From the River to the Sea

Contemplating life at the water’s edge

The dogs are at my feet, and so is the river.

The mid-afternoon sun has turned the rapids into a moving mirror, and I squint as I watch the reflected light undulate over submerged rocks. Where the stones emerge, white foam froths over and around them, converging in front of my campsite in the characteristic V of rapids. Wind bounces the boughs of balsam and the branches of maple, its orange leaves quivering and letting loose one by one. The breeze tickles the hairs on my arms; I’m in a t-shirt and shorts the first weekend of October, somehow, even as foliage is already past peak.

Seth is in the camper cooking second breakfast—not lunch, despite it being 3pm, but maybe blunch? Because breakfast foods are always breakfast, no matter what time of day they are consumed.

“What are you thinking about?” he’d asked me earlier, as we’d sat side by side staring at the water.

I told him I was thinking how badly I wanted to drop a kayak into those rapids and paddle six miles downstream to our usual pullout, making a day of floating alongside the pointy trees and negotiating the curves and drops of the river, until I was happy and bored and spent.

“I’ve already paddled the river in my mind today, too,” he said.

But we hadn’t even brought my boat on our annual trip to this campground along the Androscoggin. All summer I’ve been on doctor’s orders not to use my arms, which rules out paddling plus most of my other favorite activities. What started as a dull ache in my elbows a year ago progressed to debilitating pain this spring that radiates down my arms and curls my fingers into painful claws. I’ve been to my acupuncturist, chiropractor, and two occupational therapists, plus several doctors and an orthopedist. Aside from a diagnosis of lateral epicondylitis (AKA tennis elbow), a few stretches, and cortisone shots in both elbows, the main takeaway has been don’t use your arms and maybe it will get better eventually. Maybe. If you’re lucky.

Or maybe I’ll need a surgery that has a 50% success rate.

So I sit here not using my arms, except I’m a writer and that requires the kind of arm usage (cell phone, iPad) that probably caused this problem to begin with.

“It’s probably worse for my arms for me to sit here fiddling with my phone all day than it would be to run the river,” I told Seth.

“I know,” he replied.

Still we sat, and I told him what else had been on my mind all morning.

“Mostly what I’ve been thinking about is how I want this to be our lives,” I said, gesturing to the plot of grass where our two camp chairs were perched on the riverbank, and the dogs curled up in the sun, and the picnic table behind us and our 1999 Roadtrek camper van parked nearby.

“I’m already itching to get back on the road, but I don’t want to leave you again,” I said. “I wish you could come with me. Doing this on the weekends is so much work,” I told him, thinking of all the packing and unpacking that went into a two-day trip versus the ease of life on the road in our van.

“Well, this is how most people live,” he said, referencing the American tradition of working five days a week, fifty weeks a year, tethered to one geographic location.

“I hate it,” I told him. “It’s not how I want to live.”

* * * * *

I’m lucky to have the choice to hit the road in my tiny home on wheels—we have kept our expenses low enough that we can manage our bills on Seth’s carpentry income (barely), and I can sneak away for months at a time in the van if I live cheaply enough (cooking my own food and choosing free campsites). But Seth can’t build houses remotely, and he’s not a huge fan of van life, so he stays home and flies out to visit me every few months while I roam. The freedom to travel like this the past few years has been one of the few perks of my infertility.

After returning in June from my six-month road trip to Baja, I’ve been contemplating our two remaining paths to parenthood—donor-egg IVF and adoption from foster care—and whether I still see myself becoming a mom at 45 the way I dreamed of motherhood at 25 or 35 or even 40. Something has shifted, between the dread I felt in my body this spring at the prospect of parenting a newborn, and the anxiety and grief we experienced with our first two foster placements. After five years chasing my dream of the love and laughter of children, with heartbreak the only result, I have grown wary of parenthood. A part of me holds on to hope—our foster license renewal is almost complete, after a year of delays!—but the weight of grief makes it hard to open my heart again.

The river hums in front of me now like a white noise machine. I fell asleep and woke to its sound, forgetting where I was, transported in that liminal moment before I opened my eyes to the clinic waiting room with the round white radio that played the sounds of ocean waves and crickets chirping. A picture of a mountain decorated the pale green wall of the doctor’s office.

Most of this year, I have fallen asleep to the actual ocean and the actual crickets, and laid eyes on the actual mountain, I had thought that day at the clinic. What am I doing here?

Now I am back where I belong, dogs at my feet on the banks of an actual river, smelling water splashed over algae-coated rocks. I will fall asleep tonight in the back of my van next to my husband, under a sleeping bag, a furry dog leaning against my legs as cold air filters through the window. And tomorrow, I’ll sit here some more, and have Seth paddle me upstream in our tandem kayak so I can float on the flat water and look at some pointy trees.

