The summer tubing trip had been my mother's idea; these things are always a parent's idea. We were on our family vacation and she had seen the inner tubes at one of those mountain roadside markets that dealt such things, along with free cups of apple cider, bundles of firewood, sides of country ham hanging right out in the wide open. Those places always had wooden floors and dusty shelves stocked with homegrown food canned by local women, strange things in mason jars that reminded me of Saturday afternoon Hitchcock movies: swirling soupy storms of chow chow relish and pig's feet, brined eggs swimming in a murky yellow liquid, and something called tripe. Right next to the Fig Newtons and Corn Flakes. Out on the porch, down in the cold drink box beside the R.C. bottles there would be cardboard tubs full of fishing worms in a deep, dank dirt. My mother loved those places. We would stop to gas up and she'd come back to the car with bags of boiled peanuts and little cans of Vienna sausages.
Things were different for our family in the summer. We fished in the lake using fat green grubs mom would find when she'd shuck the dinner corn. And there was the butter from Tate's Market; it was white and shaped into a flat round, freshly churned and wrapped in wax paper, beaded with small pearls of moisture. This was a miracle to me, a child mostly fed margarine that arrived in a yellow tub. We got to drink Tang, which was somehow better than the real orange juice we had back home. Every afternoon thunderstorms sent us inside to the puzzle table. I dug for crawdads and mined for rubies, filled my pockets with flaking slabs of mica to add to my rock collection.
I thought this was what life was all about.
And then mom discovered tubing. I was eight and Hilda, a neighborhood playmate, was along for part of the vacation. Hilda had never been to the mountains before. She did not share my enthusiasm for blackberry picking, even less the obligatory chigger bites; by day two she was homesick. Mom decided a tubing trip would be just the ticket. We had never been tubing down a river before, and I'm not certain my mother had actually even seen anybody floating down a river using an inner tube. The plan was to drop us off wearing our bathing suits and the big black rings around our hips like rubber tutus, and then we would float merrily down the stream. We would float the river that ran alongside the two lane highway, so mom could drive slowly and watch us, then zoom ahead and wait on the bank for us to float by. When we got hungry we would stop and have pimento cheese sandwiches and orange Crush. Mom could just picture us careening gently along, frolicking in the waves, just two little eight year-old girls on an adventure. That was when a parent could do this sort of thing to a child.
Mom rented the tubes and paid the man an extra dollar to bungee them to the top of the Olds. When we got to the river she pulled over oohing and ahhing about how pretty the mist was on the water and Hilda and I got out, stripped out of our sweatshirts and jeans down to our bathing suits, threw our Keds in the trunk, and wiggled the sticky rubber tubes up our bodies. Then mom took off.
We waddled down the bank to the river. I stepped in and screamed. Hilda dipped in one toe and she screamed. We both hobbled back up the bank and screamed after my mom, but all we saw was the red glow of the tail lights reflecting in the damp pavement as she disappeared around a curve. I tried running after her but the road hurt my bare feet and the inner tube around my waist got in the way. We could do only one thing. I was a girl scout; I knew we would be okay.
The water was freezing. By the time we saw the Olds I could not feel my toes and my lower legs were like stumps, useless, and heavy. The coldness of the water deflated our tubes as soon as they touched the river; we could barely keep our heads above the water as we scrambled to keep hold of the slippery, flaccid black donuts. Hilda was crying, choking and hiccuping sobs. The current pulled us downstream, percolating a mountain range of small waves that splatted against the tubes and splashed into our faces. We would have dog paddled to shore but just as we neared the pullout where the car was parked the current became swifter. I waved and tried to call out to mom but the coldness took my breath away and all I could do was stutter and gasp. To mom it looked like I my waving meant we were having fun. Then we were gone.
We would have kept floating like that, tubing into hypothermia history, if a fisherman hadn't seen us and flagged down mom as she drove along, her window down, watching for us. He told her about the dangerous falls ahead and so mom gunned it, palming the steering wheel of our Delta 88 around the curves one-handed, her left hand waving frantically out the window to get our attention. I'm sure she was terrified. She caught up with Hilda who was waiting, dripping and shivering, sobbing on the side of the road. Her inner tube had been ripped away from her by a small wave.
