Running Home

by Katie Arnold

The memory of that mother comforts me—for about one second. Pippa, at nearly three, is as curious and energetic as ever; she will require constant watching. Maisy is still nursing, and both are in diapers. Diapers! What was I thinking? Who takes not one but two babies on a desert river? What kind of mother does this? A terrible, deranged mother, that’s who.

  I stew over doomsday scenarios: Maisy falling overboard into the muddy water and vanishing forever. Pippa flipping out of her Pack ’n Play crib and sleep-crawling in the middle of the night. Bee stings, rattlesnake bites, sunstroke, hypothermia, flash floods, concussion. Appendicitis! I’m pretty sure I’ve imagined every possible catastrophe until I drive to my friend Sandy’s house to borrow a satellite phone, in case of emergency.

  “Better bring a mosquito net,” Sandy says. “You wouldn’t want the girls to get West Nile virus.”

  * * *

  —

  A couple of days before we leave, I put Pippa and Maisy into the car to pick up some final supplies. I’ve spent all morning sorting piles of Pirate’s Booty and applesauce and a small mountain of organic, whole-grain snacks, but in my agitated state I’m convinced we need more. Even if going rafting isn’t the most irresponsible idea ever, there is absolutely no way it will ever be worth the logistical toil of packing.

  I’m at a traffic light, waiting to turn left, when I freeze, overcome by all that’s happened and all that might. I can’t go on. Cars zoom this way and that, careening in and out of lanes, the world raging on, indifferent to loss and full of vast, unspecified terrors. We could be rear-ended and sent spinning into oncoming traffic; I can almost feel the impact. My skin tingles as though my body has turned itself inside out and my nerves and veins are exposed. When the light turns green, I turn around and drive home in the slow lane the whole way. How desperately I want to keep us all safe, but I see now that it’s impossible. Maybe the adventurous life we love is nothing more than danger in disguise.

  At home, I call Meg in distress. “This is total insanity,” I say. “I can’t do it. I’m going crazy.”

  I’ve always relied on Meg for levelheaded advice, but this time she sounds rattled, like she thinks I’ve gone off the hook for real. “I’ve never heard you like this,” she says. “Maybe you should cancel.”

  I tell her I’ll think about it and hang up and call Dr. G., secretly hoping he’ll advise me not to go. Instead, he says longingly, “I love the San Juan this time of year.” He writes me a prescription for Xanax and phones it in to the pharmacy. “Bring it to the river just in case.”

  This time I fill it.

  * * *

  —

  The night before we leave, I go around the world. One lap, then two, and still my mind is whirling with what-ifs. On my third loop, I stop at the peach sapling we planted a few weeks ago on what would have been Dad’s seventy-fourth birthday. In the soft breeze, the leaves are waving back at me like little hands. I lie down in the dirt and look up at the branches, fighting back tears.

  “The river trip’s tomorrow,” I sob out loud. “Should we go?” I’m not blubbering to the tree, exactly, but to Dad, and it seems not unreasonable to hope he might be able to hear me, and then it is not a stretch to discern what he might be saying back. You’re doing the right thing. You’re doing a good thing. I can almost hear his low, calm voice reminding me how important it is to let kids play outside and get dirty and not have every minute jammed up with Stuff and Things to Do.

  As surreal as it seems to be hallucinating my dead father, I don’t feel as unhinged as I did moments ago. I’m talking to Dad and he’s talking back, and just as Alan had told me in the coffee shop, it does help. When it seems like I’ve said my piece and he’s said his, I go inside to finish packing. The trip has a momentum of its own, and it’s already begun.

  River canyons in the Southwest are among the last places in the country where cellphones don’t work. The walls are too steep, the sky in between too skinny. This is a large part of the appeal—to unplug for days at a time. Unless, of course, you have a new baby and are in the grips of grief-induced postpartum anxiety. Then it’s a nervous breakdown waiting to happen.

