So a couple years back my wife read Candice Millard’s excellent nonfiction book The River of Doubt: Theodore Roosevelt’s Darkest Journey (2005). She raved about it and I put it on my reading list, but somehow or other I ended up reading another more recently published Candace Millard book first, River of the Gods: Genius, Courage, and Betrayal in the Search for the Source of the Nile (2022).
In our era of satellite GPS coordinates and Google maps it’s hard to imagine the quest to discover the origin of the Nile (and particularly the White Nile) that consumed the Royal Geographical Society and British explorers in the 19th century. Millard’s book focuses on two fascinating men, Richard Burton and John Hanning Speke, who joined forces for a time and helped solve the mystery. (Ultimately it’s revealed that the White Nile originates flowing out from Africa’s Lake Victoria—or in waters of the Kagera River: it’s complicated.) Both men seem brilliant in their own ways and slightly mad for even attempting travel in eastern Africa. Their journey ends up taking several years and both explorers are close to death more than once. They battle disease, bizarre, hostile tribes, tropical heat, snakes and insects and a daunting landscape, all just to identify where the waters first start flowing that eventually become the mighty Nile River. For a somewhat romanticized (and charming) version of the story, see the film Mountains of the Moon (1990), starring Patrick Bergin and Iain Glen, who do a good job of bringing these daring explorers to life. It’s a story of heartbreak and suffering, marred by egos and the acclaim fought over by these 19th century figures.
If I were to quibble about their exploits I might note that they were so infirm from various diseases and injuries that at times they had to be carried by African porters. The notion of their “discovering” the Nile is a bit suspect, of course, but they did travel—with quite a bit of assistance—to deepest, darkest Africa and trace its source . . . kind of. (They still weren’t quite sure even when they returned to England.) But as difficult as their journey was, Teddy Roosevelt’s expedition of 1912 to map an Amazon tributary known as Rio Duida or “The River of Doubt” matches it at every level, with less assistance and more foolish chutzpah. (An odd note of thematic and historical intersection, their Amazon journey unfolds in 1912-13, soon after Hubert Darrell’s disappearance in far northern Canada, circa 1910-11. See post below.)
As an enthusiastic backcountry paddler (mainly kayaks and inflatable rafts) their preparation for this expedition to the Amazon seems laughable and perilous. The man in charge of organizing it had never been to the Amazon and knew little about float trips. Teddy Roosevelt thought it would be something of a lark. He had recently lost a reelection campaign for President and was looking to distract himself from that sense of failure and disappointment. It wasn’t until they were already in the Amazon that he got the idea to float the River of Doubt from its source to another tributary of the Amazon, where it was known to flow. They quickly and somewhat haphazardly changed their plans and embarked on a tortuous trip into the jungle. The descriptions of their misery are impressive: Insects bothered them constantly, they ran short on food, their boats were left behind due to transportation problems, so they had to rely on dugout canoes. These are fine for flat-water rivers or lakes but the River of Doubt was frenzied with waterfalls and rapids. By the end of their months-long journey Teddy Roosevelt is very near death. Teddy’s son, Kermit, is also a major character in the story. Of the two books I found River of Doubt to be a more enjoyable read. Although I knew bits and pieces of Teddy Roosevelt’s biography, I learned much more about the man, and found him to be fascinating and even inspirational. He’s a pillar of strength, honor, nobility and wisdom compared to the venal creature whom we now call President.
So I have great admiration for the hardy, crusty souls who can live and survive well in the rugged outdoors—people like the enigmatic free-style explorer Hubert Darrell, who began life as an Englishman and ended his days in far northern Canada, south of the Beaufort Sea, in the Northwest Territories. He was an amazing man whose life ended too soon.
In between his early years and his untimely death he accomplished what few mere mortals could ever hope to do: Alone, he traveled on foot (often snow-shoeing) around the far north of Canada, walking hundreds if not thousands of miles, towing a toboggan. He eschewed dog teams pulling sleds, claiming they were more trouble than they were worth. He worked as a guide for various other explorers, and was feted by no less than Roald Amundsen, first person to reach the South Pole in 1912.
Roald Amundsen
The description on Amazon offers an introduction to the book that serves it well: “In November 1910, explorer Hubert Darrell vanished in the uncharted wilds of the Northwest Territories. A prospector who had been swept up in the Klondike Gold Rush, Darrell later made his name as an expert guide, trapper, and restless wanderer who ventured where few others dared. At a time when travel by dogsled in the North was the norm, Darrell became legendary for traversing thousands of kilometres alone and on foot; ranging over mountains and across windswept tundra from Alaska to Hudson Bay. During his epic journeys, he helped rescue sailors trapped in sea ice, led Mounties on their patrols, and even guided some of the era’s most famous explorers. Roald Amundsen, the first person to reach the South Pole, held Darrell in awe, remarking once that with men like him, he could go to the moon. Contemporaries regarded Darrell as the hardiest, most competent explorer of his day. Despite clues reported by Inuit trappers and Mounted Police inquiries, his fate remains a mystery. While his disappearance sparked headlines around the world, Darrell’s name would soon also vanish from the history books, ironically, just as surely as he had in the wild.”
It’s a good book and something of a mystery story: Shoalts (the biographer) personally returns to remote locations in the Northwest Territories to try to solve the mystery of how Darrell died, where and when. By the book’s end he has a plausible scenario. But more importantly the reader comes away from the story with respect and a certain amount of affection for the undaunted Darrell, who chose an isolated life and ended up dying alone. The History Channel series Alone often features Canada’s Great Slave Lake as its drop-off location for their survivalists, who compete for prize money of up to $500,000. That’s for surviving alone in the far north for usually around three months. Darrell did it for many years. He also sounds like a nice guy and a good man.
So I saw the new Rachel McAdams star vehicle Send Help, directed by no less than Mr. Evil Dead himself, Sam Raimi. It’s way fun. As it’s just released and in cinemas, I’ll avoid spoilers as much as possible. As you can guess from the poster below, this isn’t a film reveling in the quiet moments of domestic despair, ala the much-acclaimed Norwegian film Sentimental Value (2025). It’s more like in-your-face Action/Satire.
It’s not quite as gnarly as it looks.
But here’s a connection that’s worth mentioning: It compares nicely to another Sam Raimi gem, Drag Me to Hell (2009), though it is less horror/more comedy: Both films feature a put-upon young woman in an office environment. In both stories the young woman is urged to go “above and beyond” the job’s requirements in order to be eligible for a promotion. And in both stories said young woman does not get the promotion she most certainly deserves. But all that is a distraction of sorts—or more accurately, motivation for the action. It’s not really about the job, or whether or not she gets the promotion. The stakes are higher than that. The drama is Life or Death.
Still one of my favorite Sam Raimi films.
Most of the action takes place on a small island in the Gulf of Thailand. Since I traveled to Thailand last spring it all looked familiar. It makes for a great movie location, with cliffs and beaches and jungle as backdrop to the survivalist plotline.
Maya Bay, Thailand
Rachel McAdams plays Linda Liddle, superficially the office goofball but actually the savviest employee for business-sense and numbers-crunching. That doesn’t impress the company’s nepo-baby topdog, Bradley, played well by the actor Dylan O’Brien. He’s a callous creep who has led a pampered life and doesn’t know a thing about survival in the outdoors, while Linda is a survivalist who has auditioned for the TV series Survivor, but who also seems more suited for the better reality series Alone, because Linda would excel at the survival tasks but likely fail at the social-maneuvering expected of the Survivor particpants.
