Al Kesselheim

I don’t know, maybe it’s an age thing. Maybe it’s the sentimentality of the holiday season . . .

Could be that I turned 71 and am more acutely aware of loose ends, and also of the cycles looping through my life. It’s not a ‘bucket list’ impulse. I’ve never had the cliche urge that seems to infect old people with the fever to jump out of airplanes or walk across beds of red-hot coals.  Not that, but there is something going on, some satisfaction in taking care of unfinished business, and also, the need to pay more intentional tribute to the circular seasons that ebb and flow through the course of a lifetime. It manifests in my attention to connecting the dots along incomplete trails I’ve begun, or left in segments. And in the deepened awareness of the swirling patterns I’ve become incorporated in by nature of my family, my unique history, friendships, quests, quirky traditions, and the steady, inexorable currents of time. Trails completed. Circles closed.

Not that this is something ever done, because just as a box gets checked, a new one opens up. New cycles initiated, new trails begun, fresh awareness, some physical and tangible, others emotional and only vaguely understood. Still, something’s going on, and it seems to have come into particular clarity for me lately.

Like I say, some accomplishments are very tangible and concrete. Fulfilling an ambition to float the Gila River, in New Mexico, last March, for example, which has dangled out there in my imagination since I lived in Santa Fe in the 1970s. Getting around, finally, to running the Rogue River in Oregon, which has been somewhere on my river-running radar for probably forty years. Who knew, after all those failed lottery applications, that you could just show up and score a permit, which I did with my oldest good friend, Grant Herman, in September. Or, in late August, with Marypat still navigating her knee-replacement recovery, the final 100-mile piece of the Clark Fork River between Butte and Paradise, Montana. Somewhere in those four paddling days, a revelation – “Hey, look at me!” she exclaimed, “I’m kneeling!”.

The meaningful return to a summer canoe expedition in the Far North, with a band of six guys, most of them strangers. Those extended, logistically-challenging, expensive expeditions have a poignant flavor, because who knows which will be the last I’m capable of. I had that same pang of uncertainty when we did the Mountain River with the kids, or the Noatak with a band of friends. For a guy who has no history of making the ‘cross’ to mark a blessing, I am tempted by that gesture at the successful conclusion of each one of these journeys. How lucky am I, I think, every time.

In the vein of traditions, we are logging the 10^th year of our Three Rivers gathering, that Memorial Day glut of quirky river sections with a boisterous gang of paddling friends. This spring will be a decade-marking week of rivers in celebration of a tradition no one knew would go anywhere or last even one year.

This has been a particularly rich year for family ceremony, as we managed to corral nearly 30 of us for a summer reunion in Maine, where the tapestry of familial fabric came together, created new patterns, and reinforced old ones while cracking lobster tails, walking the trails of Acadia, oogling new family members, and memorializing Aunt Judy on a bluebird day along the Atlantic shore. Most of us also came together to celebrate the long life of my Aunt Noey Congdon, in Denver. She was the last of her generation to pass the torch, and hers is an indelible legacy of fierce integrity and absolute grace.

It struck us this year how our celebrations seem evenly divided between the youthful outbursts of weddings and births, punctuations of exuberance put on by the contemporaries of our kids, and by more somber gatherings to remember those who pass on, mostly our contemporaries and our elders. In that way we teeter at a crux of comings and goings, joy and grief, dancing and comforting. The passing of energy and the anticipation of a future with new and unknowable forces at work.

Here in Butte we remember last winter held fast in the grip of old-time cold and snow. By this time last year we’d already been out skiing probably twenty days, and we were in for a season of minus 40 cold and unrelenting snow. This year, in the final days of November, I climbed a nearby mountain through a skiff of snow in shorts and a tee-shirt. My back is thankful, and anxiety about pipes freezing and whopping heat bills is reduced, but it’s another mark of the cycles we all play our roles in or are forced to live through.

All of it expressions of the great river of existence bearing us along. Headlong descents, quiet pools, swirling eddies and whirlpools, foam-laced drops, serene dawn mists, fearful unknowns, comforting serenity. Another bend left in our wake on this daunting and awesome expedition.

It was Kimmer’s brilliant idea, more than 20 years back. “What if,” she said, “as each of us reaches 50, we propose a trip and everyone else shows up for it?” A novel and intriguing challenge.

Everyone else, in this case, is a group of 8-10 of us (somewhat variable depending on partner participation) who have all been united by a zest for adventure. Some of us have known each other since college. In various combinations we have ventured off together on backcountry jaunts for roughly fifty years. Exploits that range from the epic and serious to the ribald and silly.

We all signed on, but hey, talk is cheap, right? The wreckage of failed brilliant schemes dots the arc of human history, a junkyard full of the skeletons of big talk and not-so-big action.

It turns out that I was first up, back in 2002, and it has earned me the tag of Elder ever since, whatever that means. I have the advantage of being alone in my year, which makes me a dictator free of any obligation to negotiate. And that’s a bigger advantage than you might think.

The 50s decade went largely according to plan. My outing took us down the Continental Divide spine through the Anaconda/Pintler mountains in SW Montana for a week. Over the years, with some fluctuation in group size, we sallied forth through the Kootenai Mountains of British Columbia, made a south-to-north traverse of the La Sal Mountains in Utah, and finished up with a week in Glacier NP in Montana. All more or less on time, with a few wobbly planning moments (notably on the main drag of Moab in 104-degree heat trying to decide where to go). All pretty robust multi-day outings full of goofy games, comical food hanging episodes, unbelievable blooms of Indian Paintbrush, kick-stepping up snow couloirs, morning yoga in mountain meadows, skinny dips, and grizzly bear encounters at 10,000’.

Before I knew it, my turn came around again to kick off the 60s iteration. I picked a hike in Escalante, notable for poison ivy, gobsmacking canyons, and hilarious swims with packs through route-blocking pools. Timing got a little less rigid in the second decade. One team who shall remain nameless dawdled more than five years before finally pulling off a base-camp, day-outing week in the Methow Valley of Washington, a medley of hikes, floats, bike rides, and game nights. Another team put together a moving base camp week in central Utah, featuring petroglyph panels and slot canyons. An eclipse-focused, horse-pack assisted hike and basecamp outing in Wyoming’s Wind River Range rounded out the journeys.

Notice the slippage here, from outright Point A to Point B backpack trips to base camp forays, help with carrying gear, less sleeping on the ground, more vehicular shelter. Sixty may be the new fifty, but still . . . By the end of that decade jokes about trips devoted to shuffleboard and lawn bowling were more prevalent and less far-fetched.

Now, signs of the creep of age haunt us more dramatically as we enter the decade of the 70s. I go first again. There is some wiggle room on timing, spanning both the year you turn 70 and the year following your birthday, before you turn 71. Well, I’m about to turn 71 and I’ve only partially gotten around to my outing. I looked seriously at the year preceding my birthday, but things came up. Namely, for me, a diagnosis of and surgery for prostate cancer. Kind of focused my attention. Also, one of the other participants endured a life-threatening fall on a bike ride that was no picnic to recover from. So, I put it off and blithely turned 70, like it or not. I had another year to get it done, after all.

My plan was to put together a river float and get back to a sustained outing without succumbing to the basecamp routine. There were a lot of logistics to consider – what level of whitewater to accept, who had boats and paddling skills, synchronizing calendars, and the rest. I finally settled on a week-long stretch of the Yellowstone River in Montana. I know it well, even down to the gravel bar campsites. It is upbeat current without being scary. Blah, blah . . . Anyway, everyone agreed, we set a late fall window, and time went on in its inexorable way.

What ambushed the plan was health. First, Marypat had a knee replacement. Her recovery was going well until she developed excruciating back pain that kept her from doing anything remotely rigorous. Then Charlie threw out his back picking up pinecones in his driveway (it’s never something heroic, is it?). Carol reported rotator cuff issues that would keep her from doing any strenuous paddling. Then, Sue, on the first day of a John Muir Trail hike in California, got lambasted by a random rock fall that threw her off the trail where she ended up with a gruesome compound fracture of her lower leg. Long story, highlighted by helicopter evacuation, medivac to Fresno, complicated surgery involving rods and screws, and a long drive back home to recover.

Weeks away from our late-season launch, we were down to a 50% healthy crew, and I was imagining Sue trying to gimp out of her tent on a frigid morning, Marypat cringing in pain trying to paddle, Carol being relegated to hood ornament status, and the rest of us dividing our time between paddling downriver and being assisted-living care-givers. I succumbed to the obvious and pulled the plug.

Only, the gang didn’t want the plug pulled, at least not completely. Plan B would be to meet and camp at a riverside site in Paradise Valley, downstream of Yellowstone Park along the Yellowstone River. At least we’d have a chance to catch up, gather around the fire, take on whatever outings we could, and patch together some kind of substitute.

And we did. In the end there were 8 of us. All but one, by now, had either a trailer or camper van or RV. Carol’s was the last tent standing, but it was quite the boudoir arrangement with carpeting, a chair, a sleeping cot, even a heater (although, to her credit, she says she never turned it on). The rest of us retired to our mobile getaways, complete with luxurious heat, galleys, beds, and tables.

Activities included grizzly watching, some trail walks, hot springs, and two pretty sweet fall paddling days on the Yellowstone with snowclad peaks and brilliant fall cottonwoods for scenic splendor. Not bad, but I asked everyone to promise to hang in there for a river float in April, maybe in Utah somewhere, to complete my 70s commitment. I argued that it really wasn’t my fault that time ran out on me, given the suite of setbacks we’d encountered. Besides, we’ve gotten decidedly less stringent about timing over the years. Not surprisingly, given the crew, everyone agreed. So we’re on for the culmination of my decade trip come spring, when, presumably, everyone will be back to full strength, right?

I mean, what could possibly go wrong?

 

On our fridge is a list of stuff we have on our adventure/outing to-do list. Some of it is pretty aspirational (travel to Ireland), but most is quite attainable (local trails, bike rides, paddling). One of them is to finish our top-to-bottom float of the Clark Fork River drainage. It’s a quest years in the making.

Decades ago we paddled Alberton Gorge, downstream of Missoula, a section notable for it’s whitewater quality, but until we moved to Butte our attention had been on other destinations. Then, a couple of years back we got skunked by low water on a Yampa River permit, and ended up paddling nearly 100 miles of the lower Clark Fork from Alberton, through the Alberton Gorge, and all the way down to the confluence with the Flathead River near Paradise, Montana. That, combined with our move to Butte, at the head of the drainage, got us thinking about putting it all together.

Since then we have been nibbling away at it. Over the past couple of summers we’ve been strapping boats on the rig, loading a shuttle bike, and taking on small chunks of the upper drainage – Warm Springs to Racetrack, for example . . . Garrison to Phosphate . . . Gold Creek to Drummond. Day outings with a frontage road or ranch road biking option for our shuttles. We got as far as Drummond, 60 miles downstream of home, where it got more and more difficult to pull off day outings and put together doable bike shuttles.

This past week we committed to the final 100-mile leg, taking the tandem canoe loaded with food and camping gear, and gave ourselves 5 days to pull it off.

