August 12, 2009 – Lamoille Canyon, rural northeastern Nevada.

Instead of throwing my bouquet at the crowd, I came out as the wedding began and collected one sunflower at a time from each of them to create it. Instead of a post-wedding champagne toast, we all took a pre-wedding champagne shot together. Instead of asking if anyone knows of “any good reason why these two should not be married today,” the minister asked, “who here knows of any good reason why these two should be married today?” And we passed a microphone around as each guest gave both funny and poignant answers. Instead of the crowd throwing rice at us when we were finished, we threw marshmallows at them.

And of course, we wrote our own vows:

Then we all ate, drank and watched shooting stars by the fire and music all night before camping out at what was the most beautiful and apropos setting for our wedding that exists anywhere on earth.

Posted by tee in de la vida, fun stuff, photos
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Tags: lamoille canyon, love, nevada, photos, shane, tee, wedding

First night at camp, 12 miles down. Taken with my Blackberry Curve, which bit it the following day on a thoughtless jump into the river.

Day two. Sand has infiltrated everything. I’ve already given up battling it at camp, and everything I own for the next four days is now covered in a fine, grainy film – including me. Bagels and hot coffee (yay!) for breakfast, and then we shove off.”

That was the one and only journal entry I made during our canoe trip down the Green River a couple of weeks ago. Not evidence that there was nothing else notable to say, but to the contrary, there was so much that I found little down time to reflect until it was over.

This was a trip I’ve wanted to make for a very long time, ever since the first time I dunked a foot in that river all those years ago. And since actually doing it was kind of without words to describe, it felt for awhile after I got back, I was all set to let the pictures do the talking on this one. But a few nights ago over coffee at Bibo, Susanne (of Married Geeks) tsk tsk‘ed me for not blogging about the trip. And she’s right, how can I not? So while I don’t have much time for a full day-by-day run-down, what with a wilderness wedding looming in a few days and all, I’ll share a few favorite memories as we get the last of the menu, music and lighting details tied up tight.

What’s that noise?
Late in the evening on our first night at camp (pictured above), we kept hearing “splash!” “plunk!” “splash!” all around us. Because we were the only ones on that stretch of the river that we knew of, and all of us were accounted for, we decided it had to be a fierce, deadly and very large animal frolicking in the water until nightfall when he could strike. The next day we learned it was actually rock and earth cleaving off cliffs and banks. Everybody laughed…until day three when we entered a narrower part of the canyon and were canoeing and camping right under those cliffs.

The Groover and Minding One’s Business
Ahh, everybody’s favorite topic. If you think guys are bad about poop conversations, try traveling with these 10 women. The Groover is the portable group toilet, a metal box the size of a picnic cooler with a rubber ring seat that must be used for the length of the trip (in this case, 5.5 days). You can pee but not poop in the river, you can poop but not pee in the Groover. For the first few days we chose our Groover spots carefully, hiding it behind brush at camp sites, ensuring privacy and a generally pleasant view. By the end of the trip it was plunked down quickly at each camp with more concern for smell than for privacy. By day 5 it was so out in the open we could recognize who was sitting on the Groover, facing away from camp, by the contours of their butt.

Similarly, we started the trip out modestly…wandering off into the bushes or a lower or higher piece of sand bar to pee in the wet sandy shores (those of us who didn’t just do it straight in the river, anyway). By trip’s end, everyone was practically lining up one next to another on the shoreline, squatting. Modesty has its place, and it doesn’t appear to be on the river.

It Was a Dark and Stormy Night
Lucy and Sarah had both done this trip twice before, and they and the outfitters both regaled the rest of us with stories about the legendary Green River winds and flash floods after rainstorms. The outfitters talked about rescues when unsuspecting canoers had been caught and overturned in the wind, and Lucy and Sarah told us about the afternoon when they had just set up camp and were enjoying some swimming when they saw it barreling around the corner, flattening trees. They rushed out of the water to secure their tents but were too late — the tents were ripped out of the ground and tossed downstream. They were all recovered, but what an experience!

Fast-forward to day four and we’d just set up camp in another gorgeous spot in the canyon. Our tents were erected and staked down, we had just begun talking about dinner when… drop…drop. Oh cool, a little rain. We all wandered over to our respective tents to attach the rain fly. A few minutes later, drop, drop, dropdropdropdrop and FLASH! Lightning in the canyon. And then the wind starts. Remembering the stories, we all start throwing our big, heavy dry bags into the tents to act as sand bags to weigh them down since the stakes in the sand are fairly useless, but soon the gusts get so fierce so fast we dive into the tents ourselves to hold them down.

