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Squall: Eleven Mile Canyon, Colorado
- Wayne State University Press
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Squall Eleven Mile Canyon, Colorado Sometimes when we live in the day-to-day, in the ordinary, but without being in touch with the sacredness the ordinary should have, we simply drop into the next task and the next, and the days just get longer, and there is no rest, and maybe that’s why, when for the first time my sisters—Marijo and Patti—and I gathered at Patti’s home in Woodland Park, Colorado, at the end of a grueling winter, Marijo and I fought on the second night we were there. It was all about being way too tired of life and work, and too much wine and too little understanding of things that happened a long time ago, and being apart so long we didn’t know each other as well as we thought anymore. It hurt like hell. It took Eleven Mile to get us straight again. an american map 114 There are some parts of life that belong to myth. A river might be one. Eleven Mile is that myth of a river, a place that should not exist in this world of trouble and work and mucking in the bullshit injustices of the day. It flows out of the Eleven Mile Reservoir and shoots right past the weight of sadness some of us carry, all the great wildness has left us. Even after I was there, parts of what happened are unbelievable to me. Myth, I tell you. A story we made up to save ourselves. It’s cold in Patti’s big house built into the side of a canyon above Woodland Springs. What do we expect? It’s a late March morning. We’re in the sunroom, huddled and mostly silent and for now, not yelling. But when young Ian, Patti’s lanky sixteen-year-old son announces, “If we’re gonna go, this is the day we gotta go,” I know I’m in more trouble than I was the minute before. He looks at the three of us, sister-women huddled in chairs, a little groggy, more than a little hungover, staring out at Pike’s Peak, thinking any damn colder than this, and it will snow. He says it in the kind of well this is obvious tone that only a sixteen-year-old would dare assume with three strong-willed, independent women in various stages of menopause . Anyone else would be deferential, or we’d have killed them, but Ian knows no better, and I for one am too blue to argue. He and I look at each other, and I think I’m holding a poker face, that neutral, don’t-look-at-me-I’m-not-really-here face. But the next thing I know, he’s hauling waders into the Explorer, and Patti is brewing another thermos of coffee, and Marijo is piling up slices of bread just as our mother used to do when she made sandwich lunches for five back in Michigan, where we all grew up. It’s only a forty-five minute drive, but I’m nervous as hell the whole way there. I am the oldest of five and well educated, some would say accomplished—as my sisters are—but here is [3.81.79.135] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 01:23 GMT) squall 115 the deal: I am the only one who doesn’t know how to fish. The only one. Somehow, back on the Michigan farm where we all learned to walk, when the fishing poles got handed out, I was staring at the sky. When my father took us to the pond to catch chubs and bluegills, I didn’t like the mud. When my brothers hauled cane poles to the back creek, I was afraid of the leeches. When my grandpa fished the Hart River behind his house in town, I was picking raspberries. Both of my sisters grew up to be smart, beautiful women who fish. To add to the injustice, they either married men who loved to fish and who took them fishing, or they raised kids who loved to fish and took them fishing. Or both. And of all the fishing they did, the fishing they love best is fly-fishing. And that’s where Ian comes in. I swear, if I’d been smart, I would have taken him out right there. But then we turn off from the groomed highway, turn toward the rise of mountain split by canyon...