Riding the Bull
On turning 50 and screaming all the way down
Two days ago a close friend left me a voicemail: Happy eve of your 50th birthday, she said. Use today to think about what you want to leave behind from your 40s. I’ve been thinking about turning 50 for a while now, but never in that way. What would you shed from the last decade? What would you put behind you, if that was really something a person could do?
I wish that deciding to be different was as easy as just deciding it. “Starting today, I will eat less candy.” (I eat a tremendous amount of candy.) “Tomorrow, I will finally begin to learn to play guitar.” (Tomorrow never comes.) “Next year, I will take more chances.”
But we are who we are, more so every year. It’s why the best older people you know have unfathomable depth, integrity and wisdom — and why the worst ones are stone-cold terrified and meaner than hell. Who we’ve always been is a powerful force, for better and for worse. Each time we stretch to be something different, it tries to pull us back.
Something I felt begin to happen in my 40s was a calcification — in the way I think and dream, in how I physically move through the world. Mind you, I’m not a scaredy-cat. More often than not, I say yes to challenges and new experiences. I try weird food; I go see live music on a weeknight; I ran the second-fastest marathon of my life just last fall. And yet…I have definitely felt a slowing, like someone (spoiler: I think I am the someone) is slipping sand into my gears.
Choices that used to be so smooth as to be automatic — “Yes, I will go to that place I’ve never been to do that thing I’ve never done!” — are less so. I feel myself getting stuck more often, needing to grind my way through, in a way I didn’t in my 20s or 30s. It can show up as a mundane nervousness: “I’d rather not drive tonight if I can avoid it.” At other times, it feels like a bigger shift is trying to have its way with me, to move me from boldness and flexibility toward a life more closely held, brittle and narrow and reticent. The senseless violence that our country refuses to quell makes it easy — even logical — to give in to this shift: Another mass shooting at another school/mall/grocery store? Well, then — maybe let’s not go to those places anymore. Maybe let’s not go anywhere. Underneath it all is fear.
A few days before my friend left that voicemail, I stood on the bank of the Klamath River in southern Oregon in a goofy-looking helmet and a heavy wetsuit. Nate, our girls Roxy and Elektra, and I had just rafted down some pretty gnarly class III and IV rapids, then stopped for lunch with the rest of the rafting group. I planned this trip for us over Memorial Day weekend, intentionally selecting a challenging route over the more family-friendly kind we’ve done before. But then Glen, our guide with the golden ponytail, raised the bar: “Who here wants to ride the bull?” This, he explained, would mean sitting on the very front of our big blue raft, legs dangling off the front, hands wrapped around a rope to keep you aboard, as we crashed through the next rapid. What a stupid idea! Glen insisted it would be awesome. Our raftmates Molly and Casey, two twenty-somethings on a roadtrip up from California, shook their heads no. My daughters and husband demurred. Glen looked at me. I looked away.
Earlier that morning as we descended the Upper Klamath through sections of roiling whitewater with names like “Satan’s Revenge” and “other foreboding name that I can’t remember,” Roxy and I agreed that the scariest part was not paddling through the rapid. By then, we were too focused on the doing to be anxious. Glen shouting “right, paddle!,” “all paddle!, “hold on!,” and “get down!,” as we tumbled toward each other in the bottom of the raft, me screaming, my girls laughing at my screams.
The Klamath, if you are ever so lucky to see it, is strong and cold and pristine. To stare down into that swirling, rushing water as we plunged through it, none of us strapped in, trusting only our novice paddling and this guy Glen to keep us all from flipping out of the raft onto countless sharp-edged boulders — for a moment, I understood why mountain climbers tempt death on purpose: It makes you feel alive! No, it wasn’t the rapid that was so terrible, Roxy and I decided. It was the fear upon approach, when you still might have a chance to turn back, take the safer route; our raft gliding slow and quiet over calm waters toward a challenge we could not see.
Looking back, it was only about 30 seconds between Glen asking who wanted to ride the bull and me changing my mind. It is surprising how many places your brain can alight in 30 seconds. I looked down at the clear, cold water, then up at the trees — oaks and conifers as far as I could see. I looked at my daughters, who were eyeing me skeptically, and my husband, who was just smiling. No pressure, his look seemed to say. I glanced at Glen of the golden ponytail, who may or may not have stared deeply into my eyes as a way of transferring his veteran-river-guide lifeforce into my 49-year-old-mom-with-a-desk-job heart. Finally, I thought about what I always want to show my girls: How to be scared — and do the thing anyway. How to live, despite everything there is to fear.
I scooted my wetsuited arse up onto the front of the raft. I turned my back on my family, the twentysomethings, Glen — and, I suppose, my 40s, too — and faced the rapids. Then I screamed, as my girls and Nate laughed and laughed and laughed, all the way down.