Fun fact: No Alone contestant has ever been eaten by a Grizzly Bear.
Although McAdams is known for many roles I have to give a shout-out to one of my favorite comedies of the last decade, Game Night (2018). Jesse Plemons as their cop-neighbor who pines for his ex-wife is pure genius, and Rachel McAdams has great chemistry with Jason Bateman.
Great comic film
Send Help isn’t as good as Game Night . . . I think. I can’t actually say for sure because I missed the ending! Our theater was evacuated due to fire alarms. I’ll have to finish it later, but it was in the final minutes. Someone’s eye was getting popped out.
Note: This story originally appeared in the online literary journal Solar, Spring 2022. For this one, if you think “genre,” think Gothic. It’s “Based on a True Story,” kind of.
According to his father, the neighbors who lived in the house behind them were conservative Christian weirdoes. “Stay clear of those two,” he said. “Give them a foot in the door and they’ll have you down on your knees, praying for salvation. Or nail you to a cross somewhere because you don’t.”
The neighbors were brother and sister. The brother a vet back from Afghanistan, missing a leg. He didn’t talk to people.
The woman walked over to their house and knocked on the door. The boy answered. She smiled at him and asked if he knew much about God? He was eating peanut butter crackers and shook his head. He didn’t want to open his mouth to talk and show her all the mashed-up crackers and peanut butter. “Well don’t you think it’s about time you found out? Jesus loves you, you know.” She had a nice face and was exactly the same height as he, so they looked directly into each other’s eyes.
Her forehead and cheek were unlined and seemed to glow with a waxy sheen. She had fine pale hair at her temple and scalp line as if they wanted to grow onto her face and cover it, like the Wolf Lady he had seen on the internet. Like her face was an open field in a forest of pale wispy hair. Her eyes a curious color, a dark blue tinged almost violet. She was maybe a little younger than his mother but she dressed in old-timey clothes. She wore a sun bonnet on her head, with white lacey straps tied neatly at her chin. Other faint wisps of her sandy hair curled out beneath her bonnet, at her neck, and the bonnet, which was a pale blue like baby boy clothes, ruffled in the wind. They lived near the shore and it was always windy. The boy guessed she wore the bonnet to keep her hair from being tangled.
“Who’s at the door?” shouted his father. He was upstairs, in his dark room, developing pictures. “Tell them we don’t want any.”
The woman heard that, and did not waiver. “Take this,” she whispered, handing him a pamphlet titled The Watchtower. “Read it, okay?”
He finished chewing and swallowed, then nodded. “Okay,” he said. “I’ll get right on it.”
She frowned, just a little. Turned her head. “Was that a joke?”
“No.” He shook his head. “I’m serious.” He held up the pamphlet. “Got nothing else to do.”
She kept staring at him. Looked behind him, over his shoulder, into his house.
“Who is it?” shouted his mother. She was in the living room, watching TV and working on her laptop like always.
“It’s nothing,” he said. “Just the lady who lives behind us.”
“Oh, okay,” she called out. “What does she want? Does she need something?”
The woman kept standing there, staring at him with a Mona Lisa smile on her face. “Lady,” she said, squinted her eyes. “Is that what I am?”
He didn’t know what to say. She didn’t seem to be a weirdo at all. “I don’t know,” he called out to his mother. Speaking to her in a softer voice he said, “What should I tell her? She wants to know what you want.”
The woman made a face like that was a trick question, one which she didn’t know how to answer. She held one finger to her plump lips and tapped, three times. “I want,” she said, pausing, “you to read that pamphlet. Then we will talk about it.”
“Okay,” he said. “I’ll do that.”
She nodded and started to leave—took a step backward, still looking into his eyes—then stopped and stuck out her hand. “I’m Genevieve,” she said.
Before he could take her hand she wiped it on her skirt and apologized, told him, “I’m sorry. It’s this heat I guess. My hands get so wet.”
He shook her warm and damp hand and laughed. “Pleased to meet you, Genevieve. I’m . . . .” And for a second he forgot his name. She let go of him and put both hands in the air as if she were trying to catch something, ducking and miming like she was playing baseball, in the outfield trying to catch a pop fly, until he finally remembered, “. . . Patrick.” And then her hands grabbed the air, and she closed her fist on the sound of his name, and put one hand into the pocket of her long dress. “Next time, then,” she said.
She made a little curtsey, turned, and walked down the gray concrete flagstone path to the white sidewalk, turned sharply, and headed down the street. She’d have to walk around the whole block to get back to her house from that direction. He started to call out, tell her she could cut through his yard. He held his tongue. It didn’t seem right, yelling at her like that, on the street and everything.
“Is that woman still here?” called out his mother.
“She’s gone,” he said. But he watched her walk to the intersection of Ibis Street, passing through the palm tree shadows, the brown palm fronds swaying and crackling in the wind above her. A pair of teenage girls, wearing flipflops and swimsuits and floppy T-shirts, passed her at the corner. When she couldn’t see them, they turned and made faces, giggling. One of them held up her phone and took a picture of the woman walking away.
He wished he had done that.
After that he watched her all the time. The woman in the house behind his house. The only thing that separated their yards was a weedy, sand-filled alley, where at night hunchback raccoons ransacked trashcans. It always smelled like garbage and dead things. Plus the salt spray that coated everything. Otherwise what separated their yards was just two stretches of gray chainlink fence.
His father told him that the brother was an angry guy back from serving in the Marines. His leg had been blown off and now he wore a prosthetic. “But if he walks by, whatever you do, don’t stare at it. That’s rude.”
The neighbors’ yard was a lush green square of St. Augustine grass, with four palm trees, one in each corner. A flagpole in the center, atop which flew a large Confederate flag. The woman mowed the grass every week, usually on Fridays or Saturday afternoons. The boy watched her from a tree house in his backyard, a plywood platform hidden up in the live oak branches. His mother said he should be careful up there. He could break his neck. His father thought it was good for him, would get him in touch with nature and shit. He helped the boy saw some two-by-four scraps and then hammer them into the oak trunk for a ladder, up to a vee-shaped spread of branches, onto which they nailed a sheet of weathered gray plywood they kept in the garage to cover the windows if a hurricane might hit. The boy took to spending his afternoons up in the tree house. He told his parents he was reading and doing homework. He was in ninth grade and making good grades, but he didn’t have a close friend. If she came into the yard he spied on her.
She had a precise way of mowing the grass. Push the loud mower down the length of the yard in the center, turn left and go to the back corner, turn left and go back to their patio area, turn left and back to the place where she started. With each time the mowed area became wider and the dark green grass area in the center became smaller and smaller until he imagined he was in the center of the square, and she mowed the last spot, chopping him up into little pieces. Then he would wriggle on the ground, all the little pieces of him moving at once, chopped up and squirming and giddy.
The boy mowed grass, too, for money. Several neighbors paid him and he was saving up for a PlayStation videogame console. The weed-eater was the worst part. It made a high-pitched buzzing sound. The sun was hot and it was always humid. He took off his shirt to mow some yards but then the mosquitoes in the high grass bit him like crazy.
