In this article, we present Julie Barker’s winning essay from our Fall 2009 No-Contest Contest. Each entrant submitted an essay, which I read and responded to. All entrants had the opportunity to revise their essays after reading my comments and re-submit. Our guest judge, Brenda Miller, author of Season of the Body and Blessing of the Animals, read only the revised versions and chose three winners. She included two honorable mentions, as well.

With Julie’s permission, we are publishing both versions of her essay along with the comments I made upon reading the draft she sent first. This way, you can see the changes that Julie made and how they affected her essay. At the end of the article, you will find Brenda Miller’s comments about what she appreciated in the essay.

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Julie’s Original Essay

Overturned
By Julie Barker

I

In my kitchen cabinet is a coffee cup that sports the silhouette of a man and a dog canoeing. To be more precise, the man is paddling, the dog’s enjoying the ride. This cup was given to me by Dave and Kate, who a summer or two later arranged the river trip where this kind of boating lost its romantic hold on me. Four of us that day on the Housatonic — Dave, Kate, Andy, and I — shed our illusions, along with Dave’s glasses, my flip-flops, and a canvas bag that held sun block, snacks, and what was supposed to be dry clothing.

 The Housatonic River rises in the Berkshire Hills of Massachusetts, and travels south-southeast through Connecticut for most of its 149-mile length. I had imagined that this river’s journey was lazy. Perhaps I thought so because I had glimpsed its broad estuary at Long Island Sound and the marshland and salt flats that it nourishes there. Near Falls Village, Connecticut, however, where we embarked, the river is dammed for a hydro plant. During periods of peak electricity usage — essentially during daytime hours when air conditioners and other machinery run — great pulses of water were released to rotate the turbines. So it was that the water we entered had velocity and bright white crests.

I would not have looked for this type of adventure. In my family, no one pursued rugged sports. My father, who taught me what skills I had in a canoe, was not athletically inclined. My mother had a heart condition that kept her in bed for a full year as a child. Her activities were curtailed her whole life. I learned to paddle on a lake, which is to say on waters ruffled by an occasional motorboat’s wake, but otherwise smooth, currentless, and deep. Having inherited my father’s non-athleticism, I saw myself as the dog on the coffee cup, alert but content to glide while someone else used muscle.

The first indication that we were in for something other than the languorous day in the sun I’d anticipated came before we were even on the water. En route to the hydro plant, yelling over his shoulder to a van full of canoeists, the outfitter who had rented us the equipment briefly described the run, telling us we’d have no trouble if we made sure to enter the current quickly and stay to the center, then move left to avoid the boulders in the first set of rapids. He said we’d have three or four miles of relative calm before the current picks up in a stretch called Push-em-up. He passed out maps, where the section labeled Push-em-up looked like a speckled band. The speckles indicated only the biggest rocks. I understood from his offhand remark about this unusually dry summer that there would be many more rocks to contend with. The map, then, was useless. The signature part of the run, West Cornwall’s covered bridge, he indicated would be a particular thrill. The trick there was to stay right of center. He told us how to navigate the waters cascading under the bridge. By this time I was not processing his river lore.

Disgorged from the van a hundred feet past the power station’s dam, we clambered into our two canoes — Dave and Kate in one and Andy and I in the other — and cast off into the first stretch of turbulent water.

“You’re supposed to steer,” I yelled.

Andy’s canoe expertise was acquired on a pond, where there is little pressure to perform. His basic stroke was, shall I say, basic; but this was no time to give lessons. Our canoe grazed the first of many rocks we would scrape and cuff, but we found our rhythm somehow. We dug in and held the course, paddling like contestants in a dragon boat race. We were a couple of amateurs and we were doing okay.

Let me say that I don’t think everyone is able to calmly handle death, but I could; I’d been programmed for it. One evening seven years before this day, I found myself like a robot calling 9-1-1 to report my husband’s death. He’d said he wanted to grow old with me, but I never believed he would. Anticipating his death, I’d prepped myself. I’d imagined how I would respond if he had a heart attack. Never mind that it was his cirrhotic liver that gave out, I knew how to handle it. I’d lived on the edge for a long time, I realized later.

