THE NAKED GARDENER

L B GSCHWANDTNER

THE NAKED GARDENER

L B GSCHWANDTNER

The Naked Gardener is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or people, living or dead, is coincidental.

Copyright © 2010 by Laura B Gschwandtner

All rights reserved. Except as permitted under the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the author.

ISBN 9781453734865

Table of Contents

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

CHAPTER ONE

The Garden

CHAPTER TWO

The Market

CHAPTER THREE

The Orchard

CHAPTER FOUR

The Ferry Ride

CHAPTER FIVE

The Women

CHAPTER SIX

The Trout

CHAPTER SEVEN

The Campfire

CHAPTER EIGHT

The Painted Ladies

CHAPTER NINE

The Trestle

CHAPTER TEN

The Virgin

CHAPTER ELEVEN

The Storm

CHAPTER TWELVE

The Landing

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

The Old Woman

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

The Falls

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

The Council Meeting

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

The Rock

FOR READERS AND BOOK CLUBS

AN INTERVIEW WITH THE AUTHOR

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

To my dearest friend M, who lived the life described and who loves her garden, her plants and the frogs that live in the pond; and to my friend S, who goes to her garden naked in the southern heat; I thank them for revealing the threads of this story.

I thank my writer friends, Kim, Karen, Ann, and all the others who have shared with me their love of writing.

My ever patient, loving husband, my editor Catherine, and Neil, who made the cover come alive, I thank you all for your help and wise judgment.

Cover drawing by L B Gschwandtner

Cover design by Neil MacLean

One of the most important resources that a garden makes available for use is the gardener’s own body.

Wendell Berry

CHAPTER ONE

THE GARDEN

It was a summer of firsts. The first month of our first summer in Vermont. The summer solstice, June the twenty-first: the first time I went to my garden naked.

Maze had gone to a symposium on Aztec ritual sacrifice and I spent the day nailing new boards onto the collapsed wall of a pigpen I was remaking into a studio for myself. Maze had fixed the roof so it didn’t leak anymore. I worked until I was sore and tired. Sick of wood boards and nails and sawdusty air, I stood at the half constructed wall. The sun had not set. There was a softness to the light with a fresh green-gold glow reflecting off the leaves. And without any conscious thought, I unhooked my jeans and shoved them down below my knees, pulled off my grubby tee shirt, kicked off my sneakers and stepped out of my panties. Off went the bra and I was walking like a dreamer along the grassy path to the garden. I never told anyone. Just kept going to my garden naked. Like some spirit hovering over the land. That was the first time. It’s three years later and I still go to my garden naked.

* * *

The growing season is short in Vermont. The ground doesn’t soften enough to work the soil until April and danger of frost hovers until late in May. By September the night air has a sharp chill. The first killing frost comes soon enough in October. It’s so different from Virginia. Like the world turned upside down and everything soft and easy rolled south while all the rocks stayed put up north. I think there must be more rocks in my garden in Vermont than in the whole of Tidewater Virginia. Yet the Green Mountains of Vermont and the Blue Ridge of Charlottesville did have a certain kinship, like second cousins, once removed. If it hadn’t been for Maze, I never would have planted a garden in Vermont, or bought a farm in Vermont, or even thought of heading north for the summers. But I already felt uprooted before I met Maze. Like the ground beneath me was unreliable. At any time I could lose my footing again. May in Virginia was already hot, the air heavy and humid, the rich, red earth bursting with life. But we left that behind. In Vermont the nights were still cool. The days felt like early spring, the plants not yet peeking through the rocky soil.

We arrived three weeks ago, came north after Maze finished teaching for the year, and settled into our summers-in-Vermont pattern. We roll along like a train with scheduled stops. Every weekday before dawn he drives off to the local college ninety minutes south to teach a summer class and research native cultures of Mexico at the library. We met in Mexico. It seems like a long time ago.

This morning after Maze left, the mail carrier brought a special delivery letter addressed to me. “Sign this,” she said and held out a small form. After she left I puzzled over it and then tore at the official looking envelope to find an offer of a fellowship for nine months – all expenses paid with an apartment and a stipend. In Copenhagen. I was stunned. Out of the blue like this. I hadn’t applied for it or even known I was being considered for such a thing. But that’s the way it works sometimes. You’re on a path and all of a sudden, another path veers off to the side and you have to decide which way to proceed, even though you can’t know what’s at the end of either one.

* * *

When we arrived at the farm, I put the annuals and vegetables in right away. The garden needed tilling and raking. You can almost watch the weeds sprout before the good plants have a chance to take root. I spread compost and manure, pulled up the weeds, turned the soil, raked the surface flat, marked the rows.

I always lose myself temporarily in the scent of the sun-warmed earth, the buzzing bees, the birds calling to each other, the squiggly worms burrowing back underground when I disturb their soil. Mine is not a structured garden. Not like the gardens of Europe, everything planned, clipped, and controlled. Nothing formal for me. I follow a random order. A disorder that contains a system all its own. I feel my way along and don’t attempt to contain what may happen. My garden is jazz to a formal garden’s minuet.

* * *

This morning before dawn, I was stirred out of a deep sleep as Maze bumped around in the dark of the chicken coop, trying to locate his shoes and socks, pants, a shirt to throw on. He stubbed his sockless toe on a part of the rough floor not covered by a rug, muttered a muffled, “Oh shit,” pulled out a dresser drawer, the one that always makes a gruesome screech when it catches on the left side.

I heard it all but said nothing, feigning sleep while Maze ravaged the room. Why can’t men think two steps ahead? Maze knew he had to be up early to meet his hang gliding buddies. He knew they would pick him up at six. He could have laid out his clothes the night before so he could sneak out before daybreak without waking me. That’s what I would have done.

Greg Mazur, sociology professor, student of native cultures, hang glider. Greg Mazur, who had lost his wife of five years to cancer and was hell bent on marrying again. Maze to me and everyone who knew him well.

He said hang gliding was completely safe as sports go. More people cracked up skiing than hang gliding. I countered that more people skied so naturally the crack up rates were higher. Maze said hang gliders were particularly careful whereas a lot of skiers didn’t have a clue what they were doing. I asked if it was so safe, why wouldn’t insurance companies cover it? Maze side stepped the argument with a shrug. He knew we weren’t arguing about his safety.

“If hang gliding is so safe, then why are you so set against me canoeing over the Trout River falls?”

“Because you can’t do it alone and I’m not experienced enough to go with you.”

“Maybe I’ll find someone to canoe with who is experienced enough and one of these days I’ll do it.” I stuck out my chin like a defiant teen.

“Why are you so determined to take risks like that but then you say getting married is too big a risk?”

“It’s different, that’s all.” I said.

“What makes you think it wouldn’t just be the way it is now? After all the time we’ve been together.”

“I’ve seen it happen.”

“Not to us. Not to me. I am what I am. You know me.”

“I can’t trust that. If we got married, you’d want me to be a wife.”

“Fetch my pipe and slippers? Iron my shirts? Sort my socks? What?”

“Didn’t your wife do all those things?”

The oblique reference to his wife hung there like a chandelier without bulbs. Hard to ignore, but providing no illumination.

“You’re just afraid that what happened to you before will happen again.”

I spun around to defend myself. “No. That’s not it at all and you know it. The truth is, no one could possibly measure up to your memory of her.” But maybe he was right. Maybe I was afraid of the past because I felt I had failed in some way. Failed to make it work before and afraid I would make the same mistakes again. If I could just figure out what those mistakes were. It’s easy to blame someone else. But deep inside, in a place where I didn’t want to search for answers, there was the nagging thought that I missed something basic in the music man, the one before Maze, the one who made me question the stability of any relationship. And if I had missed it once, I could miss it again.

Maze mumbled another “Oh, shit” as he knocked over a small stack of books that he himself had piled by the screen door. His leave taking, with all its concomitant sound effects was infuriating. He could have used the flashlight that always hung right beside that door in case one of us had to go outside the coop to pee in the grass in the middle of the night. It wasn’t as if he was disorganized in his work life. Or about hang gliding. I had seen all his gear up in the barn neatly folded and packed for the trip. He could do that ahead of time.

I turned slowly to face the woods behind the coop and heard a barred owl hoo hoo hoooing. Dawn was coming. Maze pushed the screen door open and stumbled as he stepped into his untied sneakers, his breath a little heavy in the still summer air. He peered back through the door inside the coop. He clicked the flashlight button and ran the beam around the small space past the mess he’d left until the light landed on the lump that was me under the covers curled up in our bed, eyes wide open now, facing him from under the covers. Maybe he knew I was awake.

“Bye, Hon,” he stage whispered to me. Oh, he knew all right.

Why couldn’t you use the flashlight before you made all that noise and woke me up?

But I didn’t yell. Instead I croaked from the back of my morning throat, “Don’t break anything.”

“Jesus,” was all he said and tromped up to the barn.

He didn’t have time to get into another fight, but did that Jesus constitute the last word? In a fight someone always has the last word. I wondered about that. Is it a triumph or a defeat to have that last word? A sign of strength or weakness?

I lay there in bed. I could picture exactly how many steps he would take to the barn door. Could see the rock permanently propped to hold it open. I know where Maze will stop. What he will make for a quick breakfast. What he will leave behind for me to clean up. The bowl with bits of dried cereal and a little puddle of milk at the bottom. The milk carton, half empty but not put back in the fridge. The cereal box open on the table for ants or mice to get into and leave chewed at the corners, spilled onto its side if the mice got to it first. Living out of a barn requires keeping everything in metal containers and not having much on hand. That means lots of trips to the market in town or going over to Trout River Falls to the farmer’s market. It means chores that somebody has to do.

My name is Katelyn Cross and I am now a permanently disgruntled person.

I ruminated on the word, one of those negative words that should have a positive opposite but doesn’t. Could you feel gruntled?

* * *

After I heard the car with Maze and his gliding buddies pull away, I wandered up to the barn, made some tea, and stood in my sweats at the barn door, the warm mug cupped in my hands like a baby bird. I looked out at the gentle hills, soft green in the dim pre dawn light. Remnants of chill hung in the air. Soon the sun would come up behind the forest where deciduous and pine trees grew alongside each other, a forest in transition. One day the pines would give way to hardwoods and even the forest would be different.

Is there ever a time when everything stands still and gives a person time to get her bearings back?

The field of tall grasses that led to the barn was moist with dewy, glistening nets of spider webs. I saw in their sparkling, delicate pattern, a reflection of my own work with glass. This was what I had wanted to capture when I first smashed a piece of glass and added it to a painting, this essence of light at the very start of a new day, this crisp, clear view of a world full of broken fragments. Wisps of mist rose off the pond down the sloped field off to the west. Tiny goosebumps dotted my arms. I stood with both feet on one wide floorboard just inside the barn door. A bumblebee whizzed by my head into the palest morning light. The sun peeked through the trees at the east ridge. A shot of bright light bathed me in a sudden rush of heat.

I dropped my sweats and slipped off my T-shirt and God if that bolt of sun didn’t feel delicious on my naked skin. I wanted to dance, right there in front of the barn. Dance like a worshipper at Stonehenge.

Standing at the barn door, I ran my hand over my naked belly. Taut and empty, waiting for a life to fill it up. I was about to turn thirty-four and every time I soaped myself in the shower or caught sight of myself in the mirror dressing, I had begun to think, Well? What are you going do about it? That body won’t last forever. If it’s going be reproducing, it better get going.

But I kept stalling, I didn’t want to think about the future. And now this fellowship offer. Another decision, another disruption to the flow of life, another change. So I worked the garden knowing it would provide me with plenty to do. I was cultivating turnips instead of popping out wriggly little bundles of joy.

I let the warmth bathe my body for as long as possible but when the sun moved quickly beyond the barn door, I stepped into unlaced ankle-high boots, the kind with heavy treads designed for climbing, and stood there naked until the beam of light moved away and so did I. Off to the garden. The rutabagas awaited me.

***

I found the farm. Maze was still at the university in Charlottesville giving exams, having conferences with his students. I called him to come up and see it on the weekend. He wanted to go north for the summers. I was a southern girl and had always lived in Virginia, had never thought of moving north.

The elderly farmer who sold it to us had lost his wife to a stroke. He turned to scotch and whatever else he could afford to pour down his lonely-hearted throat and just let things unravel. His daughter had decided to take him in, add onto her house, use the money from selling off the extra acreage and the rest with the barns and farmhouse to care for the old man. A farm untended goes to seed fast. It looked as if the Civil War had been reenacted on its fields. What did we know? An artist and a college professor looking for a summer retreat in the country. Hadn’t he done some minor house repairs long ago to make money during his college summers off? Hadn’t I always had a way with houseplants?

“The house is kind of a wreck,” Maze said when he first saw the property.

He was right of course. Two supporting beams for the roof on the north side of the house had rotted through and here and there the old stone foundation had sunk into a maze of woodchuck tunnels. But I had fallen in love.

“You know, we could ignore the house.”

“You mean fix up one of the barns instead of the house?”

The pigpen was beyond use except as a studio for me. If you were a cow, the barn could have been quite comfortable. The faint scent of manure still hung in one corner, although it had a sweet natural aroma that was comforting in some instinctual way. Anyway the barn doors, heavy and pitted with age, didn’t close and to create a livable building out of a barn may look good in some glossy magazine spread but it’s a pricey operation. Salvaging and remaking a building ends up costing more than building new. Since we couldn’t afford either, it didn’t matter.

“We could sleep in the chicken coop.” It was a freestanding rectangular low-ceilinged building down a small sloped field from the barn. “We could fix that up ourselves. And we could use the barn for a kitchen and eating space,” I suggested.

“Kind of like camping out, with a few more conveniences. I could see that. It could be fun for the summers.”

“I just want it to be very simple. I don’t want us to stress over anything. I don’t want it to feel permanent. Or settled.”

“Agreed. As long as we can use the toilet inside the house, I’m game.”

It was hard work, getting to this simplified life. During that first summer, we gradually came to understand just how many things we did not need because to get them was either too costly or too difficult.

The list was long and varied.

Cell phones (no reception for miles around in northern Vermont)

Internet (see above – we would drive to the college computer lab when necessary)

Washer, dryer, dishwasher, trash compactor (are these a necessity anyway?), iron and board (we had nothing that required ironing), coffee pot (we drank tea) blender, crock-potand assorted other small appliances.

TV

What we did acquire and use every chance we got was a second-hand canoe. For Maze this was a new adventure. For me it was old news. My father taught me how to swim, paddle, fish, and scuba dive. So I took the stern and gave Maze lessons on the Trout River to our north. We started with quick water and moved on from there. Maze became comfortable but never as adept as I was. I have an innate feel for water.

The chicken coop turned out to be the most intact structure on the farm. Chickens don’t stress a building the way cows and people do. We tore out the roosts. After two weeks shoveling what the chickens had left behind and scrubbing every surface and crevice with ammonia, we moved in. The combined scent of chicken droppings and ammonia fumes almost put me off task any number of times but, when we finally got the place cleaned, it was a pleasant single story space with a low ceiling and wide windows on three sides.

I painted the inside of the coop with bright, bold colors – scenes of birds and ferns and flowers and insects reminiscent of Mexico. Maze lined the low walls with bookcases and built small bedside tables out of weathered walls from a half crumbled shed. This was not cabinetry. It was sawing and hammering and nailing into place. We did buy a drill. And some garden tools.

We built a bed frame and platform out of old wood, carried a new mattress from our ancient Subaru, hung a screen door and stapled screening in front of the wavy old windows that pulled up from outside. Why did chickens need windows? Did they lay better eggs if they had a view to the outside? Were windows necessary for gathering eggs? All I know is, I’ve never seen a windowless chicken coop. We nailed leather belts from Goodwill to the coop’s eaves and attached these by the buckles to hooks at the bottom of each window frame to hold the windows open. When it rained, at least we could thank the chickens and lower our windows against the weather.

Electricity was a challenge. Maze got a how to book on do-it-yourself electrical wiring. He dug a narrow trench from the back of the house, took apart a conduit that led to an outlet inside the back wall of the house, spliced into it, and ran it to the back of the coop. He drilled through the wood and installed a new outlet inside. He patched around the hole and covered it with wood scraps. I painted over the patch. From then on we got by with one lamp and one extension cord that we plugged into whatever else needed electricity.

We scraped the dirt floor flat, laid planks over it, and caulked the planks to control the dust.

“It’s not a perfect solution but for summers, I think it will be enough.”

I was impressed with Maze’s equanimity throughout the whole project. We worked well together. Giving the farm new life, uncovering unexpected uses from worn relics of past lives. Every time he nailed a board in place or dug another foot of trench, I could see the tangible result. It was satisfying. This sense of completion.

We ate most of our meals in the barn at a wooden table with mismatched chairs we found here and there at secondhand stores and garage sales. This part of the barn had small square windows at seated eye level that looked out on rolling green hills beyond the barn. The space felt intimate and I could imagine docile cows in this space munching away on their cud. Occasionally we would find a black snake curled up in a corner in the sun by the barn door. We ate early salad from our own garden, and pickled beets I had put up the previous summer. Maze grilled a fat pike on a steel rack over a wood fire in a stone pit he made the first summer. Every year he restacked the stones in a small circle after winter snows, freezes, and thaws shifted them out of round.

Before we could move in we camped near the barn. Most clear nights we slept out under the stars. Sometimes something would waken him or me in the middle of the night. One of us would reach for the other and then whammo, we’d be rolling all over the grass, moaning. The nighttime creatures must have been snickering and talking about what animals we were.

One night, after we had rolled around for a good long time, we lay on the grass on a small hill between the barn and the chicken coop. When it turned pitch dark and dots of light began to emerge in the night sky, Maze reached for me and sighed.

“This is heaven.”

I had never heard that particular tone in his voice. With our fingers twined together we lay there and witnessed what was unseen in the sky during the day reveal itself slowly, in excruciating detail. How could all those stars possibly have a name? It would be like naming each plankton in the ocean. So it was possible to have these moments, to feel connected to the earth and the heavens and each other all at the same time.

By the time move in day arrived, we had arranged the chicken coop so that it really felt like a summer home. Not exactly the summer palace at St. Petersburg, but we weren’t the Romanoffs.

The still operable toilet in the rundown house was old but reliable, if you jiggled the handle a certain way and prayed. Maze and a friend had reinforced the rotten roof beams. Since carrying water from the house to the barn, where we had set up a kitchen of sorts, became an onerous routine, Maze created a rainwater catch out of an old porcelain bathtub he spotted in an overgrown field where cows once grazed. He built a platform that held it perched on the barn roof and snaked copper pipe from its drain hole into a sink that he inserted into a counter we constructed out of old floorboards from the garret of an attic in the house. Cold water of course. With a shut off valve. Some days we ran out of water in the barn. But when the rains came, we washed everything in sight with impunity. Our friends marveled at the ingenuity of it, spoke with envy of living the simple life, then went home to their tri-levels and colonials with flat screens and central heat and dishwashers and Sub Zero refrigerators.

We built a wooden platform against the back of the house adjacent to the inside bathroom and ran pipes through to the outside wall and connected a showerhead with shut off valves for faucets. Hot water was a treat after bathing in the cold pond. Maze added three wooden privacy panels that spanned from knees to neck with saloon doors for easy entrance. Three hooks on the house wall held a towel and clothes to don when dry. An old wood crate turned on its end held soap and whatever else one needed. For shaving and combing hair we hung a mirror from a tree branch next to the platform.

We arrived in the country in mid May, installed ourselves in the chicken coop, cleaned the bat droppings from winter hibernation out of the barns, Maze did his thing and I stayed behind to tend the garden and whatever else needed doing. I set up a studio of sorts where the pigs had lived and besides painting every day, and once a month packing up discs with illustrations to send my rep in the city – well I still had to have some income – tending to the garden became my main occupation. I soon discovered that a garden was a needy being. Like having quintuplets that cried all the time.

* * *

There is nothing gentle about gardening. One must be ruthless. Even the tools one uses are a kind of weaponry. They dig, stab, claw, rake, cut, snap. Creating a garden in Vermont was a struggle. Each shovel full of earth was half filled with rocks. Rakes ground against stone, trowels hit them with each downward thrust, seedlings had to worm their way around stones and, when pulled up, mature carrots looked like corkscrews. I raked and raked, removed buckets of stone from the flower beds, stacked them in piles outside the garden and still they came, rock upon rock, up from the depths of the earth like goblins emerging from underground caverns.

I planted early lettuce varieties, followed by tomatoes, carrots, sugar snaps, kohlrabi, beets, beans, corn, radish, rhubarb, fennel, leeks. It was my intention to add new perennials every year. But I hadn’t counted on the deer munching their way through everything I planted as soon as it came up high enough. They loved the tender shoots. I cursed them and chased them and yelled at them. Sometimes I got so aggravated, I thought about buying a gun. But every time I thought of shooting a deer I pictured those beautiful eyes, calmly staring at me.

Deer weren’t the only marauding intruders. My garden was a regular animal magnet for rabbit, skunk, raccoon, possum. Maze finally fenced the entire garden with a six foot tall wood frame and heavy gauge fencing wire that kept out all but the most persistent diggers. We added a perimeter of cinder blocks dug deep into the ground as a buffer, used the stones we removed from the garden to build a perimeter wall and that did it. After that the asparagus was reliable and the woody herbs came back with gusto. I planted melons, squash, and coddled the old apple and pear orchard beyond the barn back to life.

Maze created an archway across the path to the garden. I encouraged a wisteria to take root with results that I would regret in future years when its rampant growth required a strict hand every two weeks during the growing season. I planted more flowering vines around the outside. Once the vines had covered the fence, the garden became my private space.

I looked out past the dewy grass and far off, beyond the garden, awaiting me was the pond. But that was for later. Now, I took up my trowel, slipped on my garden gloves and breathed in the scent of earth and green leaves warmed by sun. I planted a straw hat on my head and walked naked in my boots down the path I’d worn through the field of Queen Anne’s Lace to the garden. Their delicate flat white heads bobbed slightly as I brushed past letting their lacy heads caress my skin. I let go of the annoyance, opened the gate and entered my garden.

I leaned down to loosen some weeds that had sprouted around a clump of lettuce and it occurred to me that I probably had no tan lines and, if Maze noticed, he would never know why.

As I worked my way down the row of lettuce, I came upon the crown of a large rock. Rain had washed off its surface, revealing it for the first time. Was this an erratic? It didn’t seem big enough.

I didn’t know anything about erratics until I came to Vermont. The poor old farmer, Mr. Reichelm, walked the place with me before Maze came north to see it. He hadn’t shaved in weeks and took me wandering up and down the hills and valleys. We skirted the woods and, from out of nowhere, came upon a gigantic slab of a stone sticking out of the earth like some leftover from an ancient Celtic past.

“Oh, now that there is what they call an erratic, you know. Aye yuh,” he told me when I asked. “Erratic boulder some calls ’em. Some as big as that barn.” He pointed behind us to the old barn where no cows now chewed their cud and the stalls sat empty. “Some like that, size of a car, right there stickin’ up at the bottom of that field beyond all them springs in the way of everything like that. Come down with the ice they says. It lays in there inside the ice for about a million year or so and then up and melts and the ice goes and the rock stays put. Balanced like what you see there and everything. Too heavy to move so we just plow around him and that’s that then.”

The stones were always popping up out of nowhere. They hide beneath the soil forever and then one day, there they are at the surface. At first I was amused by them. In Virginia, I never encountered a rock in any garden. Clay maybe. Roots. But the soil I knew was rich, red, moist and airy. You could throw a seed into it and watch it take root almost the same day. In Vermont the soil is stubborn, unyielding. I discovered that right away. It is easier to keep weeds down in a healthy soil than one that has been starved. It is easier to excise the undesirable growth if the soil can breathe. I had to breathe life into this Vermont garden, inch by inch, foot by foot, rock by rock.

I followed a simple system. I would start at one end, chop at the soil with a hoe to loosen the earth, uproot whatever stones had pushed up during the spring thaw, and dig out the weeds. Sometimes I bent down and pulled by hand at the stalks near their base. I went methodically from the first row at the outside perimeter down to the end, then back up the next row and so on, up and down from row to row. The first year was hard. The ground had not been tilled for many years. It was tough, full of stones, and dense as cement. By adding manure and compost, carefully picking the rocks out, I gradually worked the soil until it came alive, filled with nutrients, light, airy, full of body like a rich coffee.

I poked at the stone with my boot toe but it didn’t move so I thought best let sleeping rocks lie. Still it felt like a challenge. Who would be bested by this impediment? Me or the rock? I worried that it would work its way farther and farther to the surface and I would find this huge thing in my way. And maybe others were lurking around it. Its edges seemed ill defined and it irritated me to have it there, not fitting into my garden design, albeit unorthodox. I didn’t like this invasion. I tried to find its edges with my shovel but no matter how I skirted it, the real shape eluded me.

Finally, I worked my way around it and moved down the row, weeding, cultivating, sweating, picking out stones and tossing them onto one of the piles outside the garden. How these rocks reveal themselves is a mystery. Is it earthworms moving little bits of dirt at such a slow pace that we can’t see the earth changing under our feet? All those worms squirming around in the soil, swallowing it and letting it out the other end all aerated and spongy. The soil we stand on is in constant motion. The planets, the whole solar system, the solar systems we can’t see, are all in motion at incredible speed. Beneath my feet the lowly worms eat their way through the soil, slowly, yes, but effectively restoring and feeding the earth. My garden was a microcosm of all that movement and energy, the transfer of sunlight into the plants, rainwater pulled up through the soil into the roots, so that my lettuces could spring forth and end up in a salad bowl in our barn.

While Maze soared like an eagle over some mountainous abyss, I rooted around in the garden dirt like an anteater, pushing, pulling, tugging, grunting. Although perennials in a garden will come back each year on their own, so will the weeds and the struggle for survival is fierce. It was up to me to wield the balance of power. After a morning naked in my little plot of privacy, I was muddy and hot and by then my bare skin was covered in garden soil.

I worked the garden until my boots were caked with earth. Until sweat ran down my neck, between my breasts, down my back, between my butt cheeks, until I swiped my forehead with my upper arm, straightened my back, and raised my arms in a wide stretch. I watched a swallowtail dart through the trees. The way it lilted along made me smile and I listened to the nearby calls of redwing, titmouse, wren, waxwing, warbler and the raucous jay. I am the naked gardener, at home in here, preserving a bit of myself separate from the world out there, here where there is no pretense, unclothed, unfettered but connected to life.

I would come back later to sow the annual seeds but now I walked slowly down the hill through the path of Queen Anne’s Lace toward the huge erratic stone at the starting point of the pond. The size of a pickup truck, stuck there in the middle of the field, as if abandoned by some giant from a lost geologic age. I climbed like a mountain goat onto the huge flat erratic. Warm from the morning sun, it glittered a little here and there with bits of embedded mica. When we put in the pond to take advantage of the springs, we planned it around the erratic. It formed a perfect start to the pond, long and narrow for swimming laps, fed by springs that ran continually in all seasons.

I kicked off my boots and wiggled my toes in the fresh air, then climbed further up onto the flat top and looked over into the pond. The water was dark, rich, inviting. I took a step forward, saw my reflection and then jumped, splashing cold water back onto the rock. I hit the water like a gull going after a fish. The cold shock made my hot skin tingle. I swam quickly. Down the length of the pond and back, stroke after stroke, thirty, forty, fifty times. I rolled and played in the water until all the dirt had washed away and my skin was cool.

After swimming I sunned on the rock like a turtle until I realized I was hungry. It was time to be about the rest of my day and a trip up to the farmer’s market in Trout River Falls. Maybe I should have told Maze about the letter. I wasn’t giving him enough credit. He would be happy for me. Would want to spend his sabbatical year in Denmark. Or he might not. There were no native tribes to study there. No ancient sites to visit. He wasn’t interested in Vikings. And me? Could I really give all this up?

CHAPTER TWO

THE MARKET

Before I took off for the market, I climbed the wooden steps to the hayloft. We stacked canned vegetables and jams up there on a rough shelf someone had nailed into place long ago. The sweet scent from a few abandoned bales in the hayloft reminded me of the cows that used to inhabit the barn, of the old farmer and the old ways. Beyond the barn, there was also an apple and pear orchard, not very large but enough for a couple of fall crops.

I packed a carton with extra jars of stewed tomato and jams. Saturday was a big day at the farmers market.

Trout River Falls was a tiny hub of activity three days a week when the farmers’ market came to town. Besides the market – open Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday, June through mid October, when all you could buy were pumpkins, gourds, and whatever gardeners like me had put up in jars from their extra garden produce – there was the old hardware store, a one room bank – no drive through – a combination barber shop hair salon manned by Doris and Eddy Barr, a luncheonette attached in some weird way to an ancient drugstore.

If you wanted to go sit on a well worn rock wall and watch a waterfall or gaze at a mill and waterwheel long since defunct, Trout River Falls was a good place to do it. During the summer there was a steady stream of out of towners gawking and oohing and saying how wonderful everything was and wasn’t New England quaint. I was like these tourists, an out of towner who thought the town looked every bit like the picture on an old postcard you might find in a box in your grandmother’s attic. Fall foliage attracted a fair share of out of state plates and even some hardy bicyclists swishing through with their water bottles and skin tight wicking Lycra. There was a small café – open at unpredictable hours – where the drive-bys sat at little plastic tables downing sprouty sandwiches and bottled flavored teas.

I arrived to the ever present grumble of the Trout River falls. Streams of sunlight danced off the spray as I crossed the bridge over the Trout River. The falls, flowing as always, cascaded over rock outcroppings, pooling in places and then meandering down to plunge again. There was a good clear drop on the north side of the falls, just next to where the old mill pond wall had been built to collect water to turn the mill wheel. The water level was low for late spring, and I could clearly see the cliff of rocks usually hidden by water. I eyed that drop, gauging just where one would have to paddle to steer clear of the rocks and where to point the nose of the canoe. I had watched white water kayakers negotiate the falls but had never seen a canoe go over it.

The bank was closed on Saturdays. Doris and Eddy Barr had not yet opened the hair salon. The luncheonette’s door was propped open with a brick and the little plastic tables had been set out so they were open for business. The big clock on the front of the old grain storage warehouse said four fifty-two, which of course was wrong. I wondered what year it had ticked off its last minute.

I spotted Erica’s red mini van and pulled up next to it. She was busy with a few of her regular customers. Erica’s breads had their own local mystique. She had an easy way with everybody. Of course she’d lived her whole life here, knew everyone and all their business. And they knew hers. Even though Maze and I had been in the area three seasons, I still got the feeling the locals thought of us the way they thought of the tourists. Summer people. A nuisance. People who never stick around to deal with the snow and ice, the power outages and early spring mud, and year-long political infighting.

Erica was a large, tall woman. I parked where she wouldn’t see me. I wanted to surprise her. I hadn’t called anyone since Maze and I had arrived. Just the kind of funk I was in I suppose.

I came up behind Erica and said, “Boo.”

“You’re back,” she turned and hugged me, knowing who it was even before we made eye contact.

“Did you bring anything to sell or are you just visiting?”

“Both,” I told her. “Sorry I haven’t called yet. We’ve been so busy getting the farm back in shape. Do you mind if I put my jars on your table?”

“Of course not. Do you have any of that strawberry jam to trade for maybe a chocolate pecan loaf?”

A ratty old station wagon pulled up. All its doors flew open and a batch of children fell out and ran over to the wall overlooking the falls. They squealed and yelled, picked up pebbles and threw them as far as they could into the water. A balding man with a scattered expression on his face slowly emerged from the car and walked over to Erica’s table.

“Well, well,” said Erica. “Got you on baby patrol today, Howard?

“Just like you see it. The kids and their friends about to drive me over that bridge,” Howard pointed to the Water Street bridge.

“What you need is a wife,” said Erica. “For your wife that is.”

“Give me those two loaves,” Howard pointed to a wheat and a sesame on the table. “If I show up with none of your bread, Mavis’ll have my head.” Then he craned his neck and yelled over to the kids at the wall. “Hey one more throw and then back in the car. No more foolishness.”

He turned back to Erica and shrugged. She handed him the loaves wrapped in thin brown paper.

“Here you go, big boy,” she smiled and winked at me, tilting her head slightly.

“Thanks,” he said and tucked the bundle under his arm. “You girls come to any conclusion, yet?” he asked.

“Oh, Howard, how sweet of you to call us mature ladies girls,” Erica chided him.

Howard chuckled. “You’re too much for me, Erica. I’ll be seeing you at the meeting at the end of the month.”

“I do look forward to that, Howard,” said Erica.

He rounded up the children. They piled back into the car squealing and jockeying for seats and off they went. Erica carefully lowered herself onto a little chair she’d opened early that morning. She sighed.

“Never expected to see Howard Oettenger here today,” she breathed deeply and let it out slowly. “Oh look at me. Finally sitting on this rickety chair and didn’t even break it.”

“Who was that?”

“Used to be head of the town council.”

“What do you mean used to be? Who’s head of it now?” I asked.

“You’re talking to her.”

I missed a lot being away nine months of the year. “When did that happen?”

“Oh, let’s see. At the March meeting. Right before spring mud.”

“I didn’t think you were interested in politics.”

“This isn’t politics. It’s more like charity work. Trout River Falls is dying and the men don’t see any reason to run a town that technically may not exist in a year or two.”

“What? This cute old town?”

“Cute doesn’t pay the bills,” she shrugged. “Malls and office parks and WalMarts pay bills.”

We watched a few cars cross over the bridge.

“Even the bridge is cute,” I said, looking at the old wooden bridge with the tiny bridge man’s cabin at the north end. There hadn’t been a bridge man in over a hundred years but the little room stood as a reminder of days when a toll was collected to pay the bridge owner for the right to cross the river.

“The whole thing’s fading into the past.”

More people stopped at Erica’s table to buy bread. Some bought jars of my produce. The sun had passed its mid point. Light sparkled on the waterfalls behind us and downriver the water gurgled away. The market would close at two. There was always a rush at the end before the farmers shut down and went home.

“What about the businesses that are still here?” I asked her.

“What you see along River Street is it. The only revenue comes from real estate taxes and if we don’t do something soon, everything will be abandoned and boarded up. Oh I can’t worry about it now. Let’s take a break for lunch.”

We sat in the sun on top of the wall overlooking the falls with its ceaseless soft roar behind us. I unwrapped a tuna sandwich. Erica opened a salad in a Tupperware bowl and poked at it with a plastic fork.

“If you’re head of the council, who else is serving with you?” I asked her.

“Omigod,” Erica pointed to the bridge. “Look who’s coming to town.”

A silver BMW convertible – top down – sped across the bridge and pulled up next to the wall. The pretty driver’s hair was neatly covered by a printed silk scarf that ruffled a little as she drove. She grinned and waved, sticking her hand straight up over the windshield. Next to her, a dowdy younger woman whose hair had been blown wild by the drive, opened the car door and looked at the ground as if she half expected to step in something unappealing. When she did look up, I recognized her and then realized I also knew the other woman.

“Here’s part of your answer. You remember Valerie and Hope?” Erica was asking. You met them at that barbecue last summer. You helped serve food.”

It was one of those covered dish things where everybody brought something and they set up the food on long tables.

“Oh right.” I did remember. “So you mean Valerie and Hope are on the council?”

“With Charlene and Roz. You met them all last summer.”

I tried to remember everyone but there had been so many people.

Valerie and Hope joined us by the wall.

“I picked Hope up after class,” Valerie told us.

“How are you?” Hope asked me. “What have you been doing since last summer?”

We chatted about nothing in particular, the way women do when they haven’t seen each other in a while. Hope had started taking nursing classes. She was still working at the Methodist church, renting a room from the pastor and his wife, taking classes at night and on Saturday mornings. Valerie had done some modeling. A charity show at the country club. A shoot for a golf magazine. She had gone to Nevis on vacation with her husband. I told them about two shows I’d been in, illustration jobs, that Maze was out hang gliding.

“Hang gliding,” Valerie repeated. “Is that like where they jump out of planes and grab each other’s hands and float in the sky?”

“No, that’s a type of sky diving. Where they free fly in formation before they break apart and open their parachutes. Hang gliding is like flying with huge wings. They jump off a cliff somewhere or a mountain face and glide on thermals until they slowly come back to earth.”

We stopped talking for a few minutes.

“If we could save this town, we’d be like those sky divers, hanging together. That would show my husband,” Erica smacked her palm on her thigh.

“What does he have to do with it?” I asked.

Valerie and Hope groaned.

“Will.” Valerie said.

“Yes, Will,” Hope repeated.

“He’s the town’s attorney,” Erica said. “Pro bono of course. He plays golf with all these men. He counseled them to quit and disband the town council altogether. He says the state pays for the bridge and roads so just let the rest go to hell.”

Erica glanced over toward the bridge. There were no more cars. A few cyclists had stopped at the luncheonette for drinks.

“And you want to revive the town?” I asked.

“We’ve talked about it. Matter of fact, the council is going to discuss it at the public meeting this month. You should come,” Hope told me.

“The whole council wants to save it,” Valerie said. “The question is how?”

Before I even thought about it, I said, “Isn’t there some way to make it a destination?”

Erica’s voice rose a bit with an excited edge. “That’s what I thought. But Will says I’m crazy. He says I should have turned down the job to begin with. But men…”

“I know. They don’t understand.” I nodded in agreement, thinking about Maze leaving that morning.

“He thinks because he’s retired, I should just sit around like him playing golf all day. Like waiting at home to make his dinner is satisfying for me.”

