Can you all hear me all right?
Everybody hear me in the back?
OK, welcome to the second reading and the Voices
of the American West series, sponsored
by the English Department and the Creative Writing Program.
We're pleased you could be here.
Books by Annick Smith and William Kittredge
are available for sale in the hallway after the reading.
I'm sure they're both here.
Both would be pleased to sign books for you.
Tomorrow night in this auditorium at 8:00,
the Chinese poet Bei Dao will be reading.
The next reading on the Voices of the American West series
will be next Tuesday, a week from tonight,
in this auditorium.
That's March 9th, 8:00 PM.
Luis Alberto Urrea, the author of Across the Wire,
By the Lake of Sleeping Children, Nobody's Son,
and most recently, Wandering Child--
I'm sorry, Wandering Time will be reading.
Our reader tonight, Annick Smith, was born in Paris,
raised in the Chicago area, and has lived in Montana
most of her adult life, much of her adult life at least.
She is the author of Homestead and Big Bluestem:
A Journey into the Tallgrass.
That is in reference to The Nature Conservancy's Tallgrass
Prairie Preserve in Oklahoma.
She has published essays.
She has published some fiction.
She's working on fiction now.
She was a co-producer of A River Runs
Through It, the film, and executive producer of the film
Heartland.
She co-edited, with William Kittredge, The Last Best Place:
A Montana Anthology.
She has been editor, school teacher, filmmaker, mother,
not necessarily in that order.
She raised four sons.
Annick's work is clear, passionate, and muscular.
She writes about fishing, and cowboying, and pop-folk culture.
But most of all, she writes about the land, the sweep
and feel of it, and the color of it,
and the strength of many of its people.
She has just returned to us from Chile and other areas
in South America.
She describes herself as Winter's whiter-haired child
in love with this blue world.
One of my students in a paper described her work
as rich with wine, garlic, bluegrass, and wildflowers.
It gives me great pleasure to introduce Annick Smith.
[APPLAUSE]
I'm carrying my collected oeuvre.
Whoever wrote that, thank you.
That's very sweet.
I'm going to read you bits and pieces, sort
of a travelogue of my life or what I've been working on
for the last several years.
And so I hope you stay with me a bit here, a bit there,
something personal, something from traveling,
something high, something low.
I'll start by introducing you to me in the first published essay,
personal essay I ever wrote called
Homestead, which became the title piece for my collection.
"The weathered log buildings on a hillside with yellow grass
would own me.
From my first sight of the place, I was hooked.
I started to invent a new life.
Some country family lived in the mud-chinked house with sun
glinting off its tin roof, but the ranch
seemed abandoned, no sounds except the humming
of yellow jackets, dry grass rustling as we passed.
A few leghorns pecked at the last grasshoppers of summer.
Home.
If I lived here, who would I be?
I imagined a sturdy woman with skin lined and cracked
as the hewn logs.
She would be chopping kindling on the hard-packed dirt
outside the kitchen door.
Her man drove a John Deere tractor along ditch banks
thick with sedge, timothy, and high green tufts
of orchard grass.
Her horseback children raced across the upper meadows.
My husband was a college professor.
I was a city-bred wife.
Could this ever be our family?
In their youth, like so many other pilgrim artists,
my Jewish parents had left Hungary for the culture of exile
in 1920s Paris.
At the apex of the Great Depression,
before Hitler and his collaborators
claimed most of Europe, they took the boat for the United
States and settled in Chicago.
I grew up without an extended family,
for most of my great aunts, uncles,
and cousins, those who stuck to the homeland, had disappeared.
Some escaped, some ended in the ovens of Auschwitz.
Mobility was the lesson.
Do not tie yourself to one place.
Montparnasse is where I was born.
Chicago was the dwelling of my childhood,
and after I married David Smith at 19, too young,
we lived in Seattle for six years
until he was offered a job teaching English
at the University of Montana.
In 1964, when Dave and I came to Missoula with our first two
boys, friends in Seattle made bets about how long
we would stay.
They were not betting against Dave.
