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There's no time to think about any of this now, though, because there is not a single pool in sight, not this far up on the river's reach, so close to its headwaters in the Sawtooth Mountains. The current is unlike anything I've ever experienced, a choppy cascade of bony whitewater pouring swiftly through rocks. The water itself is a strange mix of green-black-clear, darkened by the forest shadows, spilling over itself like frothy soda foaming out of a shaken-up bottle. From where I sit in the bow, with Steve behind me on the oars, the rapids don't appear especially big, just constant—an unrelenting crash of whitewater disappearing around the first bend, narrow and fast.

I scan the river ahead for obstacles. There are too many to count, too many to call out, too much we don't know. We don't know that around the next bend is a pyramidal rock jabbing its pointed crown up from the middle of the river. We don't know that the rest of our group, now out of sight, has taken the left channel. We don't know that the current will suck us in to the rock like iron shavings onto a magnet or that Steve will think he has one more second than he does to take one more oar stroke to pull us off.

It all happens so fast. Maybe I say, "Do you see that rock?" with a sharpness to my voice that Steve might take to imply distrust. Maybe Steve answers, "Yes," in a hard, tight way that indicates we are coming upon it faster than he thought, or it upon us. Maybe I don't have time to say anything. I sense the tension in the way Steve is rowing, the way we seem to be resisting the river, pulling hard against it.

Then we're on it.

Instead of bouncing off the rock, as inflatable rafts often do, ours crumples against its face, blue rubber folding in on itself. We are not spinning free, we are not loosed back into the rapid. We are sideways against the rock. I'm on the high side, looking down at Steve, who yells, "High Side!" and clambers up beside me, hoping the shift in weight will release our boat from the swirl of current pinning us to the rock. For an instant, we hang there, perpendicular to the river at an angle so wrong I will do whatever I can to fight it. I climb higher on the rubber thwart. The angle is changing, but not in our favor. Now it's acute, tightening, the high side of the raft narrowing its gap with the water. Slowly, in what feels like quarter-time, we are falling over, falling in.

"Oh fuuuuck!" Steve yells, and there's no worse sound than these two words because Steve is always solid. He does not accidentally row into rocks. He does not freak out.

Steve's shout hangs in the air, the syllables elongated with terrible precision. Then, in a spin of elbow and knees, he's flopping into the water, churning white waves breaking on rocks, and I do the thing I know shouldn't: I hesitate. I hold on. I feel the strain in my neck, my arms, my thighs as I brace against the hard rubber floor of the raft. I'm not falling, this is not happening.

But it is happening.

Each fiber of my being is pinched tight, every muscle flexed, resisting gravity, resisting the river. I'm hanging in a moment that seems to stretch on forever. Let go, my brain screams, as my body does the opposite. It's futile, but I'm fighting it. I know I shouldn't, but I am. I've taught myself to run up mountains, but I don't know how to fall.

2. CONSTANCY

All month before we left for Idaho, I ran up the same mountain every day. Running up a mountain and running a river aren't so different, actually. You're part of an energy that's bigger and wilder than your own. You have to run the same way water flows. You have to move with the mountain, not against it.

The sun was barely pulling itself up over the crest of the mountain when I slipped out of the house on the first of June, still half asleep, a banana in one hand, car keys in the other. At just after six, the morning was already warm and bright, a late spring day like any other in Santa Fe. Beginnings almost always seem ordinary at the time. Only later, from a distance, can you see how what appeared to be an unremarkable decision marked the start of something that would shift the course of what was to come. What, unaware, you had begun.

Dawn is the best time to start. The whole day lies before you, before the promise of the morning dies at the hand of to-do lists, phone calls, before your husband asks, "What's the balance in our joint checking account?" and your heart sags a little because you really can't say, and the sun begins its long, inevitable slant toward the other horizon.

I never planned to run up our local mountain, Atalaya, every day, I only wanted to run up it that day. I was looking for answers. They rose up like pebbles between my toes; they flowed down like the sap that ran thick and sweet through the ponderosa trees; many days, they came as words strung together in the right order, like beads on a string, plucked from the sky. The answers came from all around, from the sound of my heart beating in my chest and from the ravens calling overhead. When I ran this way, running felt like writing, and writing like running.

 

I liked being out in the early caramel light. I liked how I could feel my body working with the hill, how my pace and effort adjusted naturally to the incline, and I liked coming home salt-filmed and sweaty, carrying the trail with me, and pouring it into my writing: the wrinkled ponderosa bark and the blue sky wavy with clouds, the lone plane streaking overhead leaving a trail, the grey, tufted-ear squirrel darting between trees, the pine needles like a carpet, softening my footsteps.