Billie and I fought to zip the zip door to our tent and failed, it was full of sand and too old and wouldn’t close all the way. The wind slammed into the side of the tent, buckling it down on top of us and ripping the stakes out of the ground on three sides, sending the rain fly sailing off the top of the tent. I plunged my arm out the broken door and grabbed the last corner of it as it tried to blow away, and held on tight while the wind whipped and yanked at it, the rain soaked us through the now-unprotected roof, and the tent poles threatened to snap in half. Every now and then Billie would run out and try to re-attach it while I held on, but any hold was tenuous. So we rode out the storm best we could, each holding up two sides of the tent up from caving in, trying hard to hear each other even inches apart over the howling and flapping.

And then it was over. When we all dared to emerge into the open, we found the tent next to us in similar peril, but no one was hurt and we were surprised to find that nothing blew away.

“It’s floating down the river! It’s all floating down the river!!”
Day five brings better weather for most of the day, and we enjoy another one of Karen’s campfires and some stories and conversation and beautiful starry skies before heading to bed. By now Billie and I have resorted to keeping our tent zip door shut with safety pins and a hair clip (the perfect setup for a team that brought pink camo grrrl warfare shorts). Sometime in the middle of the night I become vaguely aware of the sound of rain, though no wind, and the rain fly holds nicely. Ahhhh. I drift back to sleep.

Suddenly, I’m sitting straight up in the tent. Someone out there is yelling in the dark, “It’s floating down the river! It’s all floating down the river!”

Billie and I think: FLASH FLOOD! and bolt up, throwing off our sleeping bags and digging at the safety pins until the door is free, then jump out with our flashlights cocked like Charlie’s Angels, ready to save our camp. Into the dark. The silent dark. The empty, silent dark. We couldn’t see anything beyond the small shaft of light our flashlights cast, but we panned around and saw that everything in our immediate vicinity appeared to be okay. I shouted, “Did somebody say everything was in the river?!”

Silence. We went back to bed.

The next morning we learned that Karen had had a nightmare that a flash flood had washed our camp away, and the odd silence after wasn’t so much that nobody else heard it, it’s that when they did, they looked groggily around their tents and realized that they personally didn’t seem to be floating down the river and so went back to sleep.

Be Zen, Be One With the Mountain
It was a small yellow school bus that took us down to our put-in spot at Crystal Geyser. On the way down the dirt road, we wound around a few drop-offs, some small but hairy cliffs. My combination vertigo + someone-else-driving fear kicks in and I “eeesh” and “ack” and “ugh” some as we make those turns. Lucy and Sarah tell me that if I think that’s bad, wait ’til I see the Mineral Bottom road going out!

So for five and a half days I obsess about what that road will be like. About once a day I brave a question: “So, is this road a… two lane road?” Nope. Another, “So, is this road…paved?” Nope. And on it goes until Sarah finds a photo of the Mineral Bottom road in her river guide and shows me. It is just as frightening as I imagined, save for being slightly wider than I’d been picturing, but no less sporting the big letters of CERTAIN DEATH written across it. I stop obsessing out loud and start internalizing, then decide that I shall pass on the ride and hike out. Even if it does take me a full day.

But by the time we get there and are pulled from the river, dirty and sweaty and badly in need of a bathroom on the 6th day, I have made a relative peace with the idea of traveling up this road. I will simply keep my eyes closed and meditate. This person, this driver, is still alive enough to come down and get us, so he must know how to drive it safely. I shall trust him. Yes.

And I do it. I climb in the 12-passenger van, with the big, heavy trailer full of empty canoes hitched to the back, and wedge myself between Sarah and Lucy (my appointed “road doulas”), and with a lurch we go. I keep my eyes closed, breathing in, breathing out, until Lucy says we’re not at the bad parts yet and I squint one open to look and be sure. I watch red rock ramble past, the river getting farther in the distance, cliffs looming on all sides. As we round a steeper corner I squeeze my eyes shut again, and do not open them for another 20 minutes or more. Breathe, breathe, ignore everyone admiring out loud the dead cars several hundred feet below us who tried, and failed, to get up or down this slippery, pitching dirt road on the side of a cliff. Ignore the ferocious pitching of the van on rocks and the sensation of swinging wide around a precarious corner to get the trailer around, and the sound of gravel being flicked out from under the tires and over the edge. Ignore but very much obey Lucy the several times she says, “Oh God, don’t open your eyes NOW!”

And then we’re at the top. And I open my eyes and it’s raining gently, an expanse of soft, rolling red dirt and sage rippling out ahead of us. And I sigh. And then Billie lets out a breath and says “OMG, thank God you weren’t looking when he took his hands off the wheel and drove WITH HIS KNEE.”

Posted by tee in photos, wandering
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Tags: adventure, canoeing, green river, moab, utah