Out of harm’s spray

Mom asked the Witch to wake us up before sunrise so we’d have a full day to get hurt, lost, suffer a Wagon injury, and die before sunset. She was still playing worry solitaire as I drifted off.

I woke up to Mom packing the bigger, tougher packpack she’d bought especially for today by lantern light and wondered if she’d slept at all. She checked and double checked that we had plenty of fruit and nuts for her, brunch kibble for me, and an extra juice box for the Witch.

Once she was satisfied that she hadn’t forgotten any emergency supplies, she reached for the water bottles to fill the remaining space in the packpack.

“Oh dog doo!” she said when she pulled back the blankets and saw the water bottle husk looking like a toy with all the stuffing pulled out. “We only have like 8 bottles left.” 

“Yay! We’re saved!” I yawned, glad Mom had planned ahead and conserved water.

“I don’t know if that’s enough for you, me, and second-coffee,” Mom counted. 

“What about your fancy canned water?” I reminded her. “How about I drink the bottles, and you drink the cans.” 

“Eew, warm raspberry water? Gross.” 

“That’s what I thought, but you were excited about it yesterday. Isn’t this just like the survivalist challenges you’ve always dreamed about? You’ve got to go to extremes to find out what you’re really made of. Like drinking warm fuzzy water.” 

“Worrying about scarcity is only a waste of time if you survive. Do you know what happens when you lose a survivalist challenge?” Mom asked, like I’d never watched an episode of reality TV. 

“Of course I do! They turn off your torch and send you home. But first they stick cameras in your face so the world can watch you cry. The episode ends with a scene of you eating hot dogs with your Friends so your fans can see how different you look after a shower. How about I take the hot dogs and you do the crying and shower bit.” 

“There are no TV producers in the desert, Spud. I’m afraid it’s a little more depressing than that.”

“Silly Mom. Nothing is more depressing than a failed reality star.” 

There was no canyon at the trailhead, only a flat and wide frappuccino-colored river under an enormous sky. 

“See, Mom? There’s nothing to worry about,” I said, claiming big points in the worry tournament. “The river will never get us with all of this flat land next to it for us to escape.”

“Do you know where canyons come from?” Mom asked, cheating as usual. Whenever she gets stuck, she uses science to invent some improbable story because she knows a dog can’t argue with science. This time, she didn’t even wait for me to guess. “Rivers dig canyons over millions of years.”

“You’re pulling my tail,” I said. “How can water do a thing like that?”

“Erosion. It’s very scientific. You wouldn’t understand,” Mom boasted, claiming a bonus point for being so smart. 

“Nuh-uh! I may not speak science, but I know a thing or two. The desert is full of canyons, but you said yourself, there isn’t supposed to be water in the desert. Rivers are made of water, so you could never get enough of it in the desert to dig a canyon, even if that were how they were made. So there.” I hoped she would award my points before she remembered about the river right next to us.

“You wanna bet? If there’s no canyon, I’ll buy you a hot dog.” 

“You’re gonna be jealous of my delicious hot dog when all you have to eat is your words.”

The river sank as we walked, but not nearly deep enough to call it a canyon. It was more like a furrow. The bank we were walking on stayed flat, but farther from the river, the ground began to slant. The slant became a slope and started to close in, squeezing us closer to the river with every step. 

When the slope was twice as tall as Mom and far too steep to climb, the river made a sudden move. It veered off the lazy line it had been following all morning and made a sharp bend, cutting us off. It rushed head-long into the slope, carving away the sand to show the smooth wall of rock underneath. Only half a mile into our hike and both Mom’s socks and my hot dog were in danger.

Mom’s eyes bounced around the cramped furrow, searching for a way to keep her socks dry. The river closed in from two sides while the wall-like slope blocked our escape on the other side. To turn back after driving all this way was a fate worse than death. The panic on Mom’s face reminded me of the feeling I get when she calls me to the people bathroom, closes the door, takes off my collar, and turns on the shower. 

Mom’s eyes caught on something and her frown turned upside-down. “Look over here, there’s a side trail!” she said, eyes pointing at a patted-down line in the dirt. It was just wide enough for a fluffle of rabbits, as long as they hopped single file. 

“That’s definitely not where you’re supposed to go,” the Witch corrected. “You’re supposed to hike in the river. Weren’t you listening last night?” 

Mom took one last look at the mapp, put the Witch in her pocket, and followed the rabbit trail topside. I watched her go as the river’s gurgling swallowed the sound of her footsteps. All the scent tracks told me that the trail was underwater, but there was no other choice for a couple of landlubbers who hate dampness. Mom would never go anywhere without a plan, so I followed her to higher ground.

“How do you know we won’t get lost?” I asked when I caught up. 

“I have a theory.” Mom looked into the deepening rut beside us. “This trail follows the river’s path almost exactly, except that it’s a few feet to the left. Canyons can mess with GPS signals.” 

“I wouldn’t call it a canyon. It’s more like a…” I searched the scene ahead for a different word to save my hot dog. Gully? George? Gulch? “… a ravine,” I decided. “A ravine is smaller than a canyon, you know.” 

“Okay, well maybe the ravine caused a GPS error that mapped the path just to the right of where whoever recorded it actually was.”

