That's My Tribe

Tales from the river crypt.

Rodney Hitchcock inspired me to write about the ‘Party Rock’ on the Main Salmon by posting a series of photos in our ‘private’ guide social media feed. Most of the faces in the photo above are retired, soon-to-be-retired or too tired to care whether anyone sees them worshiping an enormous bottle of whiskey.

If you ever wondered just what river guides do on their ‘busman’s holidays’, you might be disappointed to learn that the photo above depicts what we typically view as a grand old time. Though admittedly - sometimes - you might discover us wearing considerably less and engaged in an activity like Red Rover.

The ‘Party Rock’ started out with a couple of guides socially distancing in the hope of getting in some precious ‘girl guide talk’. Their conversation was being enhanced with alcohol but in a very responsible way. A group dinner for forty hungry outdoors people was underway in another part of the camp.

Not being on the cook crew and having some time on my hands, I took notice of the two of them giggling and carrying on near a rock down by the beach. It was two of my favorite folks - Ann McBurney and Idolene Bratton - so I invited myself to join them in their casual reverie.

Idolene was our river company’s food person. I nicknamed her Brigadier Bratton because she marshaled all the food requirements our company needed including river concerts with hundreds of people and regular lunches for governors and because, not ever having been in the military, I had no idea what a “brigadier” was but I thought it sounded like it carried some gravitas. The other reason was, of course, the alliteration with Bratton.

Idolene was an ‘old soul’ with country wisdom beyond her years. She never cared for guiding despite having gone through our guide school but when it came to food logistics I’d just get out of her way and let her work. I consider that to be one of the best decisions I’ve ever made.

Ann McBurney was a soft spoken Iowan, who you might mistake for a wall flower but you would be very much mistaken. She could be mischievous with the best of them. A prime example being her handing out her partner’s bottomless supply of sugary snacks whenever a raft got close enough to their raft for a hand off, it would be accompanied by her sing song admonition, “Don’t tell Dane!” This, in turn, would be accompanied by a wry smile that included every part of her face.

So I joined these two and shared whatever it was they were drinking and, knowing Idolene, my guess would be something along the lines of a spritzer or a cooler. Sweet, but with a kick. The sharing continued and, eventually, the three of us began feeling the effects. After a long day rowing on a river combined with a warm evening and a cold alcoholic beverage, it’s easy to become pixilated.

(I learned this word from one of my professors at Prescott College. I liked to think of it as being synonymous with loopy, or feeling as if you are in the land of pixies.)

Through our joint pixilation we felt like we were a party unto ourselves.

We dubbed the large granite rock on which we were sitting as the ‘Party Rock’ and no one was meant to get any further than an arm’s length or two out of its orbit. The three of us decided it was a much more mundane place outside of the rock’s gravitational pull.

One by one - those who were not responsible for dinner and those who decided to be irresponsible cook crew members - gravitated toward our impromptu gathering. Eventually, just about the whole group was there laughing, drinking, singing, reminiscing, recounting the day and, since I can see the red-headed Mark Kirkland in the foreground of the photo, I am sure there were some long, very tall tales being told.

It was meaningless fun, while simultaneously being meaningful.

It was not a notable event in any way, and yet I’ve thought about it even without the prompt of Rodney’s picture.

It’s people at play unencumbered by agendas. It’s my Recreation degree in action.

It’s the closest we can get these days to reenacting what it was like for those Sapien ancestors who descended from the trees - if they wore Patagonia shorts, had access to a liquor store and hunted and gathered their food from coolers and dry boxes.

I liked Deena Doerflinger’s comment below this photo.

“That’s my Tribe!”

Indeed, Deena, it is.

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Alert reader Shan Perera brought this video about Eminem and Dr. Dre to my attention. I’ll be honest. I know nothing about Dr. Dre and the only things I know about Eminem I learned from the movie Eight Mile. I do know the term “stan” - which has exploded across social media, or maybe us older folks are just getting hip to it - comes from one of his songs.