Author’s Note: I thought the best way to capture the Insurrection of Jan. 6, 2021, was to make the day’s most famous headgear a narrator for the event. This is the first (and only) poem that I have written from the viewpoint of a hat. A class taught by Maryland poet Ann Quinn inspired me to try this technique, and it made this poem so satisfying to write.

The Horned Hat at the Insurrection

Stitched by minnow fingers
pebble-skipping over tufted
fake fur, one of oh-so-many,
I confess I was meant
for a stage smaller than this.
A community production
of O, Pioneers! perhaps?
God, look at me, I grand marshal
this snake train of tobacco-
stained, piss-scented
would-be Vikings,
the haberdashery helming
a pinwheel platform.
Circling parquet corridors
with flags and the false GPS
of rigged moral compasses,
oh, they are indeed pioneers.
Bow hunters—Antaeus waiting
for a fist fight, forging ground
on hallowed ground.
Glory, I could have been a mascot,
a bombastic bison, big horned,
bugling, canon-shot badassery,
not the taxidermy footnote
in the unraveling of democracy.

⧫

Maryland poet Jessica Gregg is a former journalist whose poetry has also appeared in Broadkill Review, Canary, Yellow Arrow Journal, Global Poemic, Tiny Seed Literary Journal, and Art in the Time of Covid-19 from the American Writers Review. Her chapbook, News from This Lonesome City, was published in 2019.

Delmarva Review publishes evocative original poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction selected from thousands of submissions annually. Designed to encourage outstanding new writing from the region and beyond, the literary journal is nonprofit and independent. Financial support comes from tax-deductible contributions, sales, and a grant from the Talbot Arts Council with funds from the Maryland State Arts Council. Website: DelmarvaReview.org.

 

Author’s Note: I write a lot about relationships, love, and other mysterious events, so perplexing events and issues interest me. Zen is perfect for that, of course, since the koan is, by definition, a paradox that illustrates how inadequate logic is. Its contemplation is seen as a vehicle toward enlightenment. The jumbled state of emotion, the complications of being and the bodily state—its flesh and consciousness—to me, these are related and ultimately unfathomable, but as a poet, I must try.

Zen and the Art of Transfiguration: 4 Koans

1.
Would suicides
feel the irony,
if they return
in the bodies
of tortoises,
doomed
to longevity?

2.
If you put
your whole
life
into a painting,
are you the art,
or are you
the artist?

3.
Are bunyip,
crying nocturnes
from riverbeds
in their hunger for
women’s flesh,
merely restless
barking owls?

4.
When you don’t
like the dream
you awake from,
do you get
another chance
as you drift into
asleep again?

⧫

Susana H. Case has authored five chapbooks and eight books of poetry, most recently The Damage Done (Broadstone Books, 2022), which won her third Pinnacle Book Achievement Award. Her books have previously won an IPPY and a New York City Big Book Distinguished Favorite award. She was a finalist for the Eric Hoffer Book Award and the International Book Awards. She co-edited, with Margo Taft Stever, the anthology I Wanna Be Loved by You: Poems on Marilyn Monroe (Milk and Cake Press, 2022). Dr. Case worked several decades as a professor and program coordinator at New York Institute of Technology. Website: www.susanahcase.com.

Delmarva Review publishes evocative new poetry, fiction, and nonfiction selected from thousands of original submissions annually. Designed to encourage outstanding writing, the literary journal is nonprofit and independent. Support comes from tax-deductible contributions, sales, and a grant from Talbot Arts with funds from the Maryland State Arts Council. Website: www.DelmarvaReview.org.

 

Author’s Note: As an East Coast suburban boy, light pollution meant I never saw the Milky Way until a trip out West. Our children were getting older, soon to college and busy lives, and only my wife had ever been to the southwest, so we planned a trip for December 2018. That moment—to try to put into words what it means to look up and be dazzled, even when you intellectually know what you’re going to see—still fills me with wonder.

the milky way at 47

I never saw it before, never understood what it was
when people talked about it, sure, I guess I saw it
in movies but never connected that to the real

even in mongolia we never saw it, though that is
a place people use for stargazing, with the steppes
and no light for miles, but it was cloudy three days

and we never glimpsed a star. so take me to monument
valley, utah, on a night in december, and let the two
younger kids sit in the room and veg out while we

(meaning wife and oldest daughter) take the rented car
down the road a few miles, between the buttes and
silent monuments, to the pullout on route 163 just

over the arizona state line, and wait as the last car
passes us. we get out and turn off the engine, kill
the lights, scuff across the gravel shoulder to lean our

backs against the cold metal of the SUV and look
up, up to what I never understood, what I knew
only in abstract. oh. oh, now I see. infinity.

⧫

David Galloway is a writer and associate professor of Russian at Hobart & William Smith Colleges. Born and raised in Maryland, he has lived in upstate New York for the past twenty-five years. His poetry and essays have also appeared in Atlanta Review, Rattle, Chiron, Typehouse, Gargoyle, and Penn Review, among others. He is the author of “poyms for people” (Kelsay Books, 2021), his first full-length collection. Website: davidjgalloway.com

Delmarva Review publishes evocative new poetry, fiction, and nonfiction selected from thousands of submissions annually. Designed to encourage outstanding writing, the literary journal is nonprofit and independent. Support comes from sales, tax-deductible contributions, and a grant from Talbot Arts with funds from the Maryland State Arts Council. Website: DelmarvaReview.org.

Author’s Note: At middle age, I went on one of the most exciting outdoor adventures of my life. While I was there, the experience reminded me of a similar adventure I had done when I was going through my “quarter-life crisis” that I had kind of forgotten about. What did it mean to bounce these two trips off each other, to mirror one against the other? What had I learned, if anything, from then until now. It took me four years of writing this essay to find the story, to find and realize what these trips had taught me about myself and the ways life and age change us all.

From Hell’s Half-Mile to Powerhouse

No woman ever steps in the same river twice, 

for it’s not the same river, 

and she’s not the same woman. 

  —with thanks to Heraclitus, et al. 

A  COWBOY, a fireman, a fisheries biologist, two foresters, two botanists, three nurses, six guides, plus a naturalist and a writer, walk onto the rafts. This is no joke: From places near and far, we descended upon Idaho and chartered a backcountry plane to drop us off in the middle of the Frank Church River of No Return Wilderness, the largest roadless area in the lower 48, to begin a six-day whitewater adventure on the Middle Fork of the Salmon River, one of the deepest gorges in North America. 

With two years of angst and anxiety under my belt in anticipation of this trip, I choose one of the “leisure boats” with Neil and some others. The leisure boat is the “safe” boat in my mind, an oar raft where a very well-trained guide, to whom we are paying a hefty sum, does all the work of rowing and maneuvering and keeping us from harm, and we guests just sit on top, amid the luggage, equipment, and supplies, and enjoy the view, 2.3 million acres of jagged western wilderness. 

Two years is a lot of time to know something is coming in advance and to think about it and worry about it and come up with all the ways injury and death could occur, or at least discomfort. Over the past twenty-four months, every time the river trip crossed my mind, my stomach lurched. Anytime it was mentioned aloud and a friend oohed and aahed over the opportunity I would have, all I could say was that I hoped to make it back alive. I was serious about that. I did not want to fall out of the raft into the icy water, hit my head on a rock, break an arm or a leg, get caught in a “window shade,” drown, or any of the other river catastrophes I’d heard about. I wanted adventure, but, at middle age, I wanted to come home unscathed. 

Even though I’m on the leisure boat and we’ve had a brief safety training, I’m still nervous about some other unknowns, such as whether Neil and I will sleep well while camping. And what about the bathroom situation?—will we have enough time in the morning, with twenty-eight other people, to do our business? On the raft, will we be self-conscious of our bodies, not so tight and firm anymore? 

And how will I fit into this crowd? We are with twenty of Neil’s old friends and their spouses from when he lived in Idaho thirty years ago working as a surveyor for the U.S. Forest Service. The group lucked out with a permit gained through a lottery system and organized the trip to reunite after one man’s newfound health after overcoming cancer, to celebrate recovery, retirements, and annual rebirth. At age forty-six, I am the youngest of this group of sixty-and seventy-somethings, and Neil’s retirement from teaching at a nature center is one year away. All these older folks seem joyful and free spirited and unafraid, and yet I’m still obsessing that this trip might be my last. 

