If whitewater is dangerous, why has it saved my life twice already?
The first time was when my brother died. If you’ve never lost a loved one, you may not understand me when I say it wasn’t like losing someone, but like moving to a strange, new place where nothing works or makes sense. It looks like the place you used to live, and all the people, buildings, and routines are the same, but it’s completely different, and you can’t get back to that place you were before.
I remember feeling like the world had literally shattered. Like all the strategies I’d developed for dealing with my life and interacting with it had ceased to function. The best I could do was try to remember how I was before he died – how I’d acted in different situations and how I talked and what I did – and do my best to imitate my former self. I was an impersonator in my own life, a poor actor doing a bad job of portraying the man I used to be.
I would collapse in tears on the floor a lot, and my entire waking and dreaming life became a torture of the continuously repeated realization: “It’s true. He’s dead. It’s true.” Not a minute went by where I didn’t think those words, didn’t feel them like a bad egg sandwich in the stomach, didn’t ask myself what good could possibly come of anything from here, didn’t feel the dread of looking in through a window at my life, unable to enter it or understand. My brother had left a gigantic, sucking hole where he had been, and I stood at the edge of it, mesmerized, looking down and in.
At the time, I was a video boater, and so, in line with my allotted task of pretending to be me, I would get up every morning, don the gear, and set out on the river. This, too, was acting – going through the motions, numb.
Then one day I was watching Glen Dunlop – local kayaking legend that he is – throw himself around in total wild control, screaming, laughing, talking far too loud (it happens to all kayakers eventually – the cold water gives you exostosis and, unable to hear yourself, you nudge up the volume on your own voice a little at a time until you’re shouting, like someone who can’t smell their own cologne and so keeps adding more until the rest of us are half asthmatic from it).
Glen’s animated manner provided a stark contrast to my own listlessness. I wondered what it would feel like to throw yourself around like that and scream and laugh like that. I tried it, and although the dread returned the moment I stopped, I realized that for those 20 minutes I’d been on the river, I was, for the first time since my brother’s death, totally happy.
I started looking forward to those 20 minutes every day – surfing Big Mama, Big Kahuna, Magic – or trying to, anyway – not caring where I rolled or how badly I got thrown. I guess I even developed a bit of a death wish – though thankfully, trying to exercise a death wish on the Kennebec is a little like attempting suicide with a throw pillow – maybe you could do it if you shoved it down your throat and sucked real hard, but it’s not likely otherwise.
Instead of killing me, the Kennebec soaked me, thrashed me, and made me laugh. It rewarded my anger with good-natured beatings. It made a light next to that dark hole my brother left behind – and however small it was, I stoked it. Those 20 minutes every day became a crack in the impenetrable wall that had surrounded me. I jammed my double-bladed paddle into it and pried for all I was worth, splitting it wider, eventually making it spill over and fill my dry-land life.
The second time I realized kayaking had saved my life was earlier this morning.
Nothing as dramatic had happened this time, thankfully. Well, okay, my mother had sickened and died of Alzheimer’s disease, but I’d grieved with less shock and more experience, knowing it was okay to feel terrible, but also necessary to find and stoke the kind of joy available through kayaking and a hundred other activities that God saw fit to give us – I did not deny the presence of the sucking hole my mother left behind, but neither did I sit and stare it down.
No, this time, long after my brother’s and my mother’s deaths, the danger came at me from another place – myself. Namely, through a desire to create something good and healthy in my life, I trapped myself in a prison of never-ending work and seclusion.
Family and friends offered helpful advice.
“No-one ever lies on their death bed and says they wished they’d worked more.”
“Take time to stop and smell the roses.”
I bit my tongue so hard it bled, to quote the ever cynical and observant John Philbrick, but I wanted to ask them if they had any other helpful admonitions gleaned from the backs of cereal boxes. Did they think I didn’t know it wasn’t good to work too much? I had been a raft guide, for God’s sakes. A video boater. If anyone understands the value of a high quality of life, and the folly of chasing the almighty dollar, it is us – us souls with the helmets and the knives and the big, sunny grins. While most of those admonishers were living the nine-to-five life and starting families and 401K’s and beer guts, I was tramping the world, hanging around with people in dreadlocks, my home a tent or a room full of lifejackets, my mantra, “Real jobs are for suckers.”
But at some point after my brother died and while my mother was dying, I looked off into the future and saw a 50-year-old videoboater, broke, sponging off relatives, broken down, sun-worn, sad, and pitied. The dilemma I seemed to face was this: to enjoy life was my number one goal, but how much would I enjoy it in another 15 years. The story of the grasshopper and the ant began to resonate with me. I mean, if someone could reliably tell you that you’d die in 15 years, you could say, to hell with it, and play all day and let it go at that. If, on the other hand, you knew that you would live to be 100, it might make sense to spend 10 years of your remaining time toiling away unhappily so that you’d never have to work again. But we can never really know, so I thought, why not both? Why not make enough to have a comfortable life and still have fun along the way?
It seemed both reasonable and possible. I loved writing, shooting video, and editing, and it didn’t sound implausible that somebody would pay me well to do a combination of those things, so I opened up a video production business.
