‘Let me adjust your helmet,’ Pat said to me. Now that he mentioned it, the helmet did feel like it was resting on the back of my head, leaving my frontal lobes vulnerable. As Pat fiddled with the straps, he whispered through a fake smile, ‘Chill on the bad-stuff-that-can-happen-to-you talk. You’ll scare the kids.’
It was true. I was overdoing it, but I couldn’t help myself. I wanted the kids to be safe without betraying my own terror at the same time.
‘Right,’ I said, locking eyes with Pat but playing to the kids. ‘Got it, captain. Easy breezy. We’re cool. Too cool for school. Give me some of that back, Jack.’
Vinod stepped into the raft. ‘Okay. One at a time.’
‘One at a time, kids,’ I repeated. ‘Otherwise we could tip the whole thing over.’
I stepped into the boat, ‘Whoa, careful, kids. A bit wobbly at first. And, Vinod? This fabric that is the bottom of the boat must be durable, yes?’
‘It’s very safe,’ he smiled.
‘See kids. Super safe. So don’t worry about a razor-sharp rock piercing through it and slicing your foot to the bone.’
Pat grabbed my wrist with intent as he stepped into the boat.
‘Right. Right,’ I said to him pre-emptively. ‘I’m done.’
When we were all aboard, Vinod positioned us on the inflated sides. It took effort to maintain balance and I had to grip the boat with my ass to stay upright as a couple of guides pushed us out onto the water. I glanced at Spencer behind me. His gaze was focused but the muscles in his face were relaxed. Vinod’s confidence had obviously assuaged his misgivings. Across from me, Murphy’s face was open, anticipatory. Good, I thought. They seemed completely unaware of dangers that I knew would present themselves once we encountered white water.
Vinod handed out the oars. ‘Be sure to hold onto the handle like so,’ he said. ‘If you don’t, the oar can slip and hit you in the face. We saw a man lose his teeth. The oar slipped loose and smashed them out.’
Jesus Christ, I thought, we haven’t even hit the rapids yet and we could lose our teeth? I looked back to see Murphy holding his paddle the wrong way. Keeping my voice even, but firm, I said, ‘Did you hear that, Murphy? A man smashed his teeth out. Hold the handle, not the oar part.’
‘Like this,’ said Spencer with a surprising amount of confidence. Murphy looked at Spencer’s hand and adjusted his own. I exhaled.
‘Now,’ said Vinod, ‘when I say ‘row,’ we row together. When I say ‘stop’, bring your oars out of the water.’
‘Got it, kids?’ I shouted over my shoulder. ‘Does Vinod need to go over it again?’
‘They’ve got it, Brett,’ Pat said. ‘It’s not that complicated.’
Within seconds, Vinod issued the first command. I concentrated on keeping the same rhythm as Keir ahead of me on my side. Reach out with the oar and pull. Reach out and pull. Out and pull.
‘Stop!’ ordered Vinod. Keir lifted his oar out of the water. I lifted mine and quickly glanced back. Pat’s oar was out. Both boys had followed suit. Jeez. They really had the hang of this and, so far, no-one had lost their teeth. We drifted for a while and my ass muscles relaxed. I looked to shore and saw huge boulders and the shapes of round-topped towers against the bright sky. The water sparkled and lapped easily against the side of the boat. Here we are in India, I thought – adventuring. I bet that anyone seeing us would think we went on adventures like this all the time. We’re that relaxed. I looked at Pat, dreamily scanning the shoreline. Could any picture of an adventuring family be more perfect?
Then. The boat began to bobble. In the distance, I heard rushing water. My pulse quickened, my neck stiffened, and I tightened my grip on the oar handles.
‘Row,’ said, Vinod, with more urgency than he had before.
Keir immediately stuck his oar in the water and started paddling with vigor. In front of me, the others were doing the same. I sliced my oar through the water. Out and pull. Out. Pull. Out. Pull.
