The Cure
	Last year I was planning a four day float trip to the Deschutes. It had been several years since my last such trip, once a monthly necessity each summer, and I was looking forward to it with great anticipation. The layers of carefully stacked gear in the garage, accumulated over the years for that exact purpose would get an airing and rearrangement, not to mention those parts of my brain I also designate and reserve for the Deschutes. The planning and anticipation are as much a part of the experience as the float itself. The frantic reverie of my last work day was shattered by a phone call from my trip-mate. "I can't go. I've come down with the flu. I'm running a fever and I feel awful. I'm sorry, but I don't think I should go under the circumstances." I mumbled something polite and understanding. He hadn't asked for an opinion, medical or otherwise. His mind was made up, his new course charted, bridges to the float trip, real and symbolic, already burned. As I hung up I began to feel that sunken hollowness which always accompanies a last minute trip failure. But mostly I felt, and said to myself rather than to the absent flu victim, YOU'RE MAKING A MISTAKE...YOU SHOULD GO ANYWAY...YOU WILL BE JUST FINE ONCE YOU GET THERE ... STAY HOME AND YOU WILL LIE IN BED AND COUGH AND EAT ASPIRIN AND FEEL ROTTEN...GO AND YOU WILL FISH AND CATCH AND THRIVE. That holistic statement might sound funny coming from a scientific medical man, but it has always been that way. The Cure. As fifth of five children I was always the "baby". Worse, my mother had an unconscious investment in seeing me as sickly, weak, vulnerable, and in need of protection. Especially from my father and his expectations that the hard male life was to begin coincident with potty training. The divorce dynamics got all caught up in that too. In any case, most of the time I found this all to my advantage. Since my mother anxiously anticipated my becoming ill, I could do so at will, and did with clockwork regularity from second grade through junior high school. Any casual observer would have noted a certain pattern to those illnesses. They never occurred during the summer, christmas or spring vacations. Symptoms inevitably began on a sunday night
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