Coming of Age Ceremony

Kesselheim’s book, Let Them Paddle: Coming of Age on the Water, chronicles a series of coming-of-age family expeditions. Each trip commemorates an earlier journey taken when Kesselheim and his wife, Marypat Zitzer, were pregnant with that child. As each kid turned 13, the family returned to that “birth river” to honor that transition to adulthood that our culture does so little to recognize. The trips took place over a span of four years and covered a geographic sweep from subarctic Canada to the borderlands with Mexico.

The following excerpt is taken from the journey down the entire navigable length of the Yellowstone River, across Montana, from the town of Gardiner to the confluence with the Missouri. It is Sawyer’s journey, and was followed by a week-long hike to reach the headwaters of the Yellowstone, near 12,000’ Younts Peak, in northern Wyoming.

The mother of us all, 

the oldest of all,

hard,

splendid as rock

Whatever there is that is of the land

it is she

who nourishes it,

it is the EarthS

that I sing.

~ Homer, “Hymn to the Earth”

Sawyer stands in the center of the circle. The four of us take up rough compass directions, just inside the ring. I hold a rock, representing earth. Ruby has an eagle feather in her hand, for air. Eli holds a candle, shielding the flame with his free hand. Marypat holds a container of water. Sawyer stands self-consciously, fidgeting a little, looking back at us. The sand is warm and yielding underfoot. The river mutters in the background. A slight downriver breeze ruffles the feather in Ruby’s grasp . . .

 “By the earth that is her body,” I say, feeling the smooth weight of stone in my hand.

“By the air that is her breath,” Ruby adds, looking down at the feather.

“By the fire that is her bright spirit,” Eli intones.

“By the waters of her living womb,” Marypat says, looking right at Sawyer.

“The circle is cast,” we chorus together.

We stand silently, focused on Sawyer, then I drop my rock at my feet. Ruby bends to plant the feather upright. Eli puts the candle down. Marypat stains the sand with water. We all look at Sawyer. He stands with his hands at his side, smiling back at us.

Marypat steps forward. She pulls a silver bracelet out of her pocket. It has a wave pattern on the outside. Inside, it’s engraved with Sawyer Kesselheim —Yellowstone River ’06. Sawyer holds out his wrist. Marypat slips the shiny bracelet onto his brown arm. It gleams in the sun. She holds his face in her hands, looks at him intently, kisses her boy. He is several inches taller than she is.

I see, watching them, that this business of coming of age has as much to do with our accepting change as Sawyer. We have to acknowledge our son for who he is busy becoming, growing inexorably away from us. As much as we welcomed him as our child, held him and nourished him and worried about him as our baby, the product of our marriage, it is now our challenge to appreciate his singularity and let him be—something undeniably of us, but also irrefutably his own.

Sure. Easy enough to say. Almost cliché. But hard to do. All of that—the acceptance, the warmth, the history, the sweet pain, the leaving—is in Marypat’s face, in her glistening eyes.

We all move in. Our arms grapple into a messy, sensuous knot of embrace. Warm skin, smiling faces, blue eyes, sand shifting under our bare feet. We linger there, a constellation loosely held together by the gravitational forces of birth and history.

“Let’s go swim,” Sawyer says . . .

A shadow passes over us. We all stop to look up. There, less than 20 feet overhead, flies a mature bald eagle. Its wings are set, six feet across. The white head is cocked. A yellow eye stares down at us. The eagle flies directly over the circle drawn in the sand, then over us, gliding silently. The bird continues upriver, diminishing in the distance.

“That was cool,” Sawyer says.

“That was auspicious as all hell,” I say.

“Or just coincidence,” Eli adds.

Thanks to Fulcrum Publishing for permission to excerpt this book.

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