Chris Offutt - The Same River Twice - A Memoir

I carried my backpack to the single road that led away from the canyon’s south rim. In another era, Bill might have been a Texas Ranger fighting the Comanche, or a mountain man scouting the Rockies. People of the West suffer from a historical malady similar to that of Appalachians. They are deprived of the old outlets, but stuck with the need to live up to their heritage.

While waiting for a ride out of the park, I resolved to live in the West — settle rather than pass through — but not yet. I was still an outrider of the self. If I stayed, I knew that I’d become a feral hermit, climbing like the end of a species to higher ground. I didn’t want my bones discovered on a rocky ledge at thin altitude. There was still California to explore, the edge of the continent.

Summer has faded deep into autumn, the days collapsing into darkness at either end. Beneath the changing leaves, I split firewood and gather kindling. Rita’s hair is lustrous, her nails strong. My winter beard is growing in. Come spring, I will shed it for another six months. Yesterday I watched a blue jay tamping weeds over a supply of acorns, hopping as if to flatten the earth above a grave. Today a squirrel has found the cache. The river is afloat with geese possessing the obstinacy of bison aiming their bodies into wind. Cattle die doing that.

I have read every pregnancy book in the library, all of which are naturally geared toward women. The most progressive include a short chapter on the man’s role at the end of the book. There is invariably a photo of a virile-looking man with a mustache who is changing a diaper. A woman smiles in the background.

The mother bear will fight to the death for her cubs while her mate wanders the mountain. The female eagle is larger than the male, and in her passion can accidentally kill him during copulation. A buck deer thinks nothing of sending his harem forward as a decoy to ensure the safety of his travel. All this sounds good to me, but Rita and I are evolved. She is not a gatherer. I no longer hunt. The fact is, I’m home all the time, deep in my private cave, blowing red ochre onto blank pages.

Expectant fathers are encouraged to clean the house, cook meals, and tell their wives how lovely they look while carrying forty extra pounds. One book admonishes me not to rush Rita into sex after delivery. Another suggests that I refuse to sleep through the night until the baby does, a period that might last a year. This is to help me bond with my kid, implying that an infant born prior to this book was insufficiently connected to its daddy. Fathers are at fault in everything; even God let his son die.

Women of my mother’s generation were drugged during labor. When Mom awakened, the doctor gave her the swaddled gift of me. Dad was kept isolated until a nurse came for him with that immortal phrase, “It’s a boy.” His first view of me was through a pane of glass. Dad has since told me that I was bright red and screaming, and that he asked the nurse if maybe the quiet one wasn’t his instead. Mom has said that she didn’t remember much for a couple of days.

For Rita and me, choosing to have children in our mid-thirties requires Lamaze, a role reversal for each of us. I am to be sensitive and encouraging while Rita’s goal is a terse machismo. Our Lamaze class meets in a hospital waiting room, which has so few chairs that pregnant women are forced to sit on the floor. Orderlies tramp in to buy drinks from a machine. The instructor’s attitude suggests that we are part of a select birth cult and should be proud of inclusion. Again and again she emphasizes the pain of birth, saying it is similar to having your lips peeled over your head. She cannot demonstrate relaxation techniques because she’s wearing a dress.

“In the old days in Iowa,” she tells us, “women rode off on horseback to have the baby alone. A few hours later they came home with the new baby. I can’t imagine that ride back, can you?” She releases a smug giggle. “You’ll understand after you give birth.”

She separates the couples and asks the men to make a list of negative qualities about their wives during pregnancy. We are leery and resentful of such a chore. Most of us are worried about money, and no one is willing to denounce his wife. Ten minutes later the instructor asks for a volunteer to read our inventory.

“Our wives,” begins our spokesman, “are grumpy, sleepy, dopey, happy, bashful, and sneezy.” He gestures to the husband of a neurologist. “His wife’s doc.”

“Very good,” the instructor says. “After all the babies are born, we’ll get together for a reunion.”

The instructor turns the lights off, plays a tape of whales’ mating calls, and urges us to meditate.

On the drive home, Rita starts to cry. She feels terrorized by the instructor rather than soothed. She doesn’t like having her body referred to as a building with ground floor, basement, boiler room, subcellar, and crawl space. Rita thinks Lamaze is a con job designed to prove how tough females should be. Women are encouraged to undergo tremendous pain, as if to earn their womanhood and deserve a baby. Lamaze focuses outwards, divorcing Rita from the event. She prefers to stay abreast of delivery. I go along with everything.

The next day Rita calls the hospital to change classes, but they’re filled and we can’t get a refund. Family life has taken its first economic toll. We borrow books and a videotape from the library. I make flashcards depicting the stages of labor and their attendant warning signs. The next morning I leave Rita to the video and go to the woods.

I am unable to walk quietly along the crackling floor of fallen leaves. Birds and animals drift away. Flattened leaves mark a common trail, while kicked leaves turned damp-side up indicate fresh tracks. A heron is poised upriver, leaning like an Eskimo fisherman waiting hours with a spear, as if the wait itself is more important than the hunt. A helicopter seeking crops of marijuana churns the sky. The startled heron lofts awkwardly from shore, stick legs dangling like twin contrails. Trees along the river are so splashed with autumn color that I imagine the pilot has dumped paint from the chopper.

In ancient Mesopotamia agricultural societies worshiped the goddess. Female priests used the serpent as their symbol. Its habit of shedding a skin was physical evidence of birth and rebirth, the moon’s ebb and growth, the sow and reap of crop. Fierce nomads eventually arrived from the desert, hunting tribes ruled by men with male deities. They took the land and created the myth of the Fall to punish women for their power. We have been killing snakes ever since. Mother Earth became Papa Sun. Jesus performed the dream of many men — he broke a hymen from the inside out and took up with a hooker. Women want a friend as mate. Men want a virgin in public and a whore in the bedroom, both named Mary of course.

My mother raised the children and took care of the house, as Rita’s mother did. Our fathers held employment, carried out the trash, mowed the yard. Life was very simple. Both of our mothers were unhappy.

I am dead set against day care, but know I’ll lose, because Rita won’t give up her career. She’s been at it fifteen years, caring for the mentally ill. She doesn’t want to be like her mother, and I don’t want to be my father. This opens the possibility of caring for the baby myself. I can wear it on my back in the woods, sleep less, quit drinking, and write while it naps. I will teach it what little I know. Electric pumps that fit the breast are used to stockpile mother’s milk. Our freezer will be full of hard milk waiting for the thaw of an infant’s scream.

We recently babysat a one-year-old girl as a dry run for our future. She slept on her side, arms and legs poised like a relief sculpture of a small running person. Upon awakening, she fouled her diaper with such vehemence that I actually gagged. I have seen men fill their veins with heroin. I’ve witnessed a limb-losing accident with a bulldozer, and the chilling aftermath of a gunshot wound. Nothing has ever quite roiled me like that diaper leaking around each chubby leg, obscuring genitals and streaking the belly. Rita calmly changed the baby, amused by my sensitivity.