* * * * *

Now a few days have passed, and I’m back home. The white noise of the river’s rapids has been replaced by the ringing in my ears, which my Ear, Nose, and Throat specialist says is caused by my Temporomandibular Joint Disorder (TMJ, or TMD)—the constant tension of my jaw muscles. The audiologist called to schedule a hearing test, but assuming I don’t need a hearing aid at 45 (I don’t think I do?), there’s not much I can do about the TMJ besides more physical therapy (which I can’t afford) or the $9,000 appliance a specialist offered me last year (which I really can’t afford). I am waiting to see if another TMJ specialist will accept my insurance—after learning that my insurance plan is being discontinued at the end of the year and I’ll need to find another (no doubt worse) plan.

The jaw and the arms are two of about twenty medical issues I’ve been navigating this summer into fall, piling up costly copays and coinsurance bills, running back and forth between primary care and specialists, and having everyone tell me that I’m basically fine or there’s nothing much they can do. Some stuff has been routine—my first colonoscopy! My annual mammogram! Another specialized mammogram because the first one was inconclusive! Some stuff is probably me being overly cautious (the thing they flagged on my EKG that the cardiologist says is actually nothing to worry about—but now I have a cardiologist.) And some stuff, I have since concluded, could probably be blamed on the hormonal changes of perimenopause (why am I so tired all the time, and why does everything hurt?) since I’ve so far tested negative for every autoimmune disease.

The bottom line is that the past few months have been mediocre health-wise, and abysmal fun-wise, since I’ve spent hours every day for weeks on end in and out of the doctor’s offices with the white noise machines and the mountain pictures on the walls. Every visit to the clinic begets more visits; they never want to do the treatment until next time (which will be at least six weeks away), or until something less effective has been tried first. I’m not sure if that’s a medical strategy or a business plan.

It does mean, though, that I have specialists scheduling me out into December already (I won’t get the results of my July sleep study until the week before Christmas), and it’s making it tough to plan my getaway if I want to get back on the road. It’s beginning to feel like these medical professionals could string me along indefinitely with more costly tests that don’t turn up anything, and being hypervigilant, I say yes to all of them.

I should probably quit complaining and be grateful that I have access to medical care at all, and that I have insurance that pays for the bulk of the cost (for now), and that most of the medical providers seem genuinely interested in helping me. It’s just frustrating to spend all this time and money and have no answers, and little relief.

* * * * *

Now a few more days have passed, and the water in front of me ripples as the tide recedes, revealing mats of yellow seaweed coating the rocks in front of this weekend’s campsite. Every year, we book-end Seth’s birthday week with these two weekend trips to the river and the coast, stuffing our faces with Smart Dogs, Beyond Burgers, and these weird vegan marshmallows called Dandies. Our setup is the same: our camper van is on leveling blocks but still a bit slanted; Seth strings a tarp over the picnic table and chops kindling for a campfire; I set up my gray camp chair with the footrest and pull out my iPad; the dogs get tied to their cables and flop down at my feet. We pop popcorn over the open flame and half the time, it burns. Seth slices and grills squash and eggplant over the coals and throws an onion in foil off to the side. This week, when we got home from the river campsite, he made an amazing babaganoush out of the roasted eggplant.

The water at my feet reflects the pink of the sky, and a half hour later, everything is gray, a silhouette of oak branches framing my view of the inlet that separates Hermit Island from the mainland. We’ve come for the campground’s annual Dog Weekend, the only time of year that dogs are allowed on the island. Tomorrow we’ll dress Baxter in her UPS outfit and Laney in her lion’s mane and pink tutu and walk them down to the dog parade, where they’ll compete for the best costume.

When I was lying in the back of my ninety-degree van in the Planet Fitness parking lot in Folsom, California in May, deciding whether to head north to Alaska or east toward home, my mind drifted and suddenly I was standing in the crowd at the Hermit Island Dog Parade, watching the Master of Ceremonies march by in her suspenders handing out Milk Bones, leading the small breeds around the ring, then the medium, then the large, then the geriatric, as smiling kids and adults pet each other’s dogs and talked about how cute the costumes were. That memory nudged me toward turning east.

Hermit Island’s annual Dog Parade

That wasn’t the only reason, of course—I also thought I was going to try one more time to have a baby, by borrowing another woman’s egg. When fear and anxiety got the best of me, though, in the middle of the Nevada desert, all that was left in lieu of Alaska was a summer with Seth, lots of medical appointments, some visits with friends and family, and the Hermit Island Dog Parade.

