So This is a River

Stupid tragedies, one fresh, the other a year old, plus: a bird rocks out, and the river does its thing

Truth & Dare is a monthly post that offers one Truth (a writing prompt) and one Dare (an artistic gesture in the world). You might also find: thoughts on writing, art, books and paying attention. You won’t find: a paywall or a thicket of hyperlinks taking you someplace else. Just a clean read, a cup of herbal tea poured over your frontal lobe. No noise. No distraction. Thanks for being here.

Also: I’m teaching an in-person memoir class in October at The Attic¹ - come join us!

One late July afternoon on a trip down the Cowlitz River, we pulled our boats onto shore to make camp and rest in the sand. After a while, I pointed out to my friend M that the flutey call of a nearby White-crowned Sparrow² sounded like the first six notes of the 1981 song, “Centerfold,” by the J. Geils band. “Thanks a lot, Laura,” she said, after the bird went on to play the same set for several hours. In sixth grade, the cheerleaders from M’s school in northern California did a dance routine to that song, which boggled our minds to consider, given that it’s about a guy who discovers that his high school crush has posed nude in a magazine, and the video³ features women prancing around in a classroom, clad alternately in saddle shoes and slips, then blouses straight from the eighties, then negligees. The lyrics are not much to look at, but the song has a very catchy na-NA-na-na-na-na part, which probably helped catapult it onto the charts, and it clearly influenced the culture, since 6th graders created dance routines to it and decades later, birds along rivers would be discovered still singing it.

By the time we stopped, we were several days into the trip and battered, sun-baked, bruised. The river had been considerably more than we’d bargained for, with snags and rapids and the occasional hairpin turn. Ben and I had already capsized the canoe once in shallow rapids, (so much depends upon the red canoe/glazed with river water/beside the white-crowned sparrow). We’d braced ourselves against the rocks and just barefly gripped the canoe as cans of beer bobbed in single file out of the cooler and floated down the river. M saved the day when she waded out and captured some of them, but in the coming days, she’d have her own mishap when her kayak collided with a partially submerged stump and tipped her upside down, dunking her solidly before her partner helped fish her out.

So we were bedraggled and exhausted. But the beauty of a river is that you kind of can’t turn back. You’ve put in someplace, leaving a vehicle behind, have floated forward in good faith that you’ll eventually make it to the vehicle parked miles downriver. And after the river soaks and bangs you up, you might find yourself sitting at the edge of the water as night falls, longing for your own bed, or your front porch with its familiar birds from the yard. But you just can’t have that, and so your mind reckons with this knowledge, wrestles, flails and somehow arrives at acceptance. This is how it will be. And the truth is, the river can be terrible but it’s also exquisitely beautiful. The benefit of being this exhausted, is that resting feels amazing. Dry pants: incredible. Coffee brewed in the morning on a little stove: the best you’ve ever had.

I found the perfect telephone on the river bank, and when I hold it to my ear, it’s always the river calling

In the end, it took so long to navigate the perilous parts, that we ran out of days and had to pull out earlier along the river than we’d planned. We stopped under a bridge and Ben hitchhiked into town to retrieve the car. After we’d packed our sandy gear and hoisted the canoe on top of the car, we learned of the drowning death of Naomi Pomeroy.⁴ How she’d set out that afternoon to float the Willamette river with her husband and a friend, and then after their tubes flipped over, she was pinned under the water by a snag. I sat in the back seat with tears streaking my cheeks, too tired to believe that awful news, but fresh enough from a river to know exactly how quickly that can happen, and how helpless we are when it does.

Naomi was a brilliant and innovative chef who loved to feed people and to create beauty and ritual around meals. It’s that part of her that reminded me of Alyna, the woman I wrote about last July.⁵ She was the artist and massage therapist who used watercolor to illustrate the recipes⁶ she shared with friends during the pandemic. Alyna was grievously injured by a speeding truck on the street near my house, and at the scene of the accident, I felt sure she would not survive what had happened to her. But she did. Her parents moved to Portland to be present through rehabilitation from the traumatic brain injury she suffered. She has learned to walk and talk again, and they are focused on helping her improve her memory and be as independent as possible. The family posts occasional updates, and the tone is always the same: optimism about what might be possible for Alyna in the future, with no time spent on what may have been lost on the day of the accident.

The death of Naomi and the accident Alyna suffered are reminders of the notion we all know and yet forget: everything can change profoundly in an instant. We can’t really know what will happen next in our own stories. But at the one-year anniversary of Alyna’s accident, one caused by a speeding truck driven by an inattentive driver, I want to put out another call for something we do have control over: how fast we move in the world, and what we pay attention to. Let’s create a collective slowdown, an inhaled breath and recalibration of our focus. Portland streets have lately felt like a smash-up demolition derby, and I know that it’s happening in other cities across the States as well. Wherever you are, may you be safe and steady. May the people you love be protected. Let’s be careful with one another.

And now to our Truth & Dare:

Truth: Write about a river, whether it’s a literal one from your recent/past memory, or a figurative one that you want to explore. Bonus points for writing on paper, folding it into a boat, and setting it to sail on an actual river.

Dare: In honor of Naomi and Alyna, make something beautiful in your kitchen and invite somebody (friends, neighbors, countrymen) to enjoy it with you. Bonus if you garnish it with fresh flowers or fruit. Double-dog bonus if you paint a watercolor of it.

1. Workshop details here

2. White-crowned sparrow songs

3. I’m sorry and also you’re welcome. You have to admit the milk-drum scene at 2:50 is amazing. J. Geils looks like a kind of scrawny, less hairy version of the writer Steve Almond, whose newest book I’ve been enjoying. It’s a book about writing: Truth is the Arrow, Mercy is the Bow.

4. RIP, Naomi

5. Alyna’s Accident

6. Her beautiful illustrated recipes