From the treehouse, he could see the windows on the backside of their house—their backside faced his backside. The house was nothing special: a two-story box with sage-colored aluminum siding, a small concrete patio behind the downstairs sliding-glass doors. Five windows upstairs, which he guessed to be (left to right): bedroom, bathroom, hallway, bathroom, bedroom. The three center windows were small squares. The outside windows, right and left, were larger rectangles. Late at night he snuck out to the treehouse and sat there watching. The right-hand window filled with golden light. A lamp on a nightstand. Gauzy curtains over the window. The figure of the woman, standing behind the curtains. Through binoculars, he saw her, standing there in her nightdress. Looking in his direction. He wondered if she could see the glint of reflection from the security light onto the binocular lenses. He wondered if she could see him when he stood up, coated by moonlight there in the tangled oak branches.
Wearing a long white nightgown with ruffles at her throat. Her dark brown hair was long and flowed down each side of her body as if her head were a stone in the center of a milk chocolate river. He took a picture with his iPhone but all you could see was a fuzzy glow of their security light and a vague square shape of house—with, on the right, one golden window—like a licked butterscotch throat lozenge.
The brother drove a red pickup truck and was the only one who seemed to leave the house. He left in the afternoon and came home in the night, late. Sometimes the boy could hear him yelling at the woman and telling her things, how she needed to clean up all this crap, how they couldn’t live like this anymore. Once he came out on the patio with an armful of stuffed animals. The boy watched through his binoculars. The brother moved pretty well for having a fake leg.
There must have been a dozen stuffed animals: Through the binoculars he spied a penguin, a fox, and a bear in a canoe. “This is for your own good,” he shouted at the sliding glass door. Behind the glass, the dim figure of the woman, standing there, her hands holding her head, her mouth telling him to stop. Her brother opened a barbecue grill and placed the stuffed animals inside, then squirted lighter fluid on them and tossed a match.
They burst into flame. The boy wanted to rush out there and knock them off the grill, but he didn’t. “It’s time for you to move on,” shouted the brother. A skinny man with a pegleg and a big adam’s apple. He wore crocs and cargo shorts. “Enough already,” he said as he opened the sliding glass door. “What’s done is done.”
The next week after her brother burned the stuffed animals, an ambulance came to their house in early evening. The sky was a violet color and the Confederate flag in their backyard popped in the wind, its grommets pinged against the metal flagpole. The boy could hear the crackle of the EMTs radio but not what they said. The flashing lights pulsed against the palm tree fronds like an outdoor disco. His father peeked out the back windows and said, “Uh oh. Trouble in paradise.” His mother said she hoped it wasn’t anything serious.
Another week went by. The brother’s truck never left the driveway. On Saturday the woman mowed the backyard up in one strip toward his yard, where he sat cross-legged watching her from the treehouse, turned left, and when she came to the corner of the chainlink fence, in the shadow of the corner palm tree, she tripped. The boy saw her fall to the ground. The lawnmower engine stopped. She just lay there in the dark green grass, half in the shadow of the palm fronds. At first the boy expected her to get up and brush herself off. She didn’t.
He climbed down from the treehouse and went out the chainlink fence, liftng up the latch and swinging out the gate, with its gray metal Irish Setter figures on top of the gate frame. He walked up and spoke to her through the fence, her lying on the ground like that. “Are you okay?”
“Shhh,” she said. “There’s a snake.”
Between her and the palm tree trunk lay the dark olive shape of a huge snake. The boy guessed it to be a python because they were all in the news now, how the swamps and marshes were full of them, how they grew big enough to swallow a child. This one was like a black and dark green log that stretched from the palm tree to the chainlink fence and slowly squirmed away.
“Can you get up?”
“I don’t want to scare it,” she said.
“I’ll be right back.” The boy ran to his father’s garage and found the garden hoe, ran back to her and passed through her fence, slowed down when he got close. “I’ll kill it,” he said, holding the hoe in both hands and raising it high. “I got a hoe.”
She sat up and straightened her bonnet, which had twisted around. Her eyebrows crinkled. “You will not.”
“Those things can bite.”
She smiled, squinting up at him in the sunlight, a halo around his head. “So can you. Should I hit you with a hoe?”
“I’m a person. Not a snake.”
“We’re all god’s creatures.” She wiped the sweat off her forehead with the back of her arm. “It’s too hot out here,” she added. “For me and Mr. Snake.”
He stood there, awkwardly, hoe in the air. He wore gray sweatpant shorts and a T-shirt that read You May Not Rest Now, There Are Monsters Nearby. “Why’d you fall?” he asked.
“I got all twisted up.” She rubbed her ankle and said she was afraid it would be swollen.
He asked where her brother was and she just looked at him. After a minute she said, “He’s gone.”
“Gone where?”
She kept rubbing her ankle, and started to hum a faint, sweet tune. “Gone?” she asked. “Gone to Dallas. The big D.”
He took her hand, which was warm and damp, and she pulled on him as she got onto her knees, then stood up, rising up to his height, like she was being inflated. “Thank you,” she said. “For not killing Mr. Snake.” He turned to look and it was in the other neighbor’s yard now, their problem.
“Did he get a new job?” asked the boy.
“Who? Donald?” She brushed herself off and started to limp away. “No. He doesn’t work. He’s injured. Or disabled, I guess you say.”
“Oh. Okay. Well what does he do?”
“Do? Mainly he just drinks.”
He let it go.
“Come on,” she said. “I’ll give you something.”
He followed her as she limped toward her house. “You want me to finish mowing?” he asked.
“No. Oh, well. I guess.”
“I don’t mind.”
She stopped and stood there. “You could?”
“I don’t mind,” he repeated.
“I’ll pay you.”
“That’s okay. We’re neighbors, right?”
She nodded. “I’ll pay you anyway.”
“I won’t let you.”
She turned her head to one side. “Stubborn one, aren’t you?”
“Principled.”
“Come in when you’re done. I’ll make us something to eat.”
The boy got her mower going and followed her shrinking-grid pattern with geometric precision. Before he finished it began to rain. The woman came out on the concrete patio and stood under the awning, waving at him. He waved back. He wouldn’t stop until he was done. The last square of grass had the flagpole in the center and he was soaked with cool rain when he stood beneath it, wind blowing the flag sideways, a spray of droplets speckling his face as it popped off the fabric with its blue X against the red background, his hair plastered to his head. He felt a tug on his shirt and turned around to find the woman, now wet and bedraggled, pulling on his T-shirt and telling him to get inside.
In the kitchen, she said, “Look how wet you are. Here.” She handed him a towel. “You look like a wet rat.”
The boy wiped his face and laughed. “Thanks. Call me The Rat.”
The woman untied her bonnet and set it on the table. “I’m wet too. Let’s be rats together.”
Dripping all over the kitchen floor, he toweled his hair and looked around the room. A wall calendar with an illustration of Jesus with a woman prostrate before him, as if kissing his feet. An old green table in the center, with a bowl of apples and bananas in the center. She left and came back with a pair of bluejeans and a western shirt with pearl snap buttons.
“Take off your things and put those on,” said the woman. “We’re wet and making a mess of everything, aren’t we?”
“I’m sorry,” said the boy.
“It’s not your fault. Go on now.” She made a shooing motion with her hands and smiled her little Mona Lisa. “I won’t bite.”