  At the boat ramp in Mexican Hat, the river is high and silty, the color of baked beans. Just downstream, two thousand cubic feet per second of snowmelt funnels through a rapid. I look at Maisy, dozing in her car seat under the shade of our umbrella, and try not to hyperventilate. I see the brown river. I smell the damp, sweet willows on the banks, I hear the rush of rapids. I taste fear, sharp in my mouth, and eggs from breakfast. I feel the sun on my shoulders. I am here. I am. Then Steve pushes off and the river catches the raft and pulls us out of the eddy and into the canyon.

  Eddies are pockets of calm water surrounded by moving current; they form when an upstream obstacle like a boulder or a logjam blocks the downstream flow. On higher, faster-moving rivers, the boundary between the main current and an eddy is often strong and clearly visible, a sloshing, foaming pleat, on the inside of which is flatwater that curls upstream like a gentle whirlpool. It takes effort and will to punch through these eddy lines and reach the calmer water. This is called eddying out. Sometimes, though, you may blunder into an eddy by accident, suddenly stalled and moving in the opposite direction from where you’re trying to go.

  I have paddled pushy rivers where the current roars along like a freeway at rush hour and the eddies are practically nonexistent, and quieter rivers where the eddies are tranquil pools. I have watched as the seam of conflicting currents flipped a friend’s kayak in an instant. Sometimes you long to be in the eddy so you can catch your breath and rest. Other times you are stuck in the vortex, trying to break loose.

  * * *

  —

  We make our first night’s camp on a grassy bench above a wide beach. Before dinner, I climb to a small knoll above camp to test the satellite phone. I dial Mom’s number and wait. The screen flashes the same spinning icon, trying to connect. I look down on our tents, pitched in a line well back from the water’s edge; I can’t see them, but I can hear them—kids’ happy voices rising above the rush of the river. I study the phone. Nothing.

  Above me rise two-hundred-foot limestone cliffs, part of a geological formation that was deposited three hundred million years ago when the riverbed was a shallow sea. The canyon walls are too tight to let a signal in. The phone doesn’t work. If we need to get out in a rush, we’ll have to row fifty miles downstream to the closest road.

  I repack the phone in its case and follow the faint trail back to camp. One of our friends is baking lasagna in a cast-iron Dutch oven, another is playing guitar, and Steve’s drinking a beer. It’s a scene so benign, I know it must be true.

  Morning brings the relief of sunrise, of survival. The river is still brown and fast, thick with sediment, but my worries have begun to fade. Cut off from real life and the incessant stream of bad news, of people I know and millions I don’t know dying of cancer, I can finally let go of my fears.

  For five days, we row the turbid water downstream, our bare feet on sunbaked mud that has cracked into slabs like pieces of a puzzle too big to decipher. Above us, the canyon walls have been varnished by millions of years of wind and rain and sun. Each layer of rock corresponds to a different epoch—youngest upon oldest—giving the impression that we are looking back in time, seeing the past exposed in every crack and fissure and flake.

  PHOTO: KATIE ARNOLD

  Maisy and Pippa, San Juan River, 2011

  We know this canyon so well, but it’s never the same river twice. The water chugs on, draining from its source high in the San Juan Mountains, two hundred miles upstream. So much has changed since our first float. Each trip marks time. We’re older, the girls are older. The water appears infinite, unstoppable, but this, too, is a false constancy. Someday in the future, the San Juan will not be a river, but a dry bed. I know this, but I don’t believe it, not complet
ely. We drift with the current, at its pace, hearing the canyon wrens warbling our passing, feeling the hot air waft down on the wind, and I remember how it feels to be happy and filled with hope, in spite of the unknowns, or maybe because of them.

  * * *

  —

  A year before Pippa was born, I’d gone back to Yosemite on assignment to write a profile about climber and BASE jumper Dean Potter. In the two years since I first met him with Steph Davis, he’d gained notoriety. He’d used a bow and arrow to shoot a rope over Delicate Arch, the famed Utah landmark, and climbed it, rogue, at first light. He BASE-jumped off cliffs with a parachute rigged to his back and walked “highlines,” tightropes rigged hundreds of feet off the ground, between rocky spires, sometimes without a safety harness. If he fell, he’d have to catch the line with his hands and pull himself back onto it; if he missed, he’d almost certainly die.