He had grown up in a small Minnesota town
and liked to fish and hunt and keep to himself.
But me, I shopped for teas, rice wine, and spices
whose names I could not pronounce.
Home was streets full of strangers,
green leafy vegetables thrown away in the rain-filled gutters.
The chickens for sale in flyblown markets
were alive and squawking.
Montana, said one friend, I give you a year, maybe two.
In our private mythology, I was the grasshopper,
and everyone knows a grasshopper will never turn into an ant.
30 years later, David is dead, all four boys
are grown and gone away from Missoula,
and I am still living out back in Montana.
I am that woman chopping her wood."
although now I bought a propane furnace.
I'm going to read this book.
This big, fat, heavy thing is a book about the Tallgrass Prairie
in Oklahoma.
And I was commissioned to write this book.
Actually, somebody called Bill Kittredge,
who I live with and have lived with for 20 years, and said--
asked him if he would write the book.
And he said no, but I think Annick Smith might be available.
And then they called me.
And I said, well, I don't know anything about Oklahoma.
I never even thought about going to Oklahoma.
And they said, well, think about it.
And so I did.
And I talked to my oldest son, who
was the realist in the family.
He's a real estate broker, and he lives quite well.
And I said I don't think I want to do this book.
And he said, well, mom, what else do you have going?
And there was no answer to that one.
So I spent the next three years writing this book,
and I'm glad I did.
Begin with grass.
It starts with an epigraph from Walt Whitman.
"I believe a leaf of grass is no less than the journeywork
of the stars.
My first sight of the Osage grasslands is in late August
when seedheads droop heavy and the lush green of summer
has begun its fade to colors more earthen.
The hot, humid air reminds me of the Midwest,
where I was raised in Chicago, the prairie city
with no prairie in sight.
Chicago, where the fog creeps in on little cat's feet,
was celebrated by the poet Carl Sandburg, who also celebrated
the much older songs of grass.
"The prairie sings to me in the forenoon,"
wrote Sandburg, "And I know in the night,
I rest easy in the prairie arms on the prairie heart."
Sandburg's Illinois and mine was tall grass once,
a broad, open stretch of big bluestem
like the Oklahoma prairies of Osage County.
Osage does not have the rich, deep, tillable soil of Illinois.
It grows cattle, not corn.
And beneath its skin of limestone and sandstone
lie reservoirs of oil and gas.
Driving the 16 miles of gravel road
from Pawhuska to the Chapman Barnard
ranch, headquarters of the Tallgrass preserve,
I feel spooked.
I am a stranger in a land I have never seen,
know nothing about, and as bewitched and bewildered
as the pioneer women who arrived on the Kansas and Oklahoma
frontiers to claim Indian lands more than a century before.
"Lost out here on this lonely prairie--"
wailed Martha Lick Wooden on a June night in 19--
in 1878.
Martha's husband had missed the wagon trail to their Kansas
homestead, and the howls of coyotes
seemed to her like wild hyenas, wild dogs laughing
at the imbeciles who could not find their way
in a wilderness of grass.
It was such a new world, reaching to the far horizon
without a break of tree or chimney stack.
Just sky and grass and grass and sky.
Lydia Murphy Toothaker said, recalling her first night
on the prairie in 1859, "The hush was so loud."
Lillie Marcks was seven when she rode into the grasslands.
As we drove on the prairie, mother and I
could hardly stay in the wagon.
The wildflowers covered the prairies in a riot of colors,
like a beautiful rug, how we longed to gather some.
The Oklahoma prairies that run on all sides of my rented Mazda
partake of the West, where I have lived in Montana
for more than 30 years.
Broad horizons where grass meets sky are Western.
I feel at home in windy, blue spaces.
But this is not the dry, light high plains
of the mountain meadow of my homestead ranch swept
by cool breezes even in the dog days of August.
This is borderland where West begins,
always the hunting grounds of nomads, a grazer's paradise.
The Osage prairies once thronged with bison and elk, antelope,
and prairie chickens.
Now, many Native animals have been hunted out, replaced
with cattle and horses.
I know there are trails in the deep grass made
by Indians, explorers, ranchers, and oilmen.
