“Ahem. Looks like we’re in good hands now that Paris Hilton is driving,” Ashley grumbled. But Ellie effortlessly maneuvered the enormous raft while simultaneously laughing and talking about her sunblock preferences. If I hadn’t witnessed it myself, I would have assumed that hers was a job that required a couple hundred pounds of muscle and a penis.
Our four-raft caravan glided calmly down the Green River between red-and-orange rock walls that dated back to the Precambrian period. Thousands of weather- and water-carved pastel arcs and layers of the earth’s crust now became visible, some turned vertical or at a forty-five-degree angle to the horizon. Nine separate oceans once filled this canyon and drained. There were rocks that looked like stacks of pancakes, ancient temples, cars of a frozen freight train …
“Okay, we’re coming up to Disaster Falls, a solid Class Three rapid,” announced river guide Gabby, twenty-four and sporting a belly ring in her caramel-colored, completely concave abdomen.
“Perfect,” said Ashley, looking ashen, “Disaster Falls. Let’s hope she’s being sarcastic.” But Gabby looked unperturbed on her raised seat high atop the lead raft. She was clearly the unchallenged queen of this group of river guides. Rapids, she explained, are rated I through VI, with VI being truly dangerous.
Ashley inhaled sharply and dug her fingernails into the palm of my hand as we both became aware of the roar of fast-moving water ahead. But Ellie slipped our raft between two large, jagged boulders like a Volkswagen Bug zipping past tollbooths. Soon we were bouncing so gently over the churning water, feeling its icy spray, that it was kind of a letdown when we arrived safely on the other side. At which point Ashley rolled her eyes, looked around for her jacket and her purse, freshened her lipstick, and disappeared.
The rest of us spent the day drifting in a blue-green stretch of river that was surrounded by sandstone walls, towers, and rock formations that looked like the aunts, uncles, and assorted cousins of the Grand Canyon.
Then at four o’clock we beached the rafts on a sandy, pine-studded inlet and went ashore for the night. Each of us was given a bag with a tent in it and told to pick out a campsite.
Now Ashley was back, glaring at me as I realized with embarrassment that the assemble-the-tent portion of my previous camping festivities had always handled by a guy. “You’re probably too big of a ninnyhammer to put a tent together,” taunted Ashley from her perch atop a rock, never offering to help. But of course, when taken a step at a time, assembling a tent was simply putting the end of one thingy into the front of another thingy. Relieved as I was to learn I could do it as well as the others, I also now found myself feeling grateful to all those boyfriends over the years who volunteered to do it for me. Whoever had convinced men to incorporate tedious tasks like this into their macho display, deserved a very special citation.
Alone in my tent later, breathing in eau de musty, wet canvas raincoat, I peeked out the front flap to take in my view. Our campground was dotted with wet clothing hung out to dry on nearby trees and bushes, making it look like a tsunami recovery area. It had been a fun day, but I confessed to Ashley I would go home right then if it were an option. Tired and sunburned, I missed my dogs, and I couldn’t relax because I hadn’t picked a level spot for my tent’s foundation. This was going to be a bit like trying to sleep on the front steps to my house.
As dinnertime approached, I became increasingly aware that there was also another reason I couldn’t relax. It was time to confront the diciest portion of any camping experience: waste elimination. The camping trips of my youth had always involved simply wandering off into the woods with a flashlight, a shovel, and a roll of toilet paper. But not anymore.
From inside my tent, I could see a steady, antlike stream of ladies heading down the path to “the baño.” For the next few days, bathroom breaks were all going to be a question of timing. There was only one baño for the entire group. At the entrance to the path, one big round rock on top of another one signaled that the baño was ocupado. That rock rarely moved.
The baño was the portable toilet our group carried with us wherever we went, because the state park that contains this stretch of the Green River insists that campers pack out everything they pack in. More toiletty in appearance than a simple hole in the ground, the baño had a seat and most of the other elements of an outhouse, sans walls. But given that the baño had been riding the rapids for years, it was to the ordinary outhouse what a Formula One race car was to the family sedan.
