by Sarah Stanbury
“Derek Pearsall, the great Chaucer scholar, once said there are only two mental activities in life: Making Things Up and Finding Things Out. I share this pleasure in Finding or Figuring Out.”
I wrote the following account more than twenty years ago, working from notes I took as we floated down the Missouri. Bob and I made the float in August. The winter before, my sister Pam had died.
***
Yellow gumweed and blanket flower caught the sun on the bank: in the Montana Breaks, where the summer comes late. August was high season for daisies, asters, and sunflowers of many kinds. The river rolled away. Yellow warblers flitted through the cottonwood and a stick that I’d been looking at five feet offshore disappeared and then rose up again—the head of a snapping turtle. A pair of Canada geese drifted past near the south bank. A great blue heron flapped awkwardly out of sight. A nighthawk soared high in the late afternoon sky. Semper festina lente. Always hurry slowly, a Medici motto. I was here to be slow. I’d put away my watch. I was here to be...what? To learn how to be with him in a new way. It was 28 years in a marriage. How to be when it’s him and me and the kids are gone. Packing up for the trip, it struck me how roles had reversed, our son Jeremy staying home because of his summer job and college, looking after the house and feeding the cat—as Bob and I sorted gear for a week-long river adventure. Lydia, spending the summer at a tennis camp in New Hampshire, where she was camp cook, couldn’t come. For me, this river sounded just right. Float the Missouri Breaks— with its beautiful oxymoron and sinister unknown. Stephen Ambrose’s Undaunted Courage about the Lewis and Clark expedition had also made this Montana stretch of the Missouri into mythic time, America as it created itself and came to know itself, dreaming, stepping out and hauling west. I would have stepped down from an administrative job that sucked away my freedom of spirit. Lydia, the youngest, would have graduated from high school. This would be the moment after which nothing would be the same.
It was also Bob’s idea.
From the beginning, one of my jobs in our partnership was to go along on outdoor expeditions into the wild. His dream, when he was a kid, was to trap beaver at the Arctic Circle. He kept a life-list in the front of his Peterson’s Bird guide. Back when he was in medical school, we’d get up at 5 AM, in early May, to catch the end of the dawn chorus. His were the solo pair of binoculars. He’d pass them to me after he’d ID’d the myrtle warbler high up in the birch. I’d maybe see it, likely not. I knew he would keep me safe. Save me, if I needed saving. His hands were big and square. He’d worked summers since he was eight for his dad, a carpenter, and he knew how to hammer a nail. On our first camping trip, which was to Assateague Island on a March weekend back when we were in college, he borrowed a pup tent from one of his friends. I’d supplied a one-person Sears and Roebuck cotton sleeping bag. It had a flannel lining patterned with ducks. As he brought more sticks for the fire and I cooked the bacon, he called me Eternal Woman. I called him Eternal Man. The sun poured down during the day. At night the temperature dipped to freezing. We slept with me underneath him, and him underneath the thin flannel sleeping bag, both of us shivering all night.
On the river Bob, from the stern, said he was going to get some sun on his body. A few minutes later I turned around to reach my water bottle and he was paddling Adamic. We’d seen no one for three hours on the river. Still and all, his outdoor excursions in the buff had been uncommon. He looked good even if his tanning patterns gave him a yin/yang, light dark bicolor. Sort of like a Hereford. It had been a year, maybe longer, that I’d been fully away from the sound of the gasoline engine.
River mile 55
No wind this morning. The day before it was blowing 20, and the river, whipped up by a good wind from our backs, rippled olive green and opaque. It was perfectly still. Patches of spit-colored foam swirled slowly in the eddies and bits of weed floated slowly by below the surface. Already it was heating up. I’d used my blue chambray shirt to refrigerate the cooler by dipping it in the river and laying it over the lid. Now the shirt was crisscrossed with silt lines. We were supposed to make 29 miles. I wasn’t feeling especially interested in hard physical labor and preferred to float along listening to the quiet sounds of Bob’s paddle dipping in the river behind me, a mourning dove, an occasional moo from a cow along the bank, the trickle of water beneath the bow like a small hillside spring, the mid-level hum of grasshoppers.
