Cool, Calm & Contentious

by Merrill Markoe

  I’m ashamed to admit that, back when I camped a lot, part of my motivation was provided by boyfriends who were gung ho about it. As soon as I shifted into a pattern of dating men who laughed derisively at the idea of spending the night in the great outdoors, it all came to a halt. I was too chicken to go by myself and too depressed by the thought of the forced gaiety and intimacy I might encounter in a group excursion with people I had never met.

  That’s why when a magazine asked me to write about an all-women’s white-water rafting trip in Utah, I had conflicting emotions. The part that proved thorniest was overcoming a fear I had been unable to shake since getting trapped for several hours in a stalled elevator during a lightning storm a month before. I realize that an elevator and a raft usually are listed in different categories under “modes of transportation,” but I was haunted by the memory of how I had heard the lightning and thunder before I got into the elevator that day. I kept revisiting the image of me perfectly safe moments before, but too distracted or stupid to say to myself, “Electrical storm. Electrical elevator. Burn some calories and take the stairs.” Even later, as I was being pulled from between elevator doors, which had been pried open with crowbars by uniformed firemen, I had already begun berating myself with “For Christ’s sake, woman—learn to think before you act.”

  This voice was haunting me now. If ever an event seemed to have the potential for unforeseen consequences requiring critical calorie-burning thought before action, it was an all-women’s white-water rafting trip.

  Yet somewhere else, deep inside of me, the idea of waking up in the morning, hearing a river, and looking up at pine trees rang an ancient but really clear bell. The photos posted online of the last version of this trip were calling to me like the Sirens (or their hetero-female equivalent, which in my case would be three long-haired indie rockers with sad, knowing eyes, stranded on a raft with their acoustic guitars singing carefully phrased, psychologically astute, semi-autobiographical songs).

  “Where red rock canyon meets alpine forest,” said the text, describing the adventure that would unfold. It went on to describe “waterfalls … prehistoric Indian pictographs … slick rock grottos.” “Yes! All the things I love and miss,” my soul cried out, followed seconds later by the voice of Ashley, the horror-movie star with whom I was now sharing a head. Ashley was a likable, somewhat sensible girl who became increasingly hysterical as signs of danger started to add up. She was carefully scrutinizing the rest of the promotional copy and finding red flags everywhere: “ ‘It’s an investment in yourself. A chance to renew both body and soul,’ ” she read aloud. “You want to be trapped on a raft with people who talk like a commercial for feminine hygiene products? ‘Spectacular river canyons offer secluded beaches where your facilitators will share the ancient art of hatha yoga and the healing techniques of massage therapy. You’ll experience excitement and female bonding as you run the rapids with women guides who understand the nature of the journey,’ ” she continued.

  By now, Ashley was obsessed with the list of pretentious buzzwords she thought meant trouble: “investment,” “renew,” “healing,” “guides,” and “journey” as pretentious buzzwords that meant trouble. She was also bothered by the presence of “facilitators” and by “massage therapy” as a mandatory activity.

  “And then there’s the part where it says ‘female bonding,’ ” she said, clearing her throat and looking out of the corners of her eyes. “As though entire genders are destined to get along.”

  “Well … come on! I love yoga!” I shot back. “And I have tons of female friends.”

  “Merrill, I’m not talking about yoga. I’m not talking about friends. I’m talking about female bonding.” Ashley was well acquainted with my previous unhappy experience with this very thing since she and I had met for the first time on an all-girl trip to Italy right after high school, where we both watched in horror as my rebellious arty teen self experienced bonding difficulties with Catholic school cheerleaders from the South. The whole episode turned so unpleasant that the group chaperone wrote a letter of complaint about my bonding deficiencies to my parents.

  “The old female bonding didn’t work out too well that time, did it?” said Ashley.

  “No, but I was a bigger pain in the ass when I was seventeen,” I argued. “These days I’m much better adjusted.” I paused to see if either of us was buying this.