To make our encounter as pleasant as possible, the guides all developed a knack for placing the baño in the most scenic of locations. Tonight it was sitting on a level area a hundred yards down a little tree-lined path surrounded by pine boughs; tomorrow it would be nestled between a couple of boulders with a distant view of the moonlight on the river. After one adapted to the idea of sitting outside, alone, in the middle of the night with one’s pants down, it was a little like going to the bathroom in a painting by William Turner. Of course, the scenic aspect of the baño succumbed over time to a certain sensory je ne sais quoi. “You learn not to look or think,” Gabby explained about performing baño duty, which included cleaning and transport. “I still dry-heave every day.”
Tonight’s baño contemplation was interrupted by Susan Ann, a saltier version of the middle-aged Joan Baez, now more New Age priestess than ethereal psychedelic flower child. She was calling for the group to join her in a circle down at the beach. Since the baño was a dream that had yet to materialize for me, I headed down to Susan Ann’s gathering in time to hear her open with the sentence “I really like circles.”
“The power of the world works in a circle,” she went on. “Everything tries to be round.”
“I don’t want to rain on your circular parade,” I restrained myself from saying, “but what about a pine tree? What about cactus needles and pine needles? What about a snake?”
“We’re going to be talking a lot about the four-fold path,” she continued. “Things come in fours. For instance, we have four rafts.” Hmm, interesting, I was thinking. And I have four dogs. But body parts come in twos: eyes, ears, kidneys, all in pairs. And fingers and toes come in tens, unless there’s a power-saw accident. Beers come in sixes. Buns come in eights. Bees and schools of fish come in hundreds or thousands. In fact, what DOES come in fours besides our rafts and my dogs? But I kept my mouth shut. No point in getting into a discussion knowing that at just the right minute I was going to have to make a break and race for the baño. Also, the view of the river and the red rock wall behind it was spectacular at sunset. The colors were glorious, and Susan Ann seemed like a very nice person. For her sake, I hoped that things did in fact come in fours and were trying to be round.
DAY THREE
I didn’t sleep too well in my mildewy, rock-bottomed, forty-five-degree-angle tent. I was up all night with a numb lower back and a leg cramp. Ashley, who spent the night with me, pleaded with me not to take a midnight hike to the baño. Starting at about two in the morning, she began babbling about how the campsite might be haunted, using the wet clothes hanging on the trees and blowing about in the moonlight as visual proof of the presence of an unseen dimension.
After a night of listening to her weird conjectures, I was a little unnerved to be officially awakened at seven A.M. by Rebecca, one of our river guides, improvising a spooky atonal melody on her recorder. For a moment I was concerned about this eerie new turn in the soundtrack, until she announced that a morning meditation session on the beach would be followed by coffee and fresh fruit. “Wow,” I said to Ashley, “it’s fun to have someone plan all your activities for you.” Even if they did start off with Susan Ann, sitting cross-legged, eyes closed, requesting in a hushed voice that we all “be the river.”
“Relax your facial muscles,” Susan Ann chanted as she led the group meditation. “Relax your neck. Relax your stomach muscles.”
“Not till I get back from the baño,” I wanted to tell her.
As uncomfortable as I was, I was not at
all prepared for Cindy to begin sobbing. “When you told us to release our stomach muscles, it really got to me,” she told the group. “The way we spend our days with our stomach muscles all tightly restricted by our pantyhose and everything.” This certainly didn’t describe the life I’d been living, but it gave me more empathy for Cindy. Wherever she worked, I was glad I didn’t work there.
A basic yoga class followed, then another amazing meal somehow prepared on-site by the river girls. Quiche! Fresh muffins! Fresh-brewed coffee! This stuff materialized magically. And by eleven we were back on the river.
Fran, an aspiring physical therapist when she wasn’t leading a raft brigade, was the chief navigator today, a task she seemed to handle effortlessly. “These all-women’s trips are very different from the usual mixed-gender ones,” she told me while she led four rafts down a river, “because the women act more like themselves without men and children to caretake.” To be sure, I had noticed a very relaxed, uninhibited, less-vain-than-usual vibe among the ladies. Especially the heavy women in minimum-coverage bikinis letting it all hang out. I watched in awe as one unashamedly picked whole peanuts out of a bag of trail mix and pressed them into her peanut butter sandwich.
