Al Kesselheim

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.

CHAPTER 11: MARCH – EVERYTHING CHANGES

Covid-19 snuck up on me. It snuck up on everyone.

I had the excuse of wilderness immersion for much of January and February, but even when I was home, the news of the virus was background noise, far away and unthreatening. I read about an outbreak in China, then throughout Asia, eventually in Europe. For months it had loitered on the back pages of the newspaper. Even when it reached America, it was here and there, single cases, outbreaks in retirement homes, distant cities.

And it was leavened by our Denier-in-Chief at the White House, who kept degrading information, downplaying fears, calling it a hoax, a seasonal interlude, a ploy by Democrats, and his message was amplified by his spineless enabling Republicans and by the right wing media. Nothing to worry about, folks. Go on about your business. Pay no attention to the “Wuhan Flu”.

There were no precautions in place when I boarded the plane for home in Albuquerque, well into February. Back home, there were those who were starting to take it seriously. Schools were making contingency plans to go online, You Tube videos sprouted up – people giving lessons on how to wipe down groceries. I went to the grocery store one afternoon late in the month and it was nuts. The place was jammed with people hoarding supplies. Inexplicably, there was no toilet paper. Really people, toilet paper, that’s your driving fear??

When I took the car in for some maintenance work, our mechanic shook his head. “This country has gone completely insane,” he said.

My brother-in-law, himself elderly and handicapped, pooh-poohed the fear, kept on hugging people, ranted about masks and hand sanitizer. “Yeah, you better hope you’re right, because if you’re wrong, you’re the one with the biggest target around here,” I said.

To be honest, none of us wanted to take it seriously, change our habits, lock down the economy, stop going to school and work, stay home. But weeks passed. The news out of New York and Seattle was otherworldly, unbelievable. Hospitals with no beds. Morgues overwhelmed. Refrigerator trucks to cope with corpses piling up. Mass graves. Cases began to crop up closer to home. A man in nearby Livingston died of the virus – a vigorous man of my age. Our kids took it more seriously than we did. Ruby insisted on going grocery shopping for us. We started carrying hand sanitizer in the car, washing hands like busy doctors, keeping our distance, wearing masks. Bumping elbows was a thing. Accounts of overcrowded hospitals, people struggling to breathe, families unable to attend their dying relatives haunted the airwaves.

Still, plans for the Gila remained on the calendar. What safer place than on the river, outdoors, with a small group of friends who have been playing it safe? In early March we exchanged emails, kept planning, reassuring each other. The most dangerous step would be our flight back to Albuquerque, dealing with crowds and packed airplanes, but we talked about masks, doing laundry once we arrived, taking all the precautions. But concerns kept flaring. Lee’s partner has compromising health issues. Kris was in touch with medical friends who warned her of the dangers. Businesses everywhere shut down. Our county in Montana had the highest Covid-19 stats in the state. My kids lost jobs, went on unemployment, struggled with rent payments.

Right up to the day of our flight, we were committed. That day, Marypat went for an early morning walk with Ruby, who argued against the plan. “It’s not something you have to do, Mom,” she stressed. “Think about other options.” When they came back, they confronted me with their worries. When your kid is reprimanding you for being foolish, maybe it’s worth listening.

Suddenly, we pulled the plug. I drove to the airport and personally cancelled the flight. I was not alone. Everyone was in flux. The airport seemed eerily empty. The clerk at the desk took care of the cancellations routinely and gave us a voucher for a future flight.

Plan B occurred to me as I returned home. Why not drive? That way we could stay safe, self-contained, on our own schedule. Dates no longer really mattered. No one was working or going to school. Who cared if it took a few days longer? I felt liberated by it, actually. We could drive down and then caravan back home with both rigs at the end of it.

I called Kris, talked to Lee. They were still marginally on, but leery. I kept pushing the plan, but then New Mexico ordered a quarantine for out-of-state visitors. “I don’t know how they would enforce that,” said Kris, “but it’s something to think about.” I imagined checkpoints at the borders. I imagined staying in a motel room for two weeks. I clung to the option, but felt it slipping away.

Early the next morning, still packing up as if we might drive south, the phone rang. Marypat’s 93-year-old mother was being rushed by ambulance from her retirement home to the emergency room. She’d perhaps suffered a stroke. Nothing was clear, but what was clear was that fate had spoken. The trip was off.

Marypat sped to the hospital to meet the ambulance and I called Kris and Lee. “Even if we had started to drive, we would be turning around right now,” I said. Both of them sounded relieved. No Gila trip. Better to cloister at home, stay safe in the face of this dire and mysterious plague. My March water destination suddenly became a minor consideration in the face of all this. Everything felt very much in the wind, everything from the most mundane (toilet paper) to the most existential (the closing of a life).

By the time Marypat arrived at the hospital, Pat had been admitted. In the new frontier of protocols the hospital was limiting visitors to one per patient. Marypat’s sister, Nancy, and brother, Matthew were there. Nancy, who had been the most constant care-giver for years, walked right in and went to Pat’s room. Marypat and Matthew were literally left out in the cold in the parking lot. Pat appeared to be dying. It could come any minute. The initial diagnosis of a stroke morphed into something more systemic. Sepsis, the doctor thought. Her body was shutting down.

Eventually Marypat and Matthew talked their way in. Protocols weren’t set in stone at that point and the doc was sympathetic. They bent over their barely conscious mother, tried to figure out what to do.

“We need to get her out of the hospital,” they agreed.

Our house was closest, but Nancy insisted that she be brought to her place. Whether she would survive transport was dubious. By force of their combined persuasion, they talked the doctor into releasing her and called for an ambulance. Nancy contacted Hospice, got a hospital bed delivery scheduled, arranged for a nurse. Pat made her escape.

She shocked everyone by surviving transport. Nancy arranged her in the living room on an adjustable bed. People kept arriving. Andrew and Sara from Dillon. Matthew’s family, Paul and Laura, Tom. Grandkids showed up. Sally made reservations to fly in from Denver. Janet was coming from Chicago.

Coronavirus protocols were very nominally practiced at the start, and then utterly abandoned. People hugged, shook hands, hovered together over Pat, played board games in the kitchen, drank coffee and beer and held forth at some volume and without masks. The virus be damned, for the moment. This took precedence. At the same time, we all heard reports of people dying in hospitals without family around, or visiting a relative in a retirement home by standing outside at a window and pressing hands together on either side of a pane of glass. In this Pat was fortunate. We all were fortunate.

It was clear to everyone that Pat was dying. Amazing, in fact, that she had lived through several ambulance trips, a stint at the hospital, and transfer into the house. But she was only nominally conscious. She was lucid one moment, delirious the next, in and out of awareness, often anxious and afraid. Nancy was the only one who held out hope for her recovery. She kept pushing food on her, casting about for medical remedies, talked about getting through this to something like a return to normal.

A routine settled in. Pat’s bedding got changed on a schedule. She was given morphine and antibiotics. One or two family members stayed by her side, held her hand, reassured her. On the edges food got made, people did crosswords, played cards. Stories got told – who flushed all the pot down the toilet at Nancy’s wedding, a near-death childhood experience on a train track in Toledo, other deaths people had attended.

In the background, the coronavirus shit-show played on, a surreal atmosphere hovering over everything. Eli was self-quarantined at home, assuming he had been exposed at his work. Ruby was visiting her boyfriend, Everette, stranded in Idaho, filling out unemployment forms like millions of others. Sawyer had become part of the care-giving team hovering over his grandma. For everyone, everywhere, all bets were off in terms of plans, travel, work, school, the future.

Pat hung in there. Days passed in an otherworldly state of transition. The routine took on a strange normality. Shifts were established. People came and went. Nancy’s drive to get Pat to recover faded away. Care became palliative, comfort, pain relief, constant attendance. A rhythm, calm and vigilant and steady. Pat surfaced and went away again, her anxiety abated, now mostly peaceful. Mostly in another place, that dream state between. Another night passed, dawn came up, as steady and constant as the human world was crazed and upended.

The need to get on the water became urgent for me. Not just because I needed to notch another month into the year’s belt, but because I needed it, period. Marypat came home before dawn on Day 3 of the vigil, after an all-night shift, ate a piece of toast, went to lie down.

“I think I’m going to get out today,” I said as she closed her eyes.

“Wait for me,” she said. “I want to go too. Just let me rest a little.”

We set the red, tandem canoe on the dark, winter flow of the East Gallatin River before noon. The same canoe we had paddled together all the way across Canada nearly thirty years earlier. A boat we wore together like a favorite set of clothes. Today’s clothes were long underwear, winter boots, paddling gloves. We settled Beans, our three-legged, eighteen-year-old mutt on a bed in front of Marypat.

Not really winter, but not yet really spring either. The river, here, is fed by spring creeks that keep the flow steady and increase the water temperature enough that it almost never freezes. Snow in the fields. Snow deep in the mountains that cut into the skyline in every direction. Warm enough, but when the wind gusted, it still wielded the knife of winter.

Birds everywhere. More birds than I had seen on any other river of the year. Their noise a spring cacophony, their wings flashing in the pale sky, flocks wheeling overhead, cranes in the fields, golden-eye, pintail, mallard, Canada geese, snow geese, marsh hawk, red-winged blackbird, eagle. Life. Urgent, season-infused, thronging life. All of it pushing against the slowly opening door of summer. Beans lay his muzzle on the rim of the canoe, dimly watched the scene go past.

We guided the canoe down dark, smooth tongues, around sharp corners, over shallows, picking side channels if they had enough water, reading off of each other’s body language to adjust course. Montana slid past – the Bridger Mountains, the Tobacco Roots, the Spanish Peaks, the mouth of the Gallatin Canyon, the broad basin of farmland held in the palm of the three great rivers that make the Missouri, a fertile and potent place. A land the natives called Fat Valley back when there were milling herds of bison, packs of wolves, lumbering grizzly, elk and moose, beaver by the score. This is a pathetic shadow of what once was, but still stirring, still uplifting, still solace.

We talked about death, how much a part of the cycle of life it is, and how, so often, we hide from it. There was something hallowed going on at Nancy’s house, waiting for the end, sitting with it, being family around it, putting up with each other, embracing each other, showing up in honor of a long life full of its drama and mundanity and quirks. Pat was drifting away. The rest of us would be left. And it was strangely peaceful, rich, simple, resigned but also noble. Soon Pat would take her last breath. Perhaps she was dying right now as we slid along at the pace of water, releasing herself, releasing her family. We talked about the state of the world under the curse of coronavirus, how it put everything on hold, cast doubt on all assumptions, made us all feel like soldiers heading out on a mission we knew some would not return from.

Meantime the river courses around the bends, the willows push out their nubile buds, the birds surge north, the seasons turn. Through it all, through the afternoon, we simply paddled, as we always have. No need to speak – seeing things, thinking things, feeling the breeze, reacting, moving under the wide sky.

Back home, Pat still alive, we shared an early dinner before Marypat went out for her bedside shift.

The river had me now. After the hiatus of uncertainty, weeks of shifting plans, looming death, the spell of currents had reeled me back in. The next morning I went again, this time solo. I unearthed my bike from winter storage, loaded up a solo canoe and picked up on the East Gallatin River where Marypat and I had left off, the next bead in the necklace of current rippling downhill. I dropped the boat and gear at the bridge crossing and drove down to the takeout, at the confluence of the East and West Gallatin. The takeout looked tricky at this level. I would have to navigate the swirling currents at the confluence, cross some strong flows as I went through the bridge pilings, and land in a narrow eddy where a vague path pushed through the willows. Then I’d have to haul the boat through a barbed wire fence and some construction clutter to reach the car. I checked it out, then hopped on my bike for the nine-mile ride.

Passing through the small town of Manhattan, I noticed people out walking, riding, families strolling along pathways. If nothing else, the virus was provoking people outside, spending time together, for better or worse. Maybe the pause in the workaday reality would hit a reset button for folks, shift the perspective. Or not.

Back at the put-in I locked the bike to a guardrail, took off my helmet, nudged the hull into the murky river, stepped in. Three strokes and I’d crossed the small river, lined up for the first deep ‘v’ of current, gone around the bend. A door closed behind me, the river took hold. The previous day had been raucous with life. Today was hushed and still. I had a thermos of hot tea in a pack, poured myself a steaming mug, sat back and let the river have me. I paddled when I needed to, drifted the rest of the time. On one bend I snuck up on a dark-furred mink nosing around on the river bank. A bald eagle perched in a snag, watched me go by. A pair of white-tail deer looked up, ears cupped forward like radar dishes. Two sandhills, pale gray and watchful, eyes as red as rubies, lifted off at my approach, made their guttural call as they floated over the fields.

Time stalled. I poured more tea. Bend after bend dropped in the skirts of my wake. I never checked my watch. Never saw anyone. The river murmured downhill, carrying me on her back. I watched a cold front approach from the west. Clouds built up over the Tobacco Roots, swooped in closer. The winds rose, cold and gusty, so that I needed to paddle to make headway. I pulled on a warm coat, hunched against the blow. By the time I entered the bare-branched cottonwood grove near the confluence the winds were burring the river. Winter had returned.

The take-out was as dicey as I thought it might be. Carefully, I turned the canoe upstream, found a ferry angle, slowed myself past the bridge pilings, nosed the bow into the small pocket of calm water. Stiff with cold, the boat rocking beneath me, I clambered clumsily out of the hull, got a boot on shore, hauled the boat onto the path.

The next day, Pat still alive, I did it again. The next bead in the watery necklace. March, this day, was a lion.

I should have had a clue when my bike shuttle felt so easy. I cruised back from the take-out in record time, pushed by a steady tailwind, locked up the bike and re-rigged. I launched in a quiet eddy and paused there, the boat rocking gently, while I poured a cup of tea, set it down between my legs, and entered the main current.

The full flow of the Gallatin River gathers itself for this last stretch before it joins the Madison and Jefferson Rivers at Three Forks, forming the headwaters of the Missouri. I have paddled the entire East Gallatin many times, and almost the entire Main Gallatin, some sections many times. The Gallatin begins at Bighorn Lake, nearly 100 miles south, well inside Yellowstone National Park, high in a mountain basin.

From there it courses through the foothills gathering pace and volume, chattering through country rich with moose and wolf and grizzly, before leaving the park. Downstream, it picks up the West Gallatin, coming in from Lone Peak and the resort country around Big Sky, and cascades through a long stretch of Class III-IV whitewater, through rapids like Screaming Left, House Rock and Portal, a kayaking mecca through the summer months. After it leaves the canyon, upstream of Gallatin Gateway, it continues to drop through farmland, the bends mined with frequent snags and deadfall, which, to my mind, are more dangerous than any of the rapids upstream.

Not long after I moved to Montana I vowed to one day paddle the upper reaches of the river, through Yellowstone National Park. Paddling is not legal in the park, but it is a gorgeous, fast-paced piece of river, bending through the willows and sage, past rocky cliffs, through meadows. They allow anglers to flail the waters, what’s wrong with a few paddlers during the high water window?