Dear God of everything holy and good. Here it was. White water. What the hell was I doing here? I wasn’t trained. None of us were, except maybe Keir. If one of us popped out of the boat and smashed our lifeless body against a boulder after being tossed around from jagged rock to jagged rock like a sea lion being flung by orcas before he was devoured, I would never forgive myself. Why hadn’t I thought this through? I had been imagining myself as Meryl Streep in that river movie that I never saw because I knew it would scare the shit out of me. But I knew what she’d be like in it anyway, because she’s always sensitive and oh-so-strong with flawless skin. I wasn’t Meryl Steep, I was a D-list actor – one of the first idiots to be hacked to death in a slasher movie because I’d gone into the basement without thinking anything through! Why hadn’t I thought this through? What was I doing in the fucking basement?
From nowhere, the water started to rise and rush ahead, carrying the boat forward. There was no way we could stop now. The roaring river had a momentum that could not be tamed by our flimsy oars. Jagged rocks jutted out of the churning water. Waves slapped against every surface – boat, rock, oar. Water sprayed into our faces. I couldn’t see. We crashed up and down. Up and down. Oars struck rocks. How were we hanging on? I didn’t know. I couldn’t feel my ass. It had been the only point of contact between the boat and me. For all I knew, I was no longer sitting. I wanted desperately to bargain with God, but I couldn’t think of words. Up and down. Couldn’t form a thought. Up and down. Up and down. Thank you, Jesus – I was still in the boat. The children must be too, unless no-one wanted to scream bad news at me over the pounding current.
And soon. Very soon. Calm.
I held my breath and listened for more rushing water. My skin prickled. I could smell my own fear.
‘Stop,’ I heard Vinod say. We all lifted our oars out of the water, my pulse still pounding.
‘Whoo-hoo!’ whooped Spencer behind me. ‘That was fun! Let’s do some more!’
‘Yeah!’ shouted Murphy.
What? That was it? How did it get so quiet, so fast? The boat drifted. The two men in the banana boat up ahead smiled back at us. I turned around to see the kids beaming, barely damp from the spray. Pat and Keir smiled like they’d just finished a satisfying meal.
‘You see?’ said Vinod. ‘Difficulty, zero.’
Difficulty zero? What was a ‘one,’ I thought? Niagara Falls? I looked back at the water we had just navigated. I had to admit that it looked like a very wide babbling brook, a couple of birds perched comfortably on small rocks. How could I have so misjudged the experience? Had my inherent fear about anything more physically challenging than leaning over to pick up a dropped potato chip altered my perception that radically?
‘Row,’ I heard Vinod say. ‘We can stop on shore here.’
Thank God. Land was exactly what I needed. Time to pull myself together before the next rapids. I dipped my oar into the rippling water and reached and pulled with the others. I had known all along that I wasn’t the river-rafting type, I told myself. Maybe I should accept my limits rather than push past them. I didn’t have to be victimized by my limits like I was in the past. I simply needed to respect them. Make friends with them. After all, my lack of youth, height and glossy hair limited my ability to make a living as a supermodel. Sometimes recognizing your limits was healthy and reasonable.
We pulled the raft ashore and Vinod told us that we would find the ruins of a seventeenth-century hunting lodge at the top of the hill. We followed him up an overgrown path. The ground felt solid beneath my feet. I liked this. I knew this. History. Ruins. Dirt underfoot.
In barely ten minutes, we came upon a couple of turrets flanking a small room. There was a fire pit in front and a shrine to the Hindu god Rama off to one side, newly painted orange. Clearly the lodge was still occasionally used by campers or hunters. The shrine looked so matter of fact and I was impressed, afresh, by what I had noticed earlier in the trip – the Hindu blending of the quotidian with worship.
‘Up here!’ Vinod
called down from what appeared to be a concrete or stone mound about ten-feet high. ‘You can see the river.’
Murphy scrambled up to join him. I glanced at Spencer. Ever since he was a toddler, I had anticipated his fear of heights. He had difficulty even climbing a short slide on the playground. Through the years, I had looked at play structures and immediately assessed, ‘He’s never going to make that.’ I had watched him place a foot on the bottom rung, stare up at the monkey bars, and freeze. When we rode escalators, I had to lock eyes with him so that he didn’t accidentally look down. Each time, every time, he balked or gave up entirely, his head hung heavy with defeat. At every new challenge, my heart had skipped a protective beat as I struggled with how to soften his disappointment with himself. This is where I found myself. Poised to comfort, I stepped forward.
