truck they nicknamed the Maxi Pad. Then someone asked me why I
wanted to write about breasts, the topic of my first book. That
inspired Herrera to come up with a name for our rubber boat: the
Boob Tube.
It was a long day on the river, a hot, twenty-mile paddle
punctuated by swimming and a beachside lunch. The canyon in this
section is steep and dotted with large ponderosa pines that emerge
from shiny black gneiss outcrops. We were passing through the
middle of the ancient Idaho batholith. Angela Day, a blond, plump
Navy veteran, bobbed along in her kayak like a mellow duck, not
working too hard and giggling through the waves. Anderson, the
nerve-damaged former ski racer, rode the stand-up paddleboard; in
the rapids it became more of a kneeling board, and sometimes an
upside-down board. In the afternoon, nurse Lopez spilled out of her
kayak in a tricky rapid. From the Boob Tube, I could see the panic in
her face, the desperate gulps of air and water. She got back in the
kayak, but she wasn’t happy about it.
At processing that evening, she looked defeated. Facilitator
Partridge had asked the group what their passions were. “I used to be
passionate about everything,” said Lopez, whose PTSD and a chronic
back injury got her medical retirement from the Army. “Life, work,
nature. Even today I was passionate about kayaking until, what the
fuck, and now I expect to be disappointed by everything.” She
shrugged. “Maybe I’ll get back in, I don’t know.”
Anjah Mason said she didn’t know what she was passionate about.
“I used to be passionate about my family.”
Connie Smith, a former Navy captain from Texas, said she was
passionate about her work training service dogs.
Angela Day said she was passionate about her relationship with
the Lord. “Today, in the kayak, I was like, ‘Come on, Lord, bring it
on! You can do better than that!’”
Linda Brown, soft-spoken, in her fifties, said she was passionate