River and We 16 With Coffee (Rogue River Part IV)

What is crucial to life as you float down a river? My mind eddied off to the left and contemplated it all, considered the meanderings and left them, floated back and left them again. The arc of the sun from the eastern arising to the western setting encompassed the entirety of the universe as we then knew it. All of what is important in life fit within that arc and exactly that - nothing more mattered.

We had left our watches back at the put-in camp out of necessity. Few of us owned a waterproof timepiece that would stand up to a minute or two of light splashing, never mind a true soaking, but that was just as well for it nudged us toward the goal we had hoped for: Getting our senses back. We needed to reacquaint ourselves with the arc of a summer day.

I awakened each day at predawn never sure quite what had opened my eyes. Most likely it was birds. Osprey chirping, eagles' dry shreep-shreep-shreep and the unholy prehistoric graaaaaak of a blue heron. I went for slow walks along the river or up around camp to see what might reveal itself, and I simply sat by the graceful curling rapids and listened to the river in all its range of sounds. Underneath all was a steady heartbeat indistinguishable from my own.

We were pleased to no end to discover that one of the oarsmen, Tom, was a devout and highly obsessed coffee brewer, a barista in disguise. He arose almost as early as I every morning and set about preparing his special brew with what turned out to be characteristic precision and care. Attention to detail matters, Tom and I agreed. He had purchased Peets coffee in advance in a very delicately blended mix, estimating almost exactly how much each of us would care to drink each morning. Starting with the large red speckled tin coffee pot that was set to boiling, he brought out filters, cream, organic sugar and a tea assortment for those unable or unwilling to savor a cuppa joe. Carefully pouring the hot water through the exactly measured grounds in the filter suspended over the coffee urn, Tom could not and would not be rushed or distracted from his crucial chore. This was not coffee to be gulped and ignored just to get a caffeine hit. Banish the thought! This was a special nectar whose full rounded rich flavor exemplified the joys of eating outdoors in a wonderful place.

We learned to be patient, and patience was rewarded. After we had been on the river only one day, for the most part we looked like a pretty motley crew and we were not ambitious nor full of urgency in the slightest. Morningtime found us gradually assembling near the brewing coffee with a distant, unfocused and vaguely unconcerned demeanor. We shuffled and murmured and smiled and remembered we had no idea what time it was and did not even care. We were entropied motes floating, loosely assembled in time and space with one bond between us: A warm, aromatic cup of perfect coffee. We took sips between long gentle inhalations of morning air and then gradually formed a novel idea that breakfast might be nice to have.

So, two of the group were handed likely cooking implements and foodstuffs for the meal. Breakfast was made. We sat again by the river in our camp chairs and stared again at the flowing water, taking long drafts of coffee, savoring what was put on our plates. It seemed that breakfast was reinvented, rediscovered and marveled at as if we were emerging from a coma in a new century.

The several cups of caffeine began to take effect in many ways: Suddenly awakened kidneys went into full gear, heart rates rose noticeably and minds were now alert. Murmuring changed to shouts and songs. It was time to go downriver again. Pack and prepare, assemble and load. Of one mind, we were 16 river floaters with all gear dry bagged, bodies sunblocked and wrapped up again in our stiff, awkward vests and oarsmen taking up position on their respective cooler boxes amidships. We were rogues on the Rogue and having none of this softened pace. Take us down 'er, men! We are ready for what she may have for us!

And ever the river flowed. It always seemed to be something more than a river and yet was only a river. It was simply water flowing down grade to the ocean, of course. But it was free and set us free again, held a mystery deep within itself - green, liquid, reforming constantly and endlessly. Beside it and now riding it again, we were of a mind: the day was in full blaze and the rapids awaited once more. (To be continued)

Remembering the Rogue (Part III)

We exist in a world of air-conditioned bubbles of metal and glass, computer-generated graphics, recorded sound, virtual reality and flash-frozen food.

A river that runs its course between high volcanic cliffs under a blazing sun or a vast expanse of stars and planets is none of that. It flows. Rushing and tumbling, thundering or lapping, it always flows.