Every river has its character – boisterous, sedate, waltzing, full-throated, lethargic – I’d call the Clark Fork a river in recovery (from us!). It runs alongside the interstate and railroad track. It courses through ranches, towns, industry, and rural lands. Most egregiously, it endured the onslaught of mining in upstream Butte, which was punctuated by whopping floods in 1908 that sluiced down unguessable quantities of mine waste and tailings in deposits as much as 10-feet deep, all the way to the Milltown Dam just upstream of Missoula. It was industrial pollution of gobsmacking proportions.

Mining ended in the 1980s and the entire drainage has been recovering (with some remedial help from us) ever since. And yet, paddling it, we often lost that sense of industrial shitshow in the cadence of the flow, in the spreading cottonwoood groves, in the riffles and channels, in the sounds of birds and chattering current. There are, to be sure, moments of confrontation with what we have done. ‘Slickens’, or dead zones, left behind by toxic mine wastes that still persist. Excavations and diversions and riprap and jetties constructed to manage and contain and deflect the river.

This past week we rode down the slide of gravity, heading for the confluence with the Columbia River far downstream in Idaho, past ranches, through Missoula, under highway bridges, camping next to the highway one night, and then serenaded by boisterous coyotes the next. Much like the Yellowstone River, that other Montana great watershed that runs the gauntlet of humanity going east, the Clark Fork perseveres, reasserts itself, finds a way through and around and despite us.

And we rode that watery rail of juxtaposition – wild and untamable, hemmed in and subdued, gritty and pure, frail and robust. Moments of danger, lovely moonrises, the cacophany of humanity, the serenity of purling river, hours of steady paddling, drifting along at the pace of current, under the gaze of bald eagle and osprey, in the company of fox and white-tail and coyote. Whispering past civilization, camping under the noses of motorists, passing college coeds on the riverbank, waving to trains, or ghosting through dawn mists.

From Montana Street in Butte, at the start of Silver Bow Creek, all the way to Paradise, we checked that box. (And yes, I know, the Clark Fork continues on into Idaho and beyond, but below the confluence with the Flathead, it turns into a massive flow, punctuated by dams and reservoirs. No thanks.)

Well, if you run a blog, I guess it’s on you to keep it current, which I haven’t been doing lately. It’s not that nothing has happened since spring, it’s just that I haven’t gotten around to posting about it. My fault, but hey, it’s my blog.

I’m just back from a two-week river expedition in the Northwest Territories of Canada on the Elk River, a tributary of the Thelon in the central barrenlands. It was a return to that evocative landscape so reminiscent of our early trips on the Kazan and Dubawnt drainages, that rolling, endless tundra terrain full of whispers of native peoples, wildlife, and horizon after horizon of people-less landscape. It is not as panoramic or stunning as the western Arctic, but there is something stirring and compelling about it that I can’t fully explain.

First, some take-aways:

• it was my first return to the barrens since 2004, when we pulled off an epic family expedition in honor of Eli’s coming-of-age transition on the Kazan River;
• it was my first all-male journey in a long time (mostly I’ve gone with family, or just Marypat, or with a group of couples). This trip there were six of us from Colorado, Montana, Wisconsin and Minnesota, ranging from 40-something to 70, some with long histories together, others who had never met;
• the trip was yet another saga of travel snafus – canceled flights, road closures due to forest fires, epic drives;
• timing was everything – we were lucky to arrive on time because of road closures on the single highway into Yellowknife. Then, after the trip, we made a hasty escape on that same highway, with flames on the side of the road. The other trip members had to contend with another canceled flight, rescheduled itinerary, lost baggage. Then, just days after our escape, the entire city of Yellowknife was under an evacuation order and several communities we had just driven through were burnt to the ground;
• we indulged a chill pace on the journey – 14 days for an itinerary you could pretty easily paddle in 7. Consequently we enjoyed multiple layover days with lovely hiking along glacial esker ridges, time for contemplation, card games and no hard-and-fast schedule. It was a sweet contrast to earlier trips with a more unbending timeline and the stress of falling behind.

Rather than try to recount a blow-by-blow trip narrative, I’m going to let a few of my journal excerpts speak for the journey. (I’ll try to insert a few photos later, when I get that organized).

Aug. 4 – Day 5: We are in a singularly beautiful spot. A crescent of sand beach, open park-like tundra on a bench above, punctuated with scraggly stands of spruce. The water is mirror calm, the sky faintly cloudy, like gauze. Loons yodel in the distance. I’m inside the tundra tarp unaffected by bugs. Washed out a pair of underwear and a tee shirt. Enjoying another cup of coffee . . .

Had a nice late morning stroll up behind camp on a broad esker plateau. Sweeping views back up river, the lake, other more distant esker systems. On top the glacial litter of boulders and gravel, old musk ox tracks and scat, a few desiccated trees. A whaleback of land from which to glass a vast quadrant of tundra, marsh, lakes, willow. Nothing moving. A quiet tapestry of land under the pale summer northern sky.

Aug. 7 – Day 8: It’s late evening. The setting sun sends its lambent glow across the tundra, under the clouds, flaming this austere scene. Full of quiet water, calling loons, ancient boulders. We put in a solid day of paddling into a light head and cross-wind. Stopped to look for wolf dens without finding any. Stopped again to fish for grayling in a riffle. Spent a long afternoon slogging across wide, lakey miles. Our hoped-for destination turned out to ba a rocky shoreline, but we found an alternative tundra site that has grown on everyone. Reminiscent of many tundra camps along the Kazan and other rivers.

I cooked dinner tonight – African stew with appetizers and a dessert. We listened to the final life story, from Mark. Each one unique and vivid and ultimately personal, shared with emotion and heart, humor and tears. We now have a foundation of meaningful personal history to build from.

Loons flying overhead in the late day sky, a harrier, some willow ptarmigan. Still looking for big mammals – a musk ox, a caribou, a wolf, a bear, some life in the empty space.

Aug. 9 – Day 10: We are officially in base camp mode. We have four days before pick up, and about three miles to paddle. Today is on our own to walk and explore, do chores, take baths, cook bannack, relax. It’s a unique feeling for me, contrasting with so many past trips where we had to keep up a daily mileage average and where weather or wind delays were cause for concern, fretful interludes waiting for a break. These days are more in my friend Lee’s style, taking a month to do a river that you could easily paddle in two weeks. Where you settle into a landscape, let it enfold you, sit and observe it, be fucking quiet for once.

Not that we are necessarily quiet, at least as a group. We also have pretty vociferous discussions and a general hubbub of conversation. That is part of the scene here as a group, and a good part. The morning two-cups-of-coffee debates over climate and population and economy and social ills. The raucous evening rounds of card games. The giving-each-other-shit banter that is a fairly constant undertone, good-natured stuff with a whiff of an edge that comes with personal history, inside jokes, and general comfort with each other. That part is valuable too, and also often absent on a more driven journey, on which everyone is watching to see if they’re lagging on packing up for the day or getting a meal done, or staying up with the other boats.

It is a relief not to feel that daily push. Perhaps a mark of age too, because there is a youthful energy and allure attached to the more goal-oriented style, the heroic days, the epic stories. Call it the retirement pace, or the Lee pace, but I must say that it’s growing on me. It makes me feel more available to northern trips to come in this style. . . .

Something about stripping down naked along the river, washing a few clothes, soaping up armpits and crotch, washing hair while the arctic terns cry in the distance, a sandpiper peeps up the shore, the constant hum of insects becomes a kind of white noise. Then sitting there, pale and clean in the sun, drying out, a slight breeze against the skin. The slowly inching river slides by on its way to the Thelon, over Granite Falls, picking up the pace, an inexorable coalescing of molecules jostling toward the sea. Water molecules our boats have been borne along by, through the miles and storms and winds, corners and pools and riffles and falls – stillness and noise. This symphony of place where time stalls out in the vast ebb and flow that encompasses the coming and going of glaciers, the slow erosion of landscape, the movements of life, including us, all choreographed by chance and fate and change. Here before us, here after we are gone, when we are rendered just another sedimentary layer, remarkable only for its strangeness.

Aug. 11 – Day 12: A passing cumulus dropping rain glanced our camp with gusts of wind. I had to hang on to the tundra tarp for probably twenty minutes as the cloud slowly passed. It lathered up the lake with whitecaps, buffeted the tents, blew my chair around. I guyed out things, put rocks on tent corners, zipped doors shut. Probably would have been okay had I been gone, but maybe not.

These trips as I age have a nostalgic flavor to them. Partly it has to do with the memories sparked as I go, past trips, the energy of youth, former partners, camps and currents and landscapes that I am reminded of. The shards of personal history evoked by whatever.

Also, the question, each journey, of whether it might be my last one to the Far North. I remember paddling the final miles of the Kazan in my fifties, with the boys in the canoe, that river so potent with power and momentum, and thinking with a surge of real grief that it would, in all likelihood, be my last trip there. How I felt so buoyed and exhilarated, and also so stricken, in that last urgent flush of current.

In a quieter way, it is the same here in this rustling camp with the lake sparkling and the clouds in slow parade and the land spreading away so vast. That this might be it. Anything could happen. Cancer. Civil war. Financial ruin. The creep of age finally closing the door. This could be it, today, the final chapter in the minor personal saga that is my dabble in adventure.

 

This Plan B world asserted itself once again on our March getaway to the desert southwest.

To begin, on our departure morning, March 15, 6 am, we crept out of town on icy roads, made it about 5 miles, and confronted a sign on I-15 south informing us that the highway was closed to the Idaho border.  In the few miles before the next exit, we explored alternate routes to get around the closure, all of which seemed ridiculous and riddled with their own fraught possibilities. Turn around, creep back home, spend the day shoveling snow and biding time.

Reboot on the 16th, with better results, arriving at friend’s in St. George, Utah in time for a stroll and dinner. The day delay allowed us to drive the 2-lane across northern Arizona to Lee’s Ferry, (closed the day before due to snow) on the way to Prescott, sighting a couple of condors along the way. All good.

The overarching reason for our journey south was the possibility of floating the Salt River in southern Arizona. It’s a tough permit to get, and even if you score one, the likelihood of having enough water to float is iffy. Our friend, Lee, got the permit, and this year, with all the ‘atmospheric river’ activity going on, looked promising.

Indeed, as we closed in on Prescott, the signs of whopping moisture, snow-capped peaks, and recent flooding were everywhere. Flagstaff was blanketed in snow, Oak Creek canyon was full of flood debris, the Verde River, normally a creek with a couple hundred cfs flowing through it, had boomed to 50,000 cfs in recent days. The Salt got up to 12,000 cfs, and our upper limit for tolerating whitewater anxiety was 5,000.

For the next few days, enjoying Lee and Truly’s good company, going for mountain bike rides and hikes, we kept checking river gauges. There was hope. The Verde dropped back down, the Salt kept moderating. As our launch date approached, it looked promising. Only, another pulse of wet weather was looming on the close horizon, predicted to arrive right around our launch day. The river ranger predicted another spike, possibly even higher than the last one, during our float. “It could go to 20,000,” he said.