Floating past in silence, both paddles in the canoe, we listened to the cooing of rock doves nesting in holes high above, along the rock face. White Cliffs rose like castles,“chalkwhite,” like Sir Bertilak’s enchanted castle in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. Some were elephant gray, topped far above us by a thick band of prairie earth that from below looked like thatch on the roof of a Suffolk cottage. Merriweather Lewis, the first person to leave a written account of this part of the Missouri, was amazed by the White Cliffs. Lewis describes them in his account of May 21, 1805:
The hills and river Cliffs which we passed today exhibit a most romantic appearance. The bluffs of the river rise to the height of from two to 300 feet and in most places nearly perpendicular; they are formed of remarkable white sandstone which is sufficiently soft to give way readily to the impression of water....The water in the course of time in
descending from those hills and plains on either side of the river has trickled down the soft sand cliffs and worn it into a thousand grotesque figures, which with the help of a little imagination and an oblique view, at a distance are made to represent elegant ranges of lofty freestone buildings, having their parapets well stocked with statuary....
I’ve stripped down and am floating shirtless. It feels good and also risqué, like that first warm day in May when you go outside in shorts and a tee and feel undressed. Three black cattle watch as we float past. One drops a crap in the water. Bob was quiet in the back of the canoe. When we first knew each other, I would sometimes ask him “penny for your thoughts.” We’d be driving up over the mountains of West Virginia to visit his family for Thanksgiving and the silence in the car would get too much. We were, then, living inside each other’s skin. How could he have a private life or thoughts he might not share with me?
On one of those trips, driving the Opal Kadett his parents had given him, already years old when they bought it, when he started medical school, I noticed that the white jeans I was wearing were turning grey. We were driving up across the mountains. Our Opal could chug 20 mph on the uphills, then zoom to 70 on the downs. The air in those mountains seemed pure and clean. Why the grey? When we stopped for gas, I pulled up the rug under my feet in the passenger’s seat to peek underneath. Asphalt. The undercarriage had completely rusted away. Under the rug my feet were resting on, the road. Once we got to Ohio, Bob’s Dad helped him weld angle irons to the frame underneath the car. Bob introduced me to riveting. Though we hadn’t thought about rust on the chassis underneath, we both knew about the patches of mottling the Opal’s silver paint with what looked like brick dust. We spent our holiday visit riveting steel plates wherever there was significant rust. The car, solid when we turned around to go back home, looked like an armored truck. Driving it around Durham, where we lived at the time, I was proud of this distinguished feature. I felt secure. Bob had made our car safe.
We floated past Citadel Rock on the right. Used since time before memory as a landmark, once by the Crow in bullboats, then by Lewis and Clark as the Corps of Discovery hand-hauled canoes heavy with provisions and scientific gear up river against the steady current, and later by steamboats that worked the Missouri up and down through the Breaks until the middle of the 20th century, Citadel Rock thrust up from the river’s edge to tower 60 feet above our canoe. Igneous intrusions, almost black and rough as lava, fissured out through the smoothed sandstone skins laid down by living organisms, when all this was an inland sea.
High noon. We were getting a system. Bob paddled in the stern while I did lots of other things, like trimming my nails with a jackknife, identifying flowers and shrubs, soaking my shirt in the river to cool myself down, writing in my notebook, rubbing in #15 sunblock, melted to liquid in the heat. Mostly, though, we drifted downstream, making about two miles per hour.
We passed Slaughter River Campsite, a Lewis and Clark camp both in 1805 and again on their return trip back down river the next year, after a wet and tedious winter spent at the mouth of the Columbia River, on the Pacific coast in what is now Washington. Slaughter River takes its name from a journal entry by Lewis on May 29, 1805:
Today we passed on the Starboard side the remains of a vast many mangled carcasses of Buffalow which had been driven over a precipice of 120 feet by the Indians and perished; the water appeared to have washed away a part of this immense pile of slaughter and still their remained the fragments of at least a hundred carcasses they created the most horrid stench.