Left and right were numbers that confused me. I knew that Mom always wanted to be right, but it seemed like right went in a different direction every time. Maybe Mom’s riddle was a clue. I studied the squiggles that the rim and river made. They were the same shape, but the rim was high and the river was low. With every paw we put in front of the other, the river went farther down and the path went farther up. If the river was right, then why were we up here on top of a cliff when Mom hated heights even more than wet socks? I needed a hint.

“You said that right was the one that goes down?” I asked, like I was just testing her. 

“Get back from there!” Mom squawked. 

I forgot. Mom would never, ever look down. She was even more afraid of heights than she was of wet socks. Whether it was because she couldn’t face the river or all that terrifying height in between, it amounted to the same thing. One look down through all that empty air to the sock-soaking river and there would be no turning back. The height would hang onto her curiosity, turning her body to stone as her imagination was sucked over the edge. I’d had to coach Mom back from the brink many times when her legs became too weak to pull her mind out of the abyss.

The river became smaller and less scary as the height grew in between. Although it was still right next to us, it was impossibly far away. All it had taken to save us from soggy socks was a slight turn and a few steps up the slope. If a single step had made the difference between danger and safety, how many other invisible disasters had Mom’s worrying sidestepped? 

That must’ve been what Mom meant when she said she could stop something bad from happening just by worrying about it. If you don’t sharpen your eyes with worry, you might miss the rabbit tracks and walk blindly into misfortune. 

We walked until the path only existed in Mom’s imagination and the soft dirt smeared our paws closer to the cliff with every step. Seeing no trail that didn’t lead over the edge, I walked behind Mom as she fought the sucking danger. The height got into her legs and each step became smaller and stiffer than the last, as if she could hold back all that ghastly empty space if she resisted hard enough. She shuffled forward in teency steps, keeping both paws locked to the ground. 

When she’s like that, she screams at me if I pick up too many paws, or so much as look at a cliff. It’s stressful because which spots are “safe” are always changing, and it’s hard to move in slow motion when you keep getting startled by screams. When Mom was too much of a lunatic for either of us to take another step, we turned and lurched back toward ground she could trust.

It’s funny how things stretch out the first time you see them, but seem a lot smaller on second view. Once the earth was solid enough that Mom didn’t have to project manage every step, it took us no time to return to the spot where rim and river parted. 

Mom let her eyes float upriver for a long moment before yanking her gaze away like the leash behind a squirrel. She dropped the packpack to the ground and pulled out all of the empty bottles, lining them up in the sand. She dunked one in the river until it was full of cloudy frappuccino-grey water. 

“What are you doing with that?” I asked. 

“I saw a sign on the way in for a trail that I’ve always wanted to visit. This way, we’ll have enough water to stay out here for another day before we go back to town.” She unscrewed the cap of the next bottle and dunked it. “You drink this, I’ll drink the raspberry water, and that way there’ll still be enough fresh water for me to make my coffee.” She proudly polished the sand from the frappuccino-filled bottles before packing them back into the packpack. “It’s called being resourceful.”

A question was still bothering me. “Was today a good adventure or a bad adventure?” 

“What do you think?” Mom asked, as if I could decide something that important all by myself. 

“You were afraid that eighty miles would be too long for me, and we didn’t have to go eighty miles after all. So that was… um… good, right?”

“It was only 18 miles, but yeah. It was disappointing, but probably for the best.”

“And you were afraid that no one would be around to help if we got in trouble, but we didn’t see a soul. So that was… bad? Right?” 

“But we didn’t get in trouble, so not seeing people was nice.” 

“You were afraid of running out of water, and then there was more of it than we knew what to do with. So that means it was good, right?”

“That was a relief,” Mom agreed. “But it did cut our hike short.”

“You were afraid of getting your socks wet and your socks stayed dry. So that’s good, right?” 

“I suppose. There was no way to keep my socks dry and see what we came here for, so I made a choice.”

“And you worked so hard to get all your worrying out of the way ahead of time, but you got scared anyway. So that’s bad, right?”

“I’m afraid of heights, but I love the views. You can’t have a thrill without fear.” 

“But we didn’t get to see the part of the trail that we came to see. So that was bad, right?”

“That was disappointing, but there’s no sense in worrying about things you can’t change,” she said like she’d known it all along. “Maybe we’ll find another way on another day.” 

“But you said it yourself, this river’s been here for millions of years. It’ll probably still be here if we ever come back.”

“Maybe I’ll figure out how to make the river less wet, or part its waters like Moses. If that doesn’t work, maybe I’ll choose to toughen up and carry on with wet socks. Perhaps the barrier isn't the river itself, but what I think the river means.”

“Is falling in a river better or worse than falling off a cliff?” I asked. 

“Tough choice, but falling off a cliff is a lot more final.” 

“How do you know? Maybe you’d discover that you can fly the second you let the fear go.” 

“Best not to find out. Sometimes things are worse than your fears, you know.” 

“Sometimes things don’t work out the way you want and still aren’t as bad as you expect,” I said. “If you’re always avoiding things that worry you, how do you know whether you’re on the right path or just the one that scares you the least?” 

Mom held up a finger as if she’d already won the point. “If I hadn’t worried so much about water, I wouldn’t have thought to drink warm raspberry seltzer all day or refill bottles from the river.” She shook froth back into a frappuccino bottle to make her point. “Because of my heroic worrying, we have enough water for one more hike before we go back to town. In your face, Mr. Know-It-All.”

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