The reader fanned the deck of cards on the table and invited me to touch them. With my right hand, I moved them in a circle, counterclockwise and confessed that I was considering abandoning my career. I worried I was making an irresponsible and potentially harmful decision that I might later regret. The air felt soft and warm, and the ocean exhaled rhythmically against the sand. The reader nodded and gathered the cards; she asked me to pick a card from anywhere in the pile using my left hand. I turned it over with great anticipation. Then I blushed.

It depicted The Fool.

*

Already October, it hadn't rained more than a handful of times since, what, May? June? A long time. Lee and I climbed out of the car and peered over the high bank to the river below. The water level, controlled by the dam, had risen slightly since Labor Day and, according to Lee, looked fine for canoeing.

We lifted Lee's navy-blue fiberglass canoe off the car and carried it down a steep trail to the water. I confessed that I'd been in a hurry that morning. I hadn't packed a change of clothes or gloves or boots, and in the dark I had grabbed my mother-in-law's life jacket, a size smaller than mine. “I remembered a water bottle, at least, and a bag of trail mix,” I said, holding up both as evidence.

She looked me up and down, waded into the water, and pushed the canoe onto the beach so I could climb in without soaking my running shoes.

A nearby fisherman asked how far we were going. We had left my truck at Sullivan Bridge, a lengthier float than Lee had originally planned. I hesitated to admit this to a stranger, particularly to someone who may have known more about distances than I did. I had a history of miscalculating paddling distances. But Lee interpreted his question generally. “We’re paddling the whole river,” she answered. We waved and floated away.

*

My family used to spend a week or two in Idaho every year. We owned a share in a small condo along the Little Big Wood River and visited in winter to ski and in summer to hike. I had brought my friend Becky one summer. We did all the stuff twelve-year-olds might do. We spent long days at the pool, took the free bus to town, bought hot pretzels, tried tennis lessons, tagged along on family hikes, and attempted ice skating, all the while complaining that there was nothing to do. My mom proposed we recruit a third friend and take an afternoon float down the Little Big Wood. The next day, she rented three inflated truck tires, stuffed five bucks in my hand, and waved us off from the condo balcony. We wore cut off shorts, one-piece suits, flip-flops, and SPF 6 Sea ‘n Ski Suntan Lotion. The plan was to float a few hours and catch the free bus home.

Not long into our trip, I announced a more ambitious plan. We would float the river to its confluence with the Big Wood River. I pictured a long, lazy afternoon sitting on inner tubes atop sparkling mountain runoff, culminating in a short jounce on bigger water. I assured my friends that the float would be straightforward, which is how it looked from the road.

We learned over the course of the day that rivers aren’t like roads. They twist, flatten, and drop. The Little Big Wood narrowed into deep channels and widened into shallow braids that snagged our tubes. At times, fallen trees blocked our passage. We bushwhacked through overgrown thorns and willow. By sunset, we had lost flip-flops, portaged around trees, slipped on rocks, and scratched our bare, sunburnt skin. My friends shivered in their tubes, mute with fear. I insisted we carry on. The sun had set by the time we dragged our inner tubes across the Big Wood River. My mom and dad found us with flashlights. They hugged us, draped us in wool blankets, and promised us we’d never to do that again.

I understood the sentiment. It was foolish of me to take my friends so far down the river. I’d been irresponsible to continue past dark. Someone could have been hurt. We could have drowned. But we didn’t, a small voice inside me insisted. I put the memory in my pocket and tried to make better choices.

*

The river paraded Lee and me around a sharp bend. We commented on the unusual rock formations along the bank. A modern, angular house peered down on us from a cliff on our right, and a simple shingled cabin lazed on a pebbly beach to our left. A great blue heron stood on a rock ahead, tall as an exclamation point. Lee said it was a beautiful stretch of river.

“Aren't all rivers beautiful?” I asked.

“No,” Lee said. “Not all rivers are beautiful.”

Lee had been on more rivers than anyone I knew and had lamented that the Spokane River had been reduced to a disappointing series of “ponds” impounded by dams. But on this stretch, the river ran free from its concrete enclosures. I wondered if the river’s beauty emerged from its lack of obligations, its few responsibilities. Water carried us easily downstream, past willows, pine trees, and a telephone pole from the top of which an osprey glared. Beyond the willows, Interstate-90 blazed past an outlet mall, a Cabela’s, and an abandoned greyhound racetrack. We bobbed along and admired ourselves in the water’s reflection.