The story is one I recollect generically, either from the Westerns I watched as a child or from western stories by Will James and Ernest Seton Thompson. Always, it seems, the Indians are yipping and hi yi yaying the thundering herds to the lip of the canyon, where the great shaggy animals tumble over, somersaulting head over hoof to the canyon below in a dusty apocalypse. Beached at this campsite was a group of six canoeists we met at the beginning of the trip, also floating this stretch of river. “There go the Maniacs,” I heard one of the women say on the shore as we floated past. When we met the group, they commented on my tee shirt, which said, Maine: Finest Kind. She and her husband were from Portland, and had even vacationed on the island where we shared a family vacation house.
“Why aren’t you there now?” she asked.
How to explain that we’d just come from Maine, where’d we gone to disperse my sister Pam’s ashes. Or that we were making this trip to see if we could be alone together in a way that was more than “Pass the salt” or “How long are you planning to work before bed.” I wondered what they made of us: a single couple, middle-aged, out alone. Our friends and family were surprised to hear we were going to make this trip. When I realized that the trip was to be just the two of us, I was unnerved. Wouldn’t I be bored? Don’t I know everything in his mind? More than half my life had been spent with him. He can be pretty quiet and I’m talkative. He prefers to be alone or with just me. For him, my company is enough, while I’m a heat-seeker. He reads intensively about the wild places of the world and longs for a jungle or forest or open arctic tundra where wild creatures live in a primordial balance. He dreams of an expedition to the northwest territories to spend time among the great caribou herds of the Yukon and their following of wolves. For me excitement in the wilderness comes in finding signs of human life: an arrowhead or a trade bead, glinting among the pebbles on the shore, that tells me someone else has been here.
When we first knew each other, we’d cut class, borrow his roommate’s Thunderbird, and drive out to the Pine Barrens or take the bus far from West Philly with its sirens and its dirt to a wildlife sanctuary, rolling green and rich through the Main Line. As two professionals, years later, we lived much of our lives in separate spheres, coming home from work to walk the bounds of common ground. When we made a date to go out to dinner, just the two of us, we talked about familiar and safe things, the expanded territory we shared between us: how well the kids were doing, irritations at work, the house, always a neglected child in need of paint and fixing up, and most easily and happily, plans for vacation trips, scheming and dreaming life elsewhere. On the occasions we found to be alone, we still talked over the static of others whose voices come with us. Since starting the float, neither of us talked about work or the kids. In those conversations, we always knew what the other one would say.
Judith Landing Campsite
Three hours after waking up at six and we were off. A light rain was falling under a stratus sky. The day before at Judith Landing we got talking with a USGS crew of about ten ecologists, camping here for two weeks to study the cottonwoods, whose status was the subject of ecological debate. Were the trees holding their own, or slowly succumbing? I envied the crew their jobs: out on the river for two weeks, a camping life, work that can achieve a material good. While we were drinking a beer with a crew member, leaning against the flatbed supply truck, the rest of them floated downriver from Judith Landing to the boat ramp, bobbing along in their lifejackets. Later we tried it, dusk streaking the sky to the west with rose, as we let ourselves be swept down the river, feet buoyed behind us in river shoes, washing off the bug dope and the sweat.
As we did up our dishes in the dark with just the light of a candle lantern suspended from a low cottonwood branch, one of the crew started up a harmonica. He didn’t miss a note and played tunes that I love to hum: “Summertime.” “Amazing Grace.” “Streets of Laredo,” the sweetest and saddest cowboy tune. “Oh Shenandoah,” which now we understood as a homesick song of exile, the longing for Virginia by a pioneer to Montana: “far away the wide Missouri.” “Amazing Grace” was the song we sang just before the pallbearers carried my sister’s casket out from the Quaker Meeting House. The Cherokee flutist had begun to play the tune, but couldn’t hit the high notes. He tried again. “Me” of “wretch like me” still came out just a whistle of air. Then one voice from the congregation started to sing, though singing wasn’t in the program. Soon everyone in that packed meeting house was singing. I once was lost, but now am found, was lost but now can see.
