The Next Fifty Years

by Stephanie Lennon

Once Grandpa’s heart gave out, there was no point in Nana continuing her treatments.

“Stop the dialysis and she’ll be gone within a week,” the doctors had said.

Five years prior, at their fiftieth wedding anniversary, Grandpa had joked that the next fifty would be much easier. We were all hesitant to laugh, knowing even then that neither of them were in great shape.

A family meeting was called. Nana wasn’t “fully there” anymore, so she didn’t have much of a say in her own damn demise.

She just knew that she wanted to be with Grandpa.

~ ~ ~

The nursing home moved her into a private room. Hospice workers from a nearby center were assigned to check on her. A nurse. A priest. A social worker. To help Nana transition. And to help us watch her go.

Apparently it takes a village when we die, too.

The first few days felt like a giant family reunion. Without the stress of dialysis, Nana was almost herself again.

She even flirted with the priest from the hospice center. Said he looked cute in his collared shirt.

Nana had never been afraid to speak her mind. Hell, at Grandpa’s funeral she looked straight-faced at the attractive EMT volunteering his time to escort her and said “I’m single now, you know.”

For days, family members rotated in and out of that tiny room, taking shifts as if Nana were a dangerous criminal plotting her escape.

Every now and then, she’d open her eyes and look around the room. Each time, it brought me back to dinner at her kitchen table.

She would always ask “How many are we?” when deciding the seating chart for the evening.

Surrounded by her favorite people in the world, Nana radiated happiness. She was the reason we were all together. She was the sun, and we were the planets in her orbit, unsure of where we would go once her light went out.

~ ~ ~

Every two hours a nurse would come to kick us out and pull the curtains closed. Turns out when you spend all day every day in bed, your skin slowly eats itself if left unchecked.

My uncle would take this opportunity to sneak out for a cigarette. One time he came back with a Snickers bar for Nana, who had been diabetic for as long as I could remember.

Whenever we visited my grandparents’ old house, my mom would give Nana a hard time about the ice cream in her freezer or the Ring Dings in her cupboard.

“You cheating again, Mom?” she’d say.

“I’m old. I can do what I want,” was her readied response.

She’s right, of course. After a while, what’s the point? Especially once you find yourself staring up at the last ceiling tiles you’ll ever see.

~ ~ ~

She didn’t have the strength to tear open that Snickers wrapper, but she sure wouldn’t let it go once she had it.

One bite. Two bites. A quick nap to regain some strength for the third. A solid grip, even with her eyes closed and her stomach struggling to remember how to digest it. She never did finish it.

We sat in a circle around her hospital bed. Made horrible jokes about the death grip she had on such a long-lost comfort food. Her rosary was nestled in her palm beneath it. It seems comfort comes in many forms.
          My cousin slid a goofy-looking pair of wireless headphones over Nana’s ears, deflated gray curls settling underneath.

Through the Bluetooth on his phone, he cued up Nana’s favorite: Elvis Presley. We watched as her shoulders shifted up and down and her lips moved along with the words, a star in her own silent movie. Joy in its purest form.

~ ~ ~

Her most lucid day came toward the end of the week. I sat next to her bed, holding her wrinkly hand in mine.

I knew this was going to be my last chance to ask the world’s wisest lady the world’s most important questions. With fifty-five years of marriage under her belt, I knew exactly what to ask.

“Nana, how did you know Grandpa was the one?”

A smile spread across her face like a pat of melting butter on Grandpa’s hot potato pancakes.
          “Argyle socks,” was all she could muster before getting lost in her black-and-white-photograph past.

I couldn’t help but laugh. I squeezed her hand to bring her back from those early days.
          “Special boy in your life?” she asked, each word a struggle.

“Not yet, Nana.”

“You’ll just know, Stephie-doo. Trust me.”

I trust you, Nana.

~ ~ ~

As the week came to a close, the hospice nurse told us that we should leave the windows open. This would make it easier for her soul to pass through once she was ready.

Once everyone had had their chance to say goodbye.

She was stubborn and selfless until the very end, refusing to let go until everyone around her was asleep. Waiting for that perfect moment, as if she didn’t want to leave anyone with the burden of seeing it happen.

Nana had been without Grandpa for exactly fourteen days. She was ready to be back with him, where she belonged. To finish up those next fifty years of marriage.

Stephanie Lennon lives, teaches, and writes in Brooklyn, NY. Her work has been featured on UbiquitousBooks.com. She is currently writing a middle grades fantasy novel titled Miss White's School for Vivacious Voices.

Those Boys

by Susan Moldaw

          Despite my skepticism, about a year ago I went to see a medium at a mindfulness spa in Arizona. The medium met me in the hotel lobby and led me to a small, windowless room with two straight-backed chairs and a desk between them. We sat and faced one another across the wood divide. She had full cheeks, a snub nose, and a blond bouffant that fell blowzily past her shoulders.