As we shove away from the launch site at Boundary Creek and start out bobbing under a cloudless sky of cerulean blue, I recite my mantra in my head: I will not fall out of the raft. I cannot find an unawkward strap to hold on to as we nearly immediately hit a series of rapids—Sulphur Slide, Ramshorn Rapid, Hell’s Half-Mile, Velvet Falls, and The Chutes—and one person on my raft, a retiree who spends half the year in Arizona and half in Mexico, somehow loses her balance and does a sort of half backflip over the side of the raft. Then she gracefully rewinds herself back in, a maneuver that resolves itself so fast that no one, including her, even knows how it happened. It is like a mirage. She doesn’t even get wet. 

Before I know it, we’ve glided over a bunch of churning disturbances—rock gardens—with ease, no doubt due to the deft maneuvering on the part of the experienced guide, and the day begins to open for me; the crushing fear releases its hold a bit. I can see the churning ahead—the wide highway of slate gray, khaki green river, with occasional areas of bubbling white froth and peaks like sharks rising. Sometimes the water gets darker, a moonlight blue next to deep boulders; sometimes the canyon narrows, or an obstacle appears that agitates the water. And then the raft bounces and jostles over whatever’s underneath causing the riffles, and our bodies jiggle side to side, front to back—we have to allow ourselves a looseness of form, a sway of hips and spine, and go with the “river massage” when it’s offered—and we get splashed with icy buckets of snowmelt. But then, in a moment, the water is calm again, see-through to the bottom, covered in bowling-ball boulders. 

The raft, I start to remember from a time long ago, with its air and loft, cushions the rapids. I don’t even come close to falling out in the first few hours. This expert guide team has run this river hundreds of times, scouting many of the three hundred rapids, memorizing each curve and eddy to perfection, knowing each drop during the 3,100 feet of descent and the one hundred tributaries that will join the Middle Fork along the way. I dare, for the first time in weeks or months, to let out my breath. 

——

IN OUR FIRST DAY’S ORIENTATION, learning about river life and the types of rafts we can float on this trip, one of our guides, who wants us to revel in our good fortune of being here, tells us with dramatic emphasis and pauses that we are thirty of only ten thousand people in the world who will get to experience this river this year. Ten thousand seems like a lot of people to me, and I will be perplexed in days to come when we camp at well- worn beaches and in forests with clear human-made paths and established tent sites and see numerous other rafts and dozens of other people every day along the river—eco-groovy families and guided fishermen in dories—because these imprints of humans don’t jibe with my idea of wilderness. 

It is upon first mention of this number of people that I recall my previous, and first, river trip, on the North Fork of the Koyukuk River in Alaska. We didn’t see another person in six days on the river, and groups (if there were any other than us) were not even allowed to travel with more than six people. We didn’t sign up for reserved campsites in advance; we floated up to whatever sandy or rocky beach we came across and set up camp whenever we wished, day or night, in the land of the midnight sun, leaving no trace of our fleeting habitation. 

Up there, in Gates of the Arctic National Park and Preserve, above the Arctic Circle, only two thousand people visited the entire 8.4 million-acre park each year; our group of four participants and two instructor-guides saw only two people in eighteen days, passing them on foot during the backpacking portion of our trip, which was odd because there are no roads and no trails in the hummocks and scree fields of the Brooks Range. 

I was twenty-five then, with only a few years of camping and backpacking experience, no river experience, no expectations, not much knowledge, and not much fear, entering a place where proficiency in wilderness skills was necessary for survival. I was an Alaskaphile, and the Outward-Bound trip was the best way I had figured out to get to see the inner sanctum of Alaska that few people ever visit. More importantly, it was the way I had decided to address what I called my “quarter-life crisis” and take stock of what I was doing with my life, whether the office job and corporate ladder track was where I wanted to be. 

In August of that year, 1996, whitewater was sparse on the river; I would learn later that the North Fork of the Koyukuk was only a Class I and II river, not expected to have much more than ripples—and the water was low that summer, so low that our group had to paddle hard all day, every day, to get anywhere, blistering my hands and splitting my fingers into bloody canyons from the wetness and friction. I was unaccustomed to that kind of work. As I was the oldest participant on the trip and the only one with a job, one of the three nineteen-year-olds who were my trip- mates nicknamed me “Office Hands.” 

I may be the only one with a job on this trip as well, self- employed with my multiple part-time gigs. But unlike the Outward-Bound adventure, whose mission was to change lives through challenge and discovery and for which I had hoped for self-reflection but gained none and to make lifelong friendships but did not, I’m not here in Idaho on this river with these people to learn anything about myself or to prove anything to myself or to change anything or to gain any new skills or necessarily to bond with anyone. I’m here on this mid-life river trip in Idaho in support of Neil and his friends, and it’s supposed to be for fun and relaxation and an abandonment of responsibilities and all life’s “shoulds”; to be taken care of, cooked for, and cleaned up after. I’m not looking back to the ghosts of lives I could have led; I’m not looking ahead to life’s next act. 

With the Alaska memory sparked, my body begins to remember that it has already been on a river. It recalls the way the raft glides over a patch of silky water, slipping on top of a surface boulder and making no splash on the descent. It knows that the bubbles in the brewing beast only indicate the deepest water, not something more sinister; that the river points our best route forward with arrows of whitewater, nature’s subtle navigation signal; and that a jarring bounce off a boulder will send the raft into a backwards twirl. I begin to recognize the river like a home I once knew, a dream I once had, a meal prepared for me in a foreign land that waters my mouth once again. 

The snake of the river slices through tall, straight, and relatively young evergreen trees like lodgepole pine, covering the brown mountains around us like a porcupine, hour after hour. Though a significantly different landscape than my regular environment in Virginia, the high desert color palette is unending and unchanging. I feel like a dead twig watching the scenery go by, bored by the inactivity on the leisure boat, while our guides seem to be relishing the mystery and thrill of each new moment of “man versus river.” I start to consider that I have five more days of passive unengagement, and by the end of the day I decide I will become a more active participant and hop on the paddle boat instead, where a guide gives commands from the back to four to eight of us paddlers who make up the crew and do the work. After this single day on the river, I no longer fear the Class III (“medium”), and Class IV (“difficult”) rapids I had built up in my mind for more than seven hundred days, that torrent of water plunging a gradient steeper than the Colorado River traveling down the Grand Canyon. I don the Neoprene gloves I brought to prevent “office hands,” and I slide back into the rhythms of the river I remember. 

——

IN ALASKA, there was no question that we would never fall into the water because there were no significant rapids. But before this Idaho trip, I had wondered, intensely, how people sitting with one butt cheek on the side edge of the raft, paddling through high and irregular waves, roiling waters, tight turns, and dangerous holes could possibly stay in the boat on a Class II – IV river. 

I learn it on day two. 

It’s a matter of weight, friction, and force. I jam my inside foot under a baffle that runs across the center of the raft, and I jam my outside foot under the side of the raft until I am stuck. Neither leg, really, is in the right plane with itself: my shins are at a wrong angle compared to my knees, and my thighs are also at a wrong angle compared to my knees, as well as compared to my ankles, hips, and torso. At the end of a paddling day, I’ll discover, the tendons, joints, ligaments, and fascia of my legs will have taken a beating without even having walked. And despite wearing neoprene booties inside my Keens, my toenails and skin become nasty from my feet sitting in cold water all day. But the essential miracle here, and what I hang onto is: with the feet tucked in as such, I do not seem to be able to fall out of the raft. 

Thus, I find my groove. I test out paddling on the right side of the raft, find it awkward even as I am right-handed, and then discover my good side on the left. I find out too that attacking the shark fins of curling waves in whitewater with our paddles in a metronomic rhythm keeps us in the raft. What looks monstrous, I realize quickly, can be stabbed into submission by human force and the friction of plastic against water. In my green hard-hat helmet, as the parched brown dryness of the rugged, mountain landscape drifts by, I jab the boiling water with gusto that afternoon. Like in Alaska, where my survival and that of five others depended on each of us learning to play an active role, I am pleasantly confident in taking back some of the responsibility for my survival. 

I settle into a spot as the second paddler on the left behind the fireman/paramedic who offers the group a variety of legal and illegal painkillers, smooth-talks the men and women alike with a conspiratory close-in lean, and who apparently earned the nickname “Hollywood” when he was young. He’s still thin and handsome, grey-haired now, and he knows how to set and keep a pace, which is what the guides tell him is his job as the foreman. I try to mimic him exactly. Lean forward with my whole upper body, dig in or spear the water with my paddle, pull back; lean forward, dig in, pull back. We paddle up to thirty strokes at a time upon the guide’s command: “forward,” “back,” or “drift.” One stab at a time, like the daily, weekly, annual, and lifelong journey navigating the river of life, aiming toward some shore, launching back into the waters, repeat. 

