Now Is the Time to Open Your Heart_ A Novel - Alice Walker [7]
She offered him tea. And a peach that seemed to materialize, like a hare from a hat, out of the green velvet sleeve of her embroidered shirt.
And it had begun.
We met, really, she would tell friends later, laughing, over nothing. Over emptiness. Space. I couldn’t believe how much of it he managed to get into his paintings, or how at home I felt in it.
He’d smiled to hear her describe it.
The moment I stood in front of any one of his paintings, she elaborated, my bird nature became activated. I felt I could fly!
Her bird nature? Where had he been, and with whom had he been, not to know there were people, women, who talked this way?
She must be New Age, he’d thought at first, shuddering.
River Run
Perhaps on the first day of any river travel one is apprehensive, one feels fear. She sat with her African-Eurasian friend Avoa, deep in the boat, not liking the heaviness of the life preserver, poppy orange, around her neck. The river, at the place they put on, was placid. Nonetheless she could feel its power in the swiftness with which the vehicles that brought their gear disappeared, as did, very soon, the flat and gravelly shore.
Large birds flew ahead of them toward the canyons, wheeling as they appeared and disappeared from view. Tentatively she placed a hand in the water. Icy cold. While overhead the sun rose higher in the sky, already warm, almost hot.
They were to be on the river nearly three weeks, long enough to traverse its entire length. Who would she be at the end of this journey?
Why are you going? her therapist had asked.
And she had sat looking behind her therapist’s head, scanning the posters of horses on the wall, and replied:
I cannot believe my dry river, that we have been discussing for months, and that is inside me, is unconnected to a wet one somewhere on the earth. I am being called, she said.
But the Colorado? Isn’t it man-made?
In the beginning, no, she said, laughing to think of early man creating so mysterious and powerful a thing as a river. It is the river after all that carved the Grand Canyon.
But now, pursued the therapist, isn’t it controlled by dams?
Controlled? I think not. Regulated? Maybe. Though she did not know this either. She admitted to being the kind of traveler who didn’t prepare much before taking off. She’d found something to enjoy in her own ignorance. Oh, that’s who’s in that tomb! That’s why they wear waist beads! Oh, now I understand all those thick dark garments in this heat. It’s like carrying your own shadow and your shade! In the back of her mind she was already wondering if she would learn anything about how the Colorado’s water managed to fill the bathtubs and swimming pools in Los Angeles. How was that possible? And what happens to a river—even a man-enhanced one—that flows continuously to a desert?
On the fourth day, and after experiencing her first rapids—her boat pitched higher than a house—she became ill. As the boat pitched and plunged down the river she felt herself slipping into the surrealness of a life lived now in a tiny bobbing space, very narrow, within the steep reddish canyon walls. Rushing madly, irresistibly onward, no stopping it. Yet at the end of each day they did stop. And on the evening of this particular day they stopped longer than usual to confer with her. Her temperature was 104. Did she wish to be evacuated? They could manage somehow to get a helicopter for her. Did she wish to go home?
The savage rushing of the river seemed to be inside her head, inside her body. Even while the oarswomen, their guides, were speaking to her, she had the impression she couldn’t quite hear them because of the roar. Not of the river that did indeed roar,