We huddled, we pondered, we alternately accused each other of being wimps and cowered at the prospect to raging water and long, scary swims in the event of capsizes. In the end we went to Plan B, picking the Gila River in New Mexico. It has also been on our trip radar for decades. It, too, is a flow often too low to run. And the wet weather was tending to miss that watershed. Longer drive, new shuttle arrangements, different maps, some changes in gear.

We drove out of Prescott in a pounding rain storm. Flagstaff was predicted to get 6 inches of snow, followed by rain, followed by another 10 inches of snow. Another big glut of water looked inevitable. Phoenix, Tucson, and finally Silver City, NM in time for an early dinner in a brew pub. Then a tortuously winding road up and over the continental divide, and steeply down into the valley of the Gila.

We camped at a closed campground near the Grapevine launch site and put in the following morning, along with a slug of other boaters (many of whom had made the same Plan B choice we had – we called ourselves “Salt River Refugees”). After a tour of the Gila cliff dwellings and a recon with the shuttle service, we launched around mid-day on roughly 600 cfs of muddy river sluicing through the intensely beautiful Gila Wilderness.

For the next six days we were held in the spell of that valley and the surrounding landscape – volcanic layers in cliffs and peaks and ridges, stunning sycamore trees shining white in the sun, tributary valleys with ancient graneries and petroglyphs, occasional hot springs, signs of recent flooding. The paddling was engaging. The river is a heads up series of challenges. Every bend is a potential minefield of downed trees or braiding channels. Paddling requires constant vigilance and quick choices. At the same time, it isn’t terrifying or pushy. For hours at a time we paddled along in a challenging, fun rhythm through the winding miles, entertained by the topography, sighting new birds, dealing with obstacles, threading the needle through rock gardens or deadfall.

We had enough time to award ourselves with half-days and a layover day with opportunities for hiking, rock hounding, and letting the landscape sink in. It was cold enough that we had thick ice on the water bucket every morning, and headed to the warmth of sleeping bags before 9 at night. The group chemistry geled. The river entertained. The country seduced. All the way to the end the river challenged and engaged us – walking shallow rapids, hitting narrow slots through deadfall, missing walls on sharp bends.

On Day 6, the warmest day of the journey, we coasted up to Mogollon Creek and the line up of our shuttled vehicles. A Plan B worthy of Plan A status. No one regretted choosing the Gila.

Two days later, back in Prescott, we looked back on the wisdom of our choice. As it turned out, the Salt had indeed peaked at almost 17,000 cfs during our window. That would have been daunting indeed. And the Verde, it had zoomed up to nearly 100,000 cfs, an unprecedented flood level that had us all envisioning the fear and loathing of being caught in such an onslaught of river charging through a broad floodplain without high ground. I’d say that the Gila was just right.

Back in Butte now, regrouping, drying out, shoveling. Winter still has us in its grip here. The snow in our front yard is several feet deep, ski areas are buried, the snowpack is upwards of 100% everywhere, and we aren’t changing out snow tires any time soon. Paddling season in Montana is looking good, but it isn’t happening for a while.

 

Of course that fickle finger of fate has caused mischief with best-laid plans forever. Just when things are all dialed in, something comes up – a death in the family, a freak blizzard, an economic crash, a vehicle break down, a sudden illness. It has always been so.

Also, it’s true that people of my generation in America have had the incredible good luck to live during a period of comfort, health, economic stability and a general lack of mayhem and tragedy. We’ve had our shaky moments, to be sure, but it’s hard to imagine a better span, or a better location, to have been born into. Pure luck.

That said, it has become clear in recent years that, to an unnerving degree, we have entered more uncertain times, and that being able to count on much of anything to work out as planned is a crapshoot – from taking a trip to counting on retirement, from buying a house to finding half-and-half at the store.

The biggest single culprit in this phenomenon lately has been the advent of Covid. For years now, since early 2020, Covid has laid waste to millions of lives, and impacted the health of millions more who have survived its scourge. For most of us, the round of plague has meant putting life on a prolonged Plan B course correction – stay home, lose jobs, work remotely, miss graduations/weddings/reunions/birthdays, skip school, don’t travel, deal with solitude, deal with scarcity, deal with grief, deal with masks, deal with boredom. Deal. From missed concerts to missed deaths, Covid made us all cope with profound uncertainty. It required us to make judgement calls on behavior. It made us miss out on things both profound and trivial.

But something more insidious and wide-ranging seems also to be going on here. In addition to the wallop of Covid on life, there appears to be a rising confluence of issues weighing in on those best-laid plans and creating havoc of our intentions. The tributary streams creating this river of unpredictability include the myriad effects of climate change, the alarming and global phenomenon of political unrest, the intrusion of health issues, and what seems to be a frail infrastructure struggling to hold everything together and failing with distressing frequency.

In my small and privileged sphere I’ve had to reschedule the last three months of canoe expeditions in my year of monthly journeys due to Covid; had to call off a Yampa River trip due to a lack of water; missed a Hamilton performance because I tested positive for Covid; had to call off a solstice cabin outing because of -40 winter temperatures; dealt with two cancelled flights on one trip; called off a family reunion because of Covid and travel logistics; and I’m forgetting/repressing a good deal. Many of my friends have had similar problems – wilderness trip permits canceled due to fires or floods or drought, trips thrown into chaos due to illness or political unrest, important transitions unmarked; careers derailed, school put on hold, deaths unattended. Others have had far more trying ordeals. Consider the millions of travelers this past Christmas season dealing with a week of horrific weather and airline failures. Consider all the people who lost jobs and still haven’t recovered. Consider those with lingering and debilitating symptoms of Covid. Consider travelers caught up in the post-election riots in Peru recently, never mind those rotting in foreign jails for being in the wrong place at the wrong time and becoming political pawns.

All that doesn’t even touch the true misery of crises gripping so much of humanity. My experience is superficial and trivial compared to war and famine and political tyranny and societal dysfunction. I speak from a privileged vantage, enjoying the comfort and security so many crave. I have no business complaining, and yet, my inconveniences speak to a wider phenomenon. What manifests in my life as a need to be nimble and flexible, open to change, resourceful with options, the challenge to make lemonade of lemons, is a much more profound and ominous trend in the wider world. The confluence of political turmoil, health threats, environmental upheaval, and our fraying ability to juggle it all may lead to a reality in which Plan Bs will be a necessary survival tool, and the stakes won’t be as benign as an altered trip itinerary, but life and health and happiness itself.

More than anything, I hope I’m wrong.

 

 

 

Less than a month after we returned from our Alaskan adventure, we left home again, this time for Peru. I’m not much of a world traveler, but our family friend Liz has been working in Peru this past year on a Fulbright Scholarship. Sawyer spent a morning with us on the computer and was able to finagle three round trip tickets to Lima for something like a total of $200 using credit card miles and the like. Liz’s time in Peru is winding up in a couple of months, and her invitation to come and see the country was compelling.

So, in mid-October, off we went. It was a little complicated. Ruby decided to join us, and was traveling separately. The deal we were able to work out through Sawyer was a tad convoluted – our tickets involved us driving to Seattle, flying to Washington DC where we would endure a 7 hour layover, then flying to Bogota and on to Lima. Then, after a day in Lima, another flight on to see Liz in the northern highland city of Chachapoyas.

We talked ourselves into this gambit because Sawyer had friends in Seattle he wanted to visit before we left. We decided we could use the DC layover to take public transport and visit the Washington Mall. Blah, blah, blah. Anyway, from afar it all seemed plausible, if a bit challenging.

Now we’re back and everything has settled back down to its normal routine. And I’ve had a chance to ruminate on our journey and reach some conclusions. Two of them, in fact, that affirm attitudinal leanings I’ve harbored for a while now. They are no longer ‘leanings’. They are now firm beliefs.

First, that modern air travel is an absolute shitshow. This is particularly true, if you, like me, have a long enough arc to remember how chill and pleasant air travel once was. Back when you could stroll with your companion to the gate and see them off, and come to the gate and wave a welcome when they returned. Back when invasive, humiliating searches weren’t the status quo. Back when you actually conferred with humans to negotiate travel plans rather then computer screens demanding login information.Back when you actually got meals on flights rather than tiny packets of dry pretzels.

Everything, these days, is complicated, onerous, uncomfortable, and stressful. Even when things go according to plan, we are subjected to snaking long lines while the clock ticks down toward our departure time, obnoxious searches of our luggage and person, demanding computer kiosks, crowded and uncomfortable seating from waiting areas to plane seats . . . you get the picture. We’ve all been there. And that’s when things go well.

When things don’t go well. . . In our case the layover in DC went more or less according to plan. We figured out public transport and spent a drizzly half-day wandering the national mall, touring the Botanical Gardens and the Art Museum, reflecting on the Reflecting Pool, gazing at the Monument. A bit bleary, and a little damp, but definitely worth it. We got to Lima late at night, 24 hours after leaving Seattle, and booked an AirBnB, slept in, toured Lima on foot the next day, enjoyed local food, reckoned with travel lag. The next morning our flight to Chachapoyas was inexplicably delayed and we hung out with fellow travelers at the gate for hours, waiting for explanations, which finally came via a bus that pulled up, loaded us up, took us back to reclaim our bags, and explained that due to weather, the flight had been cancelled.

Another day in Lima, another night in an AirBnB, another Uber ride or two, more exploring of a city we’d really rather not be in. None of it compensated for or assisted in by the tiny airline that serviced our destination. Only the next day did we manage to fly out and make it to see Liz, and Ruby, who had actually managed to match her itinerary.

Ten days later, when we returned, our flight back from Chachapoyas to Lima was inexplicably delayed by several hours, but did eventually fly. Another afternoon in Lima with the kids, spent nicely enough, and then back to the airport for flights out. Through baggage claim, through TSA, through Customs, off to our gates. We said goodbye to Ruby and boarded our plane, which then sat at the gate for an extra hour before explaining that a dashboard switch had to be repaired. Fine, we eventually pushed off, only to sit, unmoving on the tarmac for another unexplained hour, before the pilot came on the say that one engine wasn’t firing. We sat for another couple of hours in our uncomfortable seats while they tried to fix the plane, before finally declaring that the flight was cancelled. Off the plane, onto a bus, back to baggage to reclaim our luggage, back through customs, and then into a long, glacial line of disgruntled passengers who proceeded to go up to the desk and plead their particular travel distress to the agent and try to work things out. Several hours later we finally got our hotel and meal vouchers, went to a waiting bus, before taking an interminable route to the hotel where we would have to spend yet another day in Lima before taking the replacement flight back home. All in all, that debacle at the airport lasted from 8:30 at night until 5 am the following morning.

Thankfully, 24-hours later we finally boarded a plane that managed to successfully get airborne and deliver us back to Seattle, where we immediately got into our car and drove back to Montana. Sorry for the long-winded delivery, but you have to admit, that was a shitshow of gigantic proportions.

Air travel is no longer anything but an ordeal to hopefully survive. And hopefully the travel travail is made worth it by the quality of the time in the destination.

Which brings me to conclusion number two (a much more pleasant one!). When traveling to a foreign place, and especially one in which you don’t speak the language, it is an incalculable advantage to have an ambassador in place who can help facilitate your visit. Either that, or book a tour that will take all the logistical challenges off your shoulders. (The tour is a poor second choice to having an ambassador – more money, less freedom, less authentic . . .).

