At the warehouse in Flagstaff I was still able to kick in the side door, just like we used to do, when no one was around with a set of keys. The crew was still out, due back later when they would pull in dirty and tangled, sunburned and wary of anybody else clean and tidy and too happy to see them, coyotes home from a ramble, a long tour and some close calls. See, I told myself, you're home. Inside it was all the same, aluminum boat frames stacked against the back wall, rolled lumps of plaid that were the clean sleeping bags awaiting the next trip, the oar rack where we hung our oars, 12-footers at the back, the 11's close to the front. Then an odd tightening, like choking on something to rough to go down easily when I couldn't see my name above the slot where it should have been, where it had always been since the day the rack was built and we didn't have to stack the oars all willy-nilly anymore. It had been replaced by a guide I had helped to train, a guide who was young enough for me to be her mother for chrissakes. Then the bulletin board where we posted the trip photos, and postcards from traveling crewmates, sort of a walled version of a scrapbook; the details of trips from years upon years pinned on top of each other. New faces, strange faces, the same old faces, just not my face. Where had I gone, in just a couple of years? I had been a trip leader, senior crew for god's sake! I peeled back some of the newer photos and thought I could make out the bleached driftwood of my pony tail against my blue life jacket. There I was tucked back in time, covered by more recent history, washed by the ever-unfolding of a river flowing with new guides, new stories.
In the time since motherhood I had thought of myself as a guide, the one small detail of actually being on a trip eclipsed by the white-out of desire, of having been there so many times it seemed in my mind I had never left. It was something I carried within myself, a reference point of who I was, an internal GPS by which I navigated the new and unknown world that was my life on the rim; a life of SUV's and Walmarts, supercenters and movies at Blockbuster I had never even seen, the zeitgeist of whatever the world was in my twenties , my thirties, a whirlwind I'd escaped. I had thought of the river every day, of the trips and where they would have lunch that day, what hike they would be doing. As long as I had it in my sights I knew where I was. I would be lost: REI, and a salesgirl asking if I would like to try on those Tevas and I would not know how to answer. Or during the day when my husband was at work and I was alone, the baby crawling with something in his mouth and I would look out the window and would see sky swooping across the wild openness, the waterfall of horizon at the end of Surprise Valley, the afternoons the water swirled orange and blue and then green like paint splashed by a hyperactive toddler on art day. I would think of myself and it would be the desert, the river, the canyon I would see. When it got real bad I would go out to the garage, find my river gear and the ammo can that, when I opened it, had a photo taped to the inside of the lid of me in a Beatles t-shirt and red Keds when I was five, and beside that a quote from Steve McQueen I had always liked: "I would rather wake up in the middle of nowhere than in any city on earth."
Later, a couple of guys drove up in a Forerunner loaded with kayaks and said they would be some of the crew on the next trip and when I introduced myself they asked if I'd ever been down the river before and I could tell it wasn't a joke. While I was organizing my gear, re-arranging my duffle one of them kept saying Dude, I blew chunks all the way here, I could hear him as I lay down on my sleeping pad on the warehouse floor, and when I thought of those snapshots on the bulletin board, of the list of names I'd read on the crew lineup for the season and how many I did not recognize, of my son's face when I'd hugged him goodbye and promised how I'd call from down at Phantom Ranch In five days! I'd said, and how his cheeks got red when he asked When is five days, mom? and suddenly I was in the middle of a nowhere and it wasn't a place I wanted to be.
Years ago, when I was young, and in my prime, and strong and buff and cocky I wanted to visit a place on the river known as the Mystic Eye. It was an ancient archeological site hidden somewhere up Tapeats Creek, hidden above the well-worn trail we hiked to take the clients to see where the creek plunges from the Redwall limestone. The Mystic Eye was a thousand-year old granary, a small pueblo closet cradled high in the cliff with the original woven willow door intact, with dried cobs of corn inside. The oldtimer guide who lead me there had us chimneying chuckwalla lizard-style on our backs through a narrow toaster slot in the cliff face, then free-climbing to a narrow perch barely wide enough for my size 9 feet. I kicked my sandals off, kept my face against the rock and listened for the plop far below that never came. We spent the next several hours with me attempting to make the final, crux move, a let-go-and-reach with one hand and one foot kind of move, a close your eyes and breathe and see yourself doing it kind of move, with the sun barreling down on us and no water and my legs doing that crazy sewing machine shake thing, three hundred feet up. And then when I realized I could not do it, that I was inches from an amazing place but would not could not see it, I would not be one of those guides who could say, casually, Oh yeah, the Mystic Eye? I've been there all I could do was cry.
What I didn't know then was finding the Mystic Eye was more about me than finding that ancient, amazing place, it was about who I thought I was, and what I thought that meant. I did not know who you are is a destination that does not exist, that the boundaries of identity shift and flow and merge with new currents, can seemingly disappear leaving you high and dry and beached. I didn't know all this yet and I didn't know it for many more river miles and attempts to find places I'd only heard about, places I thought I needed to find.
Until I went back to the river. There on the concrete floor of the warehouse in the same old sleeping bag I'd snuggled into many a night, the same one that had been sucked off and away from my sleeping self in a sudden monsoon gust and sent downstream (retrieved the next day from a driftwood pile), I realized that it is not who I am or what I am that matters.
And so I left my boss John a dear John note pinned to the bulletin board over those younger faces and drove back north, north across the slumping basalt shoulders of the San Francisco peaks, across the Navajo Reservation, along the western edge of the Painted Desert; north to the Vermillion Cliffs, back the way I'd come, back the way I had always come.
I pulled onto the bridge at the river and got out, and looked down. We used to drop watermelons off the old bridge, before NAFTA made them replace it with this shiny new one. We filled them with cheap whiskey and set them on fire, flaming fruit torpedoes of glory, just to see what they would do, on impact, five hundred feet down.
There was a river down there, whether I could see it now in the night or not, whether I would ever see it again, or not. I knew it was there, dark and swirling like a Navajo girl's thick braid winding against the backbone of desert, the backbone of the place that carried me within it, the place where I came into my own being, the place where I found my voice, that distant mirage I'd been seeing since childhood. I felt a pain but I had felt pain before, and then there he was: the FM station from Flagstaff and Stevie Ray belting it out from the stereo of my idling car, and somehow I finally understood what he was talking about. You know it hurts me, hurts me so bad/Made my poor heart skip a beat. It's all about drowning, about drowning and livin' to tell the tale.
People who have been pronounced clinically dead have, from time to time, come back and reported seeing a white tunnel, or a bright light, as if the end is more some kind of shining moth nirvana than it is a rewind of where you've been, who you thought you were. Here is what I know about drowning, about searching for the boundary waters of who I am: I can't say I have seen any bright white light, but friends, the view up here on the back side of that big honking old wave is amazing. And I may be the only station wagon-driving mother, child safely ensconced in his car seat with a Happy Meal, Skippy John Jones book in tow, who knows the words to Stevie Ray Vaughn's "The Sky is Crying" better than she does "The Wheels on the Bus," but it's all only a matter of perspective; a perspective that unfolds over the passage of time, after many miles and not finding what you thought you were looking for, after finding yourself somewhere you weren't expecting to be. Wondering where you are and who you are in the scheme of it is like to trying to answer the question what is rock art, or what is the blues; it's all how you look at it.