And if I look closely, I would notice
that the land is littered with decaying signs of their industry
and settlement.
But I am overwhelmed with undulating prairies
that sweep to every horizon.
To my newcomer's eye, the immense landscape
shows few signs of habitation.
I see only grass, oaks, and sky.
The grass swallows every artifact.
Urban civilizations from their origins along the Euphrates
have taken hold around places where agriculture and irrigation
offered stable sources of food or at the crossing
of major trade routes, where the land is so central people can
only travel through it, dig holes into it,
or trail their herds over it, the landscape
remains more or less intact.
This is the prairie, where soil is so thin and rocky it
could not be plowed and farmed.
So this is the prairie that survives.
When I stopped my car along the gravel road,
I catch scents of musk and dust and rotting stems
and electric charge of ozone.
The Oklahoma air is warm, moist, and oppressive.
Southern.
All I see is grass and more grass, nothing but grass,
which, when I step into it, envelops me.
Claustrophobia panics me, and I push the course,
enclosing leaves away from my face.
I cannot anchor myself to the soil at my feet or the wind
at my back through connections of memory or experience.
I feel the sky descending.
In the fall of 1832, just back from a long sojourn in Europe,
Washington Irving set out on an expedition
to see the wild prairie of Indian territory.
He was anxious to reroute himself
in the American experience.
And what could be more American than the Western frontier?
In a tour of the prairies, Irving describes what he saw.
He was standing on land not far from where
I stood, watching the grasses shake their heads
in the rustle before a storm.
"To one unaccustomed to it, there
is something inexpressibly lonely in the solitude
of a prairie," said--
he said.
"The loneliness of a forest seems nothing to it.
There, the view is shut in by trees,
and the imagination is left free to picture
some livelier scene beyond.
But here, we have an immense extent of landscape
without a sign of human existence.
We have the consciousness of being far,
far beyond the bounds of human habitation.
We feel as if moving in the midst of a desert world."
The green prairies all around me spoke of a fecundity no desert
ever has.
Yet, in an emotional sense, Irving was right.
A land seems desolate if you know
nothing about its geology, botany, and biology,
know no histories or stories.
Even in my ignorance, I knew this place, like every place,
holds a long history of habitation
by birds, insects, small and large mammals, including humans.
That this prairie story is underpinned
by the tall grasses and flowering plants,
the roots beneath my feet.
If I could become familiar with the prairie I stood upon,
the meadows and gullies, dark peninsulas of post oaks
and blackjack oaks, the trickle of
streams over outcropped limestone,
I would not be lonely.
The red-tailed hawk riding air currents is not lonely,
nor the spider spinning its gossamer.
To know the stories of this place, I must begin with grass.
To understand grass, I will have to descend to its roots
and beneath roots to soil and bedrock.
First, as always, is the sky.
"I believe a leaf of grass is no less than the journey-work
of the stars."
wrote Walt Whitman, America's great poet of grass.
The evolution of the Tallgrass Prairie
may be thought of as beginning in stars,
in the forces that created the landforms of our continent."
And then I go on into geology and history,
and the horrible history of what happened to the Osage Indians
and to the other Indians of Oklahoma and the oil.
And now we finally kind of a rebirth, a coming
back to the land, coming back to appreciate
what nature had put there in the first place, which brings me
to my next selection.
I live on the Blackfoot River in Western Montana as most of you
know from what I wrote there and from my movies I
worked on and so on.
And that river has been in danger lately.
First, one of your companies, Phelps Dodge,
decided that it would come and join
with a much smaller Colorado company called Canyon Resources
and build a gigantic heap leach gold
mine at the headwaters of the Blackfoot River.
By gigantic, I mean gigantic.
It would have a pit larger than the famous pit in Butte
where they've been mining copper for 100 years.
It would pile 200ft of waste rock
up along a mile along the Blackfoot, 200ft high.
This was major industrial development
in a place that is pristine right now.
Nothing there but a few ranchers, herds of elk, so on.