“Oh, God, that’s what I’m afraid of.”

“Oh did you tie the knot and not tell anyone?” Valerie asked.

“No.”

“But still thinking about it.” Hope said.

“He’s thinking about it. I’m conflicted. But if we don’t move forward, then what? I guess one day you have to choose. Either give up your man or give up your independence. Nothing stays the way it is. You either move forward or die holding down the fort alone.”

“I wouldn’t know,” Hope said.

Erica repositioned herself so that her legs hung out over the wall with her back to the market tables. She wore Birkenstocks that looked as if they were a good ten years old. She was agile, the way some heavy people are.

“A destination. But to what?” Valerie asked.

“I do have one idea. But it involves a real sales job. And it’s only the germ of an idea. Nothing concrete yet,” Erica said.

“What’s is it?” I asked her.

“Well,” Erica turned her head toward me, her tone conspiratorial. “An old lady named Mrs. Ward lives in that big mausoleum just over there,” Erica pointed above the falls to some woods but I couldn’t see anything except trees and a high wall with ivy covering most of it. There was the weathered mill and waterwheel and I could also see an old wooden pier that stuck out from the land into the river.

“She lives in the original house. It was built about two hundred years ago. And then it was added onto later when the family really prospered. That grist mill is the last one. At one time there were three mills on the river. The other two were for lumber and power for electricity to the house and village. Old people around here say the Ward place is huge. All stone. Quarried up the river a little ways and floated down to the falls on barges. Her great grandfather I don’t know how many generations back built the mill and the family built the town and the house and the bridge and everything else around here. They had a lumber business and a store where they sold flour. There used to be a factory that made shoes and another one that made buttons and a third that wove ribbon. The ribbon factory burned up in a fire that hit the town over sixty years ago. Some people say it was an insurance fire since the ribbon business had gone south. The shoe factory just sort of fell apart after all the shoe manufacturing went to Brazil and the factory here shut down. And buttons … they just stopped making buttons. All that’s left is the house and the mill.”

“What happened to the button factory? I mean the building?” I asked

“It’s still back there, behind the hardware store. On Water Street next to the old shoe factory building. It’s been empty for years. Just a big empty place with those old skylights they used to put in the roof for light,” Hope explained.

“I’ll bet it’s a great space.” I looked at Erica. “And your idea?”

“The old lady has no children. And no family left. She’s a recluse as far as I can tell. No one’s seen her for years except the man who worked for her husband tending the grounds and taking care of the house. He buys her food and every once in a while someone sees him outside by the mailbox. He even comes to the market to buy bread from me every other week. Not today though. So my idea is to try to get her to leave the house and the mill and her money to the town in a trust. And we do something with all that to draw people here to Trout River Falls.”

I watched the water cascading over the falls to the left of the mill pond dam. Funny about all that rock. Some of it is immovable, like the rock that creates the waterfall. And some of it just won’t stop moving, like the rocks in my garden, always showing up where I didn’t want them. I thought about all the stone walls I drove past everywhere. In Virginia a stone wall is a sign of gentry, the moneyed class. Here they were as common as trailer parks. You could barely walk a hundred paces without hitting a stone wall. Stone foundations, stone houses, stone barns, stone walls.

I watched the way the water flowed and dropped, terrace by terrace, into pools and rushes. The good run on the west side had what I estimated was about a forty foot drop at a thirty degree angle. Not too hard the way the water was flowing now. After a good rain, it would be a bit trickier, more turbulent. The rocks would be hidden under water.

“I guess you’d have to come up with a way to get to the old lady. Old people get pretty fixed in their ways. They don’t like being asked to do things. Especially for someone else. Does anyone know her or know anyone who knows her?”

“I used to know some women at the club who knew her,” said Valerie. “But they’re all long gone.”

“Then we’d better hurry up and get to her,” Hope said.

I was surprised at Hope’s practical approach. She had seemed mousy when I first met her last summer. Maybe it was being at the church that day. Maybe she was like me, also in transition.

People had stopped driving up to the farmers’ market. Only a few trucks and vans remained parked outside the hardware store. The last of the farmers had packed up and gone for the day.

We collapsed Erica’s table and moved to our cars. She gave me her new phone number. Now that she was head of the town council, she had gotten her own line.

Maybe you’ll come over and see how we’ve fixed up the farm,” I told them. “Maze and I will be doing some chores Monday.”

“I’d like to see that. Anyone who could fix up that old Reichelm wreck just might be able to bring Trout River Falls back to life.”

“I suppose you think I don’t really fit in up here.”

“No,” she shook her head. “I think you fit in just fine. But I always wondered how you got here. It’s not like it’s on the main route to or from anywhere.”

Tiny droplets of water from the falls pricked at my face. I looked up at the sky and wondered if Maze was at that moment floating on hot air currents, gliding over some farmer’s fields, maybe even watching the Trout River from way off in the distance. How does anybody end up anywhere?

* * *

Sunday morning and a light breeze. Warm air currents ruffled the edges of the leaves. Sun blazing in an azure sky. Puffy white clouds moved lazily eastward, casting shadows over the fields and garden. The pond glittered with feathery patterns like a harpist’s fingertips were rippling a broken cadence across the water.

I left the barn naked, the warm sun on my shoulders. Past Queen Anne’s lace. Down the path. Then, just as the garden came into full view, a rabbit hopped into the middle of the path, munching on some tender shoots of wild violet. His ears pointed forward away from me. Tail tucked, haunches relaxed. I stopped. Watched as he chewed the flower and then the leaves, taking his time. Unaware of my presence, not frightened. It was good Maze had walled my garden off from the creatures.

When I was seven, my father tilled up a large rectangle in a wide grassy field behind our house. He must have borrowed the tiller from our neighbors who had a small farm. I was friends with their daughter. She and I used to collect eggs from the chicken roosts in their barn. In there it always seemed like dusk; it smelled like fresh hay and cow hides and milking pails. Even the manure smelled fresh and clean, a natural part of life. Her brothers mucked the stalls, refreshed the hay for the cows. There was a big old horse named Red. A gentle soul with large eyes and heavy legs. We’d climb up onto his back and ride him around the farm, never going faster than a slow, ambling walk. I don’t know how Red felt about these jaunts but we loved them.

Once my father had plowed up the field for his garden, he laid out rows with wooden stakes at the end of each row and lines of white cotton string between the stakes. Every row was evenly spaced with the next and each string ran true from stake to stake. After he sowed the seeds, he popped the corresponding seed packet over its stake to show what was planted in each row. On one side, the whole length of the garden was reserved for corn, four rows neatly spread out with more space between them than the other rows. Next to the corn, he planted vegetables. Once he reached the middle of the garden he planted flowers. A riot of flowers, as it turned out. But in the beginning, there were just the furrows with my father’s footprints running up and down in the earth.

On days there was no rain, he stood out there moistening the earth with a fine mist from a garden hose. Meticulous and patient about his garden, I had no idea at the time that he was really in a kind of mourning. My mother had been hospitalized and no one knew when she would be coming home.

Soon tiny green sprouts popped up through the dirt. They were so small and looked so tender it was hard to imagine how they would survive, as if one brisk wind could smash them back into the earth. But they were tougher than they looked. I went out with him every morning to check on their progress. I didn’t question why he didn’t go to work that year. Whatever happens in the life of a child seems normal at the time. It’s what you know. And only that.

When the green sprouts were about two inches tall, my father told me we had to weed them out. We bent over the rows and carefully pulled the smaller ones out of the dirt. Their tiny white roots dangled from my fingers and I thought how cruel it was to stop them from growing. But my father explained that if we didn’t weed them out, they would crowd each other and none of them would grow. He said we were doing nature’s work for her.

Up and down the rows we worked until we had pulled out most of the little seedlings. Over the next week I was amazed to see how fast the ones we had left grew. It was almost as if you could see them reach up right in front of your eyes. I sometimes stood at the edge of the garden and watched closely. As if I might witness them growing.

In mid June, the garden was tall and green and robust with life. The vegetable plants bloomed and I was about to discover the cycle that plants went through to produce food. These little flowers were only the beginning. Soon they would fade and in their place I would find small round green tomatoes, silk tassels with corn ears inside, round melons on vines crawling over the dirt mounds, beans hanging from poles and carrot greens with their orange spears hidden beneath the soil. But that was not all of it.

By July the first flowers had begun to bloom and the garden became like a Bonnard painting. Every color in every hue represented. The snap dragons were my favorites. The flowers looked like little faces wearing a curly bonnet. And when you pinched them in one spot between your thumb and index finger, their little mouths opened and they smiled at you.

I moved one foot and the rabbit’s ears flickered for a second before he bolted away through the field, allowing me to proceed on the path to my garden. I pulled the gate open and stepped aside to let it hang away from the fence. Once inside, I knelt down almost as if to pray. Methodically I pulled at small weeds that had sprouted under the pole beans. Down the row I went on hands and knees and all the while I could almost taste the fresh green beans, the tomatoes, the melons, zucchini, snap peas and all the other vegetables and fruit that would soon be ripe for picking. This was no small thing. A garden. To plant a garden is a sign of certainty that tomorrow will come and a sign of hope that the earth has the power to revive. I tried to think of Maze and me in the same way. Perhaps, I thought, as I moved toward the end of the row and my knees were now brown with earth and the dirt was embedded under my nails, I needed some distance on our situation. I needed something like hang gliding to get some perspective on my world.

CHAPTER THREE

THE ORCHARD

Monday Maze stayed at the farm to help prune the fruit trees. I had found an old upside down V tripod ladder, the kind I had seen in one of Van Gogh’s paintings of the orchard in Arles. It had been like finding an old friend, that ladder. I thought maybe one day our orchard would look like Van Gogh’s. At least the apple trees. Maybe, one day. Or did you have to see the trees through his eyes? See them as twisted and tortured, struck with a light that seems to vibrate with life. Poor old Vincent. How he struggled to get his drawing right. Nothing was easy for that man. So sick. And yet so determined. And then to be remembered by the general public as that guy who cut off his ear. They romanticize that act as if it was something to be admired. What he did for love. No one talks about what was really behind what he did. That he was demented at the time. Depressed? Yes, but he must have been schizophrenic, too. It was the act of a very troubled mind.

The public wants its artists to be more than their art. What Vincent left was so much more than one gruesome moment. I remember studying how he taught himself to draw. How he sketched things over and over until he felt he could really see them. Drawing is a way of seeing. Of focusing vision on a particular object in a particular moment with the mind of the artist as interpreter. And then color brings drawing alive. I’ve seen Starry Night. I’ve seen the sunflowers and the orchard paintings and the interior of his room. I’ve also seen the paintings of his boots. Those boots that speak of miles trod and the person who lived in them. His paintings had the quality of perpetual motion. Or maybe perpetual emotion, never resting, always becoming something else, alive on the canvas, disturbed below the surface, roiling like a confused sea yet with an overall pattern to its instability.

I waited on the ground, held a rope attached to the branch, looking up at Maze on the ladder.

Maze was good at stuff like this. He could concentrate on a task to the exclusion of everything else. I suppose he was like Vincent that way, that deep concentration. But Maze was not ill. And not creative in the ways that an artist is creative. He was content to study and explain how others lived.

“Be careful,” I called up.

“You just hold that rope and pull when I tell you,” he answered.

He grabbed the ends of the pruner and dug the blades into the branch then snapped them together. At the same time he yelled out, “Now!”

I yanked at the rope. The branch cracked and fell at my feet.

Maze positioned the pruner again on another branch and around each tree we went. He snapped the branches off; I tugged the rope until a circle of branches surrounded each tree trunk and the tree was cut nice and low, better for harvesting fruit next year.

We heard a car pull into the gravel drive at the same moment as Maze pushed together hard on the pruning shears and the last branch toppled. I gave it a mighty yank and it landed with a whump at my feet, clearing Maze’s knees by inches.

“Someone’s here,” Maze looked out, squinting against the sun. “Two women.”

Erica raised her hand in a wide wave. Hope followed close behind her. When they got about thirty feet from the ladder, they stopped.

“We’re not intruding, are we? Hope was helping me deliver a big order of loaves to a restaurant nearby and we thought we’d just stop in to see what you’ve done to the place.”

Nearby up here could have meant anything up to forty miles away. I was still a bit culture shocked. The way people got right to the point up north. No meandering talk, no stories about the weather or what Aunt Betty Lou did last week after she saw the chiropractor. The rhythm of life was totally different from the south. Perhaps I just didn’t understand Vermont or Maze yet. I introduced them to Maze as he climbed down from the ladder.

Erica looked around. “You really have brought this place back from the dead.”

She examined the tree with its newly pruned limbs scattered on the ground at our feet.

“If we can get this old orchard to produce, Katelyn promises to make stewed pears and put them up in jars,” Maze smiled at Erica. “And apple butter.” His eyes crinkled at the corners and I remembered how those doleful eyes had drawn me in when we first met. “You girls go on ahead and chat. I’ll clean up here.”

I nodded. I stood between Hope and Erica as we walked across the old orchard between the rows of gnarled trees. Maze began to collect the pruned limbs and stack them to one side of the path.

“You’ll be needing a bee hive soon. If you want these fruit trees to produce,” said Erica.

“I know a bee keeper who can get you started,” Hope offered. “He brings the hives and tends them.”

“Don’t they just do their own thing?” I asked.

“Oh, no. They have to be watched. The honey has to be harvested. The new queen has to be moved so the beekeeper can start a new colony. And if you let the beekeeper bring his hives out here, he’ll share some of the honey with you. There’s a lot to do.”

“I guess that would be good for my garden, too. Come on, let me show it to you.” I led them away from the orchard and we wandered up past the chicken coop.

“Wait a second,” Erica pointed to the coop. “Are you actually living in that?”

I laughed and described our summer living, cooking, eating, and bathing arrangements. We walked then along the path bordered by fields of Queen Anne’s Lace and the women were quiet. At the garden, I gave them time to absorb the scene, from the strung wire gate to the high fence covered in blooming vines, to the stone walls, loosely and randomly stacked with no regard to size or engineering. I unhinged the latch and pulled the gate back and there in front of us, as if I was seeing it for the first time, was my private garden.

We passed by the bottle tree I had started the first summer. It was on old pear tree that had died and left spikes of dead limbs sticking up in the air. Every time Maze and I finished a bottle of wine, or juice or anything else that came in a glass bottle, I slid the empty onto the pointy end of a dead limb. The bottle tree now bloomed with about thirty bottles – red ones, dark green ones, clear ones, blue ones, brown, and even a purple bottle. Friends who knew about the tree would drop their bottles off – especially if they had a particularly interesting one. We would come home to find a bottle by the mail box, or lying on the stone wall by the road, or resting in the crotch of a tree by the dirt driveway.

“Oh, this is just beautiful,” said Hope. She stepped inside and began to wander among the rows. “I’ve never seen a garden like this. Where did you get all the pottery and how do you attach it to the fences? Oh, look at the hollyhocks. And the rambling rose over there.” She couldn’t stop pointing. Butterflies flitted among the flowers and birds sang cheerily from the trees.

“Katelyn, what a wonderful world you’ve created. I never would have guessed this was here,” said Erica. She followed Hope and soon they parted, taking different paths to see the entire garden from vegetables to herbs to flowers and vines. “Oh, look. You do have some honeybees.” She pointed to a trumpet flower. “I wonder where they’re coming from.”

“If this were my garden I’d never want to leave it,” said Hope.

“Yes but we have to get going,” Erica reminded her. “The delivery, you know.”

We left the garden. I latched the gate and we walked again among the Queen Anne’s Lace up toward the barn where they had parked. When we passed by the open barn Erica spotted our canoe stored upside down on a rack at the north side.

“Whose canoe?”

“Mine mainly. Maze is not so comfortable on the water yet. He prefers being airborne. I do a lot of canoeing and kayaking on the tidal creeks in Virginia. We brought this canoe up here last summer. So far we’ve only gone down the Trout River a little ways below the falls.”

I led them through the Queen Anne’s lace path until we stood at the garden gate. I had an urge to talk about my naked gardening but Erica rattled on about this and that and finally said, “Well I’m glad we stopped by but we don’t want to keep you from your chores.”

Hope had been watching me. At that moment I caught her eye. She was such a quiet person. She seemed so shy yet there was something intent about her also. I had the sense that there was a lot brewing beneath the surface with her. A lot she didn’t say out loud.

“Is something troubling you?” she asked me and at the same time rested her fingers on Erica’s forearm as if to say “Wait a minute.”

I bent over and picked up a rock that had wormed its way up through the soil and now sat balanced on top of a frost heave the spring thaw had left behind. I tossed it outside the garden and noticed a few more stones just starting to show through fissures where the ground had frozen, expanded and pushed upward.

“There is something,” Hope prodded gently but before I could say anything, Erica spoke.

“I used to canoe all the time. With Will and Matthew when he was little. We used to go to a camp on weekends on Lake Champlain.”

“You never mentioned that,” Hope said. “Why did you stop?”

“Matthew grew up. Will took up golf. I had nobody to go with I guess.” She looked at me as if to ask if I wanted to go canoeing with her. As if she was itching to do something that would take her away from her life, even if only for a day.

Hope turned back to me but the moment had faded and I only ground my boot toe into the soft earth. The garden was coming along nicely. All my work would pay off soon in a bounty of vegetables and flowers. I noticed the wisteria vines had wound around and entwined themselves with the trumpet vines in a kind of strangling dance, each holding the other so tightly that it was now impossible to tell which you were looking at or where one started and the other stopped. The wisteria had long since bloomed but the trumpet flowers were budding out and some had already opened, their red orange flutes reaching upward toward the sun. A hummingbird flitted among them, buzzing, buzzing and then darting away in an impossible acrobatic motion so swift it was impossible to follow with your eyes.

We wandered from the garden up the lacy path toward where they had parked. I almost asked if Erica had a loaf of bread to spare and then she offered me one as we walked and I thought how incredible to be so in synch and then buried the thought as Hope prattled about the chicken coop and the barn and the garden and how lovely everything was.

“At the rectory no one’s paid much attention to the flowers and shrubs in years,” she said. “You should come over and tell the gardeners what to do. The minister hired a new landscaper to fix things up. This past winter was really harsh and a lot of plants didn’t survive. Deer ate every twig off the azaleas and rhododendron. They only left the stalks right at the ground. It’s pitiful.”

We stood at the van door Erica had slid open. She handed me a loaf of wheat bread.

“Listen” I began hesitantly, the idea just forming in my own mind and not completely at that. “What would you guys think of a canoe trip on the Trout River?”

“You mean the three of us?” Erica asked. She looked at Hope and then at me.

“I’d like to,” said Hope. “But it would have to be on short notice because I have a break in classes all next week and that’s the only one I have for the rest of the summer.”

“It would be more fun if we got a group of women together,” I said.

“Well, then,” said Erica. “How about if the whole council goes?”

“Would they?” I asked.

“I can ask them. And with you that would make six. Three canoes, two women each. With Katelyn as trip leader. Okay?” she turned to Hope.

“A retreat,” said Hope. “To brainstorm ideas for saving Trout River Falls?”

“How about it?” Erica asked.

I thought for a minute. I’d gone on canoe trips before. In Virginia. On the wide flat tidal creeks. Camped on islands in the middle of a river. Fought the mosquitoes. Listened to the ducks and geese. Caught catfish and pike. How different could this be?

“What river?” Hope asked.

“The Trout River of course,” I said without hesitating. And then repeated it. “The Trout River. Way above the falls. Where it’s absolutely wild. We’ll start up there and wind our way down to the put in above the falls. It’ll be a breeze.”

“I’ll call the other members,” Erica said.

“One thing. Do the others have any experience on the water?” I asked

“I would not call any of us expert. That’s why you should be the leader.”

“Okay. I’ll make a list of what we need and assign who should bring what.”

We looked past the barn as if perhaps the river was just beyond and we could catch a glimpse of it. “You can stern paddle with me,” said Erica. “And don’t worry. We’ll carry enough extra gear in our canoe, you know, to balance the weight. I mean my weight.” She patted my arm and let out a gruff little chuckle and then asked. “By the way, have you been canoeing long?”

* * *

The summer I turned nine, my mother dispatched me off to a two month camp in West Virginia. We were supposed to learn how to take care of ourselves in the woods and on the water, a lake and a river. On the first day we were informed that we had to learn the basics. Since many of the girls came to Camp Minnehooha from cities, swimming was a really important part of the first month’s camp experience. I was already one of the best swimmers at Camp Minnehooha. Although no one knew it yet, except me.

At the edge of the huge lake that was so long it disappeared beyond the pine trees, they had roped off swimming pens and designated these by bathing cap color. White Caps were the girls who had lived their entire lives in a city and were afraid to go in the water past their knees. Red Caps were beginning swimmers. The doggie paddlers. Blue Caps were accomplished in two strokes, usually the breast stroke and sidestroke, and Gold Caps (there were only a few) could go anywhere they liked in or out of the pens and swim freely at any time. These girls could do every stroke including that most underused of all swimming styles, the butterfly. My father once told me that if I had a shark circling me in the water, the butterfly stroke should not be my first line of defense.

Being the youngest girl in camp that first year, they stuck me in with the White Caps. I swam around and slipped under the rope and joined the Reds, kept on going under the next rope and popped up with the Blues, did a couple of laps of the crawl with a racing turn against the dock, and finally disappeared underwater again until I joined the two teenaged Gold Caps who had been attending Camp Minnehooha for six years. I headed for open water but a counselor whistled and stopped me before I hit the falls about a half mile down the lake.

They made me pass a bunch of tests that I undertook with fervor since I had set my sights on a bigger target. Gold Caps could learn canoeing. After they passed the rowing test. Thus I learned early that they always make you do the boring stuff first. Life is packed with prerequisites. They stuck me in a heavy tub of a rowboat, a pram I think it was and pushed me off from shore with instructions to follow the course laid out with small red floats. Turn first to starboard and then to port and then row backwards and keel haul and ship oars and stow oars and name the parts of the boat, gunwale, stern, and like that. It was pretty easy. The next day they had to let me take out a canoe. Which had been my chief objective all along. I’d never been in a canoe before. They looked pretty sleek. Not an aluminum canoe. These were wood and fiberglass. Very light. Tippy. But elegant.

I sat in the bow and a counselor sat in the stern. I liked everything about the canoe. The way it floated on the water. The way it was so responsive to the slightest touch. Even its wobble if you shifted your weight the littlest bit to either side. And the woven seats. Airy, light, as if you could almost float like a dragonfly over the water.

I listened to every order she barked at me and swung my paddle from side to side watching as we miraculously slid through the water, turned, made a circle, paddled in figure eights against the side of the canoe to bring us up alongside the beach so we could both get out easily, backpaddled, me paddling like crazy to keep up my part. Pretty soon we switched seats and I gave the orders. After a few days I got good at it. And then came the final test to determine if you could take a canoe out on your own. We paddled out to approximately the middle of the huge lake, where the water was an undetermined depth – and who was going diving down into that cold, brown water to find the bottom anyway – and we stopped.

I looked around. The counselor told me to hand her my paddle. I did what she asked. Then she held both paddles up high and with one athletic thrust she sent them, javelin like, as far away from the canoe as she could. And then she lurched sideways, dumping me and herself over the side, capsizing the canoe in the process. And then, as I was catching my breath and swimming to retrieve the paddles, instead of leaving the canoe upside down with a large air pocket underneath, she pulled the canoe onto its side and let the thing fill up with water. I swam back, pushing the paddles in front of me. When I reached the canoe, she told me to right it and figure out how to get rid of the water so we could paddle back to shore. And that was the final test. If you were ever in a capsized situation, they wanted to be sure you knew how to get back in the canoe, get your paddle and empty the canoe so you could get to shore. So I did it. The canoe floated fine. It really wasn’t that hard to get enough water out of it to get in. Once in I used the paddle to get most of the rest of the water out. Then I used my hands. And after a while, that canoe was floating well enough to paddle it back to shore, with the counselor swimming alongside

***

“Are you crazy?”

Maze had never spoken to me this way before.

“No. I am not crazy.” I glared. I rubbed a dinner plate hard with the soapy sponge.

“Well you can’t go.” Maze pushed back from the table and stood by the barn door, his back to me.

“Aren’t you going to say ‘And that’s final?’ ”

“Stop it. It’s way too dangerous.”

“More dangerous than hang gliding?”

My hands were shaking. I dropped the sponge into the soapy water. A poof of bubbles splashed back at me. Foam clung to my fingers.

“That’s totally different.” He went all logical then. “We’ve been gliding together for years. We know each other. We’re a team. We know how to work together.”

“You hang glide alone. You don’t need a team.”

“But we have a system we’ve worked out. If someone gets in trouble we have a plan, and we have confidence in each other to execute it.”

“And women can’t work as a team? Can’t execute a plan?”

“That’s not what I’m saying. You don’t know these women well. You’ve never canoed with them. They may be a bunch of airheads. You might get stuck with them on the river in the middle of nowhere. What if something happened?”

“Like what?”

“Like anything. You know the water. It’s unpredictable. And you’ve told me the Trout River is all but wilderness until the falls. It’s crazy to do this.”

I turned back to the dishes. Maze sat down at the table and alternately stared at his tea mug, then out the little cow windows. It was getting dark. Crickets chirped. The barred owl hooted. It was their time of day. Dawn and dusk. Maze put down the mug. I sat down across from him.

“You can’t keep doing this.”

“Doing what?”

“Trying to put a line around me and tie me down. It won’t work. I’m not her. I’m sorry your wife died. I’m sorry she got cancer. I’m sorry you still miss her so much. But I’m not her. And you can’t hold me so tight just to reassure yourself I won’t leave you like she did.”

He frowned. A deep line appeared between his eyebrows. His face reddened.

“This is not about her.”

“Of course it is. It’s about you not being able to let go of her and not wanting me to have the autonomy I need to breathe. If you keep holding me so tight, you’re going to crush the life out of us.”

He squirmed in his seat and pushed at his mug. It made a rasping sound against the wood table. “I think this is about you not feeling connected enough to us to give up some of your independence so we can really be a unit. And you think you’re competing with a dead woman but in reality you’re using her to keep us separated. I don’t understand why.”

“That’s not true,” I almost whispered it. I was getting so angry I was afraid of what I might say. Or do.

“Well it’s not about my dead wife, as far as I’m concerned,” he said.

“Then this is about you.”

“Of course it’s about me. What else would it be about?” He was almost yelling.

“I was hoping you’d be able to think about me once in a while.”

I got up. My chair nearly fell backwards. I caught it and gave it a shove against the rough floor.

“I think about you all the time,” he said. He was calm now. Logical again. “We can’t keep doing this.”

“Doing what?”

“Fighting over whether we’re going to be permanent. We have to make a move one way or the other.”

“Are you giving me some kind of ultimatum?”

“I think maybe I am. You have to decide to stay or go. You can’t have one foot inside the door and one foot outside. It doesn’t work.”

“That’s really funny. I’m the one who found the farm. I’m the one who planted the garden and got you to help fix up the barn and the coop. I made a studio for myself from the old pig sty and … ” I stopped to take a breath.

“That’s all just about the place,” Maze said. “A relationship is not only about the place where it happens but what happens inside it. What about me? Am I just another one of your art works?”

“That’s a terrible thing to say,” I told him.

“Maybe it is, but at least it’s honest. You accuse me of wanting a replacement for my dead wife when you’ve just replaced one temporary man with another. Anyway, if you’re so tied to this place, then maybe I should leave. Why do you need me here anyway?”

I rushed by him headed for the barn door. All I could think was to get out of there. But he grabbed my arm and pulled me over to him. He hugged me around the waist, held onto me so hard I couldn’t get away, buried his face in my breasts even as I struggled to get free.

“Is it too much to ask for you just to give in?” he asked.

“I can’t. One day you’ll want something else, something more than we have.”

He’d want a wife. A good wife, a loving wife, someone who would make his breakfast and not resent his little habits and pack a bag for his hang gliding trips and lay out his clothes the night before. A good wife would make sure he was all neat and tidy, well fed, comfortable, pampered even. A good wife.

Who was this good wife? No matter what the contract, it always came down to the woman giving up. I felt we hadn’t made any progress at all. Maze wanted a wife. He had liked having a wife. But he was still talking.

“You always say that but I just don’t get what you think I expect of you.”

“You don’t even realize it,” I said. “But you have expectations. They’re built in.”

“You know what I think?” He nuzzled my breast.

“I know what you’re thinking about.”

“Besides that,” he whispered against my skin.

“What?”

But he never got around to the answer, only pulled me down onto his lap. That night we made love in the coop in our bed, with the stars hidden behind a slow moving layer of clouds. When we were done, a soft rain fell, plinking on the metal roof of the coop, rustling the leaves.

CHAPTER FOUR

THE FERRY RIDE

When I was twenty-one, halfway through my senior year at art school I decided I had to “study abroad.” So I applied for a Fulbright grant. Because I was working with glass, I applied to go to Venice. I didn’t want to become a glass blower but at the time I was making prints from photographs. From these prints I made transfers – like T-shirt type transfers – that I ironed onto pieces of glass. When the transfer paper was pulled away, a transparent color image remained behind on the glass. In my Fulbright application, I said I was after a new way to envision images as a series of transparencies within the three dimensions of a sculptural space. Sounded very high falutin’ and, I thought, a bit unintelligible the way most writing about art does, so when my application was accepted, I was amazed. Off I went, camera in hand, a few pieces of clothing in a bag, and not much else. My plan had been to make the photographs, study glass blowing and other things that could be done with glass so I could understand how glass handled, the range of its possibilities and limitations. Problem. They sent me to Rome instead of Venice.

At the airport, my musician boyfriend from college handed me a small box with a silver ring inside.

“Wear it while you’re away,” he said. “When you come back, we’ll get married.”

This was not a total surprise. We had been living together for a year already. He had been against the Fulbright. But neither of us ever expected I would get it. When I did, I convinced myself they were short on women recipients that year. Or maybe it was the glass thing. How many applicants wanted to explore transferring photos onto glass?

I walked down the jetway to the unknown with a promise from my music man to reunite in nine months – same place, who knew what time.

In Rome I found lots of stone. Lots of monumental sculpture. Famous marbles and ceilings and church frescoes. A lot to see. But not much glass. So I concentrated on photographing the people of Italy. Anyway, I didn’t expect to come to grips with what I wanted to achieve in just nine months. But I hoped to get my mind around a vision, to realize it in some parts at least. To define what I wanted to do as an artist. To return home with a vision that no one else could or would create.

I lived frugally. No phone. No computer. No car. Not even a bike. Internet cafes weren’t in yet. I walked the city everywhere. There was a fairly large American community but I stayed away from it for the most part. I lived alone. Kept to myself. Took pictures. Bought an iron. I collected pieces of broken glass wherever I could find it – frame shops and the like. The Romans were generous, friendly, bemused by me. When they found out I was an artist, they fed me, saved broken pieces of glass for me, and offered advice on everything from love to where I should go for the best Cappuccino. This became my one extravagance. I even kept a photo diary of the intricate little drawings they made at different Cappuccino places. Each cappuccino artist had a signature design to top off the milky coffee.

I wrote long letters to my music man. He wrote short ones back. I was happy with the way my work was going. He was playing music and fighting with club owners to get paid. He missed me. I missed him. But I was a world away. And it was another world.

One day as I waited for my Cappuccino at a small table at a café called Rosati, a young man sitting at a nearby table said, “Excuse me, are you American?”

He was medium tall, with curly light brown hair and about three days growth of beard that set off his blue eyes. His smile, glittering, even white teeth against tanned skin, radiated like a movie marquee.

He picked up his espresso and moved over to my table. I didn’t know it yet but my photo-taking, glass-collecting adventure was about to take a detour.

Although his English was nearly perfect, he had a slight accent. Origin impossible to identify. He had grown up in Corsica cared for by a grandmother while his parents – one Corsican, one French – worked the photography concessions on various cruise ships plying the Mediterranean. Like most Europeans, he spoke a number of languages, including Italian.

“My American friends call me Pete,” he told me. “But my grandma calls me by my Corsican name, Petru.”

Once he had shaved, I swore he could have been the model for the Eros statue at the Museo Capitolino. Only a few years older than me, he looked innocent, almost pure I thought.

I never found out what Petru’s life plan was, but at the time he was acting as the “official” photographer for a theatre troupe that was ensconced at the Palazzo D’something or other, owned by the Marquessa D’something or other, up in the hills about twenty minutes outside Rome. Since Rome is nothing but hills, this did not exactly pinpoint the villa’s location. Not to worry, he would take me up there to see it for myself. On his classic Lambretta, circa 1957, a gift from the Marquessa to one of the troupe’s directors who had passed it along to Petru. The better to run errands on.

Two weeks and many late afternoon cappuccinos and espressos later, I climbed onto the seat behind Petru and hung on while he tooled around Rome, zipping between cars and circling around Piazza della This and Piazza della That until we began the ascent to the Palazzo itself.

I must say, having a title – whether real or manufactured – in Italy had its advantages. Although the Marquessa was not in residence during my brief visit, I did have the chance to see the splendor the other one millionth was enjoying. Not to mention the hundred-some-odd theatrical types who were feasting and lolling about like a troupe of monkeys in Roman Nirvana. Beautiful young people, intense looking veterans of the stage, and the hangers on, an odd mixture of sycophants, aspirants, and one English quasi journalist who was chronicling the feats of the troupe as it performed its way through Europe. It appeared to me that their wanderings had come to a screeching halt here at the palazzo. There was an ancient amphitheater in the round a few hundred yards below the palazzo gardens and Petru explained that the Marquessa had rented the old stone pit for the entire summer’s scheduled weekly performances.

Petru introduced me to the troupe’s director, named Eduardo or Eduard. I never did get it right.

“Ah,” he said with a flourish, “so you are the little American friend of Petru. You are here for the studies, no?”

“No,” I began.

But he turned to Petru and in a low voice said, “Michaela and Roberto want to see you on some urgent matter. I will embrace your friend here all over the palazzo, yes?”

He took my arm and embraced me off to the gardens where nude coed sunbathing was well underway. I spotted dozens of wine bottles lying about on tables, on the ground, in the flower beds.

“So, Kate? Like in Shakespeare, no?” he said. “Has Petru tamed you yet?”

“Katelyn,” I corrected him. “Party last night?” I pointed to some bottles on a bench in the garden.

He shrugged. “You will come to see the performance tonight? Very entertaining. With deep meanings.” He nodded as if we had just shared a secret.

“Is it in English?” I asked.

“If you like,” he answered.

As if that was not enigmatic enough, we took a turn onto a path flanked by tall, very thin old cypress trees and came upon two of the actors practicing a sword fight in the middle of the path. I had fallen into a Fellini movie for sure. Then Petru emerged from between two cypress trees and waved with that big grin. Every time he smiled at me I felt like a disappearing ice cube.

I never did see the performance. Instead, Petru proposed a trip. To Morocco. Together. Starting the next day.

“Are you kidding?”

We were back in Rome, outside my building below my tiny apartment. I didn’t know whether I should invite him up. It was so small that I barely had room to do my work in it. I slept on a pad that I unrolled every night. One old table and chair. The landlady let me set up my iron in the hall when I made glass transfers. These were stacked against one wall, neatly separated by newspaper. I had done about thirty so far. Some of them were on broken pieces of glass, odd shapes and sizes.

“Say you will come,” he pleaded and grinned. “No pressures. I promise.”

He meant I didn’t have to sleep with him. So far he had not made one move on me. I was beginning to wonder about that. I also wondered what I would do about it if he did. I didn’t feel engaged. But I did feel committed to the music man back home. Yet it was so far away. And for almost a year.

Petru reached forward and pushed a long curl of my hair back off my shoulder. Again the flash of a smile. He dropped his hand. Moved toward the Lambretta.

“It will make me so happy if you will say yes,” he said as he turned to face me, his hands now on the scooter. “It will be an adventure.”

“Can that thing make it all the way to Morocco? I asked.

“Not to worry about anything. We go by water. I pick you up at eight. Pack very light.” He pointed to the small wire luggage rack on the back.

Off he zoomed into the traffic. I thought there must have been something they were wafting through the air at that palazzo. Something that made me light headed and scrambled my senses. I hadn’t even asked him how long we would be away.

It was mid August. We departed from Rome on the Lambretta at eight the next morning. We took the Via Aurelia northwest up to the port town of Civitavecchia where we boarded a ferry which would carry us across the Mediterranean smack between Corsica and Sardinia all the way to Barcelona on the coast of Spain. It was breathtakingly beautiful. The sea calm and deep blue. The sky the same. Porpoises followed along as we pulled farther and farther away from land. We did what most ferry passengers do. Watched the sea. Let the breeze caress our skin. Chatted with the few other passengers. Wandered the decks until I finally got around to asking for some details.

“How long is the ferry ride?”

“Oh, we’ll be there tomorrow morning. Very early I think. Maybe seven.”

“You mean we’ll be on this overnight?”

“Sure. And we go past my ancestral home. But far away at night. You can’t see. But I would like to show you. Sometime.”

He looked a little sad. Ancestral home is not a phrase you hear in America. I told him so.

“No?” He looked surprised. “But don’t your people come from somewhere in America?”

How could I explain that there was nothing ancestral about coming from Akron?

“Where do we sleep?” I asked. It was getting on into the late afternoon. We had eaten at the ferry restaurant. There were bathrooms and a bar and lounge. Had he rented us an overnight room I hadn’t seen?

