by Alice Walker
Her pens as well seemed to go empty on her. An unusual number of them, though practically brand new, refused to scratch more than a few pale lines. No matter that she banged them in frustration on the desktop. Her eyes dimmed. Nor could her new reading glasses often be found. Was it the end? she thought. Or what?
And so her friends—the ones in her psyche and the ones sitting around her dining table—said: You must find a real river somewhere in the world—forget the dry one in your dreams—to travel down. They suggested one of the deepest, swiftest, most challenging of all: the Colorado.
She went. Taking just her light duffel of hiking and sleeping gear, mosquito repellant, aspirin, and a walking stick a friend had carved from a twig, lovely in its lightness and the color of dried hemp, she started on this journey. They had told her the river was wide. They had told her it was cold and deep. They had told her it roared through the Grand Canyon like a locomotive. They had forgotten to mention there were rapids. And so, the night before the start of the river run, in a motel room not far from the Grand Canyon’s rim, reading at last the material that had been sent to her by the able women who would steer her boat and the boats of the nine other women journeying also, she sat bolt upright in bed, startling her companion, a friend of many kind and unkind years. Merde, she said (though she was not French or of that ancestry); there are rapids involved!
Not small, barely perceptible ripples on the river, but mighty upheavals of the river itself. The river, in fact, with its twenty- and thirty-foot waves, roiling beneath their tiny wooden dories, would attempt, daily, to dislodge them. She, having read about this, barely slept. And yet, it did not occur to her to turn back.
When she did sleep, for a few blissful minutes just before dawn, at which time they were to leave the motel, she dreamed she was in a high-rise building, living there, and that she was informed it was time for the water to rise. She thought this meant the water would rise perhaps to the level of the gutter outside the front door. But no, a cheerful dark woman waved from the control room of the global water department, high above her own dwelling, and, pulling a lever, instigated a flow of dark water, so dark a water it resembled oil, and all the floors beneath her were soon submerged. And then her own flat was flooded. She wondered of course if she would drown. But apparently not: By some fate she seemed to swim well in oil and water and she marveled that in the world of nondream these two were said not to mix.
She whispered her dream to her buddy Avoa. Who yawned, smiled at her, and said: Hmmm. Oil and water. Both. Sounds refreshing and rich. Before disappearing into the shower. Kate lay abed a few moments longer, musing.
Her lover, Yolo, had watched her leave. A compact, muscular woman with good skin and creamy white teeth, a woman no longer sure there was a path through life or how indeed to follow one if there was. He’d folded her in his arms, yawning as he stretched her slightly backward. It was already over between them. Both of them felt it. Her journey now was to be with women. Only women. Because of women. And partly because she had seemed to feel, and to wonder aloud, about the possibility that only women, these days, dreamed of rivers, and were alarmed that they were dry.
He had no such dreams, certainly. And if he had them, he did not recall them on rising. Nor could he fathom why this should be so. In fact, dreams, the world of dreams, did not exist for him as it existed for her. And unlike her, he did not sit before the dwindling fire of their hearth wondering, pondering, nagging the question really, What does this mean?
And she left. He watched the green shuttle stop, the driver lift in her gear, her sleep-creased face appear in a window. Then with a wave, a rapping of her stick against the pane, she was gone. He would have driven her to the airport had she wanted it. But no, she had wanted to leave her house heading directly into her journey. No long cuddles near the ticket counter, no second thoughts about whether they would be all right. It was like her to want it this way. No fuss. She would meet up with Avoa on the way, perhaps in Phoenix, and then the two of them would be off, as they seemed to manage to do now just about every year.
