I’ve never been called a motor mouth. Except for the occasional morning when compelling insight from overnight dreaming must be described in intricate detail upon waking, people I’ve lived with report they want me to say more, not less. I presume I inherited this reticence from my grandparents. All four came over on the boat from Finland. Perhaps you’ve heard that joke: “How can you tell when you’ve met a Finnish extrovert?” Don’t know. “When he speaks he looks at your feet instead of his own.” This can make the supper table the land of quiet.
At 16 I got good grades and could play the cello, but what made me proud was how I had backpacked into the Superstition Mountains and twice to Phantom Ranch. It wasn’t uncommon in that great wave of late-’60s outdoors craze to be a gal with lace-up boots, but still I was very proud of my ease on trails. Life with a can-do body was my life.
Not a wonder, then, that I eagerly joined a Sierra Club Thanksgiving Grand Canyon backpacking trip from Apache Point to the South Bass trail. Here was a fine, long walk and the next way for me to explore away from the non-conversations at home. I was the youngest in the expedition of 12. Mostly I hid on the edges with my bright eyes darting, but three days into the trip, after eating a freeze-dried dinner made on my Bleuet stove, I felt myself blushing in the dusk. Who was this man with the trim dark beard who settled in beside me by the river?
A handsome stranger from exotic California, he wore worn corduroy shorts with cargo pockets. He knew as much as the trip leader without bragging about it. When he leaned back into the sand he didn’t care about the grit getting into his hairy legs, nor did he clutter the turning of day to night with long sentences about nothing. A remark. A question. Long pauses to note the emerging stars.
Water sound in the Grand Canyon can be a murmur of broad river shouldering rock; can be a shooshing of frothy air mixed into rapid; can include the kerplunk out of nowhere as a cobble rolls into new position. Stirred into commotion that night there arrived syllables between souls quietly traded under stars at a spacious pace the canyon would recognize.
The deep quiet he brought to talking eased me. I accepted the gentleness of his keen attention. I said things I’d never said out loud before about adventure, about life.
“Oh so this is what talking with a man might be,” I thought later in my down bag, cozy on an Ensolite pad tucked into a sandstone shelf away from the group. Months later a poster of a Sierra Club book cover arrived from him: that one with the orange cliffs of canyon and the title, “Time and The River Flowing.”
Fast forward 20 years. Same river, but we are raft-arrived to the beach this time. Our camp becomes lumps of cots and peaks of tents and the last two up in the sand murmur about life and legs and paths chosen or not. Again it is a stranger finding surprising access into my deep places. She was once photographed to be the poster child for the Easter Seals campaign. I thought of the cans we kids took door-to-door collecting dimes and Jerry Lewis stepping away from madcap to be serious. Back then I’d carefully studied those children with braces and I’d felt questions I didn’t know how to ask. And now, on a river trip for adults with disabilities, here was one of those kids all grown up telling me stories of her life and sharing her questions. Faces inches apart, lounging in the sand on a warm night with stars that seemed to be kissing our foreheads, I considered my own bent places and let the murmuring river help me find syllables to describe them. Her listening, her quiet, and then her wisdom were no less profound to me because I barely knew her.
Now it’s years later again. Standing outside with the clarity of a November winter sky, the voices of two strangers by a river come back to me as clear as the arcs of comets streaking through the Leonids. Meeting happens. Eloquent about feelings or not, in my life my syllables find a path to one listener at a time, persistent as the communion of water with rocks.