“Over there.” He pointed next to the Lambretta, between two large shell shaped vents.

I followed his finger and pointed also. “There? On the deck?”

He took my hand and turned it palm down and touched my ring.

“You are engaged?” he asked.

I didn’t pull my hand away. “Not technically.”

“But practically?”

“We are,” how to characterize our arrangement, “committed.”

“And this means you are,” he hesitated, looking for the right word it seemed. “Lonely for him?”

“Well yes. I am,” I said. “But I’m not sure what I want for the rest of my life.”

“Ahhh,” he nodded and dropped my hand. “I wish we could be on the fast ferry, the one with nice rooms. The other passengers will sleep in the lounge I think. Or in their cars. We have the sleeping bags. It will be all right.”

Later, in the dark, under the phosphorescent sky like a sea above us, we lay side by side zipped into our cocoons, with the soft rumble of the ferry motor and the rhythmic slap slapping of waves against the hull. I slid my arms up and out from the sleeping bag to feel the cool night air on my skin.

“Later, after we have returned to Roma,” Petru was awake. He must have been watching me. “Then I can take you on the fast ferry to Campomoro in Corsica where my family has a home. You would like that?” The air was so fine, the night sky so close, the sound of the sea so soothing, I would have liked anything. I even liked sleeping on deck behind the big clamshell of a vent.

When I said, “That sounds wonderful,” nothing else seemed to exist but that moment and I did not think past where we were and what happened next did not seem at the time to be out of place or wrong in any way.

I felt his fingers on my arm, soft, gentle. He slid the zipper of my sleeping bag down slowly until my leg was exposed and his hand moved down to my ankle where he cupped the arch of my foot. He held it like that, as if it was an apple in his palm and then his hand moved slowly up my leg.

He must have unzipped his own bag, or maybe he had never closed it at all. Maybe he had planned all this. I never asked. I don’t think I wanted to know. There were other mysteries about Petru. How such an innocent looking young man could have become so practiced in the art of love making? How he could know that a woman would say yes without actually asking her?

He moved slowly. First next to me. Then on top of me. Then inside me. Slowly, with the rhythm of the ship, the rumble of the engines. I had no idea of time and when it was over, and we lay there staring up at the night sky, he twined his fingers between mine and said in a soft voice, “You bring me luck. I feel it.”

We arrived in Tangiers by taking another ferry, a short trip from Algeciras this time, and once off the boat, Petru gunned the little one cylinder motor and off we went. I had no idea where or why. I was drunk with him by then. He could have taken me anywhere.

At the house of an American poet and his Russian mistress, contacts from Petru’s friends at the theatre troupe, we were taken inside and fed. The poet and his mistress and their three kids were living on about twenty cents a week which included a Moroccan nanny. The poet took Petru off into the country where they met a farmer who sold him a donkey load of marijuana for twenty dollars, probably more money than that man would see in a year. Maybe two. The poet even took a cut. We spent the next two days hunched over weed in the poet’s back garden rubbing the dried leaves and flowers off the branches and sifting them down into a huge hammered copper bowl. After this grueling handwork was done, we had five pounds of freshly dried pot and nowhere to put it.

“Where can we hide it?” Petru mused. He stared at our meager belongings, at the Lambretta, at me. I certainly hadn’t come prepared for this.

“Maybe we could stuff it in something” I suggested. “How about we stuff it in a pair of your socks.”

After we did that, we had two tubes of socks stuffed with crinkly fresh pungent pot.

“Okay, now what to do with the socks?” Petru asked.

We looked around at our sleeping bags, our Lambretta, our few paltry pieces of clothing and our food bag.

“There’s nowhere to hide anything really.” I was glum. Then I started to examine the Lambretta.

“What about the spare tire?”

“Perfecto.” He went to work unscrewing it from its housing. He took it off of its metal ring and inserted the socks on the inside, neatly following the curve of the tire. Then he put it back on its metal housing and screwed it back onto the Lambretta.

We said our good-byes to the poet, the Russian, the nanny and the kids, and climbed aboard a Yugoslavian freighter to cross the Mediterranean back to Italy. Genoa, Italy to be precise. This was less romantic than the ferry. No sleeping on deck. Sleeping in bunks with twelve other people.

You have to be very patient if you’re planning to travel by freighter. You spend a lot of time waiting at the dock for the ship to fill up with cargo. There’s no telling how long it will take. This freighter had two family style cabins for passengers all of whom were American. Some of them had traveled on this barge from Newark five weeks before. It must have been the longest crossing since the Pinta, Nina and Santa Maria left Spain looking for the spice route and found Hoboken. The crew all spoke Yugoslavian exclusively. The ship had a small library. Most of the books were in English. A lot of Dickens. There was also a chess board. Captain Slobishslanovanovisk – or Capt. Slob as the passengers called him – liked to play chess with the Americans when he wasn’t at the helm or otherwise occupied with captain type duties. Chess is a universal game that breaks the language barrier nicely but it’s a pretty deadly spectator sport.

After a week of waiting I wanted to ask, “By the way, when do we actually take off from this port? Should I enroll in Moroccan social security?”

After a two day crossing which followed a five day dock wait, we landed in Genoa, Italy. In the middle of a garbage strike. That was three weeks old. It was about a hundred degrees Fahrenheit. We drove our Lambretta up to the customs gate and waited for the guards to finish their Chianti before waving us through. Petru told me to wear my little sundress that stretched very tight across my bust. It worked. No one looked at the tire. They waved us on and we putt putted through the city holding our noses and dodging chicken bones and headed north toward Roma at twenty-two kilometers an hour. Petru seemed determined to push straight through and we arrived in Rome just before midnight, tired, dusty, smelly and with those socks still intact in the spare tire. He dropped me at my apartment and I practically fell up the stairs, exhausted and bewildered. Had I been taken for a trip or taken for a ride?

A week later Petru showed up at my door early one morning. He rang my bell and called me downstairs.

“Will you come to the play this tonight?” he asked, softly with that intoxicating smile. He leaned over and kissed me on the mouth. “I pick you up at eight.” He was off with a wave and a grin, his kiss damp on my lips.

We sat midway between the lowest seats around the old stone stage and the highest ones in the nosebleed section. Everyone else seemed to have brought cushions. Petru had neglected to mention how hard the marble seats were. The whole amphitheater was carved out of a marble quarry.

Music played. The crowd hushed. Petru took my hand. He kissed my fingertips. I began to melt all over and then a voice called out a kind of song and one by one the actors came onstage. Naked. Every one of them. Just like they had been the other day in the garden. I even recognized a few of them.

There wasn’t much dialogue. There was a lot of – how shall I put it – behavior modeling? I suddenly understood quite a lot of what I had experienced over the past few weeks. No, it was not necessary for this performance to be in English or any other language. And Petru? Well now I understood how he knew so much about so many things. When it was over, and I personally considered that a blessing, and he told me he now had enough money to take me to Corsica on the expensive ferry, I told him I had to work and that I did very much miss my music man back home.

CHAPTER FIVE

THE WOMEN

A river is a living thing. It has character, moods, a personality. Under average conditions the Trout River is rather lazy, like a hunting dog asleep under a tree. Its curves and pools have a gentle rhythm. Its flat water moves a canoe along at a slow, steady pace; its quick water is easily navigated. It is friendly, even tempered, altogether hospitable. Sometimes, especially during the spring thaw, it becomes quirky and spirited, burbling and jumping over rocks and fallen tree limbs, rushing toward the falls like a galloping herd.

The Trout curves around, at times deep with clear pools, at times wide with pebbled banks, at times running over boulders and between ledges. When it runs over rocks large enough to disturb the water, it forms rapids. Its gentle rippling turns into a rush; it shouts, sings, warbles, burbles, at times flattens out to no more than a rumbly current until it finally reaches Trout River Falls.

It is also remote. Only two bridges cross the Trout River; the Water Street Bridge at Trout River Falls some 250 miles from the Trout’s headwaters and an old wood and steel railroad trestle far to the north of town, an area so remote no one but the train engineers ever see it. Passenger trains used to cross with a clacking sound that echoed through the forest for miles, but train travel fell out of favor and now the north south line is used most frequently by freight trains. Above this trestle and between it and the falls, a canoe can travel the Trout undisturbed by man, machine, or cell towers. No roads run alongside the river; no towns are situated near it; only a few farms border marshes and springs near its northernmost run. Along most stretches of the Trout River, forests stretch for miles on both sides.

Maze and I arrived at the put in first. Located at a break in the forest it ran along a pebbled stretch of beach that made a perfect place for vehicles to park and unload passengers and gear. Pale orange, buff and brown stones like speckled granite sparkled in the river bed beneath the clear meandering water.

We had paddled the Trout below the falls where the banks widen and the water runs deep and smooth, but had never started this far north in the narrow, shallow part. He dragged the canoe off the car rack. Together we carried it to the edge of the water. I had packed two changes of underwear, some personal toiletries, a sweatshirt, sleeping bag, small tent, cooking gear, six camping mess kits, one for each woman. I brought food – cereals, noodles, freeze dried vegetables, dried fruits, nuts, granola bars, transferred them all from their packaging to zip lock bags and packed them into a duffel. Erica and I had agreed on a long list divided among the women. Others were to bring the rest of the packaged food, gallons of drinking water, two more small tents, the other two canoes and paddles, and the rest of the gear we would need for three days alone on the river and two nights of camping. All together, it came to eight or nine meals, a couple of changes of clothes, cooking and eating utensils, washing supplies, lighters and fire accelerant in case it was damp, flashlights, a hatchet, Swiss Army knife, and tents, towels, soap, shampoo, and whatever personal items each of us needed. Along with the essentials, I had packed one bag with something I hadn’t discussed with the others. Just in case. I loaded this into the canoe with my other duffels and laid the paddles against the canoe’s gunwale. Maze leaned against the car with his arms folded, his face a dark cloud.

“So you’ll meet me at the town put in above the falls in three days.”

Before he could answer Erica’s minivan pulled up with two canoes tied to the roof racks. Erica waved to me. She was wearing balloony overalls and red sneakers. Her hair was braided back around her head. A burly man with an ample gut got out of the driver’s side. He looked out at the river and then turned and walked toward Maze, as if he couldn’t get away from a car with five women in it fast enough.

“Hi,” he stuck out his right hand, “Will Marston.”

They pumped each other’s hands and immediately started talking about fishing on the river. They walked over to the water’s edge. Will pointed at an eddy in the middle of the water. Maze gestured as if to show a fish swimming into and out of the eddy. They nodded and wandered along the bank.

It surprised me, as it always did, how Maze could so completely mask his feelings the moment another man showed up.

“Wonderful, isn’t it?” Erica came to my side. “All the way here in the car all he could do was complain about me going away for three whole days. You’d think he didn’t know how to open a can of tuna by himself.”

***

After we loaded the canoes, said goodbye to the men, and watched the cars pull away, it was like we had been released from boarding school. The six of us gathered around a large flat rock where I spread out a chart of the Trout River. I can only describe the atmosphere as giddy. Like we were young girls again.

“Here’s where we are.”

I pointed to a spot on the chart.

“And here’s where we’re going to end up.”

I looked from face to face.

Erica. Big, friendly, outspoken, hard-working Erica. Who would always tell you exactly what she thought. Who would always be there for anyone who needed help. Self effacing, funny, with a big heart that matched her body.

Roz. Curt & to the point. A bit tomboyish, she had short, curly black hair, wore khaki shorts, a tight-fitting tank top, and Teva’s. A small ankh hung on a silver chain around her neck. Her body looked athletic so I assumed she worked out or perhaps was a runner. She had a small tattoo on her left shoulder. It looked like a bat or maybe a moth but I hadn’t gotten a close look at it. “If the river stays like this and we paddle leisurely what do you think we could cover in a day – about twenty miles?”

“I think that’s about right. If we don’t want to push it.”

I went back to the map.

“What if one of the canoes can’t keep up with the others?”

Timid, cautious Hope. She was slender, fragile looking, no muscle on her at all and pale, as if she’d spent her life indoors. She wore her straight, mousy, brown hair hanging to her shoulders. Her green khaki pants didn’t fit her body. She had on a faded logo T-shirt with the name of some lobster restaurant in Bangor, Maine.

“Don’t be scared, little girl, we won’t leave you behind.”

Roz patted her on the arm.

Hope blinked and shrugged a little. I wasn’t sure if this meant she was nervous about keeping up a steady pace or just rattled by Roz.

“Who cares how fast we can go. Let’s just get started.”

Charlene the executive type. Charlene was a lawyer. When we were unloading the car with all the gear, Charlene took over, telling the others how to pack the canoes, whose bags to put where, how to position the canoes at the river’s edge. She made a face when Will Marston pushed one of the canoes too far past the water’s edge and told him to lash it to a tree branch so it wouldn’t float away.

“It’s a good idea to have a general plan.” I told her. “So we all know what to expect. You can never be sure of what might happen on the water.”

“It’s gorgeous.” Charlene looked up at the sky and waved her arms around as if to say nothing could possibly happen.

“Let’s see the map,” said Valerie. Tall, slender, the facial bone structure of a model, fair, wavy reddish hair, large gray eyes, wearing stylish navy blue khakis, a long-sleeved pale blue cotton blouse, new blue and gray sneakers with an intricate stitch pattern of alternating bands of color and fabric. To shade her from the sun, she had on a wide brimmed straw hat with a ribbon tie. I also noted the Rolex, diamond stud earrings and wedding ring with matching diamond solitaire. No one else was wearing jewelry, except for my own battered Tag, a present from my father when I went on my first scuba dive at fifteen. And that ankh around Roz’s neck.

Valerie wore make up. She looked like she was going to a lawn party. I wondered what would happen to those sneakers the minute they hit the water and if the rings would hurt her hands after paddling for five hours.

Downriver to the falls was fifty to sixty miles of curves, pools, and, at certain points, I suspected class one rapids, which we could easily negotiate. The chart showed water depths from less than a foot to over twenty feet in some places. If the water became too choppy, I told them, we could hug the shore to avoid anything too difficult to paddle. Portaging, I said, would be hard with so much weight from gear in the canoes, but not impossible, if we had to do it. Although I couldn’t see that being necessary.

“I think in these areas, we might have to wear the life vests.”

Had anybody thought to bring helmets? I shrugged. I didn’t think we’d need them.

They gathered around the chart. I had made little red X marks where I thought we would be staying overnight and blue ones for meal and pit stops. The second red X marked an island in the middle of the river. I suggested we might stay there the second night.

“Is anyone hungry? Before we start we should all take a pee break and have a snack if anyone needs it.”

Valerie’s voice was husky, almost as if she was recovering from a cold. “And where do you suggest we pee?”

“Try over there, behind that clump of willows. And bury your tissue when you’re done. And make sure you don’t sit in poison ivy if there is any or squat over a bee’s nest,” Erica warned.

Last summer in the garden, I disturbed a wasp nest hidden in a tangle of trumpet vines. They came at me with a fury and I ended up at the local clinic, my arms swollen like inner tubes, angry red welts covering my neck, arms, and abdomen. I even had welts on one breast. It swelled up like a melon. The nurse asked how the wasps had gotten inside my clothes. I said I didn’t know. It all happened so fast. I didn’t tell her I had been naked so of course they attacked everywhere and anywhere. After that I was very careful to watch the flight paths of any bees or wasps to see if there was a pattern that had them coming and going on a regular route.

While I folded up the chart, Charlene took charge, assigned the canoe teams and made last minute adjustments with the others to balance the canoes just right. She put Valerie in the bow with Roz steering, leaving Hope with herself paddling stern.

Erica pushed our canoe into the water and climbed in, soaking her sneakers in the process so she took them off and tossed them onto the floor of the canoe. She wriggled her toes over the gunwale and slapped at the water with her bare feet like a little kid, a big grin on her face. The sun had risen to the tree line and dappled light played on the water. A slight breeze stirred the morning air.

“Oooh, the water’s cold. Let’s get going.”

“It will get hot as soon as the sun rises a little higher in the sky. You’ll be glad the water’s cool then.”

After tossing my sandals into the canoe, I shoved the stern into the water and hopped in barefoot. I grabbed my paddle and used its tip against the river bottom to move us beyond the bank. I feathered the paddle to bring us parallel to the others and waited, the tip of my paddle still rooted to the river bottom. While I held the canoe steady, I studied the river.

When I looked upriver to the left, it was about sixty or so feet wide, with a high bank on the west side partly made of a jutting rock ledge and partly earth with old gnarled tree roots sunk back deep into the bank. Ferns grew tall and wild along with elderberry, buttonbush, dogwood, willow, and hemlock trees. On the east side along the pebbled banks I could identify loosestrife, riverbank grape, tussock sedge, and reed grass growing close to the edge in sunny spots. There was a stand of birch trees, white against all the green with lovely peeling bark and feathery leaves. A straight run of river turned, just before the launching spot, into a wide curve that formed a little bay of shallow water before moving on around jutting rocks. From this point it seemed as if the water just lazed along. Tall trees formed a canopy on either side. In the middle, when the sun was higher, the water would become bright and sparkly. I loved that part of the day on a river.

The canoes pushed off and entered the gentle swirl. I lifted my paddle and said to Erica, “Okay, let’s move ’em out.”

We were truly on our own now. We dipped our paddles in stroke after stroke until we merged with the current into the middle of the river where the water was dark, deep, running smooth and steady. The two other canoes followed in a snaking pattern one after the other, carried by the current, each one in the stern position steering a course forward, keeping to the middle water where the flow was strongest.

Not too far along, as the river widened and straightened for what looked like a good stretch, the three canoes came abreast of each other. I extended my paddle to the canoe with Hope and Charlene.

“Here,” I said to Charlene, “grab it and get Hope to do the same with Valerie. If we each hang onto the paddles, we’ll be rafted for a while as long as the river runs straight and calm like this.”

The other canoe pulled up alongside and Hope stuck out her paddle to Valerie. Soon we were abreast of each other, paddle to paddle. Every once in a while I told Charlene, who was in the middle canoe, how to keep us going fairly straight by using her paddle as a rudder. The bow paddlers did the same and we slid down the river like a raft with three pontoons.

“Who wants to fill Katelyn in on our stories?”

Erica looked from one canoe to the other, her eyebrows arched. Droplets of water fell from her paddle in a thin line leaving a dotted wake that floated away behind us in a disappearing line that spread out in the water until it vanished into gentle ripples.

“If we tell her all about us, will she tell us all about her?” Charlene, the cross examiner.

“You do it. You got us all onto the council in the beginning.” Roz pointed at Erica and then leaned over and waved a dragonfly away from the canoe.

“We want to hear Katelyn’s story first,” said Charlene.

“Okay then, Katelyn, first tell us how you and Maze met,” Erica said, turning around to face me in the bow. “Whoa,” she sucked in a breath and grabbed the gunwales as the canoe wobbled when she changed her position. “Careful,” she warned.

“You be careful,” Charlene told her. “You’re the one who’s moving around in there. So, tell us.” She pointed to me. “If Erica falls in we’ll just let her swim the rest of the way.”

“My boyfriend from college and I lived together after I got back from a nine month Fulbright in Italy. I got a degree in art. He was a musician. We struggled. Financially, you know.”

“So that was before Maze?” Roz asked. “A musician and an artist? No money? Hard to imagine,” she teased.

“I know, right? I was very naïve then.”

“Is this too personal?” Hope asked me.

I shook my head slowly. I was wondering what they would think about my story. Maze knew all about it but he was hardly what you could call an innocent bystander.

“It’s okay,” I said and went on about the past in a kind of dreamy state out there on the river. So far from every day life. Like I was on a cruise. These were shipboard buddies. The kind you get close to fast and then break away from after you dock. I didn’t consider what they might think or say tomorrow.

“We were willing to live without money. We just wanted to be free to follow wherever our art took us. We were in complete agreement on that. We lived like scavengers, moving from one cheap place to another, collecting other people’s cast offs, buying clothes at Goodwill. He booked himself into any gig he could, played for nickels and dimes, got stiffed by club owners. Four years went by like that.”

“And you were what … twenty something?” Charlene asked. She dropped one foot over the gunwale and tapped her toes on top of the water. “Oooo,” she cooed, “it’s cold. But nice.”

“I was twenty-five when he got a letter that an uncle he barely knew had died and left him a big lot on a busy street corner. He went to talk to a realtor about selling it and she told him it was a good place for a strip mall. She offered to set up financing and be his partner. We would have income for life. He borrowed money from a bank using the land as collateral, built the mall, rented it out and made money. With the profits he bought another piece of land next to it and built a bigger strip mall. This realtor was hungry. Before I knew it, he was becoming a strip mall king and he stopped playing music. He turned into this controlling, workaholic, money crunching machine. He joined the Chamber of Commerce, wanted me to change the way I dressed and have people over for drinks and join the country club. Wanted to plan huge events. Especially our wedding. He got totally fixated on that. It was a nightmare. There was nothing I could do to get him to let go. It was like a drug.”

“What happened? Obviously you didn’t stay,” Roz said.

“One day I just packed up a couple of bags and left everything but my clothes and art supplies. My art rep had told me about a quiet little village on the Mexican Pacific. So I got on a plane and flew down there. I didn’t even have a place to stay so I went to a B&B for two weeks until I rented a small house in the hills above the beach.”

“Wow,” said Hope. “And you did it all by yourself?”

“How long were you with this music man?” Roz asked.

“Six years if you count the time at school. I thought we’d be together our whole lives.”

“But you were just kids,” Roz said. “So young.”

“I’ll never make that mistake again,” I said. “How old were you when you got married?”

“Yes, tell us your sordid tale,” Erica leaned over and let her fingers run along the surface of the water then flicked some drops at Roz. She turned to me. “Roz has two daughters in college. She has a Ph.D. and works for a research company. She has trouble with men.”

“I do not have trouble with men. As a matter of fact I like men very much.”

“True. She likes lots of men.”

“You’re a prude.”

“You know, just because I’m big doesn’t mean I don’t have yens.”

“Hey, did I say anything about your weight? Or your yens?”

“She’s been married three – count ’em three – times and now she’s taken up with a truck driver.”

“We all live a little vicariously through Roz,” Charlene broke in. “I think Erica’s jealous of the new boyfriend. You met Will, right?” Charlene rolled her eyes.

“For the record,” Roz spoke directly to me, “I met Ed,” she tilted her head to the side in a little bow when she spoke his name, “when I was attending a conference in Las Vegas. He was winning big at the blackjack table. Really big. And buying drinks for everybody. He spotted me and asked if I was hungry. Well what was I supposed to say?”

“She’s always hungry,” Valerie broke in. “Always.”

“They gave him one of those high roller suites with all the trimmings so he invited me up there for dinner and I stayed the night.”

“And that was the beginning of a love affair of the soul,” Erica added.

“We’re having a good time. What’s wrong with that? He’s on the road all the time. When he passes near here he stops for a day or two. And sometimes we meet in Vegas or Atlantic City. When he’s winning, it’s exciting and fresh and fun. And he treats me like a princess. I don’t want anything more than that so what’s the problem?”

“Nothing,” said Charlene. “Except that you can’t possibly have anything to talk about.”

“You’d be surprised. Ed is sort of a renaissance man. He can talk on any number of subjects.” She turned to me and whispered, “Charlene has four older sisters. When they were kids, they used to call her Snarlene.”

“Talk is easy anyway.” I don’t know why I broke in like that. I must have been thinking about Maze. They all looked at me. No one spoke. “I mean finding someone you can really connect with is … ”

“Don’t you feel connected to Maze?” Hope asked. She seemed mystified by these stories.

“Will and I are connected. Good God we are so connected we have almost nothing to say to each other anymore. After thirty years together, we’ve said it at all least fifty times. What else is there to talk about?”

“I wish I’d been married to someone for thirty years.” Hope’s voice was wistful and quiet. The canoes made a soft whooshing sound against the water. “It must be very comforting.”

“At your age that would mean you’d have been married at two. Besides you don’t even date.” Valerie’s voice was even lower now. And I noticed a flat edge to it that sounded almost Midwestern.

“Yes. How do you expect to get married if you don’t even test the waters?” Charlene slid her leg out over the side of the canoe and dipped her toes into the river. “Speaking of waters, ooh, that is so cool and fresh. Hey, when we eat lunch I’m going for a swim.”

“Katelyn,” said Roz looking over at me. “What do you think? Is it better to have sex and not even think about marriage? You’re not married to what’s his name, right?”

“Maze? No. We’re not married.”

“You didn’t finish,” Hope said. “About how you and Maze met.”

“I’ll tell you that story later. I want to hear about all of you.”

“Well I decided a long time ago that marriage and I were not compatible. I’m too driven. Too focused on work. Besides when I’m involved in a trial I don’t have any time or energy for anything but my client. I have to be there one hundred and ten percent.”

“So there’s no man in your life?”

“Oh sure there is. We don’t live together. But we’ve been together for – what is it now – twelve years I think. He owns his house. I own my house. We spend weekends together. We go on trips together when I’m between court cases. We’re very satisfied with things the way they are.” Erica’s raised eyebrows hinted Charlene was not coming completely clean about something.

“What’s that look for?” Charlene asked, “We like our situation, no matter what some people may think. Anyway, Val’s the happily married one here. She’s carrying the banner for the rest of us.”

Valerie let her hand dip in the water. She smiled, as if this was some joke between them. “Yes, I’m just a living ideal, am I not?” She arched her neck back and looked up at the sky from beneath the brim of her stylish straw hat.

The rafted canoes glided along. Spots of sunlight glittered on the water. The air had turned warm although it had happened imperceptibly. One moment it was a cool morning and the next it had turned into midday.

One by one the women let go their hold on each other’s paddles. After a few more curves in the river we came to the first flat area with shallow water where I had designated on the map as a good place to rest up and eat a leisurely lunch. The day was fine. The birds had stopped singing. They too were resting in the middle of the day.

CHAPTER SIX

THE TROUT

The spot that had looked so fine on the chart turned out to be overgrown with poison ivy and brambles along the banks. There was not a good pull out for the canoes. It was hot by then, but we pushed on, paddling steadily now to find someplace to take a break. Around two bends in the river, we came upon a wide flat stretch of sandy bank that formed an island where the river breached into two parts. We pushed onto this sandbar island, bows first, one after the other. The stern paddlers had to step into water up to their knees to get out. We splashed around a bit and squealed with the cold. On the far side of the sandy island where the water slowed, a long pool formed. It was deeper over there, the clear water dark, perfect for sunning with a few large flat rock ledges above the water’s surface,.

There were tufts of grasses here and there and short wispy willows along the far side of the bank. Redwings flitted around resentfully, disturbed by our presence, crying out as they settled on a willow, hanging like acrobatics from its swinging branches. Somewhere a jay called raucously.

I walked over to that side of the island and stood quietly gazing at one particular rock ledge that had an outcropping hanging far out above the water.

“Hey, Katelyn, what’re you doing over there? Don’t you want some lunch?”

It was Charlene, the director.

“Would anyone like fresh grilled trout for lunch?” I called back without turning my head.

“What are you talking about?”

Roz came to stand by my side. “And what are you looking at over there?”

“Does anyone want fresh grilled trout for lunch?” I repeated.

“Sure but the maitre’d says our table isn’t ready,” Roz answered.

The others came over.

“If you all will gather some dry wood and start a fire, I’ll catch us some trout to grill.”

I pushed my jeans down and stepped out of them, stripped off my T-shirt and waded into the water in my bra and panties.

“Whoa. Look at nature girl.”

This was more than even Roz, the rebel, expected.

“Oh man. That looks like fun.”

Charlene waded in. “Wait for me,” she called. She stripped down, came up beside me, and we walked farther in toward the flat rocks.

“Go collect some wood, you guys,” I called back to the others as we hit water deep enough to start swimming to the far side of the rock ledge.

Once we reached the rocks, I could see the others scurrying back to the middle of the island where they picked up driftwood that was lying around everywhere. Some of the pieces were too large for the fire but they dragged these over anyway. It was as if some primitive nesting instinct took over, as if the women were preparing to spend the winter on this little piece of land. Roz and Valerie stacked the wood and collected more. Erica and Hope unloaded the duffels packed with food. Took out the mess kits and a pot for boiling water. Set up a small standing grill on some rocks that they arranged in a circle to make a fire pit. Spread a cloth on the ground, prepared the lunch table with canned goods and small drink cartons. In packing for camping, they had tried to bring food in containers they could burn so they would make as little trash to carry back as possible. They stacked the firewood so it had a lot of air and then lit the kindling. It caught quickly and they collected more to have extra to add as it burned down. I could hear them talking.

“Do you think this water is okay to cook in?” Erica asked Hope.

Hope shrugged. “I guess so. It’s way out here with nothing upriver but river. I mean what could be in it but water? There aren’t any farms or industrial plants or sewage or anything. I think it’s okay.”

Erica fanned the fire with a branch that still had green leaves on it. The fire crackled and spit. They tossed more branches on it. It flared up. They let it burn down some while they set up the rest of the lunch things. When it was a smaller fire, Erica placed the grill above one end of it above the flames so it wasn’t in the fire but got plenty of heat from below. Hope stuck more branches around the down wind side and the fire settled into a steady burn. The others came over to admire the fire. Roz opened a drink and took a long swig. It was only then that they looked over to the pool on the other side of the island.

In a few long steady strokes we had reached the down stream end of the first rock ledge. The overhang faced up current. I skirted the rounded end looking for a handhold and found one on the far side of the rock. I grabbed onto a natural groove where I could hook my fingers over and get a secure grip. By placing my feet flat against the rock just under the water, I used the resistance of the dry ledge to lock my fingers in place to hoist myself up far enough to grab the rock higher up and pull onto the top of the ledge. I lay there in the sun, breathing hard after the swim and exertion of lifting my body out of the water, waiting for Charlene to follow me around. The stone was warm from the sun. My skin was cold from the fresh water. Charlene stretched out next to me.

“This is so nice,” she murmured. “So relaxing. I live my life in small offices and stuffy courtrooms. Sometimes I feel like I want to throw all the papers on my desk out the window and watch them fly. Just fly to the winds anywhere they want to go.” She closed her eyes to the sunlight and breathed deeply. “Is this what it’s like to be an artist?”

“Sunning on a rock?”

“No.” She giggled. “I mean getting inspired by nature. Letting down your guard. Letting go of the everyday world.”

“Not exactly,” I told her. “Artists have all of the same struggles everyone else has. Except they rarely make enough money to live on, and they have the extra burden of being pushed internally by ideas and visions that nobody else has. It’s not a decision. It’s built in.”

I raised my arms and let them fall back above my head on the rock. Sunlight bathed my body and the warm rock felt solid under me. I stood up on it and Charlene didn’t move. Her eyes were still closed. I walked to the end facing the current and knelt down. I leaned as far out as I possibly could without falling back into the water. One of the women called to me. Was it Hope? I focused on the water below the overhanging rock. It was not too shallow. The current was slow here. I reached gently into the water, letting my arms hang down about three feet apart. With great care and control I moved my hands, fingers splayed open, under the ledge feeling blindly for what I knew would be there in the middle of the day, hiding from the sun, asleep for a time. Then I felt the belly of it. Soft. Slick. Its tail swishing faintly with the current. I ran my fingers gently under its belly, tickling in little strokes. When I reached the gills, fanning in the water, I quickly locked my fingers inside them and yanked the head back, instantly killing the trout. I pulled it out of the water with almost no disturbance and laid it behind me. I moved to a new spot on the wide ledge and repeated the procedure.

By now the fire was crackling and the rest of the food had been prepared. When I had caught six trout, Charlene pulled over a large piece of flat driftwood that had settled on the rock, abandoned there by high water after some storm. I laid out the fish on the wood and we let ourselves down into the river. The water was cool and fresh. My feet glided over the pebbly bottom while I tried not to rock the wood.

With great care we floated the trout raft ahead of us, walking all the way back to the island, even though in the middle between the rock ledges and sandy island the water was almost too deep to touch bottom. When we got close, the others scrambled into the water up to their knees to meet us.

I salted the trout and then wrapped them in big leaves and we steamed them over the coals. When the aroma was at its peak, we took them out carefully and peeled away the shriveled leaves. Inside the trout were perfectly cooked.

“Where did you ever learn how to do that? Catch a trout like that?” Hope asked after we had settled down and eaten lunch.

“I have a lot of odd skills. I picked up this one from a boyfriend when I was nineteen. He was older. Twenty-three. He was going off to medical school in the fall. His family was from the Ukraine. When he was little they escaped from the Communists, moved to Austria, and then to the states. They used to go to the Smokey mountains in the summer when he was a kid. He had learned how to catch trout with his hands before they left the Ukraine. He took me up there camping for a week and we lived on what we caught in the river and found in the woods. He taught me a lot.”

“I’ll bet,” said Charlene. “Tickling trout while he was tickling your fancy.”

* * *

I learned to fish in the Keys. Easy fishing in the beginning. Practice casting off the stern of a skiff in the Gulf. Hooking sea trout and snapper on a feather with light spinning tackle. Later fly fishing for bonefish on the flats on the Atlantic side. We’d go down for the tarpon tournament in June when the sun was so strong it could knock you on your ass if you didn’t wear a hat and long sleeves and drink gallons of water. I loved it. Being out there with the men. Keeping up with them, casting to the exact spot where the guide told me a fish was lurking and then hitting that spot like I had a homing device on the line.

I was fifteen. My father, me, and a guide named Buddy took off for tarpon from Bud and Mary’s marina in Islamorada. We arrived just before dawn. Brought a bagged lunch – sandwiches and drinks – enough for ourselves and the guide. That was the protocol. I wore a white cotton hat I could dip in the water to cool my head later when the sun was up and a long sleeved white cotton shirt. Light weight long pants. The guide supplied rods, reels, shrimp if you were using bait, feather lures if you weren’t, fly rods if you thought you were good enough to hook a tarpon on a fly. During tournaments no bait was allowed. No cell phones or two way radios. We went out in an open sixteen foot skiff with a Bimini top the guide would raise for shade at lunchtime. Along one side of the boat a long pole was lashed to a couple of hooks. At the stern of the boat, the built in bait box road in the water to keep the shrimp alive. Once we headed west into the uncharted uninhabited dry islands west of the Keys in the gulf, we were alone with nothing but the water, the sky, the sun and the birds. If we had to pee, the men turned their backs and let go off the side. They would pull into one of the tiny mangrove islands and let a woman off to squat behind a pile of bleached white driftwood or anything she could find. There wasn’t much. Land crabs. Roseate spoonbills. Egrets, herons and pelicans. Once in a while, a fin rode along in the water and if it came close enough, you could see the shark sidling by. Sometimes they were as long as your boat. Dark gray shapes moving stealthily through the pale, milky, blue water. You hoped none would be nearby if you hooked a tarpon. Out there, if a squall came up, or you drank too much gin and fell overboard, you could disappear and no one would ever find you.

We were far out in the Gulf. We’d had lunch. Not seen many fish. Buddy said if we didn’t spot any tarpon in the next half hour he’d run us over to the ocean flats and we’d try for bonefish.

I was casting. A spinning rod with a feather on fifteen pound line. Light tackle to hook a legend among fish. I spotted a tail. I cast out and watched the little feather lure float through the air. Arching above the water, the line dropped and landed the white feather slightly beyond and in front of where I’d seen the tail. I jigged it. Jigged it again. Watched the tarpon tail again and then roll, its silver belly like a big crystal log. I jigged the line inches past where I calculated its mouth would be and wham. It hit. Yanked hard at the line. Pulled the rod tip down. I hauled up with all my strength to set the hook in its bony throat. If this was a good set I would have a struggle ahead. If not, the tarpon would spit my hook back out and the rod would snap back up. But it curved down in a half circle, dipping toward the water. A good set. My father and Buddy pulled in their lines.

I walked my line back along the gunwale following where the fish was headed.

Buddy was on it in a second. He lifted the pole and leapt onto the bow. He watched the water. Guides spend almost every day year after year out there on the water. They can read a shadow in the water like a lynx on the hunt. They could tell how many fish were in a ripple, what kind of school made a wake, if one fish was hunting another. They could spot the shadow of a tarpon, as it swam alone or in twos or threes in the channels.

“Set him again,” Buddy yelled. “Set him hard before he jumps.”

It was too late. The giant fish broke water. It leaped high into the air, its glistening muscular body twisting, head shaking to get rid of the lure. I dropped the rod tip to let up on the tension. If you pulled when the tarpon breached, you’d yank the hook out and lose the fish.

“Give him slack,” Buddy yelled. “Don’t lose him, now.”

Down he went flat on his side, splashing water, making waves that rocked the small skiff. I pulled at the rod to raise the tip again, trying to lead the fish toward the boat. But the tarpon had other ideas.

It plunged down under water again and then it did what no one expected. It started to run. Straight out toward the open Gulf waters. My line sang as the fish pulled it farther and farther. I tried to reset the drag but the line was running too fast. Besides, when you have a hundred plus pound fish on a fifteen pound test line and he’s running away from you, setting the drag too tight will just snap your line.

Buddy stuck the fourteen foot push pole into the water and started to pole after the fish. He ran the pole along the side of the boat and pulled it up when he reached the very stern, then ran back up to the bow and started again. Over and over he poled after the fish while I hauled my rod tip up against it and reeled in on the downward drop. After fifteen minutes of this, the fish seemed to be running out of steam. Buddy quit poling and I reeled in steadily.

Finally we could all see the tarpon coming closer to the boat.

“A monster,” Buddy said. “A cow if I ever saw one. Must be a hundred and forty pounds if he’s an ounce. If you can boat that one, my hat’s off to you.”