  That was when she reminded me that the trip to Italy ended when the propeller plane on which our group was flying home had two engines catch fire and another one explode. We had been in the air for less than an hour when the pilot came on the intercom and announced, “I don’t know what to say. I’m at a loss for words.” Shortly thereafter we crash-landed in Shannon, Ireland, where we all spent the night on the airport floor.

  Only then did I learn that someone in our group had gone to a psychic before we’d left and had been warned not to get on the plane. Was this another one of those unrecognized moments when consequences should have been more carefully calculated? When forethought could have prevented disaster-filled action?

  “For a girl like you to agree to sign ‘an acknowledgment of risk’ document that mentions the phrase ‘inherent risks’ eleven times and ‘death’ an additional seven is like one of those movies where a bunch of sorority girls agree to spend the night in an abandoned cabin even though they have heard that a serial killer has just escaped from a nearby mental institution and has been seen in the area,” Ashley scolded me.

  “I know,” I told her. “But even in the event of an escaped serial killer, these days we all have cellphones.”

  And with that I began to study the list of things we were told to bring along on the trip: a water bottle, a flashlight, sunblock, biodegradable soap, mosquito repellent. I was beginning to feel an odd yearning to walk around in the dark, in the woods, with a flashlight, listening to frogs and crickets and the sounds of a fast-moving river. It reminded me of summer camp. Maybe, I thought, I will buy name tags and sew them into my clothes.

  “You seem to have forgotten that you hated summer camp,” Ashley whispered.

  “If you need to be freaked out all the time, go become pen pals with a prisoner on parole,” I told her as I picked up the phone and called the editor at the magazine. “I’m in,” I said.

  DAY ONE

  I am so not worried about this, I told myself as I arrived at the airport a full two hours early, my wheelie suitcase full of waterproof clothing. For once in my Southern California life, there were no traffic slowdowns or problems with parking. Everything was running smoothly. Right up until I got to the gate and was informed that my flight to Salt Lake City would be departing three hours late.

  In that single moment, all my tidy interlocking travel arrangements fell like dominoes. Now I would be arriving in Salt Lake City at nine-thirty at night, which meant I would miss the only connecting flight to Vernal, Utah, which was going to put me near where the group would be gathering to begin the trip at sunrise.

  This left me with no choice but to rent a car and head out all by myself for a four-hour drive through the Utah desert in the middle of the night.

  Ashley was instantly on fire with the plot implications. To counter her histrionics, I studied maps of the area relentlessly during my flight. It looked to me like a straight shot through the desert. Nothing to worry about. “Once I find the highway, I just stay on it,” I said to her.

  “Yes, of course,” replied Ashley. “It’s simple. What could possibly go wrong? A single woman all by herself in a car she’s never driven before, on a dark desert highway in the middle of the night.”

  Still, I was pleased by how competent I felt as I was talking over my planned route with the car rental agent. This will be fine, I said to myself as he reassured me by taking a yellow highlighter and drawing a line from the freeway entrance to my destination.

  “See? It’s easy when you just handle things logically,” I said confidently as I headed onto a two-lane highway so dark that
it looked more like an allegory than a road. “No reason to get emotional.”

  It was ten o’clock at night.

  “Nope. I don’t see another car anywhere,” said Ashley. “We’re all alone out here. If anything happens, we will be stranded and invisible.”

  “Come on!” I argued. “Even if we break down, we can just lock the doors and wait until morning. Someone will be driving on this road during the day.”

  “I bet that’s what all those girls walking home from the factories in Juárez, Mexico, thought when they left work,” said Ashley. “You know, before they were never seen again.”

  “Oh, shut up and leave me alone,” I barked as I began to realize that it had been ten minutes, then twenty minutes, then thirty minutes since the last time I passed a billboard or a gas station. Or anything. There seemed to be no call boxes, or signs indicating how near or far we were from somewhere.