Meanwhile I continued barreling downstream, scouting the way, pretending I was one of my childhood heroes: Annie Oakley of the waves! Florence Nightingale of the river! It is likely I was in some daydream when the inner tube and I were sucked over the lip and slipped down the tongue of the rapid because I don't recall feeling as if I was on the brink of anything scary, or deep. I remember swirling under the water and how white and light it seemed, the slippery tube peeling off and up over my head. I kicked and swam in the froth, it was an ocean wave without the salt and I opened my eyes, I was Amelia Earhart of the whitewater!
On the way back to the cabin Hilda asked me what drowning felt like.
When you are a child the world seems impossibly big: it looms overhead like the screen at the drive-in, with the details of reality fringing the sides, off by the concession stand, along the concrete building housing the restrooms that the older kids hid behind, smoking their cigarettes. It is so big and therefore so unreal that anything is possible while some things are entirely impossible. Becoming a pathologist or a cowboy when I grew up was possible. Meeting Nancy Drew in person was possible. But something like drowning was impossible, the way that having my cat KeeKee die was impossible, or moving to a new school was impossible, or not having grandparents was impossible.
And so the beginning of my guiding life was also an ending, on the day before my twenty-first birthday when I had finals coming up, and my work study, a roommate with boyfriend troubles, and the one pay phone in the dorm hallway where I listened to Dad say the words cancer, coma, no hope. I would stay at school, concentrate, finish my senior year, graduate, concentrate. Mom could not talk or laugh or eat and I remember thinking if that was true it wouldn't be the cancer that would kill her because if anything mom was about talking and laughing and eating.
The best thing to do when caught in an undertow in the ocean is to not fight it. I was taught this as a small child, when my first swimming lessons were in the Atlantic with my grandfather and my mother would watch from shore. The key is to swim parallel to shore, not directly toward it, which is the one thing your instincts want you to do. The feeling of being pulled out to sea is terrifying even for a good swimmer. You see the beach and want to swim straight for it, kicking away from the insistent, relentless yank of current, all the time believing you are kicking to safety, but in fact all the kicking is useless and eventually you wear out. Past swim records have no say-so against a rip tide: it is only what you do when you are underwater that matters.
I kicked hard at first, that's just what you do. Your head breaks the surface, a wave comes and still you try to carp the biggest breath of your life. Then the quiet darkness and the undeniable strength of the current is terrifying, so you grab onto anything that might anchor you in place, where time doesn't rise and swell and sweep you out to sea.
I came to and was standing in a river, on the day of my twenty-first birthday, with finals coming up and work study, and a roommate with boyfriend troubles. I did not really want to go. What I wanted to do was close my door and climb under the covers, but I had the only car and so I had been elected to drive. It was the Outings Club's spring adventure, one of those commercial river trips with guides and helmets and lifejackets that would keep us floating if we fell in. Somebody gave us a speech about ropes and swimming back to the boat if it flipped. I don't remember the rapids or death-defying whitewater or the name of a single person who was with me. I don't remember being scared. What I remember is a hemlock tree that leaned out across the water, balanced perfectly on the edge of the river leaning like a rickety old man on one leg, looking like it could topple into the water but like it was holding on for dear life. And it occurred to me that the tree had possibly been leaning like that for many years, reaching and leaning, suspended by something unseen that kept it from keeling over into the river and washing away. I watched a branch dipping in and out of the current in the most perfect, even rhythm, tapping the surface of the current, the current flowing beneath it. The branch tapped and the river flowed below it and away, curled itself around a bend and disappeared. I stood in the water and watched the branch, watched the tapping, watched the river flowing. Everyone else ate sandwiches and sunned on rocks. I stood there until it was time to get back in the rafts and go downriver. I stood there finally understanding what drowning felt like.
