Braver Than You Think

by Maggie Downs

  “This is my boy,” she murmured again.

  The people around us didn’t seem to notice that my family had just splintered. Shoppers plucked books from the shelves. A teenage girl gestured dramatically to her friend with a cup of Starbucks. I heard the ding of the cash register.

  Then my mom was gone again, like someone snuffed out a candle. Her eyes dimmed. Her shoulders slumped. She looked down at her wallet with disdain, like it was a crumpled tissue someone had just dropped into her lap. This is what happened sometimes in this stage of the disease—a snap of clarity before she drooped back into the fog—though these moments had become more rare. I barely got to see my real mom anymore.

  I folded up the wallet and snapped it shut, put it back in the purse. I couldn’t accept this—that the woman I thought I knew so well was never known to me at all; that her secret compartments held much more than a receipt for an expensive skirt.

  I have always been one of three children. Now I am one of four? I never considered this piece of my identity to be malleable.

  “Let’s go,” I said, and I held her arm as I guided her away from the store.

  Later that night at my parents’ home, I repeated everything to my dad while I made a pot of decaf in the kitchen.

  “It was so crazy,” I said. “She said I have another brother. Can you believe that?”

  “Well, you do,” he said.

  His tone was straightforward. Terse. I told him I didn’t understand.

  “Your mother never wanted you to think she was tainted,” my dad said. “She never wanted you to know she suffered. She was too strong for that.”

  I always knew she was strong. I just never imagined how resilient. For so many years, my mom never revealed the story to my siblings or me, not until the flash at the bookstore, when that ancient, hungry pain cracked her open and broke through.

  After learning that, I decided I couldn’t let my mom’s disease make me a worse person. She would want me to be stronger than that. So I made a list of things I wanted: a new job, accomplishments outside of the bar, a boyfriend I didn’t have to keep secret. It took a little while, but I set my life on a new course. I found, through her struggle, a new path for myself.

  In Uganda on a crushing hot day, I watch the warriors dance around Umukuka Wilson Wamimbi. Their feathers tremble with their movements as they dance a story about the clan’s history. They create the narrative for their tribe, and they define how they are seen in the world. Their cries sound deep and familiar, the sound of longing, the sound of loss, the sound of unity, the sound of a clan.

  I understand that sound. My mother is a warrior too.

  You Can Survive the Bad Place

  AFTER MBALE, I RETURN TO KAMPALA FOR A FEW DAYS BEFORE the city begins to wear on me and I hop on a bus for my next adventure.

  It takes more than two hours to fully escape the frenetic crowds and wild streets of Kampala. Finally we reach a point where the asphalt is exhausted, becoming firmly packed roads of red clay. Dense, shoulder-to-shoulder buildings disappear, replaced by green trees and modest houses. Each time the bus shudders to a stop, hawkers run to the windows selling skewers of meat, bags of fruit, or warm chapati bread rolled around a thin egg omelet, what they call a “Rolex.”

  Men zip through the streets on motorbikes, bare-chested, not slowed at all by the long yellow kayaks that balance perpendicularly across the backs of their bikes. When I see them, that’s how I know we’ve reached Jinja, a bucolic town that has become East Africa’s hub for adventure sports. People from all over the world travel here for the world-class kayaking, the all-terrain vehicle safaris, and the epic bungee jumping. I’m here to go whitewater rafting at the source of the Nile River.

  My backpacker hostel is situated on a hill that overlooks sinuous curves of water. This is where the tour company will pick us up in the morning. I’m staying in a dorm room with several other adventure seekers, all more experienced than I am. I’ve never been whitewater rafting, but my favorite amusement park ride as a kid was White Water Canyon at Kings Island in Mason, Ohio, and for some reason, I imagine this real-life experience will be essentially the same thing: a refreshing float on some burbling water through woodland scenery, a height requirement of at least forty-six inches, possibly a funnel cake afterward.

  As the sun sets, I open a cold Tusker lager and carefully read the waiver for the next day’s rafting trip. The paper says the rapids in Jinja are “grade five on a scale that runs from one to six.” Grade one means mild rocking and rolling, suitable for beginners. Grade six presents extreme danger and barely navigable rapids, even for professionals.