           “You’re here because your father wants you to understand he’s with you all the time,” she said. Her clear voice conveyed authority. She tapped her high-heeled sandals against the concrete floor.

          I reached for the box of Kleenex on the desk, my rational mind already a muddle. My father died five years ago.

          “Is there a Bill in your life?” the medium continued, looking dreamily off to the side with a slight upward curve of her lips.

          “That’s one of my sons.” I drew in my breath.

          “He talks to your father. Out loud. So do you.” She smiled kindly. “Your father wants me to tell you that he hears you.” She cocked her head and looked away. “Bill is doing well. Your father says he’s proud of him.” She frowned. “Wait. There’s another son. You have others?”

          I nodded. “Triplets,” I said. “They’re twenty-four.” Bill, Jack, and Stuart.

          “He’s telling you not to worry about them. They’re going to be okay.”

          I dabbed my eyes with the Kleenex. My father hadn’t liked my sons’ father—my ex. We’d suffered years of family drama, divorce, and the aftermath, and all along my father reassured himself—and me—that his grandsons would be okay.

          The medium smiled. “He’s a funny man, your father,” she said. “Good looking too. Wait! He’s putting his hand over his heart.” She laughed softly and said, “He loves those boys.”

          I wiped my eyes and mumbled that I knew.

          I stumbled out of there towards my room, clutching Kleenex, but by the time I slid the electronic key card into its slot and had flung myself face down onto the quilted bedspread, I was furious at the medium’s presumption. I didn’t need her meddling. I’d felt my father’s presence many times since his death. Except, I wished I could tell him that, despite everything, the boys and I were doing fine.

Mauna Kea Beach Hotel, Hawaii, 1992

          From the patio adjoining our beachfront rooms, I saw my four-year-old sons curled up on their grandfather’s—my father’s—lounge chair, stationed by itself in the middle of a vast lawn that stretched from our rooms to the beach. He was leaning back, smoking a fat cigar, and the four of them were laughing. A breeze ruffled palm trees that lined the grass along the long, curving, fine white sandy beach. The pungent, noxious odor of the cigar wafted to my room. This was our family’s third Christmas vacation with my parents at the Mauna Kea.

          What the hell is he doing smoking in front of them? I thought.

          Inside the room, I took smoked salmon and a bagel from the minibar. Breakfast was included in the hotel’s costly charge and—following my father’s example— we’d order extra from room service, stashing salmon, kippers, cottage cheese, bagels, muffins, papaya, berries, shrimp, and tomatoes in the bulging minibar.

          “At least we’ll save on lunch!” my father would say.

          My mother, deferring to his humor and what she deemed his superior judgment about money, life and family, went along too, as she mostly did, though since his death she runs her own show.

          Back on the patio, I ate while watching the lawn scene. My father sat up and the boys jumped off the chair, sprawling at his feet. He leaned over and traced something in the air just above the lawn, using the cigar as pointer. His navy T-shirt hung loosely over red bathing trunks, his straw hat lay on a towel. He always brought the hat Hawaii-bound, stowing it in the airplane’s overhead bin on top of his neatly folded navy blazer, finally plopping it on when we disembarked.

          I stopped eating and walked over.

          “Dad, can I talk with you for a minute?” I said.

          We walked slightly away from my sons. My father smiled and familiar grooves appeared along his eyes and cheeks. His brown eyes were serious.

          “Yes?” he said.

          “I don’t want you to smoke in front of them,” I said. “It sets a bad example.”

          He held the cigar behind his back. “Is your mother around?” She hated his occasional cigars and for years he hid the evidence, until he finally stopped smoking.

          “She’s at the hair salon,” I said.

          He took another puff. “They know I’m not really a smoker,” he said, just loud enough so the boys might hear. “Besides—I’m telling them about the facts of life!”

          I looked at my sons. Jack and Stuart were giggling and rolling on the lawn, silly together, as they often were. Bill was sitting quietly, with his head turned, trying it seemed, to catch the conversation.

          “The facts of life?” I said.

          “Not that.” He spoke more loudly, so there was no mistaking they could hear. “Hard work and discipline! Good values! All the things that matter.” He gave me a kiss on the cheek. “They’re good boys,” he said. “They’re going to be okay.”

San Francisco, California 1997

          My husband, nine-year old sons, and my parents were eating dinner at the Matterhorn, a cozy, wood-paneled restaurant that reminded my husband and me of our vacations spent hiking in Switzerland, both alone and with our sons. Cheese fondue bubbled in a brass pot on the white linen tablecloth. Everyone’s plates were stacked with sourdough bread. One of our sons stood in front of my husband, his face white, his eyes wide and terrified, while my husband berated him for spilling water. The other two stared at their plates, knowing any one of them might next become the object of their father’s anger. My father watched briefly with a set expression, then looked away—unable to stomach the humiliation of anyone, least of all his grandsons.

          A few days later, my father told me, “I can’t keep watching him tear those boys to shreds. Have dinners without us. We’ll visit when he’s not around.”