  That week in Yosemite, I camped out on the floor of a shack belonging to one of Dean’s climbing buddies and tagged along with him to his favorite climbing routes and jumps. BASE jumping is illegal in the national park, but Dean and his friends jumped at sunset, when they were less likely to be spotted by rangers. He called his risky pursuits “the dark arts” and told me they were a conduit to a heightened state of awareness. He said he felt most alive on this fine line between life and death, where there was little margin for error. But he didn’t want to die doing these things. He wanted what all adventurers want: to live, so he could keep doing them.

  In my free time, I ran alone through Yosemite Valley; the Merced River glittered in the midday sun, and El Capitan and Half Dome rose up on either side. The trails were soft with pine needles, and my feet made no sound. In the hushed forest, I became acutely aware not just of my surroundings but of running itself: fast, full of awe and strength and possibility, something more to me than sport. Maybe, like writing, like Dean’s climbing and flying, it was a way of being awake in the world. The notion was there in a flash, and then it was gone. Some things you can’t hold on to, like my long-ago helium balloon. You just hope they come back.

  On my last day in the park, I stopped at the Mariposa Grove of three-thousand-year-old sequoias. The trees were so old and huge, I could feel life radiating from their massive trunks, the steady, ineffable pulse of time. They were the largest living creatures on earth, anchored to this exact spot for millennia. It seemed disrespectful to run, so I slowed to a walk, moving my fingers across their gnarled bark, their living skin, aware that I’d stumbled into something lasting and almost holy, the thin edge where time slows and then expands and all your senses fire in unison. It was here, Dean had told me, that his mind stopped its relentless, pesky spinning—“brain-rattles,” Dad called them in his letter—and the world with all its fears went quiet.

  It was the summer solstice, and the full moon was rising in my rearview mirror like a ripe apricot. Summer had begun, but something else, too: the conviction that anything is possible—huge, audacious, unfathomable things—when you live on your own thin edge.

  PHOTO: DAVID L. ARNOLD

  Man on a tightrope, early ’60s

  * * *

  —

  By our fourth day, the San Juan is a different river: wide, slow, and lazy, all the urgency drained out of it. We’ve cleared Government, the last Class III rapid, and now the river has nowhere to go except to Lake Powell and Glen Canyon Dam, twenty miles downstream. The river is quieter, no longer rushing whitewater but a low, steady swish. It’s the sound of time passing, of land forming and disintegrating, of a world in constant motion.

  Everything is simpler on the river: Keep the kids safe, don’t get too much sun, take off your watch and live by the light. My cotton sundress is filthy with mud and marshmallow residue, and I’ve stopped worrying about getting out of the canyon alive. Now I don’t want to leave. The river isn’t the threat, after all. It’s the cure, nature’s antidepressant, better than the unopened bottle of Xanax in my bag.

  On our last night, we set up our camp chairs in a circle on a beach. The stars come out like a shaker of salt tossed into the night sky. Kids streak along the sand, waving glow sticks. A sliver moon hangs above the canyon rim in the hood of darkness. I feel Dad here, too, his familiar deep voice drifting on the down-canyon breeze. Well done, old girl.

  In a few months, I’ll turn forty, but here between the walls, my hair caked with silt and my shoulders freckled from the sun, I feel young for the first time all year. I think of people my age who want bigger, more beautiful houses, high heels, new haircuts, the best schools. I just want this: to move my body until it’s tired and dirty and write stories and sleep outside and love my girls and Steve as long and hard as possible. I know this as clearly as I know there’s no way of knowing anything, really. I’ll have to fling myself forward, with equal parts conviction and ease, just like the river.

  If I’m going to die, I want to live.