Many years later I finally made good. One full moon night Marypat and I cajoled our neighbor into driving the get-away car for us. “Hell, why not?” he said. “I haven’t pulled an all-nighter since college.” We inflated the self-bailing canoe, strapped it to the roof rack, and Geoff followed us down to the park boundary around midnight. We dropped his car there and drove ours to the Fawn Pass Trailhead parking lot. It was pitch dark. No cars. We had come prepared for ultimate stealth – wearing black, headlights off, hot-footing with the boat down a slope to a small bridge where the budding river courses past, barely a hop across. None of that proved necessary. We chatted our way down to the small bridge. The night was still.

The rising moon wasn’t much help, and headlamps didn’t really blunt the darkness either, but off we went. Right off the bat we heard the sound of a small waterfall.

“Shit!” Marypat said. “Beaver dam.”

We were blind, but we lined up and bashed over the small dam, giggling nervously. Soon the waters of Fan Creek joined in and the volume ramped up. We slid along at a great rate. Lucky for us, the river was high enough to cover all but a few rocks in the channel. The moon cast a pale, insufficient glow over the scene. In no time we sluiced under the first highway bridge. Geoff was there, waiting for us, but we never saw him.

“You guys are flying!!” he called, as we whipped past below.

“Can’t see a damn thing!” I yelled back.

Then the moon slipped behind a mountain ridge and it was truly pitch black. On we went, hanging on around corners, making last-second calls where the river split around small islands.

“Left!” Marypat shouted, “No right!”

Before we went, my biggest worry was deadfall across the river. Most of the segment has no trees along it, but a few spots have nearby lodgepole pine that could conceivably fall across the current. I’d scoped it out pretty thoroughly, and was confident, but you never know. Marypat’s biggest fear was that we’d happen on a moose or grizzly standing in the river. Not all that far-fetched, when you think about it, but I chose not to think about it.

The moon never reemerged. The night was dark as a cave, cold, with stars glittering overhead. I began to get a sense for what it would be like to paddle blind. I could hear the variation in the river as it sluiced over shallows, or when it pillowed off of a bank, or tumbled over a submerged boulder with a tiny roar. It was a watery symphony full of subtle notes and we were getting the crash course in river braille at maybe 10 miles an hour.

It was so dark that we almost missed our car where Geoff had left it, parked in a wide spot above the river. I looked up at one point and just made out the blocky shadow of our van.

“There’s the car!” I said. “Eddy out!”

The whole run, roughly a dozen miles, barely took us an hour. One heady, exhilarating, risky, blind hour. Now I’d like to return and run it again by daylight, maybe starting at 4:30 some summer morning, before the park cops are about.

But here, in the final miles of the river, it was the wind I confronted, not darkness. From the get-go a stout upriver breeze kept me busy. I barely had time to sip tea. Only occasionally did I earn a respite on a calm corner where I could drift, lay the paddle down, take in the rough hills, the belted kingfisher on a branch, the wispy clouds flying past. Not bad work, though, paddling steadily, holding a course, avoiding a tree sticking out from the bank, finding the best filaments of helpful current. Satisfying as breaking trail through deep snow on skis.

In the distance, semi trucks battled the same wind on the interstate, cars motored past on the frontage road. A farm house stood out above the river valley. A train pushed upstream. That other dimension, through the looking glass. Here the hull rocked in the current, my paddle bit the water, branches clattered overhead.

Satisfying, but still, I was glad I hadn’t decided to go farther when I got to my take-out bridge below the town of Logan. I eddied in against the gravel shore, got out of the boat stiffly, regained solid ground. Satisfying, but cold enough to be thinking about a hot shower when I got home.

A young couple and their dog were hanging out nearby. I asked if they’d mind helping me tote the canoe to the car.

“Sure,” the guy said. In short order we had the canoe on top of the van. He reached out his hand. Without thinking, I took it, said thanks.

As he walked away I realized that I’d just broken that new taboo on hand-shaking. It was just reflex, ingrained courtesy, habit. But all the way back home I avoided touching my face with that hand and as soon as I pulled into the driveway I went inside and scrubbed up like a surgeon. A few weeks earlier, in Albuquerque, I’d ridiculed the couple wanting to elbow-bump. Now look at me.

Pat died on the evening of March 25^th. She had hung on for six improbable days in the company of her family, lingering on the fringes of reality, before making her final leap. Crossing that last threshold is rarely dignified. As often as someone dies peacefully in their sleep, others go out with hours of alarming death rattle or in some form of agony. In Pat’s case, she slipped away in the middle of having her diaper changed, and while her family was in the throes of a hotly-contested game of dominoes. Life ended. Spirit gone. Eyes empty. Her family, surrounding her, accompanying her, held onto each other in that sudden, irretrievable void. Relief, mourning, reckoning, fear, all the emotions we aren’t ready for.

Life doesn’t prepare us for the loss of parents any more than it prepares us for childbirth and parenthood. That lifelong legacy of influence – how to make a bed, how to greet strangers, how to organize a home, how to eat, how to entertain, how to spend time, how to win and lose, how to joke and cry and compete and be alone. All of it, the noble and the fraught, the uplifting and the dysfunctional, from the way we laugh to the way we walk to what we believe in, all of it subtly passed on, generation to generation, and then, at the end, severed. We are abruptly orphaned, left in that existential vacuum without anyone out in front of us. Never mind that in the final years, our elders become our children, forgetful, helpless, needy, comical, maddening. Never mind that, in a case like Pat’s, death is a relief.

Late that night Marypat came home, crawled into bed, backed up against me for warmth. I held her snug.

Life picked up again in the morning. Pat was taken to a funeral home, where Marypat and her sisters dressed her, cleaned her, smudged her with sage, perched her Sunday hat on her head, put red lipstick on, laid her to rest. People came in the afternoon for an informal viewing before she was cremated, but everything else was up in the air.

I helped write the obituary, but any sort of memorial service was on hold until further notice. All of life was on hold until further notice.

Marypat and I had been preparing our home for sale come spring. We had rented a storage unit, moved loads of stuff out of the house, followed the realtor’s advice for touching things up, fixing the railing on the front porch that had been wobbly for 30 years, buying a new garage door. Now, all of that seemed in doubt. Maybe we should wait for fall to sell, when the pandemic might be more contained, when the future was more knowable. Our idea of becoming long-term vagabonds seemed perilous, given circumstances, the prospect of selling problematic, and if we weren’t going to vagabond, then what? Our rig was still stranded far to the south in Kris and Rolf’s driveway. How were we going to deal with that detail?

And April was in the offing, my final month of journeys. My plan had been to head to eastern Oregon and float some stretch of the Owyhee River system. I had done the commonly-run section from Rome down to the reservoir a number of times – a stunning, fun, top-10 trip, but I was thinking about something higher up, perhaps one of the forks of the river, something new for the last outing. All of that was clearly out of the question.

By late March coronavirus had subsumed everything. Businesses shuttered, unemployment skyrocketed, the stock market tanked, lives ended, hospitals were overwhelmed, a world-wide disruption of supply chains, the election season paused, no one sure how to be with each other.

Time swept on, steady as the river currents I’d plied for eleven months, inexorable and unimpressed. An April canoe trip seemed trivial. Then again, an April canoe trip might be precisely what was needed.

 

CHAPTER 10: FEBRUARY – BORDERLANDS

Big Bend will cast its spell.

New Age types talk about power centers where mystical happenings transpire in spots like Sedona, Arizona, a town with crystal shops and psychics on every street corner. I don’t know about all that, but if there is such a thing as a landscape that emanates a mystical aura, an almost audible hum of power, that west Texas country where the Rio Grande River goosenecks south along the border with Mexico is one.

I first came in the mid-1970s. I was an instructor on a semester-long college field studies course that spanned the southwest from the Grand Canyon to Big Bend. We spent more than a month knocking around that west Texas terrain, counting peregrine falcons, canyoneering off of Mesa de Anguila, floating canyons, hiking the Chisos Mountains, looking at exotic birds – from acorn woodpeckers to Mexican chickadees, camping at oases full of quail, enduring harsh stretches of desert that could take your life if you weren’t prepared.

Something about that land grabs hold of you. The oceanic space, the sheer limestone cliffs, the unexpected pockets of verdant life, the ragged volcanic eruptions of rock, the magical side canyons dripping with maidenhair fern, the endless blackness of night skies, the heart-stopping pastel sunsets. Mourning doves calling at dusk. Javalina slamming through creosote. Herds of tarantula migrating across pavement. A place not on the way to anywhere. A place that requires effort, that demands attention, that doesn’t tolerate carelessness.

It took hold of me back then, and I have been pulled back many times since. I came back with deserving friends, on trips notable for repeated outbursts of ‘Can you believe this place?’, overlooking the sea of desert spreading away into Mexico from the South Rim of the Chisos, or marveling at the bird life at dawn at Mule Ears Spring. I came back as an instructor for a program working with juvenile delinquents and adult criminals, trips where the magic of the landscape gave way to sessions of guerrilla counseling with century plants for office furniture.

And I came back with my family.

In what Marypat still characterizes as one of the craziest parenting decisions of our lives, we drove down from Montana with two toddlers and Marypat seven months pregnant with Ruby, to canoe the entire border of Big Bend National Park on the Rio Grande River. Simply getting there involved a four-day marathon drive in a stuffed Subaru wagon, a red canoe strapped on top, and a two- and three-year-old inside. By the time we got to our put-in near Lajitas, where our outfit looked like an explosion had hit the car, scattering toys, water jugs, dry bags, and tiny life jackets along the banks of the anemic mid-winter flow, we were exhausted.

For 12 days we piloted the 17’ canoe through canyons and deserts, with marginally potty-trained boys and Marypat dramatically huge. I joked that she gave ‘Big Bend’ new meaning every time she stooped over to tie her shoes. That humor didn’t get me very far. Still, the spell cast its net over us for those couple of weeks in the limestone grip of canyons, navigating rapids through boulder fields, paddling the “Great Unknown”, as locals call the open desert sections between canyons. We had it to ourselves, and we enjoyed the relaxed border relations of the pre-9/11 era, during which people didn’t care much which side of the river you camped on and informal back and forth between countries took place routinely.

That relaxed attitude is no more. Some time in December, when my San Diego cousin heard about my plans, she sent me an email cautioning that tensions were running high along the border, and that Mexicans weren’t exactly feeling warm and fuzzy toward Americans. Not surprising, given the ‘children in cages’ policy of the Trump administration and all the loose talk about Mexican ‘rapists and criminals’. I’d be a tad hostile if I were on that side of the line, too.

In January I reassessed options. Four of us were committed to the trip, and several of us were familiar with the terrain. Because the border in that part of Texas is so remote and unvisited, we felt pretty comfortable about our safety, but the river levels were alarmingly low, less than 200 cfs along the park border. For a week we discussed alternatives via email, and ended up deciding to shift our itinerary downstream, to the Lower Canyons between Big Bend Park and Dryden, Texas, a stretch of river with consistent springs that maintain a minimal water level even in times of severe drought. Everyone was on board. We arranged the shuttle, set dates.

It is a stretch of river that Marypat and I had paddled several years earlier at Christmas time. We took six days to complete the journey, but several of my companions argued for a more relaxed pace. We have the time, they pointed out, and it’s a helluva jaunt to get there, so why not dawdle? Hard to argue that. We settled on twelve days, twice the time it had taken Marypat and me on what felt like a pretty leisurely trip. Since retirement, I’ve been striving for that more relaxed style, whether it’s driving 65 on the highway or taking a side trip to check out a point of interest. It hasn’t been easy to shake the old Point A to Point B syndrome that held sway most of my adult life, but it’s a cause worth pursuing.

“Why not,” my partners argued, “What’s the rush? You’re retired, right?”

Indeed. The entire February endeavor is the most lengthy and potentially wandering month on the year of rivers.

On a snowy Montana day I fly down to San Diego to reclaim my rig from my cousin’s driveway, where it had been parked in the shade of orange and lemon trees for the weeks since my January hop down the Colorado. Everything is in order, and after a day of visiting in their cozy home, I point east, with more than 1,000 miles between me and Terlingua, Texas, where, presumably, the four of us will triangulate our way to each other from our far-flung locations.

Through San Diego traffic, following the advice of my cousin’s husband, John, who said he always got in the second lane, drove the speed limit, and didn’t try to pass anyone. “I got to work the same time as the guy who was swerving from lane to lane trying to get ahead,” he said.

Over the coastal ranges of mountains, down the other side to the dry, rain-shadow country stretching east toward Tucson. It is desolate land, a stretch of border I can’t imagine trying to cross on foot without maps, without water, without support, in hostile territory, with your kid’s hand in yours. Dry, open, featureless, an expanse of hot sand without relief or hope.

I peg the speedometer at 65 and hold steady. I have a vague goal of reaching Tucson, but I got a late start and lose an hour in time zones. About 150 miles shy I go past a BLM sign for Painted Rocks. For the next couple of miles I calculate distances, gas in the tank, prospects for finding a camp after dark, and decide to make a U-turn. Why not? This is the laid-back tour, remember?

The non-descript access road doesn’t promise much, but a couple of small signs eventually lead me to a sweet camp. With my ‘geezer’ park pass I claim a site for $5 and set myself up for the night. I stroll over to the petroglyph site, a low lump of broken rock rising like a wart out of the flat expanse, with volcanic rock plastered with petroglyph graffiti. Most petroglyphs I’ve seen have been on dramatic sandstone cliffs, or under overhangs of rock. This is a heap of jumbled boulders in the middle of nowhere, but it must have been some significant crossroads for ancient inhabitants who were communicating here like crazy.

In the twilight a neighbor comes sauntering by and initiates a typical campsite conversation. “Saw the Montana plates,” he says. “You from Bozeman?” Turns out he used to be a cop along the Hi-Line in Montana. He’s been vagabonding for much of the past 20 years, putting in stints as a campground host now and then, using his brother’s address for mail, staying for a week or more in a place like this. He is lean, weather-worn, with long, silvery hair in a pony-tail, calm and friendly in that laconic, desert rat way.

His rig is a homemade trailer with wood stove and solar power. “I’ve driven enough of these things to know exactly what I want,” he says. “And the only way to get what I want is to build it myself.”

I end up being proud of myself for turning around spontaneously and scoring this site, for avoiding staying in some spendy, overcrowded urban KOA in Tucson, for taking a chance and happening on this quiet, cheap, unadorned gem in the midst of oceanic desert. Not sure I’d want to spend a week here, but as overnights go, it’s a keeper.

I’m coffeed up and off before daylight, catching jackrabbits in my headlights, bumping up the speed to 70. Got some ground to cover and another time zone biting a chunk out of the day. Through Tucson, Las Cruces, El Paso, ticking off the arid miles. In one of those, too-smart-for-my-own-good moves at a gas stop I take an extra loop around the hitch with the power cord to the trailer, intending to keep it off the ground. What I don’t calculate is the slack I need to take sharp corners. Sure enough, the next sharp corner pulls the plug out and I end up dragging the cord for who knows how long, wearing a good bit off the plug in the process. Always something, just when you start feeling smug about how competent and self-contained you are. I redo the length, duct tape the frayed end, and keep a humbled eye on the running lights as I head across west Texas.

