Princess Mommy Takes a Bite of River

Not long ago my fifteen year old son, Harlan, invited me hunting with him. Princess Mommy, whose idea of a good time is a stack of library books and a fresh pot of coffee, doesn’t exactly belong on the frozen mud banks in the cold. She is also not dumb enough to think that such invitations will be doled out liberally and indefinitely.

I’m all for quality time with my guys and have survived more Adam Sandler movies than any reasonable woman should in pursuit of just that. But everything has its limits and I couldn’t help thinking that the limit for first-boy bonding may well be duck hunting. Here’s the thing about this endeavor – it happens in lousy weather. Truly awful fit-for-polar-bears-and-raving-lunatics weather.

Never trust a duck hunter chatting about the weather. They don’t even consider pulling out the waders until it’s below freezing; their odds are best (apparently) in combinations of rain, snow, fog and all manner of frozen muck. While the sane are taking their brandy to the fire in such conditions, the duck hunters are heading out the door. It was my idea of perfect hell so when Harlan piped up with

“Mom, you don’t have to scout with me. You can stay in the warm car and be the driver”,

I should have been relieved. Here was an exit strategy thumbing its nose right at me. Did I take it? Noooo. The mommy-bonding instinct is far too stubborn and competitive for that.

“Stay in the car? What sort of lightweight do you think I am? Coolest duck-hunting, gun-toting mama does not stay in the car”, and with that, I sealed my own fate, watching my two favorite words, warm car, slip forever out of reach.

The first step for duck hunting, if you haven’t had the pleasure, is to dig out, categorize and load up mounds of gear.  Jackets, hats, vests, duck calls, boxes of shot, decoys tangled like corpses and several pairs of boots, per person. Boots for mud, boots for sand, boots for river, aka waders and boots for going into the first convenience store you can find to buy yourself an enormous chocolate bar in celebration of surviving the day.

“All this for a five pound duck?”

“They don’t usually get that big Mom.”

“We aren’t even getting five pounds of meat out of this? This is why people wind up at McDonald’s. Aren’t there plenty of people across the globe who catch fish with their bare hands?”

“There are guys in the South who catch catfish by shoving their arms down the fish’s mouth and grabbing their gills. It’s called noodling.”

“There are not.” Noodling?

“Are so”, and in three minutes he’d proven me wrong on You Tube and yes, it is exactly that weird.

Another piece of the why-Mommy-doesn’t-go-duck-hunting picture was our third stooge, Maddie the hunting dog.

Maddie doesn’t live at my house and we tend to approach one another with begrudged tolerance. She’s the thing I have to climb over to get to my kids and I’m the thing she has to inspect each time, struggling to remember if I’m worthy of the climb and should be allowed to pass. I actually like her protective nature; it’s the attendant jumping, clawing, snarfing and licking that I’d rather skip. I’d never been with her on a proper expedition though and here’s the thing, shockingly enough, about hunting dogs  – they are really good at hunting! She sat at attention, followed her cues and whimpered every time Harlan left her sight. So we were fools of the same stripe then, hoping to hang onto this boy for as long as we could and I wondered fleetingly if she might be trained to snarl at high school co-eds.

We stumbled around in the middle of the night – three a.m. does not count for “morning” in my book – and managed to be on the road only twenty minutes behind schedule. Harlan hid his disappointment at the day’s “bad” weather which had dawned mild and clear and hid my guilt that I had somehow caused it with subconscious appeals to every god, fairie and good luck charm I’d ever heard of to please not make me leave the house in duck hunting weather.

There is an almost charmed quality to waking so early, like the opposite of staying up past your bedtime but just as good. You know there’s something special happening if you’re awake on purpose at three a.m. and all of us were wide awake. Maddie sat upright in the back seat focused on the windshield as if she could get us there faster just by imagining the adventures ahead. Harlan poured coffee from the big  thermos he’d given me several Christmases before and there was no radio, no sound beyond our four tires spinning over the road. The stars were low in the sky, surrounding us as if we weren’t beneath them but swimming through them.

“It’s like being in space”, I said and Harlan grinned, Yeah”, as if we never tired of saying this when we took off in pursuit of small winged creatures destined for the oven.