In this way, we conquer Powerhouse Rapids, Artillery Rapids, Cannon Creek Rapids, and Pistol Creek Rapid, the sound of each preceding its presence, almost a spreading open of the river like a zipper as the whitewater unfurls around us and we pass through.

 

——

THE MIDDLE FORK OF THE SALMON is a 100-mile Wild and Scenic River, protected by Congress in 1968 in the Wild and Scenic Rivers Act, which means it is a free-flowing river with no dams, and so water levels are dictated by nature, not by man. This status is a rare occurrence in the nation now. According to the nonprofit organization American Rivers, less than one percent of America’s rivers are wild and free. Instead, most are dammed for recreation, water storage, hydroelectric power, irrigation, and flood control. Here, in mid-July, the waters are considered to be at three-and-a-half feet, and we will travel on average sixteen miles a day over six days, whereas just a month ago in June, waters were at nine feet and the guides traveled the river in about two days due to the great volume and speed of the torrent. 

The North Fork of the Koyukuk in Alaska is also a 100-mile Wild and Scenic River, but I didn’t know that then. On that trip, I was four years out of college, veering off the typical path already, taking a month off work with a plan to write about the journey, plunging myself into the outer reaches of my comfort zone for the first time. I literally had no map. 

I had never hiked, camped, or backpacked without Neil or been without him in an outdoor adventure setting at all, having been raised as a city girl who never even learned how to ride a bike. He taught me everything I knew in the outdoors: survival, weather, maps, gear. I had been a follower in all of it, though, not a leader, not even a team player. I had never walked such a thin rope all by myself as in Alaska. 

I thought the great life lessons of the trip would come from the deep connections I would form with people traveling the same path—literally by my side while doing all of the work of surviving in such a backcountry area, a grizzly-bear habitat, completely off the grid including sometimes without radio contact, without any tethers of human civilization, a situation that was wholly unfamiliar to me—as well as going through similar or forthcoming stages of life; people who understood me, who could help me see a path. But the instructors had placed me into the group of teens rather than the other group of thirty- and forty- year-olds. How was I supposed to learn anything about myself with kids who still had mom and dad cooking their meals back home and who were sent here by their parents, while I was a professional in the workforce, having worked for my own funds to attend this trip, with a soon-to-be-husband back home? 

While I was teaching those teenagers how to make a cheese sauce with the last few ingredients we had left late in the trip, I was also backpacking with a pack that weighed about half my body weight, 70 pounds, traversing a scree field a thousand or more feet high on a path we created that was the width of our own boot prints, and navigating alone in my head the complicated mental challenges of a group leader with anger management issues, the physical demands of the journey, and what it was all supposed to teach me about myself. 

Now in Idaho, a half a lifetime later, I notice I’m infinitely more adept at all the rituals that being a traveling caravan off the grid and on the river requires. And although Neil and I are here together, he decides to stay on the leisure boat, so we don’t spend the trip side by side. I choose to have my own separate experience. He takes two optional hikes that I decline on. I revel in the yoga circle our guides lead each morning, finding great comfort, joy, and empowerment in being among a familiar language from my practice back home, while he somehow manages to avoid it every day. 

Perhaps I am at last recognizing the lessons of Alaska; for the first time since that trip twenty-two years ago and the first time in our marriage, I realize I have become my own person. I have, in fact, become—the same way a wild river runs its natural course when allowed to be undammed. 

——

RUNNING THE RIVER STARTS TO SEEM LIKE OLD HAT, and I keep the same position on day three for the drop at Marble Creek Rapids, the drop and jog of Jackass Rapids, and the bend at Island and Riffle. I’m starting to feel pretty badass about my skill set, having remained in the boat so far, and so on day four, which the guides tell us offers the biggest whitewater yet, I am as hungry for the rapids as a wild dog. 

The guides rise at 5:30 a.m. at the start of yet another bluebird day and set out the first breakfast—coffee, yogurt, oatmeal, and fruit—while getting the hot, made-to-order second breakfast underway—eggs, pancakes, bacon, and French toast— to fortify our day’s exertion. We clients shuffle around, having slept well enough and in a private-enough location of our choosing, packing up our own tent and personal things like we do every day, and the guides carry the tents, sleeping pads, drybags, kitchen gear, bathroom gear, and everything else down a treacherous slope to the river and load five boats. Their chores take at least five hours each morning. I appreciate this luxury because in Alaska, we Outward Bound students were the ones making breakfast, cleaning up camp, packing belongings, and loading the rafts, an ordeal that took three to four hours and was hard on the hands. Here, after all the loading, one oarsman or oarswoman takes off, captaining the “sweep,” a Huck-Finn-like freighter raft that carries all our “checked baggage” and camp and kitchen equipment to our next overnight place and sets it up there before we arrive. 

We’ve been bath rooming now for four days, getting through it just fine. In Gates of the Arctic in Alaska, administered by the National Park Service, we were not allowed to put anything into the river: no cooking materials, no body oils, no body fluids or solids. We dug cat-holes in the woods for poop and toilet paper. We had to sing to ourselves to ward off grizzly bears. Here on the Middle Fork, within the Challis, Payette, and Salmon National Forests, managed by the U.S. Forest Service, we’ve been instructed to pee in the river, not on land, because with all the ten thousand people using the same lands, the soil and campsites would start to smell like urine. When we’re on land, men simply unzip and pee directly into the water; women squat at the edge strategically behind a wisp of plant. Or, if we pull over in our raft out of the current for a moment for a pee break, we may all simply hurl ourselves over the side of the raft, wade in the river up to our waists in our pants, and stare at each other across the raft as we pee into the water together in our clothes. All of us are totally used to this now, and it’s far easier than worrying about surviving a grizzly attack. At camp, the guides set up a glorified ammo can called the “groover” for pooping, in a spot set away from camp in the woods with a scenic view of the river. A separate pee bucket for nighttime use is set up in the bathroom-without-walls as well. Among all their other morning chores, the guides also collect and seal the groover and carry it onto the raft for disposal at the end of the journey, and they dump the pee bucket into the river. 

Day four, with its icy white sky, unfolds with Tappan I, Tappan Falls, Tappan II, Tappan III, Aparejo Point Rapids, and Jack Creek Rapids: they range from quick steep drops into large holes, to Class IIIs to IVs that the guides have to get out of the boat and scout in advance, to a series of constricted drops over a half-mile stretch. The team on my boat is fairly solidified now: the fireman, me, and a cadre of 60+-year-old women who are fearless and inspiring, with not a judgmental one among them; women of all shapes and sizes and life experiences: kind, independent, fit, and full of joy—not broken by burdens, despite enduring many of life’s hardest trials. I didn’t come to the river to take inspiration from anyone, and yet these women begin forming a picture in my mind of what a later-life woman can look like, in strength and power, a model I have never even considered that I will need in my days ahead. I had not expected to fall into such easy camaraderie. To my great surprise, this spontaneous bond forms without effort, and our team—all of us who have chosen to be here, on this boat, paddling, fiercely attuned to the moment—attacks the water wordlessly like a fine-tuned machine. 

It is on one of these rapids that, without warning, without dreading it, without planning, without intellectualizing, we come up fast on a large black boulder in the river. In a flash, our large, bulbous, steady, safe vessel that’s been so gentle and protective all week, absorbing all our potential breaks and bruises, veers up vertically on the right in a dramatic 45-degree angle: that perfect moment like in a cartoon when a character is suspended in air before falling. No one screams, no one loses a breath, no one’s stomach knots. 

“Lean!” someone yells, and we enact a maneuver we were trained to do during the first day’s orientation to keep the boat from flipping when it rides up high on one side: Each of us physically stands up, lays forward, or otherwise springs from position in order to lean into that terrifying high side of the boat with our full body weight. And so, all the weight of our eight perfect, imperfect, forgiving, forgiven selves rise up against the forces of gravity trying to take us down, trying to flip that boat and land us all in the churning water in the middle of a chute. 

The moment is over in an instant. The boat lowers itself as if it had no intention of becoming upside down, and we paddle away like that’s what we were born to do. We end our day— dry—at Little Pine Camp with a meal of antipasto, lasagna, sausages, Caesar salad, and tiramisu, cooked up by our jubilant yogi-poet-chef guides whose gentle lessons in the ways of the river have taught me to trust. 

——

THE SKY MOVES UP THE CANYON WALL now as we descend into a deep, dark cut of Idaho batholith: the Impassable Canyon, named during the Sheepeater Indian War of 1879 with the Shoshone-Bannock Tuka-Deka people who lived there, when the U.S. Army could no longer find a way to pass through the river’s canyon on horseback. Tall black rock rises up around us, and the river narrows. Here, in this chasm of earth, I feel very remote, indeed. 