You ride the river, you swim in it, you sit by it, you hear it, feel it, see it. And it always flows. Its energy is constant and abiding. It makes allowance for your presence and moves on. And after you have left it, you continue to feel it, sense it and be moved by it. Your dreams change, your balance changes. It has a pulse that drives your own.

Off the raft, on shore, kitchen in place, we shook out our chairs from their sacks and sat and stared at the river for the rest of the day. We moved from here to there on the river bank and back again, but we always heard the water in all its range of voices, and we never tired of staring at it, listening to it. To say it was magic is too simple. It captured our attention from a time long before we came to its banks and stayed with us long afterwards. It was, above all else, powerful and demanded respect. The river was always flowing under us or past us, around us.

Soon enough, we were sleepy and went to our tents and sleeping bags, slept like rocks on the shore. The whole night, constantly, the river flowed. We were soothed like babies by the shush and gurgle of water against rock and sand all night long. We had found our place in the universe, were made to feel small and knew it was right and good. An infinity of stars and a singing river will do that to you.
(To be continued)

The Big Green Tongue

It took a day or so until I heard it: No engines, no weed whackers, no leaf blowers. I was sitting on the front of the raft and heard gurgling, lapping, splashing and the occasional creak of an oar in the oar lock. Nothing else. Blissfully, wonderfully peaceful and silent.

The more I heard silence, the more I loved it. It took less time than it takes to read this sentence to realize that it was the sound of heaven to me. I breathed it in and looked around, hoping the giggling smile spread across my face didn't look like it felt: Caught farting.

Before the silence, however, there had been a lot of screaming.

Just before that had been an quick interchange: "When do we get to our first big rapids?" I asked Chris.

We had been floating downriver in lazy circles, like a leaf in a little pond blown by a breeze. Chris, the expedition leader and oarsman, had been telling jokes and looking around, smiling absentmindedly at the distant tree tops. He seemed sleepy, finally relaxed after loading up all the "shit" - boaters' talk for gear - that had taken several hours. His sleepiness was infectious; I contemplated tipping over in my life vest and taking a little nap in the sun. The best I could do with the vest though was flap my arms and shuffle my feet around a little bit. I accepted the ungainly puffy orange corset as fair exchange for the bliss I was feeling.

I asked the question casually, dreamily, believing we had a long while of floating and sunning ahead of us. Chris had let the raft float sideways, frontwards, and then backwards, unconcerned with guiding us in a one-way fashion.

"Now!" He took the oars in hand and looked over his shoulder and to the rear.

"Now?" We were going backwards, and now I heard it. The voice of the river had deepened, intensified. Oh. I am sitting on a cooler imitating a beachball and we are heading toward whitewater. Going backwards. Chris rowed and we remained backwards. I sort of laughed, but it came out like a squawk. Shouldn't we be going forwards? Shouldn't we be able to see where we're going?

I remembered my lesson from earlier: Stay out of the way. Also: Blow the whistle long to alert for something or another. Hmm...confined to a 14-foot raft with several hundred pounds of gear, my husband and an oarsman with an odd sense of direction, I wondered where I could go. Over the side? Too close to the rapid now for that. When was I supposed to blow the whistle?

Now we were slowly turning to our left and swinging around. I could see the rapid finally, a long jumbled series of splashes, stacks of water piling up like little hills frothing at the top, rocks sticking out of the hills and smoother glassier water here and there. It looked like there was no good way through it. The safety talk about not pointing at rocks and whistling recurred to me. There were rocks everywhere and a cliff on one side of the river. I really needed to point at something, and it became an urge so strong I could hardly overcome it. I became so conflicted between the need and the admonition that I just waved my arms around and squawked again. Now I was a large orange chicken, I thought. Squawking.

"Hang on!" Chris called out. To what? I looked around and reminded myself this was what I had come here for, prepared for, dreamed of. Whitewater fun! More squawks. I grabbed my vest but, no, that didn't really make sense. I grabbed my husband, but that made less sense somehow. If I was going to be jettisoned from the raft by a wild bucking river and I grabbed my husband on the way out, he would land on top of me and squish me. Not to death exactly, but two big orange beachball imitators like us would not make a pretty picture thrashing around in the river. We'd be left for dead. The rest of our party, frightened to approach, would look aghast and mutter a few prayers for our souls as they floated past. Maybe one would play a bagpipe. Or a banjo. Both. Dueling bagpipes and banjos.

