Cool, Calm & Contentious - Merrill Markoe [89]
“The power of the world works in a circle,” she went on. “Everything tries to be round.”
“I don’t want to rain on your circular parade,” I restrained myself from saying, “but what about a pine tree? What about cactus needles and pine needles? What about a snake?”
“We’re going to be talking a lot about the four-fold path,” she continued. “Things come in fours. For instance, we have four rafts.” Hmm, interesting, I was thinking. And I have four dogs. But body parts come in twos: eyes, ears, kidneys, all in pairs. And fingers and toes come in tens, unless there’s a power-saw accident. Beers come in sixes. Buns come in eights. Bees and schools of fish come in hundreds or thousands. In fact, what DOES come in fours besides our rafts and my dogs? But I kept my mouth shut. No point in getting into a discussion knowing that at just the right minute I was going to have to make a break and race for the baño. Also, the view of the river and the red rock wall behind it was spectacular at sunset. The colors were glorious, and Susan Ann seemed like a very nice person. For her sake, I hoped that things did in fact come in fours and were trying to be round.
DAY THREE
I didn’t sleep too well in my mildewy, rock-bottomed, forty-five-degree-angle tent. I was up all night with a numb lower back and a leg cramp. Ashley, who spent the night with me, pleaded with me not to take a midnight hike to the baño. Starting at about two in the morning, she began babbling about how the campsite might be haunted, using the wet clothes hanging on the trees and blowing about in the moonlight as visual proof of the presence of an unseen dimension.
After a night of listening to her weird conjectures, I was a little unnerved to be officially awakened at seven A.M. by Rebecca, one of our river guides, improvising a spooky atonal melody on her recorder. For a moment I was concerned about this eerie new turn in the soundtrack, until she announced that a morning meditation session on the beach would be followed by coffee and fresh fruit. “Wow,” I said to Ashley, “it’s fun to have someone plan all your activities for you.” Even if they did start off with Susan Ann, sitting cross-legged, eyes closed, requesting in a hushed voice that we all “be the river.”
“Relax your facial muscles,” Susan Ann chanted as she led the group meditation. “Relax your neck. Relax your stomach muscles.”
“Not till I get back from the baño,” I wanted to tell her.
As uncomfortable as I was, I was not at all prepared for Cindy to begin sobbing. “When you told us to release our stomach muscles, it really got to me,” she told the group. “The way we spend our days with our stomach muscles all tightly restricted by our pantyhose and everything.” This certainly didn’t describe the life I’d been living, but it gave me more empathy for Cindy. Wherever she worked, I was glad I didn’t work there.
A basic yoga class followed, then another amazing meal somehow prepared on-site by the river girls. Quiche! Fresh muffins! Fresh-brewed coffee! This stuff materialized magically. And by eleven we were back on the river.
Fran, an aspiring physical therapist when she wasn’t leading a raft brigade, was the chief navigator today, a task she seemed to handle effortlessly. “These all-women’s trips are very different from the usual mixed-gender ones,” she told me while she led four rafts down a river, “because the women act more like themselves without men and children to caretake.” To be sure, I had noticed a very relaxed, uninhibited, less-vain-than-usual vibe among the ladies. Especially the heavy women in minimum-coverage bikinis letting it all hang out. I watched in awe as one unashamedly picked whole peanuts out of a bag of trail mix and pressed them into her peanut butter sandwich.
Despite Ashley’s constant harangues, I, too, was feeling relaxed, though I was still secretly applying my eyeliner in the morning. Why I was doing this was unclear. If ever a circumstance didn’t call for eyeliner, this would be it. Maybe it was because of pressure from Ashley, whose makeup was always perfect even though