***
Pam was the youngest of my siblings. We were five. I was the middle, and Pam was the baby. Pam lived with Dave, her husband, and their two young girls outside Washington, DC. Pam, we all knew without anyone ever saying it, was Mom’s easiest, most loved child. Much had always been expected of the rest of us. Pam, in our parents’ eyes, was free to just be Pam. When, fifteen months before Pam died, the phone call came saying she was in the hospital, it was one of those hits or smashes out of the clear blue, where you always remember where you were when. Bob and I were sitting at the kitchen table finishing dinner with Bob’s roommate from medical school. It was the day before Thanksgiving. Ken had just come up to Boston after visiting the Vietnam War Memorial for the first time. “I didn’t go to Vietnam. There were all these names. And I hadn’t gone.” He started to cry.
Martha, my older sister, was on the phone. The telephone hung from a wall in the kitchen. From the minute I heard Martha’s voice – flat -- I knew something was very wrong. “Pam’s in the hospital. She just had a hysterectomy. She has cervical cancer.”
Ken was crying at the kitchen table. Martha, on the phone on the kitchen wall, was telling me Pam had cancer. What do you say to the room, when sadness comes in from all sides?
From then until Pam died, fifteen months later, we tried to save her. We thought we could. Bob and my dad were both medical men. Bob and my dad talked and talked. This regimen, That one. They sat on our porch that summer on hot evenings, heads together talking about this or that possible courses of treatment. Pam told me, again and again, she was going to beat it. She had hardly ever been sick, before this. I remember Dave once telling me, after he and Pam had returned from a river rafting trip in Costa Rica, how sick he’d been with the flu.
“Your sister has no mercy,” he said. “I was green with a fever and she has us still going down the river.” I recognized this syndrome. Growing up in my family, illness didn’t get much sympathy. Fevers, colds -- we were packed off to school. If I came down to breakfast saying I had a sore throat, Dad would palpate my neck for swollen glands. If he found them, I got to stay home. No swollen glands, off to school.
Dave was sure they could beat it. They had to. He and Pam had two beautiful little girls. Those girls, Margot and Julia, aged 8 and 6, were their blessing. Pam called them her munchkins. Pam and Dave had had trouble conceiving and had been told by doctors that the problem was DES. When our mother had been pregnant with Pam, in 1954, Mom had been hospitalized for a near miscarriage. At that time, in 1954, DES was a standard treatment for miscarriage. Now it is known that DES has terrible downstream consequences: infertility for female offspring; a risk of cervical cancer for those girls when they become adults. At that time DES was judged perfectly safe. DES was a blessing, in that my mother didn’t have a miscarriage, and carried Pam to term. Years later, DES was something else. After several years of trying, Pam had finally been able to conceive, and Margot was born. Then she had Julia. Six years after Julia, Pam had cervical cancer.
Our mother was never told she was given DES. “I never took it,” she still says. “I never took anything when I was in the hospital.” Back then, they would have slipped DES into her ginger ale. They wouldn’t have bothered to tell her.
In May, months after Pam’s Thanksgiving diagnosis, I came home from a long trip abroad to learn Pam was back in the hospital. I got on the train from Boston to DC the next morning. Pam lay on her back in bed in the hospital. Her abdomen was swollen with fluid, a condition called ascites. I had never before seen the look of the tragedy mask on the face of any real, living person. She said, “I’m not worried about the girls. Dave will be a wonderful father. I’m afraid of dying in pain.”
