Of all the river wisdom, my favorite is the simple encouragement that “we are all in between swims.”  Simple, without too much mixed metaphor or cheesy word play about going with the flow—and it seems to apply especially to me as of late. Since brazenly hopping into my boat after a less than satisfying snow year, I have given up two pairs of sandals to the river gods, swallowed my fair share of giardia water (luckily above the treatment plant), and fear that I’m no better at boating than I was in April.

 

I want to believe that every panicked second spent under Smelter’s churning white water has made me a better boater, but it’s hard to convince myself of any personal improvement. The harder I try, the more I flounder. Combat rolls prove most challenging because I can’t consciously convince myself not to bring my head up for air and balance, thus thwarting any efforts to succeed in righting myself and my boat. Kayaking is fascinating to me because I can’t tough it out, and force often leads to failure. So I look to the river for council.

 

Like Norman Maclean wrote, “Eventually, all things merge into one, and a river runs through it. The river was cut by the world’s great flood and runs over rocks from the basement of time. On some of the rocks are timeless raindrops. Under the rocks are the words, and some of the words are theirs. I am haunted by waters.”

 

I, too, as mesmerized by water, watching it curl like campfire smoke, listening to its constant churning roar, green in summer or black against January snows: it’s a powerful element. A friend once told me that we should all fear the river, and she was boating before she could drive. The fear and fascination are united and tell a story, like the one Maclean told about life and the river.

 

Maclean was an outdoorsman and fisherman who, through no fault of his own, inspired a hoard of fisher-folk trouncing through the rivers and streams of Montana wishing they could be more like Brad Pitt. Isolation in nature is often glamorized by Hollywood, but it’s the danger and difficulty that lures us in like a brook trout.  Fishermen, boaters and mountaineers understand what Maclean was trying to communicate: the intangible fascination that rivers hold over us all.

 

Rivers have a place in most religions, if you try hard enough to make that connection. Which I am. I have it on good authority from a buddy across the bar that the Buddha found enlightenment by ferrying across the river. Google search confirmed that Hermann Hesse’s novel Siddhartha’s over-arching metaphor of spirituality is that “the river is everywhere at the same time, at the source and at the mouth ... in the ocean and in the mountains, everywhere, and that the present only exists for it, not the shadow of the past, nor the shadow of the future.”

 

This still doesn’t make me a better kayaker, but it gives me a little understanding. Obviously, experience leads to expertise, and I’m getting pretty dang good at wet-exits. Nothing else I chose to do – mountain biking, running or skiing – scares the gooey river snot out of me like facing rapids in my kayak; nothing else I chose to do thrills me as much as successfully coming out the other side.
Not that I’m extremely conscious of my movements, which make it difficult to make improvements when I go bottom-up. I achieve what alcoholics refer to as a moment of clarity that often leads to a complete blackout of what actually happened (adrenaline, not alcohol, induced. I swear. Until I have to drink a river bootie, post-swim.)

 

The beauty of the river, the mountains or the desert, for that matter, is the consequence. They may not be high when you fall off the boat mid river parade from too much hydration, but they are ever present.

 

I suppose the trite and true river axioms exist for a reason, we should all go with the flow, admire the cyclical beauty of life and death, creation and destruction given by the river. We should gain enlightenment like Buddha, find the stories like Maclean, or take a leap of faith into the lucid depths.
Every time I jump cascade falls, there is a group of girls (sometimes they have a male escort) who makes it most of the way through before emotionally and physically freezing up in the shadowy walls of the canyon. “I don’t think I can jump,” one of them yells from above. “I don’t think you have a choice” is the advice proffered by a pragmatic friend.

 

 Often the river doesn’t give you a choice to go around, one must go through, follow through and tough it out. We are all in between swims. I will continue to get in my boat, I know I’ll get flipped, I’ll swim. That’s the river; that’s life.

 

– Maggie Casey