Bewitched

I hope I'm not keeping anybody in suspence on whether I did or did not touch a whale when I lived in Alaska.  The email has been sent to Maritxu, so now all I can do is wait.  Well, I could go out to the garage and look for my journals.  But I'm telling you, if I see a journal of mine, I guarantee you I'd be falling into at least an eight hour hole.  Reading one entry, will lead to reading another, and next thing you know I'd be burning pages and rewriting lines to make my past seem cooler for the rest of the day.  It is not a four-children compatible activity.

But anyhow...blogging about that whale day has spun me off into thinking of all the odd and adventurous days spent in Gustavus, AK that I might possibly have no record of but for what resides in my quivering brain cells.  And then today, as I was reading back over my book (blargh - work on my book, hate my book, work on my book, hate my book...so she goes) I came across a passage (hey I wrote a book where I could come across a passage - at least that's kind of cool) where the main character was remembering camping in redrock country with her family.  And that reminded me that I spent a summer working in Moab as a river guide.  Oh goodness.  And there is another bucket-full of quirky and beautiful stories that only live in my head tucked far behind more weighty facts of the present like where the diapers are in my house and how awesome oxy-clean is at taking out those stains that explode out of diapers.

Did you know I canoed down the Green River for five days all by myself until I reached the confluence of the Green and Colorado Rivers at which point I got picked up by a motorized boat and taken back to Moab where my furniture-less (if you don't count the two sleeping bags), but awesome roommated apartment waited for me?  Yeah, I did that.  What a nut.  It was a spectacularly beautiful and painful-for-the-shoulder-joint kind of trip.

When I think of this adventure I can see pictures behind my eyelids.  The first picture is of a broad-chested buck looking down at me from the top of a green hill on shore.  This happened on the first day when I was still sinking into the canyon.   The afternoon was misty.  In my memory I like to pretend that the deer had blue eyes.  He truthfully looked at me in a way that I felt like he knew there was some danger impending for me deeper down.  Obviously I'm alive and all turned out well - but it did kind of give me the shiver-me-timbers if you know what I mean.  I also picture wide stretches of river running inches deep between red plateaus and walking barefoot pulling my canoe.  I picture my tent on a sandbar heaving hard to its left in gusts of wind that didn't rattle the monoliths across river from me at all.  And I picture burnt red walls bent on boxing out the sun, forcing the water to run quick and deep. 

But beyond the pictures, here's what really stays with me from that trip.  I saw a farmer a mile or two after starting my trip on the first day and I waved to him.  He kindly waved back.  On my third day, I saw a lone guy next to his tent farther up on shore looking through binoculars at me.  I waved to him and he didn't wave back and I felt completely creeped out.  That was the total human interaction I'd had in five days.  Then on the fifth day, when I was almost to the confluence, I heard the sound of human voices.  You'd think that would have made me excited.  Ohhhhh, people!  Yipeeeee!  Time to talk, talk, talk and feel super connected again.  Maybe on day 2 or day 3 that would have been true.  But by day 5, my gut kind of turned when I heard the folks and knew that I'd have to say hi to them soon.  They sounded so darned noisy.

That's when I knew the trip needed to end.  A couple more days and I might have been done with civilization altogether.  Man, that redrock country - bewitching stuff I'll tell you what.