Shakedown Beach
by Barbara
Herrick
an excerpt from "Blackberry Tea Club" and used with permission
of the author
The
river is a torrent, constrained by the great brown hills that surround
us and the black megaliths that jut against a sky so blue my heart hurts.
The Blackberry Tea Club, four women in our Glory Years, is on an outing,
a two-day float trip through world-class rapids on the South Fork of the
Payette River in central Idaho. The water, still snow-fed in August, is
so cold it takes the breath while the air temperature sits at 94 degrees
on the flats above the canyons. It¹s hotter here on the surface of
the water, where the rock walls cradle the heat.
What's a body to do with extremes like that?
Burly water, mountain cold, crashes over my head and shoulders, streams down my back, sends our raft careening. "Dig!" Sam yells. "Starboard! Pull! Hard!" We lean far over the side of the raft, our legs straddling the tubes, bodies balanced in midair. Our paddling straightens the raft just in time to shoot over a wave the size of the monsters in my last dream and then slips us into a hole that would spin the raft for a god-induced eternity, given its keeper nature. The water clobbers us, thrashes the breath from our lungs. Cold water in the crotch is a whoop in the making. I stare into a trough of glassy, green water. Paddling white water is paddling froth; green water is hard and real as cement. To propel the raft you have to paddle deep enough to touch the green‹otherwise you have no purchase on power.
And you need to do it with the deep, spiritual connection between people that allows for concerted action in the absence of words. A metaphor, I'm thinking. I laugh and shout from the base of my lizard brain: Pay attention! Stay with the moment! Stay here!
Mind-traveling in the middle of Wangdoodle Rapids is deadly.
We dig deep -- Sam shouting what to do and when to do it -- spiral the
green around our paddles, pull free from the keeper hole, and slip through
the turbulence into a relatively peaceful stretch of water.
My hair is plastered to the sides of my head. My fifty-year-old body has taken a drenching. There is no way to hide these wide flamboyant breasts under my wet tee-shirt. I am absent of make-up and the ignoble trappings of my tiny life. This river washes me clean of prissiness and pretension.
Three other boats are with us, but clearly we had the liveliest crew. We all lead responsible, respectable lives: Sherry is all heart, too open sometimes for the challenges she faces as director of an intensive care unit in a large medical center. She hosts an amazing mind - photographic recallremembers everything she's read. Gail is the leader, a strategist, the woman with long strides and an unerring sense of direction. She finds refuge in her garden‹the fact that she views the whole Earth as her garden gives her a remarkable equanimity. Marty is a healer, ostensibly a coronary care nurse and a professor of holistic nursing, but she¹s onto something deeper and more vital.
There's no holding her back. She's searching out the mysteries of a body deeply attached to a soul and reporting back. I am Miss Priss, the poet, and there is no accounting for my mysteries. But out here, we lose 'herlady-ma'amship-divashipness-highpriestess-poetess' selves.
We giggle and scream and ride the wild waters.
We've been friends for ten years, last count, starting with conversations late at night at a bar where we sipped Blackberry Tea‹a lovely ferment of Triple Sec, Grand Marnier and blackberry tea. We talk children, men, jobs, weight, clothes, food, travel, gossip, politics, medicine, healing, spirituality, adventure, books‹the works.
We've taken to these conversations and now these extremes with the exuberance of twelve-year-olds. After each set of rapids we smack the water hard with our paddles, then crack them overhead and hoot with adrenaline joy. A stranger hearing us would be hard pressed to guess that two of us are in our forties, and the other two have reached our fifties: grand old broads riding high.
Writer
Barbara Herrick lives in Boise, Idaho.