When Andy proposed to me, I had said to him — perhaps not in these words — that I couldn’t go through that again. I was more cautious now than I’d been in my twenties and thirties, and more sure that I could go it alone. I’d been strengthened, but strengthened by bereavement. Why would I invite that again? I’d tried to make that point, and yet I’d accepted his ring. So I was already standing with one foot in a fast-flowing stream.

II

Banged and bumped, our boat remained afloat. After the river made a jog, we emerged onto a wide, smooth expanse of water. I caught the smell of pines, spiky and rough. Bugs water-skied just off the bow, enjoying their summer day. Where a log was lodged against several rocks, tinkle-y water music answered the calls of birds. This was the canoe trip I’d envisioned. We would survive this river, even when it ran with shallow urgency. We would survive it and the boulders and our own inexperience.

The Algonkian people, inventors of the birch bark canoe, would not have recognized our craft’s construction, which used several fabricated layers, the inner and outer ones being polyurethane. Our canoes were bulky and heavy. We were middle-aged and not in shape. Besides, if we dawdled too long, we knew, the power station would shut the dam. We’d be marooned on rocks. All these factors, we intuitively knew, argued against portaging when we came to the most challenging section of our route: the covered bridge at West Cornwall.

Andy and I strapped on life vests and hunkered on our knees so as to give the canoe a low center of gravity. The riverbed sloped here, just enough to create a sense of no return. Wherever I looked water was tumbling over rocks. There was no best route across the blistered surface. I noticed Dave and Kate, who were in front of us, capsize and disappear. We could not slow down to see that they were okay. We couldn’t steer. We could only keep paddling and hope that my inexpert strokes would find some convergent harmony with Andy’s.

We covered some distance, a half-mile, perhaps, before either of us spoke. “Head toward that far bank,” he called. “We can wait there for Dave and Katie.”

We struggled. The canoe turned sidewise to the prevailing current. We plowed into a boulder, spun. The boat tipped over. Submerged, I struggled against the current. I came up under the overturned canoe and gulped a breath. The river bottom was covered with rounded bowling-ball-sized rocks, slippery, but I got a footing. The water wasn’t deep. Cool it felt, refreshing. I was safe.

I’m not sure how I got out from under the boat. Like a robot, I guess. Some part of my brain took over, the part that knew I had the reserves to get through this. I’d driven in blizzard conditions with that voice in my ear tamping down anxiety. I’d made it through the wretched first weeks of widowhood with it coaching me. Self-sufficiency was not my natural bent, but I’d come to like it. I would sink or swim, so to speak, on my own merits.

My head popped out of that cloud when I heard Andy’s voice. “I thought I’d lost you.”

I heard the worry emanating from that single syllable: “lost.” It held a deep measure of emotion beside which my self-regarding concerns seemed shameful. Loss was something I thought I knew, but Andy had evoked it in a way that was wholly unexpected. There was a moral aspect to what he said. There was choice, the choice to be lost or to find myself.

I looked Andy up and down, this tall man in his late fifties with the white hair, a mustache defining his upper lip, large hands, and worried eyes. I knew him and I trusted him, largely because he’d never tried to present himself as braver or more competent or more accomplished than he was. No airs. No fudging. He wasn’t a hero in the stories he told, but he wasn’t a victim either. I knew what he’d dreamed for his life, what he’d thought he could accomplish, and how chance and other people’s actions — and his own — had intervened to change the outcome. I knew his disappointment. And when he fell in love with me, I saw his hope and excitement, thinking this is different, she is different. I didn’t want to fail him.

For a while a river might carry a stick, dropped by a child prodding in the mud for tadpoles; for a while a river might transport a feather or a branch, or something more likely to be called pollution: plastic bottles and bags, cardboard boxes, aluminum cans. But ultimately, the river is only the water. Loss, then, is in the very nature of rivers. They flow. They move on.

