Cool, Calm & Contentious - Merrill Markoe [91]
“You cringe when someone comes up behind you and starts to rub your shoulders,” Ashley needled. Of course, she was right. Even in a luxurious spa setting where I am overpaying for the service, I become ill at ease and bored lying on a table while someone kneads my muscles. I also get uncomfortable when a hug lasts too long.
Still, the fact that this particular massage therapy class was being taught by Arlene, a big woman who ran a steakhouse in Utah for thirteen years, went a long way toward making it all seem more interesting, though not as interesting as it would have been if she were teaching a class in how to manage a steakhouse.
Luckily for me, my massage partner, Janine, a woman who owned her own pretzel-cart business in Chicago, seemed equally uncomfortable. This made me more relaxed.
Ultimately, I was forced to conclude that running a steakhouse may not be the best training ground for a wannabe massage instructor, surprised as I was by her recommendation that after we finished giving a massage, we should fling the person’s energy away from us with a violent wrist flick, like we would a fistful of cooties. This seemed like a very insulting and hostile thing to do to someone you’d been oiling and rubbing. Kind of like running to the bathroom to brush your teeth right after performing oral sex.
But perhaps I was being too sensitive.
DAY FOUR
Here’s a sentence I never expected to hear spoken, not even in a dream: “Last night the ringtail cats ate the Chips Ahoy.” Jody was bitter. “I wouldn’t have a problem with it if they’d gotten the Pecan Sandies,” she said.
Today’s stretch of river would slowly through some spectacular sections of Dinosaur National Monument, full of different pastel-colored rock striations that represented every twisting, once molten layer of the earth’s surface since crust number one. In some places all the layers seemed to melt together, converging into the sandstone equivalent of wood grain.
It was an easy day, travel-wise, with only gentle rapids, so we relaxed and occasionally swam alongside the rafts. Everyone seemed peaceful and happy, especially Cindy, the woman who was used to wearing restrictive pantyhose.
Finally we stopped for the night at a little beach that had a riverbed with a spongy bottom full of gooey silken silt. Something about its easy spreadability inspired a large contingent of the women to want to mud-bathe. A number of them seemed to feel that the velvety mud had to be imbued with some kind of healing mineral content or rejuvenation properties. Thus they began to slather their skin with it from their faces on down. I was more skeptical, immediately thinking of plenty of spreadable things that offer no real net gain, beauty-wise: chocolate pudding, mashed potatoes, small containers of enigmatically named creams that sell for ninety-five dollars an ounce. But the ladies of the river all felt very good about the properties of this mud. Within minutes we were all covered with a coating of the ocher-colored goo. Yes, I mudded up, too. Had there been a photographer from a men’s magazine nearby, we would no doubt have turned up as a featured spread on a mud-fetish site. (Well, maybe not the extra-peanuts lady.) But because there was no such photographer here, we all just stood around in the shallow part of the river, talking and laughing: a lek of mud-caked slime creatures with tits.
Around the campfire that night, there was no avoiding one last Susan Ann circle event. This time she explained that when she handed you “the talking stick” she wanted you to tell her what surprised you, what challenged you, and what inspired you. In one simple sentence, Susan Ann had zeroed in on three questions I had no desire to answer. To say nothing of how little I liked the phrase “the talking stick.”
“Let’s get out of here,” Ashley said. She was so over this.
“It’s our last night,” I reprimanded her, happy when she agreed to go back to the tent so I could play along without further