In our case, once we got to Chachapoyas, we were in Lizzie’s hands and our visit proceeded in very rewarding style. Liz speaks the language fluently. She has been in place for the better part of a year and has developed friends, knows out of the way restaurants, has established relationships with vendors at the market, and has explored the region. As such, she was able to put together a string of wonderful days with us, packed with sights and experiences that delivered a true sense of Peru – the people, the customs, the food, the geography.

Before our trip, we juggled the decision of whether to try and fabricate our own top ten things to do in Peru – backpacking to Machu Picchu, going to hummingbird hotspots, visiting the Amazon headwaters, traveling to the high peaks of the Andes . . . It was that, or concentrate on the part of Peru where Liz lives and dive more deeply. I’m relieved to say we chose the latter option, and are very grateful to have done so.

With her guidance and in her company, we stayed at sweet, off-the-radar places with home-cooked meals for less than $20/night. We walked trails through jungle vegetation to a stunning series of waterfalls. We sat at a little coffee shop and watched hummingbirds. We walked back roads up panoramic, cliff-walled valleys with flocks of green parrots flying by. We toured local ruins from pre-Inca civilizations. We had a zany day of rafting on a local river, all to ourselves. We got invited to a friend’s house who provided a memorable Peruvian lunch. And we became comfortable in a town, through Liz, where we conversed with local shop owners, wandered the streets, took in local events, watched funeral processions, bird-watched, petted dogs, and enjoyed meals via Liz’s connections and facility with the language.

Our ten days in country, with Liz as our guide and translator, more than made up for the agony of the air travel. Still, I think I’d consider driving all the damn way to Peru next time, just to avoid that shitshow!!!

To begin with, that all ten of us, and our literal ton of gear, made it to Kotzebue, Alaska at the same time and in good shape is a small miracle. Arriving from Montana, Washington, Arizona, Texas, each coping with long drives, airport snafus, elderly parents at death’s door, monstrous and unwieldy baggage, everyone coalesced at the correct gate in the Anchorage airport to board the final leg to the edge of wilderness near the Arctic Circle. It is also a statement of the times that not one of us came down with Covid on the eve of departure, an eventuality that seemed entirely likely, and that would have thrown plans into a state of turmoil.

On the ground the next morning, ready to fly in to the gravel bar on the high reaches of the Noatak, inside the Gates of the Arctic National Park, weather looked decidedly iffy. Rain in town, clouds down to the deck. But the bush pilots bustled around getting us ready, weighing everything, arranging planes. I was skeptical enough that I didn’t change into my trip clothes until they started loading gear into planes. Sure enough, off we flew into the gray skies, flying low enough to look for wildlife up the Kobuk River, up the Ambler drainage, over high mountain passes so close to the ground it seemed like we could have handed an energy bar off to a hiker. Finally, into the broad valley of the Noatak, bounded by rugged peaks, and bouncing down a rough gravel bar where the weather was actually pretty sweet.

“It’s a different world up here,” the pilot said. He got that right.

That sweet window of weather lasted for an afternoon. Long enough for us to fabricate our folding canoes, get camp set up, and enjoy the surroundings. Organizing our gear on the gravel bar, we discovered the careless treatment of our baggage by airport TSA – bags of dried food opened and not properly reclosed, an essential piece of one of the folding canoes misplaced, baggage that we had carefully sealed up left undone . . . another dodged bullet.

That night it started to rain. It rained, off and on, for the next 15 days. We hoped to linger in the most accessible high mountains for the first part of the trip, and we did, but wet weather limited our views of the jagged peaks to fleeting glimpses. Our gravel bar dwindled to the point that we had to abandon camp. On our second morning Lee Lantzen’s tent was surrounded by a moat of rising river and the teepee tent had a stream running through the middle of it. If our flight in had been delayed by a day, who knows when we would have gotten in, or where they would have found a place to land, because our landing zone was under water.

It didn’t rain constantly. We were usually able to find windows in the weather to break camp and set up camp. Everyone was adequately equipped and competent enough to stay dry and warm, but hikes were rubber boot and rain gear affairs, hopping through miles of tussocks to reach low, cloud-shrouded ridges and slopes, sweating from the inside and leaking from the outside. Once or twice we got hammered by pelting storms in the boats, or mistimed breaking camp so that everything got packed away soaked and gritty. Layers of long underwear and bulky puff coats were the standard ensemble. Mega-mids and the teepee tent were essential shelters for cook groups. Zippers kept getting more and more gritty. Most days, tents went up wet and came down wet.

No one wanted to be the weak link when it came to attitude, so while we each had our internal dialog that want something like, “Holy shit, is this the weather we’re going to have for a month?!”, nobody said it out loud. Everyone bucked up, made the best of it, kept the humor going. During breaks in the rain we walked to high points to take in the vast tapestry of arctic land going into a mosaic of fall color. Paddling the long bends of river, ridges and valleys, high peaks and side canyons spread to the horizon, truly immense country on a scale that allows wildlife to live as they are meant to live. Mile after mile of wild terrain, each view full of hidden gems – lakes, canyons, pingos, rocky cliffs, broad tundra expanses, side streams full of evocative promises of what’s around the bend.

Days slid by like the bends of river, then weeks. Every boat had at least one set of binoculars and we ticked off a satisfying list of wildlife sightings – a handful of musk ox, dozens of Dall sheep, regular sightings of wolves, small herds of caribou, and more grizzly than anyone wanted to see. Every shoreline we stopped at, whether for lunch, a hike, or to camp, was adorned with fresh tracks of the big bears. We saw maybe a dozen of them, beautiful and scary, and several were more pushy than was comfortable about being near camp. More than once we woke to find fresh tracks within a few yards of our tents. Both Marypat and I adopted a form of bear-fear denial based on the assumption that no bear was going to mess with a group of ten people. Seemed to work, whether or not the theory holds water.

The Noatak kept rising with all the rain during the first half of the trip. For several days the river was the consistency  and color of wet clay, whispering against the boat bottoms as we paddled. It is a remarkable river. It flows more than 400 miles from the high peaks to the ocean, and has not a single portage, essentially no rapids of consequence, but maintains a steady current that allowed us to knock off 25-30 miles in an easy day. Along the way it covers a span of geography from jagged high peaks to broad tundra plains to boreal forest. Salmon jumped up river much of the month. Anglers in the group pulled out Dolly Varden, grayling, and salmon to add to our diet. On one of the few clear nights we all got to witness a stunning display of northern lights – green and pink and white sheets roiling through the cold sky.

As we left the high peaks in our wakes, the weather settled into a more reasonable pattern, still often gray, but not as consistently wet. On several days we enjoyed brilliant sun that brought out the true beauty of boreal fall (“All the colors of New England, only six inches tall,” noted Lee James). We settled into the rhythm as a group as well. Days off to hike and fish and enjoy camp. Making rounds of bannack bread over fires. Playing cards after dinner in the teepee tent. An occasional round of yoga-stretches before getting into the boats. Bend after bend of country unfurling as the river grew, braiding through miles of gravel bar.

Gyrfalcon and peregrine calling from cliffs. The slap of jumping salmon punctuating the long nights. A hike to a high bank above the Grand Canyon of the Noatak into a rustling grove of poplar, a sanctuary grove if ever there was one. The night, after weeks of gray, when a cold front swooped in, sweeping the sky clean and bathing the valley in tawny, lambent light. The feel of untethered river bearing our boats along. Fragments that stick fast in my memory.

As much as 150 miles upstream of the village of Noatak we started seeing native people in motor boats, coming upriver to hunt caribou and be on the land. At first it seemed like an intrusion, but they are part of this landscape, and they were out getting food for the winter. It is part of the scene. We had several nice conversations with people who stopped to share stories, give us smoked salmon or beluga, or share “Eskimo ice cream” made from caribou fat and berries (surprisingly delicious).

On the morning of Day 33, in mid-September, we pulled into shore near the airstrip in Noatak, hoping our bush flight would show up to take us out to ‘Kotz’. Locals immediately came around to help us ferry gear from the river to the edge of the strip. Our flight kept being delayed, or being put in doubt, by bad weather conditions where the pilots were coming from, so we had an entire day to spend in town or waiting along the gravel strip. “Welcome to Noatak!” residents kept saying. Regular visitors swung by on four-wheelers to visit, tell stories, show us carvings. One woman brought us fresh-baked scones.

Finally, as evening approached, our pilots were able to get in, and we flew over the final miles of winding river and coastal plane, and then across the short ocean stretch between the mouth of the Noatak and the town of Kotzebue. The next evening, after a day touring the tiny northern outpost, we caught our scheduled flight back to Anchorage and on to points south.

Good thing, because the morning after our escape, a Pacific typhoon hit that section of Alaskan coastline with 100 mile winds and a ten-foot storm surge. If we hadn’t made our flight, who knows when we would have gotten out?

I sit down to write my predictable yearly ode to the start of the paddling season. But I realize that, this year, it is layered with so much other meaning.

Never fear, the tribute to rivers and springtime and the first outings of the paddling season is as robust and irrepressible as ever. Skiing is all well and good. A nice walk is restorative. I like a long bike ride as well as the next person. But there is nothing, and I mean nothing, so soothing, so exhilarating, so seductive, so compelling, so evocative, so church-like, as riding the back of current; feeling the pulse of water responding to gravity under the hull of a boat and following its cues. Nothing.

And so, some weeks back, at the end of March, we joined our friends Molly and Jeff, Lee and David at Sand Island on the San Juan River in southern Utah. For 10 days we rode the silty flow through gooseneck canyons, past petroglyphs, stopping to explore side canyons and trails. We navigated rapids and played cards by headlamp and studied ancient rock art and wandered around. It was a leisurely jaunt with lots of time for diversions and contemplation and indulging good company.

Soon after our return to Butte, Ruby got in touch and asked if I wanted to go on a dad/daughter trip on the Owyhee River in Oregon. “Of course,” I said. In the end I also invited my friend Grant, who has been a paddling companion for more than 40 years, who was my best man 35 years ago, and who Ruby agreed would be a great addition. The three of us spent the better part of a week descending a low-flow current through the deserts of eastern Oregon, complete with volcanic canyons, fun water, side hikes, and sweet camps.

So, the paddling season has officially begun, with plenty more to come.

What’s more significant is that my recovery from prostate surgery is on track. Three-plus months out now, and bladder control is close to normal – I can go on a rigorous hike and not pee myself (mostly) and I’m back to full activity – gym workouts, bike rides, walks, river trips. The box of pads gathers dust in the bedroom and I hardly need to think about that any more.

Prostate surgery was my second encounter with an ailment that would have killed me a generation earlier. My first confrontation with mortality was my cancerous eye tumor a dozen years ago. Now it’s prostate cancer, which would have done me in if I’d been born fifty years earlier. Twice now I’ve skated past the edge of the abyss. In both cases I was lucky to find the problem in time, and to live in an era of treatment where it could be dealt with. For me, it means life goes on, more rivers will be paddled, more friendships will develop, more time with family will unfurl. I am very cognizant of how precious and frail a thing life is, especially as we age. That I have the good fortune to go on adventures and embrace exhilaration is a daily benediction.