So a lot of people have been very alarmed by this, put up
a lot of noisy screeching and hollering, and anything
we could do through environmental organizations
to try and stop them.
There was, in fact, a clean water initiative
that was put up for a vote.
And it was overwhelmingly popular
until the mining lobbies and the Chamber of Commerce,
and the moneyed corporate interests in the state
extractive interests got together and spent
a lot of money on a big media campaign that
got everyone confused.
And so that vote lost by a narrow margin,
and plans were going ahead to develop this mine.
Phelps Dodge dropped out.
Gold prices are low.
Public opinion was pretty hot on this issue.
But the other company kept on.
So I was right in the midst of this, and so was Bill.
And I was trying to think, what can I, as a writer,
do that will help to save my river that I write about all
the time that has been this inspiration?
So I got a small grant, $8,000, from an anonymous donor.
And I called and wrote all the writers
I knew in Montana and some I didn't know
and got 47 people to write short pieces for a little book
that we called Headwaters, with a cover
by Russell Chatham, a very well-known Montana artist.
And we printed 6,000 copies of this little book
and gave them away free to people
up and down the Blackfoot Valley and to the state legislature.
And I have to tell you a wee story about that.
These are pretty innocuous pieces, most of them little
stories about people's connection
to land and wild rivers.
And there was one that's a short story by somebody who
was a graduate student here in this program, Kevin Canty, who's
teaching creative writing program in Montana right now.
And so Kevin wrote a little story about a man and a woman
going down the Blackfoot after having
been to the wedding of a mutual friend of theirs
who had been a mutual lover of theirs.
And so the story has got some words that are not kosher.
In fact, two bad words on one page, page 17.
[LAUGHS]
And this book was passed around to the state legislature,
and it was sitting on their desks.
And one legislator actually opened the book
and started to read it from front to back.
And he got to page 17 and was shocked out of his pants.
And so he scrawled to the Speaker of the House,
who was extremely conservative Republican.
And the Speaker confiscated all the books
and had them under lock and key with the Sergeant at Arms,
so that if you wanted to-- if you were a legislator wanted
to get your book back, you had to go to the Sergeant of Arms
and ask.
So Bill and I were wintering--
we were in Santa Barbara, I remember,
and I got a call at 8:00 in the morning,
and it was the stringer for the AP in Helena.
And he said, what do you think of them confiscating your books?
And I said, what?
Because I didn't know anything about this.
And it became kind of a cause celebre.
People wrote articles and letters to the editor,
and they were interview shows on public radio.
And suddenly, this book was hot news,
and everybody wanted one because any print
is better than no print.
And so that was a vindication.
We got rid of a whole lot of books.
And then, a month later, Kevin, who had never published
anything in The New Yorker, although he had sent them
stories several times, his agent sent them this story,
and it was published in The New Yorker,
complete with the bad words.
[LAUGHTER]
So that's the story.
This is his book.
If anyone wants to see it later on afterwards,
I'd be glad to show it to you.
I am going to read the piece that I
wrote for it, which is called--
excuse me.
Sink or Swim.
"Indian summer.
Montana rivers, you get the picture.
Sky blue waters gurgling with trout,
freckled cottonwood leaves like a yellow flotilla, kingfishers,
rose hips, purple asters, for me,
eye-popping, soul-singing joy if that river
is the big Blackfoot a few miles upstream from my house.
By late afternoon on such a day, the river
calls to me, a cathedral bell ringing, promising glory.
The air is dry, hot, and blue, and the topsoil along the bluff
is fluffy as powder.
As I walk my dogs up the Blackfoot from Whitaker Bridge,
I turn my eyes from logged-off hills to the cleft green gorge
where the snake of bright water unwinds.
I'm walking under Ponderosa pines,
trailing along reddish columns of picture puzzle bark.
The river is splattered with yellow light,
but the water runs green.
The big Blackfoot is green as the scent of rain,
green as frogs and moss and evergreen trees.
I crush pine needles under my feet,
and their perfume mingles with a sharp odor of cottonwood sap
and the trout scent of water over stones, large shower
needles of gold on my head.
These are the days of gold.