At the first section of turbulent water, we pulled over to scout. The rapids weren’t big, but our canoe, with its open cockpit couldn’t handle waves. Lee suggested we dodge the center wave train and stay right. I nodded assent. We executed the plan without incident. The current carried us downstream, and Lee offered her customary praise of canoes. Canoes, she said, are “more sporting” than rafts. This made me smile. I pictured Lee on horseback, holding forth among aristocrats about the virtues of a sport like fox hunting.

“Sporting, indeed,” I said in my best high British accent.

*

I didn’t intend to get old. One day I was drinking beers on the back deck, chasing toddlers around the yard, and the next day I was in bed before dark, wondering how I might find cheaper auto insurance. This was not a gradual change. It was sudden. It felt like I got old only about five years ago and have been so ever since.

While it’s okay to be young and foolish, it’s embarrassing to be old and foolish. Old people are supposed to be wise, thoughtful, and reliable.

It’s not that I yearn to be young again. To redo all the piano lessons and soccer games. To endure another high school lunch or drag myself out on a blind date or negotiate condoms. I’ll be fine if I never have to attend another college party or cram for another final exam or drink beer through a funnel. I do not long for those early-twenties work environments, sitting quietly through meetings and transcribing memos. I do not want to nurse an infant or argue with a toddler about socks. But I can’t help but feel a twinge of dread when I anticipate the second half of my life. Maybe the fun parts are over.

*

Lee was an excellent pilot. I trusted her judgement on the river, and she seemed to trust mine. Over many miles on the river, we’d become unlikely friends. At sixty, she lived a nomadic life, light on possessions, informally employed, no kids. Meanwhile I had settled into my mid-forties laden with possessions, a husband, kids and a good homeowner’s insurance policy. We had both taken an interest in the river. Her heart beat with righteous passion; mine with eager naivete. We both liked to talk about things like landfills, combined sewer overflows, and invasive species. To me, it was all new. To Lee, it was what mattered.

We stopped for lunch on a gravel bar opposite a row of unimaginative 1980s houses. The roar of wheels from the freeway filled the silence. I asked Lee about her mountaineering experience with her ex-husband. “I had a husband for ten years,” she said in typical Lee parlance. Never that she’d been “married” and “divorced.” She simply “had a husband” until she didn’t. “We climbed Denali twice, three 18,000-plus peaks in Nepal, the Grand Tetons, and a lot of peaks in the Cascades.” I nodded to my sandwich. I had climbed Mt Rainier and several smaller peaks before I had kids. “Then my hips gave out,” she added. “And I started canoeing more.”

I peeked over at Lee’s gray hair, gimpy hip, and sun-speckled skin. She wore a faded red lifejacket and loose, khaki pants tucked into tall rubber boots. Sipping coffee from a green thermos, she looked well past her freshness date. But as she yammered something about private property signs and setback violations, the years fell away. I hugged my knees to my chest and ate trail mix from a Ziploc bag. The day had transported us: a lazy afternoon, sparkling mountain runoff, cut-off shorts, one-piece swimsuits. I gathered some rocks to skip.

After a few minutes, Lee waded into the water and edged the canoe to shore. I stepped in, dry as Queen Elizabeth. We paddled under the bridge where Lee had originally suggested we leave a car. The bridge came and went overhead, a reasonable offer, politely deferred. We fixed our eyes downstream and paddled toward destiny.

*

A few years ago, I was involved in a five-car pile-up on an icy road on the north side of town. My daughter, a middle schooler at the time, sat in the passenger seat. We had wisely pulled over when a white sedan slid into incoming traffic. The sedan hit the car in front of us—which slid into our car—and then ricochet back into its lane and hit two more cars before coming to a stop. In slow motion, each driver emerged (unscathed) from banged-up cars and took stock of the situation. My car suffered minimal damage, and yet my arms found my hips, and I bent forward like one of those birds tipping its beak to drink. It wasn’t dizziness I felt, but the exhausting realization that I was the oldest person on scene. What, they asked me with their bright eyes and plump cheeks, do we do now?

Jesus, I thought, when did I become the oldest person in the room?

With great effort, I guided the other drivers through the unwritten rules of accident protocol. First, we make sure no one is hurt. Next, we inspect our cars for damage. Now we exchange information and call the authorities. With logistics out of the way, we place our hands on our heads, rock side to side, and imagine how much this will cost and who will pay.

