Cat Stevens and Coffee

by Cassie Adams

            I feel like a fraud as the trip hums busily along without my assistance. I wonder if Professor Gills is judging me for thinking I’m part of the “river-family” when I clearly have about as much expertise as Paris Hilton (ok, maybe a little more). Sure, I know how to row more or less, and I know what to do if you fall in a rapid, get stuck on a rock, or faceplant (or boatplant, if you’d prefer) into a canyon wall. But these seem like things anybody could figure out if pressed. Still, I have an aching feeling that I must prove myself as a veteran of the river, hoping that like an old friend who’s gained some social status she’ll recognize and acknowledge our comradery in front of this new crowd.

            But the plain facts are that I don’t know a lot of things that are expected of river veterans. I don’t know the names of the plants of the desert (except the pesky goddamn Tamarisks), and I don’t know how all the rocks were formed. I only have a fleeting interest in petroglyphs, and if I were to be stalked by a mountain lion, I’d be dead meat. I don’t know how to tie fancy knots (although I’m up two for two thanks to Carl and Peter 'showing me the ropes' on the trip), and I don’t know how to row a boat without oarlocks. And you would think by now I’d know how not to burn the tops of my feet, but here I am with a blazing red Chaco-shaped burn.

            But I do know that sometimes it’s nice to have no barriers whatsoever on your line of sight. I know that one of the best feelings in the world is to sit at the end of camp looking out, and to pretend for just one moment that there is no camp. To forget about the boats and the people and to remember that nature will go on without us. I know that sometimes it’s worth walking barefoot even if every step lodges a new burr between my toes, and that I’ve never slept better anywhere than I do on the bow of a raft listening to each wave pass. I know what it’s like to forget time altogether, and let the days blend together as I return to my natural state.

            So I relax and forget the desire to prove myself. This is the river. There is no self. There is be, there is do. I focus on getting to know my trip-mates rather than on impressing them, and it turns out to be an infinitely better use of my time.

            I’m a firm believer that you can’t really know a person until you’ve been on a river with them. On the river, all the bullshit of city life falls away. People are no longer categorized into those who text back quickly or post obnoxious facebook statuses, those whose numbers I have or whose numbers I want, or those I wish didn’t have my number. On the river there are just people. The playing field levels instantly, there’s no cool, no fashion, no clean, no pretty, no makeup, no shaving. No pressure.

            In the “real” world, I usually find that the only authentic communication I can muster is in writing. On the river, authenticity is the norm. When you let people open up and simply be themselves, they will always surprise you. True, not everyone finds this ability on the river, but I’ve found that the majority of people see the river, at least on an unconscious level, the same way I do: as a way to forget yourself, and by doing so to find yourself more completely than you ever have or will at home (assuming there’s a place you can call home besides the river).

If you listen closely, the river will be the only therapist you will ever need. It gives perspective and wisdom when you get too close to your own life to see it clearly, something I’m a bit of an expert at. Sometimes the best part of a rafting trip is the few days after you get back. The day you get back from “roughing it” you become grateful for many things you may ordinarily take for granted: flushing toilets, showers, air conditioning, and clean clothes. You realize what a miracle it is that we can commute such large distances in a small amount of time, and you will never appreciate a comfortable bed as much as you will after sleeping with naught but a deflated piece of “padded” rubber between your spine and the earth for five days.

The only way to see where you come from with any clarity is to put some distance between it and yourself. To live in the present fully we must be able to pay attention to our surroundings with fresh eyes, rather than wading through the routines of life with a cold detachment, convinced that what matters most in life is what’s comfortable and familiar. This is another of my areas of expertise.

 In fact, the pull towards numb comfort and the inability to gain perspective on my life are representative of two defects that lie on the opposite end of what I think I’ll name “the spectrum of inevitable stupidity.” On one side, there’s laziness, routine, comfort. On the other hyperactivity, anxiety, obsession. One of the things I admire most about the river is that it doesn’t bother with finding the balance between apathy and overzealousness; it doesn’t have to. The current takes the path of least resistance without being cowardly.

This was something I thought (and talked) a lot about on the trip. It sounds like hippy nonsense, but life really is a lot like rafting. You need to know where you want to go, but in the end it all leads the same place, and if you go with the flow you’ll usually be a lot better off than if you panic and overcorrect. The river does not respond well to our attempts to control it. You must work with the current rather than fighting against it, or you have already lost before you even put the oars in the water.

My dad taught me everything I know about rafting. Which, as previously mentioned, isn’t much, but one of the best things about my dad’s style of teaching is that he tricks you into thinking there’s not that much to it, anyway. My aunt used to call him “Rocket Man” when he worked for NASA, and I’m convinced he’s the only person who could succeed at explaining Rocket Science as if it’s not that hard. In the end, it’s kind of true. Nothing’s that hard if you’re patient with yourself, and realize that everyone starts somewhere.