Even the sun can’t find us this deep. No watercolor-sunsets at Tumble Creek Camp on our last night, but we are surrounded by the orange glow of ponderosa pines. A campfire brightens the evening, and we snarf down our pistachio- and date-encrusted brie plate, our grilled Brussels sprouts with cherries and apples, the rosemary lemon chicken and cheesy polenta, our still-cold- and-fresh salad from one of the giant coolers kept aboard the sweep, our carrot cake, our beer, and our huckleberry-vodka- with-lemon cocktails. Cowboys and foresters dress up in lingerie from the costume bag that’s been unleashed for this last hurrah. Men and women paint their toenails in rainbow colors. Neil puts on a wig. I don a tutu and Mardi-Gras-bead headdress. And Karyn the geriatric nurse drapes her substantial bra-less bosom over the heads of the twenty-something year old menfolk guides seated on camp chairs, as a parting gift of love. We dance around the firelight, and most of the group drinks into the wee hours. 

I make my way to the tent by myself in the dark while Neil stays up with the group. Whereas in Alaska, the landscape was so quiet and empty that I never even heard a bird song and I craved community with others, here on this last night, I want to take a little space, a moment to be quiet, to listen, to read, to reflect. My internal landscape wants to absorb and remember the external landscape: alive, authentic, simple, and free. 

The next day, the Middle Fork ends at the main Salmon River, just as the North Fork of the Koyukuk terminated at the Middle Fork of the Koyukuk—both river trips of my life beginning at the origin of the river and ending at the terminus, like complete narrative stories with beginnings, middles, and ends, in and of themselves. The guides tell me this arrangement is not typical for raft trips, which usually cover a small segment of a very long river where you see no beginning and no end. We travel two hours by school bus on crude dirt forest roads, and eventually hop on a turbulent hour-and-a-half backcountry flight, which soars 10,000 feet over the river canyon that had been our home for nearly a week, back to McCall, Idaho, where Neil used to live and work in the forest with this very crowd. We hug goodbye to these good people, check into our hotel room, and ride out the bliss of river life for another few days. 

For weeks and months before signing up for this trip and paying the high fees, Neil and I hemmed and hawed about whether we should go. We debated and discussed, rehashing all the same issues over and over, both of us terrible at decision-making, each one wanting to please and not overburden the other. Finally, after many sleepless nights, I said to Neil: It comes down to this. What we are deciding is what kind of people we want to be, or what kind of people we are: The kind of people who take the opportunity to have the trip of a lifetime, with all its risks and uncertainties, ups and downs, and potential for life-changing rewards; or the kind of people who don’t. 

Now that it’s all over and we are back to our normal lives, remembering our wild and free days on the river in that remote, faraway place that, truly, so few people in the world will ever know, it is a relief and a revelation to me that we chose to go. 

I’d been on a river before, and what I did in Alaska was in many ways a riskier trip, more remote, more at stake. I didn’t know that then because I had the confidence and ignorance of a younger person. On the last day in the Brooks Range in Alaska, we heard the news that a lawyer from Washington DC had been mauled and killed by a grizzly bear in the same corridor we’d been traveling. We had not seen more than a mud print of a grizzly bear track, had spent the eighteen days in Alaska in virtual wildlife-silence. But it could have just as easily been one of us. It could have been me. During that Alaska trip, the first of many steps I would take to steer away from a traditional work and family life, I had been badass before I even knew what badass was. 

Did the wild and scenic rivers of my life teach me anything after all? 

Yes, they did: Possibility. 

I asked the river to intoxicate me once, as the poet Baudelaire suggested, and it grudgingly nourished me with the gift of inner strength. And then I allowed the river to intoxicate me again, soothing me with its endless rolling song, like the wind, the wave, the star, the bird. And in doing so, I found, thrillingly, that when I dared to take the leap into the wide-open unknown once again, the river rose up to meet me. 

♦ 

Sue Eisenfeld’s essays have been listed five times among “Notable Essays” in The Best American Essays. From Arlington, Virginia, she writes about nature, travel, adventure, history, and culture. She is the author of Wandering Dixie: Dispatches from the Lost Jewish South and Shenandoah: A Story of Conservation and Betrayal. Website: www.sueeisenfeld.com.

Delmarva Review publishes compelling new nonfiction, fiction, and poetry selected annually from thousands of submissions worldwide. Financial support for the nonprofit literary journal is from tax-deductible contributions, sales, and a grant from the Talbot Arts Council with funds from the Maryland State Arts Council. Website: DelmarvaReview.org.

#  #  #

 

Author’s Note: As a girl, I made frequent canoe trips to this pond with my parents. Decades later, a spontaneous excursion with my grown sons left impressions that reverberated with surprising intensity. And yet, it was such a small moment. What act—an act of observation or a suspension of knowing—opens the door?

Still Life

My son who is now a man suns
stork-like on a log, one leg dangling
over water—he is driftwood, bleached
clean. There is swimming in the lily
pads, and drying with tiny towels,
the grit of sand to wipe away
before the socks. A day that slingshots
through my reckoning and lodges
somewhere, behind—I look down
on a mosaic of black mussels
nestled in the shoals and find
strangers in the grown bodies
of sons. Next time there may be
grasses. Rain. A picnic of plums.

⧫

Kathryn Weld is a professor of mathematics at Manhattan College. Her writing has appeared in Bellevue Literary Review, Midwest Quarterly, Southeast Review, , Cortlandt Review, Valparaiso Poetry Review, Connotations Press, Still, the Journal, and others. She published a chapbook in 2019, Waking Light (Kattywompus Press). Website: Manhattan.edu/campus-directory/kathryn.weld.

Delmarva Review publishes evocative new poetry and prose selected from thousands of submissions annually. Designed to encourage outstanding writing, the literary journal is nonprofit and independent. Financial support is from tax-deductible contributions, sales, and a grant from the Talbot County Arts Council with funds from the Maryland State Arts Council. Website: DelmarvaReview.org.

Author’s Note: The shock of a parent’s death, the first moments of grief, can trigger very specific memories. Here I remembered the way my father’s hands looked, both alive and dead. My memories clustered around him in the funeral home when I arrived after my journey home, him at work as a hobbyist on his days off. Questions came to mind: the impatient questions of childhood, the unanswerable questions that come to us in the solemn presence of death.

Daddy’s Hands

I drove all night to get there,
but I got there too late.
When I made the undertaker open the coffin,
there Daddy lay,
hands folded across his chest.

I hadn’t noticed before
how ridged his nails were.
Even in death
his hands looked intent and purposeful.

In his woodshop on Saturdays
my father thought with his hands—
angling a design on the jigsaw,
marking inches off on a board.

He handled wood like I imagine Dürer did
when he cut lines into a block of applewood
for one of his prints,
and then there’s a horse running, or a king
or a rabbit, or the vacant eyes
of death on a starveling apocalyptic horse. 

As a boy I’d stand beside him, barely able to see
over the top of the workbench, asking my questions.
How old would I have to be to drive the car?
When would he let me shoot the .22?
Half listening, intent on the task at hand,
“All in good time,” he would say.
“All in good time.” 

As I looked down at him
that morning I speak of,
the questions I asked were different—
questions no one but the dead could answer. 

⧫ 

Richard Tillinghast grew up in Memphis and was educated at Sewanee (University of the South) and Harvard. The prize-winning author of many books of poetry and creative nonfiction, this summer he published Blue If Only I Could Tell You, his thirteenth collection of poems. His literary travel books include Finding Ireland and Istanbul: City of Forgetting and Remembering. He lives in Hawaii and spends summers in Sewanee, Tennessee.

Delmarva Review publishes evocative new poetry,  fiction, and nonfiction selected from thousands of submissions annually. Designed to encourage outstanding writing, the literary journal is nonprofit and independent. Financial support comes from sales, tax-deductible contributions, and a grant from the Talbot Arts Council with funds from the Maryland State Arts Council. Website: DelmarvaReview.org.

 

Writer’s Note: I wrote (this story) during the peak of the Covid epidemic. Everyone was baking bread. At the same time, I read two newspaper articles which intrigued me. One was about a “starter” museum that housed old sourdough starters. Another article suggested that some of these starters contained the DNA of the original bakers. I spent a few days researching the Gold Rush, Theodore Roosevelt, and the history of women’s rights in Wyoming. Then I was off and running…

A Convocation of Eagles

AWAKE AND ASLEEP HAD NO DISTINCTION. Her days passed in a blur; the stuff of nightmares come true. An Intensive Care Unit teetering toward disaster. Tangled tubes. Gasping patients. Tate could barely hear herself over the beeps.