Despite Ashley’s constant harangues, I, too, was feeling relaxed, though I was still secretly applying my eyeliner in the morning. Why I was doing this was unclear. If ever a circumstance didn’t call for eyeliner, this would be it. Maybe it was because of pressure from Ashley, whose makeup was always perfect even though she was so genetically perfect that she never needed to wear it. Until now I wasn’t aware that makeup was such an ingrained habit for me. Hundreds of miles from civilization, out in the middle of a river on a raft with the extra-peanuts lady, it certainly didn’t feel necessary.
After a few hours of floating downstream and staring up at the muted pastel colors of the eroded rock walls looming above the river, we pulled our rafts ashore for another four-star lunch. This time it included a homemade Japanese-style red cabbage coleslaw with sesame seeds that was so delicate I made the guides give me the recipe.
Later, we took a hike through a cactus-and-scrub-brush-studded desertscape to look at some pictographs carved into the exterior of a cave by Indians, followed by a slippery, steep climb up a rocky slope to a freezing-cold waterfall. Elaine, a seventy-two-year-old woman, was hiking ahead of me, right at the front of the line. Amazing how any inclination to complain was diminished by trying to keep pace with a fast-moving septuagenarian.
As much as I was skeptical of the whole idea of “female bonding,” something about this experience did seem conducive to openness. Maybe it evolved out of the sharing of experiences far from the usual distractions of the Internet and real life. It may also have had something to do with the kind of person who chose to sign up for a trip like this one. As a group they were a little heartier and a good deal less vain than those you might meet standing in line for TV show tickets or a Club Med mixer.
And yes, the openness also seemed gender-related. Something did seem to happen in a group of women (the estrogen? the oxytocin?) that encouraged the kind of personal confessions that were hard to imagine taking place on the side of a mountain with a group of men who just met yesterday. While we were climbing down from the waterfall, Susan Ann started to tell me, almost out of nowhere, that the way she learned she was adopted was when her mother called her home in the middle of a school day. “You’re adopted,” her mother told her when she was eight years old. “Now, never mention this again.” Then she sent her back to school and never said another word about it.
Now that Susan Ann felt she had successfully reinvented herself, I was glad that she seemed happy. I hoped she would eventually get four of everything she wanted.
After the hike, we all got back on the rafts and headed to a spot in the river where we encountered our first Class V rapid. This one required a negotiation between inflatable vessel and river rock topography that was so complicated that a girl guide conference convened to plan our logistics from a spot high on the riverbank.
I couldn’t hear what was being said, but I imagined that the calculations needed to slide a big floating vessel through an obstacle course full of craggy, irregular boulders and fast-moving water had to be somewhere between the ones required to sink an eight ball and to parallel park a tanker truck on a steep hill. The tanned, bikini-wearing, gum-snapping girls who were doing the piloting seemed as unfazed as ever.
As each raft maneuvered successfully through the white-water spouts and falls, its pilot got a big round of applause from the others. Then I gave myself one a little later, after I did a better job of setting up my tent the second night by taking the extra time to remove the rocks and the branches from the foundation. Tasks involving the need for physical action seemed to shut Ashley up. I forgot to be upset about my dogs or my weight or my career or serial killers for most of the day, even if for some reason I was still wearing eyeliner.
After dinner, it was announced that our activity for the night would be a massage therapy class. And just like that, Ashley appeared again, bug-eyed with one raised eyebrow.
Shrugging off her warnings, I joined the group gathering around a campfire. Everyone was dressed in the usual evening wardrobe of sweaters and sweatpants. Only in this case, we were all told that we had to take off our shoes and pick a partner for a foot massage. This is precisely the kind of thing, Ashley reminded me, I really hate.
“You cringe when someone comes up behind you and starts to rub your shoulders,” Ashley needled. Of course, she was right. Even in a luxurious spa setting where I am overpaying for the service, I become ill at ease and bored lying on a table while someone kneads my muscles. I also get uncomfortable when a hug lasts too long.
