Peggy Taylor holds on to the rock. She is angry.

She is standing on the banks of the Breitenbush River, in the middle of Oregon’s rain forest. Everything grows here in random abundance, but to Peggy it is a well-ordered wilderness. It’s when the balance shifts, too few wolves and too much prey, that the forest gets wild.

Peggy turns the rock over and over in her hand.

She knows wild. It is the cancer growing in her body. The cancer was once just a cell among many. Now it has its own blood supply. It grows savagely, and there are no known predators. The doctors prescribe radiation and chemotherapy, but prescriptions are not cures. Now they are beginning to think that the stress of the treatment itself, not to mention the stress of everything else going on in her life, may be helping the cancer to grow.

Peggy wonders if the cancer is as big as the rock.

She comes to Breitenbush to shut down the cancer’s lifeline and create some non-medical predators. Peggy had a miscarriage almost nine months before her cancer was diagnosed. She thinks that maybe the cancer and the miscarriage are linked. Maybe she feels guilty about the miscarriage. Maybe she is still holding on to the anger and the grief. She knows that holding on to her suffering suppresses her immune system. She thinks about the cancer and the baby and all the other resentments that she might have.

She shouts her anger and her fear about going through another round of chemo, about not knowing if it will work, about trusting doctors she is just meeting for the first time, about the trick her body has played. “I wanted a child!”

She takes a deep breath . . . and throws the rock in the river. Peggy isn’t Jewish, but in a tradition practiced at Rosh Hashana, usually with bread, she has thrown away her suffering. As she loosens her grip on the rock, she lets the causes of her pain go. She feeds the river.

Now she is done. . . with the guilt, . . . the anger, . . . and the grief. She frees herself. She will get well this time. There will be no more recurrences. Peggy is ready to begin again.

The Breitenbush Retreat and Conference Center hugs a curve of its namesake river where the water tumbles down a narrow canyon from the Jefferson Park Glacier to the Santiam River. For Peggy, it is heaven. She travels two hours from her home in Corvallis, Oregon, to take part in a long weekend of healing and wellness programs.

Although Breitenbush is only ten miles from the main highway, it is isolated. After crossing the bridge over the river, the instructions say to take every left turn until reaching the parking lot. In a surreal political dichotomy, one turn to the right leads to a maze of numbered logging roads.

The huge Douglas fir and Western hemlock that guard the road to Breitenbush have witnessed more than angry words over the past twenty years. In 1994, an Earth First! contingent barricaded roads, spiked trees and chained themselves to equipment in the designated logging areas. They threw rocks at the crummies as the loggers tried to get to their jobs cutting trees and burning slash. The violence is dormant, but the anger still remains in the canyon towns. Breitenbush is an unwelcome neighbor.

Peggy travels through these towns on her way to “heaven.” Peggy’s half-sister, Pat, introduced her to Breitenbush three years ago and she’s been making the drive at least once a season ever since. At the Center, Nordic skiing, Swedish massage and hot tubs commingle with meditation, chanting, yoga and Sufi dancing.

At first Peggy was skeptical about the healing arts available at Breitenbush. She is an Oregonian, raised in a logging community, a technical writer for Hewlett-Packard with degrees in English and computer operations. Her beliefs are firmly rooted in her experiences. But after her last visit, even her husband Dave could see a difference in her attitude. He told her that he wanted her to go to Breitenbush as often as she could.