And feeling somewhat abandoned, left, he indulged his critical mind: She was not much of a housekeeper. He thought this while picking up one of his socks he’d discarded near the door. And grimaced at the inner critic. See, he said aloud, what do you know? He went inside the house, and while making a cup of coffee noticed a cobweb already beginning to attach itself to his cup. It made him laugh. To him, this was the way of Life. Turn your back for only a moment while the water boils and you are lost in the scent of things to come, and Life puts out a tentacle to grab some part of you. Even the cup from which you prepare to drink is already being pulled if only so slightly back to the ground. A ground that moves, changes, endlessly, but is, paradoxically, always the same. Or it had been the same until, as the old ones used to say, here lately. These “old ones” were, generally speaking, her old ones, but she shared them with him; a quaintness of expression, a drollness of thought, that she seemed to garner directly from her dreams. She might awake laughing anytime whether day or night and expose him to frolicsome goings-on, pithy sayings, the oddest bon mot from perhaps a century or so ago. Sometimes he’d cry: “I don’t get it.” And she’d laugh harder and say: “Well, I guess you’d just have to have been there!”
He would miss her. He already did so. Nothing to do, immediately, but go back to bed. To burrow under a comforter still warm from her body, still fragrant with her always fresh, slightly spicy scent. In a room in which there were always flowers, and candles, and a feel of the music that she so often played. Haydn and Beethoven, of course, and also the Beatles, Robbie Robertson and Red Road, and always and for endless hours, Sade and Al Green. Because they know how to love! she cried.
Drifting off into a minor squall of despair, an eddy of disappointment, and while hugging her pillow with the mixed emotions of loss, lust, and resentment, he fell asleep. And began immediately to dream. There is a path just ahead of him. Now he sees a large brown foot, hesitant, upon it. A green hobbitlike creature sits on its big toe, riding it as if it were a pony. The toe turns into a side trail. The trail disappears in the brush. The hobbit creature vanishes from sight, his green eyes, like his green leafy cap, sparkling. You are lost, my boy, the spirit being says.
Wait! he calls. Which way to the river?
His own shout, and the desperation with which he calls out, awakens him. He lies cradling her pillow, suddenly knowing it isn’t over between them. That it will now never be, no matter that they may soon part. He has somehow joined her journey.
Hallelujah, he shouts, flinging aside the comforter, kicking away the covering quilt, giving her pillow a loud smack of a kiss, and heading jubilantly for the shower.
It blesses him. Never before, he feels, has he understood water. It cascades down his tight, healthy skin, and covers him, where the sun falls, with crystal beads of light. It astonishes him that in its purity, in its speed in covering his body, it has no scent. He smells only himself, earthy, rich, a friendly scent, he thinks, bemused, and the soap he holds, which is lemony. Also earthy, he thinks.
He thinks of how they met. She’d pursued him. After seeing one of his paintings of the desert. How can it move me so, she’d cried, gazing in rapture at a large canvas on which there was little other than space, sky, brown earth, and a large cactus. It is so empty!
Because emptiness, space, is our true home? he’d replied, amused by her enthusiasm, and that she’d called in the middle of the night to again pose the question.
It is, isn’t it? she’d said, after a long pause. And the blue of your sky! she said.
He’d turned over in bed, happy not to have a wife beside him to disturb, and lit a cigarette. The habit of smoking (terrible, dumber than stupid, he knew) had taught him about emptiness, the need to fill internal space, the huge internal space existing within all of us, with Something. He was grateful he could smoke. Though he knew there were women who dismissed him the instant they saw him light up, because t
hey could not imagine kissing him.
Do you know what O’Keeffe says about blue? he asked her, blowing out a cloud of smoke, warming to her voice, though he did not remember her face clearly from the opening night’s exhibition.
What?
That it is the color that will remain after everything is destroyed.
He could feel her thinking. Savoring this idea. Her mind carrying her into the far reaches of the heavens, of space, long after there was no more earth.
But if we’re not here to see it, she finally asked, will it still be blue?
He laughed, and asked her where she lived.
He recognized her immediately when he saw her again. And what he recognized was her energy, which seemed to precede her. As if her spirit were thrusting itself forward, into the unknown; dazzled, charmed, challenged, hopeful, happy to be energized by the mysterious, loving the adrenaline rush of surprise.