The boy stood there, holding the jeans and shirt. “You mean here?”
“Here. Where else would you go?” She reached out, took both of his shoulders in her hands, then turned his body. “You face that way. No looking.”
He heard some clothes ruffling and feet shuffling. “Go on now. I want to put these in the dryer.”
He took off his shirt and hesitated, and before he could stop himself, glanced behind him. The woman had pulled her dress down and was facing away from him, standing barefoot in her white brassiere and her bottom in white underpants, kicking the dress to the side and stepping out.
He unzipped his pants slowly and as quietly as he could and pulled them down. They were soaked and heavy. He stumbled, standing there, trying to get his feet out of the cuffs. As soon as he could he pulled the blue jeans on, put his arms through the shirt sleeves. When he turned around the woman was watching him.
“Isn’t that better?” she asked. Her dark hair was long and wavey and he tried not to stare at her. She was like a different person.
“Warmer,” he said.
“Warmer is good?”
He nodded, staring at the graceful lines of her collarbones, like wings.
She reached a hand out to him. “Come here. I want to show you something.”
He took her hand and she led him through the formal living room, with a striped hard-looking sofa and no TV set, to the garage. A floor of cool gray concrete, the smell of wood shavings. The garage door pulled shut. An amber Yield sign nailed to one wall. In the corner was a low white freezer with a black cord plugged into a socket on the wall behind it. Above it, an illuminated bar sign with the legend The Wiggle Room in loopy lime-green cursive neon script at top, and below the title, silhouette images of a blue martini glass and a red go-go dancer.
Genevieve saw the boy staring at it. “Isn’t that a hoot?” she asked. “Donald put it up there just to irritate me. Now I kind of like it.”
The boy asked where he got the thing. She said it was from a bar he used to visit. “He bought it for two hundred dollars when it closed down. But if I asked him for that much he’d yell at me. How money doesn’t grow on trees.”
Otherwise the garage was mostly empty. Cardboard boxes in the corner, a stack of Watchtower pamphlets on top. A cricket hopping across the floor. A weight-lifting set in the center, with a wide black bench in front of it. No car. She led him to a rough wooden table upon which were dolls arranged around a small wooden farm set. “What do you think?” she asked. “Do you recognize it?”
A house and barn made of Popsicle sticks. A tiny corral in which stood four plastic horses. Behind the farm scene was a good-sized cotton-candy-looking dark cloud shape with a wide top that narrowed to a small funnel at bottom, suspended by wires.
“Watch,” said the woman. She flicked a switch on the table and a buzzing noise commenced from the cloud: It began to twirl and spin around, slowly at first, then gaining speed. The narrow bottom of the cloud wobbled and skittered across the table, and almost knocked over the Popsicle stick house. “Oops,” she said, and flicked the switch. It slowly quit turning and the buzzing sound diminished. “Donald made it for me.”
The boy looked at her. “It’s a tornado, isn’t it?”
She nodded. “Bingo. But what tornado?”
She took his hand again. Hers was wet and warm but he didn’t pull away as she made him get closer and lean down on the table. He had to hold the blue jeans waist to keep them from falling off. “Look.” She pointed to the small doll of a girl in pigtails, wearing a blue and white dress, holding a little dog. The dolls were about eight inches tall, about the size of Barbies, and roughhewn. The girl stood next to a mean-looking woman in a man’s hat, standing astride a bicycle with a basket in front, pointing at her. The woman said they were corn-husk dolls, made from corn husks.
“The Wizard of Oz?” he guessed.
“Oh, you’re a sharp one, aren’t you, Patrick?” said the woman, not letting go of him but putting her other hand on her heart and fluttering her eyes.
“Looks pretty obvious to me,” he said, not knowing if he should pull his hand away or not. She was squeezing him and pulling him closer. “That’s Elvira Gulch, isn’t it?”
The woman laughed. “It is indeed.” She let go his hand and touched his cheek. “No one has ever recognized it before.”
“Way cool,” he said. “Kind of weird, too.”
She made a funny face, scrunching up her eyebrows. “Donald said it was a stupid waste of time.”
“Who’s Donald?”
“My brother.”
“Oh, right. Well. Brothers are like that, aren’t they? Always giving you a hard time.”
She picked up the Dorothy doll and held it in front of his face, ventriloquizing, “Did you ever read what I gave you?”
“What?” he asked, laughing.
“The Watchtower,” insisted corn-husk Dorothy.
“A little,” he said.
“What’d you think?”
He shrugged. “I’ve heard of Jesus before.”
“But not that much?”
“Not really. Not much. I mean, my parents? They think it’s kind of kooky.”
“It is not. It’s the light,” she said, letting go of him and lifting her hands and the corn-husk Dorothy up to the heavens—in this case the exposed two-by-four rafters of the unfinished garage.
“Okay. Well. To them it’s kind of kooky, so I don’t want to get in trouble.”
She smiled. “You’re kidding, right? Your parents wouldn’t get mad at you for finding Jesus, would they?”
He grinned. “Maybe.”
“Well, I never,” she said.
He laughed.
“Why are you laughing?”
“People don’t say that anymore.”
She smiled her little smile and lifted her chin. “I do.”
“It’s old timey. I mean, I like it. In an old-timey way.”
On a shelf above the workbench was a stack of dark blue books. She took one down and opened it up to show a page of large coins, set into slots in the book. She told him Donald was a coin collector or numismatist. “Here,” she said, working out two bright coins and holding them out to him. “Take these silver dollars. They’re rare. Worth a lot more than a dollar.”
The boy said he couldn’t do that. He was glad to mow the grass for her and wouldn’t take any money, silver dollar or paper money. “It’s just a favor,” he said. “Neighbors do each other favors.”
Before he could stop her she reached out and stuffed one of the coins into his jeans pocket. “It’s yours now,” she whispered. “You can’t give it back.” She stared at him and looked odd, in the dim garage light. Her lips were slightly ajar and her eyes seemed to be looking into him, expecting something. The violet color faintly visible in the dim blue light. Outside the sound of rain gushing out the gutters and splattering on the driveway.
“Are you hungry?” she asked.
“I don’t know.”
“You don’t know?” She smiled and turned her head. “How can you not know if you’re hungry or not?” She let go of him and pushed his chest. “You either are, or you aren’t.”
“I better go I guess. My p’s, you know, they’ll be wondering where I am.”
“Your p’s?”
“Parents.”
“Oh.” She reached out and took his hand again. “But you’re next door, at your neighbors?”
He raised one eyebrow. “But they don’t know that, do they?”
“Maybe that’s a good thing,” she whispered, looking away from him, squeezing his hand. “I have Eskimo Pies,” she added.
“You mean the ice cream sandwiches?”
She nodded. “Ice cream bars,” she corrected. “I love them.”
“Well, yeah. I could go for that.”
She smiled and walked over to the freezer. He followed her but a few feet away she paused and stopped him, putting a warm hand on his chest. “You wait here.” When she opened the freezer he couldn’t see inside, and she kept her body in the center of it, blocking the view. “Just one second,” she said. “They’re in here somewhere. I don’t want you to see. It’s such a mess.” She barely lifted the freezer lid, and rummaged around inside, feeling with her hand.
“You want me to help?”