The other thing that has been impressed on me is the value of companions. Family, friends, new acquaintances. More and more every year, I find that what matters is my company, my pod of humanity, the people who I hold in regard and who might hold me in regard. The interaction doesn’t need to be momentous or meaningful. What matters is simple time together and the sense of solidarity that comes from that network of humanity. I like being solitary, too. I often go on walks or rides alone. I enjoy that mental space, the lack of chatter, the focus on contemplation. But it would be a lonely life indeed without friends to chat with, a partner to share life with, children to marvel at, and a farflung web of human connections I feel embraced by.

And so, spring is pushing in all around, rivers are rising, the sun booms up in the mornings, birds flood north, boats are always drying out in the yard, and life is as delicious as ever. Maybe more delicious than ever.

 

 

 

CHAPTER 12: APRIL – HOMECOMING

Hunkering. That’s what it feels like. Hunkered in, staying solitary, watching the human world flounder. And it isn’t pretty.

No socializing, no going out to eat, no movies, no gym workouts, no school, no yoga. Everything is virtual. The world runs on Zoom meetings. Marypat does virtual workouts in the driveway with the kids, all distanced from each other on their yoga mats, following coaches on a computer screen. We sit with family and close friends only outside and at a distance. If we plan a hike with friends, everyone drives their own car to the trailhead, keeps well spaced on the walk.

We mask up to go in stores, step back if someone gets too close, give each other a wide berth on the sidewalk. Hand sanitizer is suddenly everywhere, every office, every store, every car, every bathroom. When you sign a receipt there’s a bin for clean pens and one for used. The world has a new measurement – six feet, reinforced by marks on the floors, arrows, signs. Mostly we all cloister with our immediate family, or alone.

Stimulus checks arrive. A temporary lifeline for those millions who can’t make rent or haven’t received unemployment checks. Bike stores can’t keep bicycles in stock. RVs are in high demand. Trailheads and fishing access sites are suddenly clogged with people with no job to go to, no travel possible, uncertain finances, nothing to do but get outside. Weddings and funerals and graduations are called off, postponed, or done through computer screens.

Protocol judgment calls confront us many times every day. Go to the grocery store or not. Hug the kids? Even see the kids? Touch the handle of the shopping cart? Leave the store where people aren’t wearing masks? Refuse to see the friend who doesn’t take Covid seriously? Plan ahead?

For me, it’s impossible to be rigidly consistent. How can you not hug your kid? What do you do when one of the little kids at a family gathering runs up to you and throws themselves into your arms? If you start thinking about all the vectors of possible contacts, you drive yourself crazy. Ruby’s roommate who is in a band, the friend who recently traveled, Sawyer’s roommate’s girlfriend who recently tested positive and is quarantined at her parent’s house, all the people you brush past in the grocery aisle, that person who coughed in the post office line . . . endless. I start envisioning viral clouds emanating everywhere, like fogs of breath on a winter day, potential evil vapors steaming from all of us. Total crapshoot.

Inevitably, I am sucked back into the obsessive news habit. What else is there to do? Hours a day trolling through talking heads, podcasts, late night comedy shows, editorial pages. Ironically, some of the most on-target coverage is delivered by comics. And it is morbidly rewarding, sickeningly entertaining. Here’s our president suggesting that we might ingest bleach, or shoot up with ultra-violet sunlight. “It’s worth a try, right?” he asks his medical team at a press conference. “I mean, it seems like something to look into, doesn’t it?” And these professionals have to sit there and nod like he’s sane. Yeah sure, Mr. President, why don’t you go first?

Meantime, people die by the tens of thousands. Not one word of consolation from the administration. Only more denial and fantasy and blame and claims of being the best. More people die than died in the Vietnam War, then double that a few weeks later, the curve spiking up like a hockey stick. It is no longer just New York and Seattle. It’s everywhere. And disinformation mingles with real information like sewage spilling into a river, where it becomes indistinguishable. Young people are immune . . . It’s only as bad as the flu . . . The side effects are horrific and last for months or years . . . You are immune once you get it . . . No, there are cases of people being re-infected . . . Masks are good . . . No, masks are worthless . . . Masks actually make you sicker . . . If you wear a mask you’re a commie elitist . . . If you don’t wear a mask you’re a patriot.

The president targets democratic politicians, tweets “Liberate Michigan!” Right on cue a bunch of self-appointed vigilante ‘keepers of the peace’ show up at the statehouse with automatic weaponry and glower over legislators at work. Meantime black men and women are killed routinely by police every couple of days, while a 17-year-old ‘patriot’ with a big gun kills protestors in Wisconsin and the president says it was self defense. Black Lives Matter protests sprout up across the country. Right wing agitators wave Trump flags and brandish lethal weaponry in response. Somehow election campaigns trudge on, almost off stage, and tribal polarization reaches such a fever pitch that talk of civil war is taken seriously.

Our house sale is on pause. Our realtor understands, although she thinks there are buyers bunching up on the border just waiting to gobble up property. “We have had people get in their car, drive here and demand to see houses,” she tells us. “It’s crazy. We are selling houses, sight unseen, via virtual tours.” Maybe so, but becoming homeless is daunting. Travel is out of the question. We haven’t found a new spot to land. The chance to put it off is seductive. Days pass. Things get crazier and crazier. I fall deeper and deeper into the well.

It is Jeff King who hauls me out.

“I just got back from rescuing my rig!” he tells me over the phone.

“You did what?”

“Yeah, I had my van in storage down in Las Vegas and I was getting a little desperate to bring it back home. I decided to rent a car and go down there. It was incredibly reasonable. I told them I wanted a car that hadn’t been used in at least three days. I packed food in a cooler, wore gloves when I pumped gas, never went in a store. I even got so I calculated wind direction when I pulled in for gas and always went to a pump upwind. I stopped on the side of the road to pee, never went inside a rest area, ate food out of the cooler, took naps in the car. Then I got the van and was on my own, self contained. No one is out there on the highways. Definitely a twilight zone, but pretty easy.”

Huh, I think. Sort of brilliant.

Not a week later, Marypat and I do the same thing.

We rent a car, wipe it down, stock up on food and gloves and sanitizer, drive out of town as it starts to snow. South of Billings the snow quits. The highway is eerily empty. I get flashes of apocalyptic movies – deserted, wind-swept relics of civilization with a few humans staggering through the wasteland. Semi trucks and the occasional car, long gaps between. We speed along at 80, develop a system for gloving up and sanitizing every time we pump gas, snack on our food, scan the radio dial, drive right through the night and into Denver in the wee hours. Yes, it’s late, but the streets are devoid of traffic like we’ve never seen them. Where we differ from Jeff’s plan is in our decision to stay with Marypat’s sister, Sally, who we have recently been around at Pat’s bedside, and who has tested negative for Covid. Not a sure thing, but as close as we’re going to get.

After the marathon all-nighter we pause for a day, enjoy each other’s company, get the dogs out for walks, watch some of Sally’s favorite Netflix shows. The next morning we are on the deserted roadways well before dawn, heading south for New Mexico. Along the way we synchronize watches with Kris and Rolf, who have agreed to bring our car to the airport rental drop off. I half expect a checkpoint at the border, but we rise over Raton Pass without incident. We meet around mid-day, wave at each other, follow them to their house, and hitch up the trailer. They leave a bag of their favorite breakfast burritos on the seat to fuel our return, and we wave at them from twenty feet as we pull away, heading back north at the trailer-hauling pace.

The weather deteriorates south of Colorado Springs, and the final two hours back to Sally’s are a white-knuckle nerve test with the trailer fishtailing behind, but we finally regain our refuge just at dark, and regroup for another rest day before heading home. By then the snow has melted off and we relax, driving north through Wyoming, buying gas at less than $1.50 a gallon, back to Montana, back to our driveway where we park the T@B in its assigned spot and breathe deep with satisfaction. One box checked. More important, a dose of normalcy, even a rejuvenating bit of outlaw escape from the clutches of this strange and demoralizing plague.

April’s river remains. Weeks pass. Out of old habit, I start checking the river gauges around the state to monitor spring runoff. It is strangely transporting, even thrilling, to watch the virtual records of flows. Along dozens of waterways in every state, the USGS has set up riverside gauging stations, each run by a small solar panel, which monitor the flow, upload information via satellite, and make available a real-time system of read-outs for anyone to study. I study them daily, especially in the spring.

Through this techie virtual portal I glimpse the magic of seasons turning, of ice melting, snow-pack dwindling, spring storms dumping moisture, and what that does to rivers around the state and around the country. I watch the Salmon and the Snake in Idaho, the Owyhee and Grande Ronde in Oregon, the Rio Grande in Texas. Close to home, I have on my daily radar the Yellowstone, the Missouri, the East Gallatin, the Boulder, the Shields, the Jefferson, the St. Regis, the Clarks Fork – all of them responding to warmth, to rain, to melting snows, to drought.

I have my favorites that I check every time, sometimes several times a day. I notice the lag between high country snowmelt on a warm day and the rise downstream of a river like the Boulder or East Gallatin hours later, when the graph peaks in the middle of the night. After a spring rain, and the resulting rise, I imagine the muddy flows, the moving log jams, the breaking ice floes, the flooding torrents filling banks, and beyond the banks, spreading over flood plains in events both life-giving and destructive. I imagine dangerous battering rams of dead trees cruising down a river that, most of the year, you can walk across without getting your pants wet. I imagine the sound of roiling water, the spring winds, the rustling new leaves on aspen and cottonwood trees, the smell of dirt in the air, and it stirs the paddler in me who wants to participate in the exuberant spring rise, the schussing ride, the mad descent out of the high country, driven by nothing more than volume and gravity and slope. I am like a skier waiting for that powder day on the hill, imagining ‘face shots’ and gullies brimming with drifts and sparkling aprons of new snow.

It is April, so rivers are coming up. The small tributary streams like the East Gallatin rise first and most dramatically. The main stem rivers, the Yellowstone, the Missouri, the Clark Fork, are more ponderous, slower to respond, less dramatic. Their time comes later, in May and June and July, when the wild roses bloom and rivers build to their behemoth, exhilarating, terrifying peaks.

I notice the Big Hole.

The Big Hole flows out of the high country of the Bitterroot Range, into a broad valley that was once home to the Nez Perce, and now to ranchers and small communities like Wisdom and Jackson and Wise River. It meanders quickly through pasture and ranch country, down into forested slopes and canyons, watering one of the most popular fishing destinations in a state famous for fishing locations, where Arctic grayling still eke out an existence in spite of us and where, on a summer day, drift boats punctuate the flow like outsized water bugs with monofilament flailing the air like mobile antennae.

The Big Hole is coming up dramatically.

I remember a solo trip I took many years earlier, when the kids were tiny, paddling the entire Jefferson River from the town of Twin Bridges to the headwaters of the Missouri, known as Three Forks, where the Gallatin, Madison and Jefferson rivers coalesce and make the Mighty Mo. I did it at flood stage and I had to hold myself back to spend two nights on the water. It flushed me down almost 90 miles like my canoe was another piece of flotsam, at a spooky, exhilarating speed that felt like a carnival ride. One of those rides on which you have to remember to breathe.