Near El Paso I cross what’s left of the Rio Grande River. Here it is mostly sand with a tiny trickle running through it. Looking at it, it’s hard not to mentally wander upstream, ticking off the onslaught.

I have hiked to the headwaters of the river, high in the flower-studded alpine meadows of the San Juan Mountains of Colorado, seen the first clear tendrils of snowmelt snake down the tundra slopes. I have bird-watched in the wildlife preserves of the San Luis Valley of southern Colorado, a marshy landscape full of waterfowl and hawks. I have rafted through the Taos Box in northern New Mexico, daunting whitewater in the depths of dark canyons. I have hiked and paddled along the river at Bandelier National Monument, with volcanic side canyons full of cliff dwellings and rock art. I have been to the Bosque del Apache, south of Socorro, New Mexico at dawn and dusk to watch the swelling thousands of snow geese and sandhill cranes come and go in thundering flights to and from the nearby grain fields.

It’s the same old story I witnessed along the lower Colorado. All along its 1,900-mile length, much of it through parched lands, the Rio Grande is siphoned off into irrigation ditches, used to supply towns and cities with drinking water – Albuquerque, Las Cruces, El Paso – powering industry, watering crops, filling water tanks, evaporating behind dams. It is the 5^th longest river in North America, with a watershed of 336,000 square miles, much of which drains into the soil before reaching the main stem of the river. Like the lower Colorado, steamboats once plied the river.

Geologically speaking, the Rio Grande has only made it to the sea in recent times. Only in the last 10 million years has the drainage managed to ‘capture’ basins and accumulate enough volume to push all the way to the Gulf of Mexico. Even now, a recurring sandbar at the river’s mouth that first formed in 2001 periodically bars the depleted river from actually emptying into the Gulf.

Again like the Colorado, the watershed is managed to the cubic foot through a variety of impenetrable interstate and international compacts and treaties constantly fought over and chronically over-apportioned. The fight is critical because the river waters more than two million acres of crops in the United States and Mexico, where it is known as the Rio Bravo del Norte. Along the international border, where we will be paddling, what water exists is almost totally supplied by Mexico’s Rio Conchos. Without that foreign river, the borderland canyons would be hiking destinations, not paddling ones. Even with the contribution of the Rio Conchos, river trips can be more adventures in dragging than actual floats. Witness our decision to slip downstream to where spring fed volume builds the river up again.

Twilight dims the sky by the time I pull into Marfa, Texas, a town with a decidedly international aura. The stately, if worn, courthouse sits behind a central plaza, scanning the radio dial there are as many Spanish stations as English, adobe is the dominant building material. It is west Texas dusty, with as many storefronts boarded up as open, the sky pastel with sunset. The funky RV park I find at the edge of town features mariachi music and laughter. A young Hispanic woman comes out of a small house and directs me to a slot near the bathroom without hookup, points out a water spigot, and tells me I can settle up with her mom in the morning. Definitely not a KOA, which is a selling point in my book. The nearly-full moon looms in the sky and a great-horned owl keeps me company through the warm, rustling night.

While I wait for the kettle to boil in the morning my phone pings. It is Lee, wondering if I want to meet for breakfast in Alpine. He is coming my way so I give him my location and tell him to stop in. By the time my coffee is brewed, he pulls up, canoe strapped on his pickup truck. He had slept in his truck on a ranch road between Van Horn and Marfa. We poke around town in search of a café, find nothing, settle on a yogurt and banana in the local grocery for breakfast, and follow each other south on two-lane toward Presidio after I rouse the abuela in the main house to pay up.

“How about $10?” she says, peeking around the door at me from the cool shadows of her house. I hand her a $20 and say “Esta bien”.

Presidio sits across the river from Ojinaga. Like El Paso and Juarez, Brownsville and Matamoros, McAllen and Reynosa, twin cities that feed off of each other along the river-scribed borderlands, a relationship both parasitic and cooperative, fraught by culture differences, political complications, historic tensions and friendships. Smuggling is a traditional way of life. Workers cross back and forth. Drug cartels do their business. People mix, fight, fall in love, eat and dance and do business despite whatever political umbrella casts its shadow across the border. Just now that shadow is dark and ominous, portentous with wall building, lands being taken through eminent domain, children in cages, and a lot of political smack talk.

I notice a t-shirt in a gas station with the slogan “Make Mexico Great Again” and a historic map of the country encompassing much of the southwestern U.S. and California.

Ojinaga seems sleepy and peaceful from a distance, but, like other border towns, local politics and businesses are controlled by drug cartels and overlords like the notorious, Pablo Acosta Villarreal, known as ‘El Zorro Ojinaga’. Gangland-style murders, payoffs, bribes, shady dealings in cahoots with federal authorities are the way things are done in these northern Mexican outposts. Acosta was responsible for running 60 tons of cocaine every year from Columbia, along with huge quantities of marijuana and heroin. Even tiny hamlets along the Mexican side of the border fall under the sway of the drug trade. Santa Elena, a hole-in-the-wall village at the mouth of Santa Elena Canyon, downstream of Ojinaga, was the scene of the final horrendous shoot-out between Mexican authorities, the FBI, and Acosta’s men in the 1987 raid that ended Acosta’s life at the ripe age of 50. El Zorro may be gone, but the drug traffic pulses on, handed on to the next kingpin, fueled by voracious demand north of the border and by the seduction of unimaginable profits south of it. These days, throughout much of Mexico, authority is wielded by drug lords, ‘justice’ meted out by their private armies, and elected officials play along, or else.

Before all this turmoil, before the Spanish, the Americans, before border wars and drug running, this meeting of the waters was a significant settlement and cultural center for indigenous people. Known as the La Junta de los Rios (confluence of rivers), the combined watersheds of the Rio Grande and the Rio Conchos, complimented by many natural springs, has been an attractive site for much of the last 1,000 years, and probably much longer, as evidenced by pottery shards and the remains of pit houses.

Spanish castaway Alvar Nunez Cabeza de Vaca, one of the few survivors of the ill-fated Narvaez expedition, wandered this desolate country for eight years after he was shipwrecked in 1527 on Galveston Island, before reconnecting with his countrymen. Around 1535 he made contact with native tribes in the Big Bend area. He survived largely by adopting local customs and techniques, and has garnered something of a reputation as a proto-anthropologist for his notes and observations. As part of his survival strategy, he fostered a reputation as a faith healer among tribes and was both feared and sought after by locals.

History books in the U.S. tend to start with Columbus ‘discovering’ the New World. News to the natives who had been busy establishing cultural networks, trading routes, and settling territory for millennia, even in this harsh landscape. For the local inhabitants at this great confluence, the combined scourges of contact with invading cultures – smallpox and slavery – combined with raids by the neighboring Apache and Comanche, essentially exterminated the original inhabitants.

Lee and I wind along the gullied river course, stopping a few times to get a glimpse of the shallow ribbon of water, flushing road runners, grinding over the “steepest hill” in Texas, slipping past the scattered settlements of Redford and Lajitas, to our rendezvous camp on the outskirts of Terlingua. Doug and Jeff show up in the late afternoon. It is always slightly amazing that everything lines up, people overcome all the potential pitfalls and problems, and find the same dot on the map, more or less on time, from thousands of miles away.

 

And then, abruptly, we are on the river. All the niggling details attended to. The T@B is parked in the dusty lot at the outfitters, our pick-up arrangements made, gear and food organized, water jugs filled, permit acquired at the Visitor’s Center. Regulations are light. The usual list of river etiquette, a few dollars for a permit. We are admonished to camp on the U.S. side unless it is an emergency. The put-in is a quiet gravel bar across from the abandoned mining town of La Linda – decaying buildings, corrugated tin peeling away, a lonely, skeletal basketball hoop. The river is green and shallow. It doesn’t take us long to organize, strap everything in, step into the boats.

We are all solo – Jeff and Doug in inflatable canoes, Lee and me in 14’ hardshell boats. Around the first bend the umbilical cord tying us to all the complications in our wake separates, freeing us, riding the arbitrary watery rail between lands. Different flags, different histories, different skins, different realities. We balance along the seam separating those worlds. So much in common, and so little. All the drama surrounding that line on the map evaporates here, this warm winter day in quiet space burbling with river.

What I forget between visits is the stirring quality of light down here. Maybe it’s nothing more than clarity, removed from smog and lights and dust and smoke by hundreds of miles in every direction. Perhaps it is some combination of the sun’s angle, the austere nature of the landscape, the dramatic rock. Whatever, it is undeniable. On the drive down to our put-in, morning mist hung in the rocky canyons, beards of moisture draped from the clouds, the early light was pink and ephemeral. Years earlier, at the end of our expedition with the kids, I walked to a high point and spotted a whitewashed adobe church on the Mexican side, upstream of La Linda, stabbed in a searing beam of sunlight. Behind that, the glowing, rampant summit of El Pico, on the Mexican side. Sunsets regularly stop you in your tracks, pastel clouds that seem impossible. The nights are deeply black, unpolluted. And the skies are largely empty of air traffic. Our four canoes are specks of color in that clarity.

A chemistry gels on every trip, made up of common ingredients – the nature of the river, the pace of the journey, the undulations of weather, the personalities and relationships, the patterns and rituals that start to develop, quirks and inside jokes and odd events that take hold. All of it a formula unique and fleeting for the duration of that interlude on a piece of water.

The river, here, is both fatigued and persistent. That is my sense of it, but also fact. The Rio Grande has run the gauntlet to get here. At this point, nearing the end of its journey to the sea, it has been reduced to an anemic, green, heavily abused trickle, a far cry from its clear mountain source and its booming crescendo in northern New Mexico. The rapids we encounter in the first days are riffles through rocky shallows. The challenge is to navigate a narrow thread of deepest water through the minefield of rocks. Mostly we slide down these uneventfully, but there is the occasional hang up and humbling need to step out and pull the boat to deeper water. The more dangerous dynamic is the sharp corners, where the deepest, and often only, channel of navigable water runs smack into a rock wall or a thicket of overhanging cane. The trick is to ride the edge of deep water and avoid getting sucked in against rock or vegetation. I lose my prized hat to an overhanging slap of river cane on one of them. Often as not, it’s best to get out, line the boats along the inside of the bend, and get back in. Not as sporting, but safe.

The river may be fatigued, but the landscape it has carved is stupendous. Limestone walls rise into the winter sky, sheer and forbidding. Buttes, side canyons, volcanic necks and dykes, miles of undulating desert spiked with cactus and lethal vegetation. The river slices downhill, picking away in the constant process of erosion. Every bend there is another compelling feature, an outstanding landform, something to exclaim over.

About half of our camps are declared ‘emergencies’ on the Mexican side of the river. We see no one. Signs of livestock, a couple of dead and bloated cows, dried horse dung, trails to the river’s edge, old ruins here and there, but no humanity. We set our tents on grassy benches, on limestone ledges, in flat patches of fine sand. We get soft drizzle one evening, and play partner cribbage under a rain fly. Late that night a band of thunderstorms move through, soaking camp, but the dawn comes up clear and washed, mist lingering against the cliffs, morning sunlight pink on the rock walls. The nights are deep and dark, stuffed with stars. Jeff points out constellations and planets before we head for the tents.

This is an exotic land, both in terms of its character, and also in terms of its population. In addition to the native species of turtle, javelina, tarantula, bighorn sheep, rare birds, there are the invaders who have landed here, mostly by human dispersion, and mostly to the environment’s detriment. River cane and tamarisk choke the banks in thickets that would require heroic machete hacking to get through. As we paddle on, we start seeing the exotic aoudad. Aoudads are a north African sheep with impressive horns brought to the southwest as a game animal. Inevitably, some of them escaped from game farms and have thrived in the arid deserts of west Texas, where upwards of 25,000 roam the wilds and compete for forage with bighorn sheep and other residents.

On our first afternoon a band of javelina, dark and muscular, bash off into the underbrush at our approach. On warm afternoons Big Bend turtles sun on logs and rocks along river banks. Canyon wrens sing their cascading, fluted song. Cardinals, white-winged doves, flycatchers, towhees, scaled quail, a long-billed dowitcher. We see far more aoudads than bighorns on the ledges and slopes as the days pass.

We paddle together, but alone. Paddling with a partner requires communication, understanding, cooperation, teamwork. When it goes well, it is a satisfying dance. When it doesn’t go well, it can be grounds for divorce. Paddling solo is fundamentally different. Miles go by without conversation, deep in our thoughts, solely responsible for our route finding and paddling decisions, for good or ill. There are ways that being alone in a boat is nice. Simpler, more contemplative, without the tension of decision-making. We take turns probing ahead in the lead, or paddling alongside one another and chatting.

The four of us make our way in a loose parade strung out down a quarter mile of river. We watch each other’s route, make our own judgment calls, only rarely discuss tactics unless it’s a particularly gnarly spot. Winds come and go, sometimes an enemy, some days a friend. The river volume grows as springs feed in. Rapids build more volume and push as the days pass.

Everyone is competent. Jeff is a skilled kayaker, a former river ranger, and veteran river runner. Lee is the only one of us who insists on solo paddling with a canoe paddle. The rest of us go with kayak paddles. Lee has done a good deal more solo paddling than tandem, by dint of circumstance and preference. He soloed the entire Back River, in the Canadian Arctic, has been down the Noatak River in Alaska many times, and is a pleasure to watch handling a boat. Doug is smart and analytical in his decisions, and he is a solid athlete and boatman in a raft or canoe. Lee and I have the luxury of dry boats and suffer less against a headwind, but Doug and Jeff are less vulnerable in rapids. It all works.

We are independent in camp as well. Each of us has a separate tent. This time of year, with long nights, we tend to head for the tents not long after dinner as the cold seeps in. I’m reading a Tony Hillerman novel by headlamp, scribbling in my journal, waking up off and on through the long darkness. I’ve adopted Jeff’s tactic of no drinks after 6 pm in an effort to reduce midnight pee trips, but I’m still out of the tent at least once a night, taking in the fading moon, the cavernous sky, the eternal silence.

Each of us manages his own kitchen. We bring our individual styles and diets along and throughout we are comparing and taking note. Lee pours his food duffle out each night on a square of tarp that serves as his counter top. He kneels before this ‘food altar’, the same posture he adopts much of each day in his canoe, and sorts through the bags. He cycles through a four-entrée dinner selection, including burrito-in-a-bowl, curry and pasta. He cooks on an efficient stove and insulated pot that requires a quick boil up and soak before consumption. His lunches alternate between slabs of cheese on bread or tuna in a pouch. He cleans his morning oatmeal pot by pouring in a half cup of coffee, swirling it around, and drinking it.

Jeff is on a protein/fat diet that includes adding dollops of brie cheese in cups of hot tea. Doug is pretty mainstream backcountry, omnivorous and not too picky. I have dried my own food for backcountry trips for decades, so most of my entrees were picked from leftover bags in our freezer back home from previous trips – risotto, spaghetti sauce, chili, lentil stew. I hydrate curry spreads and hummus from home-dried recipes for lunch, along with bags of dried fruit, trail mix, and cans of sardines. Food is key to backcountry satisfaction. You know things are going south when food fantasies start cropping up in conversation two days in. We each operate in the nightly ‘kitchen’, a flat ledge, the mouth of a side canyon, a grassy meadow, tidy up when we’re done, pack everything away snug from intruders.