“No. I’m good,” she said. A moment later she turned around and held two Eskimo Pies to her chest. “The best part of the pie is the wrapper.” She opened one and peeled back the foil wrapper, making sure not to tear the illustration of the Eskimo in his fur suit and rainbow on the cover. “He’s such a happy little Eskimo. Here,” she said. “Open your mouth.”
He hesitated but saw that she was serious. “Well, I don’t know.”
“Come on.” She came close to him and stood at his same height, with the black chocolate-covered ice cream sandwich in front of his mouth. Close enough to smell the tang of her body, her wet hair. “Bite.”
She eased it into his open mouth and let him take a little bite, then pulled it away. “That’s enough,” she said, and laughed.
His phone started to vibrate. It was his Mom texting him, asking Where in the world are you? He showed the woman, who squinted at it, then told him to shoo. “Next time,” she said.
He finished the Eskimo Pie before he walked in the backdoor of his house, and hid the stick. In his room he locked the door and took the silver dollar out of his pocket and rubbed it between his fingers. He liked the warm feel of it. It was dated 1925, the head of a woman with spikey hair on one side, an eagle on the other. He slept with it beneath his pillow.
The next day the boy rode his bike past Genevieve’s house and wondered if she was home. Her brother’s red pickup truck, parked in their driveway, close to the street, now had a red-and-white For Sale sign taped to the windshield. “$7K OBO. 512 729-2355.” Why would the woman’s brother sell his truck if he just moved to Dallas? The boy was almost old enough to drive. Next year he would be. He wondered if he could buy it. Maybe his parents would help him. Maybe he could mow her grass for a few years.
Days later, when his parents were at work, he watched her yard from the treehouse. With his binoculars he looked at all the windows and the patio. Through the sliding glass doors he could see into the living room: Two bare white feet and bare legs prone on the tan carpeting of the floor. That’s all he could see from his angle. It appeared to be a body lying lifeless on the floor.
He climbed down from the tree house, passed through both gates, and walked up to the back of the woman’s house, watching the sliding glass doors. When he got close the sun came out from behind clouds and the reflection of the light on the glass doors blinded him from seeing inside. He cupped his hands against the glass to make a shadow to see through the reflection.
The woman was lying face down, on top of a sleeping bag, her head on a small pillow. She wore only a nightgown that was hiked up to her hips. Her skin so white it seemed to glow, her dark hair tangled and curling off the pillow, and her legs open to show her darkness below. He stood for a second, staring, his shadow crossing over her white skin. He wondered if she was sick or dead or if he should go for help. She looked like the victim of a sacrifice or an attack.
She stirred, squirming and wrapping her legs around the sleeping bag, burrowing into the pillow. He heard a sound and glanced behind him, but it was just the flag, luffing in the wind. When he looked inside again the woman was staring up at him. He stepped back, hurrying sideways, out of view of the sliding glass doors. His heart pounding, he walked quickly through her side yard, past her driveway with the red pickup truck parked in it, out to the street, then the long way around on Ibis Street back to his house. His mother pulled into their driveway just as he was walking up to the door. She rolled down the car window and asked, “So where have you been?”
“Nowhere.”
She made a face. “What are you up to, Pat? Nowhere is no place to go.”
“I just went for a walk.”
“Right,” she said. “You never go for walks.”
“Okay, if you really want to know,” he added. “I got a moon pie from 7-Eleven.”
“I told you not to eat that crap.”
“That’s why I didn’t want to tell you.”
She got out of the car and asked if he would carry in the groceries for her. “And no more sweet things,” she added. “Sugar is poison.”
When he got off the bus the next day and walked past her house, the woman opened the door and waved at him. He waved back but put his head down, kept walking. “Patrick,” she called out. “Come here a second. I want to ask you something.”
She wore one of her long dresses and no sun bonnet, a gold crucifix at her throat. When he got to the door she wasn’t smiling and asked if he could come in for a second. He said that he probably shouldn’t. He needed to do some homework.
“Please?” she asked.
“I guess so.”
“Thank you,” she said. “I’d appreciate it,” holding the door open. He stepped inside and she told him, “Follow me.”
She led him to the garage.
“Does your mother know what you’re doing?”
He realized she was angry. “What do you mean? Doing what?”
“Spying on me.”
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“I saw you yesterday when I woke up. You were looking at me.”
He told her he wasn’t spying on her. He just saw her lying on the ground and thought she was sick or something. When she asked how he could see her from all the way across the yard, he told her he was bird watching with binoculars.
“So you were spying on me, then, weren’t you?” She stepped close to him. “You’ve been looking at me at night, haven’t you?”
He didn’t know what to say. She was breathing hard through her mouth. “Kneel on this bench. Hands and knees. Here.” She pointed to the weight-lifting bench. “On your hands, and on your knees.”
“Listen, I-”
“Do you want me to call your mother? Tell your parents what you’ve been doing?”
He was breathing hard now. “No.”
“Do it.”
He got on his hands and knees. It was so quiet he could hear a cricket chirping. He was wearing khaki shorts, a T-shirt, and flip-flops. They dangled awkwardly as he leaned over, and he felt her knock them off his feet, the slap sound of them falling to the concrete floor.
“Look at the wall,” she told him. “Beg forgiveness.”
He stared at The Wiggle Room sign bright with its loopy lime script. “Please don’t tell my parents,” he whispered. “I didn’t mean anything.”
He felt as she reached around his waist and unbuttoned his pants, yanked them down. She tugged his white underpants down to his knees. “There. How do you like that?”
He didn’t know what to say.
“I’m going to teach you a lesson,” she said. “You don’t want me to call your mother and father, do you?”
“No.”
“So you’re not going to tell them anything, are you?”
“No.”
He heard her moving around the room. She took a leather weight-lifter’s belt from off the rack of free weights. Then she was behind him. The basement air was cool and he had goosebumps on his skin, tingling.
“This is what Donald used to do to me when I was bad.”
He felt a sharp slap against his bare behind. She spanked him three more times with the belt. He could hear her breathing and yelping, just a little, with each swing. “How do you like that?”
He didn’t know what to say. It stung.
“Were you looking at me, asleep on the floor?”
“Yes,” he whispered.
“Good,” she said. “At least you’re telling the truth.” She spanked him again. “Are you going to do it again?”
He promised he wouldn’t. He heard faint sounds, her voice choked with emotion. “What if I want you to?”
He didn’t know what to say. He waited for more and then felt fingertips on his skin, lightly touching him. She said she hoped she didn’t hurt him. “You have red marks,” she added.
He told her he was okay. Could he get dressed now?
“I’m not a good person,” she said, starting to cry. “I’m a horrible person and I want you to know that. To know how horrible I am.” She put her cheek against his back, then kissed it, and told him to get up, helping him pull up his pants and touching his bare skin as she pulled them up. Then she got him to his feet and took his hand, led him to the freezer. “Open it.”
A gush of white mist escaped the freezer when he lifted the lid. Outside rain began to fall and spatter on the metal roof of the garage, gutter down the driveway. When the mist lifted it revealed a bulky bundle wrapped in a checkered quilt filling up the freezer, with boxes of Eskimo pies and frozen peas and hashbrown potatoes jumbled on top. She told him it was Donald. He died after he came home from the hospital and she didn’t have money for the funeral and she needed his disability checks so she was going to keep him there. “Here in the Wiggle Room,” she said. “It’s better this way, you see?”