I will dream of-- dream of them during winter nights,
the cold that may pounce perhaps tomorrow like a cougar
from the self-same forest.
Betty Boop, my big-eyed shepherd dog, and little Red, part chow,
part golden retriever, race ahead
on the trail of a squirrel.
Summer tourists are gone.
Only one Jeep in the parking area.
We head for a sandy beach that cuddles between arms of stone
across from a great crack tower of red rock, the rose-pink slabs
like a Moorish castle above a tree-shaded pool.
I am sweating.
The pool is inviting.
I decide to take the last plunge of summer.
But there on my beach, stretched out
like a walrus in an aluminum lounge, is a huge, naked man.
He basks in rays of the sinking sun,
and as my dog sniffs at his toes, he raises a listless hand,
turns his head toward me, waves.
I call my dogs and flee, moving quickly
through patches of poison ivy, invasive as the nudist.
I climb over a rocky headland descend a fisherman's trail
to a peninsula of silver-tossed willows.
Betty and Red rush into the willows.
There is a thrashing noise.
A white-tailed buck leaps from the brush and into the river.
I watch him swim into the dappled current, head high,
antlers gilded with sunlight.
I laugh with delight at the pure, surprising beauty.
An osprey dives from the sky.
His bark, they are barking at a raft
with four people that is bobbing toward us
from a bend in the river.
Fishing lines extend on each side like glowing cobwebs.
"How's it going?"
I shout.
"Pretty good," says one fellow.
Gorgeous day, says a girl.
"Anyone upstream?"
I ask.
"No, I think we're the last."
Good, I think, for I know there's another swimming
hole just ahead.
My bank lies in shadows.
But on the opposite shore, a huge rock stack
catches the light, its striated face
patterned chartreuse and orange with lichens.
At its feet is a sunny, graveled beach.
This will be my perfect private island.
When the raft is out of sight, I strip off my shorts and t-shirt,
leaving on my underpants and Tevas,
and begin to ford the river ankle deep.
The water is not too cold, but as I wade to my thighs,
it turns icy.
I catch my breath.
This is foolish.
I should turn back.
But I plunge in.
I am a strong swimmer.
I have swum this river many days, but never in October,
never so alone, never at 60.
The current is stronger than it looks.
I kick hard, turn my arms like windmills until I find myself
in slower water.
I crawl over slick stones, aqua, maroon green,
shivering towards shore.
Although the sun still hits the great lichened rock,
and the pebbled beach holds the day's heat, I am cold,
exposed, a half-naked 60-year-old crazy woman
clutching her arms around her flabby stomach, her breasts.
My dogs have followed.
They spray me with water, wag their tails.
Going back, I'll be smarter, I think.
I will make my way upstream, then let the current carry me
to the home, ashore, to my dry clothes, to safety and warmth.
But I've forgotten that the river is low.
Slime-covered stones extend far into shallow water
before the current takes over.
I'm going crabwise again, and when
I reach the deep running water, it
doesn't ride me homeward but curves downriver
to the pool where I started my upstream journey.
I'm wounded before I get halfway across.
I kick and stroke, kick and stroke.
It seems I'm going nowhere.
My breath comes in gasps, and the quickened
beat of my heart pounds in my ears.
Fear finds me now, not fear of drowning,
but fear that my strength will fail.
I will be vulnerable as a leaf at the mercy of the river.
Pull harder, I instruct my arms.
My arms obey.
Eventually, I break through the current.
Goosebumps all over.
My long white hair plasters my face.
Water drips from my eyes like tears.
I stumble toward my clothes, the dogs frolicking and nosing
at my weak knees.
Even dressed and standing in a patch of sun,
I tremble with a knowledge of mortality.
I am older and weaker than the person I am and was,
cold to the bone.
Get moving, I tell myself.
Get your blood running.
I start walking upriver on a piney ledge toward Belmont
Creek.
My head aches.
My feet drag.
It will take half an hour before I feel halfway normal.
A mile ahead, I can see a jumble of sticks on a tall snag.
The bald eagle eyrie on goose flats.