Cribbage becomes a trip theme. At least once a day, sometimes more, we gather around a low metal camp table, set up the board, and partner up. Lee and I take a few early games, but Doug stages a remarkable run that lasts most of the trip, full of double-runs and relentless pegging. There is a lot of banter rich with Spanish cussing and “Appreciate ya!” commentary.

I was leery of the twelve-day trip itinerary at the start, but the pace takes hold and I settle into it. We can take rest days whenever we feel like it, and we feel like it fairly often. On one, just upstream of the beginning of deepest canyons, I saunter up an old jeep road behind camp at a rock-hounding pace for a couple of miles into a major side canyon while Lee and Doug clamber to the top of a nearby ridge. Jeff is suffering from a long-lasting bout of Planter Fasciitis and mostly stays in camp, stretching, reading, happily putzing around.

At another, across from Asa Jones’ waterworks, we all walk up Silber Canyon to an impassable pour-off where we sit and contemplate the waterworn limestone, the cool vise of rock, the unimaginable floods that carve that fluted beauty. Doug and Lee scramble up to the incredible, abandoned water infrastructure installed at heroic effort above the river to irrigate ranch land and lubricate a major candelilla wax factory, while Jeff and I meander downstream to a gushing warm spring where we soak in the bath-temperature flow while minnows nibble at our bare backsides. I even manage a shave in the hot water.

The days start coalescing and melding, the way they do on River Time. Circling red tail hawks, warblers in the shrubbery, herds of aoudads on the slopes, striking folds and pinnacles in the rock layers, ruins left by miners and hardscrabble entrepreneurs, ocotillo and century plant. The winds come and go, gray days and blue, impenetrable nights whispering with current. Our pace settles in, camp chores, cribbage games, explorations, discoveries, drifting along at the pace of current, surviving sharp corners, running rapids.

At Upper Madison Falls things go south for me. It is a shit-show piece of water, clogged with ledgy rock gardens, impossible lines. “Upper Madison is bad at any water level,” one of the guidebooks reads. I remember paddling it with Marypat, hanging close to the right bank, working our way through the rock-choked upper section, and portaging the lower drop. This time I attempt a more center run. We each make our way, with varying degrees of success, through the rocky clutter, but my slot turns messy. I am too far in to back out, and I end up having to get out of my boat where I jam in a tight gap and start bodily heaving the canoe through a boulder field. At some point a gunwale tips underwater and the boat fills, so that I end up half swimming the heavy canoe down to a rocky island where I spend the next twenty minutes bailing and regrouping before making it to the head of the short portage trail.

“God-dammit,” I explode, when I finally get out. “Hate it when that happens! I should have run the same line I did last time.”

We camp on the Mexican side at the mouth of a tributary just below the portage. I am more exhausted by the exertion than I want to admit, glad for the stop. And it is a spectacular camp on a broad shelf of smooth limestone. Just across the river is a hike to Burro Bluff, soaring 1,000’ feet above the river, which Lee and Doug and I take on the following morning. It is a vague, stony trail through thorny vegetation up a steep wall. We take it slow, work our way through the layers of rock, skirting a gully, contouring on ledges, to the top, where we spook a group of aoudads that clatter away over a ridge.

The view from the sheer edge of canyon is gobsmacking. We look straight down at the rocky clutter of rapid where I made my ignoble run. Our camp is a bright decoration in the drab desert tableaux. Jeff is down there stretching on the smooth shelf of rock. Off to the horizon the Chihuahuan desert spreads into the shimmering distance, mile after mile in every direction of broken, arid emptiness. Just at our feet, a dramatic, knife-edged ridge separates the Rio Grande from a dry arroyo. The river is a green ribbon of liquid winding away in the ocean of tans and grays.

The three of us sit apart from each other, taking it in. Time ticks on, the river slides past, clouds parade across the pale winter sky. It is a place where geology is a dimension, where the scale beggars the senses, where words don’t apply. Eventually we make our way back down through the rugged layers and thorny brush largely in silence.

That night we are victims of a raccoon raid. We’ve retired to the tents, all of us reading or jotting notes, when we hear a scritch-scritch dragging sound from the vicinity of Jeff’s tent. Jeff doesn’t respond, thinking that one of us is spoofing him. Then Doug calls out, “We’re under attack!!”

Headlamps wink on, zippers open, we all emerge in the dim light to find a raccoon making off with Jeff’s entire food bag which he’d set near his tent.

“Hey!” Jeff yells, taking off after the perpetrator in his boxer shorts, brandishing a walking stick. The raccoon drops the loot and scampers off into the thicket of river cane.

“I thought it was one of you guys,” Jeff says, ruefully. “I could have been begging for food the rest of the trip.”

“That explains it,” says Doug. “I couldn’t find my jar of mixed nuts today. No idea where it went. They must have made off with it.”

I pull the food bags I’d stashed outside my tent inside with me, go to sleep bumping my knees against my rations. In the morning Doug thrashes around in the cane for a good twenty minutes looking for his pilfered nut jar to no avail. We all scribble notes on our maps – Raccoons!! – before heading downstream.

I don’t think of this section of border country as a hotbed of immigrant activity. It is so rugged, so remote, so inhospitable. On either side of the river, the approach requires hours of bumping along four-wheel roads, across dry washes, with sketchy navigation even in a vehicle. On foot, without good gear, without water, hanging on to your kids, forbidding doesn’t begin to describe it. And even when you get to the pavement and some scattered, remote settlements on the American side, you still aren’t anywhere. And all the way you run the risks of discovery, of thirst and hunger, of drowning, of injury. Why would anyone pick this section of border?

And yet, at one point we duck under a yellow nylon hand-line stretched across the river. At several side canyons, we find the remains of camps, abandoned clothing, empty water jugs, black rubber inner tubes, fire scars. We all imagine that scene, what desperation would lead people to that journey, how harsh the reality would be, how slim the chances. There must be, I imagine, an informal network of intelligence about the crossings, an underground telegraph connecting groups with rides on the other side, some crude maps with water sources, river crossings, ranch roads penciled in. It simply can’t be that people just wander north without some information, fragmented and unreliable as it might be.

Never mind the statistics, or the punctuations of horrifying news. What runs through my mind are the mundane images. They keep coming to me as we tick off the empty, quiet miles. Crossing the river in tattered tennis shoes or sandals. Swimming with your infant’s arms clasped around your neck. Finishing the last sip of water in the plastic bottle, miles from anywhere. Seeing the dust cloud of an approaching vehicle in the distance, and scurrying for a place to hide in the featureless expanse. Knocking on a ranch door in the middle of the night, desperate, dying of thirst, risking everything on a stranger.

This border is an ephemeral thing, an arbitrary line drawn on a map, a region steeped in the evolving history of indigenous peoples, of Spanish explorers lusting for gold and missionaries intent on conversion, of smugglers, drug runners, bounty hunters, guerrilla warfare, cattle drives, bandits, remote wax factories, sprawling ranches. Geologically it is a relatively new event, this watery boundary. It weaves and shifts, as rivers do, cutting through bends, meandering sideways, establishing new channels, a living thing that no line on a map can pin down.

In relatively modern times, Mexico extended far to the north, west to the Pacific, encompassing California, Arizona, New Mexico. Even after the border wars and the assertion of American territory, this section of border was porous and flexible. Residents of small villages on the Mexican side routinely crossed the river to pick up groceries, or ferried U.S. tourists across to cantinas. People hawked their wares back and forth. Mexican cemeteries dot the Texas side of the border. Blended families are commonplace. Jurisdiction may be codified in law, but in practice, it has been informal and nuanced, worked out by the locals.

Even now, under the heightened tensions since 9/11, there are breaches. Every year since 2012 a musical event, Voices From Both Sides, takes place near Lajitas, upstream of the Big Bend National Park boundary. It begins with a massive ‘Circle of Friendship’ in mid-river, scores of people holding hands and offering a prayer, followed by dueling bands playing music back and forth. People wade out into the river, dance midstream, swap food, drink beer, meet and greet and party together while armed border guards keep their distance. It is a moment of sanity and grace in which people are people together.

The days slip past like the dogged river current. We are held in the embrace of landscape, free of news and distraction, centered on the wavering line of liquid green and what it brings us. Lower Madison Falls is a bouldery chaos we elect to line the boats down on the Texas side. We set up stations, toss bow and stern lines to each other, maneuver the boats, one after another between boulders and down the drop. Satisfying teamwork for a bunch of old farts. At another spot, an unmarked ‘pinch’ rapid none of us remember, we squeeze through a narrows with a surprise boulder just below it that we have to hot foot around through a tangle of overhanging cane, bent low and holding our paddles out in front of us like jousting lances.

Near the end, the canyon walls slope down. We coast along in the cool shade of low cliffs, tuck in beneath undercut overhangs. Major side canyons come in, scenes of occasional whopping flash flood, but dry otherwise. San Francisco Canyon, Panther Canyon, Sanderson Canyon; wide plains of outwash boulders, mud flats, polished bedrock with water-drilled holes bored into it, the debris left by mud-thick torrents of flood waters that lay waste to roads and towns far upstream and arrive here as hydraulic monsters, tearing out vegetation, eroding canyons, moving rapids, rolling boulders the size of cars, slamming into the main river channel like a battering ram.

All quiet now.

Then, as abruptly as it began, the trip ends. We haul boats out of the river a final time, make camp at the end of the long dirt road to Dryden Crossing, a nondescript muddy gap that would be easy to float right past. A couple more cribbage games with Doug continuing his winning streak, boat washing, gear drying, rolling things up.

Our shuttle driver, Jim, arrives before noon the next morning. It is an all-day round trip from his headquarters in Big Bend. He is a desert-worn, slightly disheveled transplant to Big Bend country who happened on the landscape, fell hard for it, gave up his former city life in Pittsburgh and moved down where, ever since, he scrabbles out a marginal but quite happy existence driving shuttles, fixing cars, odd jobs. He is a fount of local lore, from epic flash flood events to failed business schemes. It takes more than an hour to get to pavement from the river, through sweeping ranch country, unmarked side tracks, isolated trailers and water tanks, a few locked gates, scattered livestock. All the way I imagine immigrants plodding across the broken, arid, prickly, exposed terrain. And when we get to pavement, it is a lonely highway with widely spaced, tiny settlements and more desert void to the north.

It is late afternoon by the time we unload back in Terlingua, reclaim our vehicles, find a campground, take showers. We decide to go to dinner at a local joint, the Kiva, where we sit at a picnic table on a patio under strings of lights as night comes on. A dog roams from table to table, begging scraps. I am sorely tempted to have a beer. That dangerous internal voice starts up – what’s the big deal, one celebratory drink at the end of a river trip. No one would think anything of it. I tamp the voice down, order a non-alcohol substitute along with Jeff. We toast to the journey, to future journeys, to our fortunes. The ersatz beer doesn’t quite satisfy, but it is a tiny, personal victory no one else shares.

The crew departs early the next morning, and I am adrift in that vagabond state, free and unscheduled for a solid week before I drop off the rig and fly home from Albuquerque. It is a week punctuated by back roads, calls home, more electrical issues with the trailer, a couple of sweet coffee shops in Alpine, Texas and Socorro, New Mexico where I dive into the dreaded vortex of current events and delete hundreds of unnecessary emails.

A switch-backing road through the Davis Mountains. Campsites in unauthorized pulloffs where I park after dark and leave before dawn, or in overly-bureaucratic campgrounds where I get cited for not parking my rig squarely between painted white lines. Hikes in Big Bend Ranch State Park where the only people I meet knew my parents in Wyoming, or at Guadalupe Mountains National Park. Sunday ‘Music on the Porch’ in Terlingua where locals gather with instruments and improvise a concert with dogs roaming the crowds, a woman languidly hoola-hooping like something out of the 1960s, everyone with turquoise and cowboy boots and that boozy, grizzled, sun-struck look. A bird-watching cruise through the Bosque del Apache near San Antonio, New Mexico, lit up by fields of snow geese, a few solitary sandhill cranes, pintails and blue-winged teal, road runners and marsh hawks. Miles and meandering miles between it all, jockeying through country full of stories and hardship and history.

It ends in Kris and Rolf’s driveway in Albuquerque where I back the trailer up to the garage, tidy things up, score a load of laundry, share a magnificent burrito dinner at their favorite local café. I joke that they could rent my T@B out as an Air BnB while I’m gone. Kris and I were former lovers, back in the Santa Fe era, and we’ve kept in touch through the decades as our lives have moved on, as we met partners and married, had families. We all plan to reunite in March to take on the Gila River, along with Lee, who will drive over from his home in Prescott, Arizona, and Marypat, who will fly back with me. The Gila trip and our drive back home to Montana will be the end of my long, complicated logistical trail that began back in early January.

The afternoon before my flight home, the three of us stroll along one of the local canals off of the Rio Grande in town. Cottonwoods thinking about spring, gusty breezes stirring old leaves, some sandhill cranes stalking a field. We run into a couple that they know and stand there in the warm day, chatting. When I’m introduced I reach out my hand, but they decline, offer to touch elbows instead.

“What the hell is that about?” I say, as we walk away.

 

CHAPTER 9: JANUARY – DABBLING IN HEARTBREAK

Now the logistical rubber meets the road. For the next three months the plan gets complicated. Big Bend is on the books for February. I’ve decided to drive south, almost to Mexico, to explore stretches of the lower Colorado River for my January outing. And my hope is to finally run the Gila River in New Mexico in March. The Gila has long been on my river to-do list, ever since I lived in New Mexico in the 1970s. All well and good, but how do I stitch together an itinerary spanning thousands of miles, in the heart of winter, without declaring bankruptcy, and keep it moderately sane?

In the end, the scheme involves recruiting willing friends with driveway space, cheap airline tickets, some heavy-lift driving, and a general leap of faith. On paper, it goes like this.

Some time after the Christmas holidays, I’ll pick a window to drive south from Montana, pulling the T@B teardrop trailer behind, heading for Lake Mead. After a week spent hopping down the Colorado River corridor toward the border, I’ll drive west to Vista, California, north of San Diego, where my cousin lives. She’s offered a place to park my rig for a few weeks while I fly back home with a cheap round-trip ticket, reconnect with family and readjust to winter, before returning in early February. From San Diego, I’ll drive the rig east more than 1,000 miles to Big Bend, Texas and meet my friends who have signed on for the borderlands trip on the Rio Grande. Then, taking my time, I’ll mosey north to Albuquerque, where another old friend from my Santa Fe days has made her driveway available. Using credit card miles, I’ll fly back home from New Mexico for a few weeks before returning, with Marypat, to take on the Gila. After the Gila, Marypat and I will drive on home. Simple as that. What could go wrong?

Laid out like that, it sounds pretty straightforward. More moving parts than ideal, but in theory, almost reasonable. It was anything but straightforward getting there. I juggled air fares, van storage fees, far-flung contacts, mileage calculators, weather patterns. There was a lot of time spent bent over a map of the western United States with my appointment calendar open and a pencil with a good eraser. I seriously considered driving all the way to Mexico, back to Montana, down to Texas, back to Montana, south to New Mexico, and finally, back to Montana, through the depths of winter, before admitting that it was lunacy.

