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appreciate. If you’ve ever lived through a drought you appreciate gray skies. Rain. Rain is gray, she said.
    Her hair was long and silvery white; she wore it in a ponytail while they were on the boat; now it hung free and the moonlight rested lovingly on it. The beauty of it there in the canyon, where every boulder, tree, and bush held its natural color, could not be denied.
    Kate laughed, and the women turned to her.
    I always tell people I am too absentminded to remember to color my hair, she said, but the truth is, I am too vain.
    The women waited for more.
    Oh, I tried it for a while. And actually got to be fairly good at it. I was never of the color every strand every single month school. I was more of the color it every couple of months, who cares about trying to do it perfectly.
    They laughed, partly at Kate’s animation. She’d been too sick to join in their talks before.
    But then, she continued, I began to experience a feeling I hadn’t felt since high school, when I first began straightening my hair. I began to feel humiliated. It felt like I was abusing myself. Hiding something important that was not really at fault. Besides, I started to feel I was missing what was going on with me. The incredible change; it had to mean something. What did it mean? I wondered.
    She leaned back on her sleeping bag, and looked around at the women in her circle. There were five of them. Another circle of four sat and sprawled around a smaller fire a few yards away. It felt luxurious to be out camping with a band of mature women, and Kate reveled in the intimacy engendered by their distance from everything and everyone they knew.
    I used to straighten my hair, in the sixties, said Lauren. She had short, bright red hair that curled around her ears. It was long then, very, and I straightened it with an electric iron. On an ironing board. I was quite the contortionist.
    The women laughed to think of the fads of youth.
    Kate remembered sitting in the beauty shop, which never, in those days, seemed clean and bright enough, and watching the women undergo the torture of having their hair straightened with hot combs. It had not occurred to her to question this behavior at the time: What could be so wrong with our natural hair? And then of course, at college there had been chemical “relaxers.” Painless, unless the cosmetologist poured on too much, or mixed it too strong. She’d dreaded going to the shop, and never understood how other young girls enjoyed it. They seemed to suffer willingly, or, more likely, now that she thought of it, they had probably ignored the process. Choosing to focus on the results. She remembered all of them sitting listlessly, oblivious to self-danger, heads in magazines, waiting their turn.
    Sometimes now she colored her hair, just for fun. But she never did it in the spirit of covering up her age. Her recognition of such an entrenched vanity eventually amused her.
    I’m glad of the tucks and sucks too, said Margery. I’ve had both. And.
    Tell us, said Sue.
    And so it continued until bedtime. One story leading to another, no woman’s story more important than another’s. Every woman’s choices honored as her own.
             
    The tenth night on the river she dreamed of her mother. Her body mangled by the car crash. Her head however completely unmarked, her eyes and face clear. When Kate looked down at her hands, she saw one of them was missing. The other was busy untangling what looked like a fishing net. They were sitting beside the ocean, and her mother gazed out upon it as she spoke: It puzzled me that you did not understand, she said.
    But how could I understand? Kate asked. I was never told anything.
    The secret is, you do not have to be told, said her mother, finishing the net, and now holding it with two whole hands, preparing to fling it into the sea. We do not need a boat for this, she added, anticipating Kate’s question.
             
    Kate woke up and lay in her sleeping bag