What Women Want

Yoga classes and massage put a gentler spin on the traditional river trip
By Ellen Fagg

Special to the Deseret News

DESOLATION CANYON, ON THE GREEN RIVER - "Your body is 70 percent fluid," the yoga instructor says, standing before a blue mat, burrowing her feet into the gray sand of this riverside beach. Charlotte Bell stretches her legs shoulder-width apart and then extends her left arm above her, gracefully reaching up, not to a ceiling as in the studio back in Salt Lake City but up to the sky.

It's 6:30 a.m., the second morning of this float trip, and I'm one of the group of sleepy women trying to follow Bell, all of us coaxing our stiff bodies into yoga poses as the Green River rushes behind us. Out here in the fresh morning air, it seems possible to envision that our bodies can change, can become more fluid, more flexible. "Will I get buns of steel from this pose?" someone asks. Bell's response: "More like buns of Jell-O."

On the Green or the Colorado or another Western river, the elements of a river trip, commercial or private, are 70 percent the same: rubber rafts, life preservers, thick globs of sunscreen and grilled food seasoned with sand. There's always the currency of the water, the cold shock of it when it splashes on winter-tender skin. And then there's the sound of it: rapids punctuating all the talk on the rafts and rushing through campground dreams.

The day before, this trip had started out as most river trips do - a group of strangers dressed in clean T-shirts, shorts and river sandals, laden with duffel bags, hats and water bottles, all of us cautiously trading names and hometowns.
That caution gave way to something else after a one-hour flight from Salt Lake to the airstrip above the Sand Wash Bureau of Land Management ranger station, after the group met up with our female guides, after we started hiking down the steep trail to the river. That's when the confessions began.

Strangers and sand

There were 19 of us river divas along on Western River Expeditions' "all-women's adventure," led by the six hard-working guides and four extra guests. Along with Bell, the yoga instructor, Jamieson Frazer led afternoon Pilates classes, and Amber Hall and Carol Christensen set up massage tables every night, working to create not a floating spa, exactly, but still a more luxurious way to experience the river.

On the rafts, the rhythm of the river ran through all our conversations. We spent afternoons talking about our lives, what we did, what we wanted to do, who we were or who we used to be. As the trip progressed, it seemed like just about everybody was looking for some sort of emotional makeover.

We were a bunch of city women, from Oregon, California, Utah, Ohio, Minnesota, New York and Virginia, ranging in age from 18 to 55. We were single and married, mothers and not, workaholics, entrepreneurs and slackers.
Barbara Beach and Lucy Sherry, two dear friends from Long Island, N.Y., were recovering from the aftermath of the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, mourning friends and family who didn't survive. Another woman, Jan Nelson, a mother of six adult children, had signed up to enjoy the company of her river-guide daughter. But she was also celebrating the freedom of her newly empty nest.

"I've never been on a boat where everybody is chatting," said Wendy Young, the trip leader, at the end of the first day.
"Yeah," added guide Kate Nelson, "I didn't have to make conversation while I was rowing." As the trip unfolded, I noticed how much I liked feeling the sun on my face, liked listening to everybody's stories while we were digging paddles in the water or coasting through the rapids on one of the bigger rafts. I had just suffered through the dot-com slowdown, after two years of traveling full time, and then another year split between New York City and Los Angeles. Why worry about speeding up or slowing down? I was ready to settle in and take comfort from drifting along at the river's pace.

Surrendering to river time
One woman was considering her life while looking ahead to her 40th birthday. Another woman, an ad agency executive, had just resigned from her job, with hardly a clue about what kind of work she wanted to do next.
Judy Kammer was also evaluating her job, trying to figure out if the corporate rat race and all the travel was worth her time. She was one of a handful of friends who had come to the river to celebrate the milestone of hitting 55, a number significant enough to be not just an age but a speed limit.

"It's why you take a trip like this," said Tracy Tupper-Looney, from Eden Prairie, Minn. "This isn't a risky adventure. There's nothing really dangerous out here. But the river offers you time to think." The guides told us that working on the river had changed their lives. At 26, Wendy Young is tall and lithe, with Utah tan skin, straw-colored hair, an infectious, goofy laugh and hands that seemed shaped to curl around a set of oars. She used to be fat, 250 pounds fat, back in high school, back before she discovered how good it felt to be outdoors, running or biking or rowing a rubber raft.
Before she started working on the river, Young said, she was too shy to talk to the pizza man; company officials worried that she would be too quiet to entertain customers. Now, she likes the family trips best, "because I get to talk about boogers and snot all day."

Kate Nelson, 24, is a guitar-playing brunette with a perpetually sunburned nose. She used to think she had her whole life figured out. Finish college in three years, get married, have kids - that was the plan. The river had taught her how to slow down, she said, "how to play."

What happens in surrender?
Dawn Quike happens to know. She works as a massage therapist back home in Virginia, but on the river she was off-duty, and instead, on the table herself. After receiving four massages in four days, she labeled herself the trip's "massage slut." For Amber Hall, one of the massage therapists working the trip, the Green River felt almost like familiar territory. "This is my second trip down this river," she said, "and the first time was when my mother was nine months pregnant with me."

One image of the trip will stay with me: two women stretched out on adjacent massage tables, each wrapped in sheets - mermaid style - only recognizable by sunburned necks and tousled, river-styled hair. One of those women was me, lying on my stomach, gazing across the river at a cowboy on horseback, who appeared to be neglecting his cattle to stare back at our campsite.

In the falling dark, I watched the cowboy and the cattle, then stared out of the tent at the big, low moon and a sky jam-packed with stars. After awhile, I surrendered to the sound of the rushing water and the comforting touch of my new friend, Amber, giving me a deep tissue massage, Green River-style. Right now, I didn't care that after this trip, I'd be moving again. It felt like I was moving home.