My Very Lucky Lot
Miriam died at 30, but she’s taught me the most important thing about growing old: to be grateful for the experience. Every time a complaint about wrinkles or age spots or fatigue emerges from my lips, her sweet face floats before me. She smiles, with merry mischief in her dark eyes, her full lips pressed just a bit, as if she’s teasing me. Her presence shames me. Aging is an opportunity that she — who loved life so well — would have given anything to have. The day of her memorial service twenty years ago, I couldn’t stop crying. She lived alone and since there had been no one to pull her face from the pillow, she smothered after a seizure in the night.
Although Miriam gifted me early on with this primary aging principle, I know there’s a steep learning curve ahead. While being 61 may make me “the new middle age,” most of my year-peers take multiple medications and undergo surgeries and suffer from chronic medical conditions. I’ve been fortunate to escape these tribulations thus far. My good health has been an enabler, allowing me to deny the aging as the years pile on. The biggest surprise each day is looking in the mirror and seeing my mother. That’s OK, because I miss her so much.
So I understand there will be many more revelations and challenges ahead. I simply wasn’t expecting one to manifest on a pleasant Sunday afternoon, during a kayaking trip to the bayous.
In our Creative Writing program, we call it foreshadowing. I feel its first frissons when I read the information sheet our professor emails our class for this voluntary assignment. At the top is the basic agenda. The field trip will begin at 8am in uptown New Orleans, with a presentation on Louisiana’s disappearing wetlands. Then we’ll caravan by car to a launch site about 45 minutes north of the city. The kayak expedition itself will last three to four hours.
The line directly beneath the itinerary arrests my attention. It shouts in all caps:
“NO DOGS OR PETS: THEY ARE NOT SAFE IN ALLIGATOR SWAMPS.”
This dredges up a story a good friend told me years ago. Her husband took their beloved black lab on a hunting trip in the marshes. The dog was swimming back to the boat with a duck in his mouth when it was pulled sharply beneath the water. One powerful tug by an unseen monster and the 70-pound dog vanished. There wasn’t a struggle. The distraught man watched the spot where the lab disappeared, ready to fight for its life, to shoot the invisible predator. But the bayou surface smoothed out as if the dog had never existed. Even the duck didn’t surface.
After reading the alligator part of the trip information, the rest now seems weighted with slightly ominous overtones — especially since I have never been in a kayak. We are supposed to wear clothes and shoes that dry quickly because they’re likely to get wet. We should use the bathroom at a nearby rest area beforehand since “peeing in the swamps is difficult.” Long-sleeves are recommended to prevent scratches. A rain jacket is a good idea in case of storms, while we’re kayaking on the unpromisingly named Blind River.
On the scheduled day in mid-October, foul weather does not intervene as I’d privately hoped. Instead, the skies are clear, humidity low and the temperatures uncharacteristically cool for a tropical fall. Opting out is still an option, of course, but I’m determined to follow through.
Dressed in long sleeves and river sandals, I choose to bring a teal and pink sunhat because I can rely on it not to blow off. The hat’s a few decades old and while the colors are fading, it’s a wardrobe favorite. The camera I pack is ancient too. If either meets with misfortune, it’s not the end of the world. Being old, they’re both expendable.
I drive uptown to pick up my new friend, Reda, and we rendezvous with the rest of the class at the house of Bob Marshall. He’s a retired journalist who’s a Pulitzer Prize winner and an expert on disappearing wetlands. We settle around his dining room table.
Marshall’s voice never falters as he presents the appalling facts. He clicks through a PowerPoint presentation as he narrates. Its photographs and graphics present the damning evidence: in a relatively few decades, humans have irreparably damaged the south Louisiana wetlands in our relentless pursuit of petroleum — and our search for security. The canals that made it easier to transport the oil have stolen the soil. The levies we’ve constructed to protect us from flooding have prevented natural regeneration. Marshall peppers the presentation with funny lines to break up the nightmare, but we’re all stricken by the time he’s finished.