Chris was now talking about "the big green tongue" of the river and I looked with a sudden stillness of heart at what he was aiming for. The water that had been swirling coyly and gently had gathered itself with an intention of purpose that rivaled any soccer mom driving a minivan in a crowded parking lot. The surface had become green, smooth and now moved much more rapidly into a long v-shaped stretch. It looked like green honey; it was liquid but dense and full of power. The tongue of the rapid.

The current grabbed the raft and hauled it down the tongue, which licked over and around a lot of submerged boulders, each one forming its own tongue of smooth water, pouring over the tops of them. On the far side of the rocks, each one in turn, was a hollow of backflowing whitewater that roared and splashed. We dipped up and down, up and down and each white wave dashed me with a bucket of cold water. I grabbed something to hang onto, probably my camera strap, nothing useful, and graduated from squawk to scream.

Suddenly, we were through and back into calmer water again. "What class was that rapid?" I asked with adrenaline raising my voice. I was ready to tell all my friends back home about my harrowing escape from death. "Class II or so, maybe III. That was a nice little one." Somehow disappointed not to be dead or mangled (odd huh?), I imagined bigger rapids. The classification goes up to Class V, which is where rapids take rafts and throw them up into the treetops at the river's edge. Class VI is Niagara Falls.

Instantly addicted to the sound and motion of a wildly kicking river, I straightened up and looked downriver for more. I felt my confidence return and made plans to become a river guide, outdoors woman, whitewater legend. Yeah, this was where I belonged, on a raft in the western wilderness, ready for any challenge, riding free. I spat dramatically, feeling like Annie Oakley and considered a cold beer.

Then, I looked down and saw the spittle on my knee. Yuck.

After a couple of hours of bucking bronco water interspersed with mellow pools of peace and serenity, we hauled ashore for the day and set up camp. (To be continued)

Remembering the Rogue, Part I

I learned a lot of things on the Oregon river called the Rogue. Most of all, I learned that humans can hardly go anywhere without a literal ton of things. River guides call it shit, so I will too. "We got to load all this shit on the raft or we aren't going anywhere." "Man that's a lot of shit!" "Where do they get all this shit anyway?" Like that.

I took all my REI prizes (see previous post) and headed north, gathering with my tribe on the banks of the Rogue. It was hot in a way that volcanologists who scoop red-hot lava understand, and metal was dripping off my car by the time I got to the gathering spot. My body, which is usually shivering and clammy in our local fog at this time of year, puffed up immediately to twice its normal size and I looked like Mrs. Tomato Head. But, I was thrilled to be joining the ranks of adventurers who seize the day and sally forth into the wild blue yonder. I was overdue for sallying.

The river was beautiful and seductive from the moment I saw it shimmering in the blasting heat. It made cool delightful noises and I wanted to jump into its arms immediately. Instead, I gaped at the massive tonnage assembled next to our four rafts. "Man that's a lot of shit!" Chris the Expedition Leader strode around making sense of it and cursing it in turn. He's been down a million rivers and had a very clear idea of what was supposed to happen in the next few hours. I had only the one idea: Get it all onto four rafts and go float on the river. That idea simplified quite a bit to the point where my idea was: Stay out of the way.

Chris gathered us around and gave us a safety talk. "One whistle means something. Three whistles mean something else!" At least that's what I remembered three days later. "Don't point at obstacles in the river, point to where there's a clear spot. If you see a rock in the way, don't point to it, point somewhere else!" Hmmm...this was going to be a lot tougher than I'd imagined. Mostly, because when you're a passenger in a car and the driver is heading straight for a truck, you tend to want to scream and point to the grill as it bears down on you, not point at a tree nearby or a distant cloud.