On January 5th, according to plan, I hook up the trailer and drive out of my snowy driveway before dawn. Roads are dry. The cold, pale sun rises. Wintery Montana spreads away from the highway, familiar and comforting. Somewhere south of Dillon, approaching Monida Pass, conditions deteriorate. The weather window I picked closes in gray cloud. The pavement gets slick. I slow to 45 mph, drive in and out of snow squalls. Exactly the conditions I had hoped to avoid.

Hours later, in the downsloping landscape north of Salt Lake City, the weather finally lifts, the roads clear up, and I relax my hunched, clenched posture. The pace picks up. Through the clog of Salt Lake traffic, I keep reminding myself of the trailer I’m towing. Then I’m south of town, the arid landscape opens up, snow line rises.

I’m conflicted. I have friends in St. George who invited me to stay over. I also am eager to start my solo time with a camper, a new era in travel. I imagine myself pulling off at a remote exit, going down a ranch road and finding a pull off to park for the night, cozy in my unit. The image is compelling, but I’m also drawn to see my friends. Mostly, I don’t know if I’ll make the long drive in a day. I’m not excited about navigating to their house, pulling a trailer, after dark.

Caught up in indecision, I keep passing those remote exits. A few seem tempting, dirt roads leading around a bend, but I keep going. It is dark by the time I reach St. George. I follow the phone directions out of town, to the subdivision where they live. The android voice leads me unerringly to their driveway, where I pull in just as my friends arrive from a dinner party.

January is equal parts river trip and vagabond experiment.

Marypat and I are thinking ahead to what’s next in life. Do we sell our house and become gypsies for a while? Do we hunker in? Do we sell and downsize? Do we do nothing? And what might inevitably come along to complicate or derail our best laid plans?

My St. George buddies, Doug and Sunny, have their take on the challenge. They found a way to buy a second house in the sun, while keeping their long-time home in Montana. They are snowbirds with a home nest. Over several winters they have found a niche in Utah, made friends, found plentiful recreation, pickleball courts, yoga studios, hiking social networks, birding groups. No question about it, they have a sweet spot in the desert from which to enjoy winter without a snow shovel. I savor their view of red rock cliffs, their days of sunny outdoor activity and a relaxed pace of life.

Other parts of the equation aren’t as appealing. For one thing, we can’t afford a second home. Even if we could, the idea of maintaining two households full of stuff, seasonal caretaking, and being pegged down to a specific spot every season doesn’t synch with us. But I have to admit, it’s pleasant as hell to have a haven on the road, a place to catch up with friends, sleep in a bed, enjoy a leisurely shower. I do all of that, and Doug and I take a morning stroll through the prickly pear and creosote before I take off. He is joining me in Big Bend in February, and we were members of the same men’s group in Montana for years, until he left town. It’s comforting to contemplate a future off the grid, away from the community we have built over decades, but with the ability to maintain many of those same friendships.

I’m more prone to the romance of the road than to a second home. Give me the freedom to roam. I get a little giddy with that as I drive away toward Lake Mead with my cute yellow and white trailer bobbing behind, and my first outing on the lower Colorado watershed around the corner. I stop in at a McDonalds in Mesquite for a $1 cup of coffee and call Jeff King to check out some logistics for later in the week. He’s been probing around this country for years in his van, and he knows what campground has a gas station nearby and whether the current in a section of river is lax enough to paddle upstream against it.

Las Vegas, that mecca of glitz, is a little tense, jockeying my trailer through the busy miles of freeway, reading the map as I go, but then I’m swinging south around the bulk of Lake Mead, across the bottleneck of Hoover Dam. On impulse I drive down to Willow Beach to top off with gas. Marypat and I were here last March with Jeff and Molly when we paddled Black Canyon. It was our first introduction to the lower Colorado, that long tail of water below the Grand Canyon that I had always written off as a sacrifice zone. For four or five days we dawdled together through the riven dark rock to Willow Beach and on down river to Cottonwood Cove.

I can’t say it revolutionized my attitude about the place. Parts of the trip were downright weird, starting with the put-in at the base of Hoover Dam, for which we all had to produce i.d. and were given 15 minutes to unload, pack boats, and depart under the gaze of uniformed security with badges and guns. The current there is an anemic pulse under the loom of dark canyon walls, punctuated by hot springs. Tourists in every imaginable self-powered craft cruise the miles like people at an arcade. Still, it was new country, great birding, good company, a stealth exploration on the fringe of the manic reality that is Las Vegas and the revved up recreation promoted by the builders of dams. Below Willow Beach, we slipped away from most of humanity and had it to ourselves, just us and the occasional wild burro, nesting verdin in the acacia, the echo of loon call, and the odd houseboat.

My destination today is Temple Bar, a marina and campground on the southern shore of Lake Mead. It is low season, so I’m banking on quiet. The road snakes across desert nearly 30 miles off of the highway. I see maybe three vehicles the whole way, and the campground is as deserted as advertised. In the many loops of sites, I see one other rig. I pick a spot, unhitch the trailer, manually turn it to face the morning sun and reorganize for camp time – chair on the veranda, water jug on the counter, cooler close at hand. Unstrapping my bike from the rack, I tool around the roads a bit, checking out the boat launch, the employee housing, in and out of side roads to nowhere.

Finally, the evening spreads before me, alone with my rig and the prospects of water to explore in the morning. Eucalyptus trees shade the site, their scabby bark piled on the ground. The air is still and quiet. I open a non-alcohol beer, consult my calendar, make some notes, snack on mixed nuts. The sun slides over the edge, my coat comes out. Eventually I make a simple dinner of soup and salad and then set up to write as daylight bleeds out of the evening. By the time I get 1,000 words down, the near-full moon is casting shadows and the light is like milk. I make my bed, open a book, turn on the solar lantern. My little portable cabin glows dimly in the expanse of desert and water and history.

The launch is deserted when I make my way down after a protracted breakfast, a stretch session on the yoga mat, and two cups of coffee. And it’s about a two-minute chore to lift the canoe off, load up, and take my first paddle strokes. The plan is to meander upstream into Virgin Canyon. I have a pack loaded with enough stuff to spend the night if I need to, but I’m planning on another sweet evening in camp. You never know what winds might come up to complicate the itinerary. At the start the reservoir is glass calm. The Temple looms out of the still water a mile or two off. I ghost past the docked herd of houseboats, a veritable trailer park on pontoons – gas pumps, buoys and ropes. The lake spreads away, blending into arid landscape.

The bathtub ring of high water mark stains the rock layers 40 or 50 feet above the lake surface. The water hasn’t been that high for 30 years and many marinas and boat launches built confidently decades ago have had to be abandoned or retrofitted to reach the water. Campgrounds that once perched next to lapping lakeshore are inland by half a mile or more these days. Lake Mead and all the other impoundments, canals, diversions and pipelines that litter the lower Colorado River valley make life possible for some 25 million residents of Phoenix, Las Vegas, Los Angeles and much between. Without that infrastructure, humanity would be sparse and scattered indeed. It is a technological marvel, and yet, paddling across the bizarre pool of standing water in the expanse of desert, it feels equal parts wonder and sadness, awe and disappointment.

When I cruise over a shallow reef, I imagine that it was once the edge of a dry wash leading down to the river. When I’m paddling against shore and see the bottom fall away in a sheer drop into dark depths, I picture the exposed lip of a cliff scarp high above the ribbon of river, punctuated with bits of whitewater froth below. It is impossible not to mourn that lost grandeur. Technology has its stupendous qualities, from an engineering point of view, but doesn’t serve up anything like the aesthetics of a wild canyon.

For several hours I get in the groove, stroke hard up into the closing walls of Virgin Canyon. Pretty enough, and a beautiful January day to enjoy it in. No one disturbs my rhythm, my thoughts roam, interrupted by a few pied-billed grebe. Maybe six miles up I swing the bow around and start back into a whisper of headwind. Fortunately for me, it keeps to a whisper. A lush green seep along the bank entices me in for a lunch stop, where the ground is carpeted with tiny white clam shells. While I eat, I scan the broad surface of reservoir, try to guess the destinations of contrails x-ing through the blue dome, consider the scale of manipulation undertaken by my species.

There are those who find Lake Mead and its miles of convoluted shoreline fascinating and beautiful. Folks come and spend a week paddling here and there, probing into coves, finding grottos and sheer walls that once loomed above side canyons. I’m not one of them. A day is enough for me. I get it, but the strange beauty isn’t enough to overwhelm the insult.

I have a neighbor in camp my second night. I stroll over and meet him. We have that campground conversation – how much he likes his A-liner trailer, where he’s from, swap our stories. I get the tour of his rig. He lives in Las Vegas because his wife’s family is there, but he doesn’t think much of the town. He makes regular escapes to spots like Temple Bar to find some seclusion and space and quiet. I don’t extend the visit. People who want some seclusion, including me, don’t need an hour of chit-chat. And I want to get my 1,000 words in on the computer.

My departure from Temple Bar the next morning is underscored by a pretty stout wind that would preclude any realistic chance of an outing in a small boat. I do a set of exercises designed to work in a campsite – tricep dips on the picnic bench, hip bridges, lateral jumps – all I need is a mat. It’s late morning before I drive off, jumping south another notch in the river drainage.

Montana winter is a distant memory. Creosote flats to the horizon, cholla cactus, yucca. The arid mountain ranges rear up dark and forbidding against the skyline. I assume they hide pockets of lush springs full of birds and dripping ferns, chuckling magical creeks with fingerling trout, shady oases, but from afar they look like bleak, tortured places to die of thirst in and puncture yourself on sharp, hot rock and spiny vegetation.

My route turns west at Kingman toward the California border, where I exit just before the Colorado River bridge and head upstream to Golden Shores. I have it on good authority that I’ll find a funky and sweet RV park. Sure enough, I pull in to a loosely-organized, eclectic collection of campers overseen by a pleasant woman named Kate who reveals that she grew up in northwest Montana. She is vague, even elusive, about her past, but we exchange some Montana lore for a bit. I tell her about my monthly river mission.

“I love knowing that the Colorado River is flowing past nearby,” she says. “There is something powerful about that ribbon of water going through this desert landscape. The contrast of it. I think about it a lot.”

Fossils and crystals lie around the office and we get talking about rock-hounding.

“You know what coprolites are?” she asks, suddenly. I understand that this is a test to see just how much of a rock-hound I am.

“Fossilized poop,” I answer, and she nods. I earn a modicum of cred.

“Picked some up the other day,” she says, pointing to a knobby gray rock on the counter.

“Kind of weird that we consider ancient poop a find,” I add.

I unhitch the trailer, plug in, and head out to do some errands. At the nearby Family Dollar store I pick up a towel, then I head down to the spot I plan to launch my canoe from the next morning at the town of Topock. The launch is an underwhelming marina with stagnant shallow water at the base of a concrete ramp, a small parking lot, and a bar/restaurant overlooking the sluggish river. A few desultory coots paddle around in the reeds. I pick up a $7 launch permit for the next morning. The weather report calls for calm winds, so my hope is to paddle down into the narrows of Topock Gorge and then return upstream against the slow current, rather than having to negotiate a shuttle to the take-out below the gorge. Long as the winds cooperate I’d just as soon avoid the expense and logistics of arranging transport. I like the self-contained feel of an out and back day.

There is some spotty wi-fi at Golden Shores RV Park, so I’m intermittently able to catch up with my emails, scan the news, communicate with the outside world. In a way it’s satisfying to plug back in, but on balance, I’m not convinced it’s a win. My old tendencies to get sucked into news and political hype rises up in spite of my better intentions, and I end up only knocking out 500 words of my writing quota because of the distractions. My neighbors are all ensconced inside bubbles of shelter. Flickering television lights illuminate windows. When I go to the bathroom someone is in the shower and has smoked a cigarette in the unventilated room. Steaming and stifling. Jesus, who does that? Outside the palm trees rustle and my phone can’t decide whether I’m on Mountain or Pacific time. I keep leaping forward and back an hour depending on the oscillations of electrical impulse my device picks up in the breeze. Clock time is an arbitrary thing.

No one is stirring when I drive off in the morning, red solo canoe on top of the car. The marina is sleepy, too. I back down the ramp, offload the boat, throw in the few essentials for the day, and paddle off. The air is cool, stirring slightly. I have a thermos of coffee and a go-cup I stuff down the front of my life vest in lieu of a cup holder.

Someone is prepping for the day on the café deck overlooking the launch, music on the radio. I slip past unnoticed, the stagnant backwater opens into the wide, slow river. Sluggish current picks up. The boat swings into it, turns downstream under the interstate bridge. Stroke by stroke I lose the shadow of bridges, an elevated white pipeline, a few houses, a private beach with No Trespassing signs. Briefly I turn the canoe upstream and paddle against the current to test how it will feel on the return. Doable.

The hum of interstate traffic attenuates. The river takes hold. A few coots, mallards, goldeneye keep me company. A great-blue heron stalks the shallows along the bank. A skim of overcast keeps the morning cool. My paddle strokes become a mantra that pulls me into that meditative rhythm, cleaving the turgid, beleaguered river that persists and endures in spite of us. A beaver tows its wake next to the bank. A small coyote trots along the edge of a rocky cliff, not perturbed by my presence in the slightest.

Life on the fringe. The osprey perched atop a bridge tower, the coyote plying the shoreline, the heron hunting, all of it flirting with the borders of civilization, avoiding conflict, making the best of it, taking advantage of opportunities, keeping heads down, paying attention. Living in the shadow of the human juggernaut. And this is a quiet day. I’ve heard that weekends on this bit of river can be a buzzing cacophony of jet skis and fishing boats.

A few bends down I start to enter the riven, volcanic-looking rock of the gorge. Jagged pinnacles silhouette the skyline. Cliffs rise out of the river. These stretches of current between reservoirs whisper with the memory of an ancient river that ebbed and flooded through the millennia, eroding canyons, creating and erasing sandbars, coursing through cottonwood bottoms, dwindling to a trickle in mid-winter, burgeoning into a raging monolith of silty water every spring, teeming with migratory birds. Now a faint whisper of that. Now a slight, managed, tepid current controlled to the inch, pooled, siphoned off, choked, bent to our needs. But here that whisper is almost audible. I imagine the swirling currents eddying past the teeth of bedrock. I can feel the old pulse against my paddle blade, insistent as always, feeling its way downhill as always, coping patiently with the obstacles we throw in its path.

I will outlast you, the whisper says.

A couple of hours later I push the bow in against a sandy beach at the base of cliff. I set up a chair, pour another cup of coffee, eat some lunch. I am alone. An osprey hovers overhead. A dark cormorant wings upstream. The river is silent, slipping south.

Upstream paddling is an art. It feels more like probing than coasting, feeling into the lean of gravity and mass. It is a more confrontational process, but also a challenging education with a weird satisfaction that comes from succeeding in a contest.