  “Did I tell you about the time I was driving alone on a road just like this when a criminally insane trucker started sideswiping my car?” Ashley asked me, after an hour of driving past nothing but impenetrable nightscape. She was now giving me heart palpitations. “Even though I tried to get away, I spun into a drainage ditch by the side of the road. By the way, there are no cell towers out here. Phones are totally useless.”

  “That never happened to you,” I responded, kind of weakly. “You’re making that up.”

  “No I’m not,” she said. “Well, you’re half right. It didn’t happen to me. But it totally happened to someone else on Cold Case Files.”

  Fifteen minutes of darkness later a sign for GAS/FOOD appeared just ahead and on the right. Elated at the idea of even a sad, empty outpost of civilization, I pulled over and stopped at what turned out to be creepy little market with dingy lighting, unstocked shelves, and a dentally deficient, sallow-faced man at the register.

  Of course, Ashley was instantly reminded of a movie she once saw where a woman went into the restroom at a truck stop and was never heard from again. “Vanished,” she said, “until weeks later, when her overwrought boyfriend, a mud-caked, bloody Kurt Russell, finds her ravaged body stuffed in a duffel bag buried underground. By the way, cellphones don’t work at all when you’re buried alive.”

  As I walked around the store, looking not for snacks but for “provisions,” I realized that I was not only purchasing sugary treats to keep me awake for the drive, but amassing supplies in case Ashley’s warnings were a harbinger of things to come. The pickings were slim. In the event that we were destined to be stranded in the desert in an inoperable car, we would have to survive on gummy bears, Cheez-Its, and Twizzlers until the helicopters arrived. On Ashley’s advice, I also made a point of posing in front of the mirrorized security cameras before we checked out, to create a record of my activities for any detectives tracking my whereabouts, should that become necessary.

  Back on the road at eleven at night, I now had no choice but to keep on driving, surrounded by thick darkness. It was almost like following a road inside a painting on black velvet. So of course I was truly delighted when at last I spotted a sign that said it was seventy-six miles to Vernal.

  And then, at one A.M., thar she blows: the Dinosaur Inn. I actually heard myself yell out “Yee-haw!” as I pulled into the small, empty parking lot. In fact, so grateful was I to see that big green neon brontosaurus on the sign out front, even though it boasted no claims of amenities except “We have Beanie Babies,” when the clerk asked me if I was Ferrill Markoe, I happily nodded and said yes.

  “I could easily imagine this place surrounded by squad cars and police tape,” said Ashley.

  “Go sleep in the car by yourself,” I told to her, wheeling my suitcase to my room.

  DAY TWO

  Turned out waking up at five A.M. was no trouble for me since I never unwound enough to fall asleep in the first place. But turning on the television to get oriented, I was stunned that the very first thing I heard was a guy on Fox News saying, “Coming up: a wet weekend. We’ve got a flash-flood watch. Be extra careful if you’re planning on camping near a river or stream.” That’s correct. He actually said that.

  Ashley sat bolt upright, her pupils fully dilated. “You heard that, right? That’s what they call ‘cryptic foreshadowing.’ Get out of my way. I’m in charge now.” Then she promptly wrested control of my body, forcing me to call up my editor and announce my intention to back out of the assignment. “You can no longer use your detached rational logic on me,” she threatened as she dialed. “I am doing a rewrite on the plot of this movie, especially the second act where we drown.”

  Naturally my editor was sympathetic but felt that I should at least go down to the trip headquarters and get their take on the weather.

  So … back into the rental car, and by six A.M. we were cruising through a very pretty part of rural Utah. The desert was gone, and in its place were dirt roads lined with lush foliage and split-rail fences. The homes and pastureland looked like postcards from someone else’s idyllic childhood.

  A half hour later, I arrived at trip headquarters: a small storefront at the end of a dirt road, where I learned that apparently I was the only person who watched sunrise television before coming over. There were no other terrorstricken people, desperate to get their money back, like I expected. No one was the least bit interested in my “Think before you act” theories.