Next thing I know, we are shoving off and piling into the rafts. I'm wearing a straight jacket. Well, they are quaintly called life vests, but you are forced by the confining thickness of the jacket to walk like Frankenstein and cannot bend at the waist at all. You feel impervious to almost everything, bumping off of other people and trees like a large ball. You jump into the river and get pulled out again by the shoulders of the jacket as if you were a large flounder flopping helplessly, kicking your legs ineffectually and hoping the person hauling you in doesn't strangle you with the jacket because you forgot to retighten the upper buckles of the jacket the last time you decided to breathe. The technique is supposed to be simple: You jump in, swim, pee in the river while pretending to watch an eagle fly overhead, swim over to the raft and ask to be helped back in. On three, your helper grabs the shoulder pad area of the vest, leans back to counter your weight and hauls you up and over the side. You slither up into the raft and resume your post in the bow feeling refreshed and content.

I was confident and happy to be riding in Chris's raft on the first day. Until he abandoned ship. Between rapids on the Rogue are long stretches of deep slow-moving water that nonetheless need some guiding hands on the oars to negotiate effectively. Just as I was beginning to develop a deep calm, Chris let the oars go slack and simply dove off the raft into the water. Just like that. Hey, come back here! Certain that we would soon be swept off an enormous waterfall or bashed up against an unseen rock, I began to calculate the time it would take me to row to shore, secure the raft and call for a new guide.

Cell phones - if you are silly enough to think yours will survive all the water and dirt - don't work in the river canyon. I realized I was exactly and simply another piece of luggage on the raft. I don't know how to row, can't get myself through a rapid, didn't really have a clear idea of where I was exactly and was wrapped up in a rented life vest feeling like - and looking a very close approximation to - a beach ball.

Just before I got to the squeak stage of anxiety (which preceeds the whimper stage), Chris hoisted himself back into the raft and took up the oars. "Man, that's the best thing on the river. Just jump in and cool off. That pizza oven wind is blowing. Can you feel it?" He grinned and laughed, rowing heartily toward the distant roar of rapids. (To be continued)

Hummingbird musings

A calendar page has turned and we are in September. At last, summer is here in the Groove. As summer arrives, the leaves float lightly from the sycamores and sail across the streets, landing with a scratchy shushing sound. They whirl up again dryly as tires rush past.

It's beautiful here when it's summer/fall. Warmth so long anticipated is a lulling tonic. Riots of bougainvillea blossoms splash color against the adobes of Monterey and clapboard sides of the Victorians here in the Groove, almost too violent a color to take in. I squint sometimes when I see them, but the intensity of the colors please me.

I coddle three rose bushes in my little garden, hoping for an occasional spectacular blossom. They are very fussy and hold out for more pay; I have to hand pick insects off of them, fertilize them just so, groom them in particular ways. In contrast alyssum and Santa Barbara daisies are like Catholics; they breed prolifically and scatter themselves everywhere, requiring an occasional squirt of a hose now and then. They bloom in any soil. Unlike Catholics, who usually smell like garlic - at least the ones I know do - alyssum is as fragrant as honey.

There's a keen little hummingbird that has set up shop in a nearby Monterey pine. It aims its little needle-like beak at a distant flower bush and flies pell mell toward it like a fighter jet. Licking nectar from any flowers that have it on offer, I can't imagine the energy that's needed just to hover as its tongue gathers its fuel. Wings hum at 200 beats per minute I've heard - a blur. Hummingbirds are ferociously territorial. I wonder if they have ever thwanged themselves like darts into fences by accident. Probably not.

I was rummaging around in a potted plant a few days ago when our hummingbird decided to check me out. He flew to within three feet of my head, wings beating like mad. He moved to his left a few feet for a better view and then to his right. Maybe my skin lotion was interesting; maybe not. Rather I think it was the fact that my garden hose was on and he smelled fresh water. I felt intimidated by his rapier beak and my skin seemed very vulnerable to a stab attack if he so chose. Bored, he returned to his high perch in the pine and carried on with his territorial rapid-fire squeaks and chirps, sounding like a tiny rusty hinge up there.

Now that the sun's rays are slanting at a lower and lower angle every day and we feel her heat all day long, we are smiling more, walking less briskly, looking for hammocks in which to swing idly in the afternoon. Summer crowds are finally gone and we in our specific summer/fall groove can drink the sweet wine of patience rewarded.