I pulled up on the rod again and reeled the fish closer. Buddy got out the gaff hook. He leaned over the side, getting into position to hook the fish and haul it in for a picture.

As he held the hook over the water, I walked toward him, pulled the line alongside the boat, steering the fish in for the final catch. The fish came within six feet of the boat and then it leapt into the air completely clearing the water with a huge splash that soaked all three of us. The huge fish thrashed its silver body back and forth and with one last swipe of its tail and fling of its head, spit out the hook, plopped back down into the water and took off like a torpedo. Just when you think you’re in the clear, you’re looking down at an empty hand.

* * *

By the time we had eaten and cleaned up, doused the fire and repacked the canoes, the afternoon sun had cleared the trees and was full on us. I had put my pants and T-shirt back on when I emerged from the water and now even my underwear was dry.

“It’s so hot,” Valerie rubbed her forearm against her face. “I’m dripping.” Her blue pants were sweat stained in the back and there were large patches of dark stain under the arms of her pale blue shirt. She took off her hat and wiped sweat from her forehead.

“Me too,” Hope said.

They both looked at the water as if they had the same idea at the same time.

Roz shrugged her shoulders. “There’s nobody around for miles.” She pulled off her creek shoes and pulled her shirt over her head as the rest of us watched.

“What’s the big deal?”

“Yeah,” Charlene nodded. “No biggie.”

She stripped down leaving only Erica and me still dressed.

“What about you?” Hope asked me.

“Oh, it’s fine with me but I can tell you it will feel better later if you get out of your underwear too.”

I began to undress again, then Charlene decided it was her duty to direct even Erica.

“If you do not disrobe with the rest of us we’ll throw you in fully dressed.”

“I want to,” said Erica. “I really do. But … ”

“Come on. It’ll be fun,” Hope said, patting her arm. “If I can do it, you can do it.”

“You all go in first and I’ll follow. But you can’t look at me.” Erica folded her arms.

The sun was blasting hot. No breeze stirred the willows at this time of day. We stripped bare and ran naked to the water. With squeals, we hit the cold water and ran splashing like puppies until we reached the deeper part and dipped down beneath the surface where we swam and swam. We all headed for the rock ledges and soon Erica was behind us doggie paddling her way across the narrow channel.

I led them to the spot where there was a handhold. I hauled myself out first and helped the others, dripping and scrambling. Erica was the last.

She reached up and took my hand.

“I never felt so free in my whole life,” she said. A big smile lit up her face. Her hair hung in wet strands grazing her shoulders. “What if you can’t pull me up?” She rested her right foot against the rock.

“Push up with your feet while I pull you. And use your left hand on this ledge. Right here,” I guided Erica’s left hand until she grabbed the rock.

“This exercise will help you develop climbing fingers,” I smiled down at Erica reassuringly.

“Just close your eyes when I come up out of the water. I don’t want anyone looking at me.”

“Oh for God’s sake, Erica. We’re not beauty queens here, Nobody cares what you look like.” Charlene again, the executive.

“Val’s a beauty queen,” said Hope.

“Not any more I’m not,” said Valerie.

With a grunt and a splash, Erica pulled herself up and onto the rock ledge. Water cascaded off her in a rush. The sun hit her body as she crawled over to a flat place and stretched out her stomach. The rock was warm. She lay there, her breathing shallow, with the sun on her back.

“Oh the hell with it,” she said as we lay there quietly soaking up the sun like turtles lined up on a log.

With an intake of breath, Erica raised herself onto her knees and then stood straight up, arms raised toward the sky. “Here I am. Take it or leave it.”

“You look just like a Rubens,” I told her quietly. “A beautiful, lush, full-bodied womanly Rubens.”

“What happened to that woman? When did we decide that emaciated was beautiful?” Hope asked.

“When gay fashion designers wanted their clothes to look like they were hanging on a clothes hanger and not on a body. Don’t think just because I’ve always been thin that I’ve always loved my body. I don’t know one woman who wouldn’t change her body in some way. The models I knew all thought there was something wrong with the way they looked.”

“I blame Hugh Heffner. The old letch.” Erica laughed but there was an edge of resentment in her voice, too.

We sat there quietly. I thought about a study I’d read. When men were asked to look in a mirror and report what they saw, they said they were handsomer than they really were and that their bodies looked better than they really did. Women reported the opposite. What was wrong with women? Why did they think there was something wrong with them? When did that happen? I supposed it was when the culture shifted from an agricultural base, when women were prized for ample hips and a wide birth canal so they could provide lots of hands to tend the farm.

One by one, each woman turned to face the sun. We sat down in a line like children, legs hanging over the rock where I had caught the fish, feet sloshing in the cool water. We swung our legs and grinned at each other.

“This is the best day I’ve ever had without a man,” said Charlene.

“Almost as good as sex. Maybe better. Don’t have to worry about…” This from Roz. After the stories about men I couldn’t help but ask.

“About what?”

“What I look like. What I’ll feel like when he’s gone. If he’ll call again. If he doesn’t, what I’ll do. If I even want him to.”

***

Before we pulled out again, I asked the women how they’d each decided to be on the council.

“I met Erica through a local save the animals fair,” said Hope. “My parents were Methodist missionaries in Ghana and then Sierra Leone. When they retired, I came back to Vermont. I got a job as church secretary, but I think being a nurse will suit me better. I still want to serve. It’s just that the missionary life is not right for me.”

Erica followed, “Well you all know how I got on it. Carter Cummings died and the other men on the council asked my husband, Will, to take his place. As an appointee. Just until the next election. What a joke. Will said he was too busy golfing so he asked me to do it instead. He had to talk those men into taking me on. But they made me promise not to suggest anything or go against any of their votes.”

“That’s disgusting,” said Charlene. “I wish you’d told me that before. I would have taken them to court.”

“Steady, Clarence Darrow,” Roz wisecracked.

“That was before they decided to bail on the town. And before our son, Matthew, was deployed. Now I’m glad I have something to occupy my mind,” Erica said. “He’s a lieutenant in the infantry, a communications specialist. I worry about him all the time. Constantly im-ing him & sending him care packages. He tells me not to worry but what can I do? Will’s way of dealing with it is not to talk about it. I blame him. All that be a man crap. It drives me crazy. I’m sixty-two, retired from a government job, and have a husband whose main interest in life is golf and trying to forget his son’s off fighting a war for who knows what. So that leaves the council.”

“Didn’t Will have something to do with developers when he was still practicing?” asked Charlene.

“He was a real estate lawyer. If that’s what you mean,” said Erica. “Like you. I mean the lawyer part. But, yes, he worked mostly for developers. He always said that’s where the money was. I suppose it still is.”

“Well at least Charlene does some pro bono work,” said Hope. “She helps people who really need it.”

“That’s how I got on the council,” Charlene turned to Katelyn. “My firm represents a green coalition and I suggested getting on the council would fit in nicely. So here we are.”

“How about you?” I asked Valerie.

“Me?” said Valerie, pointing to herself. “That’s simple. I was bored. And I guess I like anything that gets me in front of people. I get to buy a new outfit twelve times a year for the monthly public meetings. That’s about it. Oh, and my husband, Dr. Reconstruction,” she nodded at Charlene, “is against my doing it. So that’s a plus.”

“Val’s not being entirely honest about this,” said Erica. “She’s also a distant relative of the founder of Trout River Falls. The original mill owner I think. Isn’t that right?”

“So they’ve told me,” said Valerie. “Personally I think it’s probably a lot of bunk. I’m not very big on ancestor worship. My family on my mother’s side was in this area for a long time. But there aren’t any of them left as far as I know.”

“I guess that leaves me,” Roz said. “I’m a sucker for a cause. Anyone will tell you. I take in strays. It’s probably why I got married three times. Saving Trout River Falls is going to be a lot less of a headache than trying to rebuild another wreck of a man.”

I slipped off the rock ledge into the cool water. It was time to be on our way.

“We have to get to our campsite before dusk,” I told them. I dipped my head back, dunked my hair into the river and came up shaking off the excess water.

“Are you going to catch us more fresh fish for dinner?” asked Charlene as she let herself down from the rock into the water.

“If there’s a good place to fish where we land later.”

Erica was the last to lower herself. We made our way across to the sandy island where we’d left the canoes. We passed around towels to dry off and put our clothes back on. “Let’s rearrange canoe partners so we all pair with someone new,” Roz suggested.

After we packed up the cooking equipment and stowed all our gear back in the canoes, I showed Hope some paddling techniques. How to feather parallel to the canoe to come up alongside something sideways. How to back paddle to steer and how to alternate sides to keep a steady rhythm with the bow paddler.

We pushed off, Roz now partnered with Erica, Hope with me, Charlene with Valerie. The strong canoers sat in the bows so the weaker ones could get some practice in control and steering.

“See, you have the power to direct where the canoe goes, how fast, and when and how to change direction. If we were negotiating rapids, you’d have to be switching sides and steering to avoid rocks and pillows.”

“What’s a pillow?” Hope asked.

“When you see a bulge in the water, that tells you that something hard is under the surface and you want to avoid it.”

“But what about you in the bow?”

“The bow has no power to control the boat. I can only paddle harder and faster. You control what happens.”

We tried a few tests and I was surprised at how quickly Hope caught on. “Oh, I see,” she said and feathered us over to Erica and Roz. The others listened and tried what Hope was doing and pretty soon we were paddling hard down the river.

The river wound around in this section, curving in and out, skirting shoals and creating more islands like the one where we had stopped. You could see where the spring floods had left a water mark along steep banks, gouged out earth exposed tree roots dug deep back into the bank. Here and there large boulders were exposed with now and then a turtle resting on a rock ledge. Birds called, flying over the canoes. A crow cawed. Two wrens sang a lively, complex song answering each other in turn. The motion of the canoes spooked a great blue heron standing on a dead tree limb by the water. It took off with a raspy complaint. We paddled with regular strokes now, moving downriver faster than the current. The sun’s rays peeked through the leaves in a scattering of light on the water, which ran clear and brown, bubbling in spots, swirling in others, its surface like undulating velvet.

I thought about Maze and me, tried to picture what the future looked like. I didn’t want to repeat my past where the deal we made – the music man and I – had changed into something unrecognizable. How could I count on a deal with Maze to stay the same? Maze. He seemed to know who he was. He wouldn’t suddenly give up teaching, researching, being fascinated by native cultures. I was worried about nothing. But I was still worried. If we got married, how would the ground between us shift? Rocks that were now hidden would work their way to the surface. I had no idea what was down there. Or what it would require of me. I was afraid of losing myself. It seemed as if it was always the woman who got lost in marriage. Even her name was not her own anymore. I would not change my name.

In time we arrived where we would spend our first night and set about making camp. The chores were not unlike what we were used to doing at home. If any of the forest creatures that emerge at night were watching us, they might have wondered at these invaders who pitched tents, gathered firewood, unloaded mess kits and cooking gear and prepared for supper and sleep later. We set up a temporary mini village, with eating area, cooking area, and sleeping area. We unpacked duffels and food packs, went into the cooler only once to remove whatever fresh food we would need for this meal and then shut it tight to keep the rest of the food fresh as long as possible. By the next night, we would be eating canned or dried food or what we could heat in water like rice or pasta. Unless we found wild berries, or I caught more fish, fresh food would not be on the menu.

CHAPTER SEVEN

THE CAMPFIRE

Daylight faded. The fire grew brighter; it popped and crackled. Flames licked the air. A sweet smoky aroma permeated the clearing. The daytime breeze faded away with the setting sun. To keep the fire going, Hope and Charlene piled extra wood next to a large rock. The rest of us set up three small tents, carried sleeping bags inside and unrolled them for later. When we had finished our chores, cleaned the mess kits and placed them on the rock to dry, we gathered around the fire and sat on leaves, legs crossed, ready to relax.

“Did any of you go to girls’ camp?” Valerie asked in a general way. She didn’t strike me as the camp girl type. Uniforms. Unheated cabins. No mirrors. Then again, she was out here with us, so who could predict what anyone was likely to do or had done in the past?

“I did.” Roz? I tried to picture her in a cabin with a bunch of other girls. She would have been the one organizing pranks against the counselors.

“Remember the campfire songs?”

“Oh God, yes. And the girls who would start weeping,” Roz groaned.

“I was one of those girls.” Valerie said it quietly. She seemed a bit cowed by Roz..

“I never understood that. You know, got the whole thing.” Roz again.

“I can understand how that feels,” said Hope. “It’s like in church sometimes. People feel at one with each other and with their faith.”

“You equate camp girl songs with church singing?” Charlene asked.

“Not exactly,” said Hope. “But I think sometimes in a group something special happens that’s hard to put into words.”

“I think I was hoping that would happen for us on the council,” said Erica.

“But we were already friends. What more did you expect?” Charlene asked.

Erica shrugged. “Magic?”

“I think the camp singing was a mood thing,” said Valerie. “Everyone would sing some sentimental song and I think that would lead to a kind of group emotional letdown. We knew we were only there for a short time. We were going to say goodbye soon.” She shrugged one shoulder a little defensively and tilted her head. Here we were, all grown women, yet it was not so hard to remember a time of sentimental longing.

I thought about what I was like back then. The teenage angst years. Rebellious. So sure I knew what I wanted. Where was that chin stuck out at the world girl now? A disgruntled woman who couldn’t decide which direction her life should take. Who couldn’t wholly commit to the man who obviously loved her.

Erica added, “There’s something about sitting around a fire outside in the woods that takes you to another place.”

“It’s true. Some place primitive,” said Valerie.

“Yeah. Cave girls,” Roz added.

I poked at the fire and threw a fat branch onto the top where the flames were dark orange. It caught quickly and spat sparks into the air. The trees took on phantom shapes in the fading light. Boughs heavy with leaves rustled and then became still. They seemed to be patiently waiting for the coming of night. A bat swirled and dipped overhead before it darted out of range above the treetops.

“Cave girls with secrets,” Erica mused.

“Do you have a secret?” asked Valerie.

“Everybody has secrets,” Erica answered. “maybe not exactly secrets. But those things you never tell anyone. Or even admit to yourself.”

“Like what?” I asked.

“If I’m going to share one, then everybody has to.” Erica looked around at each of us in turn.

“Do we have to take a blood oath? A menstrual blood oath maybe?” asked Charlene.

Erica tossed an acorn cap she’d been fiddling with at her. “That would let me out.” Charlene ducked to avoid the tiny missile. We all agreed. Something private that no one else knew. One secret. We each threw a piece of fresh wood on the fire to seal the oath. The fire rose up higher, burned with a bright light, crackled and threw out tiny glowing red sparks.

“I’ll start,” said Erica. “I used to be even heavier. You didn’t know me then.” She pointed to me. “Not all of you did either.” She motioned to the others.

“You’ve lost weight since I met you last summer,” I said.

“Yes but I had been even bigger before then.” She never used the word fat.

“Tell us,” said Hope.

“I set a goal in the beginning to cut myself in half,” she said. “That meant losing more than a hundred pounds. One hundred and eleven to be exact.” She stopped talking but then said almost to herself. “I never said that out loud before.” Somewhere a group of ducks quacked as they flew over the river to their night roosts.

“Wow. I had no idea it was that much.” Charlene didn’t say it with malice or in a competitive way. She was letting Erica know she had done something significant.

“I know. Until I got on a scale I didn’t either. That first weigh in was a complete shocker. I fell over and nearly passed out. Two people had to catch me as I went down.”

“What got you started?” That was me. It just popped out. Maybe I shouldn’t have said anything but Erica seemed relieved to be talking about it.

“It started when my son joined the marines. Then, after basic training, when he got orders for Afghanistan and after he shipped out, I was so upset I couldn’t eat for a week. Every time I looked at food I felt my stomach turn over. That’s when I decided to change my life. To take control. When he comes back to us, I want him to see the mother he used to know before. When he was younger. Before I lost control of something inside of me.” She pointed to her heart.

“Why didn’t you say anything to any of us?” Hope asked.

“I’m not sure. In the beginning I was afraid to fail. And later I couldn’t stand the thought of everyone telling me how much I had changed. Or how good I looked. I felt so awful about myself. And I was angry at everything, I couldn’t share it with the world. I was too ashamed of what I’d become.”

“I know how that feels.” Valerie’s voice came as if from far away.

We all turned to look at her. Erica stared in disbelief. “Are you mocking me?”

“No, of course not. I think I’m a little jealous of the way you’ve taken your life into your own hands.”

“Well then tell me how someone who’s always been beautiful and thin all her life can possibly know what it feels like to have a body that’s out of control.”

Valerie stared at the fire for a long time while we waited. “I’m forty-eight. And I’ve added boob implants, had my thighs lipo-ed, my eyelids and forehead done and when I was twenty I had my nose fixed because I was told it was too wide to photograph well for modeling. Now I’m looking at the day that’s coming very soon … ” she broke off and stared at the fire again.

“You mean you’re getting older, like the rest of us?”

“Come on, Roz, give her a break. She’s always relied on her looks to get along. She still models sometimes. She has to look good. It’s just part of who she is,” Erica said and then reached over to pat Valerie’s arm. “Sorry. Didn’t mean to speak about you in the third person like that.”

“I’m just saying, it ain’t that tough to accept you’re going to get older. We all have to do that. But we don’t all have to lose a hundred eleven pounds. That’s a big nut to pay down,” Roz insisted.

I poked at the fire again, making it spark with life. “Maybe there’s something else that Valerie’s not told us yet.” I spoke cautiously.

“It’s true.” Valerie looked across at me. A sad and angry look. “My husband,” she began but stopped.

“What?” Charlene butted in before Valerie could finish. “What about Dr. Reconstruction?”

“You’ve never liked him,” said Valerie.

“I’ve never trusted him. And I’ve never liked the way he’s treated you.”

“How has he treated me?” Valerie asked her. “Any different than any other average husband treats his wife after eighteen years?”

“Charlene’s just being protective,” Roz held up her hand. “In a crude and thoughtless way. But she’s concerned about you.”

“Is it all over town then? Did everyone know but me?” Valerie looked at Roz and then Charlene.

“Know what?” Erica asked. “I don’t know anything.”

“He’s having an affair. With a 30-something who works at the pro shop at the club.” Valerie blurted it out. “I always knew this would happen someday. I knew he would move on when I got beyond repair.”

“Jesus, you sound like you think of yourself as an out of date car that’s ready for the used car lot. You’ve got more going on than that. You’re not just a pretty doctor’s wife,” said Charlene.

“I’ve built my whole life around being pretty and looking good. The perennially beautiful doctor’s wife. The trophy.”

“This is exactly why I never want to be tied to one man,” Roz muttered.

“When was the last time you were tied to one man?” Charlene asked her.

“I was tied to one man three times and that was enough for me”

“Exactly my point. And now you’re dating that truck driving gambler. So you’re tied to another one.”

“I am not tied to him. I am using him for sex and excitement. That’s totally different.”

“He’s so far beneath you I can’t even begin to explain the problems with that.”

“You’re just being a snob. And if you’re so dedicated to one man, how come you don’t live with yours?”

The question went unanswered. We sat quietly for a time watching the flames lick the air. Sparks erupted now and then and flew into the darkness then flared out to nothing. The river gurgled along nearby. Night sounds began to come alive. Somewhere a frog croaked and crickets sang. I listened for an owl but there were none nearby or perhaps our voices inhibited their calls. The night sky was clear and I thought that when the fire died out there would be many more stars visible way out here in the woods. My mind brushed by a thought of Maze in the chicken coop. I wondered what he had made himself for dinner.

When Charlene spoke her voice trembled slightly and she held her hand in front of her face.

“I’m sorry, Roz. I didn’t mean anything about Ed. I’m sure he’s a great guy. Just right for you. Lots of fun. No commitment. Out of town a lot on the road.”

“What is up with you?” Roz seemed genuinely shocked by this change of tone.

“Nothing. Not a thing. I’m perfectly fine. I mean I’ll be perfectly fine. That is when I make the decision and then everything will be fine,” Charlene shook her head.

“What is it? Something with Jake? Are you two having trouble?”

I thought I heard a note of triumph in Roz’s voice. But maybe I was wrong. I hoped I was wrong.

“Why is it whenever a woman is upset everyone always assumes it’s because of some man?” Charlene glared at Roz.

No one seemed to have an answer to Charlene’s question so it hung there for a few seconds like a hawk hovering over us.

“I think it’s because a woman defines herself by the man she’s with,” I said. “We almost never stand completely alone and feel satisfied with that.”

“I never had a problem with a man.” Hope broke the silence.

“You never had a man.” Roz quipped and then shook her head almost as if saying to herself that she shouldn’t have said that.

“I do now. At least I may.”

“What?” Erica and Valerie asked at exactly the same time. “Who?”

“He and a partner own the new landscaping company the church hired and he manages the crews. He came by the first day and showed them where to plant our hydrangea bushes. You know the ones that are right up against the east side of the church, under the maple trees? They’re really pretty. He fed them with something that he said will make their flowers blue.”

“Enough gardening news,” Roz said. “What about him?”

“Oh, I don’t know. But I kind of like him. After he finishes with the crew and they leave he stays and talks to me.”

“What are you doing, praying together?”

Erica shot Roz a look that said ‘Lay off.’

“Well,” Hope dropped her voice and shrugged a little. She pulled at a leaf stuck in her sneaker lace. “He asked me out.”

“And?” Roz asked.

“I don’t know what to do.”

“Whether to go out with him?” Erica asked her.

“No. I said I would go,” said Hope.

“Then what’s the problem?” Valerie had perked up. In fact the mood had shifted again for all of us.

“I don’t know what to expect,” Hope’s voice dropped to almost a whisper. “I’ve never been on a date. I don’t know what he’ll do. Or what I should do. Or say.”

“There’s nothing different about a date than what you’ve already been doing with him. Except there will probably be food involved,” Charlene broke in. “Unless. Wait a minute. Are you really asking about sex?”

Hope nodded. She looked like a little girl. A confused little girl going on her first date. And all of a sudden I saw in her face a mirror of my own confusion about men and relationships. It was all such a bog. So squishy. You never knew quite where you stood or what to expect. And yet part of the attraction was the uncertainty of it all. Then Hope looked around, her lips turned down, eyebrows knit together, like a child who’s just been caught sneaking out of the house.

“Oh my God,” said Charlene. “How old are you?”

“Don’t tease her,” said Erica. “Her parents were missionaries. She’s lived a very sheltered life, growing up in Africa, working at some church her whole life, home schooled. Come on.”

I thought about Hope at nursing school. If she could handle that … “Don’t worry or think about it too much,” I advised her. “Just let things happen.” I laughed. “Look who’s giving you advice. I can’t decide what to do about my own life.”

“No one knows what to do. You just put one foot in front of the other and see where you’re going while you’re getting there,” Erica told her.

“What about you, Charlene?” asked Hope. “You never told us what decision you have to make.” The attention shifted back to Charlene. She didn’t say anything. We waited. Before she did speak, she took a deep breath, almost a gasp, as if she couldn’t get enough air.

“Yesterday, after I packed up for this trip, I went out to the drug store and when I came home, I took an HPT and it came out positive.” She took another deep breath. “I don’t know what I’m going to do.”

“You’re pregnant? I can’t believe it.” Valerie’s voice was so high she was almost squealing.

“You’re not the only one. I’ve been a wreck ever since I found out. I’m friggin’ forty-one and I’m pregnant. I almost bailed on this trip. I don’t know what I’m going to do.”

“Have you told Jake?” asked Erica. “I mean what would he say?’

“You know our situation. We never expected to have a baby. It wasn’t ever on our radar.”

“I’d rather have your problem than mine,” said Roz.

“Why, what’s yours?” Charlene asked.

“I found a lump on my right breast. I go for a mammogram the day after we get back.”

“Oh, God.” Erica touched Roz’s arm. “It may be nothing at all. Most of the time it’s nothing. Don’t make yourself crazy at this point.”

“My mother had a double mastectomy at fifty. And she lived five more years. Fifty-five and she was gone. So don’t tell me about benign tumors.”

“But things have changed a lot,” I said. “Even if they find something, the treatments are much better now. Erica’s right.”

We stared into the fire. What you feel is your own to tend. No one can share it. No one can endure it for you. No one can inhabit your world but you. These secrets we carry inside, how closely we guard them. Even from ourselves. Were any of us happy? Was happiness even a state to desire? Should we all be satisfied that we were free to do what we chose? So many women in so many places were so much worse off than we were. Sitting by the river, the fire crackling, our stomachs full. Our lives may have been in turmoil in one part, but in others they couldn’t have been safer, more secure. Or was that an illusion? We are all standing on shifting sands of one kind or another. Sunspots. Asteroid showers, melting icebergs may determine our fate. What control can we possibly have over that?

Every once in a while someone tossed another branch onto the pile and the fire flared up. Darkness had come on by then and the night sounds of the forest surrounded us. Erica brought a bucket of water from the river and set it beside the rock where the wood was piled. The summer air was warm. There was no night breeze yet. A bird fluttered by in the dark sky above the trees. Perhaps it was a duck or maybe a Canada goose looking for a place to settle for the night. From somewhere far off another goose honked out a message.

When Hope spoke, it came as a bit of a jolt in the silence.

“There are only six of us. And look what we’re facing in our lives.”

“Is there ever a time in life when things slow down?” Charlene asked quietly. “It all seems to go so fast. It’s almost too much.”

“But some of it is good,” Hope countered. “Having a baby is a good thing. A joyous thing.”

“I’m going to try to look at it that way. It’s just that I can’t get my mind around it. Around what it will mean. My life would completely change,” Charlene said. “But I won’t ever get this chance again.”

“What about you, Katelyn?” Hope asked.

They all looked at me.

“Yes, what about you?” Erica asked. “What secret are you keeping out at the old Reichelm farm?”

I looked around and then said, “It seems to me that life is inherently unstable. The whole world is unstable. Earthquakes, hurricanes, blizzards. And me? On the outside I know I look like I’m all neatly put together. But on the inside I’m constantly trying to find a stable core when what I feel is anything but stability. The only time I really lose this sense that the world is shifting under me is in my garden.”

“Is that your secret?” asked Hope. “Your garden? It didn’t look like a secret to me when we were out there.”

“Not the garden itself,” I said. “It’s just something quirky I do out there. A little odd thing.”

“Tell us.” Valerie looked me straight in the eyes and I thought, she really is beautiful. And I wondered, even though I had always been told I was pretty, what it must be like for a woman to be born with that kind of beauty.

“Yes. You’re the one who suggested this retreat. And you’re the trip leader. So you can’t be the only one who has an untold secret,” Erica said.

“Okay, but just keep in mind it’s just something I started doing on a whim. It wasn’t like something I planned or anything.”

“Come on, give.” Roz said.

“Well, when Maze leaves, and I’m all alone at the farm … ” I hesitated.

“Does this involve another man?” Roz asked.

“You wish,” said Charlene.

“No,” I said. “Nothing like that. It’s just, when I’m alone, out there with the sun and the birds singing, I garden naked.”

“You what?” They all said it with glee, like a chorus. They gathered closer to me.

“You’re kidding.” Erica started to laugh. “You mean all those fat vegetables you sold at the farmers market when we met last summer? I wonder what people would say if you told them how you grew those tomatoes.” She giggled like a little girl.

It caught on and flared up like the fire. Laughter sparked here and there until we were all howling, until the tears flowed and then we were crying. Roz couldn’t stop. I moved to her side and put my arms around her and hugged her.

“Don’t worry,” I told her. “Things will be fine. I’ll go to the doctor with you for the test. You won’t have to go through this alone.” I looked over at Charlene. “And I’ll be your baby’s godmother, if you like.”

“See,” Valerie said, wiping the tears from her cheeks. “This is just what happens when girls sit around a campfire.”

After a time, we let the fire die down until the embers glowed deep red. The moon rose above the trees. Crickets chirped. The rough rasp of katydid songs filled the night. One by one we took a cup, filled it with water from one of the gallon jugs we’d brought along, and brushed our teeth, and with water from the river washed off our faces, arms, and feet, and prepared for sleep. We crawled into our sleeping bags two to a tent and soon the only sounds came from the forest and the river, perpetually running downstream, burbling at the banks.

* * *

At some time during the night I stirred and opened my eyes. A wind had come up and the leaves rustled with it. I heard a branch crack somewhere and fall, hitting others as it went down. Or perhaps it was a deer wandering through the forest and what I heard was its hooves crackling branches underfoot. I pushed at the tent flaps and slipped on my creek shoes before standing up in what was left of the moon’s light. The air was fresh but not cold. I could hear the river running past and the scent of the water reminded me of my grandmother’s house on the river so long ago that now it was truly only alive in my memory The house and the stone walls my grandfather had built to hold the water back were now long gone.

That river was not so wide as this one, nor as deep. Not so cold. Dark brown under the shade of overhanging trees, with a particular scent of fresh water inside my grandmother’s house just yards from the river’s edge.

Her wooden house was dark green with dark red shutters and inside, in the leaded kitchen cabinets, she stored dark blue, cut-glass drinking glasses. She always poured a glass of milk for me when I visited her house. She sat me at the kitchen table and pulled one shade open halfway and gave me two cookies. I dunked the cookies, I remember. And she told me about her mother and her childhood and her life. I didn’t want the flood to take away those glasses. But I knew things would never be the same after the flood. She wouldn’t want to come back here. Our days at the river were over.

Before the big flood there were a series of smaller ones. The first flood only dampened the kitchen floor. The second one did in the bedroom rugs and the third annihilated the living room couch and armchairs. In a one story house there was nowhere to move things away from the water. And when your house sits not twenty feet from the river, well, it’s lovely in dry weather, but every time it rains you start looking at the water with a measuring stick in your hand. But there they were, in their one story wood house. An idyllic existence.

To assure himself that he had control over the rise and fall of the water, my grandfather hired some men and brought in a cement truck and went to work. Well he didn’t do the work. He just forked over the money. It probably cost him no more than a thousand dollars in nineteen hundred and thirty-something. Now it would be well over a million, what he did. And he would have been tossed in jail. So the lawyers’ fees would be another million. That’s what you call inflation.

First he built a stone wall on the house side of the river all along his property. He left an opening with steps down to the water opposite his back porch. And opposite the little house, as they called the cottage where my parents lived before I was born, he built a wide set of steps leading to a cement cube about fifteen feet wide by about ten feet long by six feet tall. Then he put in a lock. Then another cement platform, as wide but only about four feet long, then another lock, then a final platform a bit bigger than the first. From this he built wide stone and cement steps across the far corner of the river making a stairway into the water. Embedded vertically in the sides of the openings between the cement platforms he had the workmen place vertical channels for wooden panels with handles. These panels stacked one on top of the other, three high, thus allowing him to control the depth of the water on the upstream side of his dam. The floor between the channels was cement also, and the children used to climb down into these spaces and sit with our backs to the wood panels letting the waterfalls cascade over us. In times of heavy rain or runoff, he took out some panels to allow more water out of the river. In summer, he put them all in place, damming the water to a depth of six feet or so. When the water dammed up as high as the locks allowed, the excess would run over the locks and pour into the river below the dam.

We fished for sunnys with small tackle, bobbers and sinkers. Not much of a challenge. After my grandfather started stocking the river, we practiced fly casting for trout. He caught a few every once in awhile but, since trees overhung the riverbanks it was always very dark and hard to see the trout. Sometimes he walked the rocks downstream to where the water below the dam ran into rapids where he would cast for long hours. Kids were not allowed on the downstream side of the dam. Snapping turtles they told us. This was a fearsome image. A snapping turtle, we were told, could grab a child’s leg and bite clear through it and never let go.

One day my grandfather led me down the rocks and put a fly rod in my hands and taught me how to spot a trout wiggling in the current and cast for it. My first fishing lesson. We didn’t catch any that day, but I learned how to navigate the wet rocks and read the water. And whatever fear of snappers I’d had evaporated like a drop of water on a sun soaked stone.

It was late in August. It had been the kind of Virginia summer heat that makes you feel like you’re inside the housing of a steam engine. You could barely breathe and your skin felt clammy all the time. When it got that hot, we always went over to my grandmother’s to swim at the river.

The people who predict weather, the ones who were supposed to know what was coming and how long it would last, had thought we were over the worst of the hurricane that had hit five days earlier. It had come ashore north of the river where Grandma Cross lived. The next day the upstream rivers began to crest. The cresting pattern rolled southeastward reaching my grandmother’s house about ten that night.

The night of that first storm, my father brought my widowed grandmother to our house to get her safely away from the rising river. She stayed in my room that night and, while the rain pounded our roof, my grandmother sat on my bed and read Heidi to me.

Then a second hurricane whipped up the coast lashing the land in thirty hours of non stop deluge. Two days after that storm passed, the real trouble began. Inland flooding swelled rivers, rising coastal tides along with flood waters moved down the rivers toward the Bay and back up to the land at the same time salt water came inland pushing back at the fresh water flowing down toward the sea.

The second hurricane had moved up the east coast. Everyone predicted it would be a bad one. First it was supposed to hit Florida. Then it turned toward Bermuda and everyone released their breath. But this hurricane decided to do a one eighty at the last minute and steamed back toward the coast, heading west northwest aimed at North Carolina. But it surprised everyone again, turned north and skirted the Outer Banks beaches kicking up waves and clawing out huge chunks of valuable oceanfront as it churned its way up the coast until it swerved in and hit Virginia. It thundered up and across the state, its eye bearing down on the river where my grandmother lived.

With the hurricane, whose name I don’t remember all these years later, came torrents of rain. It seemed as if it had been raining forever once that monster storm made landfall. It rained up and down the coast and inland for miles and miles, swelling the streams to overflowing, breaking over their banks. Every hour was another report about when this or that river would crest, or what streams were now impassable, what car had been stranded, what motorist rescued, what house swept away in the torrent.

After the second storm, my grandmother moved to the mountains for an extended stay with her sister. My father took me over to the river the day it was supposed to crest at flood stage. I didn’t know what to expect. My father told me it had rained fourteen inches during the storm. I tried to picture what that meant but it was lost on me until my father put me in the car and drove us to the river.

The water was up to the roof of my grandmother’s house. There was a goat stuck up in the top of a tree, just hanging there with his feet dangling. As we stood there gaping at the flood, a car washed by swirling around and around in the water. Its doors were closed, windows shut, no one inside. A ghost car riding the wild surf. But the thing I remembered most clearly was the sound. It filled the space, roared all around you. You couldn’t hear wind or talking or a car horn. Anyway no one said anything. There was nothing to say.

* * *

The dawn chorus woke us early.

“God what a racket.”

Charlene crawled out of the tent she had shared with Erica. She had slept in a tank top and bikini panties. Now she stretched her arms as high as possible above her head, grasping one hand with the other and pulling from side to side.

“Why do all the birds wake up and start calling at once?”

The others emerged from their tents. Erica was the last to come out, wearing a flowing nightgown that had little flowers all over it.

“Oh, look girls, grandma’s here,” said Charlene, pointing at her.”

“If I could fit into a tank and panties, I’d be wearing that, just like you.”

“That’s okay,” Hope came over to Erica, “you’ll get there. If that’s where you want to get. Personally I’ll take jammies anytime.”

I started a fire. The women drifted off to the woods to take care of their morning business while I placed a big pot of water over the fire on an iron stand. We hadn’t brought a camping stove so it was good the night had been clear and the wood was crisp and dry. The fire crackled right up and soon the water was heating and Roz had placed a griddle over the fire and cut slabs of bacon to fry. The cooler food was still fresh and on this first morning out we would have eggs and bacon and butter and jam on some of Erica’s bread. There were cartons of juice and some fresh oranges to cut.

“It’s amazing how much it requires for us to survive.”

Hope motioned to all the gear and food as she helped Roz with the bacon. With each meal, the loads the canoes had to carry grew lighter. Erica had packed enough loaves for all the meals. Different types. Some were sweet breads we could eat as a dessert. She brought three loaves of chocolate pecan bread that always sold out at the market before all the others.

“I know. Camping would be a lot different if we had to kill our own food or forage for it. Could you stay alive out here in the wilderness?” Hope asked me.

“For a few days I think I could. In summer anyway. I don’t know about winter. I’d probably starve. Or die from cold.”

“But if you walked far enough you’d get to a road or house or something.” Roz suggested. She sounded a little frightened.

“As long as you walked in the right direction. But most people who get lost in the woods go around in a big circle and never get anywhere. As long as you marked the trees while you were walking, and watched the sun, you would eventually get somewhere I guess. But if you knew you had to find your way out of a forest it would be better to have brought a GPS with you. All we’d have to do is follow the river down stream.”

“So what if, say, one of us got stuck out here alone?” Hope asked. She looked around at the trees and down the river. “I mean how would we get out?”

“Don’t you worry, little bird,” Charlene nodded toward me. “Fish girl will pull us through.”

We moved to the fire where Valerie had placed the clean mess kits on a large blanket so we could all sit to eat. As she broke eggs and dropped them into the skillet, they made a searing sound and then crackled at the edges. She and Erica bustled around the fire as if they were at home in a kitchen.

We sat around for awhile to enjoy the morning air and let our food settle. The forest had come alive and it would be a fine day for canoeing.

“So,” Erica said, “Anyone have any concrete ideas for saving Trout River Falls?”

“Let’s bring this meeting to order,” Roz joked.

“What about – I mean if we could get the old woman – and what’s her name again?” I asked.

“Mrs. Ward,” Erica said.

