Montana, Day Six: Curdles and Limits

Lunch over. Back on the water. Paddling. Paddling. Paddling.

Blisters on our thumb webs. Chamois cream. Wrap with black electrical tape.

After a few hours, I improvise a song to keep my muscles working, making up lyrics, consoling myself that even pirates sang heave ho to keep going.

But my muscles are tiring. The sky is darkening. Oh please no.

Portage again. Two, three times. Dodge rocks. Tedious.

Where is the campsite? Whoops, Mike missed it. We went right by it. There is no going back. We have to choose another.

The sky curdles with dark clouds. Say it ain’t so. Our raingear is tightly rolled inside dry bags we can’t open now. Can’t chance soaking our sleeping bags.

Mike scours the shorelines for alternate campsites. While not a highly trafficked area, it is Friday night. All the mapped ones are taken. Oh my God. How will Seidlitz find us?

Hour six and fifteen miles into our paddle, immensely weary. Now, as meteorologist Ro predicted, it starts to rain. Not a sweet-summer-thank-God-it’s-falling on-our-sweaty-selves rain, but a solid-cold-muscle-clenching-what-are-you-doing-here rain. We are now more than drenched. We are cold.

Cold, as we’ve seen, is a trigger for Ro. She can endure heat in a way I can’t, but cold sends her somewhere into our Minnesota childhood, days of soggy snowsuits, mittens hidden or mismatched or still wet in the morning, toe-numbing walks to school in rubber boots that effectively transfer body heat directly into the snow and conduct icicles of cold directly up the legs, souring the heart, pressing tears from the eyes.

We’re shivering. Can’t be that far from a campsite, can we? At least the effort of paddling offers muscular compensation, a bit of warmth from movement.

Bright-veined lightning stabs a mountain, thunder cracks. The downpour begins in earnest—more waterfall than rain.

“Pull off! Pull off! Everybody off the water now!” A river raft is not a place to be in a storm, and this one is building.

With tremendous effort we order our rubbery muscles to pull us to shore, get out, haul the boats up, but once we’re on the bank, our bodies go from warm to freezing. Can’t stop teeth chattering, body trembling.

We all huddle under a pine for a bit of shelter. Ro’s pale and shaking. I’m helpless to help her.

Then from his miraculous pack, Don pulls two small plastic bags.

He tears open the emergency rain poncho. We help Ro into it. It’s the density of a cleaner’s bag, but it sheds the rain.

The other packet holds a silver emergency blanket. In it he wraps not his kids, but Ro and me, his old aunties. It is surprisingly, welcomely warm. I practically want to cry for his thoughtfulness.

It starts to hail. If our jaws were not so tightly clenched, they would have dropped. This is pretty pure. A thin strip of mylar between us and The Elements, which are trying themselves out in all kinds of configurations.

Warmth. Rest. Food. Dry Clothing. Basics. None of them available now.

We don’t gripe. Everyone is wet. But sure wish we hadn’t missed that first campsite. It’s 6 p.m. Light is fading in the mountain valley.

The hail subsides, the rain lets up slightly.

“Let’s take our chance now,” Mike says. “It might get stronger, but we’ve got to make a break for it. The map shows a campsite not too far off.”

Back down the hill, the ubiquitous slippery rocks, shove the rafts back on the water, take up our paddles again. The rain still broadly falls, but the lightning has business elsewhere for the moment.

And of course the rapids are still rapids, we still have to pay attention and pull and curve and try to avoid stone shores and projectiles but soon, we know, soon we’ll be out.

And indeed, it is true, within an hour a splendid campsite comes into view. Perfectly situated on a promontory above the river—but wait, is that smoke? Yes.

Hell. There must be a dozen people up there. They’ve erected a giant tarp and have a blazing fire going. They wave and toast us with their beer cans as we pass.

Our hearts are so heavy they almost swamp the boat. We have to paddle on.

Just then, an impossible-to-see feisty rock protrudes. Our raft runs into it, Ro gets tossed out again. Her leg goes under the raft. I see by her bloodless face she is at the limits of her tolerance, of her physicality. She’s cold, she’s in pain, please don’t break her knee.

This tips me into my limit. I shout to Mike, “This Is Enough! Enough! We have to stop!”

“Okay we’ll stop, we’ll find some kind of campsite. Pull up everybody!”

Mike’s crew is already farther downriver, swirling around a bend, but our crew has stopped.

Ever so gingerly Don helps Ro extract her leg from under the raft. It will sport a huge bruise, but—mercifully—nothing worse.

“Why don’t you two make your way back to that campsite?” Don suggests.

“Those folks will let you get warm by their fire while we set up our campsite.”

“No, no,” I say. “Let’s go straight to our site so we don’t have to walk back over these horrible rocks.”

For indeed, the rocks along this shore are the most treacherous yet: grapefruit and cantaloupe-sized, slick with algae and plant life. Perfect anklebreakers.

I begin singing an old affirmation quietly to myself: I create my reality, the present is my point of power.

After ten minutes on this difficult path, we’re within shouting distance of the other raft.

Mike calls out, “Go back to the other campsite. Get warm at their fire while we set up camp and start making dinner.”

We almost burst into tears, but any kind of warmth sounds good right now.

So we turn around. Back, step by step over the precarious rock. Don holds Ro’s arm. I am just slowly, slowly proceeding.

There’s a massive rock promontory between this stony shore and the path leading up to the campsite. The beach ceases altogether here—it’s just a pool of green water. Looking up, I spot on the promontory fairly regular ledge-y handholds and footholds.

“We could climb up it rather than go around if you want. Looks pretty doable.”

“No!” Ro says. “I can’t. I can’t climb up there.”

“Okay, okay, no problem—just trying to make it easier.”

The cold rain still falls. Calf deep already, we start inching around the promontory. With each step it gets deeper and colder. This water lives at the base of this stone and never warms.

To our knees. To our thighs. To our waists. When the icy water covers my breasts, an inner alarm goes off. I am colder and more miserable now than I have been in all my life. This is the nadir of exertion and expectation. How much deeper is this pool? To my neck? Will we drown?