“Mr. Kowalski. The one in bed five. His oxygen’s at 77. He should be dead. Why isn’t he dead?”

Chicago hospitals were short of staff and long on prayer. Desperate. Trained as a dermatologist, Tate was learning on the fly. There were no cures. No easy fixes. Instead, she spent every spare moment studying intravascular coagulation and cytokine storms.

This bug was a beast. People showed up for work terrified, their eyes darting above their masks, their gloved hands shaking. Twelve hours later, they’d finish their shifts numb with fear, dawdling in the parking lot, sleeping in their cars, convinced they’d bring the monster home with them.

But Tate was strangely happy. Thirty-seven years old, she had no husband and no kids. No one to live for and nothing to lose. The job was a perfect fit.

They say you can divide your life into two phases: before and after the virus. Her Before Life had all the trappings. Men spun their heads when she walked down the sidewalk. She owned a condo with a Great Lake view. But she wanted little and needed less. A comforter on the bed. A tea kettle on the stove. Each night she slurped a bowl of cereal. Then she’d stare at the light blinking on her machine.

That night, the night that changed her life, the light blinked one, two, three times.

Tate, It’s Harvey. The office is a shitstorm. Call me, will you?

Her finger hovered over his number. There were three dermatologists in the office, three cosmeticians, a handful of rotating P.A.s. Harvey owned the entire building and was savvy enough to include a dietician, a hair salon, and a day spa. Basically, they were a one-stop shop. Cleanse and exfoliate. Purge and peel.

Thanks to the virus, business had taken a big hit. But Harvey treated his tenants like indentured servants. Constrained by the law and chained by their contracts. If she even considered quitting, he’d think of a hundred ways to sue. The rest of the messages were from her mother. She called maybe three or four times a year. Looking back, it was the first clue.

Tate, it’s me. Mom.

Call me, Sweetie. Will you?

She replayed the messages over and over, and each time her mother sounded worse. Short of breath. Raspy. Evelyn just had turned seventy-five. That age alone made her high risk. With her pulse pounding, Tate punched her number.

“Mom?”

“Sweetie?”

Then Tate heard the telltale sputter. Like an engine that won’t turn over. Put. Put Put. Put. Tate closed her eyes and took a deep breath. Her whole body clenched.

“Jesus, Mom. How long have you had that cough?”

The voice that answered was her mother’s default mode. Professional. Composed. Before she retired, Evelyn had spent nearly forty years as an ER nurse. Tate watched her deliver babies. Sew up dangling fingers. A pro at calming crazy people down.

“I won’t have the results for another week,” said Evelyn. “But MaryAnn’s in the hospital. We all four got it, Sweetie.”

Tate’s mind switched channels. And suddenly, a black-and- white movie scrolled across the screen. She’d grown up in a small town in Colorado called Glenwood Springs. Instead of a father and siblings, a coven of crusty women had raised her. They lived in separate homes but were inseparable. Closer than sisters, they’d swap recipes and advice. Trade gossip. Share heartache. Night after night, they’d drown their sorrows at the kitchen table, laughing and crying, whispering and wailing. A finger would slowly trace a jaw. A hand would rest upon a knee. The table littered with coffee cups, the cups discreetly filled with gin. The scope of the disaster took a minute to sink in.

“All of you?”

For as long as she could remember, they were family. There were no other children. No husbands. No mention of Tate’s father. No treacly histories littered with romance. Tate had few memories of arguments or dissention. Their oddball household suited the four of them fine.

“I suppose that makes me backup,” she heard herself saying. “I’ll be there in two days’ time.”

First thing in the morning she’d run to the hospital and get tested for antibodies. Then she’d pack up her car and aim west. She set her alarm for four in the morning. Then she got ready to leave.

The antibody results came back by the time she hit Kansas. If she could trust the test, it was good news. She’d been exposed to the virus and was hopefully immune. A few hours in a motel outside of Wichita, then she barreled straight through. Soon the terrain started to change. Towering mountains. Rushing waters. Soaring eagles. Her car careened through one valley after another while she rolled down the windows and sucked in the clean air. It had been years since she’d traveled back to Colorado. First college. Then work. She always had an excuse.

Dawn was breaking as her car rolled through town. She passed the Hotel Colorado, built in 1893 as a spa for the rich. The Hot Springs where tourists dragged their kids. Her old elementary school. Then, finally, she pulled up beside her mother’s house. Tulips and petunias lined the walkway. It was too early in the season to plant vegetables. Still, her mother’s garden was easy to picture. Tomatoes. Peppers. Cucumbers. Plus herbs for all the neighbors’ aches and pains.

The key was swinging from her keychain. Tate opened the door and was slammed by familiar sights. The kitchen cabinets her mother had painted. The dining room chairs her mother had upholstered. Each of Evelyn’s projects marked another year of her childhood. The bedroom door was opened. Summoning her courage, Tate peeked inside.

Her first impression was shock. Evelyn was sleeping. Her color was sallow, her lips pale. She had covered herself with a nest of blankets. A hand tatted with veins lay splayed on top. Tate grabbed her mother’s wrist and felt her pulse. The beats were fast, too fast. Then, all at once Tate realized that her own heart was beating in tandem. She grabbed an oximeter from her bag and slipped it on the mother’s finger. Her oxygen was at 96. No need to panic yet. Next, she took out a thermometer and a blood pressure cuff. Soon, a plan unfolded. Tate would start her on an inhaler for the cough. Then some antibiotics to ward off pneumonia.

Then suddenly, like a gust of wind busting down a door, The Mother Before made an appearance. Evelyn opened her eyes, sat up straight, and snarled.

“For Pete’s sake, Tate. Stop fussing. Hand me my list, will you?”

Some mothers are known for warm hugs and tender embraces. Tate’s mother was known for her lists. A piece of notebook paper sat next to her clock. And numbered from one to twenty-three was a list of chores. Water the tulips. Trim the petunias. Feed the starter.

“Your starter?” asked Tate.

“It’s been a full week,” said Evelyn. Then slowly her eyes began to close. “Some fresh sourdough bread would be mighty fine.”

Again, that black-and-white movie played. Her mother’s hand dipping into the mason jar. The starter waking like a newborn, bubbling as it took its first breath. Then overnight, the doubling. Like a creature rising from the swamp, the mixture would come alive, the starter throb, the jar ooze. Tate knew enough not to argue. Instead, she headed for the kitchen. The starter, as always, was in the refrigerator. Evelyn claimed it had been in the family for over one hundred years.

Tate opened the seal and breathed in the musty odor. A pinch of DNA, a dollop of drama, a cup of the past defined each batch. Legends abounded. Tucked in her bed, Tate was both recipient and receptacle. Her mother’s hand on the quilt, the shutters thwacking, the shadows looming on the wall. They were the kind of stories that kept her up at night, the stories and the starter inexorably intertwined, passed from one generation to the next.

She took out the Mason jar, scooped half of the mixture into the sink, then added fresh water and flour. Like her mother, she counted to thirty as she stirred. Soon life surged through her fingertips. The past merged with the present. Electricity filled the air.

Sure enough, the dreams started that first night. Tate saw an icebox and a steaming stove. An aproned woman sweating as she worked. The woman looked vaguely familiar. Long hair down to her waist. Her face grooved. Her mouth grim. Her hands worked mechanically. First, she cut an onion and boiled it. Then she took a mortar and pestle and mashed it up. When she was through, she wrapped the concoction in cheesecloth and tied it with string.

Meanwhile, a man hovered in the shadows. Watching. Waiting. Worrying. An opened door and then a child. The bed was tousled. The child crying. The woman held the poultice to the girl’s ear. Then she started humming.

Tate woke up with the sun slicing through her window. And for a moment, she was utterly confused. The dream was so real she felt like she was still in it. And that song. That humming. In the distance, her mother was shuffling in her bedroom. She could swear she was humming the same tune. She tiptoed down the hall and laid her ear against her mother’s door. She heard drawers opening and closing. A toilet flushing. A faucet running. And beneath it all, like an underground spring, was that song.

She knocked on the door, and seconds later, Evelyn barked come in. Though her mother was back in bed, she had taken a shower, changed her nightgown, and looked one hundred percent better. Sometimes, thought Tate, you get lucky.

She offered Tate a sly grin. “So, how’s the list coming?” Then, once again, her mother started humming.

“That tune,” said Tate.