Past Abiquiu we pulled onto the dirt road and when the first steep bend took the highway out of sight we stopped in the gray light. The Chama tumbling below the cliff felt like the only thing in the world and it was easy to think it had been waiting for us, was rolling its eyes upward in greeting.  We each found a place to send our own water into the ground and I was reminded that it’s nearly impossible to pee outside without grinning.

We shoved on and settled on a spot after watching a small cluster of ducks rush into the air. Their wings swiveled madly and their little heads looked cartoonish to my untrained eye which was also halfcocked in the other direction hoping to spy a beaver. Or a mountain lion. Perhaps a bear. I’d made it all the way out there and figured it was only fair for the wildlife to rise to the occasion and put on their best in-the-field zoo story for my benefit.

“So Mom, if you keep your eyes on the deepest part of the river and concentrate really hard, you might see – “

Oh boy. I focused my gaze and waited for instruction from my trusty guide. Might see what? Turtles? Trout? Muskrat?

“A blue whale.”

It’s a tangle of flattery and humiliation to realize how closely these children observe our idiocy.

“Or a heron smarty pants. Look.” I pointed down the river to where a heron was landing, as proudly as if I’d discovered the species myself. It was a beautiful blue gray, calm and poised, its wingspan seeming enormous and its legs looking too thin to be useful.

“Do you think it can see us?” I asked.

“Probably. But the ducks definitely can. Which reminds me, if you see them flying over, don’t look up.”

I looked straight up.

“That’s what I just said not to do.”

“How would I know there were ducks flying over if I wasn’t doing this?”

“You have to be sneaky.”

“Like looking for whales?”

“No, this is serious. Really. They’ll see your big white moon face and you’ll scare them away.”

“I don’t have a moon face.”

He blinked as if patiently waiting for me to understand that pointing out the obvious was simply not a good use of his time.

I sighed. “Duck hunting is complicated.”

“You just have to pay attention”, he shrugged. “Do you want to carry the decoys or the gun?”

“I can’t carry the gun. I’ll shoot off a kneecap or something.”

“You should carry the gun so you get used to it.”

Used to it? I was thrilled to think of being included in Harlan’s escapades and horrified to think this might become a regular thing. Rising at three a.m. is only special if it’s rare.

“Safety’s on. You can’t shoot off your kneecap. Anyway if you did it wouldn’t be life threatening so why don’t you try?”

“Is this how I sound when I’m making you do your homework?”

“Pretty much.”

We trotted three hundred yards through the brush with Maddie leading the way and me snagging my gun barrel on low-hanging branches, cursing myself for never having learned to accessorize properly.

At the water Harlan was already untangling decoys.

“You can help me set Mom.” He tilted his head toward the river.

“Out there?”

Wading into the freezing water sounded about as appealing as sticking my face in wet mud. Plus there were unseeables down there. Snapping turtles, sunken logs, treacherous rocks and no doubt at least one alligator gar.

“Can’t we just lob these babies from here?”

“You have to place them together but not too close. It’s supposed to look natural.”

Oh. I’d heard of decoys and seen beautifully carved wooden ones in antique shops but I’d not devoted any time to how they might be used in practice. Like ninth grade algebra I was sure it was information I really wasn’t going to need.

He showed me how to drop the weight into the mud and be sure the decoy was bobbing without floating away. It took us twenty minutes or so, back and forth to shore, untangling and retying leads. Some of the weights were missing altogether and we tied those strings to dry sticks and sunk the sticks into the mud. This was my idea and I was shocked when it actually worked.

“I think I’m starting to get it”, I said. “We come out here, we put on matching outfits and then we decorate.”

“That’s not how I would describe it Mom.”

I gestured at our leaf-patterned get ups and our gently curving line of decoys.

“Am I wrong?”

He grinned his sheepish grin and I knew that for months we’d be making each other laugh by whispering matching outfits!

When the last decoy was placed we settled into a spot behind some reeds.

“Now what?”

“Now we wait.”

Tasks done for the moment, we sat on the soft ground and took in the day.

When Harlan managed to get a clean shot Maddie bounded into the river, swimming a  male bufflehead back to us through a strong current and I was amazed again at the creature that is the hunting dog. She can inhibit the instinct to tear this bird to shreds onsite but she can’t learn not to jump on my linen pants?