A white-headed giant screams at me as he glides from his perch.
I want to scream back, hey, you, I'm still alive, too.
Here is what I learned from that Indian summer swim.
Take no chances when you are dealing with a river.
Stay humble.
Be prepared for the unexpected.
Don't try to buck the current alone.
The river is wider than it seems.
Respect it.
Then, both you and the clear running waters
will live another day to take care of the families that
depend on you.
Death waits amidst slime-colored stones.
Even a river is mortal."
Okey doke.
One more plunge.
Do we have time?
What time is it?
We have time?
We have time.
When we were in Peru, Bill and I were really
impressed with the Quechua religion--
with the culture that preceded the Incas
and extended into the Incas.
The Incas were very short, only a couple years,
but they were long, long years of cultures before the Incas
that the Incas kind of incorporated into their own.
And we went up to Machu Picchu, and it is more
fabulous than any postcard.
And even though it's a major tourist destination,
it is one of the great places of the world.
If you want to see a place which is a perfectly designed,
a place to live that combines the spiritual and earthly
pleasures, I couldn't think of one more beautiful
than Machu Picchu.
Of course, when the Chilean poet Pablo Neruda went up there,
he felt odd also, and he began to think
about how each one of those stones
had gotten to where it was and how
we build our cities on the backs of the people who work.
He wrote a very famous poem out of that called "Machu Picchu."
One of the things that most impressed me was our guide.
We went to several different ruins and historic places
and had [INAUDIBLE] guides.
And these are young people, sometimes not quite so young.
But there are people who came many times
from the country, countryside, campesinos.
And they believe still, I think, in the Quechua religion.
Oftentimes it's combined with Catholicism,
but it's pretty Quechua.
And you will see three steps often in sacred places
in the Inca ruins.
And the three steps represent three important forces
that make up the universe for these people
and are embodied in snake, puma, and condor.
Snake being the symbol of the underworld,
the backbone of the world, the repository of wisdom,
and knowledge, two different things, wisdom and knowledge.
The puma being the face of the world, the present time,
the level ground that we're on and representing power--
and finally, the condor being the spirit,
the spiritual part of the world, the above symbol, the bearer
of peace and freedom.
And these really made sense to me.
And I think I'm going to become a Quechua.
I'm going to read you the last little piece, which
is an essay I wrote about the Grand Canyon, which to me is
the snake part of the world, the bottom part of the world, where
knowledge and freedom reside, but not at no cost.
This is called-- it's in a book called Writing Down the River.
I think, 13 women writers were given
trips down-- separate trips down the Grand Canyon
and asked to write about very short pieces about them.
And I was one of the lucky ones that was asked.
This is called Falling into the Canyon.
"It is the end of September, and for the second time in my 61
years--" I keep getting older as you can see.
The next one is going to be a 63-year-old one.
"I'm falling into the Grand Canyon.
The first voyage was in May of '94.
Friends and lovers platooned on a large black motorized raft.
"The Colorado carried us down through amber, sienna,
rose-colored layers of rock, a descent vivid and unreal
as a dream.
We fell into time and found bedrock,
the schist called Vishnu, glowing
silver-black sculpted butter older than life,
2 billion years old.
I remember the thrill of canyon wrens, a distant roar of rapids.
This morning, as the Canyon exploration's bus winds
into the Earth crack called Marble Canyon,
I feel like crying out, hey, dream, here I come again alone,
no love for anchor.
Flame-striped mesas tower over me, and at my feet is the chasm.
We are dropping through Earth's crust
toward a path which will be water.
To my delight, I discover that three of our guides are women.
Nicole, a green-eyed Italian whose icon is mermaid,
and Laura, who reads Mary Oliver's poems to us and looks
like a model, and blonde Megan, the daredevil who runs up
mountains--
Larry, a veteran of the Colorado will be our leader,
and a wry artist named Sam will be the oarsman, riding sweep.
Pulled up at the landing at Lee's Ferry,
our four yellow ore-powered rafts
loaded with gear and a 16-foot paddle raft.
