About the Book
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"Hats off to the crew of a 'year without time.' A wonderful and intimate personal account of lives forever cemented together. For those who live their lives to the fullest... Life is infinity."
John F. Edwards
Executive Director
United States Canoe Association
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Getting Your Hands on a Copy of the Book
To purchase A Year Without Time, ask at your local bookstore*, order it through Barnes & Noble or amazon.com, or, since we get a discount, order a signed softcover directly from us. $16.00/each includes postage; we'll have it shipped lickety-split. Make checks payable to:
Cate Allen
4461 Northside Parkway NW #381
Atlanta, GA 30327
*If your local bookstore doesn't carry it, they'll need the ISBN to order it. Here 'tis:
Softcover: 1-4140-2059-7
Hardcover: 1-4140-2058-9
Excerpts from the First Chapter...
Ask for What You Want (Jen) I grabbed the railing as I headed down the narrow stairs in the cottage. The phone rang its third ring and Diva lifted her head to inquire. I pulled on the railing as I jumped to the right of the landing, into the kitchen. A fourth ring and I grabbed it off the hook just before it went to the answering machine. I wondered if it was Mom calling back.
"Hello?" I said.
Diva settled back onto her bed in the living room, her tail taking one ceremonial thump as she assessed that all was under control.
"Jenny, I want to canoe the Missouri River before I die. Want to come?" Bill's voice was a familiar one. I grinned before knowing it.
"Bill," I said, "that's a great idea."
I had dropped the -ny ending on my name years earlier, using the shorter "Jen," somehow thinking it allowed me to escape, at least partially, the taunts of childhood. With Bill, however, it had stuck, and I didn't mind. I was thirteen when we met, he stealing my mother's heart a few years after a quiet divorce. He was canoeing the great Mississippi, and we lived in a small riverside town. The first night he came to dinner was the only night of my life my mother prodded, "Don't you think it's time to go to bed, Jenny?" I awoke to find the car gone, Mom and Bill taking in the Midwest sunrise. They married a year later and my mother had found her mate; Bill is the only person I know who can fit her wanderlust-filled life, a life she had passed on to me.
I shifted my weight onto my other foot, the linoleum cold against my bare feet. "When are you going to do it?" I asked. Having just gotten off the phone with Mom, I wished I could have heard the route they had taken to get to this idea.
"Not me Jenny, us. I think the four of us should do it together, do the whole thing, all the way to the Gulf of Mexico."
He sounded like a little boy, anticipation measuring itself against imagination. I could picture him grinning on the other end of the phone line, his crooked smile giving way to a full-toothed grin. Bill had watched me grow out of girlhood; he had been the adult who found a fit into a girl's life, at the most awkward time of adolescence. Now his seventy-eight years gave way to my twenty-nine, and I wondered if he was serious.
"So what do you think?" he said, "How long do you think it would take?"
I heard Donna move from the smallest bedroom into the bathroom upstairs, her delicate steps making the floorboards creak. "I don't know Bill, how long is it?"
"I'm not sure, let's see, the Mississippi is just over 2000 miles, but the Missouri River starts somewhere in Montana and then meets the Mississip' just above St. Louis. If we went all the way to the Gulf, I think it would be about 4000 miles. Do you think we could do it in a year?"
This is where I began to measure who Bill thought I was against who I was becoming. The past year had found me in a new relationship, I was just completing the first month of a new job - the first job in my life that actually had a salary, not the hourly wages I was earning before - and Donna and I were just getting to know each other's wishes and dreams. She had not mentioned canoeing the Missouri River as one of her dreams, and I was trying to control my wanderlust.
"I think it could be done, Bill, but would Mom do it, too?"
I knew, and Bill knew, that this was a silly question. Cate Allen would do anything, be anything, go anywhere, just because a) she wanted to, b) somebody dared her to, or c) God forbid, someone told her she couldn't. My mother would be in a canoe on the Missouri River for a year just because she knew of no one else who was doing it. That was her way.
"Yes," he said, a smirk in his voice, "I think I could talk her into it."
Now it was down to me, and Donna. My life had been measured with a wanderlust yardstick. As I grew older and moved out of the house I realized that not everyone moved every year, and most families didn't sit down together during Christmas break and wonder where they would be next Christmas, asking each other what adventures the coming year would bring. Donna had been reared in three houses, all within thirty miles of each other. She was the yin to my yang, and somehow it was working. The first year we spent together taught me that I could build a career, that maybe the wandering was more costly than I knew, and that indeed, it was with Donna that I wanted to be. There was, however, a glint of doubt in me, that longing to make it over the next hill, just to see what was there. My wanderlust was a part of me that brought me many adventures, and a sense of pride. I was more my mother's daughter than I wanted to admit...
Ask for What You Want (Cate)
Funny how we each remember it differently. I remember having my usual Sunday afternoon call from Jen. She told me Princeton was wonderful and hectic in August, that Angie and Mark were having a baby, that she'd cut her hair, and did I remember that haircut I gave her before the first day of kindergarten. We rambled on, aimlessly as always, and laughed out loud about the year I began a traveling school, pulled her out of fourth grade, and took twelve kids to Baja to study whale migration, lived in snow caves in Yellowstone for a month, studied government in Washington D.C., theatre in New York, and ecology and finance on a little farm in Missouri.
We laughed.
Then she said, "Mom, I miss living with you."
"Jen, take a weekend off, come to Kansas City, and we'll play."
"I was thinking of something longer," she said.
"Tell you what," I said, "I'll take a week off if you will, and we'll travel somewhere."
"Mom, I was thinking of something longer," she said.
"Do you want to canoe a river?"
"What?"
"Do you want to canoe a river? How about the Mississippi?"
We both loved that river. It brought Bill to us.
Twenty years ago, my son, Gig, read a magazine article about a television newscaster who walked into the studio one day, took off his tie, handed it to the floor director, and said, "I quit. I want to see the world I've been reading about for twenty years each evening at six and eleven." Then he hitchhiked around Europe, fell in love in China, taught English in London, and decided to canoe, alone, down the Mississippi River, the river where my three kids and I lived in a tiny river town. Gig wrote to him, told him that if he'd stop in our town his mom would make dinner for him. He stopped, I made him dinner, put my kids to bed early, kissed him on the midnight Grafton ferry ride across the river to Calhoun county and back, and put him back on the river in his canoe the next morning. He called from St. Louis that evening, ten miles downriver, and asked me to join him for dinner. I skipped an evening class, joined him for dinner and put him back in his canoe the next morning. And the next morning. And the next. Three months later he called to tell me to listen to a radio interview he was doing that afternoon. Jen and I listened. The interviewer asked if he'd had any life-changing adventures along the river. He said, "I think I have. I met a woman upriver and am taking this opportunity to ask her to marry me."
When I asked Jen if I should marry him she said, "Would I get his canoe?"
Now, on this Sunday afternoon, when I said, "How about the Mississippi," she said, "Would I get his canoe?"
"Seriously, Jen" I said, "Why don't we take a year off and canoe a river? What about the Missouri?"
"Where does it begin," she asked.
"I don't know, up north somewhere, I guess. Isn't that the river Lewis and Clark explored?"
Jen said, "Ask Bill if he's up for another river in his eightieth year."
"Bill," I yelled into the kitchen, "do you want to canoe the Missouri River?"
"Sure," he yelled back.
"He says sure," I said, "What about Donna?"
"I'll ask her. Love you, Mom. Bye. "
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