No matter. We dressed the duck in the field and by “we” I mean Harlan did it while I watched. He showed me the inexplicably tiny lungs and the smooth, surprisingly firm, heart before stuffing the chest cavity with damp grass to keep it cool. Later, the duck steaming off our forks would not strike me as a hunk of meat but  as a creature of the wild. It would taste of tall trees and river bottom and of being led through the brush by someone who knew what they were doing. It would taste of sustenance.

Before leaving the river we stood over the bufflehead with our foreheads touching and thanked the little guy for becoming our food. I dreaded the place in the road, just ahead, where the highway would separate us from the river.

“I guess fifty degrees, clear skies and one duck doesn’t exactly put us in line for the record books does it?”

“Not so much”, Harlan admitted.

“I liked it though.”

“I did too.”

We clambered reluctantly into the car and Harlan closed his eyes. Maddie snored on the back seat and all the way to town the sound of dried mud pinging off the tires reminded me that I’d been, however briefly, exactly where I belonged.

August

There is something delicious about August.

My birthday falls in September but it often feels like an afterthought. August is my month, a time of renewal and taking stock, of reflection and gearing up for the next thing. There is a kind “energized restfulness” to August, a pause before springing into flight. Maybe it is when, long ago in the womb, I was preparing for life itself. My very first thought may have been in August. “Hey sleepy, wake up! Time to be born.”

There tends to be a sense of anticipation in the air, of things on their way, just out of sight. It’s the invitation that hasn’t  hit your doorstep but is already in the mail, on its way to you.

It may be the clouds. The best clouds are in August when Santa Fe’s high desert feels like living in a Magritte painting. They slide past the window like ships’ sails and I find myself leaning back back a bit, as if I need to make space.

In August I spend as much time as I can beside windows and sitting in doorways. Raindrops splashing into the house remind me of my newborn self plopping into the world. As it rains harder and the floor becomes drenched, I reach for the window and open it as far as it will go.

Wedding Dress Chronicles

No doubt plenty of women have clear plans about what to do with their wedding dress once the party ends.

I am not one of them.

I thought of turning my layers of silk and lace into throw pillows but never got around to it. I imagined shortening it, dying it flame red and wearing it to the Opera (opera is a thing in Santa Fe; trust me) but I put that off too and then I had children and couldn’t get one leg into the thing.

I gained sixty pounds having my first son. Yes, that’s 6-0.  I’d been rather an underweight, bony thing but still. I tapered off but son number two came along and I probably should have gone ahead with the wedding dress pillow idea but only crafty people have time for making throw pillows when they have two children under the age of 3. I am not crafty.

The dress languished on a shelf as I imagine many of them do. I took it with me in the move when it came time for the inevitable divorce and lo and behold the Divorce Diet is a real thing. Maybe, I thought, I could finally shorten my wedding dress, dye it flame red and wear it…while I sat around the unfurnished apartment by myself. I did manage to wear the thing, if “wearing” means holding your breath, standing stock still and not even thinking about pulling up the zipper.

About ten months later, on an afternoon jaunt to the park after I’d been walking around for weeks with a cough that I was sure was hay fever, I found myself tired. Terribly tired. I let myself lay back on the slide and close my eyes, my sons blithely jumping over and around my limp body. When they eventually got bored and asked me to please take them home (this is not how leaving the park usually goes with 4- and 6-year olds) I was dizzy and sweating.  My sister dragged me to the emergency room where I got to spit into paper cups and have my lungs x-rayed and be diagnosed with pneumonia.

In case you haven’t had the pleasure – and I sincerely hope you haven’t – pneumonia is horrible. It tries to kill you and in the middle of the night between breaths and counting the minutes until your next round of pain meds, you wish it would. A practitioner of eastern medicine told me at the time that trouble with the lungs meant I was full of unresolved grief.  Well there you go. I didn’t want to think about what that meant for my prospects of recovery but everything does have an upside.

The upside of not eating for three weeks is that you can fit into your wedding dress and, Halloween being around the corner, you have an excuse to wear it. I put on my sneakers, my denim jacket and the infamous dress and went trick-or-treating as a runaway bride. My sons hummed the wedding march at each house while I walked ahead of them down the sidewalk. People blinked at us and waited patiently for the two legitimate trick-or-treaters and their weird guardian to take their candy and go.  We ran between houses, high on our own silliness and at the end of the night I folded the dress fondly and put it back on the shelf.