One of our first northern expeditions featured the ascent of the Rat River in the Northwest Territories of Canada, above the Arctic Circle. We pushed 90 miles upstream to a low pass in the Canadian Rockies. Some days we labored against rapids, hauling canoes up against heavy whitewater and ending up three miles above our last camp. We proceeded via paddling, poling, lining, tracking and simple brute hauling for nearly two weeks before we gained the high tundra pass that led to the Porcupine River drainage and from there into the Yukon. I learned more about the music of current and the dynamics of water in those days than I had in all my combined time in boats to that point.

This is nothing like the Rat, but it is uphill nonetheless. The insides of bends tend to be where the current is slowest, and where eddies form with their helpful upstream tug. My canoe finds a line against the cliffs, hopping from eddy to eddy, fighting past bits of stronger current around points of rock, then relaxing into the next bit of slack or even upstream flow. It goes pleasantly. Good work. My pace is slow but steady, as satisfying as splitting wood.

I extricate from the canyon walls. The view opens. Eventually the distant highway bridge heaves into the skyline. I decide to take another break, have a hot drink on a beach. I aim for a sandy cove. There is a dark, undefined shape on the strip of sand. Garbage bag, animal, dead cow? I come close. Then it moves. A man straightens a leg. His head comes up. He looks down the length of his outstretched body at me. We don’t say anything. I creep slowly past. A homeless man finding a spot for a nap? A drunk sleeping off a hangover? Someone on a lunch break? I bump up another half mile to an unoccupied beach. The faint buzz of rubber on highway pavement wafts down on the breezes.

Winds howl the next morning. Palm fronds clatter outside the window while I have breakfast. I meet a guy in the bathroom at the RV park, brushing teeth. “Not a good day for towing a trailer,” he observes.

“Or for paddling a canoe,” I agree.

The good news is that I can leave my trailer parked and go explore up historic Route 66. Bikers know it as the Mother Road, simmering in the cultural stew of rock and roll lore and hitchhiker fame. I am firmly in RV Land. Along the margins of two-lane, heading toward the tourist-trap ghost town of Oatman, I glimpse RVs parked on BLM parcels of land. Every pull out has a rig or two. Every side road or two-rut track leads to encampments of trailers, truck campers, Winnebegos with solar arrays and lawn chairs, grills and generators. Technically, BLM ground is open territory. No amenities, no regulations, and no fees. Feels like a healthy little dose of anarchy going on, people figuring out protocol on the fly, a little unfettered democracy with a vigilante edge. Fair enough.

Oatman is a scene, on the verge of appalling. What was a dried up mining ghost town that once boomed to a population of 300 souls and bragged that its hotel hosted honeymooning couple Clark Gable and Carole Lombard, has found a new mother lode as a tourist stop along the rediscovered highway. A couple of blocks of Old West main street crammed with curios, tourist traps, rock shops. I have to park on the far end of town in a suspect parking spot. The place is crawling with sunburned tourists buying belt buckles, bumper stickers, embossed leather wallets, cheap jewelry, crystals, shot glasses, crass t-shirts. I wander in and out of stores packed to the dusty rafters with stuff no one needs. The rock stands hold my interest. There are agates and crystals and fossils spilling out of bins and shelves. A few gnarled hunks of petrified poop. Wild burros roam the main drag. People buy alfalfa pellets to feed them. The animals nose into stores, stand at intersections, wait for handouts. They remind me of homeless people flying their flags – Anything Helps – and heading back into the backcountry when the tourists go home.

I happen to be there at noon, for the predictable shoot-out reenactment on main street, a slightly embarrassing, marginally entertaining bit of showmanship. Ready for lunch, I head into a busy restaurant, but can’t face the scene. I end up spending a grand total of 62 cents for a post card and stamp that I send to Marypat from the funky post office near my parked car. Leaving town, I stop to take a picture of a roadside burro who canters right up to my car and sticks his head brazenly into the open window.

More life on the fringe. The dried up town fumbling toward survival, burros on the take, RVs poaching campsites, artisans crafting cheap earrings and soldered trinkets, rockhounds selling crystals, everyone jockeying to get by.

Driving south on Route 95 the next day, I pick up an NPR station long enough to hear that Iran shot down a Ukranian airliner by mistake, and that estimates of wildlife killed in unprecedented wildfires in Australia are pegged at 1 billion creatures. A billion! Thankfully, the station fades and I am left to the arid, unoccupied landscape, tooling along at a sedate 60 mph. In the middle of it I see a figure on the side of the road. A man walking. Not hitchhiking. Head down. No bag or pack. Just walking. Miles and miles from anywhere. There are no houses, no roads, no towns, nothing, for a very long ways in every direction. Where the hell is he going? Where did he come from? What’s his story? He fades in the rear view.

I am a little fringy myself. Out here finding my way to likely spots to engage with an insulted river, seeking shelter every night, beetling along under the arid skies, paddling here and there, making food, buying fuel. The difference between my dance along the edge of things and the guy walking the road or the coyote making do along the riverbank is that I tow along a cape of security, invisible, but as tangible as the trailer I pull. The security of a dependable vehicle, a network of contacts, friends and family, a phone loaded with people to call, money in a bank, a piece of plastic in my back pocket that has the power to keep me fueled, fed, sheltered and out of trouble. I have my skin color and place of birth, my station in society. I am fringe by choice. Others are not so lucky.

I jog south towards the desert town of Quartzite, Arizona. As I go, RVs of every stripe seem to proliferate. Every single day, 10,000 Americans reach the retirement age of 65. 10,000 old farts every day! That’s 300,000 a month, more than 3.5 million every year. Sure, not everyone retires on the dot of 65. Some retire earlier. Some work well into their 70s. Still, pretty staggering numbers. Some healthy percentage of those 10,000 are going out and buying recreational vehicles and hitting the road, including me. As I approach Quartzite in the middle of January, it seems that all of us are coming here.

Motorhomes, trailers, camper trucks, customized vans, teardrops and bump-outs, RVs the size of buses, actual buses, homemade jobs with smokestacks and wood-burning stoves, folks towing cars and jeeps and 4-wheelers, boats and bikes and scooters and surfboards. Miles before I hit this flat, desert, non-descript town the countryside is littered with encampments, some organized and official, many helter-skelter and off the grid. By the time I hit the main drag of town my mouth is hanging open. When I planned this outing, I had no idea that I’d be driving into the epicenter of RV mania – the January gathering in Quartzite. There are thousands and thousands of rigs parked everywhere, spreading under the desert sun for miles. A veritable antpile of motorized humanity – everyone busy hanging out, tending grills, occupying lawn chairs, bumping around on bikes, chatting with neighbors. There are casually organized markets, craft fairs, speakers, events, outings.

When I stop to gas up I ask a local about the scene. “Yeah, it’s a thing. Every January it takes over town. It’s like Burning Man around here for a month, without the drugs.”

I escape as quickly as I can, slowly slipping free of the motorized gauntlet that clings to the roadside for miles past the city limits. Even then, every side road, every pull out, every flat BLM spot is ornamented with blocky rigs and their clutter of toys.

My target is the Imperial Refuge along the Colorado River. I park at the visitor center where two retirees staff the information desk. It’s pretty quiet there – no other visitors, some information kiosks, the usual banter of government displays. At a nearby boat launch I offload the canoe and hop in to explore the maze of managed waterways fed by the fatigued, overused, recycled remnants of this mighty river that begins far to the north in the high peaks of Colorado and Wyoming, that roars down the awesome canyons of the arid west, that hums with the history of millennia, the lore of pioneers, Indians, John Wesley Powell, the Oregon Trail, and more recently, that suffers from our love affair with technology and all the unintended consequences that romance has unleashed.

It is warm. The water braids through rushes and reeds, isolated palm trees, backwater channels with unnatural contours. No current to speak of. No cottonwood trees or floodplain. A few birds catch my eye – the ubiquitous coot, a great blue heron, an osprey in a palm tree, black-crowned night herons, an egret, a kingfisher or two. I find a paddling rhythm. A rushing sound of air close overhead wakes me from the trance. A duck plummets into the river a few feet from my boat and disappears. I look up in time to see a falcon veer away and fly off.

Then, abruptly, the duck, a goldeneye, surfaces, shakes itself, and wings off. A near thing for this pretty bird. A missed meal for the predator. Who knows if my red canoe put the falcon slightly off its game or if the duck ditched into the river just in time. An outburst of life-and-death drama in the midst of this tamed, restricted backwater. Yes, we may have superficial control of things, we have bent things to our will, overlaid this river channel with our management scheme, but nature carries on.

I decide to join the legions of ‘boondockers’ for the night. A few miles from the visitor center a flat, rocky expanse spreads off the road, pocked with vehicles and campers in an off-the-grid scatter. I pull off, bounce across the moonscape of cobbles to the edge of a shallow valley, keeping a respectful distance from the neighbors, and call it home for the night. Not much to recommend it – the overview of an arid drainage, some military installations in the distance, mountains on the horizon. No amenities, but I don’t need amenities. And the price is right. I sit next to the cute trailer, sipping a drink, reading my book, A Man Called Ove. A cool evening breeze wafts across the flats. Just me and a few thousand other retirees with the same idea.

My final dabble in the Colorado River is an exploration of Senator Wash, a few miles north of Yuma, Arizona and the border with Mexico. I succumb to an organized BLM campground because it is near the boat launch and has a bathroom. To call it camping is an affront to any camper worth their backpack. My site is literally in a parking lot, complete with painted lines I have to park between. Each ‘camper’ gets their spot and one next to the rig in which to set up chairs and grills and plastic fences and astroturf and flags and whatever else they cart along. Most spots are full. Generators hum. The smell of barbeque wafts in the breeze. People stand around chatting up the neighbors, sitting in lawn furniture, putzing with awnings. It’s embarrassing. I escape as quickly as possible to the boat launch and set my solo canoe in the water.

It is a challenge to avoid the clutches of humanity on the lower Colorado. Even out of sight of people, the evidence of human manipulation is everywhere – dams, levees, canals, docks, moorings, buoys, boardwalks, houses in the distance. Fifteen minutes of steady paddling earns me a quiet side channel with a few ducks probing in the reeds. I stop and let it all slough off, lose the hubbub, take a breath. Just then I hear the low drone of an approaching motorboat. A couple putt around the corner in a skiff, fishing poles bristling like antenna. We wave. They disappear around a bend. The noise dies off. I turn into a tiny channel too small for motorized craft.

All this week on various sections of river I’ve had Aldo Leopold on my mind. Leopold, that 20^th-century lion of conservation biology and land stewardship, came to the lower Colorado with his brother and spent a week or two exploring the delta of the Colorado across the border in Mexico. It was the pre-dam era. He wrote an essay titled, ‘Green Lagoons’, in which he extolled the maze of watery channels, the thickets of impenetrable underbrush, the hum of life – waterfowl by the millions, deer, jaguar, fish. He and his brother got happily lost in all of it, living off the land, not knowing where they were most of the time, just bumping around in the myriad channels and backwaters and sloughs where the Colorado spread in a wide, lush fan as it emptied into the sea.

That delta is gone. What remains is a sandy, dry expanse that only sporadically sees water at all, and when it does, it is a pathetic trickle of spent liquid that has survived the raids of irrigation, diversion, damming, industrial and municipal use, power generation and evaporation.

Where I paddle was once a fertile flood plain forested with cottonwood trees, through which the river ebbed and flooded by season, supporting a vast and varied array of vegetation and wild critters. Until we showed up with our water needs, our transportation needs, our power demands, our desires for recreation. Gone are the cottonwoods, gone are the floods, gone are most of the wild critters, gone or transformed or replaced by exotics is the vegetation.

In the mid-1800s, Yuma, Arizona was a thriving inland port full of steamboats, busy with commerce, feeding goods to the interior of Arizona and on into Colorado and New Mexico from the historic Yuma Quartermaster Depot. Hard to even imagine that now, despite the museums and displays in town. Much of the year you’d be hard pressed to get a canoe up to Yuma, much less a steamship. These days, Yuma is a ‘port’ to some 85,000 seasonal residents, the RV snowbirds who flock here like motorized migrants each winter for the climate and social life of sprawling, cheek-by-jowl paved RV parks. Among other things, the snowbirds are drawn by the fact that Yuma is the driest and sunniest population center in the country. On average, Yuma reaches 90 degrees on 175 days each year.

I spend the day poking around in the flat water behind another dam, the last complicated diversion of river water into canals and pipes, siphoning off the final dregs into canals like the Highline or All American, piped up and over the mountains to San Diego, the last greedy suck before Mexico gets its meager allotment of precious liquid, tainted and depleted as it is. The water is still, pooled. I stroke past low outcrops of rock, small valleys leading away to higher ground, palm trees perched on rocky slopes. Solitary pintails, cinnamon teal, widgeons come to view. A falcon glides past. It is pleasant enough, but I can’t help thinking about the Leopold boys poking around in the delta, alive to the possibility of seeing an elusive jaguar, startled by flocks of ducks erupting out of backwaters and clouding the air overhead, wondering where the hell they were, but not caring much, cooking on coals with a Dutch oven, sleeping in a canvas pup tent, lost to the world and happy to be lost.

Late in the day I re-emerge at the boat ramp, lift the red boat onto my roof rack, nod to a couple sitting in lawn chairs nearby, fishing pole angled at the turgid pond, red and white bobber motionless in the water. I come back to the paved camp in time for my dinner, eaten inside my teardrop bubble to the monotonous music of neighborhood generators.

 

 

CHAPTER 8: DECEMBER – BROTHERHOOD

Early on I knew that the tough part of my yearly schedule would be the heart of winter. The months of December, January, and February; months when Montana is frozen hard and boats are sensibly stored for the season. I knew the mid-winter lineup would be the most challenging to figure out, the hardest to get to, and likely the most expensive.

One of my biggest worries about retirement was the pitfall of free time. Life needs a certain tension to be interesting and to keep me out of trouble. At least my life does. In my freelance career, deadlines have always been welcome. When things are loose, no expectations, it’s too easy to let it slide. I was worried I’d fall prey to frittering time away, getting sucked into endless news streaming in the era of Trump, letting days slip by where I couldn’t remember what I’d accomplished. Even worse, the potential to get lured into old, unwanted habits.

December, January and February turn out to be a pretty effective antidote against that tendency. Planning a year’s worth of paddling trips, without breaking the bank, and while juggling the other responsibilities of life is a half-time job. I have to keep months ahead of the game to get things organized, find contacts, seek partners, arrange logistics. There are repeated dead ends, dates that don’t add up, trips that cost too much.

My first break comes in a conversation with Jeff King. “I’ve got the last half of February open,” he says, one day. “I was thinking about something in the Big Bend area. Any interest in joining me?”

We have coffee one morning with calendars in hand. It’s still early, but we bracket out a couple of weeks during the last half of February, a loose plan to paddle the three canyons of the Rio Grande in Big Bend National Park, and decide to tighten it up once we get closer.

With that in hand, I email a couple of friends in warmer climes for paddling destinations in their parts of the world – a cousin in San Diego, an old family friend in Mississippi, and a friend I collaborated with on several magazine stories in northern Florida. Any suggestions?