The Big Hole joins the Beaverhead River near Twin Bridges to form the source of the Jefferson. Down below, summer irrigation dewaters the Jefferson after spring runoff, making it a less than desirable float. Later in the season, the Jefferson ebbs to an anemic, turgid flow susceptible to brutal headwinds. But at high water, early in the year, when birds are flooding north and the current is booming, then it can be a sweet ride indeed. So I watch the Big Hole boosting up, pushing the gauges on the Jefferson. I imagine that river, what it would feel like under my boat hull, and I talk to my partner.

“What do you think of a top-to-bottom float of the Jefferson?” I ask her. I know there’s a chance I can seduce her onto the trip. Her duties as an art teacher at the nearby elementary school are mostly on hold and fluid, given the school shut-down situation. Marypat is nothing if not competitive, and she’s had the Jefferson on her list ever since I did my solo rampage down it and left her behind with the kids.

It is hardly an effort. She signs on with only a whiff of hesitation. “Let’s take Beans,” she says. “Why not?”

There are layers of attraction to the Jefferson. Given the state of the world, it is a safe outing. Just the two of us in one boat, our faithful tandem canoe of 30 years. The logistics are dead easy. Sawyer agrees to drop us off and then leave our vehicle at the take-out. It is close to home, less than two hours from our driveway to the put-in. It grants the delicious satisfaction of running a flow from its source to its mouth, a lure that I have always found irresistible. This time of year, with the water high and muddy, we should have it to ourselves.

“Let’s take our time,” I suggest. “Last time I could have done it in two days, easy. The water is up, but it’s not flood-stage.”

“Okay, how about five days?” Marypat says. “The car will be waiting for us. We could take an extra day or come out a day early and it wouldn’t matter. And we’ll have cell service off and on if we need to let the kids know.”

The chance to leave everything behind – the virus, the insane, tribal politics, the family grieving, the house sale, the uncertain horizon, is undeniable. We mine the freezer for old packets of dehydrated meals, make a shopping list, engage the same old packing routine we’ve repeated over 40 years of gearing up for trips together. It doesn’t take long. This is an easy one.

The day before we leave I chat with an old friend, Jake. He was the one who recommended the realtor we signed up with, and has sold a few houses in his day. I tell him that our plans are on hold for selling the house, that with the uncertainties of the world, we just aren’t sure how we should play things. “We’re thinking of putting it off until fall,” I tell him.

“Boy, I don’t know,” he says. “Who knows what’s going to be going on in the fall. The way they are talking, the virus could be much worse by then. What with the election, the economy, the virus, I think it’s pretty sketchy. If I were you, and things look good for selling this spring, I’d go for it.”

“Hey, you can always park your trailer in my driveway if you’re homeless,” he laughs.

His advice has the ring of truth. Who knows what could be going on by fall? The forecasts are ominous. We’ve come this far down the trail to prepare the house. It does seem like the demand is high. How much of our reluctance is simply resisting the final, arduous push to get it over the finish line? And my guiding principle in life has always been to embrace these leaps of faith that, more often than not, lead to good things. Haven’t I always seen the unknown as an opening to adventure, even if things don’t go according to plan? If nothing else, they make for good stories.

When I mention it to Marypat, she nods, takes a deep breath. “Yeah, we’ve come this far. Maybe he’s right.”

That night we call our realtor to chat. “Listen,” I say. “I think we’re ready. We can pick the exact time, and we’re going on a river trip this week, but I wanted to give you a heads up. We think it’s a go.”

Late morning, April 24^th, Sawyer follows us out of our driveway, our boat perched on the rack, supplies filling the back, Beans on his bed, happy to be going wherever we’re going. We drive to Headwaters State Park and leave Sawyer’s car at the take-out on the Missouri, just downstream of the confluence of the three rivers.

It is a powerful geography. Indigenous people understood its significance. Lewis and Clark spent days here, gathering themselves late in the summer of 1805. They faced yet another fork in the road, a decision about which waterway would lead most efficiently to the west coast. They had faced the same choices at the forks of the Missouri and Yellowstone, at the confluence with the Marias. At each, they wandered the countryside in search of clues, talked to natives, studied the landforms. Agonized.

Here, Sacajawea was home. Still a teenager, she had been captured very near this spot by raiding tribes as a young girl, enslaved, brought far down the Missouri to Mandan country, where she had been traded as a bride to a fur-trader, and where, by twist of fate, she had met and been engaged by this foreign troop of strangers who aspired to travel across the continent and who saw her as a potential asset – both as a guide and as a translator. Never mind that she happened to be pregnant, and that she was saddled with her fur-trading lout of a husband. This great coming together of watersheds was her home ground, the landscape where she spent much of her childhood.

I have always thought of the Three Forks as a gigantic palm of geography, with the rivers as the strong lifelines etching the landscape. Named, of course, by Lewis and Clark for politicians. The Madison flowing out of the high plateau of what would eventually become Yellowstone National Park. The Gallatin, named for the Secretary of the Treasury in Jefferson’s administration, unfurling from the high peaks of the Gallatin Range and the fringes of Yellowstone. And the Jefferson, the farthest west of the three, coiling its path down from the continental divide. They paused at this coalescing of waters, the summer season already waning, after having navigated up the entire Missouri River, passing the Yellowstone, spending precious weeks portaging around the Great Falls, past the Marias and the Gates of the Mountains, on and on against the ponderous flow, until they came to this confluence and considered their options.

Should they continue on up the dwindling waterways by boat, or trade with the Indians for horses? Which fork should they follow? What lay further to the west?

I wonder if Sacajawea ever found wry humor in the Corps of Discovery’s penchant for naming things. Of course she would have known the names of the things these men were busy ‘discovering’. The new animals and bird species, the tributary streams, the prominent landforms. All of them already had names. Names given to them and passed on, generation to generation, by people with a deep, visceral relationship with the landscape. I wonder if she was ever tempted to tell them the actual, centuries-old names of places and creatures they pretentiously named after girlfriends, distant politicians, members of the expedition, or themselves.

It is mid-afternoon by the time Sawyer has us unloaded at the rest area on the outskirts of Twin Bridges, along the banks of the Beaverhead River. He waves us off, heads back to drop our car and take his home. It doesn’t take long to load up. Beans gets settled on his bed, nestled in among the cooler and dry bags and camp chairs. He is 18 years old, hard of hearing, his sight dimming, down to three legs. He hobbles around enough to do his business, but the spry and rambunctious days of his youth are long gone. The kids cajoled and harassed us into getting the cute Australian shepherd/malamute pup they named Beans from the local animal shelter back when Ruby was still in elementary school. Now the kids are all grown and gone, but Beans keeps waking up every morning to greet the day with us. In his youth he was an incorrigible boat dog, always leaping out after deer, refusing to stay put. Now he curls up and naps, or rests his muzzle on the gunwale of the canoe and blearily watches the scenery go by.

Not half an hour down the brimming flow of the Beaverhead, our red canoe teeters in the boisterous currents where the Big Hole comes in and the Jefferson officially begins. It feels, suddenly, like we’ve hopped onto the high-speed escalator. The water is brown with silt, loud with volume, ripping along at a good seven miles an hour. We barely need to paddle except to hold our course and avoid obstacles.

Lewis and Clark were a bit confused at this confluence, as they had been at many such forks in their trail. Clark and the main party were still hauling boats laboriously upstream while Lewis and others roamed the surrounding country in search of the best route while, at the same time, hunting for wild game and hoping to run into local Indians with whom they might trade for horses. The crew was often separated for extended periods and were in the habit of leaving notes on sticks for each other to update their whereabouts. In this stuttering fashion, the Corps toiled on up the Beaverhead, grinding over shallows, man-hauling their craft, wetting and drying supplies, making slow progress.

Upstream of present-day Dillon, they hooked westward along what we now call Horse Prairie Creek, and eventually up to Lemhi Pass. Sacajawea proved her worth when they encountered a group of Indians, several of whom knew Sacajawea from her childhood, and they successfully bartered for horses. Just downhill from the crest of Lemhi Pass, a small, pure, clear spring issues out of the ground. To this day it is a beautiful, quiet, unadorned bubble of liquid oozing out of a hillside, much as it did more than 200 years ago. Lewis and Clark dubbed it the ultimate source of the Missouri River, the great flow they had labored up for two full summer seasons of travel, and wintered along with the Mandans. Above the spring, they encountered what must have been heartbreak. The view to the west is a vast jumble of ridges and peaks and snow-covered slopes spreading to the far horizon.

The specter they took in was a far cry from the easy crossing they had seen depicted on fanciful maps hypothesizing the layout of the divide at the crest of the continent. Far from the quarter-mile saunter of a portage they had been told to expect, they confronted the full scope of the Bitterroot Mountains, the rugged Salmon River country, and rank after rank of mountain ranges still separating them from the waters leading to the Pacific. It was already the middle of August. Nights were getting uncomfortably cold. Snow was coming. Winter. And the view ahead was more daunting than anything they had faced in the year of travel they had already accomplished.

I love the fact that the expedition was in the habit of leaving notes for each other on sticks fluttering in the breeze, some of which blew off in the wind or were cut down by gnawing beaver, and resulted in a few consequential lapses of communication. These days we carry our cell phones in a dry box. Even on remote expeditions we have the option of ‘spot’ devices with which we can update the world on our location and status whenever we want, or satellite phones we can call home on from anywhere on earth.

When Marypat and I took our first trans-Canadian canoe expedition in the mid-1980s, none of that was readily available. My parents prevailed on us to carry along an EPIRB device, an emergency beacon carried by bush pilots that could send out an SOS in the event of a crash or other mishap. Even that we resisted. The reason we go to the wilderness is to escape that very technology, that very safety net, we argued. I still stubbornly question the level of ‘progress’ all the technology has afforded us. I still choose to leave the claptrap of computers and blogs and location devices behind whenever I can. I still prefer paper maps with their wide, evocative lens on country. I still go to quiet, wild places to escape the clutches of all that crap, to let the artificial busyness and distraction fall away, replaced by rippling current, the call of geese, the feel of sun and wind on my face, where solace at least has a chance to creep in.

Our canoe glides past gravel bars, snags, cottonwood groves. Birds everywhere. Mergansers, bald eagles, kingfishers, pelicans, red-winged blackbirds, Canada geese, red-tailed hawks. We adjust to the personality of this river, at this level and season. It is an ongoing, ever-changing negotiation, this relationship, one that revs up on every river trip. It is absolutely a relationship – paddlers, boat hull, river, weather – working it out together. Here, a sense of urgency bears us along, the burgeoning river, the press of birds, the warming days. To the east the Tobacco Root Mountains are clad in white.

Well before dark, plenty of miles already in our wake, we pull in on a low gravel bar downstream of the small town of Silver Star. The two-lane highway is faintly audible in the distance, a ranch house sits a ways off, across some fields, but here the river dominates. The rest fades into irrelevance, background noise. Here the birds are busy, the river is hurrying, the winds push clouds over the high peaks. We set up a low table, make hot drinks over a driftwood fire, erect the tent, carry Beans to his bed.