The promise of the parade gave me something to look forward to every time I was dreading the next medical procedure. After tomorrow, though, what will be waiting for me?

We finally got our foster license renewed this week, after a long period of administrative delays, which reopens a doorway to parenthood that had been closed to us for the past year. We had been so frustrated by the process that we had pretty much written off the adoption option, and now we have to decide if we are still serious about pursuing it. Adopting a teen would avoid the challenges of becoming older parents to young children, but finding the right fit in our state’s foster system could be tricky. What if I get on the road and then the perfect match becomes available? What if I stay home and spend all winter waiting, but nothing moves forward? Seth and I had just begun to accept the idea of childlessness, so getting back on the adoption rollercoaster is another big adjustment.

The campground has gone dark now; the only way I know there’s still water in front of me is the reflection of lights from houses across the inlet. I’ve moved my chair closer to the campfire. There’s a chill in the air. The last two nights back home have dropped below freezing; Seth drained the water lines in the van and ran the space heater so the pipes wouldn’t freeze. We’ll have to winterize the camper after we return from this trip.

The cold presents a hard deadline for my trip departure. I can manage a few nights in the high 20s and low 30s without freezing my pipes, but anything colder than that or that stays below freezing during the day risks damaging my plumbing. Basically, if I’m going west this winter, I need to leave in the next few weeks. Otherwise, I won’t make it across the continental divide before winter arrives, no matter how far south I drive. Last year I left for my trip the day before Thanksgiving and booked it to southern Texas. I still hit freezing nights along the Rio Grande.

And so, I don’t know if Hermit Island will be my last camping trip of the year, or just a prelude to another six months of life on the road.

It’s hard to think about leaving again. I’ve barely been home all summer, between our weekends at Seth’s parents’ lake house and running around to all my medical appointments. I’ve just gotten used to spending time with my husband again after six months on the road to Baja last winter.

It’s especially hard to leave, given my reasons for coming home. Although I got cold feet about trying another round of fertility treatments, I still sneak peeks at newborn Facebook reels. A part of my Instagram algorithm is devoted to outdoor-adventure-moms and moms-having-babies-over-40, who make it all look so easy, and so full of love. I keep reminding myself that I can desire a baby and still decide not to have one—separating the desire from the decision. But that sliver of a percentage of me still wonders: What if I went for it? Would it all work out? And she is afraid to leave again, because it would make that small chance go away.

So how will I decide? How will I know if, or when, it’s time to go or time to stay?

I only have my gut to guide me. I trusted my gut when it brought me home this summer, despite knowing shortly into that trip that I wasn’t going to follow through on the fertility treatments. I still don’t regret that decision, even if my only medical breakthrough was taking four months to find out I needed a cortisone shot.

Maybe I needed a break from the road to remind me just how much I need to be on the road. Every day I wake up at home, I feel flat, uninspired, unmotivated, and trapped. I move between the same four rooms I’ve spent the past seventeen years of my life in.

Seventeen years.

Yet the moment I walk out into my driveway, open the side door of the van, and step inside, my whole body relaxes and my face softens. I sit on the end of the bed and sigh. Life doesn’t get much simpler than distilling it down to what those four wheels can carry; it’s everything I need and nothing I don’t.

* * * * *

The coals of the campfire are burning red-orange, throwing blue fingers of flames around charred logs. Seth and I toasted some Dandies, wondering as we always do why real marshmallows made out of horse hooves get so much crispier in a flame than these vegan imitations. Seth is scrolling Facebook Marketplace for TIG welders, and I’m still typing away at my keyboard, our two favorite pastimes. Children’s voices from the next campsite fill the silence, and dogs bark across the island. The sulfurous smell of low tide mixes with campfire smoke in an aroma I’ve only ever experienced at Hermit Island. Seth snuggles Baxter in his chair, hugging our 45-pound lap dog to his chest. Soon it will be time to walk to the bath house and contend with Hermit Island’s narrow and breezy shower stalls. I’ll sit by the coals a bit longer.

A bright light emerges through the trees to my left—the reflection of moonrise on the ocean. In the distance, I notice the familiar shushing sound of the white noise machine from the doctor’s office. Then I realize it’s the ocean waves crashing on the beach at the southern tip of the island. I’ll crack the camper windows open tonight and let it lull me to sleep, the first or last of many nights lived on the edge of the water.

Scenes from Hermit Island, Maine

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This poll is anonymous, but please feel free to elaborate in the comments! Of course I know you can’t decide for me, but I’m curious about your perspective.

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