rowing, and paddleboarding (nonmandatory), participate in
“processing” groups and team-building activities (mandatory), eat
together, collapse into tents, and then do it all over again the next day.
On the sixth day, we’d leave the river, flying home off a dirt strip in
small planes. Unlike the miners, we’d be returning to civilization,
hopefully a little bit changed.
The night before launching our boats at the end of a dirt road, I
met up with the women, gathered on a restaurant patio for pizza in the
no-traffic-light town of Stanley, rimmed by the vaulting, aptly named
Sawtooth Mountains. This clearly was not your usual river-rat crowd.
These women were on the whole younger, more ethnically diverse and
less able-bodied. The nine former service members carried an
assortment of cigarettes, butch hairstyles, tattoos, piercings and
physical supports that included a cane, orthopedic tape and an arm
splint. Collectively, they brought a small pharmacy’s worth of
antianxiety drugs, antidepressants, antiseizure meds, painkillers,
digestive aids and sleeping pills. One service dog, Major, a yellow lab
mix, wore a bib that read DO NOT PET. The warning could have
applied to anyone. Heavy-lidded and surly after a long day of travel,
they were not about to smile for a bunch of cowtown selfies.
The recreation therapists, Brenna Partridge and Kirstin Webster,
handed out matching black fleece jackets emblazoned with the unique
crest of this “unit”—HG-714-RA, which stood for Higher Ground,
July 14, Rafting. (Other Higher Ground units, typically coed or all-
male, might spend a week fly fishing or skiing or doing lake sports.)
Partridge smiled and asked us to introduce ourselves and talk
about why we wanted to be on the trip. Marsha Anderson (some
names, including hers, have been changed) described being
medevaced out of Afghanistan on a stretcher, convinced for a while
that she was already dead. It took her thirteen months to relearn to
walk. Now she felt angry, misunderstood by her family, and cheated
of the sports she loved like surfing and cycling. She was hoping to