Light bleeds from the sky. We make a quick dinner, play a round of cribbage, scribble notes in our journals, pull close to the fire and shrug into jackets as night comes on. I work hard to think of a place I’d rather be, come up empty.

“I try not to think about losing all our friends in Bozeman,” Marypat says. “It’s going to be really hard.”

“I know,” I agree. “And it’s going to be harder for you than me. I’ll miss our community, but I don’t thrive on my partners the way you do. I’m pretty capable of being a loner.”

Marypat sips her tea, sighs, looks off at the distant ranch lights, the dark wall of mountains behind. The river murmurs past.

“It’s a really weird time right now. But I’m trying hard to see it as an adventure, not a setback. And who knows, maybe we won’t really lose our community. Lots of our friends are retiring or cutting back, being more flexible about meeting for an outing. Most of them are making their own plans. Who knows where they’ll end up.”

“I know,” she says. “I’ll just miss calling someone up and spontaneously going for a hike. Or having people drop by.”

“That’s going to be tough,” I acknowledge. “But that will come with time, wherever we end up. And I’m not giving up on the Three Rivers tradition. Come Memorial Day, it’s going to happen again.”

The dangers presented along the Jefferson River are largely manmade. Natural hazards on moving water fall into predictable categories. Snags and logjams, which to my mind are the most treacherous features confronting paddlers. Ninety degree bends where the current runs smack into rock walls, known in the paddling vernacular as ‘wall shots’. And a variety of whitewater, most commonly caused by one of three conditions. Namely, a tight constriction of the river channel, water cascading over bedrock ledges, or rapids formed by tributaries carrying in loads of rocks during floods that clog the main channel with debris.

The Jefferson is free of most of those naturally occurring issues. Other than the odd snag or overhanging log, some tight corners, the river flows smoothly downhill at a heady rate but without much excitement.

Early the next morning, we edge up to the first major diversion dam along our route, just past a bridge on a ranch road. The river has been dammed by a wall of boulders set in place to check the flow enough to divert irrigation water into a ditch. Nothing natural about the rapid it creates. Normally I’d be looking for the ‘V’ to run down, or the eddies to pause in, or the route to ‘sneak’ along shore. Here there is a jagged barrier of boulders in a wall, with the river cascading through however it can. There is a hint of a ‘V’, or tongue of water, on river left. I remember the same slot when I ran it at flood stage. The dam was largely submerged at that water level, the passage more defined. I remember contemplating it, then running it, shipping a little water on the way through. This time the run isn’t as clean.

“No way, especially with Beans,” Marypat says, after a cursory look.

I’m more tempted than she is, but not enough to push back. It isn’t much of a carry, and we set about it. Beans limps across, we schlep the gear and the boat, set it in below the turbulence, repack, nest Beans in his spot. Maybe a twenty-minute chore.

The obstacles and hazards that present themselves here are bridge abutments, irrigation canals, diversion dams, sections of rough rip-rap channelizing the river, barbed wire draping in over undercut banks. I know how rivers respond to the environment. It isn’t always easy or predictable, to be sure, but the manmade challenges don’t conform to nature, they obstruct nature. They work to plug the flow, direct the flow, clutter or alter the way water wants to move. Farmers and ranchers don’t like the way a river channel erodes, meandering here and there, eating into property. Residents like riverside views, but don’t like floods, despite the natural functions floods perform. Road builders see a river blocking their path as a problem. As usual, we throw technology at the ‘problem’, try to assert our will over the natural force of moving water. In the long run, it’s a losing proposition, but we don’t think long-term. In the human worldview, a long time is a lifetime. In the world of rivers, a human life span is a grain of sand making its way to the sea.

But for those obstructions, the river is a joy. We cruise along, ticking off bends, miles, landmarks. I barely check the map. This is home ground. There are enough bridges, fishing access sites, or tributaries to keep track of our progress. Birds keep us entertained. A flock of natty, black-necked stilts pepper a gravel bar, looking like they are attired in tuxedos. They fly up in coordinated flocks, flashing in the sun, red legs trailing behind. Such simple, breath-taking beauty. Avocets bob and probe in the shallows. Yellow-headed blackbirds adorn a shrub like ornaments. Killdeer feign broken wings to distract us from their ground nests as we float past. Swallows scythe through the air. Bald eagles perch on cottonwood branches, waiting their chance to swoop on a trout. Marsh hawks tilt over the fields. We paddle past heron rookeries, messy nests of sticks congregated in cottonwood groves. Cinnamon teal, bluebirds, cormorants, sandhill cranes, bufflehead, pheasants, meadowlark. Our binoculars are in constant use. We keep pointing at new species.

Mid-afternoon, after a languid lunch stop and a siesta on a grassy bank, the second diversion dam of the day confronts us. We end up on the wrong side of the river. At flood stage I ran right through the turbulence before I even knew the diversion structure was there. At this level, more rocks protrude and the paths through are limited and littered with boulders. The best shot is along the far bank. Marypat is nervous about the whole thing. A portage would be arduous, up a steep dirt bank, around a concrete buttress, steeply down again through tangled brush. I lobby for a strategy that involves stroking back upstream along the bank, ‘ferrying’ the boat across above the dam, and then running the smoother option.

“I don’t know,” Marypat says. “The current is pretty strong. We don’t want to get swept into the dam.”

“I think we can do it,” I push.

In the end, it’s even easier than I thought. We stroke hard in the slow current along the near bank to get well above the rapid, angle the boat and paddle into the flow to make our way across, and then have an easy run down the left side.

“Yeah, baby!” I crow, in the fast water below.

“I don’t know why I get so nervous these days,” Marypat says. “I didn’t used to be that way.”

“You have a better knowledge of what can go wrong than you did in your bold and brave 30s,” I say. “And you weren’t part of the Social Security crowd back then either.”

Along these rivers, where civilization hovers over the banks, finding camps is akin to the daily challenge of the homeless, who seek temporary shelter where they can rest easy and avoid being hassled. After a few potential spots don’t pan out, we find refuge on a small island nestled under the river bank. There are some houses above and behind us, but we are out of sight below the high dirt bank. Across the river, in the distance, a grain elevator outside of the town of Whitehall and the mountain-top-removing scar of Golden Sunlight Mine. But here it is tucked away, intimate, sheltered. Our tent goes up. We collect firewood. The boat is turned over and secured to a bush. The only downside is that Beans finds a thicket of burrs that he gets coated with to the point that we have to cut them out of his fur with the wholly inadequate scissors on a Swiss Army knife.

Sunset casts the sky pink. A flock of white pelicans coast in and land on the river, their white breasts plowing softly into the current. They drift downstream in some shallows, then gather in a tight circle, begin agitating the water, corralling fish, gobbling them up with their pouched bills. The feeding frenzy lasts maybe a minute, then suddenly stops. The white birds float together downstream, like a serene fleet of dazzling ships in the last light of day.

This travel style is so reminiscent of our long trips across Canada. It feels more like lifestyle than recreation. We have our miles to make each day, the weather to adapt to, conditions to assess and navigate. It is stripped down and simple, while also profound and occupying. The chores of making camp, reading maps, cooking food, staying dry, traveling safely are both mundane and fundamental. The rest of life fades away. What comes into focus, then, is the immediate, the now, the essential. The world that we hold at arms length so much of the time comes flooding in, as real as the sharp stars and the ceaseless ripple of water.

I wake early in the morning to the sounds of a rousing world. Pale light. The liquid music of sluicing river. Some sandhill cranes call, close by. Robins are active. Canada geese honk and bark, like they have urgent business to attend to. I guess migration, mating, raising young is as urgent as it gets. I leave Marypat sleeping, start a fire on the fire pan, put water on to boil, feed in sticks. The thin plume of smoke trails downriver in the breeze. Maybe a tailwind today, I think. No rush.

Spring sun bathes the valley. I’m on my second cup of coffee when Marypat joins me, and it feels like mid-morning by the time we pack up and settle in the boat. Marypat is in the stern today. We switch positions each day to change things up, a habit we established powering a boat across the continent. It helps to appreciate the other paddler’s perspective and to change the view. In the bow you concentrate on close up adjustments, put in corrective strokes, have the world opening up before you. In the stern you take the longer view, establish the general line, and play off the body language of the bow paddler, who occupies the immediate horizon.

The wind gusts along, mostly behind us, so we scud downriver at as much as ten miles an hour, clipping past landmarks. A highway bridge abutment near the town of Cardwell sets up some squirrely eddy currents, strong enough to tip a boat if you aren’t ready for them. The Boulder River comes in, river left, then the South Boulder on the opposite bank. We enter the limestone canyon near Lewis and Clark Caverns, a spectacular rocky cleft full of pockets and caves and underground passages. It is scenic, but the river channels through in a straight, monotonous shot. I prefer the meanders, gravel bars, islands, every bend a surprise. This feels more like a slog. Not long after lunch we pull in and decide to camp on a flat bench. A quiet, two-lane highway ribbons next to the river across the way, but Marypat is keen to walk the abandoned electric railroad bed. We set up camp behind a berm that offers some privacy and protection from the wind, leave Beans on his bed, and strike off downstream on the old railroad grade, Marypat hunting for the porcelain insulators that once adorned the electric poles.

“Remember, we’re getting rid of stuff, not collecting more,” I caution, our burgeoning storage unit fresh in mind.

“Yeah, yeah,” she says, not the least swayed.

It is gray, spitting rain, the next morning when we load up. We wriggle into rain gear. The air is hushed and cool, the sky lidded. We don’t talk. Even the birds are quiet, huddled. Just paddle, eating miles, until the canyon releases us, we slide under a highway bridge, and approach the final diversion dam of the trip.

Fifty feet above the unnatural break in the river horizon we land and pull the boat up. A herd of cattle stand nearby, watching us. The river slides over the dam with an obvious tongue of water on river right. We stand above it, appraising.

“Portage?” Marypat says, hopefully.

“Nah,” I say. “Piece of cake.”

While we’re assessing the river, the cattle are assessing Beans, who is teetering in front of the aggressive bovine challengers.

“Hey!” I shout, jogging back, waving my arms. One steer is particularly confrontational, only reluctantly moves off as I run at him. No doubt these cattle have had their fill of herding dogs and see this as a chance for payback. The steer eyes us belligerently from twenty feet while we scoop Beans up and return him to the safety of the boat. The red canoe slides down the smooth ramp of silty water. The day clears. The river regains its meandering, island-dotted course. We stop for lunch, and to strip off layers, across from a limestone cliff with swallows arcing and gliding through the pushy currents of air.

The clearing day ushers in wind. Perhaps winds are what pushed the cloudy front off stage. They gather ferocity as we paddle on. Depending on the curve of river, we battle forward, or are shoved downstream, or skid sideways across the liquid surface. Willows bend before the gale. Spume lifts off of wave tops. We start looking for camp above the towns of Willow Creek and Three Forks.