She didn’t die in pain but lived in pain for most of the next nine months. Because we all believed we could save her, and she wanted to believe that too, she refused pain meds until almost the end. “I want to fight this,” she said. Pain meds, she and Dave believed, would weaken her resolve. From May, when she was briefly hospitalized, until she died at home nine months later, she was unable to eat. Her various courses of chemo made her sick, but the intestinal blockage responsible for her ascites made it so she couldn’t keep food down. Every night Dave hooked her up to an IV, which pumped her with nutrients. When I visited, I slept on a mattress on the floor in her room. The swoosh of the pump, like a heartbeat, was strangely comforting, and I will never forget its sound. The one thing she asked for after she got sick: never to be alone. We all took turns visiting, and she always had somebody with her. Near the end, on one of my visits, she said from the rented hospital bed where she lay most of the time that she wanted to write a cookbook for cancer patients, with recipes for all the things she fantasized about eating. She had been an exuberant, imaginative cook. She and Dave, who were both anthropologists, had spent years in India and Sri Lanka before their time in DC. Their house wafted with the fragrances of cumin and cardamom.
I wasn’t with her when she died, at home in her hospital bed, but Martha was there. Martha, who isn’t a religious believer, says she felt Pam’s spirit float up and off. “It was palpable,” she said. After Pam’s death her body was kept at home for two days in a ritual based on Rudolf Steiner’s philosophy, a leave-taking Pam and Dave had planned. Friends and family took turns around the clock keeping vigil in the room where her body lay, surrounded by candles. Passing through the kitchen to get a glass of water, I spotted Julia crouched like a wild animal under the counter. She looked up at me with her wide blue eyes.
All day long visitors stopped in to pay Pam their respects, and we sang hymns at the piano. We hadn’t been able to save her.
***
Derek Pearsall, the great Chaucer scholar, once said there are only two mental activities in life: Making Things Up and Finding Things Out. I share this pleasure in Finding or Figuring Out. At home I figure things out all the time, like what to cook for dinner, but the problem with home figuring is the little gerbils running in their wheels rattling out the litany, Oh Lord we have left undone those things which we ought to have done. On the river there wasn’t much else beyond the task that we were doing at the moment. I repaired the inward-facing clips on my dry bag, set backwards by a dry bag factory worker on a bad day. This little job took complete concentration for a few minutes. I pulled off the clips and studied how they could be reinserted on the straps and still work.
Bob was the map keeper and reader of signs and water, keeping track of where we were on the river. He calculated by time and our estimated speed (six mph if both of us paddle, four mph if only he paddled, two mph if we were just floating). I remembered this formula from word problems in math: t x r = d: time multiplied by rate equals distance. Here t x r = location. Where we were, which is the here and now. Figuring it out.
###
We pulled into the boat launch at James Kipp Recreation Area about four PM. Or really- Bob pulled up. I couldn’t see the launch ramp, because I’d made a head net out of my bandana, secured over my face by my baseball cap and tucked in under my shirt collar. Through the fabric the river and sky were a soft purple. No-see-ums banged up against the cloth and crawled over it, but I was OK observing their silhouettes, knowing they were out there and not inside. At Kipp we hauled canoe, paddles, cooler and life vests up the bank, hosed them down. Bob changed into a bathing suit and turned the hose on himself. We washed the mud off the gear and tried to pry the mud from our river shoes. I changed out of my pants, worn for four straight days and mottled with foodstuffs and ash from our campfires, but refused the cold shower. My front tingled with sunburn in places that had seldom seen the sun. I was in no hurry to bathe.
In English, the earliest uses of the word “speculation” refer to sight and vision: “the faculty or power of seeing; sight, vision, esp. intelligent or comprehending vision.” Oxford English Dictionary, I.1.
Sarah Stanbury taught in the English Department at the College of the Holy Cross and is the author of many critical studies on Chaucer and other medieval writers. A recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment of the Humanities and the Guggenheim Foundation, she divides her time between Providence, RI and Isle au Haut, Maine. Her float through the Missouri Breaks is one of many treks in a canoe, a kayak, or a pair of hiking boots under the weight of a backpack.
Photos by Robert J. Smith