“The Irish lullaby?” Her mother answered. “You remember. My mother. My mother’s mother. One generation to another. We’ve always loved our lullabies.”

Tate ran downstairs. She must have walked past the picture a million times. And there, in her mother’s parlor, on a wall above the fireplace, was a sepia-colored photograph. A teenage girl dressed in a graduation gown standing next to a woman who looked remarkably like her. Tate’s grandmother and great- grandmother immortalized.

It was another bedtime story. Against all odds, her grandmother had attended a university for the deaf and then nursing school. Though she passed away years earlier, Tate never forgot her visits. The grandmother’s hands fluttering as she mouthed soundless words. Her mother signing along. The two of them communicating in their own private language. Of her great- grandmother Tate recalled very little. In the photo, her long hair is swept in a fashionable updo. Her face is shiny, smiling, even beatific. She’s anything but grim.

WITH HER MOTHER ON THE MEND, the next stop was the local hospital. Valley View had been around for as long as Tate could remember. Her mother’s long-time employer, Tate’s home away from home. How many times had she been parked in the visitor’s lounge with a lap filled with homework and a bag filled with snacks? Armed in her N95 mask, a visor, and gloves, Tate’s feet found their way to the information desk.

“I’m looking for a MaryAnn Whitmore.”

The clerk’s fingers danced on the keyboard. “I’m sorry to say Mrs. Whitmore’s in the Covid ICU,” he replied. “No visitors allowed.”

No one called MaryAnn Mrs. Whitmore. The clerk, this stranger with his smug smile and fake concern, knew nothing about her. Tate stood taller and straighter. Something like courage coursed through her.

“Which floor?” she asked.

“But, but, but…” he replied.

Tate grabbed the credentials from her wallet and pressed the elevator button. A half hour later, further fortified with a gown, she stood in front of MaryAnn’s bed.

Sometimes bad news only gets worse.

“We’re about to put her on a ventilator,” said the nurse. “Take a look at her stats.”

Her oxygen was low, her pulse fast. But MaryAnn’s kidneys were holding. And the films of her lungs showed minimal damage. Tate looked around the room. Valley View had seen just a handful of cases. The room was half empty, the equipment brand-new. And all at once, it occurred to Tate that she had seen a lot more of this disease than MaryAnn’s doctors. She glanced once more at her mother’s friend. Her eyes were closed, her hair a startling white.

Stubborn. Resilient. MaryAnn was the kind woman who never flinched from a man’s job. A fixture on Main Street, she owned the town’s repair shop. Nothing broken or in need of refurbishing was beyond her grasp. Kitchen appliances. Sewing machines. Toys of every shape and size. Tate’s favorite babysitter MaryAnn would show up at our house with her toolbox, and together they’d take things apart. Her pet name for Tate was Squirrel.

“Squirrel,” she’d say. “A bit of spit and a lick of luck can fix anything. You can do it, Squirrel! Trying is halfway there.”

A breast cancer survivor, MaryAnn had beaten the odds more than once.

The nurse was waiting for Tate’s cue. “You gotta plan?”

She doesn’t weigh more than a hundred pounds, thought Tate. They need to flip her on her stomach. Between the tube and the wires, it took five of them to maneuver her body. Within minutes MaryAnn’s eyes opened. Then she gasped.

“For fuck’s sake, I finally can breathe.”

Tate felt a smile crease the corners of her face. Then she delivered more instructions. Two milligrams of dexamethasone. Some exercises and inhalation therapy. Acetaminophen for the fever.

The nurse scurried. Machines groaned. Meanwhile Tate bent down and gently rubbed MaryAnn’s hand. After a few long seconds, she saw her eyes flutter. First a hint of recognition then a wash of relief. Tate’s smile grew wider.

“It’s me,” she said. “Squirrel.”

THAT NIGHT, Tate came home to find her mother remarkably improved. Evelyn asked about her friend. The chaos at the hospital. The morale of the staff. Finally, Evelyn asked about her starter. “Drop a pinch into a glass of water. If it floats, you know you’re ready.”

Tate had forgotten about the damn dough. She took a half cup of starter and mixed it with more flour and water. Then she left it again on the counter to settle. Meanwhile, her mother handed her the key to MaryAnn’s house along with another list.

Ten minutes later, she was there. She turned on the lights and found a scrawny cat huddled under the couch. Watered the plants. Took in the mail. But exhaustion soon took over. Her eyes were heavy and her back ached. She was halfway out the door when she remembered. There was yet another starter to attend.

They say that starters tell a history. Each one has a distinct fingerprint: an odor and texture that sets it apart. Like the cat, MaryAnn’s starter was badly in need of reviving. Tate added and mixed and added and mixed. Soon the air was tangy, and her fingers tingled. And, sure enough, that night she had another dream.

She was climbing a mountain over a staircase of ice. The wind was howling while the cold was burning her ears. On her back was a satchel that must have weighed forty pounds. She looked ahead and put one foot after another. A frozen horse lay on its side, its legs straight out. A man sat on the hard snow, crying. Each step was torture, and each breath was agony. Despite the frostbite, in spite of hunger, all everyone talked about was gold.

A friendly face pulled her aside. Red cheeks. A grizzled beard. “Squirrel,” he said. “You gotta plan?”

“Sure, I’ve got a plan,” she replied. “Trying is halfway there.” Inside her head, the route was laid out like a map. The Mounties would weigh her provisions. Then she’d head over the pass to Lake Bennett. If the weather held, she’d buy a kayak. Then she’d land in Dawson City.

When you’re in a dream, there’s no distinguishing what’s real and what’s not. Instead, the scene played in Technicolor with Dolby Sound. When she reached the peak, she collapsed by a makeshift fire. The wood was wet. The kerosene thick like gravy. She was too tired to eat. Too tired to sleep. Instead, she groped inside her bag with a desperation that made no sense. Her mittened fingers dug and tore and scratched their way around. At last, she found what she was looking for: a sack of flour and a small clay crock.

She took the crock and buried it inside her jacket. She could swear she felt it beating against her chest. To survive, that starter needed her, and she needed the starter. First thing in the morning, she’d fortify herself with flapjacks. Then she’d take her provisions and head toward the open waters. Her pockets were already itching. Buried treasure was screaming her name.

THE NEXT MORNING, Tate woke up hot and cold at the same time. Half of her was in Colorado while the other half was stampeding the Klondike. She checked on her mother, took a shower, then drove straight to the hospital. MaryAnn was stable. If her progress continued, they planned on moving her out of the ICU. So far, so good. With both her mother and MaryAnn responding nicely, she decided to head to her next patient. Pinky Hayburn lived on a ranch ten miles out of town.
The car meandered across wood bridges and over dirt roads. Chipmunks scurried and eagles swooped. Soon the path was canopied with trees. While she had a few minutes to spare, Tate prepared herself for what she’d find. Pinky had always been larger than life, a goddess disguised as mortal. Tate never knew anyone as fearless. She dyed her hair pink. Ran a weekly poker game at the Elks Lodge. Lived in a large log cabin deep in the Colorado woods. She always remembered her kindness. During the summers, when Tate and her friends were desperate for jobs, Pinky let them work at her ranch. Of course, they were nearly useless. But they needed the cash, and their mothers needed a break. When MaryAnn got cancer, Pinky shaved her head, too.

Nothing daunted her. She always had a long line of suitors knocking on her door. But Pinky considered a man one more mouth to feed, a beau just a feather in her cap. Tate pulled up to her front porch, took out her mother’s spare key, and walked into the house. Then she stomped her feet and announced herself. Within seconds, her cellphone buzzed.

“I’m in the sunroom,” said Pinky. “Awaiting my callers.”

One small room in the rear of the cabin boasted floor-to- ceiling windows and a valley view. Tate headed east and found the older woman completely unchanged. Her hair was still pink, her color good. She was dressed in designer sweatshirt and pants. The words FILA FILA FILA ran down her leg.

“You sure you’re sick?” asked Tate. Then she took out the pulse oximeter and cuff.

“You know I always eat like a horse,” she answered. “But lately I’ve no appetite.”

Tate quickly decided Pinky was more neglected than ill. Together they explored her kitchen. Tate looked inside her refrigerator and was shocked. It was nearly empty. A Mason jar with her starter. Some butter. A few eggs. When Tate offered to make an omelet, Pinky ate two.

Three hours later, Tate had completed another list. She had refreshed Pinky’s starter, changed her bedding, run a load of wash. Meanwhile, Pinky fell into an old familiar groove, pelting Tate with questions about her life.

You like your job? You got a beau? You wanna have kids?