Spencer stepped onto the rock. I stopped. He timidly reached out one hand to guide himself. I wanted to move further forward, offer him my arm or a boost. But his face had a look of steely determination. He put his other hand down and raised his other foot, placing it next to the other. Now he had both hands and feet on the boulder. Scaling it like a land crab, he started to inch his way up.
‘You can totally see the river, Spence,’ Murphy crowed from the top, hanging onto Vinod’s hand. Spencer lifted his head toward Murphy and smiled, stretching out one hand and then the other, then lifting and placing one foot, then the other. I watched, breathless. Pat appeared beside me.
‘He’s doing it,’ he whispered.
‘By himself,’ I whispered back. ‘Why now? Is he hyped from the rapids?’
‘Maybe. I wouldn’t exactly call them rapids.’
Spencer reached the midway point, stopped, and looked up again. I started to reach out. This was surely where he’d buckle. Turn back. Look for me. I readied my reassuring smile. But he didn’t look back. He inhaled and moved his hand forward again. I dropped my hands. Holy shit. He was going to do it! Maybe he’d finally had enough of being afraid. All eyes were trained on him as he painstakingly inched up the last couple of feet. When he got close to the top, Vinod reached out a hand and pulled him to the summit. Pat, Murphy and I erupted into cheers and applause. Pat hugged me, Murphy pumped the air with his fist, and, teetering, Spencer turned to look down at Pat and me with a goofy grin. If our guides were confused by our familial enthusiasm for such a simple act, they didn’t betray it. Perhaps they had children too.
Pat and I scrambled up to meet the boys and Vinod. We gazed over the Betwa River, aglow with triumph. It was a cosmically invisible victory. But the four of us savored it. Spence had climbed a mountain, and in a year when almost everything that could go wrong, had – we had made it to India.
This is where the story should have ended. Neatly. The metaphoric mountain summited. The boy having pushed past his fear and won. The mother having learned that limitations are constructs of our own making and can, therefore, be transcended by the same maker. But had the story ended there, the mother might have thought later that such a triumph was unique to her oldest child. Perhaps it was simply his story, she might reason. Perhaps he was simply an extraordinary child.
Our descent was unremarkable and took five seconds. Keir lifted the boys down and they loped ahead, leading the party to the boats. The moment on the rock had been so perfect that I wasn’t anticipating angry rapids around the bend. I was, at last, where I should be – on an overgrown path in India, with my family.
Murphy stopped abruptly, turned, and said, ‘Dad …’
His tone was plaintive. I wasn’t aware of what was happening but Pat leapt ahead, barking, ‘Yank ’em down. Yank the pants down.’ He made exaggerated pulling gestures in the air as he hurtled down the hill. For days, Murphy had been suffering the unavoidable intestinal distress that attends almost every foreigner in India.
I sprinted ahead, only to find Murphy staring up at both of us, his legs already wide apart. The look of misery on his face was so complete, so unguarded, it could only be owned by a seven-year-old boy.
He looked up at us, his pants still secure at his waist, and whimpered apologetically, ‘I pooed.’
‘I know, buddy. I know,’ Pat said, leaning down. I stood behind him, seeing Murphy’s curly blond hair as Pat eyed him. My body ached with cellular memory, a lifetime of petty humiliations, each one endured, shamefully, not to be spoken of – loose bowels, a period stain, a crush announced to all my friends, a subpar SAT score, a one-night-stand zipping up his fly without a word, a credit card denied by the cashier, a dinner invitation including everyone but not me, bankruptcy. How do we ever move on?
Keir caught up with our Indian guides in tow, the sides of his mouth twitching. He loves a good story about events going horribly wrong, and I could see him already drafting this one. My own mouth hardened protectively. In response, he turned to the men and said, evenly, ‘There has been an incident.’
They nodded formally and stepped back a polite couple of paces as if they had just served our meal at a five-star restaurant. I squatted next to Pat, ‘Buddy, we’ve got to take your pants off.’
Murphy squeezed his eyes shut, ‘No.’
‘Honey, you can’t keep them on,’ I coaxed.
He stood rigid, like he was growing roots into the soil. As if the very act of staying completely still with his eyes clamped tight would transport him somewhere else. I inferred all of this because I was familiar with the state. I have never been successful at astral projection, but it isn’t for lack of trying.
‘Honey,’ I said, ‘you will feel better when we clean you off.’