Afterward, five of us cram into a very small sedan. We rocket down the interstate racing north-west across the raised bridges that run through a long string of lakes and swamps. My fellow students are excited and chattering, but I’m mostly mute, considering the reality my generation shirked. Recalling President Carter’s energy policy in the late 70s, and Al Gore’s alarms two decades ago, sobers me. Course corrections made then could have changed our trajectory as a country. Twice, we came so close. Now the climate change deniers are in power, uprooting conservation policy to satisfy profiteers, with unimaginable consequences for young people like my companions in the car — and their children.
These grim thoughts have greyed a few more hairs by the time we hit the last-stop restrooms. The launch site is a bit further on, at a roadside park. The expedition crew has beat us there and is already unloading the kayaks from the trailer. The other car of students has arrived and we’re instructed to get life jackets from the back of the SUV. Mine is the sandwich board variety, thick foam plates front and back. Strapped on over the extra pounds that have gradually fluffed onto my frame in the past few years, it constricts my movements. I feel like a walrus padded by blubber.
We’re given a quick paddling lesson standing in the parking lot. Grip from above. Push and rotate. It looks very easy to me. After all, I used to canoe a lot. I push back the doubts that have been niggling in recent weeks. Like the fact my upper body workouts in the last ten years have mostly consisted of a wrangling pit bulls on walks. Resistance-training, I joke. And since I started the MFA program and a new business, my daily yoga and walking routines of thirty-years have been overrun by deadlines. Yet, today, I am depending on my body’s latent power to surface, to thrust my weight across miles of water. I am certain the strength and endurance are still there.
With help, I lower myself into a neon kayak that looks like the mold for a giant lemon popsicle. Nothing about my entry into the boat feels comfortable. The happy neon color belies the boat’s treachery — it rocks threateningly as I try to torque myself into position. My body has forgotten all yoga training — I’m ungainly, gawky, arms spiraling. The reality of my age and physical condition crashes home.
Yet, I am eventually settled and join several cheerful students paddling around the bayou, waiting until the rest have launched their boats. The waterway is wide here, with no current to fight. I’m encouraged. While the paddling works nothing at all like canoeing, I’m sure to get the hang of it shortly. Even the other kayak novices are zipping around easily, laughing.
But once we take off, I immediately fall behind. My paddling style is fundamentally flawed. My muscle memory is stuck in canoe-gear. With every stroke, my boat veers from one side to the other. The zig-zag doubles my work and slows my speed.
One of the guides notices my difficulty and paddles back to offer a private tutorial. She demonstrates again, stressing the pushing part. Good, good! she says when I manage to go forward a few feet in a straight line. But it doesn’t stick. My frustration builds as the distance between myself and my classmates grows. I’m expending twice as much energy as I should. My left shoulder, a trouble-spot that’s emerged ferociously in recent months, already aches.
I catch up with the others at the first impasse, a few minutes later. A cement railroad bridge crosses low over the water. We can’t paddle through sitting up. The guides show us how to lie back over our kayaks’ sterns and push with our hands against the bridge roof to propel ourselves through the low arches. The dark concrete will be scant inches over our faces. Someone calls out warnings about spiderwebs. I wonder how many dog-murdering alligators are lurking beneath.
The first of my classmates makes the passage. She vanquishes the bridge challenge with minimal difficulty, but the gauntlet’s just beginning. The waterway on the other side of the bridge is barricaded by a closely woven phalanx of water plants and she is snared in this botanical bushwhack. The guides cry out to her. Rock the boat, they urge. Back and forth. She sways as directed, but remains stuck for several minutes.
Portage! one of the guides finally calls. He says he’ll carry the kayaks over the bridge and put them back into the bayou past the worst of the blockade. Reda goes first. She lands her kayak neatly on the bank, steps out and follows the guide as he carries it. They both drop out of site on the other side of the bridge.
Meanwhile, the other four intrepid classmates have passed beneath the bridge and are floundering in the Sargasso Sea. Then, somehow, suddenly, they’re all making headway. Together, they push through to the open water in the distance. I see Reda, who has relaunched, join them.
Our professor, Richard, is an experienced kayaker. He and the tutoring guide have remained behind to watch over me, their boats just behind mine. The guide on the bank beckons me toward him so he can carry my kayak across. But I’m having a change of heart seeing how the others have made it past the quagmire. Their determination and bright spirits inspire me. I don’t want to be the feeble one who needs special assistance or watching over. I want to face the challenge and experience the same sense of victory my classmates are enjoying now.