The boy said he wouldn’t tell anyone.
Donald complained of aches and pains all the time. “It was for his own good,” she added, reaching into the freezer and giving the body wrapped in quilt a tender pat. “He was in misery, you see? Out of which he’s now put. I was arranging his pillows and he just stopped breathing.”
“I’m sorry,” said the boy.
“He didn’t like anything. He thought women were evil because he never had a girlfriend. I told him how can women be evil if God created them? And he said yeah but he just pulled out a rib, and it was a bad one. They’re a trap, he said. But I’m a woman, I told him. Don’t go bragging about it, he said. You’re my sister, but give you half a chance? You’d be like the others too.”
The boy said it was wrong for a man to say a thing like that.
She handed him the belt. “Here. You take this.”
The boy told her he should leave now.
The woman made a small motion with her head, turning it to one side, as if trying to hear him better. “Will you help me be a good person?”
He told her he really had to go now, that his parents would be worried. They’d be calling any minute. But she didn’t seem to be paying any attention to him as she crossed the room and got into position on the bench. On her hands and knees. Then she asked him to come over and bring the belt. Told him she was bad and she deserved it.
He said he had to go home now.
“You don’t want me to tell your parents about you watching me, do you? You know what they do to peeping toms?”
“No.”
She said they would castrate him. That it’s a law. “You have to do this,” she told him. “You have to save me. It’s the only way.”
He stood there with the belt in his hands, the sound of hard rain rattling on the metal roof.
So it was my (pleasant? gruesome?) surprise yesterday to stumble upon this new film Grizzly Night, which is based on a true story, famously recounted in Jack Olsen’s nonfiction book Night of the Grizzlies (1971). I’m a sucker for a bear-attack story. This one is actually quite good.
Is that poster an homage of sorts to the Jaws (1975) poster, with its impossibly gigantic Great White Shark being replaced with an impossibly gigantic Grizzly Bear? I think so. Both creatures have jaws agape, about to devour a comely young maiden. And why not? Jaws is one of the great, seminal animal-attack movies of all time.
I first encountered Night of the Grizzlies in 1980 while backpacking in the Bob Marshall Wilderness Area of central Montana, south of Glacier National Park. I was with a group of cavers exploring the ice caves there and had sprained my ankle, which took a week or so to heal. While sitting around I discovered the Night of the Grizzlies paperback in their little stash of reading material. (Cavers visited that area for several summers in the late Seventies and early Eighties exploring the ice caves; people would leave books they brought for others to read.)
Paperback reprint cover.
It freaked me out. One night I ate some hard candy in my tent and later heard a loud snorting/snuffling outside and was convinced a griz was coming to eat me. I was clutching a fistful of watermelon-flavored Jolly Ranchers like a dowager whose pearls were about to be snatched. The book and movie tell the tragic story of how two young women were attacked on August 12, 1967 by two different grizzlies. Although it’s been all these years since I read it, I remember it as a balanced, sober account of the tragedy, not exploitative or cheesy. Its narrative spans the entire summer, establishing the woeful policies that led to the attacks: Grizzlies were fed garbage nightly at one of the nearby chalet hotels and garbage dumps that were supposed to have been closed were allowed to operate. The movie, on the other hand, focuses just on the night of the attack and the day after.
As opposed to The Salt Path (see posts below)—now infamous for its allegations of fraud—this “Based on a True Story” appears to be quite trustworthy. The attacks were of course investigated at the time and were a major news story. While the film version may have fudged some of the personal interactions of the characters based on real people, the particulars and logistics of the night of the attacks seem accurate and aligned with the historical record.
As gruesome as bear attack/mauling stories can be, I hardly think it’s a reason to avoid the backcountry of such gorgeous parks as Yellowstone, Glacier, and the Tetons. Grizzlies rarely attack people. But when they do, it makes the news. Or the paperbacks.
[Note: This is satire. In the spirit of the New Yorker’s “Shouts and Murmurs” satirical op-ed slot.]
New bombshells revealed after the recent release of the shocking documentary The Age of Disclosure, detailing U.S. government’s possession of recovered UFO craft and “biologics.”
When the Sandblasters from Alpha Centauri first invaded we all panicked, of course: They’re zapping innocent citizens into ash-puffs all over the parking lot of Texas Roadhouse and IHOP, so who wouldn’t? Conventional weapons seemed to have no effect on the many tentacled, green-lipped creatures. So our fearless POTUS came up with a capital idea: Why waste the murderous talents of the Hunting Wives on suspiciously “pregnant” high-school sweethearts and troublesome methhead brothers? Point them in the direction of said alien menace and give ‘em a good swat on the keister, problem solved, right? Kristi Noem of Homeland Security chimed in enthusiastically, “I’m a hunting wife myself, and these gals ain’t just shootin’ puppies.”
After being deputized as official border patrol agents, the indefatigable crew of Margo (aka Mandy from little ole Alba, Texas), “Boston” Sophie (uppity Yankee but a killer behind the wheel), “Longjaw” Callie and “Bible-thumper” Jill played along. During a shooting hiatus of Season Two they got in the mood by having a Guns-for-Gals afternoon at the local semi-automatic shop. Lunch began with Cadillac Margaritas and footsies beneath the table. Halfway through a plate of nachos Margo got a text and excused herself for a moment, saying she’d forgotten something in her Lexus. “You mean ‘Sexus,’” said Callie, grinning. When Margo returned a half-hour later her dress was covered in green goo and her hair was a bit mussed. Time for bizness. “Let’s not get our panties in a wad over these E.T.’s,” she began. “They may shoot all kinds of laser gizmos but I tell you what they ain’t resisting the girls,” and here she cupped her fulsome breasts in their push-ups and gave them a boost.
Even so, the gals decided to add some heat to their weapons portfolio. At the mini-mall gunshop Jill went with a Ruger 10/22 for being easy on the shoulder while Margo preferred the no-nonsense AR-15 for blasting some extraterrestrial ass to Jupiter and back. Margo said they probably didn’t need all that firepower. “Really, they’re not so bad. I had a little look-see of their mother ship and it’s like the set of Yellowstone, with lots of wooden beams and Navaho rugs, stuffed grizzly bears and expensive whiskey. The big kahuna is a teddy bear if you ask me. Got a funny name like Crabmonkeyprawn or something, so let’s just call him Crabcakes. He showed me their shuttle bay and let me fire the photon blasters at some illegals, getting cheeky with his tentacles if you know what I’m sayin’.” She added that she didn’t like the smell of so much ammonia in their spacecraft AC. “I told him to go terraform France if you want a wreck an atmosphere. They’ll lie down like dogs for a piece of cheese.”
At press time President Trump proposed a ceasefire while taking a “drone tour” of the smoldering ruins of Los Angeles. “It will be beautiful,” said Trump. “I’ve met with Emporer Crabcakes and he’s apologized for wiping out most of the blue cities, explaining the Samsonites are really color-blind, so whatever. Not like it was on purpose! I didn’t know a thing about it. Really. Crabcakes is a great leader, a true arthropod slash cephalopod with silicon-based armor, and such a kind man! Or being I guess. His gift of a solid-gold statue of myself was truly heart-warming.”