          We sat in our family room on a deep, red corduroy couch. My husband was out of town and my parents had dropped by. My mother was upstairs with my sons. I was struggling—privately— with my own decisions—leave the marriage, stay? What would do the boys the least harm? No options were good. My eyes fell to the white wool carpet. “I need you, Dad,” I said. “Please come with us, sometimes.”

          Wind rattled the old paned windows behind our heads. Bare tree branches tapped their code on the wavy, rippled glass. My father leaned into the softly textured pillows. Then he patted my hand.

          “I’ll be there,” he said. His voice was kind, his eyes, sad.

                    

          Five years later, I finally got out, in a contentious divorce that went to court, where a judge ordered my sons to attend Connecticut boarding schools for their first year of high school. They’d only applied to boarding schools to satisfy their father. My attorney asked for a stay, and a week later I brought the boys to testify. One by one they took the stand. They wore button down white shirts, khaki pants, and white athletic socks bulging out of their brown loafers. They looked impossibly young.

          Jack and Stuart said, no, they wanted to stay in San Francisco and didn’t want to go to boarding school. Bill said his father told him he’d bring him home on weekends, and if so, boarding school would be okay. Bill trusted his father’s promise; Stuart and Jack doubted.

          I rolled my eyes. Home to San Francisco from Connecticut on weekends. The judge and I locked glances. I felt certain she read my hollow-eyed plea for her not to send my sons away.

          A week later, determined to get them out of the marital fray, she upheld her prior order and sent them to three different high schools in Connecticut.

          I visited my sons midway through the first term in October for conferences and vacations. I walked into Stuart’s dorm room at dusk and found him ensconced on a bottom bunk, leaning against the Indian bedspread that covered the wall behind him.

“Well?” he said, looking at me from the darkness. Stuart had had enough of boarding school; they’d all had enough. My sons were counting on me to bring them home.

“I’ve changed my mind. Boarding school is the best option.” My voice cracked. “There’d be no peace in San Francisco.” Their father and I agreed on nothing.

Shadows darkened, obscuring Stuart’s expression. A door slammed, somebody turned up the volume on a stereo and Metallica blasted. Stuart got up and picked a gray hooded sweatshirt off the floor.

“Whatever,” he shrugged, pretending he didn’t care, though I knew he was angry. He pulled on the sweatshirt and we left for dinner.

Bill understood boarding school was for the best, when I told him; Jack was resigned. No one had come home on a weekend.

“You’re doing the right thing,” my father said later, in San Francisco. His encouragement loomed large for me. He was determined to step into the void left by my sons’ father. He and my mother were already making plans to fly East to visit each school in February on Grandparents’ Day.

          The four years of boarding school melded into one long visit East for me and my parents, punctuated by the boys’ school breaks and summers in San Francisco. My parents would meet the boys and me in Connecticut or New York; sometimes they met the boys without me, usually one son at a time because their school calendars differed. In New York, we always stayed at the Regency Hotel. I had stayed there years before with my parents during college, and later, on business. The Regency had morphed in style since those days, from Louis Quatorze to business sleek. Dinners were at Gino’s, one block over from the hotel. The Maître d’ greeted me and my mother and shook my father’s hand, calling him by name and bringing him a Grey Goose vodka, and the boys each a Roy Rogers. Breakfasts, my father and the boys ate around the corner at the Viand Coffee Shop, my father always having scorned the Regency breakfast as overpriced, though my mother and I ate there. My sons told me how they perched at the counter with its view of Greek cooks yelling orders, frying eggs, and making to-go bags at the register. On one of their trips they coined an expression, “LBTJ” (let’s blow this joint), a phrase they employ to this day in honor of their grandfather. Always, at the end of a visit, my father smiled and shook his head.

          “Those boys,” he’d say to me, “they’re going to be okay.”

          We were lucky that their high school graduations fell on separate days, during two consecutive weekends at the end of May. In April, my father and I took all three boys shopping for graduation suits at Paul Stuart in Manhattan, where years before my dad had shopped with my now ex-husband. The manager fitted their jackets and pinned their trousers. Afterward, we went to the shoe department, where my father insisted on buying the boys expensive dress shoes.

“They’ll last a lifetime,” he said, well pleased, as if a good pair of shoes could protect his grandsons from the vagaries of life.

 The summer after the boys’ graduations, my father called to tell me in a cheerful, matter-of-fact voice that he had cancer. “It’s a question of attitude,” he asserted. “I’m going to beat it.”

I wasn’t worried. He was invincible. A few days later, my mother phoned, using the voice she reserved for emphatically stating her husband’s needs. “Your father must hear from his daughters every day,” she said. My sister, in Santa Fe, said she had called to tell her the same thing. I felt slightly more concerned about his health then, but thought this was just my mother’s usual overzealous protection.

