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< September/October 2003
	Innuendos
A River Guide Reflects on 40 Pam Houston

It was just past midnight, the beginning of what would be day 13 in the bottom of the Grand Canyon, on a beach just below Tapeats, and I was the only one who hadn’t gone to bed. I had told my husband I wanted to wait until the moon rose over the canyon wall, which it had, hours ago, and now I was apparently waiting for it to set behind the other one. I stayed up because I had a bone to pick with the river, and I wanted to speak to it alone. "We used to be so close, you and I," I said. "What happened?"

We were more than halfway through at least one definition of "the trip of a lifetime," 18 days in 16-foot rafts on the granddaddy of all river trips—the result of a permit I applied for back in 1989 that had finally bubbled to the surface in 2001—and I wasn’t having any fun whatsoever. In fact, no one on any river trip in the history of boating has ever been a bigger drag than I. When everyone else wanted to do shots of tequila and play anatomical croquet, I wanted to talk about the psychology of risk around the campfire. When everyone else was eating pancakes and eggs for breakfast, I was spending what had become the requisite two hours crying in my tent. Any reputation I had ever had for bravery, for chutzpah, for fearlessness in the face of churning whitewater, was so far out the window there was no chance of recovery.

I was scared of the canyon, as scared as I have been of anything in my life. And when you consider my life—which has included dipping the mast of my friend Shelton’s sailboat into the Gulf Stream in Hurricane Gordon; riding the top of a full moon avalanche down a couple hundred yards of Seven-mile run near Winter Park; getting arrested by Chinese guards at a Tibetan airport for trying to "conceal a weapon" while boarding the flight (my house-sitter is really into pocketknives); and having what I was pretty sure was a heart attack at 18,000 feet in the Bhutanese wilderness, five days trekking from even the most rudimentary medical facility—even I could see that my anxiety in the Grand Canyon had gotten a little out of control.

The moon dropped behind the Tapeats sandstone with a nearly audible plunk, leaving the river darker and louder than it had seemed when it shimmered in the moonlight. "This used to be," I began again, "the place I belonged more than any other, and now I feel so unwelcome, like some kind of alien."

The river laughed in my face. "Really?" it said. "And who’s fault, do you suppose, is that?"

Mine, no doubt. That much I knew. I kept asking my fellow trip members—the ones who weren’t avoiding me entirely—questions like, What is it exactly that we are doing down here. And, is this, actually, fun? And, given that there is a perfectly good trail along the shore from the top of this Class 10 rapid to the bottom of it, why, again, are we risking our lives? And, given the fact that there are hundreds of people motoring past us on massive bologna boats every day, that between the intermittent outboard engine noise and the almost constant helicopters the Canyon feels a little more to me like Oakland than it does wilderness, does the fact that we are down here mean anything at all?

Good questions all, but all motivated by fear, and the unshakeable idea in my head that I owed the river something for all those times that, instead of having too much fear, I had too little. That the river was going to want to take something back.

There was my first big swim almost 20 years ago when I was just a wide-eyed passenger on the Selway. We flipped in Wolf Creek—at least that’s where we think we flipped. The river that day was so fat and fast we were never quite sure where we were on the map. That combined with how I choked and sputtered through a couple more rapids before I got to shore, how I hauled myself up the cliff and ran the trail five or six miles to the take-out—hypothermic and shocky and praying that around the next corner I’d see my boyfriend and/or the boat.

Or just a few weeks later when that same boyfriend was running bootleg trips on the Main Salmon, and gave me—on my rookie outing—all the women and children in my boat. I knew that the rock in Big Mallard was what everyone was worried about. I had yet to learn about checking my speed before trying to make a difficult cut. We sailed over the top of that rock so fast and so dead center that the boat did a kind of a Wile E. Coyote thing where it flew out into thin air, and came down hard and flat on its bottom to the cheers of the campers on the beach below.

There was Westwater one year, in the terrible teens, with a man in my boat that I wanted to impress for some reason (a movie producer maybe?). Three straight miles of nasty water and me all of a sudden with a broken oar lock, balancing the shaft against my thigh and never for one minute exactly in control, and somehow, making the cut at Skull, getting stood right up on end in Surprise, winding up winded, but topside.

There was a different boyfriend hitting the Wall in a high-water year on the Dolores, me right behind him and the crack of his wooden frame and his passengers flying into the water, rowing my brains out and gaining purchase at the last second, only because of the warning his crash gave, everybody shaken up, but nobody hurt.

There was the flip in Cataract, in one of those ridiculously huge years that are now only the stuff of legend, where I followed that same guy right over the rock in Big Drop 2, and swam 3, with a girl who would have followed me anywhere, and the fact that we both came out safe.

Finally (but not exhaustively) there were all the things that didn’t happen to us on our one-boat trip down the Tatshenshini. (Another idea of mine that was full of far more hubris than brains). We did not ground ourselves on a sand bar too big to carry out of. We did not fall into a crevasse free climbing up the wrong side of Walker Glacier. One of the 20 plus brown bears we saw on the trip did not decide he wanted our cooler or our small intestines for lunch. We didn’t starve at Dry Bay (that name is a little joke) because the weather was too bad for our pilot to come in for six days...

How many times did I make the cut at Velvet Falls by inches? How many times did I shut my eyes in the middle of Warm Springs and just pray?

But somewhere between all those good old days and September 2001, I had gotten over my death wish. More significantly maybe, I had gotten over men who hadn’t gotten over their death wish. I was newly, happily married, to an actor. I had, and was enjoying, something that almost passes for a real job. The fact that I no longer needed to risk life and limb to feel satisfied was a sign that I had had some good therapy. The fact that I needed to cry for two hours to get out of my tent every morning was a sign that I hadn’t had enough. And what happened to the sheer joy I used to feel, not just in the rapids, but in the very fact of river travel, that we were moving at the perfect pace to see a landscape, that we spent our whole day in service of that motion, that we had everything on earth we needed rolled into our dry bags and strapped on the back.

"You’re 40," the river said. "Give yourself a break." And because self-directed mercy is one of the best things about being 40, I decided the river was right.

In the end the river didn’t exact any revenge on me at all, though when we took out at 9 a.m. mountain time on Sept. 11, we found out the whole world was a scarier place than it had seemed like at the put-in.

I didn’t get on the river in 2002, unless you count a good day of canoeing on the Boardman in northern Michigan’s first real snowstorm in October with my buddy, Jack. I don’t think the river and I are finished with each other, because it still comes to me in dreams, as both a lover and a fighter, and because every time I sit on its banks, I still get the itch for some oars in my hand.

—Pam Houston is the author of Cowboys Are My Weakness, Waltzing the Cat and the novel Sighthound, forthcoming from W.W. Norton. She lives in Creede, Colo., at the headwaters of the Rio Grande.