Pinky was always a sure shot. Suddenly, Tate found herself confessing what had long been bottled up. She hated being a dermatologist. She was lonely. And if she ever wanted kids, she’d have to act soon. Meet a man? Freeze her eggs? Her life was as empty as those pantry shelves.

When she got home, she found her mother restless. Evelyn had spent all afternoon stretching and folding her sourdough and waiting to hear about her friends. Inside the refrigerator, two proofing baskets stood halfway filled. By the next morning, the dough would be doubled and ready to bake. Tate straightened the house. Then, once again, she spent a restless night, her dreams so real she could touch them.

The world was sepia colored, the air parched, the scene shot through a dusty lens. A woman was wearing a double-barreled skirt and a pair of cowboy boots. Beautiful boots, custom made, and hand etched up and down with vines. A town square with a drug store. A mercantile. A post office. A sign saying: “Welcome to Jackson Hole Wyoming, population 1347!” Men tipped their hats as she rode by. Howdy Sheriff! It’s a fine morning! On her hip was a pearl-handled pistol. Pinned on her blouse was a silver star.

SINCE TATE’S THREE PATIENTS were holding their own, she spent the next afternoon visiting the fourth Musketeer: Sally Sidwell. The wealthiest woman in town, Sally was encumbered with a full-time staff who anticipated her every need. This house was markedly different from the others. A private entrance lined with spruce trees. A bridge that cleared a moat. Like the Hotel Colorado, the mansion was old-style Italian, a replica of another time and place.

Every old-timer in town knew the stories. Sally’s grandfather first came to Glenwood Springs hoping to cure his tuberculosis. Instead, he made a fortune mining silver. Met Theodore Roosevelt. Lived and died in the hotel. When Tate knocked on the door, the housekeeper greeted her. If Tate’s mother and her friends were in their seventies, the housekeeper had to be pushing eighty. Her hand swept the air.

“We’re all under the weather, Ms. Tate. The rest went home to stay with family. The two of us are taking care of each other.”

The housekeeper walked slowly down a long corridor and then pointed the way upstairs. Tate had never been invited into Sally’s bedroom before. On the wall was a large gilt mirror. She glanced to make sure her hair was combed.

The hallway was eerily quiet. First Tate knocked. Then she
opened the door. Her initial impression was awe. Silk curtains. Mountains of pillows. But buried in bed underneath the finery were the remnants of the woman she remembered.

“Sally?”

But the old woman waved her aside. “Take care of yourself,” Sally whispered. “Take care of your mother. We Sidwells know when it’s time.”

The beast took many forms. Some people hallucinated; others had personality changes. Tate assumed that Sally was out of her mind.

“This is a tricky disease,” said Tate. “It plays havoc with your heart, your lungs, your kidneys. I’ve seen people go from bad to worse in minutes.”

Sally barely had the breath to speak. “I’ve called my lawyer,” she said. “My friends will all be remembered. They’re all I ever loved.” Then she coughed so hard the windows rattled.

Tate drove home unsure and unsteady, taking one wrong turn after another. The farther she traveled, the more lost she became. It was close to dusk by the time she pulled into her mother’s driveway. The Dutch oven was on the counter. Two loaves of bread were cooling.

“I’m not sure whether to call a priest or an ambulance or the cops,” Tate confessed.

She reached once more into her bag and extracted Sally’s Mason jar. Then she held it, shook it, watched a few measly flakes fall like snow. When she sat down, her body crumbled. Then she started to cry.

But if Tate were seeking compassion, she was looking in the wrong quarters. Her mother only doled out comfort in small and measured amounts. Evelyn grabbed the jar, set her jaw, and began to work.

“I don’t think Sally’s crazy, and I don’t think she’s depressed,” said Evelyn. “Sometimes enough is enough.” A bowl of water and a cup of flour sat on the counter. Like birds, her hands swooped in and out. “Every day we’ll tend to it.” said Evelyn. “Feed it. Talk to it. Make sure it knows we care. One way or another…we go on.”

Tate glanced out the window. The sky was slate gray, the clouds stacked like plates. Evelyn was right. Sometimes enough was enough. Tate was tired and tired of being tired. She’d had enough of her mother’s bromides and homilies. Enough of her mother skirting the truth. Thoughts that had been incubating surged to the surface. Something like rage poured out.

“I must have looked at the photos above your fireplace a million times,” she blurted. “Did you notice there are no men in those pictures? My great-grandfather. My grandfather. My father. What’s wrong with us? What happened to the men?”

Her mother took her long serrated knife and sawed through the first sourdough loaf. The crust was a golden brown. Hard. Just the way she liked it.

“Grandmama’s husband was an alcoholic,” she said. “He smacked her, and she stayed. He gambled all their money, and she stayed. He caroused with other women, and she stayed. But the day he took a fist to their daughter, she left.”

Then Tate remembered the dream. A poultice. A crying child. All at once, the pieces of the puzzle came together.

“Grandma wasn’t born deaf?” she asked.

Her mother nodded her head. “An ear infection damaged one ear,” she replied. “A beating took the other.”

That night, Tate had trouble falling asleep. She circled the hallways. Then she peeked inside the refrigerator and checked Sally’s starter. If they were lucky, a few bubbles would soon be breaking, the starter crackling with the alchemy of life. But so far, nothing. Tate held the jar inches from her face. Then she glared at the listless lumps. Finally, she opened the seal, took a deep breath, and let the magic course through her. Her hands tied and her options few, she turned off the lights and went to bed.

She woke to daylight. In the distance, music was playing. She walked onto a dirt street, passed barrels of water, dodged horses tied to a post. Then she glanced both ways and headed toward a pair of swinging doors. Men were playing cards, and women were sitting on their laps. She walked up to the bar, ordered a whiskey, and drank it in one swoop. When she was through, she thanked the bartender, threw some coins on the counter, and left.

She was tired and tired of being tired. Most of all, she was tired of this cough. A cough that came from deep within her belly. When she covered her mouth, she found her handkerchief spattered with blood.

If only she could find her way back. If only she could make it to her room. If only she could make it to her bed. And all at once, there it was. A stone fortress in all its glory. The Hotel Colorado.

Like all of Tate’s dreams, there was no telling what was real and what was not. But when she woke up the next morning, two things were certain. She knew she was safe in her mother’s home. And she knew that Sally was dead.

A MONTH PASSED. Sally was given a small but proper memorial service. MaryAnn moved into Evelyn’s house to recuperate. Pinky wasted no time haranguing Tate about her life choices. The old woman was right. It was time for Tate to move on.

But first the threesome insisted on a big send-off. The parlor was strewn with balloons and banners. A homemade cake. Evelyn’s finest china. A coffee urn they all politely ignored.

“Here’s to friendship!” said Pinky.

A pile of presents sat on the dining table while her mother and friends perched on their chairs. Tate opened each gift slowly, savoring the moment, remembering the moment, never knowing when another like moment would come to pass.

The first gift was a small box. Tucked inside was a man’s gold ring topped with a large emerald.

“It was my grandfather’s,” said MaryAnn. “The one who struck gold in Alaska.”

The next box was bigger. Tate scrambled through the tissue paper. Then she extracted a weathered pair of cowboy boots. They were exactly like the ones in her dream, down to the etched vines. She blinked.

“They were my grandmother’s,” said Pinky. “Now they belong to you.”

It was hard to open the third gift. Like a phantom limb or a missing tooth, Sally’s absence was palpable.

“She had set it aside for you ages ago,” said Evelyn. “We figured now was the right time.”

Inside was a ratty teddy bear. It looked handmade. Ancient. From its velvet coat to its moveable arms and legs, Tate had never seen anything like it.

“The ladies at the Colorado made two,” said her mother. “One for Mr. Roosevelt and one for Grandpa Sidwell. I believe Mr. Roosevelt’s in the Smithsonian. This one’s the other.”

A ring. A pair of boots. A stuffed bear. But sometimes the most important gifts slip through your fingers. And sometimes the most important words go unsaid. So, they gorged on cake. They sipped their gin. They swapped gossip and talked about the news. And when everything they could say or do was all used up, they walked Tate to her car.

The sun was setting. Tate got in the driver’s seat and started the ignition. The horizon was endless, the moon a suggestion, the stars still waiting to shine. Tate took one last glance at the three faces glowing with the day’s last light. It was hard to leave. Hard to put her foot on the gas pedal. Hard to clear the misgivings from her head. Why was everything so damned hard? But the three old women just stood there, demanding little but expecting more. Their legacy? A lifetime of wisdom, a litany of lessons, their stories, like their starters, waiting to be savored in the years to come.