Nonetheless, I began daily calls and weekly visits to their home in Atherton. One Sunday my father and I drove to a small strip center a few miles from his home for non-fat frozen yogurt. He wore his favorite navy-blue sweats and a baseball cap. Now that he was retired from a lifetime in the retail business, he had time to kibbutz, and he quizzed the manager about sales figures.

“Terrific!” he said, learning that business was outshining last year’s. We ate the yogurt in the car and rushed home to watch the start of his beloved Washington Week in Review. In his library office, he settled into the leather recliner, and after a few minutes, I looked over. He was snoring under his mohair blanket.

That winter, he announced he was cancer-free, and I was elated. My parents spent a joyous two weeks with my sister and her family in Hawaii. But soon after they got home, the cancer popped up in a new spot.

I asked the cancer surgeon why. We stood in a long hallway at Stanford Hospital. My father was getting radiation treatment.

“It’s an invasive cancer,” he said. “You knock off a few tumors and new ones take their place.”

It flashed through my mind that maybe he wasn’t going to beat this disease, but what I mostly thought was how discouraged my usually optimistic father would be—good news followed by bad, on and on. I must have looked dejected because the surgeon touched my arm and said, “It’s tough.” He had invented a cyberknife and had used it to remove tumors from my father just months before. “I’m going to invest!” my father had said, after the operation. He loved all things entrepreneurial.

In May, after their first year of college—Bill in LA, Stuart in Massachusetts, and Jack in Florida—my sons flew home. My father was spending most of his time in bed by then, worn out from his radiation treatments. I picked the boys up from the airport and drove to my parents’ home. I was worried about how my sons would react to seeing their gaunt and ailing grandfather, but they went straight to his bed and got under the covers with him. Later, after they left, I walked into my father’s room. He patted the bed. I sat down and leaned close. His expression was earnest, the way it always was when he spoke from the heart.

“Those boys,” he said. “They’re going to be okay.”

After a week of sleeping at my parents’, one night I went home to take a breather. The next morning, I returned to take my father for his radiation treatment, but when I got there I saw that he was sleeping heavily and knew I’d never get him up for the appointment. I went to find my mother. We stood uncertainly by the side of the bed. My father’s chest rose and fell. I grabbed the phone and called his doctor, and then a hospital transport service. I phoned my sister. “Come now,” I said.

A few hours later, three men with a gurney came into my parents’ bedroom. They went to the bed and lifted him. My father cried from the pain in his back. They put him in the ambulance and my mother went with him. I followed behind. Midway to the hospital, sirens started. Someone stuck a hand out the ambulance window and waved at me to follow. We sped to the hospital and they whisked my father into the emergency room. By now, my sister had arrived.

In the emergency room, my father perked up when the doctor asked him who the president was.

“George Bush, the bastard!” he said.

He spent three days in the hospital, hooked up to machines. My sister, mother, and I took turns staying overnight. My sons came and went. My father mostly slept, breathing through a plastic mask. One afternoon, I was standing in the hallway with my sons. A nurse rushed out. “He opened his eyes!” she said.

We filed into the room. One by one we went to his bedside to say good-bye.

“I love you, Dad,” I said. Tears streamed, though I knew he didn’t want to see me cry.

His eyes were warm and kind. “I love you,” he said, through the plastic mask.

The day of my father’s funeral, the sun shone and the air was cool. The boys wore their graduation suits and shoes. My mother, sister, sons and I each put a rose into my father’s grave and a shovelful of dirt. At the end of the service, as everyone was leaving, I looked at my sons. They stood in a group hug, their arms around each other, their heads and hearts close. They’d grown into loving young men—straight shooters, too— like their grandfather.

A few years before he died, my father walked into my home office in San Francisco. The bookshelves were filled with photos of my sons.

“There’s no photo of us!” he said, referring to himself and my mother.

He was wrong. There was one photo hidden behind my sons’ photos. How little I understood, then, that someday I’d long to see my father’s smile, his eyes, his face. There are many more photos of him now. There’s a picture I particularly like from Stuart’s high school graduation. He and my mother flank Stuart, who has a big unlit cigar stuck in his mouth. My mother’s pearl earrings and gold and ivory carnation pin sparkle. My father and Stuart are both wearing silk twill ties, my father’s an all-over pattern of yellow and white ovals on a red background, Stuart’s a red and white stripe. They’d bought them together at Paul Stuart. My father looks pale behind his oversize sunglasses. It was a broiling Connecticut day. He’d had cancer then, but we didn’t know it.

I woke in the middle of the night in tears two months after my father died. I had the start of a eulogy for his memorial service. On the small notepad by the side of my bed, I wrote, ‘When my heart broke, his heart broke.’

          I sometimes stay at the Regency on visits to New York. One time, I took Jack, who transferred to a college there, to see the musical, The Book of Mormon. Afterward at the hotel, Jack did homework sprawled on the enormous bed. He talked about his friends and life in the city. Listening to him, I realized he was only a few years older than I’d been on my first stay at the Regency with my parents. If my father were with Jack and me, he would shake his head and complain about my breakfast bill, then scrounge around the mini-bar for shelled peanuts. He would quiz Jack about his homework, and want to know what exactly did he plan to do when he finally got that college degree, knowing that—whatever Jack decided—he, and his brothers, were going to be okay.