“I want to go under the bridge,” I declare, turning to Richard and my tutor guide.
If they are surprised, they don’t protest. Go for it! They say. We’ll be right behind you!
Passing under the railroad bridge is surprisingly manageable. But there’s no time to indulge in a sense of satisfaction. Immediately, feral water-lily mutants grab my kayak and hold it fast. Even when I push the paddle with all the force I can muster, the boat moves only a few inches. Each time I yank the paddle free from the thicket, fetid plant parts shower down. The water, heavy with the odor of rank decomposition, drenches my clothes. I rock back and forth. I rock sideways. Although the boat jostles on the thick green mat it does not move forward. The group ahead turns to look at my predicament but can’t help. My shoulder is screaming in pain. There seems to be no way out.
A strange epiphany swoops down in that moment: Denying my limitations has not made them disappear. Claiming strength that I no longer have will not power the kayak. What’s worse, my refusal to accept reality has consequences for the others. At the very least, I’m throwing off the trip schedule, making everyone wait. I should have accepted the portage.
This inner commentary is interrupted when I’m rear-ended by Richard’s boat. I’m surprised, but my kayak moves forward, maybe a foot. Somehow, he’s making his own kayak go forward with enough force to propel mine too. Once I realize the strategy, I try to help; when his boat rams into mine, I paddle even harder. The guides shout, cheering me on. Eventually, I break free into open water.
I pause to knock off some of the slimy plant pieces from my boat and my person. Tendrils drape the brim of my sodden hat and cover me like confetti. Richard paddles up, all cheerful bonhomie, and takes a photo. My smile is genuine. In that moment, I’m just grateful to be free.
In the temperate Louisiana autumn, the cypress are the only exhibitionists — their needles flare rust before they drop, as if the trunks are steel. That short show has passed, so the trees that tower above us stand as bare sentinels, draped only with garlands of Spanish moss. Their stark majesty is revealed in full, reflected in the placid bayou waters that’s broken only by our paddles. I focus on that beauty for the rest of the trip — it helps dial back the pain in my shoulder.
My paddling improves somewhat, although half-way through the trip, I accept that it’s like dancing — something that will never come naturally to me, even after lots of lessons and practice. But I manage to keep up with the main body of the group for most of the return lap.
Faced with the plant/bridge barricade at the end, some hidden pod of adrenalin inside me bursts and shocks my protesting muscles into forcing the boat through. Yet the biggest challenge of the day comes at the dock, trying to get out of the confounded kayak. My muscles have petrified and refuse to respond. With assistance, I eventually wallow onto the pier, an upended walrus struggling to right itself.
In the parking lot, I pour myself into the backseat of the sedan, feeling pity for my companions, who lie to be kind and say my clothes don’t stink. When we’ve arrived back in the city, Reda and the other students — with their unlined faces and open attitudes and extraordinary powers of recuperation — invite me to go out drinking with them. Their generosity thrills me, but I decline, claiming I have work to do.
I am not lying. The most important work before me is ingesting some pain relievers and getting into bed as fast as possible. My legs, which have gotten off lightly in this adventure, manage to haul my wrecked upper body up two flights of stairs to the apartment, where opening a bottle of Advil and a bottle of wine are my first goals. I step into the shower to sluice off the algae, turning the stream on my stony neck muscles until the hot water goes warm. Next, I plaster my shoulders with adhesive patches that claim to relieve aching muscles and pour another glass of wine.
While I wait for the patches — or the wine — to work, I consider my biggest takeaway of the trip: the predicament caused by my pride and the inevitable diminishment caused by my aging. I’ve been studiously ignoring the signs, believing that denial would save me in the end. The day’s events have exposed that strategy as useless.
This line of thought hasn’t gone on long when sweet Miriam appears, dimly taking shape in the polished wood surface of the table. As always, she’s silent. As always, she’s smiling. With her dark hair caught back from her smooth face, seeing her reminds me again: learning to navigate ever-mounting losses with acceptance and with grace is a gift.
And my very lucky lot.
Although it’s only seven o’clock, the pain patches kick in and I head for bed. It’s an old person kind of thing to do, but I’m good with that.