Two out of three come back almost immediately. Mississippi is not encouraging, and things in her life are in turmoil. My cousin in San Diego almost laughs at me through the email. “We’ve been in a decade-long drought,” she writes. “There’s nothing within a six hour drive of us unless you want to paddle in the ocean.”

I had thought about the ocean, but it’s not really my jam. Baja could be an option, maybe, but more complicated than I want to deal with, the border is an absolute shit show, and who knows how friendly Mexicans will be, what with president Trash Talk. Meantime, weeks go by and I don’t hear from Florida. I’m beginning to wonder if I have the right email when he finally replies.

Joe Hutto sounds somewhat encouraging. He’s busy writing a book. He has recently married. Yes, there are paddling destinations he might suggest, but he’s vague about any specifics. His new wife is Rita Coolidge. Yes, that Rita Coolidge, and it just happens that she’s giving a concert in Bozeman in the late fall. He’s going along and maybe we could meet. I go online and buy tickets to the concert.

That’s enough for me. I start looking at maps, firing up ideas I’ve had on the edges of my vision for decades. I’ve always been drawn to the Suwannee River, for one thing. Might be that sweet southern song. Might be that when it comes down to it, there really aren’t that many multi-day river trips available in Florida. Many rivers in the state emerge abruptly out of limestone springs and have short runs to the coast, or disappear again underground. Only a few navigable rivers run any significant distance. No doubt there are candidates, some of them stupendous, but from the vantage of Montana, with a couple of months lead-time, the choices are limited.

I do a little research, find that there is actually a pretty active Suwannee River paddling following, with some non-profit involvement, some descriptive river guides, camps set up along the banks, a couple of outfitters for rental gear and shuttles. Promising.

On impulse, I send out an email to my brother and sister, both of whom live in New England, about joining me. My sister can’t get the time off, but my brother, Craig, seems interested. He’s in his final year of work with an educational consulting firm, planning for June retirement. His workload has been cut back and he’s got a lot of vacation time in the bank and credit card miles saved up. And he’s an obsessed bird watcher. One of those “Stop the car! There’s a long-billed dowitcher in those cattails. Turn around!” That kind of bird watcher. I know damn well that, for Craig, Florida in December might be irresistible.

And I’m right. It only takes three emails and a follow up phone call to have dates penciled in and the early logistics set in motion. I call an outfitter in northern Florida. Craig looks into flights. The focus narrows down.

These kinds of trips – unknown terrain, few contacts, not much reliable intel – are bailing wire and duct tape affairs. The outfitter I chat with has a mixed message. He seems reasonably certain that we can get a trip in, that time of year, but it will depend on water levels. The year before, in the same window of December, the river was flooding at historic levels and was closed to travel. This year it’s been dry, but you never know when a tropical storm will brew up. He threw out some possible itineraries, said he could shuttle us and rent us a boat.

Craig and I book flights to Tallahassee, where Hutto lives, and plan to rent a car for the week. We split up the menu, dry some food on home dehydrators, talk about gear. There is a lot that could go sideways, but if worse comes to worst I’m thinking we can cobble together some sort of outing, paddle around with manatees, do some bird watching in a swamp, something.

In November Marypat and I go to Rita Coolidge’s concert in town, just a few blocks from home. It’s a packed house with a lot of gray hair. Coolidge has been at this for more than half a century. Now in her 70s, she has had a career that included touring with the likes of Joe Cocker and Eric Clapton back in the Woodstock era, a career that earned her a handful of gold and platinum records. Marypat and I have a couple of those vinyl records in a box somewhere. She was married to Kris Kristofferson for a while. She managed to avoid the overdose and excessive lifestyle traps that brought down so many of her contemporaries and she is still standing on stage for a two-hour set, knocking out songs, old and new, backed up by musicians from Los Angeles she’s worked with for years. Absolute pros, all around.

We meet briefly after the show. Hutto breaks away long enough to talk about some paddling destinations, but nothing very specific. It’s late and they are tired. Touring is grueling in your 20s, never mind keeping it going into your 70s.

“I’m so ready to be done,” Coolidge says. “I mean, why can’t I retire too?”

I give Hutto the window of our dates, tell him we’d love to knock around and see some of his favorite haunts on the edges of our time there. We leave it at that.

I’ve made more stunning geographic leaps, but Montana to Florida is a huge ‘L’-shaped plane saga, straight south to Dallas, a three-hour wait in an amorphous airport, and straight east to the panhandle of Florida, hopping over time zones, switching up climate, landing in an exotic place. I get off the plane near midnight. The night is warm and dense. My brother has stayed up way past his normal bedtime to meet me with our rental car, already checked into a motel he booked with credit card miles.

“Not in Montana anymore,” I observe.

“Or Maine,” Craig agrees.

In the morning, after a regrettable hotel breakfast, I call Hutto. “Come on over,” he says. “We’ll put on coffee.”

Half an hour later we’re hanging out in his kitchen, Rita Coolidge in a bathrobe asking whether we take cream, drinking coffee together. And five minutes after that we’re tromping around Hutto’s back yard with binos around our necks, and Craig is in bird-watching heaven.

If Joe Hutto isn’t one of a kind, he’s at least very rare. I first came across him in a movie with the unlikely title, My Life as a Turkey, which tells the story of Hutto’s years-long affiliation with a brood of sixteen young gobblers.

From a young age, Hutto has spent a great deal of time in the company of critters. These days he calls himself an Ethologist, but as a youngster he just bonded with wildlife and couldn’t get enough of it. He spent time in the woods, picked up orphaned animals here and there and took care of them. He was an only child and his parents were tolerant types. They lined the walls of his bedroom with linoleum and imposed only one limitation on his menagerie – no venomous snakes. Set free, Hutto took on hawks, foxes, wild boars, a boa constrictor, crows, ducks, raccoons, anything he could get his hands on.

“Kind of put a kink in sleep-overs when I was a kid,” he told me once. “You know, don’t mind the boa constrictor, he doesn’t take up much room in the bed.”

Mind you, this wasn’t a caged or domesticated relationship. He might coop up his brood when he was off at school, but outside of that, he wandered with his charges through the woods and fields and wetlands of northern Florida. The animals weren’t pets, they were companions. Hutto became addicted to spending time with wild animals and learning from them. When the young animals matured and gained independence, off they’d go, much as they would naturally.

Hutto told me about a fox he’d brought up that one day disappeared. Months went by. Hutto assumed the fox had struck out on its own as an adult, or, more likely, been hit by a car or shot by a farmer. Then one morning Hutto was sitting in his cabin with the door open when that fox ambled back in like no time had passed, hopped up on the bed and visited for a while. Then it strolled back out the door and never came back.

Hutto gained a local reputation. His avocation continued as he grew up. In college at Florida State University Hutto studied archaeology, but continued to spend time with animals. That is also where Hutto and Coolidge first met. They played music together, fell in love, hung out, but then they each went their way. Coolidge embarked on her long musical career and Hutto kept up his studies and his quirky alliances.

One day, when Hutto was living in a remote cabin in backwoods Florida, someone dropped off a bucket of sixteen turkey eggs. Hutto knew exactly what to do. He also knew the responsibility he was taking on. He picked up an incubator and waited, periodically clucking away like a hen turkey over the warm brood of shells. When the baby birds broke free, Hutto was the first thing they saw.

For the better part of the next two years, Hutto spent every hour of every day with those growing birds. For that period of time Hutto had essentially no human interaction. He was, for all purposes, a mother turkey. He walked the Florida woods with them, wandered fields, watched the turkeys grow and develop personalities, talk to each other, find food and water, suffer trauma, observe their surroundings.

Remarkably, Hutto was also accepted as part of the flock by other wildlife in the area. In the company of his brood, he’d wander among black bear, deer, snakes, animals he’d rarely see on his own, but which accepted him as nonchalantly as they would a true mother turkey.

The film is a reenactment of Hutto’s time with the flock. At the end of the movie, a postscript mentioned that Hutto was presently living with a band of mule deer in Wyoming. “What the heck?” I said, when I read that. “How does that work?”

In one of those small-world coincidences, it turned out that Hutto was living with the deer roughly six miles from my parent’s home in Lander, Wyoming. During a visit to my folks, I picked up the local phonebook and there was Hutto. I called him up.

“I’m a fan of yours, “ I told him, when he answered. “I’m also a writer. I’d love to buy you a cup of coffee some time.”

Two days later we met for breakfast at a local café and spent several hours talking. Hutto became a regular contact whenever I went to visit my parents, and over time I wrote several magazine stories about him, including a lengthy interview for The Sun Magazine. I met some of his mule deer comrades. I heard about the incredible string of interactions he’d had with wildlife over the years, from wood ducks to bighorn sheep. More importantly, I was introduced to the underpinning of philosophical wisdom that grew out of those relationships. And we became friends.

Tragically, Hutto’s wife at the time was struck down by a lingering bout with cancer. He had watched animals in the throes of gruesome injury, killed by hunters, maimed by barbed wire, struck by vehicles. He witnessed the grief and mourning of their comrades. Here was his own.

“I have not learned any extraordinary wisdom about the nature of life or come to see nature as kind,” Hutto told me after his wife’s death. “It’s not. My wife contracted a terminal form of cancer. She had led a healthy life, never had a bad habit, and yet this awful disease took her. It was one more tragedy I had to experience up close. She was one more beautiful creature who died with her head in my lap. This lifetime of study has left me disappointed by the brutality of it all.”

After his wife’s death, Hutto lasted another season or two in Wyoming, but eventually sold the property and moved back to his home country in Florida. He hadn’t been back long when a friend mentioned that Rita Coolidge was coming to town to do a reading and book-signing of her recently released memoir. Hutto went to the event, stayed in the back of the room, was shy about reconnecting. Friends pushed him forward. They hugged. They went out afterward to talk. They talked all night. They haven’t been apart since.

Hutto and Coolidge may live on the outskirts of a bustling city, but their back yard abuts a wetland with towering cypress and pine trees, small ponds, habitat rife with birds, gators, otters, deer. We squelch around on deer paths. Craig is intent, picking up songs, catching movement. Piliated woodpeckers, a pair of otters in a pond, song birds and warblers. Hutto perks up at Craig’s enthusiasm, starts talking about migrating water moccasins wriggling across the yard, owls in the trees just past his lawn.

The three of us hop in the rental car and follow Hutto’s directions to Wakulla Springs, the largest freshwater spring in Florida, nearly 200 feet deep, a powerful explosion of crystal clear water ushering an instant, full blown river out of an extensive underwater limestone cave system. The spring gushes 200-300 million gallons of water a day, feeding the short, nine-mile-long river. The springs gained fame after the discovery of mastodon skeletons and bones of other extinct species in the waters, along with bones and artifacts of indigenous people from at least 12,000 years ago. More recently, the springs and surrounding habitat have been the set for Tarzan movies. A stately lodge was constructed on the site by Edward Ball, who later donated the surrounding land to the state under the condition that the reach of river a mile or two below the ‘rise’, and extending down to the next highway bridge, would be permanently off limits to humans. No one allowed, period. Ever since, for more than half a century, those miles of river have been untouched by humans, essentially unvisited.

We buy $8 tickets for the boat tour that putts a mile and a half downstream and back. It is a gray, dreary day. Only a few people are on the ride. The driver doles out historical tidbits, humorous stories, and identifies wildlife as we idle slowly along shore. Despite the touristy nature of the outing, it is rich. Alligators lounge on the banks, anhingas air out on gnarled branches, ibis, egrets, hooded mergansers, black vultures. The river course teems with life and jungle-like vegetation. Where the boat turns around, we peer downstream into the void where humans have been shut out and wildlife goes about its business. It’s a tiny postage stamp of a preserve, but it serves as a reminder of what was, and what might come back if humans stepped offstage.

Hutto grew up in a wild Florida where a young man undaunted by adventure could slip into the forests and swamps and fields, into the thicket of nature, encountering snakes, finding artifacts, adopting creatures, discovering jewels of habitat, swimming with manatees, being half wild himself. Florida is not that place anymore, but if there is a vestige of that quality, it is in the northern and panhandle part of the state. “Experience Real Florida,” the billboards say.

That night we meet Hutto and Coolidge at their favorite diner, a hole-in-the-wall place tucked inauspiciously in a strip mall. The grits and shrimp are the opposite of inauspicious, almost as memorable as the company.

Craig and I drive east to the Suwannee from Tallahassee the next morning. Pastures, small towns, surviving plots of forest, muddy streams. We stop for gas and go inside to pee. A heavy-set, bearded biker dude with solid tattoos everywhere watches us from behind the counter.

“Have a blessed day,” he says, as we leave.

“Yeah, forgot,” Craig says. “Bible belt.”

“Pretty unlikely looking church-goer,” I say. “Probably a story there.”

Craig’s phone has the outfitter’s location and we follow directions that wind us through a vast state park and campground, down to a steep, concrete boat ramp with the dark river at the bottom of it. A couple of beat up vans sit in the gravel lot, racks of dented aluminum canoes. When I called, I imagined a log building with maps on the walls, racks of bug dope and nature guides, paddling accessories, snacks. Instead the ‘office’ is a phone booth sized kiosk with a sliding window and a guy named Steve with a cell phone. He is waiting for us. It is low season on the river, and low water to boot, so things are pretty quiet.

“This place is hopping starting in February,” he says. “It can be busy in September and October too. Right now you’ll have the river to yourself.”

Fine by us, as long as there’s water to float the canoe. We talk about our itinerary, how high up we can go before we’re dragging the boat more than paddling, where the river camps are, what the weather’s supposed to do. It doesn’t take long. I notice that Steve has bible verses up on his computer screen. We pick out a weathered, dinged up Old Town Tripper canoe for sentimental reasons. Both Craig and I started our wilderness canoe careers with that boat. This one has seen better days, but so have all the rest of the canoes in the livery. We get some old-style life vests that neither of us has any intention of wearing, a couple of heavy paddles, settle up by credit card, load the canoe on a trailer and Steve is ready to go.

Steve gives us the twenty-five cent version of his life story as we drive the two-lane roads. He grew up in Kansas, in what sounds like a fairly dysfunctional family, and decided to come to Florida for the warm weather and beaches. He has knocked around picking up jobs over the years since, does some school teaching, started this outfitting business. All of it appears pretty shoestring, but he seems content and cheerful enough. He drives the rattling van upriver to a dirt road with no signage, jounces down through narrow limestone cutbanks at an alarming speed and comes to an abrupt stop at a sandy opening above the river. Three minutes later we are unloaded and he clatters away, leaving us in the faint cloud of his exhaust.

It goes quiet. Where the Wakulla Springs and River were rustling and alive, the Suwannee whispers past through a ghostly silence. We have lunch there on white sand as fine as flour, looking upriver into the cypress and live oak lining low limestone cliffs. The river is as dark as truck stop coffee, the current barely perceptible. Low clouds brood overhead. Not in Montana anymore, I think again.

The Suwannee begins in the vast Okefenokee Swamp on the border between southern Georgia and northern Florida. From there it winds some 250 miles to the Gulf coast, picking up tributaries, replenished by springs, ending up in the mangroves and bayous along the coast. It isn’t what you’d call wild, but there are quiet sections, along with state parks, music venues, riverside houses. The section we’ve settled on courses through sparsely settled country and gives a solid dose of the river’s character. Anything higher up, at this water level, is more shoal than river and we would be walking the canoe as much as paddling it.

