Yellowstone River Canoe Trip
Sawyer's Paddleabout on the Yellowstone

We launched with a send-off delegation in a bevy of inflatable craft—a couple of rafts, several inflatable canoes, some kayaks. The first day on the Yellowstone is the best whitewater on the entire river, starting with the Gardiner Town Stretch, full of wave trains and loud holes, and ending with Yankee Jim Canyon, with three emphatic rapids, each with boat-eating potential.

There is no warm-up. As soon as you put paddle to water the rodeo starts. Sawyer straps into a solo inflatable kayak, snaps on a helmet, and pushes off, aiming for a mid-river set of four-foot waves. He has grown up on rivers—the Salmon, the Snake, the Gallatin, the Green, the Rio Grande, the Yukon, the Churchill. He barely crests 100 pounds, but he’s comfortable in Class III water and already has a trip resume many adults will never achieve. He’s the kid his siblings coax to try things first. “Sawyer, you go,” they’ll say. And he will, which accounts for his history of teeth knocked out, stitches, and puncture wounds.

I watch him pop over the first waves, a red dot in a sea of silty froth, then I scramble into an inflatable canoe and chase after him. The day goes like that. People swim. There are a good many whoops and yells. We stop for a picnic lunch where Ruby finds an arrowhead. Yankee Jim Canyon punctuates the afternoon. At the end, all the kids jump into a deep hole off of a bridge.

There we reorganize, switching to two open canoes, one folding and one hard-shell, along with a solo inflatable kayak. We load up expedition style with three-weeks of food, 5-gallon jugs of drinking water, spray decks, the gear that will sustain and shelter and feed us all the way to North Dakota. We hug our friends and drift off to our first gravel bar camp as the sunlight goes orange. It feels suddenly subdued, quiet and auspicious, straddling the threshold of the trip.

At the end of the third river day, camped on a gravel bar and feeling the new embrace of clockless rhythm, we hold Sawyer’s coming-of-age ceremony. It is a symbolic ritual. The real thing is made up of thousands of paddle strokes, bends of current, pestering headwinds, repetitive camp chores, swimming wave trains, absorbing the lessons that come day-by-day cruising downstream.

We aren’t churchgoers. More accurately, we feel the most in church on trips like this one. Drinking from the first trickle of the Yellowstone, for example, with Montana and Wyoming spilling away at our feet. Or in the grasp of roiling whitewater. Or at dawn, with mist melting into the day and a great-blue heron stalking the shallows. That’s our version of things holy.

We circle up under the late-day sun with the river rolling past. Because we have no prescribed ceremony for this, we make it up. Sawyer stands in the center. Each of us takes a compass direction. We hold symbols of the elements: earth, fire, water, air. We speak to Sawyer, pay tribute to the earth, and to the web of mystery we are all caught in. We collapse towards him, embrace his lean, strong body. The moment feels awkward and sacred, both, like the moment I first caught him, slipping from Marypat’s womb.

When we’re done, we walk back toward camp. Just then, a shadow goes over. We look up. A mature bald eagle coasts directly overhead, not ten feet up. Its head is cocked, fixing us with a yellow-eyed gaze.

We all stop, watch the big bird sail upriver. “Hmmm. That was cool,” I say. “I guess that was for you, Sawyer.”

You can make too much of a thing like that, a blessing that feels more than coincidence, but then, you could not make enough of it, too. The fact is, Sawyer has a history as a “bird whisperer.” When he was four, he once walked into the yard and picked up a pigeon that was feeding there. Again, one time on a family trip to Mexico, when Sawyer was five or six, he disappeared behind a row of market stalls and then emerged, clutching a wild turkey to his chest. The bird barely struggled.

Day on day the Yellowstone uncoils. We ride its back to the next camp, through rapids, around diversion dams, past cottonwood bottoms. Our time has the feel of Huck Finn on a homemade raft. Civilization lurks on the fringes. We glimpse the interstate highway. Coal trains rumble past. Our boats ghost past the outskirts of towns. We never once cook on stoves, use a firepan and driftwood instead.

The moon waxes towards full. White pelicans fish along the downstream ends of gravel bars, deer bound away into the willows, a rattlesnake swims the river near Miles City. It’s a toss-up whether we swim or paddle more of the river. Every day the kids are in the current as much as in the boats.

At some point around day 16 or 17, I sense the sand trickling away in the hour-glass. The days become more precious with that awareness. We drift for long stretches, gravity takes us, lazy but insistent.

Then, abruptly, it is the last morning. I am paddling with Sawyer. He has a natural stroke with real power. It’s the kind of stroke you get when you’ve been paddling since you could walk—unconscious, unpretentious, supple and efficient. I drop into his cadence. It is a sweet spot, there. Our paddles strike the water in tandem. The boat sings along so that it feels like flying. The bow wake purls towards the Missouri.

Too soon, around a bend, there it is. We stop and coast toward this storied confluence. Sawyer stands up, strips off his shirt and shorts. That’s my son, I think, looking at him. Not my baby, not my boy. There’s my son.

Without a word he slips, naked, over the side. I stand up and follow his lead. Everyone does. All five of us bob naked in the river next to our boats. The river accepts us, as it has all the way down. We ride together into the mingling with the Missouri, a visceral participation in the river union.

A few of the water molecules caressing us, perhaps, began in a drop of melt falling from the snout of a snowfield near 11,000 feet, almost 700 miles upstream. A spot where, in a few weeks, we will all lie in a row on our bellies and drink deeply.