I wouldn’t move on. Also, I didn’t want to lie to him, and I felt that might be what I’d been doing, because at the center of my being was a very big doubt that I was ready to be half of a married couple again.

Childishly I argued, “I was with the boat. You’re supposed to stay with the boat.”

“Who cares about the boat! No, when you’re in a situation like that, get away from it. It could hit you on the head.”

Several more times Andy told me, “I thought I’d lost you.” I argued with him silently, saying, I was following standard operating procedure: Stay with the boat. Was I ready to do the opposite of what my inner voice told me to do? Subsume myself to couplehood again? Was I ready for that?

III

We got back into the canoe and continued downstream to a quieter stretch of water, where we pulled up and rested. Dave and Kate eventually came into view. They had just one paddle left. Dave was using it. Kate, in the bow, had the role of boat pilot, pointing out rocks, detailing the hazards for Dave, whose eyeglasses were somewhere among the debris down under the river’s flow.

With guilty shock I realized that while I was under the canoe, I’d never given a thought to where Andy was and whether he was okay.

I once interviewed a training director from Outward Bound whose company exposes ordinary adults to physical challenges that to me seemed terrifying. He assured me that most participants do what is called for, going up against a lifelong fear of heights, say, and in the end feeling transformed. Something did happen for us that day. The canoe trip crystallized what was important to each of us. Dave and Kate spoke on the way home of realizing why they had married a dozen years before and knowing that they wanted to be together still and always. I don’t remember what Andy’s takeaway was. Mine was reached slowly: I was looking for a way to be self-reliant and yet to also join my fortunes together with this man who might not steer a canoe all that well, but who watched out for me every bit as well as I did. I married him a short time later.

That was five and a half years ago. We have not been in a canoe since, though I would not rule out a quiet paddle on a pond or a lake like the ones each of us began canoeing on during long-ago summers.

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Sheila’s Response:

I enjoyed reading “Overturned” and think the title works really well.

I like the list in this sentence: “Four of us that day on the Housatonic — Dave, Kate, Andy, and I — shed our illusions, along with Dave’s glasses, my flip-flops, and a canvas bag that held sun block, snacks, and what was supposed to be dry clothing” and the way it sets up what is to come. I like this phrase, “waters ruffled by an occasional motorboat’s wake” and the idea that you saw yourself as the dog on the coffee cup. I feel rushed when I learn that you lost a husband to a cirrhotic liver. I start to wonder if he was an alcoholic, and I also wonder why you were preparing for him to die of a heart attack. This was a very significant person/time in your life and I don’t think it can be handled so quickly.

I enjoy the way we go from the speaker telling Andy she couldn’t go through “that again” (referring to losing a partner) to a description of the canoe as “Banged and bumped, our boat remained afloat.” The emotional subtext is well drawn here.

I also enjoy the amount of information I am getting about the geography of the area and the water of the area.

This passage reads especially beautifully to me:

I looked Andy up and down, this tall man in his late fifties with the white hair, a mustache defining his upper lip, large hands, and worried eyes. I knew him and I trusted him, largely because he’d never tried to present himself as braver or more competent or more accomplished than he was. No airs. No fudging. He wasn’t a hero in the stories he told, but he wasn’t a victim either. I knew what he’d dreamed for his life, what he’d thought he could accomplish, and how chance and other people’s actions — and his own — had intervened to change the outcome. I knew his disappointment. And when he fell in love with me, I saw his hope and excitement, thinking this is different, she is different. I didn’t want to fail him.

For a while a river might carry a stick, dropped by a child prodding in the mud for tadpoles; for a while a river might transport a feather or a branch, or something more likely to be called pollution: plastic bottles and bags, cardboard boxes, aluminum cans. But ultimately, the river is only the water. Loss, then, is in the very nature of rivers. They flow. They move on.”

I am satisfied as the reader learning everyone’s “take away” message, especially the speaker’s.