This is the last day motorized boats can put in,
so there will be no gas fumes, no stutter of engines to break
the illusion of wildness.
We smear sunblock on our noses, adjust our not-quite-broken-in
river sandals.
It's a motley group, not the well-heeled rich but working
couples, brothers, families who saved sweaty cash to be here.
Oddly, women are the driving force.
What is it we women desire?"
That's the famous question Freud asked, "What do women want?"
"I, for one, desire always the physical stone, leaf,
rain, blood.
I want to see clearly the red-spotted toad,
the blue beetle, the purple petals of a 4:00 opening to sun.
I want to scale cliffs, touch Anasazi shards.
I want to wallow in the desert's heart.
It pleases me that no one, man or woman,
mentions the adrenaline rush of running
rapid, that need to prove oneself
in contest with the river.
Our first day in Marble Canyon, I dropped swiftly
into river time.
Hours are marked by the angle of sun shadows
on riffles, the growl of a stomach.
The river cuts through strata of limestone, shale and butter,
gold, sandstone, and we are insignificant
as the common white butterfly, a flutter of wings
against ancient faces.
The Colorado blue-green at Leeds Ferry
takes on the tone and texture of chocolate milk
as silt-laden tributaries dump their loads into it.
Even the turquoise waters of the Little Colorado,
which emerged from sacred Hopi birth springs,
are running brown.
It has been raining monsoons for weeks,
and the canyons, slopes, ridges, gullies, and beaches
are splashed with an improbable electric green.
The river bends, and I spot a blue heron
etched on a cliff like an Egyptian hieroglyph.
Another day, snowy white egret wing
over Red Rock on warm stones.
A colored lizard with yellow feet pumps on his hind legs
like a mechanical toy.
So much amazing life in camp.
The night-blooming sacred Datura unfurls
its fragrant, hallucinogenic, toxic white petals,
beckoning the sphinx moth to feed and humans
that dare the most dangerous sexual dreams.
At Pipe Creek, I join the paddle boat crew.
I'm a veteran, having paddled two days despite a bum shoulder.
I love the team effort, the action and focus,
the breathless rush of riding square in the maw of the river.
Our raft is strong, light, unencumbered by gear.
It ventures into waters no oar boat would dare.
Three rapids rated 8 to 10 on a scale of 10 await us.
Megan is at the helm.
Paddling on either side are a Southern lady, Della,
and her strong grown sons, a nurse, an optometrist, and me.
We scream through some granite rapids, stroking down
glassy V-shaped tongues, skirting,
the holes pulling through waves that rise above our heads.
Megan maneuvers us into the calm at the tail of each rapid
and, released from danger, we let out a wolf howl of victory.
She stands in the stern, eyes wild, blue, hips
swinging in her paddle dance.
Living the moment like children, we
raise our paddles above our heads, slam them on the water.
Megan, at 24, has run the river 70 times and never capsized.
Now clouds darken the sky, and the day turns cool.
The rangers at Phantom Ranch had warned Larry
a hurricane was approaching.
Several people have been swept from side canyons
by flash floods to drown in the river.
A headwind blows in from the west.
Only one rapid to go.
Hermit, the roller coaster ride, Sam told me,
is the most fun of all.
First as always is the row.
"Forward!" shouts Megan.
We drop from calm into havoc, attacking Hermit's wave train
head-on.
One, two, three, four giant waves lift us.
All I can see is the high brown foam, the dense fury into which
I must place my paddle.
As we rise and fall, breakers slam into us, slap our faces,
drench us in icy blasts.
But we keep stroking to a beat set by the lead paddler.
Stroke, stroke, stroke for a paddle wedged in water
will keep you saddled on the slick yellow sides,
and momentum carries us through even this fierce water.
Then comes the fifth wave.
We climb up and up, stroking hard, but we do not cut through.
The wave grows.
It's a demon curling above us, its foaming dragon
breath as distinct as a Japanese painting.
Alive.
Now, I am stroking air.
The raft is hanging vertical in the crest braids.
We are thrown back.
The boat flips, we are flying.
I go down a long way.
Buried in the brown deep, I'm a pebble in a maelstrom.