“Well if we can get her to agree, how about restoring the mill to operational shape and creating a whole grain, organic milling operation? And then if we could get that old button factory to use as a bakery and warehouse, we could – I mean you could,” I pointed to Erica, “bake bread. How do you make these breads anyway? I mean do you have a really big oven or what?”

“No. I use my kitchen oven. I can make ten loaves at a time. The regular sized ones like these,” Erica pointed to the heel of the loaf we had just eaten. “Why?”

“And how many different kinds do you make?”

“I have no idea. I come up with new ones all the time. I have about five that are the most popular so I make those every week.”

“How often is the farmers market open?”

“What are you getting at?” asked Charlene.

“I’m just thinking about how big the bakery would have to be and how many loaves you could make a day. There would be a lot of figuring to do.”

“You mean like on a commercial level?” Charlene asked.

“Of course I love that idea,” Erica said. “It would get me out of the kitchen.”

“All organic,” mused Charlene. “Milled at the Trout River Mill.”

“Does anyone know anything about milling flour?” Roz asked.

“We can learn,” Hope said. “I used to watch the villagers grinding wheat into flour. We could do it.”

“I can design the packaging,” I offered. “And help with the restoration of the buildings and the mill.”

I had only restored the chicken coop. Whatever gave me the idea I could do anything more than that? Still, I wanted to try. And isn’t that the first step to actually doing anything?

“Charlene and I could find suppliers and do the ordering,” Roz said.

“I can take care of the accounting and bookkeeping,” Hope added.

“Which leaves me,” said Valerie.

“You can run the retail operation,” I said. “For starters. And how about coordinating with other farmers markets?”

“What about money?” Roz asked. “We can’t do this on credit cards.”

“Don’t worry about that,” Erica said. “I know a reliable source of capital.”

She meant Will, of course.

“All this is fine,” Erica cautioned. “But we don’t own the mill or the warehouse. How are we supposed to make this happen if we don’t have a place to work and a place to mill the flour? We can’t very well sell organic baked goods if we can’t control the whole process.”

“She’s right,” said Roz. “For a destination, we’d need the whole town to buy into the idea.”

“There are always a lot of obstacles to starting something from nothing,” I said. “We’ll just have to cross them as we come to them. But if everyone agrees it’s a good idea, we can start to lay the groundwork.”

“Yes,” Erica said. “And we can do that at the next council meeting.”

“We’ll have to approach the old lady who lives in the big stone house and ask if we can lease the mill and get it going again,” Roz said.

“One thing, though,” Valerie said. “What about Katelyn only being here for the summer?”

“Maybe she could be kind of bi coastal. Like come up from Virginia on a regular basis,” Hope suggested.

“I couldn’t live in the chicken coop in winter,” I said and then realized Maze had a sabbatical year coming up. And what about that letter? It was just possible Maze and I might combine my fellowship with his sabbatical and spend a year in Denmark. But Maze had talked about going back to Mexico. Another bridge for us to cross, another change to work out, another negotiated passage.

“So that’s one of those bridges we’ll have to cross,” said Charlene.

“Seems like we have a lot of those,” Roz echoed.

“Life is full of them,” I said. “Here’s another one. I brought a surprise for today’s paddling.”

CHAPTER EIGHT

THE PAINTED LADIES

I sometimes wonder why women’s bodies are not all the same. They have the same components but it’s as if a variety of parts was shipped to a body plant that lost the assembly instructions and stuck a long torso on short legs, large breasts on a small chest, a long neck on narrow shoulders and altogether ignored any sort of standardization. Not like tigers or robins or Luna moths, which are all interchangeably alike. Artists understand that women’s bodies are uniquely separate one from the other. Museums are crammed with images of women from Greek ideal to Cubist distortion. Lucille Clifton calls herself “a Cadillac of a woman” and mourns the end of her menstrual cycles. Mary Cassatt paints women caring for, cuddling, bathing, holding little children close. Picasso’s patterned Girl Before A Mirror, gazes at her reflection which is not wholly her, cut into a geometry that’s partly herself and partly a patchwork quilt of her own image. DeKooning’s tortured women, ghastly, grimacing, wildly painted, reflect the painter’s ambivalence, anger, fear of women. And what imagery would I bring back to the studio after this trip on the river?

We took off our night clothes and ran naked for the river. I had brought vegetable soaps and natural shampoo for washing. We used our bailing buckets as showers and tossed water at each other, soaped up, rinsed, and floated in the cool water. Even this early the sun was warm. It was going to be a hot day.

When we emerged, our nipples were taut and our skin tingly. A run for towels, a quick dry, we wrapped up like mummies and stood together by the river’s edge.

“Um, before you put on your clothes, I have something that might be fun for today’s leg of the trip.”

“The famed surprise,” said Charlene. “Wait, don’t tell me. It must be tequila. But so early in the morning? Oh I couldn’t. But if you force me … ”

“Actually I did bring a bottle of tequila along but that’s for tonight. For today I brought this.” I held up a canvas bag.

“Oh goody. A bag,” Charlene joked.

“Stop,” said Hope. “What’s in it?”

“I’ll show you.”

“Let’s put our clothes on first,” Erica said.

“No. Don’t get dressed. Look.”

I placed the bag on the ground and pulled the top open revealing many jars and brushes, lotions, and painting sponges on sticks.

“What’s all that?” Roz asked.

“Oh my God. It’s body paint. I once did a photo shoot in body paint. It was the coolest thing.” Valerie leaned over the bag and poked around inside it.

I handed out jars and brushes and showed them how to apply lotion first so the paint would come off easily later. After they did that, they wrapped their towels around their bodies again and stood waiting.

“I don’t know how to paint anything much less a body. Law school didn’t have an arts and crafts class,” Charlene said.

“Start by thinking about your body. About what’s going on with it. Maybe about what you like or don’t like about it. About how you think about your body.”

“Mine’s done something it wasn’t supposed to,” Charlene said. She frowned and then looked down at her stomach. She unwrapped the towel slowly. Her body was tanned and athletic, her legs tight, the muscles in her upper arms defined from playing tennis. She had small round breasts. Her stomach and trunk were paler where they had been covered. She laid her hand over her stomach and looked around at the other women. “I’ve never felt like this. I don’t know what to make of it,” she said in a voice that had none of the direct, tight edge it usually did. In her eyes I could see confusion but also a kind of bewildered awe.

I opened one of the jars. A bright yellow. I dipped a sponge in it and moved closer to Charlene. Carefully, and with a tender touch, I drew a circle around Charlene’s belly button. From this circle I drew a pattern of interlocking half circles connected to one another radiating them over her stomach and then around her hips. Soon the drawing took on the look of a sunflower. I opened a jar of dark orange and drew a stem from Charlene’s right ankle up her calf and thigh to her right hip just under one of the yellow petals. Valerie opened a jar of green. She drew a series of slender leaves growing from the stem. Erica took a sponge brush and dipped it into the green paint and drew leaves on Charlene’s other leg.

“Something’s growing on you and in you,” said Roz. “Give me one of those brushes.”

With yellow paint she began to draw smaller sunflowers on Charlene’s left thigh. She moved to her left butt cheek and drew a smaller version of the one I had painted on Charlene’s stomach. The others clustered around her. They painted small buds and green leaves and an interlocking grid of branches. In the spaces between the branches they filled in with pale blue as if the sky was peeking through Charlene’s sunflower body.

Charlene turned this way and that on command as each woman filled in the spaces on her skin up to her hands and feet. We even painted her neck with horizontal concentric circles to look like the neck rings called dzilla worn by married Ndebele women in Zimbabwe and South Africa. On her cheeks we made small sunflowers and twined the extra stems along her jaw and up to and then around her ears. Soon there was less and less of Charlene and more and more of a kind of exotic nymph, a walking, moving flower with patches of sky and bright yellow blossoms on her butt and stomach. In the transformation, her body became not that of a woman anymore, but a mural of life and with this change came a new attitude, a different tone in her voice, a softening in her demeanor.

She picked up a paint brush and turned to Erica.

“You have to experience this,” she said. “You have no idea how different you’re going to feel about yourself. About your body,” she whispered.

“Okay ladies,” Erica said. “I’ll be next. I am sick of feeling like a fattened hunk of beef. I want to look …” She had trouble finding the right word. She gazed out at the river and up at the trees. “I want to feel as free as that bird,” she said pointing up as a richly hued indigo bunting flew by overhead. “And I love those colors.”

She let her towel fall. She closed her eyes and let the other women begin. It was like some tribal wedding night ritual where the women of the village prepare the bride, where the community of women support each other.

We painted her with purple, blue and a deep mauve. Beginning at her ankles, we drew ribbons of color around her legs and wound them between her thighs and across her ample hips. When these ribbons reached the tops of her hips we came around to the front with our lines and crisscrossed them over her belly and around from the front of her hips to the back. Instead of making a separate drawing over her breasts, which for a large woman were decidedly full yet buoyant, we drew the ribbons from the back of her hips up her back, over her shoulders and down onto her breasts from above. We covered her breasts, including the nipples, with concentric circles of alternating blue and mauve. I painted a long feather on each arm, with the widest part covering Erica’s upper arm and the stems of the feathers pointing down her wrist onto the backs of her hands. On her face we painted stripes across her cheeks and feathers around her eyes.

“You are a bird woman now,” Hope said.

She stood back to take in the whole effect. Erica had all but disappeared. In her place, a tall exotic bird emerged.

“What does it look like?” Erica asked.

“You’re beautiful,” said Charlene. “Like one of those South American parrots with the long blue tail feathers. You look like you should be in a jungle somewhere. It’s just amazing.”

Charlene turned to Roz.

“You next?”

Roz still had her towel fastened across her chest.

“Hey Roz,” I said as I opened a new jar, “you know there’s edible body paint.”

“You’re kidding, right?” Roz grinned.

I dipped a brush in black and drew a line from her chin down to her breast bone. Roz unwrapped her towel and stepped back.

“Where’s the lump?” I asked.

Roz raised her arm slightly and pointed to the outside of her right breast.

I selected a different jar and a new brush, dipped it in and it came out bright red. I painted a heart over the lump. The others went to work. We covered Roz’s body in bright red hearts. All different sizes. Roz had wide hips and thighs. We drew the biggest hearts on either thigh. Around her slender waist we made a belt of small hearts. We drew black lines from heart to heart until her entire body was a maze of hearts and intersecting lines with parallelograms and triangles of skin showing all over. Then I opened a jar of white and we filled in the geometry of Roz’s skin with white until she looked like a harlequin of hearts.

“When I was a little girl in Africa, I used to imagine what it would be like if I could fly through the night sky,” Hope said shyly, like a child.

“Stars. You want stars.”

I opened a fresh jar of dark blue.

“Yes,” Hope said and shed her towel.

We started with her small, flat breasts, like fried eggs on her chest. We covered each breast with a five pointed star in a variety of colors. Over the wide, flat nipples they used a pale yellow to show the star’s glow. We painted stars down each arm and on each cheek of her face, stars on her butt cheeks and on the outside of her thighs. Up and down her slender legs we added more stars on all sides and a pattern of bright colors around each star so that when we had done she looked like she was enrobed in a patchwork of Lone Star quilts our great grandmothers might have sewn together.

The four women who now looked like living paintings, applied paint to Valerie and me in long swaths.

Valerie’s tall, slender model’s body became a series of moths taking flight. The largest was a green and white Luna moth that covered her trunk from her neck, across her breasts, down over her stomach and around her hips. The long points at the bottom of the moth wings extended over her thighs and below these, smaller moths fluttered around and around her legs, wingtip to wingtip. As if they were circling her while taking flight.

“Paint tropical fish on Katelyn,” Valerie suggested.

And they did. Angel fish and clown fish and parrot fish and fish that they created with every color they could possibly use until I was a cacophony of colors, stripes, dots, circles, bands, and zig zags all over my body. They spun me around to admire their work and then they all stood back and looked at each other for the first time as a whole group.

“We’re like aliens from another planet,” said Erica. “Look at us.”

“We’re beautiful. All of us,” said Valerie. “Especially you.” She pointed to Erica, the exotic blue orchid mauve bird.

“I am aren’t I?” Erica asked. “I really am.”

We took off with different canoe partners this time and moved out down the river. After an hour or so of quiet paddling, we rafted our canoes again and let the current take us along. A few puffy white clouds hovered high in the sky. Between scattered patches of green leaves, bright blue sky in irregular shapes floated like mismatched puzzle pieces overhead. Here and there a bird whizzed past, a robin carrying a long piece of dried grass, a swift swooping down to the water, picking up some small bug, a woodpecker sailing jerkily through the air from one tree to the next, then landing and hammering away with a fury. The river hummed and gurgled. The water was deeper on this stretch than it had been the previous day. We couldn’t see through to the riverbed anymore. Here and there large rocks poked through the surface, not along the banks but in the middle of the river. I showed them how to paddle around rocks and other impediments. At times we broke apart from each other’s canoes, and at other times, when the way was clear, we grabbed each other’s paddles again and moved downriver as one group.

We chattered like birds and at times sang songs we could all remember. When we had been out for a couple of hours, the river widened, the current seemed to slow. We glided through the water, without needing to paddle much to keep up our momentum.

CHAPTER NINE

THE TRESTLE

We looked like an escaped tribe. Painted women of the rain forest, canoeing out of the lost world for the first time. Anthropologists would write about us one day, pick apart the symbolism, guess at the sacred rites behind our body decorations. Assume there was some ritualistic fertility goddess we worshipped. There would be dioramas of us in museums, naked but painted like birds and stars and moths and hearts. We would call into question all the previously accepted reasons why women painted their bodies and faces. Was it only to attract the male, to further the tribe? Or was there some darker, more sinister objective at play? They would investigate the way we lived and played, what we made and ate, what our bones could tell them about nutrition, child bearing, strange and exotic rites of passage. Would our menstrual blood be mixed with pigment and left as residue on pottery fragments? Would we have been the keepers of tribal lore? Perhaps we would have been like Artemis with painted bodies as camouflage for the hunt. We would have left behind piles of the detritus of primitive life, petrified pieces of tree branches stripped of leaves and bark after being used in producing our body tints, the stone marks embedded deep in wood showing where we had scraped and pummeled. There would be curved tools, and brush handles made from bone with human or animal hair wrapped at the ends with leather straps.

I was paddling stern with Charlene. Hope was paired with Erica for the day. I didn’t hear the beginning but Charlene called back to me to pull in closer so we could listen to them. Hope talked and talked, babbling like the river itself, giddily chatty. Did it only take body paint to loosen her reserve?

When we pulled up, Erica was asking if what Hope meant was that God didn’t want her to have sex.

“I was taught that sex is only between married people. That’s why I never…”

This was just too juicy for Roz to let it go. “Well of course we’re all taught not to have sex outside marriage but who listens to that?” She didn’t wait for an answer. “No one. Except maybe you.” She pointed over to Hope. “I think Hope’s problem is she grew up like some bubble girl. She never went through adolescence in the states so she never questioned anything her parents said. Now she’s in a situation where she has no frame of reference.”

“What did he actually say?” I asked her.

“He told me he wanted to take me to a restaurant on a lake.”

“What did you say?”

Charlene broke in. “What makes you think you have to have sex with him? I mean if you just go to dinner, you have no obligation after that.”

“Well, what if … ” Hope stumbled.

“What if it comes up?” Charlene asked. “If you want to, then why wouldn’t you?”

Hope turned to Charlene. “Are you going to have an abortion?”

This from Hope surprised me. It surprised Charlene, too. “I hope you’re not going to lecture me. Anyway, what has that got to do with going on a date?”

“That’s a stall, Charlene.” Erica spoke quietly but with a certain authority. “It’s a legitimate question. Women have so many choices now. That they didn’t have before. No one cares if a woman whose not married has a baby anymore. How do you know what’s right and what’s wrong? Forget what society thinks. What’s right or wrong for you. I mean what have we gotten ourselves into? We can choose the gender of our babies and we don’t have to look like our parents because we can start having plastic surgery as teens, we can live anywhere and do anything we want. So where are the boundaries?”

“All I know is, I’m glad we have all these choices. I felt stifled in every one of my marriages until I finally figured out that I liked sex but didn’t like marriage,” said Roz.

“Do men talk about what they should do about women and sex?” Hope asked.

No one answered her right away until Erica told her, “Men talk about sex but not in the same way women do. And it depends on their age. I doubt if Will and his golfing buds discuss sex much. Maybe when they were younger. Now they talk about annuities and the twelfth hole and what’s on the lunch menu at the clubhouse. And politics. They do talk about politics.” And then she added. “What are you going to do Charlene?”

“I have no idea. This is certainly my last chance to have a baby. Now or never.”

“I wish I’d had a child,” Valerie told her.

“Why didn’t you?” Roz asked.

“He always said he was too busy building a practice. He told me it would ruin my figure. Besides, I was still modeling and I never thought I had the time to devote to a child. And now … ” Her voice trailed off.

“So you’re saying I should have it because you regret that you didn’t?”

“I’m saying I just wish I had known when I was younger what I would feel like now.”

“We all feel that,” said Erica. “The regret of age.”

“What about you?” Charlene turned to me. “Don’t you want to have a baby before it’s too late?”

“Yes I do, but you don’t all sound like great endorsements for marriage and babies. I mean, what can you depend on anymore?”

“Taxes,” said Roz. “are the best reason to get married. You save on a joint return and you can depend on that.” She pointed to Erica. “You’re the one whose been married longest. Why did you stick it out?”

“Oh Lord, don’t put this all on me,” she said. “Katelyn, do you love him?”

“He drives me crazy sometimes,” I told them. “And sometimes we’re so happy together. We agree on everything except whether to get married. We’ve built a life I love. He would be a wonderful father.”

“So what is it? He doesn’t want to make it permanent?” Valerie asked.

“It’s not him. It’s me.” Just saying it like that, admitting I was the one who couldn’t make that leap – what did people call it? a leap of faith? – just hearing it, made it sound as if I was some kind of neurotic who couldn’t make up her mind. Maybe this is why people signed prenups. I promise to love and honor you and not to get in your way or subvert who you are or expect you to fit into some idea I have about what married life should be like. I further promise not to change our deal down the road unless we both agree we want to change it and stipulate to those conditions. Yes. That would be my kind of prenup. Nothing about money or property or who gets to drive off in which car. For me it would be about stability. You will not change. We will not change.

How did you two meet anyway?”

“We met in Mexico,” I said and thought: But that hardly explains anything.

* * *

It was October, two months before the humpback whales arrived for the winter in the Bay of Banderas. The air was pleasantly soft. I rented a little house nestled among bougainvillea and palms halfway up the hills above the beach in a fishing village called Sayulita. The season was changing to dry days, cool nights, the leaves starting to shed from the Quercus trees.. A small, hospitable village. Easy going, low key, cheap to live.

At that time I was only doing illustrations for magazines and ad agencies. I wasn’t thinking about art and I didn’t know who I was anymore. The love of my life had turned into someone I didn’t know. Nothing was working the way I had expected. I wanted to get back to my inspiration. It’s not easy. You can lose it.

From my terrace the Pacific Ocean with its long rolling waves sometimes looked like wrinkled satin, sometimes like undulating velvet. When the sun was high, light danced off the water as if ice crystals were bouncing on the waves. Every morning I got up with the first light of dawn and tried to capture the Pacific. But it was no use. Until one day I dropped a piece of framing glass on the patio and it shattered into hundreds of jagged pieces. That crash of glass, sparkly and disorganized, changed the way I looked at the world and I began to adhere chips of glass over the painted canvas. This created a mirroring effect that picked up light and cast it out again. Combined with the colors, and the luminous paints I was using, the paintings came alive. And finally I felt I’d reconnected with the self I’d lost.

At the cafes and restaurants along the beach, people would gather for the evening meal, a few drinks, some music. One evening the bartender led a man to the table next to mine.

“’A good view of the sea, señor,’” he said.

The man, trim and well spoken, an American with sad, blue-gray eyes, nodded to me, told me he hated to eat alone, asked if he could join me. After dinner we walked on the beach to the sound of the rolling surf.

“Are you living here or just visiting?’ he asked as we walked slowly above the breaking waves.

“I’m not sure,’ I answered. “Life here is easy. Not like home. What about you?”

He was there on sabbatical to study the Huichol people, a native tribe that lived way above the sea. He’d just come from the mountains where he’d gone to market day in Penita to meet the people he studied. I told him I was readjusting after a period of disturbance. Like I had lived through a blizzard and was surveying the wreckage

“That sounds very intense,” he said.

We walked. I talked. He didn’t interrupt. I thought maybe I was telling him too much but I had gotten started and it just gushed out of me like a tipped over milk carton. Glug, glug, glug.

And when I finally stopped, he told me his wife had died a year ago. He blurted it out, almost as if he had been carrying a burden for so long he just had to unload it to someone. Pancreatic cancer. He said it without emotion. Just the clinical fact of it.

What can you say? Sorry? That hardly covers anything. Sometimes it’s better to let silence do your speaking.

“Every time I think I’ve accepted what happened, I feel like I’m betraying her,” he said.

Waves came and went, pushed themselves into the shore and then pulled themselves out again, one over the other, leaving behind a churn of popping foam. He went up into the mountains for days at a time. When he returned we had dinner together, walked the beach, hurled ourselves into the surf, ate fresh grilled fish at Don Pedro’s, had lunch at Tacos Yolanda above the Avenue Revolucion, turned a dusky tan in the Mexican sun and together studied the intricate Huichol beadwork and delicate woven jewelry that he brought down from the mountains. One evening, after a fine meal and a bottle ofCalifornia Chenin blanc, we started to climb the dirt trail back to my house. I tripped on a rock or a root and when he reached out to steady me his hand cupped my breast and I fell into his body. We stood like that for a few seconds, both of us realizing it was a point of departure or no return. When we straightened up, we moved toward each other and kissed.

The next few months were filled with laughter, love making and a kind of teenage sense of sweet timelessness. One evening in January, as we sat on the terrace watching the sun set over the Pacific, he cleared his throat, held up his glass of wine, and proposed that when he left, we go back to the university together. He raised his glass and drank the last of the wine, watched me over the rim.

“Just like that?”

He nodded, waiting.

“Why can’t we stay right here, just the way we are now?”

“Because,” he said, “this is not real.”

I didn’t know anymore what was real and what wasn’t. How can you tell for sure?

* * *

So?” Roz asked. “You met in Mexico and … ”

“And it was all very romantic and I was not ready to start something new but there he was.”

“They always seem to turn up when you’re either not ready or your guard is somehow down,” Roz said. “Anyway, no one’s ever ready. You just have to go with the flow.”

“How did you and Will decide to get married?” Hope asked Erica.

“Will got drunk the night before his bar exam, stumbled into my apartment in Burlington and asked me to wake him in time to get there. I asked him what was in it for me and he said, ‘I’ll marry you if I pass.’ And that’s about as romantic as he ever got.”

We had come to a long curve in the river. From far off we heard a kind of rumbling. The sky was clear, although it had turned hot and the air was heavy. We felt a slight breeze because of our own forward motion, but it would be uncomfortable when we stopped later. As we rounded the curve, we passed large old growth forest and trees with gnarled roots as large as boulders overhanging the banks. Branches heavy with leaves drooped down, grazed the water. Halfway around the curve the rumbling grew louder and then, as we came around the last of the curve, we spotted a tall old wood and steel trestle that crossed the river high above us. Soon now we would be paddling directly under it. As we came closer, the rumbling grew louder and louder and then a train appeared, moving slowly on its approach to the trestle.

Before coming to the bridge the engineer sounded his air horn, hitting a chord once, twice and then a third long pull on the horn as the train approached the beginning of the bridge. As it lumbered along, clacking inch by inch, slowly, carefully along the old tracks, he looked down and there we were, like open pods floating single file below him on the water. And there he was above us, with a clear view of our naked, painted bodies, his elbow resting on the open window as if he was just taking his pickup truck out for a spin.

As the train clacked along, the ancient bridge shuddered and I could clearly see his arm, his profile outlined against the light that filled the train cab, his other hand pulling on the airhorn. The train cars rumbled over the rails and he looked straight ahead as the locomotive started over the bridge but he must have made this run a thousand times, maybe every week for years, and he must have seen the Trout River from above like this in sunlight and rain, fog and snow and ice. Still, even though this whole track must have been as familiar to him as any commuter’s route, he slowly turned his head to take in the river below, the lush greenery of the forest, the sunlight sparkling on the water as it flowed under the bridge. And when he looked down, he squinted as if he could hardly believe the scene below. For a moment he just stared. As if he was not seeing us, in our canoe pods, but some mythical creatures never before seen by any man. He stared as the train bumbled slowly along the tracks, freight cars snaking behind him like some Chinese dragon on wheels and then he leaned way out of the locomotive cab, the top half of his body hanging out, one arm waving like crazy, making giant arcs in the air. He hooted and whistled. We came alive then, yelled back and waved with arms and paddles and our boobs bouncing and we just went a little nuts, laughing and yelling “Hi” and “Hey” and “Love you” to him as the train moved slowly over the trestle until he was gone and the only thing left was his air horn sounding a final goodbye. The rest of the freight cars clattered along the tracks for a while as we paddled under the trestle and left it behind and the sound of it finally faded away into the forest.

CHAPTER TEN

THE VIRGIN

In the middle of the day, when the heat was too oppressive to paddle, we tied our canoes together by the riverbank under a large oak tree. I tossed a line over a low hanging limb and secured my canoe to a tree. Erica handed out sandwiches she had made that morning and we opened a couple of bottles of wine we had been dragging in the cold water under one of the canoes. We cut open and sliced up a melon, passed around tiny sweet pickles and Greek olives and enjoyed the day. If we hadn’t been naked and painted up like some escaped tribeswomen, we would have looked like any ordinary campers on the river. As it was, we looked as if we’d come to life from a Botticelli painting, vines wrapped around our bodies, and moth wings painted on our thighs.

“I just don’t see how you can have gone this long without ever having been with a man.” Of course that was Roz talking to Hope. More precisely talking at her.

By now Hope had finished three plastic glasses of wine and it seemed to have loosened her up.

“You,” she pointed her index finger at Roz and waved it up and down a little, although that could have been the rocking of the canoe. “are a sinner. In the eyes of the Lord that is what you are.”

“Oh, man,” Roz just laughed. “You,” and Roz pointed her finger at Hope, “are drunk.”

“It’s true,” said Hope and giggled. “and a virgin. I am a drunk virgin.”

“What you need to do is get drunk with the gardener and then you won’t be a virgin anymore.” That was Valerie. “I remember the first time I had sex. I was seventeen. My parents were away for the weekend and I stayed at my girlfriend’s house. She had an older brother who was so cute. All the girls were after him. Well,” she paused.

“Well?” Charlene broke in. “Well what?”

“He went after me. Got a friend of his to take his sister to a movie and leave me there. And he sweet talked me right out of my clothes and before you know it there we were, in the family playroom, naked and writhing around on the floor with some dumb TV game show blasting. I didn’t even know what happened. One minute he was telling me how beautiful I was and the next he was panting and shoving himself at me and then it was over. He got up and left the room and never spoke to me again. I was so humiliated I found some reason to pick a fight with my girlfriend so I wouldn’t have to talk to her. But I don’t think she ever knew.”

Valerie sighed and tipped her plastic cup up and emptied the rest of her wine. It was ironic, listening to her tell this sad story and yet she was so lovely especially with her body all painted in soft greens and yellows with false eyespots in white on the wings.

Hope patted her arm from the canoe next to hers. “That’s OK Val, I love you even though you are a big green moth.”

“Oh, that was just the first time. It wasn’t always like that.” Valerie looked across at Hope but I could see her eyes were a little wet.

“What about you, Katelyn?” Hope turned to me. “What do you think I should do?”

“Sex and virginity are not the issues. The issues are what do you want for your own life and how do you want to go about getting it? You have a strong moral base already. But that shouldn’t prohibit you from finding pleasure and love and all that goes with it.”

“Katelyn’s right.” Erica filled her empty plastic cup and dumped the water out over and over like a child playing. “I may make fun of Will, of his golf and his gut, and his kowtowing to the developers, but he’s just doing his best for his family. Is it any more wrong than anything I’ve done? We’re both part of the system. I didn’t refuse the money he made that way. I married him knowing what he was and I bought into it.”

Then her voice dropped and she was almost whispering. “It’s not fair that I started questioning the system when my son went over to fight for what he believes is the way to defend it. If I lose him, how can I then blame the system for my loss? It’s belonging to someone and with someone that makes a life. Without that, what are we? Just dust in the wind.”

It may not be fair but it’s when something goes wrong within the system you’ve bought into that you do start questioning it. I didn’t question my life with the music man until he changed the rules of our game. If he had stuck with what we agreed on when we started, I would still be there with him, within the system we had created. The world does operate within laws. Natural laws. Man’s laws. Both flawed. Neither reliable all the time. If the universe is spinning in an expanding spiral pattern as the physicists say it is, if our solar system will one day, some unfathomable millennia from now, blow apart and cease to exist, then the systems we rely on most heavily are falling apart at the same time we are counting on them. And yet, everything looks so normal. The seasons come and go. The sun rises and sets. The stars stay put in the heavens above us, even though some of them are, in our time, actually dead. Planet earth is four and a half billion years old now and likely to last another few billion so what’s the use of worrying about how things may change in my little life? Maybe this is what those physicists mean by chaos theory. Ever since I had read about it, the thought kept coming back to me.

Systems are fully defined by their initial conditions, with no random elements involved. We are predictable based on our initial conditions.Chaos theory. Funny name for a theory about predictable outcomes within a system.

It seemed to me that Maze and I were inside such a system, fully defined by its initial conditions. His loss fueled his need. My loss fueled my reluctance.

***

Before we set up camp for our last night, we stepped into the river to wash off the paint that covered our bodies. We used sponges we had brought to clean our mess kits. We soaped them up and took turns cleansing each other with the cold bubbly water. I had expected us to giggle and tease but this process took hold of us and we washed quietly in the river as if at a christening of some kind. We stood knee deep in the river on a bed of pebbles that sloshed under our feet as we moved about. The paint came off easily in streaks of color that slid into the water as if we were working in washes on a wet canvas. It flowed away from each of us, now red, now lilac, now dark blue, now green and yellow, this last from the sunflowers on Roz. And strangely the color did not dissipate as one would expect but each band remained a separate stream of color in the dark, clear water. I thought of the Gulf Stream in the Atlantic and the Humboldt Current in the Pacific, currents that remain separate from the surrounding sea, each carrying abundant life that depends on the environment within its particular water. The Gulf Stream with its warm water and the Humboldt with its low salinity, how cleverly the planet protects life and provides for its renewal.

We were all sorry to see the paint mix with the water and flow away from us. We had, for a short time perhaps, become something other than ourselves, beings not so tied to the outward skin we had inherited. Now, in the washing off, we reverted back to our own skin, our own images of our bodies. Still, we had more paint. And limitless imagination. We dressed quickly. I don’t think any of us thought we looked better without the body paint, but maybe we felt a certain release because of it.

We made supper, fresh shucked ears of sweet corn, rice and beans, Erica’s wheat and walnut bread with strawberry jam and the bottle of tequila I had stashed in the duffel along with lemons and salt.

We did some shots and pretty soon we were all giggling over nothing at all and then Hope’s expression turned serious and she wagged her finger at all of us, one by one and said, “I vow to all you girls that by the next time we get together I will no longer be the same.”

“I think that’s a euphemism,” Roz poked me in the rib.

“I think you’re right,” I poked her back.

“Well I vow that by the next time you all see me I will be pregnant,” Charlene sounded a little more drunk than the rest of us.

We all howled and I said, “You already are pregnant.”

“Then if you’ve decided to have the baby, you should stop drinking,” Erica told her. “Here, I’ll take your glass.” She reached out to grab it but Charlene pulled her arm away.

“Oh no you don’t,” she said. “This is my last party as a non mother.” Her neck snapped back loosely and her eyes rolled a little.

“Anyone else made any decisions?” She asked and looked around the group.

“I’ve decided to stop drinking tequila,” I said. “And to put you girls to bed.”

Sometime later, I don’t know why, maybe it was the hooting of an owl, perhaps the squawk of a heron, or maybe rustling leaves as a breeze swept past my tent, but something awakened me in the night. The moon was no longer visible. I remembered it had been bright when we crept into our tents, a bit loopy from tequila. And the forest had been strangely quiet. Erica was sleeping on her side, turned away from me.

I could hear the river. It was a peaceful sound. Steady and soft. Far in the distance I thought I heard the rumble of something but it was not clear enough to tell what it was. Certainly we were too far downriver from the railroad trestle to hear any trains. A thunderstorm dozens of miles away perhaps, although I saw no flashes of lightning.

It was not unusual for me to waken during the night, leave the coop to pee in the grass, or just sit at the barn door and look at the stars. So I fumbled around next to my sleeping bag until I felt the small flashlight I had put there before going to sleep. Trying to be as quiet as possible, I slid into my creek shoes and crawled out of the tent into the night air, surprised by the difference between the closeness inside the tent and the cool air on the outside.

I stood and walked as quietly as possible to the edge of the woods where I squatted to pee in some undergrowth. I shined the light around in an arc but saw nothing unusual. Night shapes were always mysterious and a little ominous, yet there was a tranquility to being the only person awake while the night creatures wandered the woods. I knew there must be raccoons and possum, or fox roaming nearby. The scent of people would likely keep them away. There could be black bears but they would only come around if they smelled food and were used to foraging in this spot. Still I watched for signs of bears, which was not easy to do with no moonlight. I wondered if it had indeed set, if it was that late. But I saw no indication of sunrise and I thought I couldn’t have been asleep too long.

I was not the least tired. Whatever had stirred me had not yet receded. I wandered over to the canoes by the river and waited until my eyes became accustomed to the dark. I sat backwards in the bow of the nearest one facing the water with my feet propped up on the thwart. This was our last night together. Tomorrow would be the last day. Then it was back to the farm, the coop, my work, the garden, and Maze. I had not made any decision. It seemed foolish, sitting there in the canoe, staring at the dark water flowing past me, that I had even entertained the thought that I would gain some sort of clarity during three days on the Trout River. Foolish and naïve.

The air had become heavy. I thought it was because dew was falling, a mysterious event to me, the air letting go its moisture during the night to cover the earth. The air was still. No leaves moved, no tree branches swayed. It was as if the night was waiting, holding its breath.

As I sat there alone, the night sounds came into focus. There was the river, whooshing past, sometimes gurgling. A fish snapped at something on the water’s surface. From somewhere frogs croaked to each other. And there was the music of crickets chirping along with katydids. The forest and the river had a secret nighttime life. I heard it all but I couldn’t quite hear my own voice telling me what to do. Not yet.

***

The first boom of thunder woke me from a deep sleep. I was back in the tent zipped up in my sleeping bag. A crack of lightning followed almost immediately. A second ground trembling rumble of thunder woke Erica, too.

“What’s going on?” Erica’s voice was raspy from sleep.

“It’s a thunderstorm.”

I reached forward and pulled the tent flaps open just as another bolt lit the night like a strobe – a flash and then a shorter flash – just for an instant. A long rumble of thunder followed.

“I can’t tell if it’s coming toward us or going away from us.”

Thunder rolled and rolled until it finally faded out and then another bolt hit, bam, very close with the clap almost immediately following. It seemed to be all around us.

When the lightning flashed Erica flinched. “Are we okay in the tent?”

“I’m sure we’ll be fine. Probably just a passing thunderstorm. It’ll be over soon.”

But then another bolt struck and I heard the patter of raindrops on the tent. Lightly at first. Just a slight tapping. A summer storm, no more.

I aimed the flashlight out at the night sky. Not nearly dawn. I thought about the heaviness of the air when I was sitting in the canoe earlier. So this is what it was, an approaching storm.

Across from our tent, Charlene was looking out with her flashlight. Our beams crossed and she yelled to me.

“So what’s this? Should we take the tents down or what?”

“I don’t know how long it’ll last. I think we should hang tight the way we are.”

A third beam crossed ours as Valerie emerged from the tent she was sharing with Hope.

“Hey,” she started to say but an enormous bolt struck somewhere on the other side of the river, followed by a rumble of thunder and a huge crack as another bolt lit up the night.

“Oh my God,” she yelled. “What happens if a tent gets hit?”

“Don’t get crazy,” I called to her. And she ran to our tent.

The patter of rain became a drumbeat, louder and more ferocious. I knew the wind would follow. In the darkness of night, it was impossible to tell how big a storm this was going to be. I tried to pick up cues from the sounds but it was no use. We would have to ride it out the best we could. Before I could think about anything else Hope came running across the leafy ground, barefoot, in her pajamas. She pushed her way past me and collapsed on my sleeping bag. “I hate storms.”

With the next flash of lightning she cuddled against Erica like a child and hid her face. Erica put her arms around Hope, who disappeared into Erica’s large frame until they became one.

“It’ll be over soon.” I tried to sound comforting but it came out a bit rougher than I intended, more like a command than a reassurance.

Rain started splattering now, and I could hear that it had reached enough mass that it was also running rapidly off the trees. I had observed this process many times from the coop. Rain falls. It hits the tree leaves. For a while it doesn’t reach the ground. Finally, if it rains hard enough or long enough, the leaves grow heavy and turn down. The rain falls off the leaves and more rain can’t collect on them.

Pattering turned to drumming. Drumming turned to a steady loud hum. And then I heard the unmistakable sound of clicking and I knew it had begun to hail.