Where I feel a little disappointed is at the very ending. Let’s look at it:

That was five and a half years ago. We have not been in a canoe since, though I would not rule out a quiet paddle on a pond or a lake like the ones each of us began canoeing on during long-ago summers.”

I think what I feel is that I want to know that Andy is always looking out for the speaker and she has found a way to be a part of the couple and independent at the same time. I am not sure that the quiet paddle’s on ponds as the people did when they learned to canoe gives me that info.

When an ending doesn’t work, I look at the top:

In my kitchen cabinet is a coffee cup that sports the silhouette of a man and a dog canoeing. To be more precise, the man is paddling, the dog’s enjoying the ride. This cup was given to me by Dave and Kate, who a summer or two later arranged the river trip where this kind of boating lost its romantic hold on me. Four of us that day on the Housatonic — Dave, Kate, Andy, and I — shed our illusions, along with Dave’s glasses, my flip-flops, and a canvas bag that held sun block, snacks, and what was supposed to be dry clothing.

Okay, I haven’t really met the speaker yet so all I know after reading the first sentence is that she relates to the picture by focusing on the way it is the man who is paddling and the dog who is enjoying the ride and the romance of that. Then she shifts focus to Dave and Kate and a summary of the canoe trip they all took, stating that her view of the romantic trip was changed.

Later, I’ll find out she is the dog in her mind — using someone else’s muscle and then later I’ll find out that she wants to be an independent person — and I will never at the end get back to the dog and how she views that cup now. So, my recommendation would be to get back to the cup and make a comment on that dog — does she still relate or has she changed? Is Andy really the muscle or something else? In other words, what did she learn that is different than what she thought and how can she reinterpret that picture? I think that part of what is missing, the thread that can be woven into the rest of the fabric of this essay, probably also involves that area where I think more should be said about the previous marriage and the speaker’s feelings then.

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Julie’s Revised Essay

Overturned
By Julie Barker

I

In my kitchen cabinet is a coffee cup that sports the silhouette of a man and a dog canoeing. To be more precise, the man is paddling, the dog’s enjoying the ride. This cup was given to me by Dave and Kate a summer or two before they arranged the river trip where this kind of boating lost its romantic hold on me. Four of us that day on the Housatonic — Dave, Kate, Andy, and I — shed our illusions, along with Dave’s glasses, my flip-flops, and a canvas bag that held sun block, snacks, and what was supposed to be dry clothing.

The Housatonic River rises in the Berkshire Hills of Massachusetts and travels south-southeast through Connecticut for most of its 149-mile length. I had imagined that this river’s journey was lazy. Perhaps I thought so because I had glimpsed its broad estuary at Long Island Sound and the marshland and salt flats that it nourishes there. Near Falls Village, Connecticut, however, where we embarked, the river is dammed for a hydro plant. During periods of peak electricity usage — essentially during daytime hours when air conditioners and other machinery run — great pulses of water were released to rotate the turbines. So it was that the water we entered had velocity and bright white crests.

I would not have gone seeking this type of adventure. In my family, no one pursued rugged sports. My father, who taught me what skills I had in a canoe, was not athletically inclined. My mother had a heart condition that kept her in bed for a full year as a child. Throughout her life she could do nothing strenuous. I learned to paddle on a lake, which is to say on waters ruffled by an occasional motorboat’s wake, but otherwise smooth, currentless, and deep. Having inherited my father’s non-athleticism, I saw myself as the dog on the coffee cup, alert but content to glide while someone else used muscle.

The first indication that we were in for something other than a languorous day in the sun came before we were even on the water. En route to the hydro plant, yelling over his shoulder to a van full of canoeists, the outfitter who had rented us the equipment briefly described the run. “Just get into the current quick and stay to the center. When you come to the rapids, the first set, keep left to avoid the boulders.”