  Ashley stared slack-jawed at the happy campers as they packed and chatted among themselves. They were about twenty sporty-looking women in shorts and T-shirts, sweatshirts and sandals, raring to go. Most were in their thirties, with a few in their twenties and a few in their forties and fifties. The senior member of the group was in her seventies: an extremely fit-looking woman in shorts and a hoodie.

  Ashley was duly annoyed. “Don’t trust what you’re seeing,” she warned me. “It’s the kind of false lead they always add to the front half of the movie so everyone will continue skipping merrily toward their doom.”

  As someone in charge handed each of us two waterproof duffel bags in which to put all of the things we were bringing, Ashley refused to buy into the prevailing mood. Especially after our group leader, Susan Ann, a woman with a touch of the sixties folksinger about her, reminded me to lock my wallet and my cellphone in the car. “There’s no point in bringing them,” she said calmly. “Cellphones won’t work where we’re headed.”

  “Of course not,” Ashley whispered breathlessly, humming the theme from Psycho. “More cryptic foreshadowing. We should back out.”

  Feeling naked and nervous as I locked my wallet and cellphone in the trunk of my car, I comforted myself by packing extra makeup instead. In the event of a disaster, at least I could count on looking kind of cute in my autopsy photos.

  Before we boarded the vans meant to transport us to the river, we were asked to form a circle, introduce ourselves, and say why we were making the trip. Ashley looked at me through half-closed eyes, well aware of how I hated stuff like this.

  The other women seemed nice enough. Thirtysomething Cheryl, a married high school math teacher who wore her curly brown hair pinned up in a barrette, explained that she was here to grab one last hit of summer before school started again on Tuesday. She also bought the trip as a birthday present for her oldest friend, Tammy, who was sitting beside her.

  Next to Tammy was Jody, a pretty fortyish woman who worked in advertising sales at the Houston Chronicle. After she’d shown some rafting brochures to her husband and he’d said he wasn’t interested, she’d simply told him, “Okay, well, I’m going anyway.” There was laughter and applause from the group when Jody imitated his parting words to her: “Well, now what am I going to do?”

  Seven of us were traveling solo, though Suzie had actually been traveling alone since her divorce last spring. In preparation for this trip, she had made a special point of not watching Deliverance last night. Beside her sat Cindy: trim, blond, and forty, a married mother who took a vacation by herself each year. She was so excited about this trip that she
had her fake nails removed. “It feels so good to be able to pick stuff up again,” she sighed.

  When it was my turn, I intended to be brief and unobtrusive, since I was concerned about the reception I might get when the other women learned I was there to write about it all. That fear proved unfounded, but they did stare at me quizzically when I blurted out my anxiety about drowning in a flash flood.

  “Did anyone else hear the wet weather travel advisory this morning on Fox?” I asked, trying not to sound too hystrical. Everyone looked at me blankly.

  “Of course they’re not worried,” whispered Ashley, as we lined up to board the large white van that would carry us to our point of embarkation at the Gates of Lodore. “We’ve both seen this movie a million times. No one is ever worried.”

  When we finally arrived at the “put-in” and each of us received our life vest, we were all asked to make a solemn pledge: “I, (state your name), promise that I will play an active role in my own rescue.” Ashley glared at me and cleared her throat. “I wonder in what percentage of cases that has ever been remotely effective?” she muttered.

  Before we began the trip for real, we each had to choose from one of two rafting options: take the paddle boat, a smaller raft where everyone wore a helmet and helped to paddle, or be a helmetless freeloader on one of the larger orange rafts that carried the refrigeration chests and tents. The paddle boat seemed like a lot of work. Especially since I was already supposed to be taking the very notes that could be critical to an understanding of what happened when they were recovered next to my lifeless body at the scene of a rafting disaster. So I took a seat on the outside corner of one of the four big orange rafts.

  Above us all, on a makeshift throne in the middle of everything, was river guide Ellie, a woman in her twenties, stunning in her perfect brush-cut hair, Star Trek sunglasses, and tiny black bikini. Ellie was manning the two and only oars from an elevated platform in the center of the raft.