Cool, Calm & Contentious - Merrill Markoe [90]
After a few hours of floating downstream and staring up at the muted pastel colors of the eroded rock walls looming above the river, we pulled our rafts ashore for another four-star lunch. This time it included a homemade Japanese-style red cabbage coleslaw with sesame seeds that was so delicate I made the guides give me the recipe.
Later, we took a hike through a cactus-and-scrub-brush-studded desertscape to look at some pictographs carved into the exterior of a cave by Indians, followed by a slippery, steep climb up a rocky slope to a freezing-cold waterfall. Elaine, a seventy-two-year-old woman, was hiking ahead of me, right at the front of the line. Amazing how any inclination to complain was diminished by trying to keep pace with a fast-moving septuagenarian.
As much as I was skeptical of the whole idea of “female bonding,” something about this experience did seem conducive to openness. Maybe it evolved out of the sharing of experiences far from the usual distractions of the Internet and real life. It may also have had something to do with the kind of person who chose to sign up for a trip like this one. As a group they were a little heartier and a good deal less vain than those you might meet standing in line for TV show tickets or a Club Med mixer.
And yes, the openness also seemed gender-related. Something did seem to happen in a group of women (the estrogen? the oxytocin?) that encouraged the kind of personal confessions that were hard to imagine taking place on the side of a mountain with a group of men who just met yesterday. While we were climbing down from the waterfall, Susan Ann started to tell me, almost out of nowhere, that the way she learned she was adopted was when her mother called her home in the middle of a school day. “You’re adopted,” her mother told her when she was eight years old. “Now, never mention this again.” Then she sent her back to school and never said another word about it.
Now that Susan Ann felt she had successfully reinvented herself, I was glad that she seemed happy. I hoped she would eventually get four of everything she wanted.
After the hike, we all got back on the rafts and headed to a spot in the river where we encountered our first Class V rapid. This one required a negotiation between inflatable vessel and river rock topography that was so complicated that a girl guide conference convened to plan our logistics from a spot high on the riverbank.
I couldn’t hear what was being said, but I imagined that the calculations needed to slide a big floating vessel through an obstacle course full of craggy, irregular boulders and fast-moving water had to be somewhere between the ones required to sink an eight ball and to parallel park a tanker truck on a steep hill. The tanned, bikini-wearing, gum-snapping girls who were doing the piloting seemed as unfazed as ever.
As each raft maneuvered successfully through the white-water spouts and falls, its pilot got a big round of applause from the others. Then I gave myself one a little later, after I did a better job of setting up my tent the second night by taking the extra time to remove the rocks and the branches from the foundation. Tasks involving the need for physical action seemed to shut Ashley up. I forgot to be upset about my dogs or my weight or my career or serial killers for most of the day, even if for some reason I was still wearing eyeliner.
After dinner, it was announced that our activity for the night would be a massage therapy class. And just like that, Ashley appeared again, bug-eyed with one raised eyebrow.
Shrugging off her warnings, I joined the group gathering around a campfire. Everyone was dressed in the usual evening wardrobe of sweaters and sweatpants. Only in this case, we were all told that we had to take off our shoes and pick