Montana, Day Five: In Camp

The next day we’re blessedly staying put. We can actually relax. Don and Jack play chess, Lauren washes laundry, Ro, Jim, and others play cards. Mike is deservedly slung up in his hammock, snoring. Too wired to take out my watercolors, I sit under a tree, reading John Muir and looking up from time to time.

I’m glad I get to the health club regularly and lift weights. In spite of the hours of paddling yesterday and on horseback the day before, I’m not sore.

After a few handfuls of lunch—on the trail it’s always snacks: nuts, chocolate, fruit—I do a stupid thing.

Appreciate where you are, I tell myself, and pick up the skinny wire-bound guidebook Jim has at last laid down. The river is sectioned on these pages. These dog-eared pages are the sequence of the maps for our trip.

Big mistake.

The mapmaker has highlighted in pink the locations of multiple upcoming rapids. Oh my God it looks like chicken pox. Okay, okay, calm down. But so many. Look, it’s just a few days. You can do this.

Okay, really, how long is this trip? I flip to the last dog-ear. The take-out point is here by this big red mark. What’s this say? Scout these rapids! Very dangerous. The worst rapids are at the end? Beware. I’d Turn Back If I Were You. My Cowardly Lion tail twitches in my hand.

I try to forget the warning, but it remains a big red throb for the rest of the journey. You’re not going to get the hard stuff over and then relax, Irene. The Worst Is Yet To Come.

I won’t tell Ro.

Ro worries. I do my best not to worry her. I do my best to remind her how good she is, how smart, how sensitive.

She’s dearer and closer than anyone but my husband, and there’s no one I’d rather share this trip with. She’s the river running through our family landscape, like the Mississippi, starting stepping-stone small, then broadening, uniquely nourishing each of us.

She totally gets girl-fun—loves the occasional trashy movie or a side-by-side dip into Vogue, chatting fashions: the fabulous and ridiculous ones we wore, the ridiculous and fabulous ones now. Laughter with her attains pants-wetting intensity.

You want her with you when you shop. “Check the seams! How often will you really wear that?” She spots the genuine bargain—not something cheap, but quality at a low price.

You want her at your side cooking, too—her palate is like the sensitive perfumer’s nose—a specificity nearly acrobatic to behold. Will she make it to the end of the dish with accurate stepping? Of course. She always does.

“Cinnamon, nutmeg, allspice—a bit of coriander. I would have toasted the walnuts, brought up the flavor a bit. Almost anything front to back of the meal can be improved with lemon.” She lends her chopping hand and culinary smarts with no ego whatsoever.

She can talk books, theater, art, and human motivation, because she is a deep listener. She knows the little hollow places hurt collects, offers wise advice.

And you surely want her in the wild, for Ro is exquisitely tuned to nature and celestial events: it is she who spots the halo around the moon, the phosphorescent sea creatures, multicolored wings of Aurora Borealis. Hummingbird babies play at her sprinkler; over her shoulder the owl reveals himself. Her cosmic sensitivity yields also a fierce sense of justice that led her to marry a brilliant compassionate criminal defense lawyer who shares the same. This woman asks the deep questions, loves to study wisdom.

But she also carries within her a black leather moto-jacketed maverick. She wanted a tattoo back when no one but sailors got them.

Oh sure, she can drive me crazy with a fear that seems unfounded, or an occasional lack of belief in herself, or the need for some configuration of objects, temperatures, and sensations that must be met or her discomfort will be tooth-clenching.

But I drive her crazy, too, with my own fussy requirements, my name-dropping, my own misgivings about myself.

And Jim and Skip and I are somewhat to blame. She was a trusting and gullible child and we mercilessly hoodwinked her.

“Watch out! It might explode. That’s not a horse chestnut. See these spikes? It came from outer space. Aliens sent it to Earth. ”

“Don’t sing ‘Pick a Bale of Cotton!’ You don’t know what it means? It’s offensive and insulting.”

Once we’d hooked her, we’d laugh and laugh. “You believed that? We were just kidding!”

We were just terrible.

And of course we were hogging all the dinner table attention (to say nothing of the food), making it nearly impossible for her to get a word in edgewise.

How did Ro turn out so well?

For one thing, she learned to watch. The whack-a-mole shift of demands in a household as large as ours called for quick adjustments. She is a natural artist and her eye has always been sharp.

But on one occasion her combination of innocence and artistry led to a damaging incident.

•••

In a quiet classroom moment, Ro decides to draw her finger. No other paper nearby, she begins the careful pencil sketch on the grocery-bag cover she made to protect her speller. Funny baggy knuckle, curved fingertip, hint of fingernail.

Not every finger, just the one. One, like her, in a twitching hand of siblings.

She shades the sides. She’s good at this.

“What does this mean?!” her teacher roars and yanks the book away.

Ro is utterly bewildered. “What?”

“You know! Obscenity! Obscenity!”

Ro is marched over the unyielding terrazzo, through the wood and starry glass door into the principal’s office.

“Call her parents immediately. I won’t have her in my class!”

The call is made; Ro is sent home.

The artist does not understand her crime. Nor does Dad that night. He inspects the evidence.

“What were you drawing, honey?”

She holds up her left index finger.

“What did I do wrong, Dad?”

“Your teacher has a sick mind. She thinks it’s a vulgar gesture.”

He calls Monsignor Colbert, at this time of night. I hear the buzz and murmur of his conversation accelerating into his professional broadcaster thunder.

“That drawing is perfectly innocent. This warped woman is libeling my daughter. If there’s one black mark on her record I will sue the teacher, I will sue the school and I will sue the Catholic Church if need be.”

Mom pales with embarrassment, yet she too knows her Ro is innocent. The school capitulates.

As for Ro? The teacher’s shriek, the public humiliation, the chill of the principal’s office, her mother’s gasp, her father’s fury, and her own molten confusion flow into the muscles of her arm and harden into doubt. Her drawings become tinier and tinier. Unquestionably non-controversial. Unicorns. Daisies. Valentines. An artist exiled from anatomy.

•••

While Ro and her powerful creativity eventually surmounted this, to a large extent we were all brought up exiled from anatomy (particularly our own). And we were brought up to doubt. To doubt ourselves, our impulses.