She was some years older than him and made no pretense of being younger. Her hair was graying; she would tell him later she was the sort who forgot to dye it, even when she tried to remember. She also felt humiliated to be eradicating some part of her hard-won existence. Don’t people who try to look younger miss part of their lives? she queried, seriously. She also held a superstition she didn’t tell him: that if you lied about your age, the number of years you took off were subtracted by the Universe. That’s why so many people died sooner than they thought they would. She had her adequate cushion of estrogen fat on tummy and hips; her full breasts swung lower than ever before; her eyes sparkled to find herself still vitally alive. An artist who was passionately enchanted by the real, however odd or singular it might be, he felt, almost at once, a sense of home. They stood, at that first meeting, simply measuring each other with their eyes. They were nearly equal in height. He thought, immediately, of what a boon that would be for kissing. If, in fact, she deigned to kiss a smoker. He thought it might prove a boon for other things. But he was modest, and tried, unsuccessfully, not to go there.
She offered him tea. And a peach that seemed to materialize, like a hare from a hat, out of the green velvet sleeve of her embroidered shirt.
And it had begun.
We met, really, she would tell friends later, laughing, over nothing. Over emptiness. Space. I couldn’t believe how much of it he managed to get into his paintings, or how at home I felt in it.
He’d smiled to hear her describe it.
The moment I stood in front of any one of his paintings, she elaborated, my bird nature became activated. I felt I could fly!
Her bird nature? Where had he been, and with whom had he been, not to know there were people, women, who talked this way?
She must be New Age, he’d thought at first, shuddering.
River Run
Perhaps on the first day of any river travel one is apprehensive, one feels fear. She sat with her African-Eurasian friend Avoa, deep in the boat, not liking the heaviness of the life preserver, poppy orange, around her neck. The river, at the place they put on, was placid. Nonetheless she could feel its power in the swiftness with which the vehicles that brought their gear disappeared, as did, very soon, the flat and gravelly shore.
Large birds flew ahead of them toward the canyons, wheeling as they appeared and disappeared from view. Tentatively she placed a hand in the water. Icy cold. While overhead the sun rose higher in the sky, already warm, almost hot.
They were to be on the river nearly three weeks, long enough to traverse its entire length. Who would she be at the end of this journey?
Why are you going? her therapist had asked.
And she had sat looking behind her therapist’s head, scanning the posters of horses on the wall, and replied:
I cannot believe my dry river, that we have been discussing for months, and that is inside me, is unconnected to a wet one somewhere on the earth. I am being called, she said.
But the Colorado? Isn’t it man-made?
In the beginning, no, she said, laughing to think of early man creating so mysterious and powerful a thing as a river. It is the river after all that carved the Grand Canyon.
But now, pursued the therapist, isn’t it controlled by dams?
Controlled? I think not. Regulated? Maybe. Though she did not know this either. She admitted to being the kind of traveler who didn’t prepare much before taking off. She’d found something to enjoy in her own ignorance. Oh, that’s who’s in that tomb! That’s why they wear waist beads! Oh, now I understand all those thick dark garments in this heat. It’s like carrying your own shadow and your shade! In the back of her mind she was already wondering if she would learn anything about how the Colorado’s water managed to fill the bathtubs and swimming pools in Los Angeles. How was that possible? And what happens to a river—even a man-enhanced one—that flows continuously to a desert?
On the fourth day, and after experiencing her first rapids—her boat pitched higher than a house—she became ill. As the boat pitched and plunged down the river she felt herself slipping into the surrealness of a life lived now in a tiny bobbing space, very narrow, within the steep reddish canyon walls. Rushing madly, irresistibly onward, no stopping it. Yet at the end of each day they did stop. And on the evening of this particular day they stopped longer than usual to confer with her. Her temperature was 104. Did she wish to be evacuated? They could manage somehow to get a helicopter for her. Did she wish to go home?