He said we’d have three or four miles of relative calm before the current picks up in a stretch called Push-em-up. He passed out maps, where Push-em-up looked like a speckled band. The speckles indicated only the biggest rocks. I understood from his offhand remark about this unusually dry summer that the number of rocks breaching the surface would be extraordinary. The map, then, was useless. The signature part of the run, at West Cornwall’s covered bridge, he indicated would be a particular thrill. He told us how to navigate the waters cascading under the bridge. The trick there was to stay right of center. By this time I had tuned out his advice and river lore. Drumming in my head were the words, Say something, back out, be a wimp. I was remembering that the choices we think we can live with sometimes turn us inside out.

One evening seven years earlier, I had dialed the phone like a robot to report my husband’s death. That was the ending we were heading toward even before our wedding. I knew “happily ever after” would elude us. Yet I was insanely happy to marry him.

At some point in the early years of that marriage, worry started to form a small stone inside me. In bed at night I listened to his breathing stop for long seconds. I waited for the choking snort, the gasping intake, the start of regular snoring again, and hoped I could catch some sleep before the whole cycle repeated. In the daytime, too, I worried. I’d be dusting the bedroom, imagining making the call to 9-1-1 if my Type A smoker had a heart attack. I didn’t admit to myself that alcohol was his demon until very, very late in our ten-year marriage. Let me say that I don’t think everyone can calmly handle death, but I could. When his cirrhotic liver gave out, I knew how to respond. I’d lived on the edge for a long time.

II

When Andy proposed to me, I felt at the center of my being a very big doubt that I was ready to be half of a married couple again. I didn’t need a mate as I had in my twenties and thirties. I could go it alone. I’d been strengthened, but strengthened by bereavement. Why would I invite that again? The question was not yet resolved when we set out that day, but truly, I was standing with one foot in a fast-flowing stream. I’d accepted Andy’s ring.

Wobbling and squabbling, Dave and Kate embarked in one canoe. Dave is creative and hapless, with a self-deprecating humor that amuses Kate much of the time, but wears thin too. Andy and I, in a second canoe, were facing our first stretch of turbulent water. “Steer,” I yelled.

Andy’s canoe expertise was acquired on a pond, where there is little pressure to perform. His basic stroke was, shall I say, basic. Our canoe grazed the first of many rocks we would scrape and cuff, but we found our rhythm somehow. Push-em-up presented more ways to crash, yet, banged and bumped, our boat remained afloat.

After the river made a jog, we emerged onto a wide, smooth expanse of water. I caught the smell of pines, spiky and redolent of summers past. Bugs water-skied just off the bow, enjoying their day. Where a log was lodged against several rocks, tinkle-y water music answered the calls of birds. This was the canoe trip I’d envisioned. My stomach unknotted. My shoulders shed tension. We would survive this river, even when it ran with shallow urgency. We would survive it and the boulders and our own inexperience.

We took a lunch break and then came to West Cornwall’s covered bridge. Serenely attractive, it stretches from bank to bank, but beneath it formidable rocks and eddies, like the sirens on Odysseus’ journey, lie in ambush. Wherever I looked water was tumbling over rocks. There was no best route across the blistered surface. In my solar plexus terror formed a hard pit and the drumming resumed in my head. Could we leave the water? portage? Our canoes were too heavy. Could I just stall? No, if we dawdled too long, the power station would shut the dam. We’d face even shallower water and more rocks.

With faltering fingers, Andy and I strapped on life vests and hunkered on our knees so as to give the canoe a low center of gravity. We aimed for a point on the structure’s right, a window that we saw other canoes pass beneath. Beyond the bridge’s center pier, Andy steered us into the current, the roiling, wild water. The riverbed sloped, just enough to create a sense of no return. I watched horrified as Dave and Kate, in front of us, capsized and disappeared. We could not slow down to see that they were okay. We could only keep taking strokes and hope that my inexpert ones would find some convergent harmony with Andy’s.

We dug in and held the course, paddling like contestants in a dragon boat race. We covered half a mile before either of us spoke. “Head toward that far bank,” he called. “We can wait there for Dave and Katie.”

We struggled. The canoe holding us in its palm turned sidewise to the current. We plowed into a boulder, spun, and the boat dropped us. Submerged, I struggled against the water’s force. I came up under the overturned canoe and gulped a breath. The river bottom was covered with slippery, bowling-ball-sized rocks, but I got a footing. The water wasn’t deep. Cool it felt, refreshing. I was safe.