It sat there until years later when I decided to hang it up in my dining room. Why not? It’s a piece of artistry, a piece of personal history. Much more interesting than some kimono or hand-woven rug. When I went hunting for it though, I found the poor thing fallen behind the washing machine, water-stained and caked with gray dryer lint. It may finally be the end for this particular piece of history. I’m not sure yet because it’s been stuffed in a bag at the back of my car, headed to the dry cleaner for at least six months.

When I finally get it there (I get to everything eventually) I imagine the receiving clerk picking up this ragged garment with gloved fingers and asking, “Is this your wedding dress? What did you do to it?”

“Oh this is nothing”, I’ll say, “You should see the ex-husband”.

Turn off the Water

Dinner guests at my house are not allowed to do dishes. This is not because I am kind or generous or a fabulous hostess; it is because I can’t listen to

Santa Fe, New Mexico

anything that anyone says when they are letting the water run like that. Streaming away while they walk across the kitchen for their wine, while they wrap leftovers, while they chat. They could be telling me they were diagnosed with a brain tumor earlier that day and all I can think is Turn off the water. Growing up, we caught our drinking water off the roof – when it rained. When it didn’t rain we showered less and flushed when necessary (“necessary” being subject to interpretation). My sisters and I laugh about men trying to seduce us in the shower, making their well-intended romantic maneuvers, fussing with wash cloths and lavendar oils when all we can think is Turn off the water!

Naked Feet are Happy Feet

Pacific Ocean 2011

No one has ever told me so but I must have been barefoot at birth. I love being barefoot. My early years were largely shoeless by choice and the calluses on my feet were a source of pride. My thick skin was a badge of honor that let me explore across sharp rocks and burning sand- a freedom I savored.

As I got older high heels intrigued me. I discovered that the sound of spiked heels scraping the sidewalk does particular things to certain men and wearing certain shoes could take me places I’d never imagined. Throbbing dance floors and sleek bars are made for strutting around with nothing but your toes attached to the ground. I had a lot of fun in high heels but nothing ever felt better than taking them off.

These days I like having my heels flat on the ground. I’m not willing to skip the walk because my feet hurt or stay inside until the rain passes. I’ve got tough shoes for the mud, snow and pea gravel of daily life because striding through the deep end of the puddle makes me shudder- and grin.

Still, my favorite thing is no shoes at all and I hope I am barefoot when I die.

Where’s the Adventure in “Plan”?

The first year I lived in Santa Fe, I landed a job at the Ski Basin. I could get around on a pair of skis but I didn’t know these hills at all and my

Sangre de Cristo Mountains, New Mexico

orientation included a snow mobile tour of the mountain.

It was early in the season, cold but not bitter and my eyes watered in the wind but the “tears” were surprisingly warm and I couldn’t stop grinning even though it made my teeth ache and my lips numb. My driver gestured toward gulleys and outbuildings, shouting what must have been the names of ski runs and facilities but I couldn’t really hear him and I wasn’t really paying attention anyway. I was too busy enjoying the ride.

I loved the roar of the machine as we sped over bumps and plunged down embankments. I loved the sensation of flying and the view over the buff-colored plains below us. It was surreal to be squinting against the snow, bundled in jackets, boots and gloves but still have the clay-red earth on display. I loved feeling as if we might catch just enough air for me to bump my head on a cloud.

I was disappointed then when we slowed to a stop on the ridgeline.

My chauffer turned to me, looking perturbed and my mind raced, wondering what snowmobile etiquette I had unknowingly breached.

“You don’t scare easily do you?” He squinted at me.

Aha. There was my faux pas right there.

I hadn’t begged him to slow down, hadn’t clutched at him in a death grip or, perhaps most egregious of all, I hadn’t squealed in terror. I hadn’t been girly enough.

“Sorry”, I shrugged, “I like to go fast. “

As kids, my brother couldn’t talk me into surfing with him because it was too slow. I was a water skier. I liked being whipped behind the boat so fast that sometimes you were underwater before you even realized you’d been falling. We somersaulted across the water like skipping stones before we finally sank. I loved zipping out, parallel to the boat and then letting go of the rope, seeing how far I could go on the leftover momentum that felt like my own steam.