When a reporter from the Associated Press tried to derail the joyous news of the Hunting Wives being unleased on the Samsonites (Trump got the name wrong, true, but the luggage corporation is thankful for the press and has promised a 15% stake in stock options, class A) by noting that the so-called “Hunting Wives” aren’t “real,” but actresses playing . . . . The press secretary cut her off and frowned, saying, “That’s loser talk. Why don’t you take your chubby woke ass out into the hallway and vape or whatever it is libtard losers do when you’re fuming for attention.” The AP reporter tried to speak but no one could hear her for all the laughing. “What does that mean, anywho?” said the press secretary. “‘Associated’? Like you know someone in the media or something?” She pressed a button that made a mwah-mwah-mwah sound. The press secretary’s staff assistant (daughter of a wealthy donor) giggled and took an iphone shot of the AP reporter looking gobsmacked. Within moments a squad of masked agents entered the briefing room and muscled the reporter. When she tried to resist they pinned her right arm behind her back and rushed her into the hallway. “Bye bye now, Pastor Pete!” called the secretary. “Who are you to decide what’s real or not, anyway?” she added. “Perception is reality, dogface. Don’t forget it.”
So as not to be considered too “elite” I have actually watched not only the original Greenland (2020) film, starring Gerard Butler, but have also watched Greenland: Migration (2026), the sequel, to boot. And I’m thinking either Trump or one of his minions watched it and didn’t quite understand the idea of “fiction.” They want that island. It’s where we’ll all go when the comet hits! Or “comets,” in the movie anyway. I liked Greenland: Migration the best. Some good footage of London (the comet-destruction version), including the English Channel as a landfill/canyon. Next up: Disaster movie titled America in Flames: The Trump Years. Actually the tagline on poster below is good for both movies: “Hope is uncharted territory.”
So last Spring when I was arranging a week-long kayaking trip on Shoshone Lake in Yellowstone National Park I read a number of Trip Reports, on various blogs and backcountry-travel sites. They were helpful. Some of them were kooky, such as the group who did a Shoshone Lake trip on paddleboards. (They looked like they had fun, though I think it’s a little crazy.) I’ll repay the favor by offering my own trip report. There were some surprises.
Morning launch from Lewis Lake boat dock
First off, Shoshone Lake is defined as the largest backcountry lake in the Lower 48. It’s “backcountry” in that you can’t access it from any road. You can hike to it via various trails (it’s a big lake) but if you want a paddle trip most people access the lake via the Lewis Channel, which is essentially a small river flowing out of Shoshone Lake and into Lewis Lake. We launched kayaks from the Lewis Lake boat dock and paddled the 4 miles across it to the channel, then about 3 miles paddling upstream the channel to the lake. From there our first campsite (site 8Q9) was less than a mile away, so our first day was probably less than or around 8 miles.
On Lewis Lake nearing the mouth of Lewis Channel
Wildlife: A common complaint or observation from other trip reports was the lack of wildlife sightings on Shoshone Lake. Our trip was in early September. While we saw no grizzlies (thank god) or black bear, we did see mule deer, elk, beaver (close to bank), Sandhill cranes, Bald Eagles, Mergansers, Swans, and other waterfowl.
Bull elk on shores of Yellowstone Lake
That first day there were numerous Mergansers in the Lewis Channel, as well as Trumpeter Swans.
.Mergansers in the Lewis Channel
When we reached Shoshone Lake I saw a stately bull elk with huge antlers trotting in the line of trees off the eastern shore. Eagles perched high in the spruce trees near every one of our campsites. (And for those wanting bear sightings, we did see both Blacks and Grizzlies in the park, just not at Shoshone Lake.) At night we heard wolf howls and the deep hoots of a Great Gray Owl. And a word of caution: While we didn’t see any grizzlies a ranger told us one had been sighted on the banks of the Lewis Channel. It’s a narrow river with often a relatively thin strip of bank/shoreline before a line of forest and hills on either side, so if you saw a grizzly it would probably be relatively close to you. The first half of the Lewis Channel you paddle upstream (against weak current) until the “Rock Garden,” where the river gets shallow. At that point you line the kayaks upriver.
Lining the kayaks up the Channel
Campsite quality: I’ve kayaked and backpacked from Alaska to Mexico and Shoshone Lake had some of the finest backcountry sites I’ve ever visited. They even have pit toilets! Know that most of the lake shore is steep cliffs, so the campsites tend to be either in flat areas close to shore, like Moose Creek sites (3 of them), or, more commonly, on plateaus above the lake accessed by short, steep hikes.
Shore view from first campsite
The views from the cliff sites were fantastic. We ate lunch and dinner on cliffs watching the beautiful blue lake, completely devoid of people. Which leads me to a surprise:
View from a cliff camp
They aren’t kidding about “backcountry”: We were shocked and pleasantly surprised at how isolated it was. People complain about crowds in Yellowstone? When we launched we saw one other paddler, a solitary guy in an aluminum canoe. He launched before us and once we reached the Lewis Channel we never saw him again. (Think he was a day-tripper.) That was Monday. From then until Friday we had the entire lake to ourselves! We didn’t see any other people, until the weekend, when a few groups did show up. Even then I don’t think there were more than 10 people on the lake, total, during our visit.
Alone on Shoshone Lake
It was spectacular: A big, cold lake surrounded by forest. With no people. It was like having Lake Tahoe all to ourselves.
Western end of the lake, near the geyser basin
Geyser Basin: The western end of the lake is maybe 10-12 miles southeast of Old Faithful Geyser Basin and other thermal sites like the Firehole River. It has its own Shoshone Lake Geyser Basin there, quite large and spread out, with no crowds. Our afternoon there we met two hikers leaving the basin and two park-ranger hydrologists studying the geysers. That’s it. The coolest sound we heard on the whole trip occurred in the marshes on the lake side of the Geyser Basin: A loud warbling call, haunting and resonant—the call of Sandhill Cranes. They were feeding in the marshy grasslands near the shore. Huge birds closely related to Whooping Cranes. We had seen them before in Yellowstone and were thrilled to hear the call and see their blue-gray plumage with a red dash on their heads.
Shoshone Lake Geyser Basin
The biggest danger that ranger-folk warn you about on Shoshone Lake is the weather, mainly fast-developing storms popping up and roiling the lake, wind-generated waves that can easily capsize canoes. We read about three deaths and took the recommendations seriously. (We had also already spent a week kayaking Yellowstone Lake the year before, so we knew how strong the wind could be.) That affected our daily paddles: Our kayaks were two Aire Lynx II tandem inflatables, self-bailing, packed tightly. With the weight of enough food and gear for a week we were definitely slower in the water.
Aire Lynx II tandem kayak
Each day we wanted to launch as early as possible—for us that meant 9:30-10—and arrive at camp before 1 p.m., when the storms would start popping up. They did, too. Almost every day there was a storm with wind and rain, often short-lived, often developing quickly. So we usually paddled 5-6 miles a day. When we reached the far western side of the lake, near the Shoshone Lake Geyser Basin, we made camp and had lunch, then paddled our empty kayaks over to the banks near the Geyser Basin.
Lake shore near the geyser basin
The Last Day: Woke up to freezing temps, ice on the kayaks.
Iced kayak
All week long we had dodged the weather successfully, launching early to beat the wind and waves and hunkering in camp when the afternoon storms arrived.