  15

  Resolve

  PHOTO: DAVID L. ARNOLD

  Crawling over the Fodderstack finish line, 1982

  It’s the last day of December. The year is over, and somehow I’m still alive. Maisy turned one and weaned herself, learned to walk. All the first anniversaries of Dad’s illness arrived and passed. I’ve endured the hypochondria and loneliness, the moments of pure lunacy, the teething and tantrums, the bewildering fatigue, the hammering headaches and night sweats and the certainty of imminent death. I’ve eddied out, in writing and life, swirled in endless panicky circles in my mind. I’ve run up mountains and floated rivers and mourned my father. I’ve felt all the elation and terror of being human on this planet.

  None of the things I thought would kill me have killed me yet. With this realization comes an inkling of something familiar and pleasant but very, very faint. Optimism.

  That night, after Steve and the girls have gone to bed, I sit in front of the woodstove in the half-darkened living room, listening to Dad’s favorite K.D. Lang CD. I haven’t taken it out of the stereo since I brought it home three weeks after he died. In two hours, it will be a new year, the second without him.

  Helpless, helpless, helpless, K.D. and I sing plaintively. But I haven’t been helpless. Isn’t that what the past year has taught me? That I knew what I needed: mountains and rivers and motion and love. That I asked for help and accepted it and that I also helped myself.

  I pull out my notebook, and at the top of a blank page I write, “2012 New Year’s Resolutions.” Suck the pen tip, trying to dredge up my old ambition. A memory floats out of the cobwebs of my brain, the shape of something I once wanted, and maybe still do: to be bold and adventurous, and wild every day.

  I think for a moment and write, “Train for and run a 50K ultramarathon.”

  Ultrarunning is defined as any distance over a standard 26.2-mile marathon. The “shortest” ultramarathon is fifty kilometers; from there, race distances typically increase to fifty miles, a hundred kilometers, and a hundred miles. Participation in ultrarunning has quadrupled in the past ten years, with more than eighty thousand Americans competing in more than twelve hundred ultra trail races each year, including the notoriously brutal Hardrock 100 and Western States 100-Mile Endurance Run, events that make obstacle races and road marathons seem like warm-up runs.

  Many ultrarunners describe their transition to ultra distances as coming out of nowhere: Dean Karnazes ran thirty miles to Half Moon Bay on his thirtieth birthday; the vegan ultra athlete Rich Roll, overweight and unhappy on the verge of turning forty, went out for a spontaneous twenty-four-mile jog. The urge to push your body beyond its known physical limits doesn’t originate from rational thought. It’s too unruly to fathom. If you pondered it logically, you would see it for what it is: pretty much insane. Rather, it arises from within, from the voice in your unconscious that knows that you long for bigness and are capable of achieving it, even if you haven’t the fo
ggiest idea how.

  I’ve been making New Year’s resolutions for years, mostly unsuccessfully. Sometimes I focused on ordinary and slightly embarrassing personal habits I ought to have mastered ages ago, like flossing every day and not biting my fingernails. Other years I went for lofty personal mantras—don’t micromanage my career so much!—that I could never quite figure out how to execute. Sometimes I chose single words (“true!”), which buoyed me in the beginning of the year but were soon overshadowed by more mundane mantras like “What’s for breakfast, Mama?” I was not in the business, however, of setting audacious, pit-in-the-stomach objectives that required concrete steps to achieve.

  Two months ago, I turned forty. I was pregnant or breastfeeding, and sometimes both, for four years straight. For the past twelve months, I’ve been terrified of my own body, certain I was dying. Why on earth would I want to run long distances alone through the wilderness?

  But the unconscious mind isn’t linear. It doesn’t travel neatly from A to B to C. It circles and spins, doubles back, detours and switchbacks and jumps ahead—months, decades, lifetimes even. I hadn’t thought about Dean Karnazes in years. The idea came out of nowhere—my own disorienting, eddied-out nowhere.

  * * *

  —

  One of the ideas of Buddhism is that between the polarities in your life, there is an unseen third thing, a way to sidestep the suffering and contention. Natalie had mentioned this in passing on our hikes, but I always felt like I was listening to her with cotton stuffed into my ears. I’d hear her words, but I couldn’t make sense of them. She cheerfully admitted that, most of the time, she couldn’t, either. “If I had sixty more years, I still would hardly know anything,” she sometimes said.