          I’d like to tell him he was right—not that I ever doubted. Each of my sons inherited their grandfather’s entrepreneurial spirit and desire to live a purposeful life. He’d be proud.

          At the end of my visit with the medium she told me to watch for hawks—they were messengers from my father, a sign that he was around.

          A simple Internet search reveals that hawks are believed to be messengers from the divine, with powers of awareness and enlightenment. Any medium worth her salt could have said it, to anyone.

          And yet—a few years ago I noticed hawks flying at the place north of San Francisco where my husband—I’m happily remarried now—and I spend summers. I like to sit outside and watch them soar.

          “How do they do that?” I asked my husband. He’s a pilot; he knows these things.

          “They’re carried by rising air currents,” he said.

 I watched the hawks, thought of my father, and knew our boys would be just fine.

Susan Moldaw works as a chaplain in San Francisco. Her writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Brain, Child Magazine, Broad Street, Lilith, Literary Mama, Narrative, Ruminate, and others. 

River Passage

by Susan Pope

Hockey posters—two walls’ worth. A row of ball caps slung on hooks. The requisite electronics—TV, computer, smartphone. Dishes caked with dried food. And over every inch of floor space, camping gear, some with price tags still attached.

Perched on the bed in my fifteen-year-old grandson Cason’s bedroom, I watch him pack. Tomorrow we leave for a raft trip, on a river we’ve never seen with people we’ve never before met. He’s had five months to get ready. His mom—my daughter—has quit nagging. He could have recruited his grandpa, my husband, to help. But he knows that Papa—the name Cason calls him—would just say you’ve got the list, check it off, pack it up. That leaves me, the organizer, explainer, and most of all, the soft touch.

I miss talking with Cason. We used to have moments of conversation in the car, on the way to hockey practice, when his sister and parents weren’t around. Little things: How he hated math. Liked his new hockey team. Hoped to catch a king salmon this summer. Now he rides with his buddies who drive, so the two of us rarely speak except in passing.

Cason asked for the trip. Not this trip specifically, but any river trip. I’m not sure why. “Sounds like fun,” is all he said when I asked.

His family—my daughter’s—does not camp or fish or hike. “Roughing it” is a cabin with running water on a lake surrounded by all the mechanized toys an American family could desire. To Cason and his pickup-driving, four-wheeling, dirt-biking friends, my husband Jim and I are the quaint old bird watchers, nature lovers, greenies.

But something made him curious, made him want to find out for himself if our stories were true—the river journeys that changed our lives, the adventures, mishaps, near disasters. Maybe it was the passion in our voices or the faraway looks in our eyes as we sat around a family dinner while Cason half-listened to us reminisce about running rapids through the Grand Canyon or dodging ice on an Arctic river. Maybe he just wanted a way to impress his friends. Whatever his reasons, here was this boy turning sixteen asking to spend time with his grandparents—on a river, no less.

As his life is opening up, our lives are narrowing down. We have this brief moment in time when the dreams of the old and the young intersect, while Jim and I are still hardy enough in mind and body to give him this gift. Of course, we said yes.

Pen poised to mark off items as he packs them, I read from the gear list.

First aid kit. He unzips the small nylon bag with the Cabela’s tag still on it. Band-aides, gauze, alcohol swab, tweezers, eye drops, Neosporin ointment.

Check.

Socks. Two pair.

Check.

Bandana.

“Why do I need one?” He asks.

“To keep the sun off your neck, wipe the sweat off your face. We’re going into the desert in summer.”

 “I’ve got one, but you won’t like it,” he says.

“What’s not to like about a bandana?”

He ducks into his closet and retrieves a neatly folded blue and red piece of cloth. With a flip of his wrist he opens it out. It’s a Confederate flag.

“Not appropriate. Not anywhere.” I’m about to launch into a lecture and history lesson when I notice the half-smile on his face. He’s baiting me. Of course I won’t approve. He knows that. I remember doing this with my father, but not until I had left home and was in college. It’s called breaking away.

What I can’t stand is Cason’s sullen, sarcastic, and disrespectful side. Screaming and door slamming are easier for me to handle than silence or outright refusal to help with something so simple as carrying groceries up the steps.

Yet just a few weeks ago, at a Father’s Day barbeque, he was the perfect son and grandson, serving food, cleaning up, smiling. Which person will he be when we’re out in the wilds without his parents as the enforcers?

As for me, I’ve taken a silent vow to be the warm, relaxed grandmother who lets Cason experience the river in his own way, enjoying the terrain and our companions, taking responsibility for himself. No nagging, no hovering, no treating him like the four-year-old he sometimes seems to be.