But something happened. I got busy. The weddings and the corporate work took off like rockets, and despite my own convictions to avoid all stress and to enjoy my life, I got lost in the struggle to make my business work. In spite of journaling and late-night conversations and convictions and assertions about quality of life, I leaned more heavily toward making clients happy, and gradually – again, like someone wearing too much cologne who doesn’t notice it – I let the quality of my life decline. I was like that frog they talk about who won’t get out of the water because he doesn’t notice the one-degree change in temperature, but after 99 of these unnoticed changes, he cooks. Well, I was cooking.
To be fair to myself, through all of this, I hiked, I kayaked, went to Gauley and shot video there, and I traveled to Costa Rica and Belize… But the bottom line is that you have to ask yourself at intervals, “Am I happy?” and I had to answer to myself that, at these intervals, I was not.
There are a million reasons you can give yourself for why you feel the way you feel. Conditions are not right. You need more money or a different girlfriend. Smaller ears. A better place to live. Or, self-help books will tell you self-acceptance is the key. There have been a lot of people on the planet, and most of them have had some idea about where happiness comes from. You can drive yourself crazy listening to all the different theories and methods, not a few of which will cost you money.
I think the shocker came, for me, when I was at a corporate video shoot and the subject of whitewater came up. I heard myself say, “I used to be a videoboater,” and hearing those words come out of my mouth felt like walking over my own grave. I received an instant, vivid memory of an only slightly younger, but an infinitely different-feeling me, sitting on a rock in sunshine by the roaring water, bare-shouldered, grinning, suited up, trading craziness with other camera-wielding vultures on the shore, wondering what kind of life I’d have if I ever said those words, “I used to be a videoboater.” I had to admit, it was a poor trade.
Over the next few weeks, more memories like this cropped up – my life was flashing before my eyes, and I didn’t even have a cold. And every memory held itself up in comparison to my present life, showing this new world I’d built to be a paltry substitute.
Again, I can’t blame myself. The goal – to never have to work again, so I could kayak and relax more, was such a shining prize to my Teva-wearing, cartwheel-throwing personality that it sucked me in completely. The memories of river time haunted me like ghosts of July 4th past from some play Charles Dickens never got around to writing. Was I really working seven days a week? Was I really working 14 – sometimes 24-hour days? Had I really not boated in all of April, all of May, and most of June? Me? To whom hard work had always been anathema? How could this happen?
The unsettling memories made me ask these questions. How do you go from a slacker, lover-of-life, happy, broke, world-traveler, to a frustrated, angry workaholic who spends all day in front of a computer screen? How do you convince a fish to climb out of the water and spend the rest of his short life flopping on the sand?
It’s easy. You promise him more water. Better water. More time to enjoy the water. You tell him that it’s only for a little while – another day, another week, another month and you’ll have it made. That’s the kind of promise that will make him – even him forget about his conviction to enjoy every minute – every breath along the way.
I had to admit, when all this self-examining was done, that this successful business I’d built up around myself with good intentions had become a cage.
People were depending on me, and I wanted that deeper, cooler water, and so it made sense to work a longer day, to work a weekend, to stay up all night if need be.
The only problem was the river, and its troubling, painful memories of being happy. Memories of how, after my brother died, the river and its denizens gave me an example of how I “ought” to feel. That “ought to” came back now, put a water pistol to my head, and said, “Get out on the river.”
Feeling awkward and out of place, I forced myself to drive up to the Kennebec. I forced myself to start taking weekends off. I forced myself to quit work habitually at 5 p.m., to exercise again, to throw myself, Glen Dunlop-like, into anything and everything, to talk too loud, to shout, to laugh.
I have my 100 reasons to be unhappy still, just like anybody else. But the funny thing about that is, a source of joy like whitewater and its people tend to cancel all those reasons. It doesn’t eradicate them, but it trumps them, rendering them unimportant.
Once again, the river opened up a crack of hope in my high wall of impenetrable doom, and once again I worked my paddle into it and shoved.
I still run my business, but at 5 p.m., I forget about it – let it crumble if it will – and on Friday afternoon, I’m gone for two days of solid paddling and river people. As an added benefit, I find that joy I rediscovered on the river creeping back into my daily life, like a cancer that does good instead of harm.
Today, suited up and feeling good, standing in the sun in front of the bath house up at Harris Station, my orange kayak resting on the gravel, excited rafters all around me, I found myself thanking God for creating rivers, river people, kayaks, kayaking, and whitewater. Feeling free, easy, sunny, happy, I had realized that the river isn’t going to let me feel any other way. It will always track me down. I may have goals, I may have dreams, and those are good and necessary, but the hard, unhappy paths to all those things will stay forever closed to me. I’ll have to find a way to be a different kind of animal – a hybrid of grasshopper and of ant.
Whitewater is dangerous. It can bruise or break – it even takes the odd life here and there in payment for what it gives us. But most importantly, and conspicuously unreported in the information made available by Charlie Walbridge, it drowns unhappiness.
So now I sit here at a picnic table beside the sunny, sparkling waters of the Kennebec, listening to the happy shouts and the occasional belly flop of a camp kid jumping off the bridge, my business taking care of itself today, or so I assume, and I have to ask myself, “Am I happy?”
I have 100 reasons not to be. But the sun, the warm wind, the very recent memory of surging, rocking on the current and of heartfelt conversation, the green, leafy smell of birch and grass and sumac, the laugh and splash of camp kid and the occasional tootle of a log truck passing through The Forks fill me to overflowing, force me, coerce me to say, “Yes.”