This is power, pure power strong enough to drive turbines.
I'm holding my paddle.
I let it go.
I push up through the icy turbulence
until breath leaves me, and I am choking, swallowing water.
A gulp of air, blessed air.
Then, I am driven down into a whirlpool, up and down
and up again.
The river roars past rock walls, and I'm still helpless.
Inert as driftwood, I bob toward an eddy,
held aloft by my life vest, dazed, numb, gulping air,
and I'm drifting away from the rescuing oar boats.
I swim toward Nicole's raft, kicking despite exhaustion.
A man's hefty arm grabs mine.
"Annick," says Nicole, "you're bleeding."
She leans, long brown hair in my face.
"Who am I?
Do you know what's happening?"
"I'm OK."
She grabs my vest and yanks.
It isn't tight enough.
It slips above my eyes.
"Can you give me some help?"
I want to help, but I'm a stone.
When they pull me in I lie on the boat's self-bailing bottom,
gasping like a landed fish.
The night is windy and cool with no stars.
My head throbs from a welt across my forehead,
a cut below my right eyebrow, a bruise
across the bridge of my nose.
All the rest who had gone swimming
are equally shaken but not injured.
It seems a paddle hit me as I went overboard, maybe my own,
probably the handle of the paddle
of the guy in front of me.
Forsaking a mirror, I smear my wounds with oil of arnica,
take two aspirin, drink a gin and tonic with a crew.
I down a beer at dinner, swig brandy from my stash,
put long underwear, and still, I'm shivery.
I put up my tent for the first time on the trip,
glad for cover.
"Tonight," says Larry, "you may wake up crying.
It's a thing that happens.
Come over, and I'll comfort you."
"I don't think so," I say.
If I need comfort, I'll go to the river women: Nicole, Laura,
or Megan who is also wounded, nursing her pride.
Deep in the night, I have a nightmare vision.
An amorphous brown glob like a giant amoeba advances
toward my tent.
It flows closer, relentless, unstoppable.
I know it is coming.
I wait.
Its weight creeps over my head, my chest, crushing breath.
I lie passive as the brown glob engulfs my legs, my feet.
The terror seems endless and then it's gone.
I watch it creep away.
I'm a [INAUDIBLE] with fear.
I know it won't come back.
I'm safe.
I ride fearsome Lava Falls in Nicole's boat,
face forward into the waves to keep the prow down.
She skirts the ledge, glides skillfully
through the 30-foot drop.
The paddle boat follows.
Every craft passes the test, and we let out a great cheer.
On the 13th day, I'm ready to mount the steed again,
paddling front right, setting the pace
through the final 7-plus rapid.
It's taken four days to gather courage,
but the ride is perfect, and I am redeemed, if not reborn.
Our last camp is on a hot beach at Mile 220.
We use the paddle raft as a water slide,
leaping and splashing into cold waters like otters.
The river has allowed us to pass in ecstasy and fear.
Men and women together as a team.
And now we can laugh.
At dawn, we will float the final six miles in [INAUDIBLE]..
After dinner, in the warm dark, people
talk about what this journey has meant.
"It's made me stronger and more humble."
I say.
"More sure-footed, but less sure in my head.
I've learned a few things about mortality."
I am referring to Hermit Rapids but also to a sunstruck hike
up 1800 feet to Thunder River.
Falls thundered from limestone caverns
to a leafy oasis hanging gardens of maidenhair
and cardinal monkeyflower, clear blue pools, the source says.
And to the bighorn ram who stood looking out
at the Canyon this dusk from the top of a high lava outcrop
called The Gorilla's Head--
the last glow of sun lit his horns, which swept forward
in heavy curls like waves.
The ram stands at the apex of his world.
He is my living shrine, transient
and magnificent, Canyon wren, the Bright Angel shale.
The fire ants and us, he tells me this path down the river
is not a fall into dream, but into the great reality, the only
one and only."
Thank you.
[APPLAUSE]
I fell so in love with the Canyon
that I'm trying to write a novel about a river guide.
[APPLAUSE]