But I draw a line at the Confederate flag. “Dump it,” I say. “If you don’t have another, I’ve got an extra.”

Cason shrugs, then drops the bandana back in his closet. We return to the last few items on the packing list. He starts pulling knives out of drawers, off his desk, from his closet. “I’m not sure which ones to take.”

“No knives on the list.”

“But I’ve got to take one.”

He lays them out on the bed. A small stainless-steel pocket knife, a bigger one with a bone handle, a sleek silver one that when he hits a button pops out a long, menacing blade. We used to call it that a switchblade, the kind used by gang members and criminals in the movies I watched as a kid.

“What are you doing with so many knives?”

“I collect them. I buy them with my own money.”

I’ve known this kid all his life—changed his diapers, cradled him when he was sick, comforted him when he was hurt—and these are the tools he shows me to prove he’s grown up. Inhaling slowly, I hit the pause on my internal alarm and point to the plain silver knife on the bed, the kind that unfolds into a pocket tool kit—knife, screw driver, pliers, everything you could need to repair anything. “Take that one.”

He slips the knife into a small nylon bag with his first aid kit and resumes packing from the list. Broad-brimmed hat, camping towel, long sleeve shirt. With each item he grills me. “Why do I need this?”

I should be more patient, relishing this rare opportunity for conversation, but there’s only so much you can explain about a raft trip through the desert Southwest to someone who’s never been there. Besides, I have to get home to my own packing.

“Trust me,” I say. “If it’s on the list, you need it.”

***

1:00 a.m., Vernal, Utah. In our motel room, a pale blue light radiates from the next bed. Cason’s face is aglow with flashing images from his cell phone screen.

          “Cason,” I whisper. “Shut that thing off.”

          A grunt. Covers rustling. The flashing glow shifts from one side of the bed to the other.

          “We have to get up early.”

Another grunt.

Beside me, my husband kicks the covers, mumbles, and turns over.

No electronics on the river. No cell phone coverage there, so that’s our deal. Cason said he was fine with that. Later, I’ll find out he’s loaded his phone with an entire season of Grey’s Anatomy and brought a solar charger.

I want Cason to find life more compelling than images on his screen. I want this trip to be successful, memorable, even life-changing for him. I want him to fall in love with rivers, canyons, the desert, a world beyond.

I believe one journey can change a person’s life. The Grand Canyon changed mine. I was fresh out of college, traveling with my then-husband, backpacking with cheap equipment and ill-fitting shoes. We descended from the rim in February to two nights of camping in single-digit temperatures, hiking the trail beside the river, then trekking ten miles back up, icy trail beneath our feet, stars scattered extravagantly across the ink-black sky. Every step was agony but also triumph. For two Alaskan kids on their first traverse of the United States, the world opened up, the map of the country becoming more than just abstract shapes on the pages of our social studies books. More than that, I discovered a person could strike out into unknown territory for no reason other than to find out what the rest of the world looks like.

Sluggish here at our put-in, the Yampa River, which straddles Utah and Colorado, will gather speed until it merges with the swifter, bigger Green. At the end of the trip, we’ll run a long string of rapids as the Green rushes to join the Colorado.

Helmets on, life jackets zipped and buckled, paddles raised, the two men I love most in the world are poised to shove off into the brown water on this first day of our journey. Grandpa and grandson. They’ve never kayaked together, and Cason has never floated a river. Yet without hesitation, he slips into the inflatable double kayak in front of Jim. A few moments of circling, drifting, bickering, swearing, and they float away. I’ll see them—hopefully—at our first camp. 

          This is what I wanted, grandpa and grandson working together, sharing an adventure. As I snap their picture, I’m proud but also a bit jealous. They’re off without me.

I find an empty space on one of the blue rubber rafts and hop in. Together, we are twenty-two guests and six guides in a flotilla of six rowing rafts, one paddle raft, one double kayak and three single kayaks, all traveling at different speeds but never out of sight of each other. With the exception of our guides and two sisters ages thirteen and ten, everyone in the group but Cason is over fifty.

In early evening, we dock our boats on a hard-packed river bank. Jim and Cason—wet but intact—have managed to propel themselves successfully down the river. Together with our group, we haul the rafts and kayaks up on shore and tether them, then form fire lines to unload gear—folding tables, chairs, stoves, pots, pans, dishes, coolers of food, and waterproof bags containing tents, sleeping bags, and personal gear. A pattern we will repeat at each new camp on our five days along the river.

When the boats have been emptied, Deja, our trip leader, yells, “Campers: Set up your tents.” 

We each grab our two waterproof bags and scurry to find shady camp spots. After surveying our options, Jim picks out a flat space big enough to pitch two tents and far enough away from any snoring neighbor. Working together, we three assemble the tents we’ve rented from the guiding company. When we’ve mastered the mechanics of poles and pegs and our two identical tents are pitched within a few feet of each other, Cason throws his gear into his tent, then stands beside me while I pull out clean clothes to replace my smudged and sweaty ones. I hold back a barrage of questions I want to ask—about the river, the guides, our fellow travelers, and most of all about whether he’s having fun.