  So. Grade five? Holy mother of paddling. This requires skillful maneuvering of choppy water, huge hazards, steep drops, and crashing waves. It also means that as a first-timer, I am terrified. The chapati bread I ate on arrival now churns uncomfortably in my stomach. My throat burns and tastes acidic. I knew the rapids were a five before I signed up—I just thought the scale ran from one to ten.

  That night I call Jason via Skype. When he answers, I tell him what I’m about to do. I expect him to be proud of me.

  “So this might be goodbye,” I laugh.

  “Then why are you doing this?” he snaps. He’s angry, so different from the man who held my hand on a skydiving aircraft during the ride to altitude and told me to relax in the sky. “Nobody’s forcing you to go rafting.”

  “People always say that when you grow old, you’ll regret the things you didn’t do, not the things you did.”

  “That’s if you grow old,” he replies.

  It’s a joke, but the rest of the conversation is strained. I wish I knew how to comfort him, but it’s hard to do over a jumpy internet connection, especially when I am equally apprehensive.

  I think about my mother in her quiet room at the nursing home. She was proud to be a mostly stay-at-home mom while I was growing up, and she worked hard to create a safe, warm environment there. After she became ill, my dad retired from the air force, determined to keep her at home for as long as he could. He really tried.

  Eventually my mom forgot how to go to the bathroom; sometimes she used the sink, sometimes the bathtub, and that’s when she wasn’t fighting the process altogether. She forgot how to eat; sometimes her mouth was mid-bite when she forgot that she needed to chew the food. In the middle of the night, she was restless and unsettled and often woke in a panic. She forgot the identity of the man sleeping next to her; that’s when she became violent. My dad considered buying a gun, just for his own safety.

  My dad was devastated the day he signed my mom over to the nursing home and drove home alone. But she required a level of care he could no longer give.

  The remainder of her life will be spent in one hushed and sterile room, a thought that always leaves me cold and afraid. I know she’d rather be facing rapids than losing more of herself each day. I know she would take chances if she had the opportunity. I have to do this, because she cannot.

  I sign the waiver.

  The next morning, twenty of us are taken by bus from the hostel to the launch point. My heart is pounding so hard I hardly hear the employee who asks for my payment. In return for fifty dollars, I’m handed a long paddle. I have no idea how to hold it, even on steady ground. The paddle is awkward and cumbersome, like I’ve been gifted a third arm.

  Here at the launch point, the Nile River is jagged, a silver expanse that slices through the morning mist. I slip my toes into the river, the longest in the world. The water I see now will flow north from this point all the way to the Mediterranean Sea, a journey of three months and 6,800 kilometers.

  From the dock, the rafts look as tiny as poppy seeds floating in an Olympic-sized pool. My raft of five other people, all strangers to me, is the last to launch into the river.

  Our captain is Jane, a long-limbed, muscular blonde with hair braided into taut cornrows that reveal tanned strips of scalp. Her Australian accent gives the impression of someone who guzzles stocky cans of Foster’s b
eer and wrestles crocodiles, which is soothing since there are, indeed, crocodiles around us.

  Jane barks, “Wild or mild?”

  Our group is divided. Half want the more aggressive experience, while the others want something more subdued. Jane narrows her eyes and shakes her head with disapproval. She looks feral, and I’m certain we’re in store for something fierce.

  Despite my fear, I feel completely present in this moment. The air is hot and stagnant, and the rubbery smell coming from the red raft is strong and medicinal. The shore appears far and unreachable, like a distant mirage on the horizon. Insects skim the Nile with grace.

  Jane teaches us how to hold the paddle and scoop the water, propelling us forward. She chastises me for not digging deep, merely skimming the surface. After ten minutes of calm, placid rafting, Jane abruptly—and deliberately—tips the boat, forcing us to swim through a set of small, milky rapids.