Without opening his eyes, he whispered, ‘I’m so embarrassed.’
‘Oh, my love,’ I said, ‘things like this happen to everyone. Even to grown-ups. No-one thinks anything about it.’
Platitudes, but I didn’t know what else to say. Anything further would highlight the fact that there were ten people simply standing around waiting for him to make a move. I breathed in and stared into the distance. Spencer looked away respectfully, sympathy in the curve of his shoulders. I felt stuck. Stuck again. How could I move Murphy from this spot without making him feel worse? I could see Pat sifting through options in his head and I hoped that he had better ones than me. None of us even had a sweater to tie around Murphy’s waist.
Murphy’s despair made the back of my eyes hurt. He was the littlest. It wasn’t fair. He knew it wasn’t fair. Spence got to conquer a mountain and Murphy got to shit his pants. Where was the justice in that? There was no story of transformation here – short of his shit turning to gold.
Pat put his hand on Murphy’s shoulder. ‘We’re going to walk down to the river,’ he said. ‘Then we’ll take off your pants and wash them. And we can clean you up too.’
Murphy squeezed his eyes tighter, ‘No! I can’t move.’
Spencer shifted his weight. My legs were beginning to feel the stress of squatting but I didn’t want to move. I thought that standing would indicate impatience. I needed to let him know that we understood how difficult this was. The men behind me waited. We all waited.
‘Buddy,’ Pat said, softly, ‘I’m going to hold your hand and we’re going to walk down to the river.’ Pat sounded sympathetic but firm. I, myself, had always responded well to this tone. It allowed me to abdicate all decision-making and leave it in the hands of someone who sounded more rational. More capable. The fact that the tone might not match his actual problem-solving capabilities was irrelevant in the moment. Someone had to take charge.
Murphy opened an eye, ‘Okay.’ He slipped his hand into Pat’s. Pat stood up and they started their slow progress toward the river’s edge. Either afraid of leaking or simply trying to avoid discomfort, he would not bend his legs or alter his stance. He moved as if he were a human compass, leaning on one leg so he could swing the other stiff leg forward, then repeating the move on the opposite side. The rest of us inched along quietly, not wanting to affect the delicate balance of trust and will that the task demanded.
When we got
to the water, I slowly inched down his pants and underwear. Pat and I kept murmuring, ‘You’re doing great, buddy. You really are.’ When we finally wormed his unbending legs out of the soiled clothes, I rinsed the pants in the river while Pat held Murphy’s hand and led him into the water, splashing it up to his waist to get him clean. Murphy gritted his teeth, enduring the cold, not looking at any of the bystanders. ‘You’re doing great, buddy. You really are.’
I wadded up Murphy’s wet pants and stuck them in the boat. Murphy, helmet and life jacket still in place, was completely naked from the waist down. Except for his shoes, which Pat slipped onto his feet when he emerged from the river.
‘Okay,’ said Pat, ‘I think we’re ready.’
Murphy turned to the assembled poker-faced group and fixed his own face with an expression that looked almost regal – dignified and aloof. As if in response to an unvoiced command from the boy king, everyone jumped into the boat, took their positions, and grabbed an oar. The two guides in the banana boat started rowing ahead of us. Pat led Murphy to the boat and lifted him in. Wordlessly we all adjusted our positions. Murphy picked up an oar and we pushed off.
I heard the water rushing up ahead, but this time I was so focused on Murphy that my body barely tensed. I was empty of any feeling but ache for the boy. Murphy was sitting behind me, bare-assed, and I could feel his humiliation burning through my life jacket. The whole experience had been ruined for him, I was sure. He wouldn’t remember the exhilaration of rafting, Spencer’s triumph, or standing with his family on a rock in India. He’d only remember that he soiled himself in front of everyone. I was stupid for having agreed to river rafting. If we had been back at the campsite, I could have rushed him to the bathroom or we would have had a clean pair of pants.
The guide in front of me started rowing faster. We kept pace. I didn’t look back. We hit the rushing water and used the oars to steer between the rocks. We bobbed and I could hear Spencer whoop. Rowing took all my attention and that was a relief. Muscles moving. Pulling the oar. Pushing away from the rocks.
Lights, Camera...Travel! Page 21