There was a tandem bicycle my brother and I rode in the summer time. It was an old clunky thing that was not particularly graceful but its bulk and two-person capacity made it much faster downhill than a single bike. It was worth the effort for us to heft the thing up the steepest hill we could find just so that we could turn it around and point it straight down. It had a headlight on it that got brighter the faster we went and sometimes it looked as if it might explode. If it had had a sound it would have been an ambulance siren. I loved watching it flare in the night – these things are always better at night, preferably after curfew – knowing that it was the two of us balancing together that kept us going, that our helmetless heads were only one wriggle away from taking us into the pavement. The longer we stayed at the top of the hill thinking about it, the longer we were stuck there. The trick was to go.

When we snow skied, all four of us siblings pointed our skis straight down the mountain.

“First one to turn has to buy the hot chocolate”.

None of us were particularly good skiers. We lived in the Caribbean where practicing our Christies was not exactly a backyard affair but it wasn’t the point anyway. The point was the thrill.

Of course my snow mobile chauffer didn’t know these things. He only knew I was a recent college graduate bumming around Santa Fe, unremarkable in the endless steam of transplants searching for crystals, Native American chants, alternative lifestyles, concha belts, adobe and ristras. To this man whose family was a part of the landscape, outsiders were all essentially the same and so I ought to at least be screaming, “Slow down!”,  like everyone else as we tore up and down on his motorized sled.

Paused at the top of the mountain, he gave me names – Baldy, Truchas, Pecos, Gayway, Broadway, Thunderbird, Columbine.

Looking at the gleaming peaks, it started to sink in that the quasi-adulthood I’d faked my way through in college was over, that things were somehow now real. Things now counted in a way they hadn’t before and Tomorrow gaped in front of me like a thing I’d been foolish enough to wish for.

“So what’s the plan?” everyone had wanted to know.

Plan. There was meant to be a plan?

There had been office jobs in Manhattan but they all came with pumps and pantyhose. No thanks.

There was a receptionist position at a salon. A tanning salon they clarified over the phone.

“Isn’t that bad for you?” I wanted to know. They didn’t ask to schedule an interview.

There was going home to work for dad in the family real estate business where I would have earned a proper living, become a member of civil society and not taken a truly deep breath for a solid decade, if ever.

So I was answering phones in Santa Fe which had led to zipping across a mountain ridge on a snow mobile. What was the plan? All I knew about “plan” was that it was small. It didn’t look as if it held space for much of anything and it pretty much rhymed with bland. I wanted adventure which was wide and varied and looked as if it had hidden ways of making you pay attention.

The mountains and their valleys were deceptively quiet. They seemed full of secrets to me, as if they already knew where I was headed, as if they had no intention of letting me go. They were shaped like adventure and looking back I think they did already know where I was headed. To Truchas Peak and the tiny town of Cordova where the neighbor’s white horse stuck his head in the bedroom window and we made peach pies from the fruit trees that grew beside the acequia. To Santa Fe itself where I lived in a converted garage and baked up massive lasagnas for friends I hadn’t yet met – who were told they would need to bring their own forks. I only had two. To Pojoaque where I would one day stand on the side of the road while a band of strangers called the fire department to put out the fire burning in the back of my pick-up truck, which is a whole separate story.

My chauffer revved the engine.

“Alright then, Manhattan, you want to see what this machine can do?”

He put it in gear. I tightened my grip and then I said, “Yes.”

 

Drinking the Clouds

During a downpour Mom would run outside and get drenched, teetering on a kitchen stool to pull leaves and twigs from blocking the rain gutter. There was no well or city hook-up at the house and we counted on rain for all of our water.

The big cement cistern was a gathering spot for frogs, lizards, neighborhood cats, clusters of insects and, naturally, insect larvae. The muck settled harmlessly on the bottom and water “purification” was a set of screens covering the pipes. Crude but effective and in my grown-up life with the requisite filter on the suburban faucet, I miss water that tastes faintly of earth and moss.

We had a rat die in the cistern once. We couldn’t pinpoint the smell and thought the water only tasted off because of the smell. When we finally found it there was nothing but bone.

“Gross! We’ll get the plague!” I squealed.

“Naahhh. Builds immunity”, Dad said and that was that.

Sometimes it rained so hard, for so long, that the cistern overflowed. Then there was a sense of great abundance as water coursed down the cement wall. But there was also futility as it cascaded across the road and you wanted to scoop it into your pockets for later. Instead, you had to forget the memory of drought and place yourself -head back, palms raised- beneath the deluge.