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The Marriage Test

I first met Diane in 1963. She was a looker even then but, since we were both in the second grade at the time, I didn't pursue her just yet.

In 1988, after a thorough 25-year evaluation of her personality (i.e., her ability to put up with the likes of me), I decided the time had come to put her to the final test.

I was, at the time, living rough; no permanent job, no permanent home and no plans other than to spend a year or two roaming the country with pack and paddle. What little I owned fit nicely in the back of my truck, with room to spare. I guess you could say I was quite a catch.

Rumbling hot and dusty into the one-horse town of Portal, Arizona I stopped to pick up a pre-arranged mail drop. If you ever decide to spend a few years drifting aimlessly across America it helps to have dependable friends back at your last known address who are willing to cull your mail for car insurance bills, registration renewals, letters from your probation officer and other inescapable drek of modern society. Renewing your driver's license from 2500 miles away has its advantages; for years my license bore a large blank square, stamped "Valid Without Photo".

In my mail packet of hard-on-the-homeless governmental intrusiveness I found an oft-forwarded letter from Diane. She had some time off coming up and wanted to come out west and accompany me on my wanderings. After enduring the difficulties of long distance communication that are inevitable when you lack both an address and a home phone we eventually made contact and Diane found a cheap air fare into El Paso. I headed east a month later to pick her up.

I had spent a few weeks roving about the Big Bend region of south Texas, the highlight of which was a solo-paddling trip through Boquillas Canyon. I was certain Diane would also enjoy the solitude of paddling Boquillas.

Picking Diane up at the airport we continued into south Texas as I described the joys of paddling the Rio Grande through Big Bend. We stopped at Panther Junction to pick up a river permit, filled a 5-gallon carboy with water and proceeded down to the Boquillas put in at Rio Grande Village.

Staging my twelve-foot solo canoe at the waters edge I packed up a few dry bags with Diane's clothes, sleeping bag, tent, food, stove, cookware, tarp and water carboy. Settling Diane into the seat I handed her a paddle and shoved the canoe out into the current.

Diane performed a graceful pirouette on a paddle plant and, as the bow swung back around in my direction, asked the now famous question:

"Aren't you coming too?"

Although the paddle plant earned her an A for athleticism, I was forced to deduct points for not having grasped the innate complexities of downriver trips and shuttles.

It seems that in my enthusiasm for introducing Diane to river tripping I had neglected to mention that she would be running the canyon on her own. I only had the one canoe. And one vehicle. Someone needed to run shuttle. That would be my job.

I explained all of this to her as gently as I could and promised her that I'd be waiting on the Mexican side, at the last gravel bar on river right, just before the bridge to La Linda, in four days. And pushed her back into the current.

To her credit she didn't paddle back to shore, tell me I was crazy and catch the next flight east. She did shoot me an "Are you quite sure about this" kind of look - a look I've come to know well over the past decade - before she drifted off into the canyon. That earned her an A for adaptability.

Four days later I was waiting on the Mexican side with a cooler of cold drinks when Diane emerged grimy and sunburned from the canyon. She related a tale of having overshot the arroyo that I had suggested as a perfect mid-canyon campsite, passing through what I described as a "rapid" at that arroyo's entrance without really considering it much of a rapid. That earned her an A for accuracy in rating rapids.

The campsite she finally selected however was home to a herd of feral longhorn cattle, which spent the ensuing night noisily clumping and snorting around Diane's tent. Diane meanwhile spent a sleepless night pondering the consequences of being trod upon by a large bovine, this being a truly ironic way for a vegetarian to go. This earned her an A for active imagination.

Racking the canoe and pointing the truck north we chewed up the 1500 miles to the Wind River Range in day's worth of non-stop driving, with Diane earning additional points for wheel work while I slept in the back. Less than 48-hours after paddling out of Boquillas Canyon she was shouldering a pack up the switchbacks into Titcombe Basin. This earned her an A for adventurousness.

While alpine camping in Titcombe Basin we spent the next few days supplementing our food larder with trout and Diane demonstrated one of the oddest fishing techniques ever seen. Hooking her first-ever trout she began a dancing about in a mad Irish jig, deaf to my increasingly frenzied shouts of "Reel it in REEL IT IN!" How she managed to land that fish while hopping about from one leg to the other is beyond me. Unorthodox as her style was, she landed the first fish of the trip, not to mention the largest fish of the trip, and so earned an A for angling audacity.

I have a treasured photograph I took of Diane that day, standing above timberline holding a stringer for trout, with snowfields dotting the background. Two weeks of traveling rough, without a bed or a shower or any convenience of easy living and she still looked great. She earned an A as an accomplice in backcountry exploration.

She passed the marriage test.

(Diane's telling of this story, especially the Boquillas Canyon episode, may differ considerably from the version above).

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