The savage rushing of the river seemed to be inside her head, inside her body. Even while the oarswomen, their guides, were speaking to her, she had the impression she couldn’t quite hear them because of the roar. Not of the river that did indeed roar, just behind them, close to the simple shelter they’d made for her, but because of an internal roar as of the sound of a massive accumulation of words, spoken all at once, but collected over a lifetime, now trying to leave her body. As they rose to her lips, and in response to the question: Do you want to go home? she leaned over a patch of yellow grass near her elbow and threw up.
All the words from decades of her life filled her throat. Words she had said or had imagined saying or had swallowed before saying to her father, dead these many years. All the words to her mother. To her husbands. Children. Lovers. The words shouted back at the television set, spreading its virus of mental confusion.
Once begun, the retching went on and on. She would stop, gasping for breath, rest a minute, and be off again. Draining her body of precious fluid, alarming Avoa and the oarswomen. Soon, exhausted, she was done.
No, she had said weakly, I don’t want to go home. I’ll be all right now.
Avoa’s eyes were huge. Kate realized she must look a fright. She took the electrolyted water offered her, and later on, a tepid broth.
Really, she said, attempting to smile. I’ll be fine.
All the women looked skeptical, but helped Avoa set up a proper camp.
He Wondered
He wondered, wandering about the house, how she knew what to throw out and what to keep. Her house had a bare look. There was nothing extra. Yet she was one of those people who seemed to attract gifts and to buy them for herself. Nothing, however, stuck for long.
The rug rolled up by the door, for instance. A rug given her by a friend from Yugoslavia, when the people still had a country and enough of their wits about them to make traditional handmade rugs. A rug she’d loved for years. But now did not.
How did this happen?
He was the kind of person who kept things forever. His smaller house, a few blocks from hers, was filled with clutter. Each year for Kwanza she’d given him the same present: a book called Clear Your Clutter with Feng Shui. Each year he read it from start to finish. Each year he agreed with everything its author said—from the necessity of clearing one’s front entrance, in order that a cleaner, more brisk energy might sweep through one’s life—to the need to completely void and scrub out the colon, so that fresh life could sweep through the body. Think of all the old shit everyone’s carrying around! she might say, raising her ey
ebrows in concern.
They might lie on the sofa—a large, overstuffed one built for two, their feet touching. Each reading silently. He might feel her eyes on him as he read, sometimes marking a page by turning back a corner. She might smile knowingly, hopefully. He might feel a surge of determination. Indeed, reading of all the ill effects of clutter—procrastination, lost items, fuzzy thinking—he might imagine his house already clutter-free.
And then he would return to his house and freshly see his clutter. The exercise bike that was covered in dust, the back issues of Prevention and Utne Reader resting beside the door. Bundles of clothes almost on their way to Goodwill. Chipped dishes. He did not use these things anymore, and yet, the thought of letting them go made him sad. He felt they represented times in his life he could not recall without their presence. They represented stories.
For had he not bought the exercise bike when he was in love with a leggy Swede and wanted to impress her with his fitness? Without the dusty machine to remind him, these days he’d never think of her. And that time too had been a real and vivid part of his life. At least at the time. And when he’d suddenly realized his body was changing. Aging. Perhaps needing supplements and vitamins, and he’d subscribed to Prevention. And then not long after had felt his disconnection from “the news” and the voices of “the media,” and he’d subscribed to Utne Reader. And for a time had read it cover to cover every month. He was the only man he knew who owned a twelve-year-tall stack of Ms. magazine. The very first issue, in the early seventies, with a bluish painting of Shakti, her seven or so arms spinning, had caught his attention. He’d stood at a newsstand in New York City, furtively reading the thoughts of women, realizing he’d never known a thing about women his whole life. Looking back to that moment, he could not imagine becoming the man in Kate’s bed without that experience.