The last morning, at Moose Creek campsite 8Q7
But the last day we paddled from Moose Creek (8Q7) to the Channel, then down the Channel to Lewis Lake, and the 4 miles across Lewis back to the boat dock. By the time we reached Lewis Lake we had to fight a stiff headwind all the way back to the dock. It was hard paddling, adding maybe an extra hour to the paddle-time. We reached the boat dock and were quickly surrounded by friendly people there to enjoy the view, asking questions about our trip. I went to move our Outback into position to load the gear and the battery was dead. No sooner did I mention that than the folks curious about our trip came to the rescue with a portable charger and we were up and running.
Paddling downstream in the Lewis Channel
My favorite moments: Having coffee and breakfast at our cliff camps, watching Mergansers and Eagles on the lake, listening to wolf howls from our cozy tent, watching a storm rise on the north side of the lake and come down on our Moose Creek camp with the whitecap waves crashing against shoreline not far from our tent. We loved our Lewis Lake kayak trip. Would gladly do it again. Although this year we have our sights set on the Boundary Waters in Minnesota.
So after a lot of pre-release buzz the Jennifer Lawrence film Die My Love fizzled at the box office and did not get much attention. (Note: Minor spoilers ahead.) That’s a bit unfortunate, as it has the terrific performance of Sissy Spacek as crazy J-Law’s mother-in-law, who is trying to help her overcome postpartum depression.
Sissy’s and Jennifer’s scenes are the glue that holds the fractured storyline (and structure) together. Sissy plays Pam, Jennifer Lawrence’s (as Grace) husband’s mother, with husband played by the feckless Robert Pattinson (as Jackson). I felt sorry for Jackson throughout, who seems harmless enough, except for bringing home a puppy to the much-addled and psychologically desperate Grace, not the right move. Grace descends into madness as the new dog barks and barks.
After a while you see this is not going to end pleasantly. Ultimately she channels her inner Kristi Noem, famous for bragging about how tough she was to shoot a dog that bothered her. (It’s a short step from shooting a troublesome dog to shooting troublesome people, as Kristi’s ICE goons are doing now in Minnesota. No. Correction: It’s not a short step. It’s no step. It just shooting living things you don’t like.)
Looming in the background of Die My Love is the topic of postpartum depression. I hesitate to say that’s what it’s “about,” which would be reductive and dismissive. It’s not a Lifetime Channel movie or an ABC After School Special. It has a great cast (including Nick Nolte as Harry, Jackson’s dementia-cursed father), an artsy sensitivity, and a fragmented structure—much is elliptical and unstated. Jackson works but it never really shows what he does. We never know much about him. He’s the Boyfriend, the Young Father, then after their (ill-advised) marriage he’s the Husband. The guy we can feel sorry for.
Then there’s Grace, the Mother, who starts out like a firecracker—in vintage, sassy Jennifer Lawrence mode—and fizzles into a basket case. She creates a tragic, believable character, although at times it seems the director told her, “Just act crazy.” She crawls around on the ground a lot. She barks a lot. She pleasures herself . . . a lot. She takes care of her baby a lot—until the madness sets in, and then it’s like “Baby? What baby?” Ostensibly she’s a “writer,” although they never really mention anything she’s written. At one point Jackson asks her how she’s doing on writing The Great American Novel. He’s lucky he doesn’t get stabbed in the forehead with a fork.
One of the saddest scenes occurs late, when Jackson is driving Grace home after she’s had a hospital stay. They sing along with the great John Prine/Iris DeMent song “In Spite of Ourselves” as it plays on the radio. Poignant moment. When she finally confesses, “I can’t go back” it’s heartbreaking. We the audience don’t know exactly why she feels cornered and trapped, but we can guess. Good soundtrack. They also play the great Johnny Cash song “The Beast in Me.”
So my wife and I are inveterate backpackers—the seasoned, often bedraggled kind. We’ve backpacked in many locations from Denali National Park in Alaska (perhaps the “wildest” backcountry) to Yellowstone and the Wind Rivers in Wyoming and many others. But truth is we don’t enjoy carrying heavy packs on our back. That’s the hard part. Sometimes the miserable part. (Depends on how far you have to go.) The reward, however, is always worth it: We backpack to reach beautiful, untrammeled and uncrowded locales. (Yellowstone is our favorite, have done about a dozen pack trips there.)
En route to Alaska, the Saskatchewan River near Banff National Park in Alberta, Canada.
Shouldering the packs is always a chore. Sure, we try to pack lightweight and carry ultra-lightweight tent etc, but usually for a weeklong adventure my pack would be around fifty pounds. That’s a third of my weight and about as much as I want to lug. Most movies that depict backpacking are silly, fake, or foolish. You can always tell the actors don’t have much weight in their packs. They stand so straight! And when they stop they don’t drop their backpacks asap. I always suspect the packs are filled with Styrofoam peanuts. They often seem as if filmed by people who have never or very seldom carried a pack for miles. Which is where last year’s excellent film The Salt Path deserves a mention.
While I usually try to avoid spoilers, I should note this is most definitely not a thriller, murder-mystery, horror, scifi, or action-adventure flick. No demon strippers or flying monkeys either. It’s quiet, thoughtful, compassionate, and touching. There are some surprises I won’t reveal. But the core of the film, and the engine of its charm and emotional appeal, is an aging, late-Middle-Age couple (they have grown children) who embark on the “Salt Path”—a backpacking trail that follows the coast of England for several hundred miles.
Opposed to the fake backpacking films I rant about, the packing depicted in the film seems surprisingly realistic. For one thing, it looks hard. The husband is played by Jason Isaacs, of recent White Lotus fame, season three in Thailand. (He played the father who decides to kill his family due to financial collapse.) He struggles at backpacking more than I ever have, and he has to go miles and miles. I felt sorry for him from his first limping steps. The wife is played by Gillian Anderson of X-Files fame, although that seems dismissive: She’s been in many films and television since that Nineties show, including Sex Education and The Crown—in which she played Prime Minister Maggie Thatcher. She is remarkably stoic in their physical travels and travails. Anderson does a good job of not milking the difficulty, but not sugar-coating it either.
Yet the film is not only or even primarily about “backpacking.” As I’ve noted in my intro, I think of carrying heavy packs as just a means to an end. The film touches on our modern economic perils, on companionship, on honor and dignity, and on how to survive and even prevail when the going gets tough. It’s touching and heartfelt. A rare commodity these days. We watched this movie out of sheer chance, and I’ve remembered it more fondly than most films I saw last year. Here’s a comparison: One Battle After Another is being touted as this year’s Best Picture; The Salt Path is better.
UPDATE 2.2.26: I originally wrote, “Note this is a true story. That adds some zing to the suffering and the struggle of the couple. Based on the eponymous book by Raynor Winn, which is touted as an International Best Seller and the Best Book of 2019 by NPR’s Book Concierge.” But apparently Raynor Winn has been accused of fraud, for a number of reasons: I won’t go into all the details here but a friend mentioned it to me and a quick google search turned up the dirt. She’s been accused of embezzlement, lying about Moth’s (her husband’s) illness, and whether they ever even hiked The Salt Path at all. I’m not the judge in this case but the accusations sound convincing and damning. That doesn’t change my opinion about the movie. But it does undercut the “True Story” zing.