Charlene appeared at our tent flaps, followed immediately by Roz. Now we were all crowded together so that if there was a lightning strike, it could hit us all. I was about to say something about at least spreading out to three in two tents but outside the wind picked up and when I pointed the flashlight at the trees I could see the branches bending sideways in the wind and then one of the tents upended and rolled over and over until it wedged on its side against a tree. One zipper flap waved wildly, smacking against the tree trunk

“It’s just a thunderstorm. It will pass quickly. Nothing’s going to happen.” It sounded confident but everyone knew I had no idea what was coming.

Erica rummaged in her small duffel and pulled out a little battery radio. We tried to get a local station but could only hear static so we switched it off to save the battery.

The wind picked up, lightning flashed all around us, rumbles of thunder roared one on top of the other in an endless kettle drumming crescendo. The hail stopped but rain pelted the tent in enormous drops and we could hear the trees swaying like a giant thresher going around and around. The tent was still dry inside but outside rivulets of water were now flowing freely toward the river in a swirling soup of leaves, branches, and mud. I watched out a crack in the tent flap, as the wind whipped around and the treetops bent down.

Charlene and I decided to make a dash to the canoes to drag them back from the river and turn them over to protect whatever we could. By that time our food, equipment, clothes, and whatever else we had left in the canoes had been pummeled by the rain. But we reasoned it was all in duffels or cans and would not have been ruined yet so we had to try before it was really too late. We pulled on our creek shoes, grabbed two flashlights, and with our heads down, we slid through the tent flaps out into the storm.

There’s something about wind and rain hitting you at the same time that seems to get to your bones. Like you have no skin. The transition from the warmth of bodies together in the tent to that howling wind and rushing rain hit us like a cruel wave. And it kept coming. Beneath my feet the ground had turned to such mush it was hard to move forward. With every step it felt as if my creek shoes were pulling me down.

Charlene kept her flashlight steady in front of us but I couldn’t hear anything she said above the wind and pounding rain. We tried to run but it was impossible.

We stopped at the first canoe, and I yelled.

“Let’s drag another one next to this and store the stuff from both in one then turn it over and put the stuff under it.”

She couldn’t hear half of what I yelled so I made hand motions and she nodded. We dragged another one so they sat side by side. We transferred everything into one of them then we dragged the third up away from the river.

I didn’t say anything to Charlene but when I reached the last canoe I scanned my flashlight beam out over the water. It was starting to rise. And flowing very fast. Streams of water and mud ran past my feet onto what had been the dry riverbank. The bank where that afternoon we had pulled out had now disappeared under rising water. This meant the storm was moving from upriver of us, down to us. We were at its leading edge and there was no telling how long it would last.

We had to drag the canoes farther away into the woods where there was no mud so we could hide the gear under the overturned canoes. By the time we finished we were completely soaked through, our hair hanging, dripping water as if we were standing under a shower. We slogged our way back to the tent and backed in one at a time, taking our shoes off outside the tent flaps. The others dried us with towels. We were both shivering.

“How bad is it?” Hope wanted to know.

“Bad,” was all Charlene said.

I didn’t mention the river. I was calculating our food and water supply. No way would we be able to boil that river water now. There would be no fire for cooking breakfast. It was a different river now.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

THE STORM

I don’t know when I fell asleep or if we all drifted off at the same time. Somehow, even with the storm pounding us, we got so tired that we couldn’t resist closing our eyes. Bunched together like puppies in a basket we huddled in the small tent through it all. I suppose the storm abated after a while and that allowed us some peace. I was chilled through and my feet felt like they’d been in a tub of ice. It was good to feel the warmth of other bodies against mine after the struggle to secure the canoes and all our gear, fighting against the wind and rain.

I slept deeply at times, at others I woke abruptly at a sharp crack or perhaps only a dream of one. Breaking branches, I thought dimly, and went back to sleep.

In the morning there was no dawn chorus. I peered out from between the tent flaps like a wary animal. It seemed that the whole forest had erupted since yesterday. It had the violent look of a battle scene. Branches littered the ground. Some stuck straight up in the air, some stacked one atop the other, their leaves all askew, hanging down with their undersides, bright green with a whitish tint, exposed.

One large tree limb had cracked and was hanging suspended just over the canoes. It looked like the tiniest breeze might dislodge its tenuous connection to the tree trunk, sending it crashing down. I thought I should move the canoes but what if the branch crashed down on me? Leaves and small branches covered everything in a disordered maze.

“What a night.”

Valerie sat up, stretched, yawned.

“Shhh.” Roz put a finger to her lips. “What’s that sound?”

“What sound? It’s blessedly quiet after that horrible storm,” Charlene sat up and pulled at the tent flap.

“What is that sound?” Erica asked.

I had heard it, too. And I knew what it was, that sound I would never forget.. Exactly as I had heard it years ago.

I pushed at the tent flaps and pulled on my creek shoes.

We all tumbled out of the tent and saw it at the same time. The raging river. Gushing past just grazing the edge of one canoe. A large tree limb had fallen over it during the night and landed upside down, with the underside of the leaves facing the sky so they looked pale and strange. It couldn’t have happened too long ago because the leaves were not yet wilted.

Hope picked her way through the rubble and branches until she stood at the river’s edge. I followed close behind and we stood there, arms crossed, very still. What had been a peaceful, lazy, clear stretch of water was now a roiling, muddy, torrent. For the first time on this trip I was afraid. Not because I thought we couldn’t survive out here. But because I felt such a strong urge to ride this river.

“I had no idea a river could change so much,” Hope said.

Charlene and Roz tried to pull the canoe back from the water. The branch groaned. Pulling got them nowhere. They dragged a heavier branch over and stuck it under the end of the branch lying on the canoe, then wedged this under the heavier one and using it as a lever were able to lift the branch off the canoe. Then we all tied a rope around the higher end and pulled it back and away long enough to drag the canoe out from under it. When we were done we just stood there in a kind of daze.

“Oh God,” said Valerie. “The stuff’s all mangled and soaked.”

For the first time we looked around. It was as if a bomb had detonated all around us. Trees had been cracked in half. They hung one atop the other, branches tilted at odd angles, leaves askew. Some trees just a little way from where we had slept were twisted at the top like a giant had wrung them out and tossed the tops away. Rivers of mud had swept past the tent leaving deep crevices and piles of leaves behind. Broken branches littered the ground. Where we had made a fire was now a mud bog. And past it all flowed the relentless river, churning, brown, opaque where the day before it had been clear and placid.

Then we saw the tent that had blown against a tree and gotten wedged there. Its side had torn, its flaps lay back like an open wound.

“Look,” Roz pointed to the tent she had shared. A twisted off tree top had squashed it flat.

“Must have been a mini tornado,” I said as we surveyed the wreckage. Valerie started to shake and couldn’t stop. We all gathered around her but she just kept shaking like a bobble head. Even her teeth chattered.

“Come on,” I said, “let’s get the canoes turned and see what we can find to eat. We’ll clean them off and we’ll be fine.” I led her away and placed her shaking hands on a canoe. “I’m sure we’ll be okay. We just have to wait. The storm’s over now.”

But it was like the storm was still raging and she was stuck in its eye. The reality of it was over, but the thought of it stuck. As we bent over the canoe to turn it right side up, she looked sideways at me, her head going up and down like a little bird twitching on a limb. “I could have been in that tent. We could have been killed.”

“But we weren’t. Come on help me turn this over.”

We righted the canoe. Then we moved over to the one Charlene and I had lifted during the storm. It was obvious our theory hadn’t worked well or provided much protection from the rain. Everything was sodden and heavy. The canoe facing right side up had a pool of water in the bottom. We lifted the other one off and turned it over. At least that one wasn’t swamped.

I pulled a rope out of one of the duffels and we strung it between two tree trunks as high off the ground as high as possible and pulled it as taut as we could. Then we started hanging things over it to dry out. We couldn’t spread anything on the muddy ground to dry so we hung things from broken tree limbs and fallen trees wherever there was enough room to keep them from touching the ground. I grabbed the rope from the tree limb and we tied this between two trees also and thus worked our way through the mess.

The others unpacked whatever fresh food we had left, some fruit, tomatoes, hard boiled eggs, bread. At least the food had been stored in plastic containers and bins. There was no way to make a fire so we ate everything cold and drank juices. When we were fed, we took turns going off to the woods, and then we used bottled water to brush our teeth. Bathing was out of the question. Even cleaning the mud off our feet was a useless exercise. With every step more mud attached itself to our shoes. We were mired in it. The sky was still gray, heavy with low rolling clouds but it didn’t seem like it would rain again.

We tried to lift the tree limb off of the squashed tent but could not budge it. I untied a rope from the stern of one canoe and we tied this to the limb and tried and tried but nothing was going to move that monster limb so we dropped the idea and untied the rope. Better to use it as a clothesline we agreed and suspended the rest of our wet gear and duffels from it.

We stopped to rest and have some more juice and, with the immediate work finished, we turned toward the river.

“Well we’re really in the shit now, aren’t we?” Erica asked.

Roz added, “How long are we going to stay here?”

“The pastor from church was going to pick me up this afternoon when we got to the landing above the falls,” Hope said quietly. “What is he going to think happened to us?”

“Maze is going to go berserk,” I said, almost to myself. “He was going to pick me up there, too.”

“Will was coming to meet the rest of us.” Erica stared at the water. “I wonder what the river looks like at the falls.”

“The landing must be swamped,” I said. “There’s no way anyone could meet us there anyway.”

“I doubt the doctor will be chewing his nails over me. He’s probably in surgery and doesn’t know what day I’m supposed to be back or that I’m even gone.”

I picked up a tall, fairly straight stick that was lying near my foot. I walked just to the edge of the water and stuck the fatter end into the mud until it wouldn’t go any deeper.

“What’s that for?” Charlene stood next to me, her shoes looked like mud pies. Some of it had dried to a dull beige around the edges.

“To tell if the river has crested or it’s still rising. I have no idea how many streams run into this above here. Or below for that matter.”

I notched a mark at the current water line and both of us stared at the water moving by us fast, swirling and whooshing, sometimes carrying a tree branch, leaves tumbling and shaking. Every once in a while a group of dead limbs all tangled together rushed along on the water like a runaway raft. There were still no birds singing. The forest had an eerie feel to it, as if everything had died overnight.

We busied ourselves with cleaning the canoes, bailing out the water, shaking our towels and clothes free of leaves and debris. The sun came out intermittently until the last of the clouds rolled away leaving the bright blue sky above us. It was still early. The air began to warm. I heard the first bird chip in a nearby tree and then others answered. The forest began to return to normal. So did we. But without saying it out loud, all of us were unsure of the next move. After collapsing the one remaining usable tent and rolling it away in its bag, we stood around one of the canoes.

“Well, we have to decide what to do,” I said.

Erica looked from face to face.

Roz sighed and shrugged. Hope turned sideways to me, as if I had the answer.

“I’m willing to try it. I don’t want to hang out here for days just getting hungry and sleeping six to a tent.” Charlene finished by kicking her shoe against the canoe to knock off some of the mud.

“It looks pretty rough,” I told her. “Maybe you and I could handle it but what about the others?” We stared at the river again as if it could give us some sort of guidance. The stick was still at the edge of the water. At least the river wasn’t risinghigher.

“Maybe the river will go down some by the afternoon,” said Hope. “How far do we still have to go?”

I took out the map and spread it on a canoe seat. I found about where we were and pointed to the landing above the falls before the bridge.

“We’re farther down river than I had planned for the last day. So we don’t have as far to go as we did the first two days.” I looked up at the river. “With the water running this fast we could cover that in a couple of hours I think. But that’s not the problem.”

“What is?” Valerie asked.

“Isn’t it obvious?” Roz motioned to the river.

“Listen,” I said, “let’s not get ahead of ourselves. Let’s wait awhile, make a plan for how to navigate the river and see if it goes down some. If we wait until later this afternoon, it could be okay.”

I got my Swiss Army knife out and cut the torn tent loose. We untangled it from the fallen tree as best we could and stretched it out on a couple of flat rocks by the water.We dragged some large tree branches over to the rocks and constructed a rough bench of sorts, then cut up pieces of tent for mats to sit on and later eat what was left of our food. We busied ourselves cleaning our gear, drying out whatever we could, restoring order from the rubble the storm had created. With the roar of the river filling the forest, I gathered the women around and talked about what to expect on the river whenever we decided to take it on.

* * *

I watched the stick I had marked to see if the river was rising or receding. For the hours before it was time for lunch it held steady and then the water level began to drop. While still roiling and muddy, the river seemed to be losing some of its fury.

We ate what food we had left, packed up our gear, cleaned the rest of the water and debris out of the canoes and packed them up. Then we just watched the river for a long time.

“We can’t stay here another night,” I finally said to the others.

They all nodded. It was time to take our chances.

“Now we all have to wear life vests.”

We had left them out and now slipped into them, tied them closed over our chests and picked up our paddles.

“Remember, this water is going to feel different than it did before. What you have to do is maintain your speed. Don’t let the current take control,” I warned. “The objective is to stay ahead of the river. That’s the only way you can hold your course.”

“What happens if we capsize?” Roz asked. “Do the others try to pick them up or what?”

“No,” I said. “If that happens, just don’t fight the water. It will carry you down stream. Your life vest will keep your head above water. Try to steer yourself toward a bank or a tree you can grab onto or something stable. Just keep your head up and do not panic. If anyone goes over, we’ll keep going so we can bring help back.”

“Maybe we should just stay here,” said Hope. “Eventually someone will find us. Or the river will go down and then we can paddle safely.”

“How long?” Charlene asked. “How long could we stay here? We have almost no water left. Little food. And how long will it take for the river to get back to normal? Two days? Three days?”

“I don’t know,” Hope said. She looked out at the water and repeated, “I just don’t know.”

“And how about when we get to the falls?” asked Roz. “Do we go over?”

“No,” I said. “Since the put in above the falls is flooded for sure, we’ll aim for the big old dock. You know, the one they built for the logging and quarrying operations so long ago? At the old lady’s house? It’s much higher off the water because they used it to offload materials from the big barges they pushed down the river. I’m sure that dock isn’t under water. We’ll head for that.”

“Okay then,” Erica spoke up. “I’m with Katelyn. I say we go for it.”

We pushed the canoes into the water. The river swung the bows around and it was a job to hold them steady to get the bow paddlers seated first. Then the stern paddlers pushed and at the last minute jumped into their seats before the rushing river floated the canoes away from the ravaged bank and into the current.

Erica and I waited until the other two had cleared the water’s edge and then we pushed off and paddled like hell to come up just behind them.

“Try to stay close behind them,” I yelled to Erica. “That way they can hear me with any instructions.”

Erica nodded. Paddlers ahead can hear when someone behind them yells but there is no way the paddler behind can hear someone yelling in front unless the bow paddler turns completely turned around. No one in this situation could do that. I didn’t expect Erica to answer me but I could see her nod briefly so I knew she had heard.

“Hug the left shore,” I yelled to everyone.

I hoped they could hear me. But I couldn’t be sure.

Often a river will have one low side and one high side. So far on the trip we had landed on the right side of the downriver flow. But I noticed a change after we took off and it seemed that now the left side was flattening out. I remembered the landing ramp at Trout River Falls was built on the right side where the water was deep and that the mill was on the other side where the water flow was gentler and shallower. There was also the old mill pond where water dissipated before rejoining the river above the falls. The falls would be wild today. We had to pull up before we got there. Erica paddled hard, trying to keep up with the water flow while I steered us always left. The river wanted to pull us to the middle. It was a battle not to let the bow of the canoe get pulled over.

The other two canoes bobbed ahead of us. Erica yelled my instructions to the first one, with Charlene in the stern and Valerie paddling bow. Valerie yelled to Roz in the stern of the third canoe and she transmitted instructions to Hope. In this way we kept fairly close to each other and to the left bank.

We were moving very fast. I began to feel in control when a large branch swept by and slapped me in the eye. I faltered and the canoe slid sideways toward the middle of the river. I let out a howl and Erica turned to see what had happened. As she did, the branch slid by and she pushed at it with her paddle, nearly overturning us. She pulled back just at the last minute and I shook off the shock and thrust my paddle back into the water. We came back to the left side and caught up with the second canoe. If I’d had the time, I probably would have panicked but in the situation that was impossible and all I could do was paddle as hard as I could and try not to let the canoe get away from us.

I noticed an old barn to my left as it sped past. The storm had blown all the way down the river. I saw broken limbs everywhere, trees hanging over the banks, their leaves dipping underwater. Around us it rolled like surf, one wave topping the next. It churned a dusty brown. Every once in a while a disembodied branch would poke through the surface like a body trying to rise from the bottom. The river would take it down again and it would disappear popping up again on the crest of a wave farther down. I saw farm fields battered by the rain and wind. We were leaving the forest behind.

CHAPTER TWELVE

THE LANDING

Our canoes bobbed and snaked in the swirling water. Bows pointed up and then sterns lifted on each swell. We rode down the river so fast it was a blur. We paddled just to keep pace with the water and when we couldn’t match the river’s speed, we paddled just to keep our canoes balanced.

The river’s natural flow had been replaced by a raging wave that swept the canoes along like little pods on a stormy sea. Frightening yes, but also exhilarating. With adrenaline pumping I focused on the paddles, the river, wave upon wave of gushing water. It wasn’t like running some rapids. On this part of the river there was no discernable falloff. The river ran flat and if there was any gradual fall to the land, the flooded water had submerged it, burying any protruding rocks. At brief moments, when it seemed as if we were doomed to capsize, I regretted leaving the campsite behind but then wondered what else we could have done. And then the river swelled and I could think of nothing but staying afloat and moving ahead faster than the current.

Erica paddled diligently switching from side to side every few strokes to keep from over using her muscles. I managed to get into her rhythm so that I could steer us as straight as possible, always trying to hug the left shore. Somewhere in my mind was the image of the dock before the falls, upriver from the mill and the mill pond. I thought if we could just get past the other canoes before we reached that dock, I could lead them to it and possibly use it as a backstop. Ramming the dock was the only way I could see to find a place to land where at least there was a building. One thing was certain. We had to get out before we reached the falls. Between here and Trout River Falls, there wasn’t much of anything. All the houses were located below the falls. Above the falls was only forest and field.

The river widened again, the water climbed up and up the banks as more and more streams emptied into the river. I could see a change and I yelled to Erica that we should try to pass the others. She nodded and we paddled hard, pulling and pulling into the current to get ahead of the rushing water’s speed. We inched up until we came alongside the canoe with Charlene and Valerie.

“Keep as far left as you can,” I yelled.

They were paddling hard and it looked like they were getting tired.

“Stay behind us,” I yelled as I jabbed my paddle into the water again and again. As hard as we paddled, the water just kept coming and it seemed as if we were riding the waves more than we were pushing ahead.

Still we managed to catch up with Hope and Roz so I could yell to them also. The roar of the water made it hard for me to hear my own voice. Erica called out to them when we came abreast of their canoe and it seemed as if they heard her because we passed them as they let up on their paddling.

I had no clear idea how much farther downriver the mill was. I looked for any landmarks that might give me some sense of where we were. Then the pull on the paddle shifted. The river flattened out and widened in front of us and the left bank dropped down to a flat plain. We followed a deep curve past a stand of willows whose trunks were half submerged by flood, branches deep in the water, leaves swishing with the current.

There it was.

Far ahead to our left, we could just make out the dock but its pilings were under water that swirled around their very tops under the dock stringers. Only the decking showed above the water. But just barely. At the same timethere was a distinct change in the roar of water. A higher pitch. A whooshing sound. We were coming to the falls.

“Paddle hard on your right,” I yelled to Erica. I could only hope the others would follow what we did. I paddled for my life on the right side. The rushing water and the current made it impossible to meet the bank anywhere. I had been right. The dock would be our only option.

I tried to warn Erica that we were going to crash into the dock but the words never came and I thought she must realize we wouldn’t make a soft landing.

“Watch your head,” I managed to yell.

Erica paddled hard and nodded.

Use your paddle to fend off,” I yelled again but I couldn’t tell if she heard anything above the roar of the water. I paddled harder and harder, keeping us on a course for that dock. As we headed straight for it, I estimated how many strokes it would take to reach it, how close I could come to the bank where it was anchored, how much room that would leave for the others. I hoped they were close behind us. I hoped Erica had heard me and could use her paddle to fend herself off the dock. At that point hope was all I had.

And then we were approaching the dock fast. We careened through the waves as I tried with all my strength to back paddle, to turn us sideways to the dock and yet keep us hugging the shoreline as close as possible to give the others space to ram the dock after us.

I managed to turn the canoe across the wave patterns. Water splashed my face and I was quickly soaked. We were so close I could see every board. I paddled and paddled and, as another wave splashed me smack across the face. Erica raised her paddle and extended her arms.

Good girl. I thought for an instant.

Then we rammed the dock with a great force that tipped me forward. As I went down, I held my paddle up and it smacked against the old wooden dock. The waterpushed us up against it and we bobbed there with the waves running over the side of the canoe. I grabbed a dock board and then a hand came out of nowhere, took mine andpulled me up. Instinctively I reached up with my other hand and whoever was up there took that one and pulled me up and onto the dock where I lay with my waist against the deck boards and my feet still in the canoe.

“Help her,” I heard my own voice but it sounded far away. The world looked crazy from my perspective lying on the rough dock boards. Water lashed the dock and I saw trees scattered all over the land. It looked as if I had landed on some alien planet. Nothing made sense for those first seconds and then the disembodied hand let go of mine and I thought maybe I had only dreamed that part. That no one had pulled me up. At the same time I heard another canoe smack into the dock. Water splashed up the back of my legs and I felt the extra weight of my wet clothes dragging me back down into the canoe. I pulled with all the force I could muster, straining against the hard wood, aware that the rough edges were digging into my arms, tearing at the thin cotton of my summer sweatshirt. Then I clung to the dock with my arms splayed out in front of me, exhausted. By inching my way up, my legs cleared the canoe and I was able to hike one knee slowly over the deck boards. With more than half my weight now on the dock I could pull the other leg up until I rolled over on my side to get my wind back. I was facing the land and for the first time in what seemed like days I was not seeing water.

Above me patches of bright blue scattered through great clusters of rolling gray clouds. I heard the roar of the river and then another smack as the last canoe hit the dock. Someone yelled “Hold on.” Above the roar of the water, someone else screamed “Grab my hand.” I heard the water, heard the voices, but nothing seemed real at that moment. It was as if I was looking down from somewhere high up and all this was happening in slow motion a great distance from me.

When I rolled over onto my other side, Erica was reaching over the dock to help Charlene out and yes, there was another person. A small man wearing overalls and work boots, with gnarled hands that reached down to take Hope’s arms and pull her from the second canoe.

I roused myself then, pushed up onto my knees, stood, rocked a little back and forth. I felt dizzy, weak in the knees for a moment before I could make myself run down the dock to the last canoe. I reached down as the water splashed up and over the dock. On the crest of each swell, the canoes rode high in the water, almost ready to slide over the dock but then came the troughs and the canoes dropped again, bumped against the dock just low enough to hold them from being carried downriver on the current. When a trough came, it was harder to reach down to anyone inside the canoes. With the canoes rolling up and down it was impossible to get a good hold on the dock unless your canoe hit at exactly the right moment on top of a wave.

I tried to grab Roz’s hands but she lost her footing and bounced back into the bottom of the canoe. The others, Erica and Hope and the man wearing work boots were beside me, all of us reaching for Roz and Valerie. And then a huge swell carried the canoe towards us. The man grabbed a gunwale and pulled hard moving back parallel to the dock toward the land.

I realized what he was doing. I grabbed the bow thwart and, on the next upward swell, we yanked as hard as we could. And then, with Valerie and Roz splayed in the bottom, the canoe was on the dock and we were all safe. Dazed, exhausted, some of us bruised, wet and disoriented, but safe.

The man grabbed the other canoes, one at a time, and pulled them onto the dock beside the first. Valerie and Roz sat in theirs for a few more moments, as if they were not yet sure whether they really had landed. With Erica and Hope helping, they climbed out but I just could not move. It felt as if my arms had torn loose from my shoulders. The swells still swept up onto the dock, splashing me again and again.

“Come on,” Erica took my hands. “Let’s get off this dock and onto solid land.”

As she helped me to my feet, we heard a high pitched voice that sounded forced, as if it took the speaker some effort to raise it high enough to be heard.

“Lewis, what’s going on out there? Who are those people? What are they doing out there after this storm?”

Lewis turned away from the water and called out, “I don’t know yet, Missus. Got to get these here boats off the dock. Water’s still comin’ up.”

My hands had begun to shake. I couldn’t stop it. All I could do was watch old Lewis hauling our canoes onto the land. His work boots thumped on the decking. He had no trouble pulling the canoes since we had left the broken gear back at the campsite. When he was done, he turned to face us all standing there on the dock, unsure what to make of our situation or what to do next. He smiled, a shy, confused, little smile at the corners of his lips.

Behind him, an old lady hobbled down the worn path that led to the dock. She had trouble getting through all the storm debris. For a time an uprooted tree stump spread out in a huge circle of earth and roots hid her from view until she got around it. She leaned on a cane. Her gray hair was swept back in a loose ring around her head. She wore blue rimmed glasses, a dark blouse, and long cotton skirt. She squinted at us and raised her cane in the air as a pointer.

“Who are you?” she called to no one in particular. “And whatever are you doing out on that river?” As if there was more than one river.

I couldn’t tell if she was confused in her head or just resentful that we had landed on her property. She stopped where she was and stared at the three canoes and then at us. Lewis walked closer to her. “Well, Lewis?” she said to him.

“I don’t know yet, Missus Ward.” He shook his head.

I felt as if I had landed in a dream somewhere, someone else’s dream maybe. Like the whole day had not happened and I was about to awaken in the tent in my sleeping bag with the birds singing their dawn chorus and we would make breakfast and set out for our last day on the river.

But then Erica spoke up and I snapped back to the moment.

“We’re so sorry, Mrs. Ward. I’m Erica Marston.” She strode over to the old lady and stuck out her right hand.

Mrs. Ward just stared at her, head slightly cocked to one side. I thought maybe she was hard of hearing.

“Lewis,” she barked in that high pitched voice. “These girls look a mess. Bring them up to the house.”

She turned away from Erica and hobbled back the way she had come, thumping her cane hard on the ground with each step. I watched her disappear behind the uprooted tree.

“Excuse me, your name is Lewis?” I turned to the man in work boots. “I wonder could we use the phone? We have to call our homes and let them know we’re all right.”

“No phones,” he said and gave one last yank to a canoe then dropped its bow with a thump where he stood. He turned and started up the way the old lady had gone. “House is up this way.”

“Hey, I don’t know about the rest of you but I peed myself on one of those waves and thought I’d never see land alive again so I’m all for heading to the house, no matter what’s up there,” Charlene told us.

“This is all kind of weird, don’t you think?” Valerie looked from one to the other and Hope looked as if she was still fighting the waves.

“She’s just an old lady who lives alone,” Erica said. “There’s nothing to be afraid of.”

She reached out and took my hands to help steady them.

“I think I must have pulled some arm muscles or maybe the tendons when we collided with the dock,” I told her. That would have explained the shaking, although it had calmed down some.

“Maybe it’s fear,” Roz stood by my side. “I know I was scared shit the whole way.”

“Yeah but it was kind of exciting, too,” Charlene grinned. “I mean except for the river.”

“What else was there except the river?” Hope asked.

“We’d better catch up with old Lewis before they lock the doors on us,” Erica said and let go of my hands.

“What do you think he meant by no phones?” I asked.

“Yeah, what are they out here, some sort of wilderness survivalists?” said Charlene.

“Shakers maybe,” I suggested.

“You mean the ones who didn’t use buttons or anything and pray in silence?” asked Roz.

We skirted the uprooted tree.

“No that was Quakers. The Shakers were the ones who made all the very simple furniture and didn’t believe in procreation. So they died out.”

“Oh that’s a helluva religion.”

We were giggling by then. As we walked it was clear the storm had ravaged a huge swath of the whole area.

“Jeez, look at that.”

Someone pointed to a tree that looked as if it had been twisted like a corkscrew.

“Tornado.”

“Yeah.”

“Will must be worried sick.”

“Lewis must have meant the phones are all out from the storm.”

“Maze is going to kill me when we do get back.”

“Must not be any electric either.”

“Oh God, the one thing I really wanted was a hot shower.”

“I’m starving.”

“And someone smells like pee.”

“Her hands are still shaking.”

“Maybe we should get her to a doctor.”

“How exactly?”

“The roads must be a mess, too.”

“I’ll be okay. They’re getting better.”

“That was some scary canoe trip.”

“I don’t know. Now that it’s over I think it was kind of fun.”

We stopped at the top of the grassy slope that led to the house and looked back at the river. It rushed on, wild, murky, foamy, roaring with power.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

THE OLD WOMAN

We stood on the back porch for a moment. My legs felt like jelly and I held onto the porch railing for support.

Although the railing and the porch floor had an old coat of gray paint, pealing here and there, the house itself was constructed of dark gray granite blocks that gave it an austere, permanent stature. Sloping gently down to the dock, the carefully tended lawn was a deep green. I imagined the old man who had pulled us out limed it every spring and rode one of those giant mowers up and down in summer during the growing season, his knobby old knees poking up above the seat. Our canoes sat on the wet grass. The river roared behind them. Downed trees, broken limbs, and general debris from the storm lay over everything. But the three story stone house, flanked by enormous old oak trees and forest all around was impassive, solid and unyielding to momentary passing events. At one time, people must have flocked to this house I thought.

Tall leaded windows on the ground floor gave the house a solemn, gothic look. On the second and third floors, smaller windows had little balconies overlooking the view to the river. The way the house had been sited, once you climbed the steps and stood on the back porch, you could see downriver to the mill and dam beyond. Whoever designed the house and built the mill obviously wanted to be able to stand here and watch what went on downriver.

I tried to imagine what it must have been like to live here when the mill was in operation, the water wheel turning constantly, the big mill wheel grinding flour, workers loading it into sacks, horse drawn carts carrying them over the bridge to the store in town. It must have been quite a hub for this remote area.

Life always seems simpler looking back. In one hundred and fifty years people will look back at us as living in simpler times with fewer problems. One day far in the future our era will be as far removed from humans then as we are from our seed gathering ancestors who roamed the plains when the earth was cooling down and giant animals roamed at will. I think I must have taken to the garden in order to feel connected with that inexorable march of time. And there I stood, on the steps of that old house, which will be there long after I am gone, wondering what it must have been like back when this old woman’s great great great grandfather built the mill, the town, the house, took down the trees, planted this lawn, carved out an existence. But the women were chattering and my attention snapped back to them.

“We made it anyway.”

“I had doubts when I saw that water. I’d never have believed we could paddle like that.”

“You were right, Katelyn. Better than sitting around waiting.

“Anyway it was exciting.”

“Will is probably camped out at the police station.”

“It’s going to be ugly when I get home to Maze.”

“It wasn’t your fault.”

“This house looks a little ghoulish.”

“I hope the bathrooms are working.”

“I feel completely disgusting.”

“We all do.”

“What I wouldn’t give for a hot bath.”

* * *

“I put a few pots of water to boil as soon as the power went out last night.” The old lady stood at the door, squinting in the afternoon light. “Well, come on in,” she made a sweeping motion with her cane as she stood back to let us pass.

We were all a bit tentative, as if we expected to find a steaming cauldron in the kitchen and dried toads’ feet hanging from the rafters. I must say we weren’t far off,because inside the house, with its extra high ceilings and old furniture in dimly lit rooms, was dark and a bit creepy. Although the leaded windows were huge, they faced east and now that the sun was in the west, and with the oak trees shading the house, even on a sunny morning that house would be dark. I remembered my grandmother’s house by the river, with shades drawn against the weak rays of sunlight that managed to break through the leaf canopy and actually peek in a window. In those days, every woman was afraid of two things, moths and sunlight. God help the woman who let light fade herfurniture or moths chew her rugs.

We filed in one at a time and followed her through the main hall, past the living room, which looked as if it hadn’t been used in decades, into the kitchen. This was obviously where she did most of her living.

On the floor by a huge fireplace – the kind where before there was electricity people used to hang iron pots full of food over the fire – a golden retriever lay on an old blanket. He thumped his tail when he saw us, but didn’t move from his spot. A small fire kept the room overly warm for July but the rest of the house we’d walked through was as cool as if it had been November. I wondered if this house even had central heat and when I saw the gigantic wood stove in one corner of the kitchen I had my answer. I figured bow legged Lewis must be busy all year long to keep this place functioning.

“However did you girls get caught out in the storm?” Mrs. Ward asked.

Erica started to explain what had happened but Mrs. Ward bustled around the kitchen hauling pots of hot water from the wood stove, replacing them with others, and didn’t seem to hear her. So Erica offered to help her but Mrs. Ward was not a woman who accepted help easily.

“Here,” she handed Hope a big bucket. “You go on out to that hand pump to the right of the porch and fill this one up. “And you,” she handed one to me, “take this one and do the same.”

The way she said it meant no discussion would be tolerated so we took the buckets. I looked sideways at Erica with raised eyebrows as if to ask, “What am I supposed to say?”

She shrugged and smiled at Mrs. Ward.

“Go on,” she waved us off. “If you girls are going to wash up you’ll need enough hot water for all six of you. With the storm the electric pump’s out. We ran out of water this morning so you may as well use a little elbow grease.”

“That’s Wally,” she pointed at the dog as we headed for the door. Wally’s ears perked up. He cocked his head when he heard his name but after a second laid it down and sighed deeply. His eyebrows arched a little and he looked at all of us as if he wasn’t sure what to make of this invasion but it was just too much effort for him to investigate.

We pumped the water, something I had never done. But Hope seemed to know what she was doing and we filled the buckets.

“We had a well and hand pump in Africa,” she whispered. “My parents helped the villagers dig and install it when I was a little girl. I grew up pumping water by hand. It was a big deal in a village to get a well.”

“Do you think she’s senile?”

“Who?”

“Mrs. Ward.”

“Oh no. I think she’s lived alone so long she doesn’t have any patience for the social niceties anymore is all.”

“If she ever did,” I mumbled as we hauled the heavy buckets back up the porch steps.

* * *

With us following like a Brownie troupe, Mrs. Ward thumped through the main floor of the house, using her cane as a pointer.

“I stay on this level nowadays,” she explained. “You.” And here she motioned with her cane at Charlene, “can use my bathroom. Careful you don’t spill anything or break anything now. There are fresh towels in there.”

She pointed at what I assumed was a linen closet.

Charlene leaned over to me and whispered, “I think she must have smelled my pee stained shorts. Nothing gets past prison matron.”

I poked her in the side to shut her up.

“Now what about those clothes? I suppose you all want to get into something clean.”

“That would be wonderful,” Erica nodded and again tried to engage the old woman in conversation.

“You see we were out camping and … ”

“Don’t want to hear about that now. Got some old clothes and robes and things in a room upstairs. You,” she pointed at me, “go on up to the first room on the right and see what you can find. Look in the closet and in the old trunk in there. Don’t care what you wear in this house. Nobody’s coming calling anyway. And who knows how long it’ll be until they get this power back on.”

“Do you have a car?” Valerie asked.

“What’s that? A car? Course we’ve got a car. But the bridge is out and the roads are covered with trees. Where do you think you’d be going?”

“Oh,” said Valerie. “I just thought maybe that man who helped us could take us somewhere that had a phone so we could call our families. They’re probably worried sick.”

“I doubt Dr. Recon is worried sick about much of anything,” Roz told her.

“Won’t do any good to concern yourselves about others. They’ll find out in good time that you’re all right.”

She thumped her cane over to the wooden staircase and pointed up.

“You can take turns in the big tub. Don’t go to the third floor. Nothing much up there anymore. Now go to the stove and take some potholders and carry the big pots of hot water to fill the tub. You’ll have to pump some cold to mix with the hot. And you go on and get some fresh clothes for yourself and the others. Look in the closets and the old trunk in the east bedroom.” She nodded to me.

The old house was like a labyrinth. The wooden staircase creaked but it was as solid as the stone walls. It wound around in a quarter circle and lead to the middle of the upstairs hall. Once on the second floor, I could see doorways to my right and left. Now which one was the bathroom and which was the east bedroom? I poked around from doorway to doorway and realized there was a familiar scent about this house like my grandmother’s house on the river so long ago.

Upstairs I moved from room to room until I found a walk in closet with many clothes inside. It looked as if the closet had been added long after the house was built because it protruded out from the wall half the width of the room. On either side bookcases had been attached floor to ceiling. These were crammed with books of all sizes stacked vertically, horizontally, and stuck in at odd angles. The room faced the river. There was a large old trunk at the foot of a four poster bed that sat so high off the floor, there were petit pointed footstools on either side. When I pulled on the brass hasp of the trunk and opened it just a hair, the scent of camphor sent me reeling back and again I thought of my grandmother’s house, her dark closets, the camphor against moths. Even these little memories of daily life evoke the inevitability of change. I couldn’t hang onto the past forever, no matter how good or bad it was.