Craig and I haven’t been in a canoe together in a while. In fact, even when we’ve been on canoe trips together, we’ve mostly been in separate boats. The load fits easily inside the hull, we climb in, take the first strokes. The boat sets a purling wake through the slow water, we match our cadence. In the first couple of bends there are shallow spots we have to ease over. Then Craig puts his paddle down, picks up his binoculars. Paddling with Craig is a stuttering affair, punctuated with pauses to identify a distant speck of soaring hawk or the flash of color in underbrush. He’s efficient about it. He doesn’t miss much. It usually doesn’t last more than a few strokes.

“Red-headed woodpecker,” Craig says. Or wood duck, Carolina wren, black vulture. The birdlife is sparse, but Craig picks them off one after another, by song or sight, makes quick, shorthand notes in the notebook he keeps in his breast pocket. GBH for great-blue heron, like that. He’s been at this since he was in college, has become somewhat of an entity in the national flock of birding aficionados. He regularly logs his sightings on eBird.org. To call it a hobby is like saying Joe Hutto enjoys being around wildlife.

My first deep wilderness canoe expedition was initiated by Craig in the late 1970s. He and his partner at the time had their sights on a big-volume river in Quebec, the Moisie. He invited me along. It was fairly early in my paddling learning curve, but I was young and immortal. Why not? Four days into the trip, near the border of Quebec and Labrador, Craig and his partner very nearly died when a sudden wind came up during a lake crossing and they capsized. We spent the rest of that day rescuing them from the frigid, white-capped lake, hugging their naked bodies in sleeping bags to revive them, slowly rekindling warmth and life. It was a narrow thing. Day 4! Needless to say, caution became the watchword over the next weeks as we descended the whitewater-filled canyons and treacherous rapids back to the north shore of the St. Lawrence.

Craig and his wife, Beth, joined Marypat and me for the second summer of our first trans-Canadian canoe expedition in 1986. They flew in to our wintering site in northern Saskatchewan and paddled with us for 40 days across the Barrenlands of northeastern Canada. Remote, untouched, vast landscape full of immense herds of caribou, grizzly, wolves, Inuit artifacts, daunting weather and portages and black flies. We didn’t see a soul for more than a month, never mind a fence, road, town or any sign of modern civilization. Only the ghosts of the Inuit who thrived for centuries on the austere landscape before being uprooted by the incursion of Europeans. That old story. For Craig and Beth, fresh from a year of teaching school, it was baptism by fire. It was tough enough for Marypat and me, and we’d had a year of isolated northern travel and living to prepare us.

More recently, Beth was laid low by a rare form of leukemia that imposed an endurance survival marathon on their relationship. For years they weathered a seesaw of grim episodes where the end loomed near, followed by hopeful stretches of remission, followed by yet another relapse and brush with death. More than once we traveled east in support, death hovering in the wings. Beth finally received a successful bone marrow transplant and has been cancer free for almost twenty years, but the battle transformed her, made her frail and vulnerable. Through all of it, Craig has been her champion.

Their adventurous outdoor lives were put on permanent hold after the bout with cancer. In the decades since they have gone out in a canoe maybe once or twice a year to pick fiddleheads or poke around an estuary. A few summers earlier Craig came to Montana for a visit and we spent a day on boisterous whitewater on the Boulder River in a self-bailing inflatable canoe. It may have been the first time Craig and I had partnered up in a canoe since we were teenagers in an aluminum boat, back when paddling together was a good deal more adversarial than cooperative.

That day on the Boulder we slammed through watery holes, slapped down wave trains, wove through fields of whitewater and boulders. It’s a run I do every spring, but Craig hadn’t done whitewater like that in decades. Being together that way in a boat, sharing that watery exhilaration, was a gift.

This first afternoon on the Suwannee we only paddle a handful of miles down to one of the riverside camps maintained by the state. Far enough to get the gist of the landscape. Limestone cliffs, pocked and pitted and convoluted, alternate with white beaches of powdery sand. Overhanging the river, live oaks, cypress, beards of hanging moss swaying in the faint breezes. The river swings through shallow sand bars, past freshwater springs gushing in from the sides. Cypress ‘knees’ poke out of the water and stand like knobby posts along the banks. We have it to ourselves.

The riverside camp is hardly roughing it. A boardwalk ramp leads up to a series of screened platforms. Wheelbarrows are available for portaging loads. A picnic area, bathroom with hot showers, paved walkways connecting to other platforms, electric lights. And it’s free. We pick our platform, unload, set up camp chairs. No one else is around and the campground host is AWOL.

Turns out that taking a walk with Craig is a lot like paddling with him. More than once on the afternoon stroll we take from camp I realize that I’ve been blathering on about something, only to notice that he’s twenty yards back, binoculars on his face, checking out a sapsucker while I’m entertaining myself. My blind eye and consequent lack of peripheral vision doesn’t help keep track of his frequent pauses.

“Not nice to make fun of the handicapped,” I say, when he catches up, chuckling.

Away from the river, seldom-driven dirt tracks, ribbed with bedrock limestone, wind through the woods. The weather report forecasts rain and thunderstorms for the next day. It rains off and on through the night and the morning is gray and sullen. We could paddle, pull on rain gear, ignore the weather, but we have plenty of time so we decide to lay over in camp, take another long walk, play cribbage.

On our walk through hushed, dripping woods, between sightings of black vultures and towhees, Craig brings up our childhood years and our troubled times as brothers. “I didn’t want to let this trip go by without bringing it up,” he says.

It is a topic we’ve skirted for decades. I was not an easy older brother. In fact, I was something of a tyrant, especially in my adolescent years. Craig suffered the brunt of it and that tyranny had a lingering effect.

“It wasn’t until the road trip we took after you graduated from college that I sensed a change,” Craig says. “That was the first time I really felt treated as an equal.”

I remember that summer when we drove my ’67 Chevy pickup across the country, hiked together in the Uinta Mountains and Canyonlands of Utah, both of us on the cusp of self-discovery, what we would make of life, where we’d live, what we’d do. On the fringe of personal frontiers.

Through middle school and high school I treated Craig badly. I don’t have an excuse.

After he brings it up I let it sit as we walk. Craig stops and kneels down to take a picture of a snail on the roadway with his phone, posts it on a naturalist site he uses to identify things or pose questions.

“There were years there when I felt trapped in a version of myself that I knew deep down wasn’t true to who I was,” I say, finally. “I’ve given up trying to figure out where that version of me came from. I didn’t know how to escape from it, but some inner voice told me that I eventually would. I know that didn’t do you much good at the time.”

We walk some more. Craig’s phone pings. In a matter of minutes someone out there in the ether has identified the snail he photographed on a dirt track in backwoods Florida. A house hunkers behind a spreading live oak off the road – mossy roof, a rusting car, screened porch. No one around.

“I don’t know how to make up for that time,” I say. “I am really sorry for the way I treated you. And I’m profoundly grateful that you have found a way to forgive me and go on. At least I hope you have.”

“College was a chance to hit the reset button in my life,” I continue. “I reinvented myself in those years.”

“Me too,” Craig agrees. “It was an opening to become someone outside of home and family and the roles I was constrained by.”

It is not a come-to-Jesus moment there on the roadway. We’re more restrained than that, but it feels like a breakthrough, a lighter load between us, simply to have it out there, to acknowledge it, to agree that it happened, to recognize its power, to express relief at its passing, to apologize out loud. Not an easy thing, even decades distant, for Craig to bring it up, for me to ask forgiveness.

Our rest day call is propitious. During the night thunderstorms roll through close overhead, shaking the shelter, pelting on the roof. The morning is still gray and brooding when we launch, but the rain has quit. We have almost 20 miles to cover if we want to reach the next established camp. We switch sides paddling every hour or so. Craig keeps racking up birds on the list – limpkin, sandhill crane, red-shouldered hawk.

“Right now I’d say that the trip bird is the eastern phoebe,” he says. “I bet there’s one every two-tenths of a mile.”

Being obsessed with birds illuminates a great deal. It’s a thing I’ve noticed on outings with Craig. By clueing into the bird life, you also clue into the season, migrations, what vegetation provides habitat, weather conditions, insect life. Being curious about one layer of nature inevitably connects you to everything else.

Around midday we stop on a beach and brew up coffee. As we sit and eat lunch, sipping from mugs, the clouds break. By the time we pick up paddles again the day is brilliant, the river transformed. Turtles sun on logs. We’ve heard that there are 100-pound alligator snapping turtles in this river, which effectively constrains any impulse to take a dip. The river coils through amber-colored sandbars. We shed layers. Springs pour in from the side of the channel, Spanish moss waves in the breeze, cypress trees with labyrinthine roots, forests of ‘knees’ poking out of the water. It is an enchanting afternoon and we cruise steadily around the sunlit bends.

The campground host is in at the next camp. We arrive late in the afternoon. “At high season this place has 40 people a night,” he tells us. “The line for showers can be 10 deep.”

Today there is one other guy, a hiker out for an overnight along the Florida Trail, which borders the river for long stretches. An armadillo snuffles through the deep leaves outside our screened platform. Woodpeckers drum on nearby trees.

“On this day last year the river was right up to the edge of camp,” the host tells us. “This year it’s at historic lows.” We look down at the tannic flow forty feet below camp.

The Florida Trail system wobbles from the southern tip of the state all the way north, and then doglegs west across the skinny length of the panhandle to the Alabama border. Counting side trails, the system covers some 1,400 miles. Who knew? Much of it doesn’t sound very appealing. In the far south, there is a lot of slogging through boggy wetlands writhing with invasive, burgeoning populations of Burmese python. Farther north, quite a bit of the trail follows dirt roads. But here, along the Suwannee, the trail stays close to the bank and bends its way through the cypress and live oak with frequent views over the river. Here it looks pretty attractive.

We plan a layover day to do some hiking, despite the campground host’s warning that this weekend is a special hunting season. “I wouldn’t be out walking,” he says. But his advice is leavened by the hiker who did just that for 20 miles without incident. Besides, he tells us, there’s a hiatus on hunting in the middle of the day, between 10 and 3, known as ‘Drive Time’. We figure we’ll wear colorful clothing and walk during the break.

The next day, after a leisurely morning punctuated by distant gunshots, we head upstream. The trail is deep with dead leaves, easy to lose, doesn’t seem very heavily traveled. We follow paint blazes in and out of shallow gullies, through stands of cypress trees. The landscape is pitted and sunken, characteristic of the ‘karst’ topography common to limestone. There are sinks and hollows, shallow bowls. This is a state where houses are fairly routinely swallowed up in sinkholes. There is a lot going on in the subterranean layers, where springs gush from the ground at great volume out of nowhere, where cave systems web here and there out of sight, where solid ground can collapse without warning. It is also magical, quiet, dappled with sunlight, and full of birds.

It is warm and sunny. We pose for pictures next to massive cypress trunks, or in thickets of cypress knees the height of baseball bats. I’m pretty vigilant for snakes along the trail, although we’ve been told that the python scourge that has decimated birds and mammals in southern Florida hasn’t pushed this far north. Even so, there are snakes a plenty without counting the invaders. This time of year should be pretty quiet, on the slithering front, but you never know. Craig keeps picking up warblers, a soaring red-shouldered hawk, red-headed woodpeckers. From high banks we look over the rust-colored river with sunlit sandbars. We eat lunch in the shade of a live oak, leaning against a log coated in emerald green moss.

The Burmese python probably gained a foothold in Florida from released or escaped pets, and has proliferated in the southern part of the state over recent decades, wreaking predatory havoc on a wide range of small mammals and birds. Python effectively extirpated the rabbit population in Everglades National Park in less than one year, for example. Fox, raccoon, birds, opossum, bobcats are also frequent snake prey. The pythons can live twenty years or more, and female snakes lay 20-50 eggs at a time. The largest python found in the Everglades was 18 feet long and weighed 100 pounds. No one really knows how many there are. Estimates range from 30,000 to 300,000. And they are hard to hunt. The 2013 Python Challenge, sponsored by the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission, complete with bounty money, attracted more than 1,600 hunters but only netted 68 snakes in a month.

The python’s potential spread is unpredictable. The biggest limiting factor on their range is temperature. Some models predict that they will be constrained to southern Florida and a few sections of Texas, while others forecast an alarming spread through a third of the United States, including all three coasts. Another instance where global warming is not our friend. All of this because a couple of pet snakes got loose.

Our hike is uneventful, at least on the snake and camo fronts, and we enjoy another relaxed evening in camp. Craig wins the Suwannee Best-of-Five Cribbage Championship.

“It took an act of will not to get my journal out and record my triumph,” Craig jokes.

“Payback time for all those basketball games of H-O-R-S-E I forced you to play, right?” I say.

“Something like that.”

For me, the highlight of our final day on the Suwannee River is the Alapaha Rise. For our part, we rise early, get on the water with mist steaming off the river. The air is bated. It feels exquisitely southern. We don’t break the silence with chatter. Craig looks at things from time to time, interrupts the paddling cadence, but we glide through the dark water mile after mile.

When the sun burns through the mist we pull in on a point of beach and boil up water for a coffee break.

“I wonder if Beth could maybe handle a trip like this,” Craig muses. “If we used the river camps she might be able to pull it off. Probably have to bring a cot along, but it’s a possibility.”

I can almost hear the wheels turning. Craig was once an avid outdoorsman. He worked for Outward Bound over several summers, had an appetite for adventure. All of that evaporated in the glare of cancer and the reality of survival. Even after that immediate threat receded, life changed in profound ways. His role as a caregiver has informed his identity. And he’s not young anymore. But this trip has rekindled something.

“Yeah, it could work. And even if Beth isn’t up for it, you’ve got friends to go paddling with,” I remind him. “It’s not like Maine doesn’t have canoe destinations.”

In the final miles before the boat ramp where we hope Steve will meet us a few houses appear, perched on the high banks, with ladders and stairs descending to the water, boats tied up. A guy in a skiff is bait-fishing in a dark eddy below a limestone cliff. I keep watching for the gap in the right bank where the Alapaha Rise comes in. We are almost to the take-out and I’m thinking I might have missed it when I see a narrow opening in the layers of limestone.

“Let’s go up,” I say.

We turn the canoe in, enter through a gate of rock. Current pushes against us. We pick up the pace, hang near the cliff where the flow is slower, inch ahead. Then, suddenly, we’re there. It is a circular room of bedrock, gray walls looming overhead. Water blooms up from the depths, blistering the surface. The canoe quivers on the break between worlds. Underneath, who knows? It is a dark and wonderful mystery, this outpouring of clear, clean, subterranean flow ushering out of the earth. Our imaginations follow it down, into the labyrinth of channels and fissures and rooms leading to the source, whatever and wherever that might be.

It is cool and dark and hushed. A chapel. Vegetation screens out the sun. Water, endless water, booms softly under the hull, insistent and gentle at once, like an ominous caress. We keep paddles ready, bracing against the quiet turbulence. We both know better than to speak.