  I am plunged into both the river and the memory of the last time I was overpowered by water. My mother never learned to swim, and she wanted me to seize every opportunity she never had. So I dutifully attended classes at the Dayton YMCA, even while I maintained a weak stroke and a strong fear of drowning, dog-paddling my way through each level: polliwog, guppy, minnow, fish. Up I climbed through the aquatic food chain. When I somehow attained shark, I was tested on my ability to tread water while fully clothed. The goal was to last a half hour in the deep section of the pool, and toward the end I gave out. My memory of it is more like a montage of film clips—sinking, inhaling water, struggling to the surface, coughing, chlorine tears burning my cheeks, and my mom on the side of the pool, howling for help. She looked beautiful even in her panic, her short, curly blonde hair teased around her head, her poppy lips frozen into an O. I don’t remember a single thing she said, only that she looked perfect while I flailed.

  Now, here in Eastern Uganda, it is baptism by boulders. I emerge on the other side of the rocks bruised and with a stomach full of Nile water. I bob to the surface, white-knuckling my life jacket. I’m okay, but I’m irritated. I’ve put myself in the hands of this Jane woman, and she didn’t think twice about tossing me from the boat.

  After the raft is righted, I hoist myself into it again. Jane gives our group the option to bail out now and float down another part of the river in a safety boat instead of tackling any more rapids. Go, fool, go! yells the sane part of my brain. But I can’t. If I turn back now, I’ll always doubt myself. I’ll forever be the eleven-year-old girl, sinking in the deep end at the Y in Dayton.

  It’s a shock when I discover the first few rapids are actually fun. Each time we approach rocks and roaring water, Jane cries, “Paddle-paddle-paddle!” followed by a quick “Get down!” We dutifully obey her commands. Our raft successfully skims rapids and slides down waterfalls.

  We reach a treacherous spot known as Itanda, “the bad place,” a series of rapids in quick succession. I dig my paddle in—Jane would be proud if she were paying attention—but the raft spirals as though we’re not even tending to it. As I heave and grunt, I peek at the other people in my boat and see we’re all grappling with this thing. I see the sturdy, brute determination to survive.

  At the other side, I’m surprised to find myself still aloft. We’ve made it through.

  Then we meet the rapids called Silverback, a name Jane speaks with reverence. I know we’re in for it. I can hear it coming. The green river churns and crashes against pointed rocks like a terrible, bubbling stew. I close my eyes. I don’t want to see what’s coming.

  I think about my last visit home before leaving on my backpacking trip. My dad brought me to the nursing home, and we entered the elevator. He knew the security code to make the doors close—this is a safety feature to prevent the Alzheimer’s patients from wandering onto another floor or out of the building. My dad paused.

  “You might not recognize your mother anymore—the disease has taken a real physical toll in the past few months,” he said. I braced myself for the worst, my stomach hard with dread.

  When the elevator opened, my dad gestured across the room.

  “There she is.”

  I forced my eyes to open, and I saw the skeleton of a woman arranged on a recliner. Her eyes were sunken, and her cheeks were two dark hollows. I gasped.

  “No, no, no,” I cried, the words rushing forth before I could stop them.

  The waves swallow the boat whole, and I’m still not looking. In an instant I feel the raft drop out from under me, and I am airborne for a brief moment before I am chewed by raging water.

  “That’s not your mother,” my dad said gently. “Look behind her.”

  She wore no makeup, and her hair was gray and limp. Her shirt was nothing pretty, and the elastic band of her pants was pulled up far too high. But there was no doubt. This was my mother, the woman who birthed me, who nurtured me, who challenged me to become everything she couldn’t. She didn’t know me enough to love me anymore, but every part of me remembered her.

  My head barely breaks the surface before the swells hammer me again. When I open my mouth, it is partially underwater, partially above. I inhale a mixture of sweet air and frothy, murky foam. Above there’s muck and dirt and a kaleidoscopic shimmer of waves.

  Sour river water slides through my nose, cutting a raw path down my throat. I splash around and somehow my right hand makes contact with the raft. My shoulder feels hot and heavy as I grab the rope and cling to it.