The others were all busy carrying pails of water, filling the tub, washing their tired bodies. When we were all clean, we picked through the clothes I laid out on the big bed and assembled some odd outfits for ourselves. I wore an old pair of men’s overalls, the legs rolled up to my ankles, and a long sleeved faded blue work shirt with the sleeves rolled past my elbows. Erica chose a loose, printed cotton dress that snapped down the front and Roz opted for torn jeans that had obviously belonged to Mrs. Ward’s son when he was about twelve. She added a T-shirt that said Camp Eagle Feather in faded green letters. Charlene, Hope and Valerie picked through what was left and walked downstairs wearing variations on old pants and shirts, a belt that Valerie found to hold her loose khakis from falling off her slender hips and we all walked around with nothing but socks on our feet as we’d washed our sneakers at the well pump and left them on the porch to dry. Even Roz’s Teva’s had taken a beating in the mud from the storm. We felt better being clean, ill fitting outfits aside, and when we were done, we found Mrs. Ward in the kitchen cooking a big pot of soup and there on the table were two loaves of Erica’s bread with butter and cheese and jams and a big urn of hot coffee. This didn’t seem bad at all.

* * *

“I may not get out much but I still know what’s going on,” Mrs. Ward told us as she watched us wolf down her food. She seemed as if she hadn’t had anyone to take care of in so long she was as hungry for company as were for food.

“So,” she added, “you decided to take a canoe trip and camp out by the river. Well, just your bad luck this storm came up out of nowhere.”

“We were doing fine,” Erica started to say, “until the morning after the storm.”

“Where did you camp last night then?” It was the first time she seemed interested in an answer. The others looked at me since I had chosen the spot.

“I’m not sure I can explain exactly where it was. But when we got up the whole forest looked like it had been hit by a bomb.” Had it only been that morning? It seemed like weeks ago now.

She didn’t try to find out any more. “The whole area got hit hard,” She didn’t say any more. Just shook her head. She stood up and began to clear the table. Erica and Charlene stood also. They carried plates and bowls and silverware over to the old soapstone sink.

“Please, Mrs. Ward,” Erica said. “Let us at least do the dishes. You’ve been so kind.”

“I know who you are,” Mrs. Ward turned to face her squarely and leaned a little to one side on her cane. “You took over the town meetings. The council. After the men quit. Bunch of ninnies.”

“Us or the men?” asked Charlene.

Mrs. Ward let out a howl of laughter.

“Both I guess,” she said and sat back down at the table. “Go ahead. Clean up if you want to. Seems it’s what you like to do anyway.”

Roz spoke up. “Would you have let the town go under without even a fight to save it?”

This seemed a rude response and I was ready to hide under the table, afraid Mrs. Ward might kick us all out of her house and send us back down the river and over the falls. I was also feeling a strong urge to strangle Roz for being so outspoken. Couldn’t she ever keep her thoughts to herself at all? I was about to apologize to Mrs. Ward when she turned to Roz.

“You the lawyer?”

“Not me,” Roz was not about to back off.

“Men,” was all Mrs. Ward said.

“What about men?” Hope’s quiet voice defused the moment and Mrs. Ward turned from bellicose to thoughtful.

“They’re not like us,” she said. “They need to think they’re winning something. I never thought those men would stick it out for the sake of Trout River Falls. Wasn’t surprised at all when they quit. Was surprised, however, by you women taking over. Now my husband, Mr. Ward, he never quit on anything. And neither did my father nor my grandfather nor my great nor my great great grandfather who founded this town. Think they didn’t see all kinds of hard times? Of course they did. Winters like to froze them to death. Bad crops. Rocky soil. Floods and wars and changing times. Babies dying. Sons killed in battle. Stock market crashes and all manner of terrible things, including damned lying politicians. When our boy got killed in Vietnam my husband nearly lost all hope. Poor man. But he never gave up completely. No, not completely. But something in him died the day we got the news and it was never the same. Yes, men need to feel they’re winning something. It’s the battle of life keeps them going. Now he’s gone, too. And what’s left? Trout River Falls. This house, the mill, the town, such as it is. Not much anymore. Only what the men fought so hard for.”

“That is exactly the point,” offered Erica. “We want to make it into something again.”

“You want to show up the men, then? Is that why you’re out to save the town?”

“We all got talked into it by Erica. Showing men we can do what they gave up on is a pretty good reason. I don’t see anything wrong with it,” said Charlene. “We all have different reasons.”

“What’s yours then?” Mrs. Ward turned to her.

“I like a fight,” she said quickly and then added, “and I like to win, too.”

“Oh, you’re like the men then. Got no children. Nothing to hold you.”

Charlene looked away. Like a confused child, I thought. But she added nothing more and we all remained silent.

Mrs. Ward turned to me. When she said, “You’re the odd one. Not on the town council,” I had no idea what to say to her. I thought about the rose-scented parlors in the old houses along Washington Street back in Virginia, and about the ladies who sat in their straight backed cushioned chairs sipping tea and nodding as you answered their cordial questions about your mother and your grandmother and your aunts and uncles, as if they were tallying a genealogy chart. And you sat on a loveseat covered in some flowered print and answered “She’s just fine, Ma’am” and “He passed last August.” It was a carefully choreographed script, a slow dance of culture, a way to anchor yourselves in past and present as one. But, as it turned out it wasn’t necessary to say anything to Mrs. Ward because she didn’t wait for an answer and turned to Hope.

“And you? What do you get out of this?”

Hope lowered her head.

“I know about you, too. Reverend Amiss calls on me once a month. You work for the church. So you’re out to do good I expect.”

“I always try to,” said Hope quietly. “I may not always succeed but we should all try.”

“Oh you think God wants us to do good?”

“I believe that, yes.”

“How about you?” she turned to Erica. “You believe that, too, that God wants you to save Trout River Falls? You think you’re playing like in some old black and white movie?”

“No,” she told the old woman. “That’s not why I want to do it.”

“Then why? Most people would just let it fade away.”

“If everyone felt like that and gave into it, we might as well let the whole country fade away to the developers and the land rapers for their own personal gain.”

“Erica’s right,” Valerie suddenly broke in, which surprised me and I think the others, also. “It’s like that woman who saved the Everglades. You know? In Florida? Everyone just thought of it as a big swamp with no purpose and she figured out that it was really important and then fought for decades to save it.”

“Marjory Stoneman Douglas” Mrs. Ward said quietly. She thumped her cane softly on the floor and stood up with a deep sigh.

I don’t know what set me off, but my mind wandered. Away from the table, the house, the whole day, as if I had wandered into my own dreamscape and gotten lost there. Thoughts scattered across my mind like marbles.

Sometimes, you’re just going along with your life, not thinking about what’s next or where you are, or maybe you are thinking about what step to take next and where you’ve been. Anyway you’re all jumbled up inside and you can’t seem to see clearly. That’s the way life is. It’s a big puzzle where the pieces never seem to fit together and you keep sorting through it and trying one piece here and another piece there and sometimes you fit a few together and a picture starts to form. But then you can’t quite manage the edges and the picture stays half formed. And the puzzle pieces may be lying all over the table of your life in front of you but there are other extraneous puzzle pieces that don’t seem to go anywhere.

You examine them and think, well where did that one come from and what does it mean and how does it fit into the others? Then you see a bright colored one over on the corner of the tableso you try to fit all the brightly colored ones together. Some of them fit and others don’t and you get even more confused because someone once told you that the brightly colored ones should go together. But then you see that they don’t always. So you try a different way to fit them together. And just when you think you’re so confused you should just run your arm across the table and push the whole thing off, you find a piece that fits into another piece and all at once you have a picture that makes sense. And that’s what happened when I met Erica. She spoke about saving the town. And it was like a revelation. A way to focus on one thing in the morass of life. One simple thing to do. That everyone could put their energy behind. And sometimes that happens in life. You meet a moment where everything seems clear.

In that moment, sitting in the old woman’s kitchen, with everything going on around me, I had a moment of total clarity.

I stood up abruptly – it must have been right after Mrs. Ward stood – and walked out of the kitchen and onto the porch. I stared at the river. All I could think about was how much I wanted to get into one of the canoes and paddle hard over the falls. I wanted to hear the crash of water, feel the buoyancy of the falls under me, let the spray splash my face and just go until I had ridden the wave all the way to the river below where it would flatten out and carry me to shore.

Erica was by my side. She hugged me with one arm and squeezed my shoulder with her strong fingers.

“I feel like we didn’t finish,” I said to her.

“The falls?”

“Yes. Is it crazy?”

“I don’t know. Maybe.”

I wanted to rest my head on her shoulder and have her tell me what to do. She seemed so sensible. So determined. At the same time, I knew she was hanging on the same way I was. Waiting for her son to come home the same way I was waiting for Maze to get over his dead wife and turn to me just because it was me and not because it was a way to put a lid on his grief. But now that seemed a poor excuse and one that was no longer valid.

“Is it wrong to want everything to be just right?”

“You mean about you and Maze?” Erica pulled her arm off my shoulder and moved toward the lawn. She took one step down from the porch. Hard gray clouds were rolling by now, showing wide spaces of blue sky. “You know it seems to me our lives are made up of our complaints. Mostly about our men.”

“Do you love Will?”

“Of course I do. There’s an old German expression my great grandmother used to recite. “Wer Schimpft, der Kauft. “Loosely translated it means ‘The one who complains buys.’ I know Will is terrified that our son won’t come home. Or he’ll come home in pieces. Bruised, scattered pieces and his life will be one long hell of mending never to be whole again. Twice a month I go to the VA hospital down in White River Junction. I bring small gifts to the injured boys. There are some women too. I read to them. And you know what they want me to read?”

I shook my head. Patches of late afternoon sun glinted on the rushing water and I could see it was already receding, that the worst of the flooding was over. Tomorrow it would be calmer, calm enough to paddle it again.

“War stories. The gorier the better. Can you imagine? At first I thought, ‘God this is awful. How can these boys want to hear more of this horror?’ And then I realized, it’s about their complaints. They love what they hate. Mrs. Ward in there lost her son in Vietnam. That war was on TV all the time every day for years. The whole country watched its horror. The wars we’re fighting now are silent, removed from our lives like some video game someone else is playing. I hate that. I want everyone to see what hell it is. For these young people, coming back, it’s not a game. It’s the big complaint of their lives and they’ll live it until their lives are over. Will is like that for me. The big complaint – the one that keeps me buying in.”

She stopped talking and we both watched the river.

“Let’s do it,” I said. “Tomorrow, when the power’s back on and we’ve called the men to pick us up in town at the public landing below the falls. Let’s all go over the falls together.”

I looked at her. She saw I was not teasing. She nodded agreement.

“How did you know I was thinking about that?” I asked.

“I don’t know. I just knew it that’s all. We’ll do it together. All of us.”

“Promise?”

“I promise,” she nodded. “Now let’s go in and talk that old woman into leaving her money and house and mill and whatever else she still owns here to The Trout River Falls Trust for Historic Preservation. Charlene’s already explaining to her how it would work.”

* * *

That evening, after Mrs. Ward cooked us dinner and we did the dishes, we sat around the kitchen table drinking an old bottle of cognac she had pulled out from somewhere in that mausoleum of a house. It was good stuff. There was no telling what she had stored in all those rooms.

After dark, she lit candles and old oil lamps that looked like they dated back to her great grandfather’s days. She told us stories about growing up, how she met her husband, when they moved to Trout River Falls and took over the mill. She told us about the night her son was born during a blizzard, how they couldn’t get to town and the doctor couldn’t get to them, how she almost bled to death after her husband delivered the baby. At dawn the snow stopped and a farmer brought the doctor in on a sled pulled by mules.

She softened up as the evening progressed. Maybe it was the cognac. Maybe it was talking about Trout River Falls. She did love the old town. You could tell by the way she dismissed it the way you bad mouth a husband you’ve been married to for thirty years, the way you trash your mother or your sister, but you’d defend them to anyone who dared say anything against them. There was nothing neutral about that old woman. The way she stomped her cane for emphasis and shot us direct questions. And the more Erica and Charlene and Roz talked about their ideas for reviving Trout River Falls, the more Mrs. Ward taunted and teased them, until Erica suggested she record an oral history. At that moment we all saw a shift in her attitude. She said somewhere in the house she had old photographs of the town dating back to the mid eighteen hundreds, before there was a bridge, only the dam and the falls. When the only way across the river was a pull ferry attached to a rope. She asked us to return when things settled down and we had time to sort through her old things.

We went to bed weary and worn out but satisfied that thanks to the storm, we had accomplished what we set out to do. There was only one item left on my list.

Early the next morning when we were all assembled in the kitchen, the lights that had gone dark when the storm hit suddenly came on and a radio announcer blared out local news about storm damage and power outages and river and stream flooding. It startled us and Hope rushed to shut off the radio.

“No,” I told her. “Just turn it down some so we can hear what happened.”

“Must have fixed the main line at last,” Mrs. Ward stomped into the kitchen, her cane heavy on the wood floor. “Just in time for breakfast, too.”

“Does that mean the phone is working?” asked Valerie.

“Go ahead over and try it.”

Valerie was closest to it.

“Yep,” she said. “It’s working. I guess that means we have to start making calls.”

The minute she said it, we all looked at each other and realized, at the same time, that we didn’t want this to end. After a few moments I offered to call Maze first and as I walked over to the old wall phone Erica told the others she had something to discuss with them.

“She’s going to tell Maze to meet her below the falls at the town dock,” I heard her say as I picked up the receiver.

“And I’m going to ask Will to me there, too.”

“What are you saying?”

“Yes, Hope’s right. Are you suggesting what I think you are?” Charlene asked.

“Katelyn and I are going. If you four want to go over the falls, we can all go together. Same canoe teams as yesterday. One last hurrah.”

“Last is right,” said Valerie.

I waited to hear what they would decide. My hand was shaking a little. From excitement I think because I wasn’t scared of going over the falls. And whatever Maze said about it, I was going over anyway.

“I’ll do it,” said Charlene resolutely, almost challenging any of the others to argue it with her.

Roz and Valerie looked at each other. We needed one more to make the canoe count right. One person couldn’t go it alone. And then Hope said, very quietly, almost whispering.

“I think we should do it painted up. Like before. But wearing panties and life vests. I mean we don’t know who might be in town,” she smiled at each of us, a shy little smile but there was something behind it, too, that hadn’t been there when we started out.

Valerie and Roz grinned and nodded.

“Perfect,” Roz said.

“I want to call the doctor and tell him exactly when to pick me up. I want him to be there. And if he says he can’t, I’ll threaten to expose his little affair to the entire club.”

“Fuckin’ right,” Charlene smacked her on the back. “We’re all in then.”

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

THE FALLS

The sun had returned. From Mrs. Ward’s porch I could see the rapids above the falls. Bubbly, foamy, rippling cascades splashed excitedly over a rock outcropping now and then which meant the water, still dusty brown from flood, had crested and receded. Enough so you could see the riverbanks again. I spotted one jagged rock pointing up at an angle like a spear.

Lewis stored our gear in a shed so the canoes would be as light as possible. After he left, we took the whole morning to paint our bodies as if we were preparing for a carnival – or maybe a wedding, although there was no bride among us. Erica the bird turned into a blue wave with Japanese woodcut curls that followed the contours around and around her body. Painted with hearts before, Roz now became a series of lollipop circles in vibrant colors. Where Hope had been starry before, now we covered her body in flames flickering from her legs up, over her panties and bra up to her neck and onto the left half of her face. Valerie, who had been a moth, became a sinuous snake, sexy and delicate but a bit foreboding with fangs on her cheeks and scales all down her neck and arms. And they covered me in facets like prisms of glass catching the light, small rainbows of color stretching across my hips and thighs and back, around my breasts and up to my chin. Around my eyes peacock feathers and down my cheeks slender feather-like lashes.

We paired up as we had the first day. I cautioned them about paddling the rapids and advised them on strategies for navigating the falls. Stroke hard until you start the descent; then let up on the bow and the stern paddler just steer as straight a course as possible, while keeping clear of any rocks on either side. The bow person should look out for boulders and fend off when needed, I told them. They all listened intently and didn’t say anything. I couldn’t tell if they were afraid or excited. Probably a little of both. Erica and I would go first and they would follow behind just where we paddled.

“Should we wear life vests?” Erica asked.

“Of course we should,” said Valerie.

We tied on life vests over our painted bras.

“Okay then. The tribe is ready to roll,” Roz called out, fist raised in the air.

By then the water level was about two feet below the dock making it a balancing act to step down into the canoes. I didn’t want anyone tipping over before we even got started. We lined up one canoe behind the other.

“Here’s how we’ll do this,” I said. “Erica and I will hold the first canoe while Valerie gets in the bow and then, Roz, you get in the stern. Then you both hold onto the dock until the rest of us are settled. First toss your paddles in so you can grab them once you’re seated.”

Everything went smoothly. A good omen. We repeated this process with Hope and Charlene. I hadn’t noticed earlier, but Mrs. Ward had thumped down the path to the dock and stationed herself on a little rise from where she watched us intently. Now she ventured down the last few yards over the grass and onto the dock itself. She thump thumped with her cane toward the closest canoe. Erica was seated in the bow holding it against the dock. I was about to climb down into it.

“Well, you girls nowadays. Look at you all painted up like I don’t know what all.”

She laughed and bumped her cane for emphasis.

“Go ahead now. I took those falls some sixty years ago after a spring flood and I can tell you …” she stopped, looked at the river and then at me, waiting to get down into the canoe.

“How was it, Mrs. Ward?” I asked her.

“Watch for the tall pointed rock on the far right just where the rapids end and the falls begin. You’ll want to run left of that spot because it looks like the easy fall. But there’s another jagged peak just next to it that will be hidden by the high water. But only below the surface. Not deep enough so you won’t hit it. If your canoes hit that one you’ll never make it down. So stick as far left as you can and you’ll get down without a problem.”

We smiled at her and I nodded to the others. That meant we had to steer a course as close to the mill dam as possible without going over it. That dam, now completely obscured by water, would present a straight drop-off with no angle at all. And we had to keep going fast enough and far enough to the right of the mill dam to shoot the falls with enough power to steer down without swamping.

“Okay, ladies. Stick as close behind us as possible.”

Erica let go of the dock as I pushed at the wood piling with my paddle tip and we were off into the swirl. The first few strokes were easy. Close to the bank the water was fairly smooth, although the current had a hard tug to it, wanting to pull us into the flow. We paddled to the middle, me steering on an oblique angle across the river and downstream. The current picked up and swept us along fast so that we straightened out in the center and paddled hard straight toward the rapids downstream.

I kept my eyes on the river and concentrated on my paddle slicing into the water, watched the water swirl around the front as I dug down and pulled back hard, feathering to keep us on course. I watched the ripple pattern and looked for pillows. Guiding the canoe forward became like a game. I was the helmsman on the open sea, fighting for the safety of crew and captain alike.

Just before we hit the rapids I glanced back to check on the others. They were right behind us, paddling hard, too. Waves splashed up over the sides and the going was bumpy. We rode them up and down a few times and I heard Roz squeal with delight. It was a kick, this bouncing, bubbling, splashy ride. Then the water shifted.

I sliced into the water deep, again and again, thinking in, out, in, out, stroke, stroke, stroke, as a kind of rhythmic song in my head. The bow of our canoe dipped and then came back up fast as we hit an eddy line and pulled down then up and down again. I almost slid off my seat. Water splashed up against the bow into Erica’s face and she shook her head from side to side to clear the water from her eyes. A wave hit us broadside, splashing me from shoulders to knees. From that point we were in heavy water, jostling us up and down and rolling from side to side. I steered as straight a course as possible and ran us between pillows where hidden rocks might have capsized us in seconds.

Everything was rushing by, the way it’s reported a drowning person sees the past. Stark scenes of lovers and parents and what seem like other lives lived all together again in one kaleidoscopic funnel leading to your own demise. I was dying in a way. Letting the old me go. Saying goodbye to the music man whom I had loved. Yes, I had loved him with such an intensity that when the light faded, I could not let it go out completely. So I stayed too long. Hung on too tight. Refused to believe that it would not work out the way I had dreamt it would. Hoped it would. Clung to it the way I used to clutch my old doll Madeline when I was a child. And when you cling so hard, the letting go is that much more painful, the wounds that much deeper, the confusion about why it had to end that much harder to untangle. So I blamed it on him. Blamed him for changing. For abandoning me. For walking out on our deal. Yes, he stayed physically. Yes he slept next to me in bed, he ate breakfast with me, he went to movies with me and had sex with me. But he was no longer there really. The man I had thought would be my husband turned into a vapor of what he had been. I couldn’t hold him anymore, couldn’t even see him clearly anymore. And the reflection of myself that I had always seen when I looked at him, when I turned to him, when I made love to him, had, with his disappearance, also evaporated.Because I no longer knew who he was, I had become unsure of who I was. And that’s what I was demanding of Maze now. To define me with a guarantee that he would never change.

While I focused on the roiling river in front of me, a part of my mind was clearer than it had been in months. Somehow the bits and pieces of my past now crystallized like the broken pieces of glass I reassembled into my paintings. I was also busy thinking about Maze. About what was really holding me back from moving forward. It was uncanny, this giving slow consideration to something that had weighed me down for so long, even as I was jostled and propelled forward by the rushing river. This river that was so wild now would once again become calm and clear.

When did I first realize that the music man was shifting in front of me; that life I shared with him was a shadow I was chasing and could never catch? The waves ran along faster than I could paddle to stay in front of them, the crests rolling us up and the curls sinking us down. I had spent years denying what was right in front of me all the time. The music man wanted to make good. That was it. He just wanted to make it. If he couldn’t do it one way, he’d do it another. I should have realized all along that his ambition was not limited to music or art or even a way of life. If he hadn’t inherited that corner lot, would he still be wearing thrift store clothes and begging club owners for pennies? I should have read the signs better. It was only a matter of time. Something else would have come along. He would have jumped at it. And wanted me to jump right along with him. Most women would have been thrilled to move quickly to the moneyed side of the street. Most women. They would have regarded that as improvement. Making it. Moving up. It was me, then. I was the one who really bolted. I was the one who couldn’t accept a tarnished silver dollar, even if it meant giving up a truckload of them.

My life with Maze. I could almost see it projected in front of me like one of these waves. Maybe not completely predictable, but at least reliable. And who would I be in that reliable life? Would I disappear into some wifedom? My distrust of the future came down to that. If I could still be me, if I could know who I was now and be true to that, not become someone else, or be expected to become someone else, but could grow within that framework, then marriage would be all right. Marriage would not be a cage or a trap or an ether that would engulf and transform me. But I had to be sure of me.

The river pushed us forward, floating on it and in it. We had to keep moving. We had made our choice. You can’t move forward if you’re constantly looking back. Change is the only constant on the river and that’s the way it is in life. No guarantees. Only promises and pledges. Life is full of them. Legal pledges and pledges of the heart.

It felt as if we’d been paddling for a long time but in reality it went fast. We reachedthe heavy water in a few moments and I knew that meant the falls were not far ahead. Once we started our descent it would seem as if we were hurtling down. I knew that in my head. But I didn’t know how it would feel. And then, I could almost see the fall off in front of us. A shelf in the water, rounded at the top with nothing visible beyond it. A horizon.

“Here it comes,” I yelled.

Erica would be the first to see the drop-off. Just seconds before me. I waited for her yell. I waited for what I’d have to do to keep us steady. I could hear the roar of them now. Could taste the mist in the air. Could feel light spray on my cheeks and lips. It would be a shock. We would feel as if the earth had fallen away from us. Would hurtle us down into its maw, this falling off, this letting go, this tipping away from equilibrium. Is that what kids love about roller coasters? When they hover at the very peak of a downhill ride. That second before the car starts its descent. That floating moment. When you know you’re about to lose control and you wait for it to happen, know it’s inevitable. Your whole body gears up for it and then wham, you’re dropping, free falling down and down and down with no end to it, nothing but your head thrown back and your own screams filling the air. What Ospreys must feel as they plunge head first into the see, their wings pulled back, their necks stretched to a straight line, beaks pointed down, crashing into the water and then grabbing a fish and up, up, up again. They always come up. They always return to the air to free fall again. Not like Maze soaring with giant ersatz wings, catching the thermals, gliding from a mountain over a valley. No sound except the wind passing by. Not this hurling, crazy diving feeling.

I steered on the right, back paddling some to keep our bow pointed straight ahead while Erica stroked like crazy on the right side and then, after a few strokes, on the left. We had to avoid the last few pillows before the falls. I swung my paddle in ever widening arcs on the left to balance her strokes but still the current wanted to pull us toward those rocks Mrs. Ward had warned us about just at the top of the falls. But how could I know exactly which rocks she had meant? There were so many and they came up so fast. We approached the last of the rapids fast now, and I could hear the roar, see the water churn and spout, and then we were in it, riding down the first dip past the last pillow.

Why had I given in to Maze in Sayulita right after I left the music man? Attached myself to another man before I even had time to breathe? I hadn’t gone looking for him. Or for anyone. I thought I’d gone so far away I would certainly be alone. I had chosen the little fishing village just for that reason. An isolated, foreign, retreat. Yet he appeared. Out of nowhere. That was part of it. So unexpected. To find someone who seemed to understand what I was feeling. Who had lost something, too. Who had kissed a dream goodbye. Those sad gray eyes. Soulful and yet full of a boyish love of life. He didn’t hide his feelings and he let me express mine. There was no pretending with Maze. He made me feel understood. Now here we were. That understanding had vanished. Or I had buried it like a bulb in my garden. With the rocks. Stuck it deep down where Maze could not get to it no matter what he tried.

The water swelled around us, wave upon wave from behind pushing us forward, the canoe riding high on each crest. A few more rock outcroppings stuck up above the churn. Before I grasped it fully, Erica squealed and the canoe nose pointed down and we were falling hard, falling through water and space. Mrs. Ward’s pointed rock slid past to my right and I realized we had avoided that trap. My butt raised up off the seat and then smacked down again as a wave hit the stern just behind me. I paddled, Erica paddled, she shrieked – I didn’t know if it was fear or excitement – and down, down, down we hurled, the fury of that water all around us, a feeling of elation and screaming terror together inside me, and finally with the stern whipping to the right and me holding the paddle as hard as I could to swing us back on a straight course, we plunged into a gigantic froth and then flattened out below it only to hit another and another, bounced up and down by the falls. We slid down the last fifty or so feet of the falls and smack, landed in the eddy pool at the bottom, where inadvertently we spun around and faced back looking up the falls as the other two canoes hurtled down after us.

We roiled around in the eddy for a few seconds and then paddled our way clear to let the others come up behind us. Erica and I both looked back to see the other canoes flying down the falls, Roz and Valerie first, paddles held high, not even trying to steer their way to safety. Then came Hope and Charlene with high pitched squeals, cascades of foaming water thrashing their canoe from side to side.

“Paddle,” I yelled at them but they couldn’t hear me anyway over the booming falls and then they had landed too and I could hear them, screaming with excitement.

“Holy shit,” Roz yelled.

“What a ride,” Valerie echoed.

After the yelling, they began to laugh and laugh. Erica joined the laughter and I heard Hope yell “Yay for us!” and none of us noticed above, hovering in the air, propellers whirling, a helicopter with a TV logo on its side and a news photographer inside leaning way out with his long lens pointed in our direction. The headline in tomorrow’s paper would read: Naked Painted Ladies Take Trout River Falls and it would be all over the internet and someone who was shooting video of the flooded bridge would turn his cell phone at us and we would forever exist as a footnote on YouTube.

We all raised our paddles in triumph. The current carried us down a little ways until I realized we might overshoot the pickup point at the town dock and yelled to everyone to follow us. Erica and I paddled over to where the river had crested and receded and the put in below the bridge was just barely accessible. We paddled for it. Saw Will and Maze standing ready to catch our canoes. Saw others also, milling around. Cars and vans parked by the roadside. People just looking at the river. People pointing up. More people than had come to town in years. I looked over to where they were pointing and only then realized the bridge, or what was left of it, was half mangled, timbers hanging over the water. Other huge old timbers hung in the air like sticks. The old wooden frame broken in places but in others as intact as ever. Incongruous. Sad. Yet awesome in a strange way. The water had been so high at one point that it had engulfed the falls and simply rolled along as if the underlying boulders were not even there. The power of water. On each side, a police cruiser was parked perpendicular to the bridge so no one could approach it. Debris piles had collected high up on the banks where the water had peaked and receded. It had been some flood. One for the record books I would later learn. A freak line of storms that no one had expected.

We pulled up and the men grabbed the bows and hauled the canoes from the water. We stepped out and I looked back at the falls to see where we’d been. My legs were shaking. I was wet and some of the paint had melted on my arms leaving streaks and blotches of color that made me look like some living Jackson Pollock.

“God love us that was exciting,” Erica at my side. “I’m ready to do it again. Anytime.”

Maze and Will were hauling the other canoes out now. It was hard to hear what people were saying with the roar of the falls drowning out all but the closest voices.

“What is that helicopter doing?” I asked Erica. She turned to the crowd and people pointed to the bridge. A lot of them were talking at once and then we realized they were also pointing at us. And the helicopter was hovering just above us again. I saw a large camera lens pointed at Erica and me.

“Oh Lord,” she said. “They came to cover the flood and the bridge collapse and now they’re shooting video of us.”

“There’s nowhere to hide,” I told her. And then Roz and Hope were at our side.

“I’m going to lose my job at the church,” Hope whispered in my ear. “If the minister sees this on the news.”

“I’m sorry. I had no idea this was going on.”

“It’s not your fault. But I wish I could find a towel or something.”

“Just don’t take off your life vest,” I suggested. “They’ll just think you’re wearing a bikini. It is summer after all.”

“Screw that,” said Roz and tore off her life vest and grinned up at the camera.

I took her arm and whispered, “I meant what I said. I’m going with you to the doctor. I’ll pick you up. Call and tell me when.” She nodded and we hugged briefly, our painted colors blending for a second.

“You scared the crap out of me,” Maze appeared through the crowd. “I think you’re going to make the nightly news.” He pointed to the helicopter and the vans above the put in. People were approaching us. People with TV cameras and microphones, dressed in city clothes, looking very determined.

“Let’s get out of here,” I said to Maze.

“Good luck,” he told me.

Will was just helping Valerie out of the last canoe and as I worried about having to face these news types, painted up as I was, they wafted right past me and converged on Valerie.

That’s what it means to be beautiful.

The thought stuck in my head and I grabbed the canoe and started to haul it up to the car with Maze carrying it from the bow. After we got it tied on top of the car rack, I turned to Erica, who was helping Will with the other canoes.

“Well?” I said, eyebrows raised.

“What a thrill,” she hugged me. “And thank goodness they’re focused on Valerie.”

“We’ll talk,” I told her. “I’ll call you.”

“You’ll come to the council meeting Thursday,” she said. “I’m going to bring our plan up for a vote. We don’t have time to wait.”

“Me? But I’m an outsider.”

“Not any more,” she patted my arm. “You’re a landowner and a taxpayer. You have to come. We need all the support we can get. And bring him along.” She pointed up to Maze who had started the car.

I waved to Roz and Charlene, carrying the third canoe up the put in ramp to the street where Will had parked. They yelled to me, “That was the most exciting thing we have ever done.” I stood there for a minute and watched Valerie talk to the reporters before Maze waved me into the car and we pulled away, leaving the falls behind us. I wanted to tell Maze about the ride down the falls. About the storm and the trestle and the trout and everything. Wanted him to be happy to see me, to put his arms around me and kiss me and say how proud he was that I had landed us all safely. But he was grim and silent and I kept it all to myself.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

THE COUNCIL MEETING

I thought of it on my way to buy toilet paper and shampoo. We ran out of both just after my return from the river. And Maze had a call from his department head at the university. They wanted him to come down to Virginia for some meetings so he’d taken a plane from Burlington back to Charlottesville. He would be gone a week which meant he would not be coming to the council meeting. I was left with the old wreck of a pickup we used to haul plants, manure, and lumber.

I took the long way over the mountain to a grocery store and found myself heading toward Trout River Falls from the north, a way I had never gone. With the bridge out, I couldn’t cross the river there but something pulled me and I found myself driving slowly by the long paved drive that led to Mrs. Ward’s house. I had only seen it from the river and tried to imagine the front entrance. We had left a lot of gear in her shed. I wondered if Lewis worked every day, if the shed was locked, if I could just stop in without a call first.

The driveway was flanked by two granite pillars, with the name Ward carved out of a slab on each one. Tall sugar maples, planted decades before, stood majestically on either side of the pillars. I could see years upon years of tap marks where the trees had given up their sap for maple syrup. The drive wound in a curve and I followed it, wondering when the house would appear and if I would be turned away by anyone.

As I pulled around the curve the driveway straightened and ran to a huge circle with a gigantic willow tree in the middle that spread an umbrella of branches that swayed in the summer breeze, barely grazing the newly cut grass. The imposing stone façade and great windows of the house looked out to the grass lawn and full old rhododendrons that formed a border around the base of the house. I imagined a butler in full regalia coming out to greet me.

Instead Mrs. Ward drove around in her golf cart from the left side of the big house,her cane sticking out beyond the cart, her head covered by a battered straw hat, a fake flower drooping off one side. She wore a denim skirt and cotton blouse and looked as if she’d been digging in a garden as her laced up shoes were brown with earth. We had that in common.

We pulled up to the circle by the front door at the same moment. I opened the door fully expecting a reprimand for invading her privacy.

“Well, look what the cat dragged up the drive and deposited at my front door,” she said and poked her cane firmly at the ground for support as she wriggled her way out of the cart and onto her feet.

“Just look at that, would you,” she pointed to her shoes. “Another perfectly good pair ruined by that vegetable patch out back.”

I started to speak but she interrupted.

“Come in and have some tea,” she motioned me to follow her around where she had come from and I did as I was told. “Or do you prefer coffee? My husband was a coffee drinker. Liked it black and strong. Best coffee he said he ever had was in Denmark. Made it with a coffee press. Looked to me like thick paint but he just loved that coffee. It’s Katelyn isn’t it?”

“Yes. Tea would be fine,” I said it rather meekly. How was I going to talk this headstrong woman into something I was sure she would not be willing to do?

At the back porch, the one I’d stood on before, the one that faced the river which was now flowing calmly past her lawn, safely below the level of the dock now, she asked me to help get her shoes off.

“Can’t bend over to untie these laces. Sorry to be a bother but don’t want to track this all over the rugs.”

I untied her shoes and helped pull them off her feet. She stomped up the steps, her cane acting as a third foot, and by the door she stepped into a pair of slippers and in we went. Today the house smelled like pine cleaner and there was no soup bubbling on the stove. I imagined she must have a cleaning woman and wondered where Lewis might be. Did he hover around unseen watching to make sure the old lady didn’t fall or something worse? She wore no medical alert thing the way my mother had in her failing years. Living like this alone in that big house, well I couldn’t have done it.

“You like to garden?” she asked me as I followed her into the kitchen.

“Yes. I do. Very much.”

She turned to peer at me and took off her big straw hat.

“I’ll wager you have a big garden. With flowers and vegetables and all sorts of vines. I’ll bet it’s very lush.”

I smiled and nodded and for a moment I thought here was a woman who would understand how I became the naked gardener. One day I would be old like her and I would feel free enough to say exactly what was on my mind. She bustled about getting cups and putting a kettle on the stove. She took out a box of cookies as if I was her granddaughter there for an after school treat. The box had a painting of a lighthouse on it.

“Well.” She poured hot water into my cup. “Out with it. What’s it you want?”

The steam formed a little cloud above the cup before dissipating into the air. I hesitated for a moment. How to begin, I thought. And what would make this headstrong woman want to do what I was about to ask of her. I mentioned the shed and gear we had left behind and then added, “The town council is meeting tomorrow evening.”

Before I could continue she interrupted, “And I suppose you want me to come over there and put some heft behind this plan that you girls have concocted.”

“Well yes. We certainly need all the support possible.”

“You mean you want some leverage.”

“I guess that would be more accurate. But I believe if you show public support for this, other people will be much more likely to get behind it. Especially if they know you plan to set up a historic trust to save most of the town.”

She stirred her tea and then sipped it. She put the cup down with a little clinking sound. Her teacups were porcelain, with tiny blueberries around the rim, the handles ornately carved.

“Will you pick me up and take me home after? Lewis is done by six you know.”

“I would be happy to do that, Mrs. Ward.”

“Oh for goodness sake now, if we’re going to be in business together, as it were, you’ll have to stop calling me Mrs. Ward. It’s Cecelia but my family always called me Ceal. Like the seal they used to have bouncing a ball on its nose in the circus.” She giggled at herself. “Now that’s settled, you ought to know I spoke to my attorney and he is going to set up the papers for the trust and all. He thinks it’s a fine idea, too.”

It occurred to me then that Cecelia Ward was happy we had been dumped on her doorstep like so many babies in a basket. That through us she was going to leave a legacy.

“That’s wonderful. I know the others will be happy to hear it.”

She looked out the kitchen window toward the river, stirring her tea which by now must have been only lukewarm. I reached out and for some reason placed my fingers lightly on her forearm and when she turned towards me her eyes were moist with tears.

“I haven’t thought about my boy in many a year. Not really thought about him and who he might have become.” She spoke softly, wistfully. “Of course it brings back the sadness. But there’s something else too. In doing this with you young people, I feel a connection with him. I want to thank you for that my dear. For the chance to feel that again.” She patted my hand with her slender fingers. Her nails were carefully trimmed and polished clear and shiny. I thought she must wear gloves in the garden.

We all want to leave something when we’re gone. We have so few choices about what contribution we can make and so many conflicting demands on this earth for who and what will survive. We can’t control very much for very long. Cataclysmic events unfold beyond our reach. We only have a small corner where we can make a difference and such a short time to try. But if we start in one small place, no one can predict how much difference that little corner might make.

