Sara Schaefer - Grand: A Memoir

For Lovie

So, what are we talking? Maybe a couple of Class III rapids but mostly flat river, right? I inched my car forward along a brutal Los Angeles commute and waited for my younger sister, Ross, who was on speaker, to respond.

I thought of Wyoming. Over a decade earlier, I had experienced my first and only whitewater rafting tripa thirty-minute dabble for tourists in the Yellowstone River. Theres a photo of me from that day as we navigated a modest, Class II rapid. My face is overcome with terror, red and shrieking, as if I am about to die in a plane crash. Its a hilarious picture, not only because of the contrast of my reaction to everyone elses (theyre all weeee! and woohoo!), but also because it looks like Im terrified of a lazy river.

Rosss voice wavered slightly.

Uh I think there are going to be some pretty big rapids.

But no Class V rapids, right? I wasnt sure what constituted a Class V rapid, but I knew it was tough stuff. They dont let regular people do those.

More silence.

Sara, its the Colorado River.

Well, well be wearing helmets, so it will be fine.

Helmets? Sara, no.

It was at this point that I realized I had no idea what I had gotten myself into.

From the moment we confirmed the trip, Ross had been focused on the packing list, which I had yet to even think about. Not because I wasnt excited or didnt care. For the past two years, I had been traveling somewhere for my comedy career every week, and once I booked the flight, rental car, and hotel, I wouldnt look at the details again until the day before departure.

But this was not an overnight trip to do a show at some random college in suburban St. Louis. This was an eight-day whitewater rafting and camping trip through the Grand Canyon. The plan came together after I announced to my family that, during the year of my fortieth birthday, I wanted to take a one-on-one trip with each of them. My older sister, Cristy, and I would tour some California wineries; my older brother, Jay, and I would hit New Orleans; Dad and I would have a staycation at his new condo in Longboat Key, Florida. Ross and I decided to do something a bit more bucket-listy.

I am a birthday scrooge, and thats because I think my birthday is absolutely stupid. I dont understand why other adults dont think their birthday is stupid, either. When I see a novel-length post on social media about how crazy it is to be turning thirty-two, my eyes go dead. This birthday ennui isnt as a result of some sort of childhood trauma in which one of my family members was killed by a balloon animal. I am a birthday scrooge because I generally hate parties (far too noisy), and also because I was born in July. A July birthday means never getting a school celebration or your locker decorated, and, because most people are on vacation, very few of my already small circle of friends could attend my parties.

On top of this, Ross was born just eighteen months after me, and we were raised as a unit. Everyone called us The Girls. (Cristy, six years older than me, was apparently a full-grown woman already, and was not included.) Anything that affirmed me as an individual, separate from The Girls, was interpreted by Ross as a personal attack and she reacted badly.

In my family, there were just enough kids (four) and emotions (four million) to make it hard to stay in the direct eyeline of my parents (two) for very long. Attention was a fossil fuel: we all desperately needed it to survive, we worried it might one day suddenly run out, and we were willing to go to war over it.

My siblings each had a strong position on the battlefront: Cristy was the oldest and a cherished leader and assistant parent. Jay was the only boy and a clever minister of fun. I was the second-middle, which was a real dud, tactically speaking. Ross, the baby, was the cutest child any of us had ever seen, and she wielded that power to get away with all sorts of naughtiness.

There is a picture from my sixth birthday party, held at the local Putt-Putt. In it, I am wearing a gray apron dress over a white puffy shirt. I am proudly holding my favorite doll, Penny, and looming behind me is a large Putt-Putt sign. It had a white rectangle marquee, and in it, black letters read HAPPY BIRTHDAY, SARA! Seeing my name up there made me feel like the most important person in the world, and it was the precise reason I had chosen to have my birthday party at Putt-Putt. I knew from past parties that part of the package was getting to see your name in lights. But even with a gigantic sign in the sky proclaiming it was my day, if you look at the picture closely you can see two legs directly behind mine, and the outline of a little blonde head peeking out from over my shoulder. It is Ross, my ever-present shadow, ever reminding me that its her day, too.

Deep down, I actually liked sharing my birthday spotlight with Ross, as it made me feel like a benevolent queen. This was part of my strategy in the attention wars. As the second-middle, I had to employ the long game. My best shot would be through diplomacy and good behavior. It also helped that every time I received praise for being good, I simply felt better. Not better than others, just better than I normally did, which was caught in a tangle of worries over what I believed to be my responsibilities. These included everything from knowing how to correctly spell the word chief, to managing the feelings of my stuffed animals (Penny was domineering and made the others jealous), to preventing the untimely death of myself and everyone around me.

Now, as I was staring down my fortieth birthday, I decided that this time I would allow myself to make a big deal out of my own birthday. Id heard that when you turn forty, you stop caring about what people think, and finally become a warrior goddess hero boss queen.

Ross, too, was at a crossroads of sorts. After years of struggling with her health, she had finally found a treatment plan that was working. A trip like this would not have been possible for her a year before.

The guides will cook gourmet meals for us, Ross said. She and Cristy had both settled not far from the Grand Canyon, in the mountain town of Flagstaff, Arizona. Ross knew someone at the rafting company and assured me this trip would be luxury. Well have comfortable cots. Everything is included and taken care of. I took this to mean that it would be a relaxing vacation, not a rugged expedition. This is not to say I was completely obliviousI knew that anything involving wilderness and water would be probably out of my comfort zone. And though Ross had worked at a 4-H camp in her twenties, she, too, would be experiencing something new. This was Big Nature, not the little nature we had known as kids.

In our upscale neighborhood in Midlothian, Virginia, a suburb of Richmond, we never encountered outdoors on the vast scale of the American West. I had no regular contact with a distant horizon, the way someone who grew up on a prairie or atop a mountain might. Our sunset splintered through trees, and Id only heard of shooting stars. To us, nature was an empty field on Midlothian Turnpike, soon to be turned into a Walmart. Wildlife was a deer, soon to be turned into roadkill.

Danger was anything from the outside that had found its way into our house, like wasps. Their big butts would make a soft tapping sound against the wall, a sound that will make your skin fall off. Or, God forbid, the mouse. Mom feared mice and rats more than anything, but she summoned the courage to kill one that came into our house with a cast-iron skillet. She spoke of the incident in weighted tones, like an Oscar-winning actress describing how hard it was to pretend to be ugly.