Still, the fact that this particular massage therapy class was being taught by Arlene, a big woman who ran a steakhouse in Utah for thirteen years, went a long way toward making it all seem more interesting, though not as interesting as it would have been if she were teaching a class in how to manage a steakhouse.
Luckily for me, my massage partner, Janine, a woman who owned her own pretzel-cart business in Chicago, seemed equally uncomfortable. This made me more relaxed.
Ultimately, I was forced to conclude that running a steakhouse may not be the best training ground for a wannabe massage instructor, surprised as I was by her recommendation that after we finished giving a massage, we should fling the person’s energy away from us with a violent wrist flick, like we would a fistful of cooties. This seemed like a very insulting and hostile thing to do to someone you’d been oiling and rubbing. Kind of like running to the bathroom to brush your teeth right after performing oral sex.
But perhaps I was being too sensitive.
DAY FOUR
Here’s a sentence I never expected to hear spoken, not even in a dream: “Last night the ringtail cats ate the Chips Ahoy.” Jody was bitter. “I wouldn’t have a problem with it if they’d gotten the Pecan Sandies,” she said.
Today’s stretch of river would slowly through some spectacular sections of Dinosaur National Monument, full of different pastel-colored rock striations that represented every twisting, once molten layer of the earth’s surface since crust number one. In some places all the layers seemed to melt together, converging into the sandstone equivalent of wood grain.
It was an easy day, travel-wise, with only gentle rapids, so we relaxed and occasionally swam alongside the rafts. Everyone seemed peaceful and happy, especially Cindy, the woman who was used to wearing restrictive pantyhose.
Finally we stopped for the night at a little beach that had a riverbed with a spongy bottom full of gooey silken silt. Something about its easy spreadability inspired a large contingent of the women to want to mud-bathe. A number of them seemed to feel that the velvety mud had to be imbued with some kind of healing mineral content or rejuvenation properties. Thus they began to slather their skin with it from their faces on down. I was more skeptical, immediately thinking of plenty of spreadable things that
offer no real net gain, beauty-wise: chocolate pudding, mashed potatoes, small containers of enigmatically named creams that sell for ninety-five dollars an ounce. But the ladies of the river all felt very good about the properties of this mud. Within minutes we were all covered with a coating of the ocher-colored goo. Yes, I mudded up, too. Had there been a photographer from a men’s magazine nearby, we would no doubt have turned up as a featured spread on a mud-fetish site. (Well, maybe not the extra-peanuts lady.) But because there was no such photographer here, we all just stood around in the shallow part of the river, talking and laughing: a lek of mud-caked slime creatures with tits.
Around the campfire that night, there was no avoiding one last Susan Ann circle event. This time she explained that when she handed you “the talking stick” she wanted you to tell her what surprised you, what challenged you, and what inspired you. In one simple sentence, Susan Ann had zeroed in on three questions I had no desire to answer. To say nothing of how little I liked the phrase “the talking stick.”
“Let’s get out of here,” Ashley said. She was so over this.
“It’s our last night,” I reprimanded her, happy when she agreed to go back to the tent so I could play along without further ironic interference.
This led me to another gender-related moment: leave it to a group of women to all be able to have a meaningful personal revelation in the space of just seventy-two hours when called upon to do so.
Quite a few women had been inspired by the daughter, mother, grandmother triad traveling together who seemed to be genuinely enjoying each other’s company. For my part, I had been watching this reunion as though I was Margaret Mead, observing the customs of a miraculous and magical family unit utterly unlike my own. Mainly I was astonished by Michelle, the granddaughter, who answers the question “What inspires you?” with “I know people who hate their parents. And hate their birthdays. And hate getting old. But I look at my mother and my grandmother and I think, ‘How can I not look forward to that next stage?’ ” Amazing, I thought, unable to remember having had a single moment like the one she was describing, trying not to dwell on images of my frequently unhappy mother and depressed grandmother.
Cool, Calm & Contentious Page 20