“What do we do now?” he asks.

I’m not sure what to say. The options seem obvious. “Sit, watch the water, swim, take a nap, go for a walk, take pictures,” I tell him. “I’m going to wash up in the river.”

He wanders off to sit by himself in the crescent of canvas chairs facing the river. I stifle an impulse to rush over and sit beside him so he doesn’t feel lonely. This is the empty space I wanted him to experience. 

Day two. Cason tries out his skills in the paddle raft with some of the seasoned river runners in our group while Jim and I split up into separate rowing rafts. Our journey takes us through narrow canyons, sweeping meadows, abandoned ranches, and old outlaw hideouts. We tie up in early afternoon and make camp on a floodplain at a curve in the river.

When we’ve pitched our tents, the group scatters to find patches of shade, awaiting a hike that will start when the heat of the day has passed. An hour later, we fill our water bottles and pull on day packs.

Cason remains in his canvass camp chair in the shade. “Hiking is boring,” he’s declared repeatedly whenever I’ve invited him to join me for a walk at home. The truth is that hockey has made him a sprinter, not an endurance athlete.

Bross, our wiry, twenty-something guide, will lead the hike. With his rumpled brown hair, big sunglasses and gray hoody, he could be one of Cason’s high school buddies. “You coming?” he asks Cason.

“I don’t know.”

“Sure you are. Get going.”

Bross grabs a pack, tucks in a first aid kit and a bag of granola bars, slings a jug with extra water over his shoulder, and starts walking.

Cason jumps up, fills his water bottle, and hurries to catch up with Bross.

The trail that begins behind our camp switchbacks up the canyon wall. At the top, we’ve been promised a vista of the river, where we’ve traveled and where we’re headed. As our group of twenty snakes up the hill, Jim dallies to take pictures, while I fall behind trying to spot birds with my binoculars. Cason takes the lead with Bross.

At a fork in the trail some forty-five minutes into our climb, Bross and Cason pause in the shade of some thorny bushes while we stragglers catch up. I sip from my half-empty water bottle, feeling light-headed. Even now, in late afternoon, the air feels no cooler than when we made camp. Alaskans, we’re not used to this desert heat. I worry that Cason’s not drinking enough water.

As I weigh whether to express my concern, Bross articulates it. “Drink water,” he commands, and Cason obliges with a big swig out of his red bottle.

From here the trail is not as steep, but now we labor in soft sand, so the way is no easier. Where we reach solid rock, the trail levels off, ending abruptly at the canyon rim. I peer over the edge at the brown river curving gently below, bright yellow pods of our tents spread out along the bank. I’m dizzy—the heat, the height, the edge—so I step back while others pose for pictures against a backdrop of unobstructed sky. I take pictures of the guides, the other hikers, and Cason, slightly apart from the group, at the rim’s edge, smiling back at me in his red Oklahoma Sooners tee shirt, blue ball cap with American flag on the front, red water bottle in hand.

While I fill my bottle with the extra water Bross has carried all this way, Cason wanders off. When I turn back, he is sitting by himself on an overhanging ledge, feet dangling into oblivion, gazing over the canyon. My brain yells get back, stay away from the edge, you’ll fall off, while my stomach flips and lurches in its own panic dance.

Even if I yelled, he’s too far away to hear my pleas, so I motion for him to get back, but he doesn’t see me or pretends not to. I wave again. He lies back on the flat rock and stares at the cloudless sky. In my mind, the ledge cracks, gives way, and his body hurtles to the valley floor.

I turn away. He’s showing off, testing his limits, feeling the power of his own body.

When I turn back, my husband is approaching the ledge. He’s talking some sense into Cason, I think. But no, they’re both leaning over to watch something below the precipice. I gesture at the two of them, but they pretend not to see.

I rush to Bross and point to the two crazy guys on the brink. Bross shakes his head and waves them back. Moving slowly, Cason pulls in his feet, takes a swig from his water bottle, leans over for a final look, then rises and rejoins us. Jim follows.

***

Day three. I join five other women in the paddle raft with Travis, one of the guides. We’re at his command, relying on his well-timed directions and expert rudder skills to pivot us from lethal boulders and rubber-piercing logs. The afternoon heat beats down on my bare legs. Even though slathered in sunscreen, they feel as if they’ve been basted in olive oil and roasted in the oven. Whenever we have a few seconds’ break in paddling, I unzip the mesh bag strapped to the pontoon in front of me and gulp water from the bottle within, only to be put back to work by Travis’ sometimes frantic orders to forward left, right, back paddle, stop.

In my peripheral vision, a shape drifts past. It’s a big rowing raft with Cason at the oars. Bross stands behind him, ready to avert a disaster if necessary. Cason flashes a quick smile and continues rowing. I grab my camera from its waterproof case and snap his picture. Broad-brimmed hat, orange-framed mirrored sunglasses, faded red life jacket, blue tee shirt, yellow and blue and orange gear bags lashed behind him. Facing forward, he’s leaning into the oars, propelling his raft through the riffles.