Finally, her mother rapped on the window. I love you, she signed. Come back soon.

♦

Marlene Olin was born in Brooklyn, raised in Miami, and educated at the University of Michigan. Her short stories and essays have been published in The Massachusetts Review, Catapult, PANK, The Baltimore Review, and other literary publications. She is the recipient of the 2015 Rick Demarinis Fiction Award and the 2018 So To Speak Fiction Prize. She occasionally tweets at @writestuffmiami.

Delmarva Review publishes evocative new fiction, nonfiction, and poetry selected annually from thousands of submissions. Designed to encourage outstanding writing, the review is an independent, nonprofit literary publication. Financial support comes from tax-deductible contributions, sales, and a grant from the Talbot Arts Council with funds from the Maryland State Arts Council. Website: DelmarvaReview.org.

 

Writer’s Note: In this poem, I imagine my future dying process, hopefully “years from now,” surrounded by quiet, love, nature, and music. The scene is borrowed from a real place, Commonweal Retreat Center in Bolinas, California, where many have found solace and healing. The poem has since been included in my chapbook “A Doctor Only Pretends: Poems about illness, death, and in-between” and reviewed by poet Matthew Lippman in Tikkun Magazine

Years from Now

Near the outskirts of Bolinas, a woman offers me

a small pot of coral impatiens and leads me 

into a large retreat house, where I choose a room 

that faces cypress trees facing the ocean,

and I curl up in the pillowed quiet.

When she shows me the path to the driftwood 

chapel, I find an altar of feathers, bones, shells, 

a tall vase of fresh wildflowers, river stones etched

with names warming by the window. In my singsong 

heart a campfire lights, where I toast marshmallows, 

belt out I Know an Old Lady Who Swallowed a Fly,

and where a woman waits beside me 

with a pot of coral impatiens. When I tire, she leads me 

back to the house and the room facing the cypress trees

and ocean, its pillowy quiet. Later, I dance the path 

to the driftwood chapel, its altar of bones, shells, 

vase of fresh wildflowers, and warm stone 

with my name on it.

⧫

Abby Caplin is the author of the chapbook A Doctor Only Pretends: poems about illness, death, and in-between (2022). Her poems have appeared in AGNI, Catamaran, The MacGuffin, Midwest Quarterly, The Southampton Review, Tikkun, among other journals. She has been a finalist for the Rash Award in Poetry and the Anna Davidson Rosenberg Poetry Award, a semi-finalist for the Willow Run Poetry Book Award, and a nominee for Best New Poets, Best of the Net, and the Pushcart Prize. Abby is a physician in San Francisco, California.

Delmarva Review publishes compelling new poetry and prose selected annually from thousands of submissions regionally and nationally. Financial support for the nonprofit literary journal comes from tax-deductible contributions, sales, and a grant from the Talbot Arts Council with funds from the Maryland State Arts Council. Website: DelmarvaReview.org.

 

 

Author’s Note: “Fried Chicken, 1981” is a portrait of my mother when I was a child. I wanted to say her name the way her mother said her name. I wanted to capture the way she spoke and her mannerisms. I wanted to acknowledge her youthfulness in the context of aging. I wanted to point to the everyday experience of expressing love and care by making dinner. And of course, I wanted to write down how she made fried chicken.

Fried Chicken, 1981

Joanie props her elbows on the table cloth
then picks up a chicken leg-
and-thigh combo, dredges
it through egg and milk, through
breadcrumbs with flecks
of green and black, nestles it
in with the rest of the body. Later, Joanie
hunches over stove and frying pan,
before pushing the tray
into the oven for, oh,
35 minutes, and back to the table
with her elbows
pointer finger,
still unbent by time,
aimed to the ceiling
to mark her words,
and she looks out the window
where we will never build
an addition. This is the process
no one else seems to use
to get their chicken fried
and I know
other people’s recipes
are supposed to be good,
but hers is the greasiest cracked
pepper and salt
love I have ever tasted. 

♦

Louise Robertson serves as the marketing director for Writers’ Block Poetry Night in Columbus, Ohio. She counts among her publications, awards, and honors a jar of homemade pickles she received for running a workshop as well as a 2018 Pushcart Prize nomination (“Open: A Journal of Arts and Letters”) and a 2018 Best of the Net nomination (Flypaper). 

Delmarva Review publishes evocative poetry and prose selected annually from thousands of submissions regionally and nationally. Designed to encourage and present outstanding new writing, it is an independent, nonprofit literary publication. Financial support comes from tax-deductible contributions, sales, and a grant from the Talbot Arts Council with funds from the Maryland State Arts Council. Website: DelmarvaReview.org.

 

 

 

Author’s Note: I spend a great deal of my writing wondering about and exploring masculinity; here, I wanted to look at the idea that “men don’t cry” and really twist that around to ask questions about the value of emoting.  As a queer writer, I’m also always trying to examine what it’s like to feel islanded outside of the world of heteronormativity, and when those two things came together, this story emerged.

Criers

EVERY DAY AT RECESS, SOMEONE MADE LARRY HELVIG CRY. We kept eyedroppers in our pencil cases, extracting them right before the bell rang if it was our turn to suck tears from the corners of his eyes or draw them up off his cheeks. Larry’s tears were magic. A single drop squeezed onto a worksheet made the answers appear, written in perfect black graphite. Spiking our parents’ wineglasses ceased their fighting. A tiny smear rubbed into the palms transformed a klutz into an expert free throw shooter or pitcher. Daubing Larry’s tears on a scrape dissipated the pain like a powerful analgesic. Larry, we all knew, would one day change the world. His tears would cure cancer, eradicate AIDS, probably create world peace. But while we had him, we would use his tears to pass science and get better at playing the oboe. 

Making Larry cry wasn’t difficult. Some people, especially the girls, tickled him, the ribs on his left side were particularly tender. Others smuggled Tabasco sauce in their lunch boxes and dabbed it on his sensitive tongue. Naomi Marcus had a knack for singing sad songs, and these made Larry bawl profusely; some of us subcontracted her to serenade him, for which we promised her a portion of the take. Others, like Willy Ziegfeld, used pain, pressing into the tender spot of Larry’s shoulder or giving him rabbit punches to the sternum. 

The great tragedy was that the only person his tears couldn’t help was Larry himself. For him, they were just saline and salt. They could give the rest of us exactly what we wanted but left him only hiccupping and red eyed. Larry was small, pale—rumor was he suffered scoliosis—and we all knew he was madly in love with Peter Frost, a tenth grader with bronze calves who played soccer and swam for a club team. We once sent Peter’s younger sister home with a vial of Larry’s tears, a massive dose that she slipped into one of Peter’s protein shakes. They made him run faster but did nothing to make him notice Larry. 

But we noticed Larry. We noticed that he smelled like stargazers and sweet alyssum, which his mother grew in a tiny greenhouse in their backyard. We noticed how hollowed out he looked after weekends with his father, who had left his mom for his secretary. We noticed everything but that which we should have, and when he didn’t show up for school on the last day of eighth grade, it took awhile for us to realize something was deeply wrong. When we learned what Larry had done to his eyes, we cried. But we sobbed not for what the world had lost or for Larry’s hungering pain but for what had slipped away, all our hopes and dreams leaking out of our eyes in tiny, hollow twinkles. We tried using our own tears, but all they did was sting, soaking our mouths in our own bitter taste. 

⧫

Joe Baumann’s fiction and essays have appeared in Phantom Drift, Passages North, Emerson Review, Another Chicago Magazine, Iron Horse Literary Review, Electric Literature, Electric Spec, On Spec, Barrelhouse, Zone 3, and many others.  He is the author of Ivory Children, published in 2013 by Red Bird Chapbooks.  He possesses a PhD in English from the University of Louisiana-Lafayette.  He was a 2019 Lambda Literary Fellow in Fiction.  His debut short story collection, Sing With Me at the Edge of Paradise, was the inaugural winner of the Iron Horse/Texas Tech University Press First Book Award, and his second story collection, The Plagues, will be released by Cornerstone Press in 2023.  His debut novel, I Know You’re Out There Somewhere, is forthcoming from Deep Hearts YA.  Website: joebaumann.wordpress.com.

Delmarva Review publishes evocative new fiction, nonfiction, and poetry selected annually from thousands of submissions locally and nationally. Designed to encourage outstanding writing, it is an independent, nonprofit literary publication. Financial support comes from tax-deductible contributions, sales, and a grant from the Talbot Arts Council with funds from the Maryland State Arts Council. Website: DelmarvaReview.org.