I’ve gotten a lot of compliments on my dad since the trip, as if he’s my accessory or pet. But I’m glad my classmates saw what I see; “cool” might not be the word to come to mind for a mechanical engineer, but he’s cool because he’s, as Sadie pointed out, one of the few people left who’s just a genuinely nice guy. He was even more impressed by the class than they were with, him, though, I suspect, given the fact that his main spiel since our return has been “You know how they say this generation’s lost? They’re not. And I’ll tell you why. College kids back in the ‘90’s were drinking coke in the morning instead of coffee. These kids already are drinking coffee, and they listen to Cat Stevens.” When he gave this spiel to my aunt, she replied, “So that’s all it takes for you to regain faith in a generation?” to which he replied, “Well, yeah!”

Every generation thinks they’re different, but some things always stay the same. There’s something in people that guides us, and will take us where we need to go. Like the river, the world keeps us on track if we let it, so we’ll all be okay if we just listen to the part of us that keeps us listening to Cat Stevens and drinking coffee. I might be giving my dad more credit for that thought than he would desire, he’s a smart guy who’s capable of speaking for himself, even if he does call me “Annie” once in a while, despite the fact that she’s my fraternal twin, and we don’t look anything alike.

I’ve come to realize that a person’s absence can shape an experience as much as their presence. I’ve been on very few river trips without Annie, but those trips always seem to be shaped by her absence as much as anything. The first trip I went on without her was also the San Juan. We did a longer stretch that time, and I spent the entire trip flirting with my cousin’s friend, Cassidy (male, his mom was high on painkillers when she named him, don’t ask me), who also went by “Cas.” Which actually worked out okay, because usually when people called for one of us we were together anyway. He was adopted, like me, but by his aunt and uncle. His aunt and uncle had a daughter his age, who turned out to be his quasi-twin. We talked about what it was like to be raised comparing yourself to someone more intelligent and emotionally stable than you. At the time, that’s how I felt.

Nothing ever came from Cassidy’s and my mini-romance, and like most mini-romances, I now mostly remember him with a fond chuckle at my complete ineptitude at interacting with other human beings. But the San Juan seems to be etched into my formation: it was my first ever river trip with Annie and my family, then round two with Cassidy at a stage in my life when I was having difficulty finding my individual identity, and now our relationship is rounded off by a third encounter, with writing class that's taught me how to embrace the in-between, after finally realizing that I’m ok with myself as an individual. A lot of the self-discovery talk on the trip was fueled by a mutual quest for individuality as experienced by the twins: myself, Savannah, and Garrett.

I’m sure, now that I’m back in the world of self-consciousness, that all the twin talk probably got pretty annoying. But on the other hand, I think the struggle to find yourself is something we all understand, regardless of whether or not we have one specific person to bounce our self-awareness off of. The twins all got along swimmingly partly because of our shared twinhood (in a sense, I'm not even a 'real twin,' sharing only the same amount of DNA with Annie as any sibling), but because we all have given a lot of thought to who we are and how we fit into the tapestry of existence. We’ve all done a lot of meditating, one could say. “Meditate” is one of those words I hesitate to use because it tends to make people laugh. I’ve never consciously 'meditated,' really. The word makes me think of yoga class where I was asked to breathe into my toes and imagine giving someone a flower in my heart-room, or to open my loins like a lotus flower, and other such absurdities.

However, let’s not sell a word short just because of our preconceptions. To meditate: (1) To think deeply or focus for a time for spiritual purposes or to relax, (2) To think deeply or carefully about (something). This, I have done. A lot. I don’t consider myself spiritual, but I guess that’s another word I should look carefully at the definition of. That’s a whole different meditation, however, and for now I guess I’m content to accept the fact that I have done a lot of meditating in my life thus far. This, I think, is the big thing the twins had in common (which is not to suggest we were the only ones, most Honors students, I would guess, think deeply about the world around them on a quite regular basis).

Savannah expressed frustration that the caption on Ellen Melloy’s The Anthropology of Turquoise had been changed from the original copy’s “meditations on desert, sea, stone, and sky” to “reflections” on the same. This does seem to be doing the book a grave discourtesy, unless, I suppose, it was in an effort to highlight the reflective nature of light. But I think that the meditation is a great word to describe what Ellen Melloy does for nature writing, and that the meditation is an especially useful device when writing about nature. Nature pervades our senses in a way that can sometimes only be described by “meditating” on its effect on us. Because the great thing about nature, particularly the river and the desert, is that by showing us itself in all its harsh, perilous, and unforgiving glory, it reveals to us a lot about what goes on inside us, beneath the petty anxieties and frustrations of day-to-day life, in the part of us that doesn’t need words, the part that speaks the language of the river, sand, and sky. Nature speaks to our cores in ways we can only hope to comprehend after thinking deeply and carefully until we finally figure out what it means to us.