I’m not sure how I got out from under the boat. Like a robot, I guess. Some part of my brain took over, an instinct that knew how my arms and legs and lungs must work to survive this. I made it through the wretched first weeks of widowhood with that internal voice coaching me. And as months passed, I did better than just keep going. Self-sufficiency was not my natural bent, but I’d come to like it. I’d learned to rely on my own merits, knowing I might sink or swim.

“I thought I’d lost you.” It was Andy’s voice.

Worry erupted from that single syllable: “lost.” My self-regarding concerns seemed shameful in contrast. Loss was something I thought I knew, but his worry gave it a moral aspect. There was choice, the choice to be lost or to find myself.

I saw Andy then, really saw him, this tall man in his late fifties with white hair, a mustache defining his upper lip, large hands, and worried eyes. I knew him and I trusted him, largely because he’d never tried to present himself as braver or more competent or more accomplished than he was. No airs. No fudging. He wasn’t a hero in the stories he told, but he wasn’t a victim either. I knew what he’d dreamed for his life, what he’d thought he could accomplish, and how chance and other people’s actions — and his own — had intervened to change the outcome. I knew his disappointment. And when he fell in love with me, I saw his hope and excitement, thinking this is different, she is different. I wanted not to fail him.

For a while a river might carry a stick, dropped by a child prodding in the mud for tadpoles; for a while a river might transport a feather or a branch, or something more likely to be called pollution: plastic bottles and bags, cardboard boxes, aluminum cans. But ultimately, the river is only the water. Loss is in the very nature of rivers. They move on, leaving feather, branch, box behind.

When we got engaged, he’d said that he wouldn’t move on without me, and I agreed I wouldn’t move on either. But something had snagged me, and I couldn’t seem to pull myself free.

Childishly I argued, “I was with the boat. You’re supposed to stay with the boat.”

“Who cares about the boat! No, when you’re in a situation like that, get away from it. It could hit you on the head.”

With guilty shock I realized that while I was under the canoe, I’d never given a thought to where Andy was and whether he was okay. Several more times Andy told me, “I thought I’d lost you.” I argued with him silently, saying, I was following standard operating procedure: Stay with the boat. Was I ready to do the opposite of what my inner voice told me to do? Subsume myself to couplehood again? Was I ready for that?

III

We got back into the canoe and continued downstream to a quieter stretch of water, where we pulled up and rested. Dave and Kate eventually came into view. They had just one paddle left. Dave was using it. Kate, in the bow, had the role of boat pilot, pointing out rocks, detailing the hazards for Dave, whose eyeglasses were somewhere among the debris down under the river’s flow.

I once interviewed a training director from Outward Bound whose company exposes ordinary adults to physical challenges that to me seemed terrifying. He assured me that most participants do what is called for, going up against a lifelong fear of heights, say; in the end they feel transformed. The canoe trip did something like that for us. It crystallized what was important to each of us. Dave and Kate spoke on the way home of realizing why they had married a dozen years before and knowing that they wanted to be together still and always. I don’t remember what Andy’s takeaway was. Mine was reached slowly: I was looking for a way to be self-reliant and yet to also join my fortunes with this man who might not steer a canoe all that well, but who watched out for me every bit as well as I did.

I married him a short time later.

That was five and a half years ago. Every morning I open the kitchen cabinet in the course of making our coffee. Some days I notice the cup that Dave and Kate gave me. It’s a simple design; no trees, no sun, no horizon. Just a man and a dog in a canoe. I see something more, though. I see the balance the two of them have worked out.

****

What Contest Judge Brenda Miller Said:

“I like the way this essay has a strong sense of self-awareness and perspective concerning the author’s experience. She was able to create vivid scenes that invited me to share her experience. The image of the coffee cup at the beginning and the end of the essay is a strong image that transforms in the course of the author’s new understanding. Very satisfying.