  My arm is fiercely yanked one way. More rapids. In the chaos of rocks and waves, the raft is torn from my grasp. Crocodiles, I think. Oh my God, what about the fucking crocodiles? I curl into a ball, some kind of animal instinct, and then I am rolling, tumbling downstream, whisked through a channel of noise and turbulence, the container inside a pneumatic tube. If the crocs are nearby, I’m surely moving too fast for any of them to catch me. When my head breaks the surface again, I don’t know how much time or distance has passed. But the water is calm, the boat is gone, and I am alone.

  I wipe water from my eyes and float for a few minutes looking up at the sky, the river holding me like a soft hand, before a safety kayak glides toward me and tows me to a larger safety boat. After I hoist myself inside, I cough, but not productively. I try to summon enough muscle to bark out the water in my lungs.

  A paddle bobs on the surface nearby, and I heave it into the boat with me. Several minutes later, my sinuses clear. My ears pop. I finally catch my breath. My heartbeat slows to a normal rate. And it’s a relief when more heads bob up nearby—the rest of my group. They swim to the safety boat, and I help tug them inside. Only one girl is bloody, but her cuts are shallow, and our nervous conversation gives way to excited hugs. We are all okay, and the river has offered us solidarity. Swapping stories about our rapids, adrenaline flowing like a geyser, we don’t feel much like strangers anymore.

  When Jane appears, unscathed, from an inlet with our boat, we all cheer. I’m one of the first to leap into the water and swim to the raft, and I’m genuinely happy to be back in it. We drift for about an hour on a placid portion of river. Jane hands me an orange, and I drop the peel into the water. It curls and floats lazily for a moment, until it catches a current and is torn away. I imagine it gliding from here through the newly formed country of South Sudan, mingling with sediment from the Blue Nile and White Nile tributaries, sweeping past Egypt’s farmlands and tombs, washing ashore somewhere in the Mediterranean. Maybe somebody will find this proof of my existence and wonder where it came from.

  When I was still an active skydiver, I kept a letter in my desk to be given to my family in the event of the worst-case scenario. The letter explained how my life was richer for them being a part of it, and I offered assurance that I wanted it to end this way—though risky, I believed that death while soaring was both noble and true. But I didn’t write any letters before I left for this trip. I realize now it’s because I expect to survive. I’ve hauled my way through the bad place, and I’m traveling the route that will bring me home again.
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  My legs are tired and my skin is sunburned. When I look to the horizon, I see churning water. It’s time to paddle. I sit erect in the boat, and I stare down the whirlpools and rocks. When the waves strike, I refuse to close my eyes. This time I approach them on my own terms. The raft remains steady.

  For the last few rapids, I don’t even need to hear Jane’s instructions to know what to do. Our boat never capsizes again, and my group successfully finishes twenty-five kilometers from where we began.

  It’s early evening when I jump from the raft for the last time. The sun sinks behind the tangle of scruffy trees, and the river is broad and black, open as a wound. The air has cooled considerably, and the water is chilly. I keep my limbs warm with a few freestyle strokes, making shimmery waves with each movement. My new friends call from the muddy bank, but I’m not ready to head for shore yet.

  I remember from school that the Nile is shaped like the lotus flower, a symbol of renewal for the ancient Egyptians. Right now I am in the stem, pulling myself toward the blossom.

  Some Things Can’t Be Understood, Only Experienced

  A REGGAE-THEMED HOSTEL IN KIGALI, RWANDA, SOUNDED so promising in the guidebook: “If it’s the spirit of peace and harmony you are after, then this little retreat is the place for you.”

  Peace? Harmony? Retreat? I didn’t even need to read about any other lodgings. This one sounded perfect.

  Upon arrival, I’m surprised to discover this retreat is surrounded by a concrete fence, a massive metal gate, and a guard post at the entrance. The gardens are overgrown. The office is a small room with a cashbox on a table and skinny yellow cats that zigzag around my ankles. Aged posters of Bob Marley hang on the wall.

  Near the guesthouse where I’ll be staying is a prosthetic workshop, where limbs are made for people who lost theirs during the 1994 genocide. Stray wooden limbs clutter the paths to the rooms, and some of them are broken.