* * *

The room at The Grange Hall was packed. Following the rules, Erica had posted signs about the council meeting vote and word spread fast. The hall was located at the very end of Bridge Street, the last building that made up the town of Trout River Falls north of the now defunct bridge. People who lived south of the bridge had to travel an hour out of their way to reach the Grange Hall so it was surprising how many showed up. There was also going to be a vote on motions about what to do about the bridge itself. An unusual mix of vehicles in the parking lot hinted at a crowd that was not altogether local. I spotted pickup trucks and mud spattered Jeeps but also BMWs and at least one dark blue Mercedes limo with New York plates. Although power had been restored and trees cleared from streets, there were still signs of the storm’s fury, especially the pieces of mangled bridge dangling over the river just beyond the falls.

“I think the developers have come to make trouble,” I told Ceal as we pulled up.

“That should give your friend Erica’s husband some steady sources of income,” Mrs. Ward chuckled at herself and picked up her cane as I helped her out of my pickup. I was again impressed by how much she knew about what was going on in the area. We were an odd pair indeed. She had dressed for the meeting, complete with string of pearls at the neck and a ruby brooch holding her shawl in place around her shoulders.

Rows of folding chairs filled the large room. At the front, tables had been set up for the council members and a machine readied to record the proceedings. Lights suspended from the ceiling had not yet been lit but soon would be in use and there was a water fountain at one corner and a hall leading to bathrooms at the other. The tall windows had original glass, wavy in the evening light. It was a lovely old wooden building, a perfect place to have this public forum. Erica spotted me right away and motioned to the front where she had roped off two seats. I saw Will Marston seated among a bunch of suits and figured these were the limo riders from New York. The old man from the pharmacy was there, nodding in his seat. The hippies from the luncheonette and Doris and Eddy Barr sat near the back and I spotted some farmers from the market and a few others I knew, including our mailman and two guys from the public works department who had fixed a deep pothole on our road. I estimated the crowd at close to two hundred people, maybe more. The meeting agenda was posted on a big white paper tacked to a cardboard resting on an easel. The American flag stood off to one side. I wondered if the meeting would open with a prayer like they did in Virginia. A buzz filled the room. Mrs. Ward and I took our seats. My stomach felt slightly queasy. She sat straight in her chair, smiled broadly, nodded to a few people, and seemed perfectly comfortable. Erica tapped her gavel hard and the room hushed. Someone coughed. I heard a fly snapping against a window pane.

“Please follow the rules,” Erica announced after tapping her gavel three times. “After the council has reviewed the recommendations it will vote on, if you have a question or comment, please raise your hand to be recognized, state your name and address for the record, and briefly state your case.”

There was no prayer. It began with the mundane – dispensing with reading of the last meeting’s minutes, thanking various officials from the County Seat, the state representative and senator and a host of others who had begun working on the problem of replacing the bridge. Erica kept the thing moving along and there was little discussion since the decision to replace the bridge had already been made at the state level. Everyone agreed it was a necessary part of life and commerce for the region. After that a discussion of a new dog ordinance – to leash or not to leash – took up the council’s time until the vote was taken. Result: to leash within town limits, which were designated on a map in the hall that anyone interested could look at on their way out.

* * *

At 7:15 someone switched on the lights and Erica announced an open discussion would follow the council’s recommendation for agenda number four – the future of Trout River Falls. Silence followed a general murmur as Valerie read from an official looking document.

“Whereas the closing of many businesses has caused the town of Trout River Falls to face a severe financial crisis due to lack of tax revenue, the five member council has reached out to the largest landowner, Mrs. Cecelia Ward, and proposed that her properties be turned over to a preservation trust and that, further, this trust shall refurbish, own and administer the historic properties comprised of Ward Manor, the Trout River Mill, and the Back Street Button Factory building. Further the trust or its appointees will supervise new milling and bread baking operations.”

Valerie put down the paper and turned to Erica. A hand went up to my right. Another popped up over near the flag. I heard a rustle of chairs and people began to talk. Erica tapped her gavel lightly and leaned into her mic. “We will now open the floor for comments. Five minutes per person maximum. Thank you.” She nodded to Valerie, then looked out at the hall and I thought her gaze rested on her husband, Will.

“Millicent Fendy, 103 Pine Ridge Road,” a stout woman stood up to speak first. “I want to know how you think starting a bakery is going to save Trout River Falls. Now we all know the problems an old village like this one has what with malls and interstates and competition from all these discount places. Maybe we’d be better off turning this whole town into a museum.” She sat down abruptly as if she didn’t expect an answer.

“Craig LeLong, North Cedar Drive up on the hill north of town. I don’t see any reason to go getting ourselves into a spin over what the council ladies want to do here so long as it’s not going to cost us taxpayers any money.” He sounded to me like a man who never met a tax he would support. Ben O’Shea stood up and said he was for anything that would bring in more money and what about a grocery store. It went on like that for half an hour until Will Marston stood up.

“I represent a group of investors.” he began and paused to peer around the room. The men in suits surrounding him looked to me about as out of place as I would in a Board of Directors meeting on Wall Street.

“My clients have developed the mall north of town.”

“We all know what they’ve done here,” a voice shouted.

Erica rapped her gavel. “Please let’s all be civil.” She nodded to Will.

“And they have also bid on two properties that lie between the mall development and the town boundaries.”

“The Pritchard dairy farm for one,” the same man’s voice called out. Erica rapped the gavel hard this time and gave the man a stern look.

“Development is coming to the Trout River Falls area. It’s inevitable,” Will went on. “And we believe it will be good for the entire community. Therefore, my clients,” he motioned to the suits surrounding him, “would like at this time to publicly state – so there will be no intimations of secrecy later on – their intention to bid on the remaining properties in Trout River Falls – that is any properties not controlled by the trust after it’s been established and approved by the council – with the intention to develop and attract a variety of businesses tied to the area’s community developments that have already been approved at the county seat level.”

As Will finished his prepared statement, there was the sound of a group intake of breath, a as if suddenly the room had become starved for oxygen. A dozen or more hands shot up. People began to whisper and it seemed, inside that high ceilinged room, like a warning wind from an approaching storm had slipped in under the doors. My heart was thumping and I looked at Mrs. Ward, seated beside me, but she only smiled, one hand resting on top of her cane, the other in her lap, fingers curled inward around her thumb.

When she stood, it was with an attitude of authority that had much more than age about it. She surveyed the room for what seemed quite some time, gazing at the table of council members, the women who had landed so unexpectedly at her dock only a week before, and then the faces of her neighbors. She waited for the room to settle, as she seemed to know it would. She did not raise her hand for permission to speak. She did not clear her throat. She did not hold a paper with prepared remarks. Her hand rested on her cane as calmly as if she were standing on her porch steps. I was probably the only one in that room who saw her left foot tapping slightly, impatiently, a bit imperiously. Then there was silence. Complete, utter lack of any sound. The sun was setting. The lights hanging from the ceiling above us seemed brighter than they had been earlier. Will Marston sat down. One of the suited men whispered something to him, his hand cupped over his mouth.

“Well now,” Cecelia Ward began. She rested both hands on top of her cane. She was like an old tree that had grown for so many years in one spot that she and the piece of ground where she had rooted were now inseparable.

“I’ve lived my entire life right here in Trout River Falls. I’ve seen hurricanes, floods, blizzards that buried houses. I’ve been through three wars and now we’re in another off over there in the Middle East. I suppose when you reach my age, you can look back and say, ‘I’ve seen it all.’ Fact is, I don’t feel as if I have seen it all. Not yet.

“When I was a girl, this town was as active as a hive of honeybees. We had an old wooden bridge then. It was a busy bridge, something always rumbling along over it back and forth. And over the years, as I watched the town slow down, and I felt myself slowing down, and when all the things that happened to the town seemed to happen in my own life, well I resigned myself to the inevitable.

“Now these young women come along and say “Wait a minute. It is not inevitable that something vibrant has to fade away forever. There must be ways to build on the past, to revitalize what was once a dynamic, active community. We do not live in a museum. We are not wax figures doomed to watch through unseeing eyes.

“And so I agreed to set up this trust. Through the land and buildings that were willed to me by previous generations, I own most of Trout River Falls. The men in suits can come close. They can come right up to the boundaries of town if others are willing to sell. But they cannot cross that bridge. Because most of this town is going in that trust. And if others want to build on that I say fine. But find a way to build that improves on what we have. Not a way that denigrates or denies it.”

She sat down with a soft thump of her cane.

Hands shot up to be recognized. Erica raised her gavel. A fly bumped insistently against one of the ceiling lights above me Maze was down in Virginia now, where it was hot and humid and I knew when he returned, without needing any proof of this, that he would be there tomorrow and the next day. He would be there as surely as the rocks in my garden were an immutable fixture beneath the earth. He was like this town, unwavering, placid in his ability to wait out every twist and turn of the march of time. I raised my hand and Erica pointed her gavel at me.

“It’s getting late,” she said. “I know many of you have something to say but we do have to cut this discussion off before we vote. The council will recognize one last speaker.” She pointed to me.

“This is a beautiful place,” I began. “A place worth saving. A place worth nurturing. A place for everyone to enjoy. It can be a dynamic place. A place with a future and not only a past. There’s no reason why a historic mill has to lay fallow or why it cannot come alive. It may be that milling flour the old way is less economically efficient but there are markets for what is less efficient and these markets are growing. As societies move forward into an ever more advanced technological future where everything is mass produced, we will want not more efficiency but more authenticity.

“I’ve been an outsider here. But I’ve come to treasure this place and the people in it. I would hate to lose all that to another mall or subdivision that could be plunked down anywhere in the world and look exactly like any other mall or subdivision anywhere.”

I sat down abruptly. The council voted unanimously in favor of the motion to move forward to the next step. Establishing and endowing the trust, and installing its board of directors. Chairs scraped the floor. People shuffled out. Talk about the storm, the bridge, the heat wave, the new mall, and other topics could be heard in bits and pieces as we all filed out into the late evening air.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

THE ROCK

I stood at the garden gate again, naked with the sun on my shoulders. The sky a deep azure spread out forever above me. The green forest surrounded me in the distance. My garden wall, obscured by the riot of blooming vines, hid me from the outside world. The hose was coiled at my feet like a snake snoozing in the midday heat. I turned the spigot, heard a small burst ofwater and watched the hose plump out. I would need it soon. The cool water. But now I opened the gate and stepped into that world of blooms and brown earth, of row upon row of beans and tomatoes, mounds of melon vine and yellow zucchini blossoms like ruffled paper flowers that dotted the dark soil. Around the edges, clematis bloomed bright purple like a flower curtain. Vines with red-orange trumpet flowers reached out above the fence, standing at attention like an orchestra of small horns pointing in all directions. Pink and white hollyhocks stood in a tall array along one side, and opposite them red rambling rose hung down over the ground heavy and full. Hummingbirds zoomed from one trumpet flower to the next, jockeying for position, chasing each other in wide arcs, darting in then out from flower to flower, hovering for the few seconds it took to drink their nectar.

I saw it all as a blur of color and motion, saw nothing in particular but the whole as background music. I was aware that this was the beginning of the very height of my summer garden and with the canoe trip now over, I was back in my own world, safe but still unsettled. I picked up the cultivating rake and slipped on my gloves, lifted the hose nozzle and opened the valve. I pointed the nozzle up toward the sky and released a soft spray of cool water over my naked body. This was just right. The water ran down, cooled my skin, and I dragged the hose behind me into the garden, leaving the gate open. Droplets of water rolled off my body onto the dark soil.

In the few days I’d been away, weeds had taken hold. How fast they encroached into my space in this short growing season. Now it was time to restore order. First I pulled up the largest ones. From one row to the next, I worked methodically, pulling and then piling weeds in small clumps as I went. Those that were too small to pull got the rake. They would die from being disturbed and if they didn’t, I would go after them again another day. Outside the garden I had left a large basket. Later I would pick beans and tomatoes, fill the basket and take it back to the barn. There were green peppers and eggplant ripe and ready. Soon the ears of corn would tassel out. Then we would eat sweet, juicy corn every night. All the lettuce but a few hardy stragglers were past their prime. The sun was too hot now for them to withstand. But now, besides the vegetables, a profusion of flowers begged to be cut. The barn would look like a Bonnard painting tonight, festive, fragrant, rich with life provided by the earth.

I moved up and down the rows of vegetables. At one point, about halfway down the row of pole beans dangling like earrings from wood tripods along the south side of the garden fence, my foot struck the big rock that had worked its way above the soil. In the beginning, when Maze and I had first prepared the garden plot, we had dug up enough stones to build a two-foot high wall along the north side of the garden. Some stones required loosening with a pick axe. Others had to be wedged out from underneath and pried up from the soil. I often came upon a nest of rocks, some small, others too heavy for me to lift alone. At such times Maze and I worked well as a team. I would loosen; he would haul. Together we had built the wall that outlined the first perimeter of my garden. The fence grew from just inside the stone wall and wrapped around the other four sides to meet itself at the gate. I crafted the gate out of aluminum and copper wire strung between a frame and posts Maze built out of treated two by fours. He hung the gate on hinges at the fence posts that he set into concrete. Whenever I came upon more stones, if they were small enough for me to lift, I carried them to the wall and welled loosely around the posts with stones. By now the fence along the north wall seemed to be growing like some ancient Druid construction. A series of stone circles around pillars that stood facing each other. These circles connected to a wall that was slowly surrounding the fence.

Every summer I strung more wires into the gate. I’d wrapped and wrapped it until certain parts of it looked sculptural and began to take on organic forms as if they had grown from the garden. I wove wire around old ceramic pots and bowls, anchoring them firmly into the gate and in these I planted perennial seeds that sprouted anew each season. Cracks in the old pots allowed water to run through and the plants flourished, flowers springing up or drooping over heavy with blooms as each year they grew larger and more luscious. The pots and fragments of pots held daffodils, iris, hyacinth, crocus, and in others day lilies that hung loosely with their roots all a jumble, the blooms gaily heralding each new morning. I planted sunflowers along the south side just inside the fence. Each day they followed the path of the sun.

Now, since Maze had not yet returned from Virginia, I struggled alone with the big, round rock. It was dark gray, and I could not get a good grip on it nor find its edges. It didn’t look like the others in the stone wall and it seemed worn down with age, smooth and without any discernable shape to grab. I trudged up the path to the barn to retrieve the pick axe and the large shovel. I preferred the smaller, square nosed one but this procedure called for a pointed tip and the large one would also give me more traction under the stone.

Normally by this time of day I would have been at the pond, swimming or stretched out on the flat erratic drying in the sun. But today I was on a mission, determined to rout this stone from my garden and move it to the wall. If it was as round as it seemed, I thought it would be possible to roll it out of the garden by myself.

I reached the barn, grabbed the shovel and pick axe and trudged back along the path, bumping against the bobbing heads of Queen Anne’s Lace. Butterflies flitted among the flower heads as I moved past. The pick axe dragged along the ground, too heavy for me to hold over my shoulder along with the shovel. Beads of sweat gathered on my chest and ran down between my breasts. My feet squished a little inside the work boots.

Once back in the garden, I sized up the stone’s crown, estimating how much more of this beast lay below the dirt’s surface. How it had escaped us before I couldn’t imagine. Except that earth was always shifting in the garden and this was not an area where I had planted anything yet. Perhaps it had been buried before but had moved up until I could see it and now it bothered me just to know it was there, like a discordant note in an otherwise harmonious tune. I lifted the shovel and pointed it down at what I thought must be the edge of the rock. With a determined, muscular thrust I aimed it into the ground and jabbed hard. The shovel tip hit rock with a clang that reverberated up the wooden handle and jangled my hands. Instinctively I dropped the shovel.

“Damn.”

With the pick axe raised above my shoulders, I let it fall, aimed at what I assumed was just beyond the edge of the stone. It came down with a mighty whack farther out from the rock’s crown and again struck rock, this time with a dull thud. It sank into the dirt where I let it rest standing on the flat of its blade.

I stood there in the sun and realized sweat was now pouring down my body. I took the hose, turned the nozzle to spray and held it above my head. A fine mist, cool and sparkling in the midday sun, washed over me. I needed to dig around this thing, to get it out of my way. That meant sizing up its dimensions. How deep did it go? Was it really as round as it looked? Or did it have some odd shape that would fool me into thinking I could deal with it alone only to discover I was way out of my depth? It seemed to be too big a task for me and yet I was drawn to it in some perverse way, as if it held some secret that I had to unearth. This rock and I were now in a relationship and I had to know what made us tick. We’re like these stones, pushed around by the life around us. But we’re also like the erratic boulders. Once we stop rolling aimlessly, we find an immovable stability. If we can ever find that place where we are meant to land.

So back to work with the shovel, digging earth, piling it to the side, going around and around the rock until I had dug a moat. Deeper down the ground was hard packed, more difficult to dig. I applied pressure to the top of the shovel and, with my boot heel, pushed it as hard as I could into the ground. After a certain depth it would not budge any deeper. So I pointed the hose to run water into the trench to loosen the harder subsoil. Its always a dilemma just how deep to go with any endeavor. There’s always risk. And the promise of reward. The balance is not only delicate but elusive. Sometimes the risk is not as obvious as the reward seems to be. The risk can take different forms. Some of them subtle, almost invisible.

After the trench had absorbed quite a bit of water, I again applied pressure to the shovel and felt the ground give way ever so slightly. I moved to a new position and with the greatest force I could muster, jumped onto the top of the shovel to let my weight force it down. As I landed, my left foot didn’t quite center on the flat edge of the top of the shovel blade and I slipped and lunged left while still hanging onto the shovel handle. Both of us – theshovel and me –tilted left and in what seemed to me like a slow motion dance, over we went onto the wet earth. The shovel handle lurched towards me and hit my skull above my forehead.

I let out a yowl and, as I lay there in the mud, immobile, felt hands under my arms pulling at me. I fought to pull away but in my dazed state was not quite sure what was happening.

“It’s me,” Maze’s voice came to me. “I’ve got you. You’re okay.”

He pulled me up into a sitting position. I rubbed my head and realized my hands were covered in mud and I must be transferring it to my hair.

“What are you doing out here like this?” Maze’s voice seemed far away.

I didn’t answer for a minute. The garden began to come back into focus. I saw flowers, beans dangling, a butterfly here and there, green tomatoes, a few red ones now, and then I looked down and spotted the shovel and the giant stone. I struggled to get back up onto my feet. Maze held me down.

“What are you doing?” he asked again.

“Trying to get that big rock out of the garden,” I answered absently, as if we were talking over a cup of tea in the barn and not out here in the sun with me on the ground and a lump forming on the side of my head. I explored it with my fingertips.

“Ow,” I howled.

“What is it?” Maze asked and leaned over me to peer at where I had just touched the side of my head.

“Shovel hit me I guess.” Slowly I looked at the rock. “I can’t tell where it ends.”

“Let me have a look,” he leaned farther down. “Can you stand up?” He parted my hair, wet and matted with mud, so he could see the lump better.

“What are you looking at?”

“You have a lump and you wanted to see where it ends.”

“I’m not talking about that.”

I pushed his hand away.

“What are you talking about then?”

“The stone. I can’t tell where it ends.”

“What stone? What are you doing like this?”

“That one.”

I pointed to the crown of rock with the muddy moat I had dug around it. I grabbed Maze’s arm and pulled, using him as leverage to hike myself up.

He flexed his muscle and pulled me. “I don’t understand,” he said looking from my naked, mud splattered body to the stone and back. “You’re here naked trying to pry up a huge stone all by yourself?” He looked into my face, stared at my eyes, then looked back at the stone. “Why are you naked?” He asked it again sounding a little frantic now. Like maybe it occurred to him that I might be demented or suffering from heat stroke.

At that point, I let go of his arm. I stepped over to the hose, swiveled the nozzle and rinsed myself off , starting with my hair and letting the water cascade over my body. The sun had moved west, its most intense heat over for the day. A slight breeze rustled the leaves and moved through the garden.

“There’s so much you just don’t know,” I answered him finally. I had no idea where this was going to go, but I wanted to lay it all out now, to root out everything that was on my mind.

“Obviously.” He said it dryly, with no trace of emotion. “Like this.” He pointed to my naked body and waved his hand over to the rock.

I sighed. I felt tired, overwhelmed by the whole thing. And then he did something I never would have expected. He reached up and grabbed the V neck of his shirt and pulled at it and tossed the shirt toward the garden fence. It missed but he let it lie there. He grabbed the shovel and walked with determination over to the rock.

“You want it out of here?” he asked, his voice louder and more strident than the situation demanded. “Let’s get it the hell out then.”

With a powerful thrust he sank the shovel at an angle a few inches beyond the rock and pushed it deep into the soil. I didn’t hear the shovel hit rock. He pulled it out and moved a little to the right and repeated this until he had gone halfway around the stone and reached where I had dropped the pick axe. He grabbed it and raised it above his head, with the flat prying side faced forward. His arm muscles flexed. He sized up the position of the pick axe and the rock. Down he came with it in a mighty arc until the axe head landed with a thump half buried under the earth. He left it standing there and brought the shovel around and slid it under the pick axe and using it as a lever against the axe head, he pulled back. I heard the axe tip scrape against rock, saw the rock move slightly upward. Maze grunted as he pushed the shovel farther under the axe head and repeated pulling it back towards himself. His back muscles swelled as he applied pressure. The rock groaned, moved again, and now I came over and grabbed the handle of the pick axe and pulled it back towards Maze. Together we pulled and pulled, pushed both tools farther under the rock, and pulled some more.

Finally, after much straining and pulling and repositioning of our tools, we had managed to tip the rock about a third of the way out of the earth.

“We need something to put it on to wheel it out of here,” said Maze.

I didn’t say anything. Maze was breathing hard. After a few minutes he wiped sweat from his forehead and stared at the rock.

“Why aren’t you dressed?” he asked.

“It’s a long story.”

“I have time. We need a break from this thing anyway.”

He dropped the shovel and walked out of the garden. I watched as he made his way up the path and toward the barn where he disappeared. Was I supposed to follow him? Was he simply walking away from me? Back to wherever he’d been hiding? Where had he come from anyway? I hosed myself off once again. It would be lovely to go for a swim in the pond I was thinking. Why did he suddenly show up in the middle of the day I was also thinking. The plane must have left Charlottesville early. And all those questions he asked. What could I or would I even want to tell him about my activities when he wasn’t around? Thoughts roiled around in my mind like a school of fish, first heading one way then swerving off together in a different direction.

Relationships have a life. That life relies on decisions reached at odd, unexpected moments. Two people live together, eat together, have sex, talk about everyday things. They go about their life together as if it will go on the same way indefinitely. People rarely look at what keeps them together, at what their deal was at the beginning and is at any given moment as it moves through time, or what it has tacitly become. Their deal can change. Sometimes the people change but never get around to renegotiating their deal. I didn’t know what our deal was anymore. Maybe I never had understood it.

I dropped the hose and turned toward the barn. As my gaze rested on the path worn through the field of Queen Anne’s Lace, I spotted Maze, walking toward me, holding a large plastic pitcher and two glasses against his bare chest. The thing was though, the rest of him was naked also. He sauntered down the path grinning and I could see that he would have waved to me if his hands hadn’t been full. He slowed down as he got closer and watched me tentatively, the grin fading to only a sheepish smile now.

“What are you doing?” I asked as he entered the garden.

“I thought we needed some refreshment.” He handed me the glasses and filled them up. He placed the pitcher on top of the stubborn stone and then raised his glass high in the air.

“To the naked gardener,” he grinned again and took a long drink of what I realized was lemonade.

I drank mine, too. I was very thirsty. I drank the entire glass empty and held it out for a second, watching him as he picked up the pitcher and refilled our glasses.

“Let’s get this rock the hell out of here,” he said. “If we can get it onto the shovel I think I can pull it out and over to the wall. I can’t lift it, though. It’ll have to sit there. Maybe we can use it as a marker next to the gate. What do you think?”

I was too stunned to answer.

We again applied all our strength to the rock and slowly, little by little, we upended it and finally exposed its borders. It was not as round as I had thought judging by its crown alone. Indeed one side of it was rather flat. Maze managed to push this flat side over and onto the shovel. Walking backwards along the garden path, he dragged it to the gate outside the garden and over to where he had long ago cemented the gate post into the ground. When he got the rock against the post, I came to his side and together we pushed and pushed at it, grunting and gasping in deep breaths, until it rolled off the shovel and landed smack against the post where it sat inert in its final resting place.

I looked over to the hole it had left behind. I didn’t know what to say. Thank you seemed a bit formal. You’re naked seemed a bit obvious. But there was so much I wanted to say. Right now I loved him more than I thought I could ever love anyone again. Right now I would have stayed with him forever. Right now. But then there was the other day and the look of anguish and anger on his face. What happened the next time I resented him or thought he was trying to control me, or that he might at some other time, some time far away in a cloudy future that, on this day, neither of us could see with certainty.

“Nobody can tell what tomorrow will bring,” Maze said, looking up at a cloud far off in the distance above the trees to the west. “I can’t give you any guarantees. And you can’t give me any. I guess that’s about the whole thing right there.”

The cloud looked so pretty against the bright blue sky. And darkly ominous at the edges also.

“I can’t turn back the clock for you. I can’t bring back your wife. And I can’t be her either. You have to let her go if you want to hold onto me.”

Maze took my hand as we left the garden and wandered over to the pond. He helped me climb up onto the erratic boulder. We sat on it together. I let my feet dangle over the edge into the water.

“I started gardening naked the first year we were here,” I told him. “Whenever you leave to go to the college, I come out to the garden. Nobody ever comes here. Nobody ever sees me. I never told anyone. Until now. Except I told the others on the canoe trip.”

“If you had told me I probably wouldn’t have left at all,” Maze said. “I would have watched you all day long. I’ve let my wife go a thousand times. And I’ve clung to you a thousand more. All I have left now is the anger I felt after she died. I was angry at you for going on that trip and then when I saw you riding the falls, I thought I would explode. I wanted to jump in and grab that canoe. And then you handled it so well. Much better than I could have. And it made me feel stupid. And then I was angry at myself.”

“And now?”

“Now.” He grunted a little. “I like it out here with nothing on.”

I didn’t say anything.

“I’m not asking you to be a good college wife or to join any groups or to change in any way. I don’t need you to adapt to my way of life. I want us to build a life that works for us. Together. I want to stay together but not because I want to replace her with you. I want you. I’ve been feeling angry because ... ”

I lowered my body from the stone into the cool water. I held onto the stone and looked up at Maze.

“Because?”

“Because I felt guilty.”

“Why?”

“Because I think of you as my life. And because I didn’t know until I met you what love really was.”

I grabbed his feet and yanked. He slid into the water. He put his arms around me. We rested against the giant glacial stone that was abandoned on this spot ten thousand years ago. It felt solid, immovable. Yet it had been pushed here by a force greater than its own weight. It would not move again in my lifetime or even in a thousand lifetimes. But one day, perhaps another ice age would descend upon this land, pushing this rock to some other place, depositing it somewhere further south. I had felt it was too dangerous to attach myself to anything permanent because nothing is fixed. I thought if I made my own rules I could let go of the feeling that I couldn’t really hold onto anything. But nobody really makes their own rules. The rules are there. Maybe nature makes them. What could be more unreliable than that? I didn’t know anymore. I wanted to become part of the unpredictable flow of life, to go over its falls with confidence that no matter what happened, I could manage it somehow.

Maze pulled himself onto the erratic and I pushed off, swam to the other end of the pond, turned and kicked freely in the water lying on my back. Slowly I propelled myself back and looked up at him.

“Do you think there’s hope for us?”

He slid back into the water and together we swam down to the other end, turned and came back to the big stone. We climbed out of the water and stretched out on it to rest in the late afternoon sun. I closed my eyes and images of rushing rivers and sleeping trout and painted bodies, of soft southern nights and stately old houses, of Mexican sunsets and debris strewn riverbanks, all swirled together in my mind.

Maze rubbed my belly. His hand slipped down to my thigh and he rolled onto his side so that his leg was over my legs and his body pressed against mine.

“Shall we have a baby together, leave Virginia for Vermont every summer, work the farm together, grow old together?” I asked almost of myself.

“Do you want a baby?” Maze asked.

“Maybe.”

I expected him to have all kinds of plans, to be organizing our lives in his head. When he said nothing, I turned to look at him. I traced the line of his nose and chin with my index finger. What would he look like in twenty-five years? How handsome he was now, I thought. The girls in his classes must be in love with him. In twenty-five years would I still be gardening naked?

It was impossible to answer these questions and I didn’t give voice to them. There are no certainties. I hoped he understood that somewhere deep in his soul. I couldn’t guarantee that it would rain tomorrow or that the sun would shine or that the earth would always tilt exactly as it did today.

“I’ll accept whatever comes,” Maze spoke without warning. “We don’t have to get married. We can leave things just the way they are now. I don’t want you to feel pressured,” said Maze.

Couples work out all kinds of arrangements,” I said.

“Is that what you want?” he asked. “For us to work out an arrangement?”

“I think I wanted certainty that nothing would change,” I said.

I wove my fingers between his. I turned on my side to face him.

“But now I think I’m happy with what we had in Mexico and what we have right here. Mexico and the garden. I’ll hold onto that and the rest I’ll leave to whatever power holds the world together for us. Because there must be such a power. Otherwise we would all just fly off into nothingness and yet here we are.”

He kissed my shoulder and my neck, cupped my breast in his palm, moved over me in that way he had done the first time on the hard tile patio of my little rented house in Mexico so long ago. I closed my eyes as he lifted my hips to meet him.

There is a theory in physics that says everything in the universe is composed of very short sub atomic strings constantly vibrating at very subtle frequencies. Vibrating at all times, forever and ever. So vast, so unimaginable, yet predictable in the eons of universe time. And all of it a constant recapitulation where nothing is lost, only transforming into something else.

We left it there. And the world did not fly off into nothingness. Because everything turns into something else and nothing stays as it is. And yet there we all were, the same, yet different. The years ahead of us would stretch out to include a baby, a house on the farm, canoeing on the Trout River, going over the falls enough times so that Maze took over the stern spot, seeing the rebirth of Trout River Falls, and my integration into a community of women who set out to make a success of what seemed at the beginning an utterly impossible task. How we did it is another story for another time.

FOR READERS AND BOOK CLUBS

Questions & Discussion Topics

Katelyn has a dilemma. Should she marry her professor and make a life with him or leave for a year-long fellowship in Europe and probably lose him?

Discussion:

When Katelyn strips off her clothes and heads for the garden naked, do you think she is going toward something or running from something?

Is Katelyn’s reluctance about marriage justified by her past experience? Do the other women’s opinions about marriage support or contradict Katelyn’s uncertainty about what she will ultimately decide?

In the first chapter Katelyn resents having to clean up after Maze – albeit in a barn. But this is the traditional role of women. Will this ever change? Should it?

Is it possible for a woman to be married and maintain the independence and sense of self she had before she married? This is a big worry for Katelyn. Is it for you? Is it for most women?

Katelyn is concerned about the issue of a man trying to control her. Their argument about hang gliding and canoeing over the Trout River falls is about that. Do women tend to become more accommodating – give up more – after they get married so the marriage will work? Is Katelyn right or wrong to worry about this happening to her?

Katelyn turns to other women as a counterpoint to her fear that Maze does not understand her. What role do the friendships with the other women play in Katelyn’s life? How about yours? Do you find comfort and understanding with your women friends?

Each of the women on the canoe trip is facing some kind of challenge.

Discussion:

There are references to stones and rocks throughout the book. What do rocks represent where they appear in different places in the story?

What are the big challenges most women face? Are the five other women on this canoe trip equipped to face the challenges life is throwing at them or do you think they are unable to cope with their dilemmas?

When Katelyn initiates body painting during the river trip, she gives the women a new way to view their bodies. Why are women so intensely anxious and ambivalent and unhappy about their bodies? Is this societal or are women born with bad feelings about their bodies? In what ways can women counteract all the negative messages thrown at them about their bodies?

What do you think the scene with the train engineer represents?

When the storm hits, the story shifts from showing nature tranquil and soothing to threatening and out of control. What does the storm represent in this story?

There are seven women in this story. They represent a wide range of female maturity and life experience. What do women want from life at different stages? What should they want?

Saving The Town

Discussion:

One of the themes in The Naked Gardener is saving something that has all but collapsed. The farm. The chicken coop. The town. And even relationships within the story. What do you think about this theme? How is it relevant to your life?

At the town meeting, Katelyn talks about building on the past. How do cultures do this and are they still building or are we destroying the planet more quickly than we can possibly save it?

Katelyn spends a lot of time in her garden. This is a major theme in the book. What do you do to restore your energy and reconnect to your dreams?

In the book, the town council is made up of women. Are women more likely to cooperate for the common good or is politics the same game for men and women?

AN INTERVIEW WITH THE AUTHOR

Q: People often ask authors where they get their ideas. Where did this idea of a naked gardener come from?

A: At a certain point in my life, I knew three women who gardened naked. They all had different takes on why they did it but all of them felt it was really important to them. So I began to think about a woman who goes to her garden naked and what that might mean and in what ways it was liberating for her and important in her life.

Q: Was one of those women you?

A: Ha! Decidedly not. I’m allergic to bee stings and poison ivy and bug bites of all kinds.

Q: Do you have a garden?

A: Not a formal garden any longer, but I love to be outside planting and clipping and weeding and doing all those things that bring me closer to the earth. I love to nurture growing things, including plants and people. Plants always thrive for me. I plant to attract birds and butterflies and I raise orchids and bring them into my greenhouse in the winter so I have blooming plants all year long.

Q: How about living in a chicken coop. Have you done that?

A: Well, I did stay as a guest in one for a few days and I have to tell you it was really lovely and delightful.

Q: Where was that?

A: In Vermont. My friend and her (oh how I hate this descriptive phrase) significant other were living in a chicken coop at the time and there was another coop attached to a rundown old barn. They made that into the guest coop. I wasn’t the only person who stayed there. It was a prized treat to be invited.

Q: Your character Katelyn has real issues around marrying. Was that the main theme you were addressing in The Naked Gardener – ambivalence about marriage?

A: That was one theme. But the main thrust of the book is about how to be with someone else – for a woman – and still be who you are. Not necessarily who you were before you were with that person because we all change through relationship and through time and just through living. But how do you stay with someone – be married – and not lose yourself. I think a lot of women just become automated and one day wake up and ask: “Where did I go?”

Q: One of the other themes is the community of women. I was struck by the differences in their ages. In many books about a group of women they’re all pretty much the same age.

A: I think of each of these women as a person yet I also wanted them to symbolize what a woman at that age might be going through. There’s a huge spread between Hope, the youngest, and Mrs. Ward, the oldest. And they’re facing totally different life challenges and choices.

Q: And what about the river and the rocks?

A: When I was in Lamaze class our teacher, who was a nurse, talked about giving children roots and wings. I had never heard that before. The river represents the wings. It moves you forward. The rocks represent the roots. They’re in the earth. In the book, there are different kinds of rocks and stones. Some are fixed and some are always showing up anew. I think each of us is born to face a certain life challenge. That is fixed. Along the way we come up against many obstacles in our path. It’s up to us to deal with them. Katelyn faces the stones in her garden and she figures out how to move them out of her way so she can get closer to solving her own particular life puzzle.

Q: How did you start writing? I mean did you just sit down one day and begin a novel?

A: Oh no. It was a long process. I began as an artist. I actually did the cover drawing for The Naked Gardener. At some point I began to think in terms of stories. Words kept appearing in my paintings so I began to write small pieces. The first full book I wrote was a novella about the last gargoyle being carved by the last Italian stone carver for the world’s last Gothic cathedral. It’s about the gargoyle coming to life and escaping in Washington D.C. After that I wrote more and then attended writing workshops to learn craft and how to think about putting a book together. It’s taken me a long time. And of course I was working and raising a family so I didn’t have all that much time to devote to writing.

Q: How long did it take to write The Naked Gardener?

A: Oh about twenty years. Everything I’ve ever written – all the lessons I’ve learned – go into the book I’m working on now. But in real time, this book took about a year. I would say that’s average.

Q: What are you working on now?

A: I’ve begun making notes for a follow up book about saving the town that figures heavily in The Naked Gardener. The town called Trout River Falls. I’m thinking it may be told from the different women’s points of view. I also plan to publish a middle grade novel about a sensible girl who’s visited by a tooth fairy with an attitude.

Q: What do you hope readers will take away from The Naked Gardener?

A: Oh that’s such a highly personal experience – reading a book. For me, a book is a success if I lose myself while I’m within its pages. It’s a kind of magic. Different from a movie because it lasts longer and because it engages the reader on a deep level. If readers forget where they are and become immersed in Katelyn’s world, if they feel the river moving them along on the canoe trip, if they think how lovely it would be to go into their gardens naked, then I would feel the book has done what I set out to do.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

L B Gschwandtner is married, the mother of three daughters, a writer, magazine editor, artist, and co-owner with her husband of an integrated media business.

Her short stories have been awarded prizes from two Writer’s Digest Writing Competitions, The Lorian Hemingway Short Story Competition, and one of her stories was short listed by the Tom Howard Short Story Contest. Her work has appeared in various journals including Del Sol Review.

She is the founder of TheNovelette.com, which runs no-fee, themed, short story contests for emerging writers.

She lives in a house on stilts overlooking a tidal creek in Virginia where she watches Bald eagles soar past her windows.