I tend to play the role society asks me to play. As an age-spotted, white mother of teenagers, my job is to show up, serve snacks, and wear low-heeled shoes. We are molded by experiences and by the people who teach us what we’ll never do again. I’ll never drive 55 mph through the airport, never wear a white swimsuit to the community pool, and never forget to pay my insurance premiums. I eat on a predictable schedule, pack wipes, tie shoes, pay my bills, return calls, and arrive on time to pick up my kids from school. I know that, in the coming week, I should deal with the maintenance light, take the cat to the vet, and buy a pair of pants with a higher waistline.

But when, I wonder, did life became such an effort to avoid failure?

*

We found ourselves in a long set of riffles that curved left. The waves intensified as we rounded the bend turning to whitecaps. With no time to maneuver, we headed straight down the tongue of the rapid. The canoe teetered bow to stern. The first wave sloshed in, saturating my shoes and socks. The second wave filled the boat to my thighs. The third sunk us to the gunnels. I turned to look at Lee, thinking she might know what to do.

The boat flipped.

My bag floated a few feet downstream, along with some garbage we’d gathered along the way. I reached for it and bobbed downstream in my too-small lifejacket, gasping for air. Fed by the aquifer, the water in the Spokane River registers about twelve degrees above freezing in some places. “We must be in a gaining reach,” shouted Lee, referring to the cold. I kicked, pulling the boat with me, and swam with one arm toward shore. “It’s weird” I shouted back, my lips too numb to function, “I don’t feel cold.”

But my mouth swallowed the c.

On land, we snapped selfies in our wet gear and sat on sun-warmed rocks. Lee shook her head in disbelief. “We didn't do anything wrong,” she said, “we just swamped.” She changed into a dry shirt and scanned the river for her lost paddle. “Maybe we could have steered to the right and missed the waves,” she went on. “Or maybe, if we had hit the waves with more speed, we’d have taken on less water.” I blew on my wet phone and felt the corners of my lips turn up.

*

In a Tarot deck there are 22 numbered trump cards known as the Major Arcana. The Fool is number 0—some say, “the number of unlimited potential”—and can be played high or low. He is depicted wearing brambles in his hair and carries a small bundle that hangs from a stick. His eyes gaze upward at the sky as he walks off a great precipice, oblivious to his fate. The card symbolizes naïve beginnings, bold and baseless decisions, stupid trust. It both warns against and encourages excitement for the adventure ahead.

When I was young, I assumed people my age were complete. I thought adults developed evenly and possessed a ripe, round, knowledge of the world. I believed that people waxed like moons into their forties and waned after fifty. Now, I wonder if we develop like clouds, appearing and disappearing in form and substance as we move across a sky of time. Each new season teaches us to learn again who we are and what we might become, our morphography changing with the weather.

*

We lined the next rapid, which means we walked the canoe like a dog, walking alongside it, chest deep in water.

“This is such a better idea than canoeing,” I yelled back at her.

“I am one with the river!” Lee shouted up to me.

Drenched and short on time, we hopped back in the canoe and navigated the final rapid before the boat take-out. It was just as big as the one we had lined, but we maneuvered it expertly. Hardly a gallon of water came aboard. We pulled to shore, grinning like champions.

With biceps bulging, shoes sloshing, hair dripping wet, we carried the boat to my truck. A guy in the parking lot leaned against his car and gave us a long, concerned look. He watched us heave the boat over our heads, over top of the truck, and strap it down, our strong hands dappled in sunspots and wrinkles.

The truck’s tires pealed out of the lot, and I draped my arm out the open window to give him a wave. Lee hung her arm out the other window. A crackly silence settled upon us. We gazed onto separate horizons, held by our private thoughts. A voice in my head scolded me for taking the long way and not scouting the rapids. You could’ve been hurt. Another voice whispered, but we’re not.

Twice, I caught Lee’s eyes and shared a wry smile. Like clouds, we floated safely across the sky.

About the Author

Heidi Lasher

Heidi Lasher writes from a refurbished goat barn near her home in Spokane, Washington. Her creative nonfiction essays have been published in several literary journals and magazine, including Orion Magazine, Cagibi, Litro Magazine, Cream City Review, and in Allegory Review’s nonfiction anthology, Allegheny. One of her essays was a finalist for the Michigan Quarterly Review's 2024 James A. Winn Prize in Nonfiction. She is currently working on a collection of essays about her exploration of the Spokane River.