As usual, there are a couple of dead ends that look promising from a distance, but won’t work, before we stumble on a brilliant beach on the lee side of an island, with a screen of aspen acting as a stunningly effective windbreak. All around us wind batters the vegetation, but on our beach it is completely protected. Protected enough to build a safe fire. It feels like the eye of a hurricane, unnatural stillness in the midst of maelstrom.

Not long after camp is set, the phone rings. “Guess we have service,” I say, overcoming my reluctance and looking at the phone. “Hey, it’s Grant Herman.”

“I’m about two hours west of Bozeman,” he says, when I answer. “Heading for Wisconsin and I thought I might stop in and bump elbows or something.”

“Dude!” I say. “We’re on the river. It’s my last month. You’ll be driving over the Jefferson on the interstate. We’re camped about a dozen river miles above the highway.”

“Windy as all hell,” he says.

“Tell me about it,” I agree. “Any chance you can lay over a day? We could be off the river by midday tomorrow.”

“Not this time,” he says. “Gotta tie up the last business in Wisconsin and get back home. It doesn’t seem like a great time to visit anyway. But I thought I’d at least check in.”

The intrusion of our outside lives interrupts the spell of river time. We both start thinking about the impending sale of our house, the resulting homelessness, the chores still to accomplish, the unpredictable news of the world. I make a fire, brew up hot drinks. A bald eagle parries the wind across the river, manages to land on a cottonwood branch. Sun pours over us like something we can wear. Slowly we return to our pocket of serenity in the windswept world.

And we resist the end the next morning. Marypat loves nothing better than to loll in bed until the sun hits with its delicious warmth. She luxuriates in that pool of light, snuggled in down, listening to the world outside. By the time she emerges, looking the way she looks after a gentle yoga class, I’m on my second or third cup of coffee, stirring the campfire, making notes in my journal, contemplating the day. My own version of campsite meditation. Not a bad duet.

Breakfast is relaxed. The winds have died down. Packing up is bittersweet. As are the final miles of river, sliding past the town of Three Forks, under a bridge or two, meandering briskly through the cottonwood bottomlands, avoiding a few snags, noticing herons and pelicans and hawks. The river is talking to us through the hull of boat, through the blades of our paddles, up our arms, into our torsos, into our subconscious.

The reel of all the rivers of this year scrolls across my mental stage. All those fluid relationships, from Grasshopper Creek to the Mountain River, from the ‘rises’ along the Suwannee in Florida to the hot springs dotting the lower Rio Grande. Friendships and brotherhood. Solo meanderings and good company. Strolling gravel bars for agates. Enduring the onslaught of thunderstorms. Watching a grizzly amble through camp. Riding the seasons of a yearly cycle like the currents of the rivers I chose. Rambling around the continent on this quixotic, lazy quest while most everything else on the larger stage is fraught with discord, tension, desperation, sickness, death.

We drift under the cool shadow of interstate highway, thinking of Grant, my November, San Juan River partner, who drove over the bridge less than a day earlier, glancing upstream toward our final camp. The Jefferson sweeps us along on her back, fast and implacable. We are together in this – the swirling currents, this trusted boat, my partner in life, our aging dog, my favorite paddle, this spring, bird-loud day.

The Madison River joins in from river right. The two waters, slightly different hues, mix and eddy together, blending personalities. A mile or two down, the Gallatin swings in from the east, dances its way onto the stage. The Missouri is born, suddenly burly with volume, rich with sediment, the first mile of its legendary journey across the span of continent. A pair of nesting peregrines call from the cliffs across the river, busy at the work of life.

 

 

AFTERWORD

 

For much of this year I felt the sharp contrast between my reality and that experienced by the majority of life on earth, human and otherwise. Never more than the last few months, with the heightened conflicts of unrest, death, disagreement. I inhabited my small, personal bubble, in which life was pretty fine, while, in the larger bubble all hell broke loose. This contrast was one I heard many people describe.

“I’m doing fine. Really well, as a matter of fact,” people would tell me. “But when I think about the big picture, it’s like an oppressive storm looming over me.”

In my bubble I’ve enjoyed good health, with fingers crossed. I have enough money in the bank. I have my family, my friends, and my community for support. I have good books to read, a partner to share my life with, and Montana to spend time in.

Yet, when I pan out, even just a bit, it all goes pretty quickly to hell. Our weather has been warmer and drier than usual, punctuated with some alarming episodes. In much of the world the weather is truly alarming, apocalyptic alarming, evacuate-now-alarming. Our politics have devolved to such an appalling level that we have to invent new terminology to describe it. Who would have thought, even after we elected Trump, that things would have gotten this crude, this cynically mendacious, this untethered from anything remotely normal. If this were a script being proposed to Hollywood editors, it would be laughed out of the boardroom as too far-fetched.

Millions of our brethren are falling through the cracks into desperation each day – financial ruin, emotional distress, life-threatening illness, food insecurity. In this existential state, events that would normally rise to the level of personal crises get overshadowed by the general emergency. A friend dies suddenly, unexpectedly, too young, but that event is overwhelmed by the larger context. A cancer diagnosis, a career lost, a marriage failed, all of it as fraught as ever for the individual, but lost in the cacophony we are mired in.

So I am left with this split-screen duality. I head out for an afternoon paddle on a local stream, or a hike on a mountain trail. I glide past groves of cottonwood on sparkling current, or walk through sun-dappled glades of aspen. I return home to my partner. We share dinner together, read books, maybe watch a show. While all around me, as wide as the view can get, things fall apart, someone dies of Covid every few seconds, politicians play games with people’s lives while they profit corruptly in plain view, and another storm/fire/flood hits somewhere in the world.

This contrast has always been so. Playing the comparison game is as old as humanity, and as unhelpful as ever. And yet, now, the juxtaposition is so staggering it makes me wonder if even those of us on the lucky end of the spectrum are just clinging to the driftwood of a shipwreck, relatively unscathed, but still adrift.

The only certainty is that time rolls on like the currents of the rivers I plied over the course of the year, tireless and immutable as ever.

In that march of time we did manage to sell our home in Bozeman two months after our final trip on the Jefferson River. We followed our realtor’s instructions, down to installing brighter light bulbs in some rooms. Suddenly the house was ready. A photo shoot happened, the For Sale sign went up in the yard, and we were told to leave town for a few days.

“When you get back we’ll look at offers,” the realtor said.

“Yeah right,” I thought.

Well, she was right. We had five offers in the first day, all above our asking price. We had to come home early from our camping weekend to begin processing. Within five days we were under contract, and before the end of the month, we were homeless, living out of our camper and availing ourselves of friends with flat driveways.

In that what-have-we-done fog, a realtor from Butte called in early July. “That house you were interested in that I told you was under contract just came back on the market,” she told us. “If you can be here tomorrow morning, you can look at it.”

We had planned to head for the Pryor Mountains in eastern Montana over the 4^th of July. Instead we headed west, towing the trailer, planning to camp along the Skalkaho Highway in the Sapphire Mountains, and stopping in uptown Butte to get a house tour.

We toured. We made an offer. We left town.

Going camping seems to do the trick. By the time we regained cell service on Sunday, we had a text from our realtor. “You’re under contract,” she said. “Closing date is August 4^th.”

For the month of July we parked in Marypat’s sister, Nancy’s, back yard. We made plans for projects in the new house – sheet rocking, floor finishing, stair building. We hiked in the Mission Mountains with friends. We drove south to Colorado to climb some 14,000’ peaks with family. Then, in early August, we closed the deal and officially moved to Butte America, Superfund capitol of the world, and also, a friendly, relaxed, unpretentious community full of stories and surrounded by new terrain to explore. The trade-off was the loss, or at least the attenuation, of the community we’d built for almost 40 years. A frontier. New eras. Another leap of faith in a pretty long string of leaps we’ve made together.

In that flow of time river trips have not stopped. We almost hit pause on the Three Rivers Memorial Day tradition in May of 2020. How could we keep safe and distanced within our camping and gathering tradition? Our friend Scott suggested that maybe we could do day trip outings on rivers close to home, and forgo the camping part. Someone else suggested doing bike shuttles to avoid being in cars together. So the tradition continued – three more quirky, seasonal Montana flows in the books. As much as it cemented our commitment to tradition, it was a chance to be with friends we dearly missed over the months of pandemic isolation. The enchantment of new water was overwhelmed by the joy of relaxed lunches shared on grassy river banks or sunny gravel bars, catching up with comrades.

Then, only partially moved in to our new home, with the wreckage of house improvements everywhere, we abandoned the projects and launched on the Middle Fork of the Salmon River on September 7^th. Five of us, including Lee, Jeff and Molly, made good on our pledge to take on the entire through float from the headwaters of the Middle Fork, all the way down the Main Salmon, and into the Snake River, where we took out 23 days and 330 river miles later. We were joined by several friends for sections of the journey, which facilitated food resupplies and off-loading of poop buckets. For nearly a month we roared down one of the most iconic and inspiring drainages in North America, rollicking through the many boisterous rapids, camping on sand and gravel bars, taking whatever weather came our way, soaking in hot springs, singing around the fire, seeing birds, tolerating oppressive days filled with forest fire smoke, playing cribbage, telling our stories, settling deeply into River Time. 23 days and it ended too soon.

I continue to be sober, ever since the family reunion after our Grande Ronde trip. Other than sampling some Christmas eggnog I have managed to resist those temptations, that pesky inner voice, those moments of weakness, and find the clarity that comes free of that numbing, ubiquitous influence. Of course, there are those moments, and those old impulses to give in. But honestly, it isn’t that hard, especially now, well over a year in.

I can’t say the same for my news compulsion. I was lulled a bit when Joe Biden won the election. I naively expected the noise to turn down, the craziness to abate, the political fever that had sickened our country to subside. There was a week or two in there where that seemed possible, and I tuned out the news. It was a relief to return to the boring, normal parade of reporting without the infusion of insanity. I started to have open books on my lap instead of the computer.

It didn’t last. Trump and his minions ratcheted up their false claims. Millions of Americans were watching a different movie, one full of fraud, outrageous lies, bizarre conspiracies and denial of the virus. And, not surprisingly, when stoked to a bonfire of outrage, those flames nearly consumed the country. I don’t know if any of those students I taught during the 2016 election, the kids I admonished to ‘pay attention’ were watching, but I was.

What comes next is anyone’s guess. Marypat and I in Montana are embarking on a new chapter in our lives. We still hunger to vagabond around the countryside. Next Memorial Day the Three Rivers will feature water in our new neighborhood. The vaccine is coming our way. Some version of safety and normalcy is dimly in sight. But we have no idea what normal will be anymore. Our country is also forging a path through the wilderness of truth and fiction, loyalty, resolve, danger. I have been a little embarrassed by what seems like hyperbole, but over this year I have come to see the drama playing out as a titanic battle of good vs. evil. Right now, it seems less hyperbole and more apt description.

So we are paused, all of us, as if above a heart-pounding rapid on a river. We have parked the boats upstream and are walking down to scout the passage through the turmoil. We stand together, sober and focused, discussing the line. Several of us wander off to pee out of anxiety. We point out options, voice opinions, weigh dangers, come to some semblance of agreement, and start back to our boats, earnestly talking with our partners about what needs to happen, what to watch for, and how to react if things go badly wrong.