How different we are. My life has been careful, measured as I’ve mustered the courage to take risks, unsure in my body, while Cason is confident, competent, a risk-taker. In another culture, he’d have harpooned his first whale by now, shot his first seal, killed his first caribou. Instead he’s here, learning to master the art of reading a river.

Later, as we sit next to each other watching the river at sunset, Cason says, “I wish my family could be here.”

“Your sister hates bugs and your parents don’t like to camp. They’d hate it.” 

I catch myself before blathering on, realizing I’ve cut off a chance to find out what the trip means to him, and to say what it means to me.

 “You’d like to share this with them,” is what I finally blurt out.

 “Yeah.”

Day four. The Yampa, the last undammed tributary of the Colorado, has merged with the broader, more powerful Green River. We’re camped near a wide, grassy valley just past Jones Hole Creek, a clear, swift stream that empties into the Green.

Cason is now Bross’ sidekick. “Guide in training,” Bross calls him. Bross has mastered the unique set of skills essential to a good river guide—river running, local knowledge, yarn-telling, bravado, and above all, patience. Not a bad role model for a teenage boy.

We ready ourselves to hike a trail that follows the creek. The guides promise opportunities to cool off with plunges into the cascades and to view rock pictographs and petroglyphs left by the Freemont people who lived in this country long before the first Spanish explorers.

Bross will stay behind, on dinner duty with Deja and Bob, another guide. I call out to Cason who has slipped into his tent to take a nap.

A muffled moan.

I call again.

“Uh, uh,” he mumbles.

I want him to have this experience. But I want him to choose it.

We leave without him. When we return hours later, bringing stories of still-vibrant drawings by ancient people, immersions in icy water, and encounters with snakes, Cason greets us with a slight nod from a chair in the shade. Hair combed, clothes changed, he looks fresh and clean, his red shirt drying on a tree limb above his tent.

“Bross and I floated down the river,” he says.

The logistics elude me. After floating the river, they’d have to paddle back upstream to return to camp. “How’d you manage that?”

 “We hiked up to the creek, put on our helmets and life jackets, floated down the creek, then down the river and back to camp.”

Slowly, I comprehend their feat, undertaken without boats. Frigid water, bouncing over boulders, dodging sweepers, dog-paddling like mad to reach camp before being swept down the mighty Green. “Wow, that’s quite a trick.”

What I don’t say is What were you thinking? What was Bross thinking? I wanted Cason to discover a sense of himself on this trip, but letting go is harder than I imagined.

It’s our last night of camping. Exhausted hikers leave the campfire one by one, saying goodnight before they slip into bed.

Cason sticks with the guides at the fire. I take toothbrush and water bottle down to the river. On the way back to the tent, I contemplate nudging Cason out of the circle, allowing the guides their night to kick back and drink a few beers, sparing Cason the inevitable foul language and stupid tourist stories. But, as I catch his face in the glow of the fire, he looks older, like a taller, leaner version of someone I once knew. So I duck into my tent, slip into my sleeping bag next to Jim, and leave Cason and the river crew laughing around the fire. 

The next day we face the biggest whitewater on the river. One long intense stretch that must be scouted, pondered over, strategized by the guides. They’ve done it before, many times. But each run is different. The river never stays the same.

I decide to ride with Garth. Measured, cautious, conservative, college math teacher in his other life. Jim chooses a different raft, while Cason of course rides with Bross, who takes the most aggressive run through the rapids, drenching everyone in his boat. When we reunite at the take-out, Cason’s grinning, eyes wide, wet clothes clinging to his body. 
          “That was so much fun. I want to do that.”

“Do what?”

“Be a river guide.”

          This is what I wanted: For him to fall in love with rivers, to find a world beyond cell phones, hockey, and pick-up trucks. And for me: To step aside and let him.

Back at the Microtel in Vernal, I awake to a familiar blue glow in the bed next to me. I get up and gently tug the cell phone from Cason’s sleeping grasp. He jerks awake and snatches it back. Doctors and nurses flicker on the screen. He’s back to Grey’s Anatomy.

          “Cason, we have to get up early.”

          “I don’t care.”

          I climb back in bed and think how nothing has changed. And how everything has.

Susan Pope writes nonfiction from her home in Anchorage, Alaska. Her work has appeared in Pilgrimage, Damselfly Press, The Southeast Review Online, Cirque: A Literary Journal of the Pacific Rim, Hippocampus, Under the Gum Tree, among others. Her writing reflects intimate connections to home and family in Alaska as well as a restless wandering in faraway places. Throughout her career as counselor, teacher, and researcher, she has continued to pursue her first true love, writing. Her essay entitled, “Canyon,” which appeared in Bluestem, was nominated for a Pushcart Prize.