’s sake, Pam, spread it around!
