The Perfect Cut

Becoming one with adventurer Doug Ammons
Eric Segalstad

Earlier version published March 10, 2005 in the Missoula Independent.

It’s Wednesday evening and Doug Ammons stands barefoot on a blue mat in a bright white dojo on Brooks Street. His feet look too small to carry his large frame but he moves smoothly and swiftly, advancing toward the target—a rolled-up straw mat propped on a wooden stand. The top of the tube stands five feet above the linoleum floor.

Ammons’ right foot is two-and-a-half steps in front of his left one, and his torso leans aggressively forward. His bearish upper body is not as ripped as it was 10 years ago, but it’s powerful. He raises the blade of the samurai sword and pauses. Holding the scabbard of the razor-sharp 3-foot blade at eye level, lightly but firmly, he stares at the target across his left elbow. Concentrating. Done right, cutting the 3-pound sword through the target should feel effortless. Done perfectly, the cut piece will not even move.

The cast comes suddenly and slices the top at close to the perfect 28-degree angle. Subsequent casts follow rapidly, in time with Ammons’ breathing. A kariagi from below, another head-high kessa. Swoosh, swoosh. The severed pieces fall gently like flower petals next to the tube’s stalk and Ammons’ dark blue T-shirt stains with sweat.

The sport is a variety of Japanese sword fighting called Ishi Yama Ryu Battujutsu, and as an offshoot of his long martial arts training, Dr. Ammons has practiced it for the last four years. It requires dexterity and technique, is built on ceremony and tradition, and is potentially deadly and aesthetically pleasing—all aspects that fascinate him. But then again, Ammons is fascinated with a plethora of subjects.

“Working with a live blade is like kayaking class V+. You have to be completely mindful and in tune with the sword and your surroundings. There are no mistakes allowed.”

“Only the tip of the sword was used in battle,” he explains. “And a single cut was enough to end the fight. Take the kessa cast: In the feudal days of Japan, used on a human being it would leave a deep and deadly diagonal cut from the shoulder down to the hip.” Ammons is the first to admit that he’s not likely to ever use his sword outside the dojo. For him, Japanese swordsmanship and Kenpo karate, another enthusiasm he has had for the last ten years, are extensions of his life-long training of mind and body. Whether it is the judo and swimming he did as a youth, or the climbing and kayaking he has done for over 30 years, he sees each sport as an extension of the others. “They are all the same thing,” he assures me, “At the surface level, they’re fun, exciting, challenging, and great exercise. But at a deeper level they are all vehicles for understanding what it means to be human, ways of seeing our limits and possibilities, and for expanding our awareness.”

They also are lower-impact activities he can enjoy without worrying too much about his knee problems, his period bouts of acute exhaustion or his sometimes arrhythmic heart from a lifetime spent with intense focus on everything he touches.

Ammons, perhaps best known as a pioneer expedition kayaker with many first descents, and for audacious solos of the hardest runs in the world, has a personality so multifaceted and layered that it’s hard to understand what drives him—at least on the surface. It’s not superlatives. After he paddles off a 50-foot waterfall—because it’s part of the river and he knows he can do it—he doesn’t go scouting for a 60-footer. He’s not looking for sponsors and movie deals, although he’s pictured on Patagonia posters and has participated in multiple expeditions filmed by National Geographic Explorer, ESPN, and Outdoor Life. It’s not publicity, because he’s done scripts and edited films, written for Men’s Journal, won an Emmy award as a cinematographer. Those were never goals he strived for—only consequences of who he is as a paddler and person.

He has been repeatedly offered positions as a sponsored kayaker, and also for doing stunts for companies like Ford, and to be a stunt coordinator for major companies’ advertisements. ESPN approached him twice about taking a class V race he started and making it into a televised event with big cash prizes.

“I turned them all down,” he says. “If you do something for the wrong reasons, it changes your soul. Many younger paddlers aspire to those things as if they are the true goals of the sport. But they don’t realize that success measured that way will, at best, distract you from what is important, and at worst, destroy the most valuable gifts a river can give.” He shakes his head in disagreement, “They speak of it as ‘getting paid to play’ and ‘living the dream’. My dreams aren’t about getting paid to play, they’re about ideals that inspire me.”

A look around his office at work shows what some of those are: massive numbers of books on all subjects; nestled into every available place on the walls are photos of his family and children, of mountains, Japanese wind gods and Chinese pen and ink drawings of tigers and Daoist sages. A Buddhist Thanka of the wheel of life is next to the door, while on the adjacent wall there are photos of stars and exploding nova, classical music scores, a portrait of Alexander Solzhenitsyn, and another of the Chinese man standing in front of a line of tanks at Tiananmen Square. To their right is a beautiful print of two salmon by an Inuit artist and a Picasso-esque drawing of a guitar. “Nietzsche said that art was the medium that unfroze the heart of man and allowed it to be free,” he says, “and art is about seeing the world with insight and feeling - so all music, all painting, all science and every skill can be seen as an art.”

From his office on Higgins Avenue, Ammons is one of several editors of two international scientific journals in clinical and experimental psychology. The field is basically a tossed salad of research on human behavior. As explained by Ammons it includes “learning of skilled movements, perception, the psychology of politics and religion, rehabilitation from injuries or strokes, cross-cultural comparisons, personality—the list is really endless. Anything that humans or animals do can be looked at from a psychological perspective – or even many psychological perspectives.” The more you talk with him, the more you realize he is all about looking at different perspectives.

“I believe in looking at the world every way I can, while always seeking a greater truth.”

His parents founded the family publishing venture more than 45 years ago, and his mother, Dr. Carol Ammons, remains a part time editor. “She is a remarkable woman,” he says, “she is trained both as a psychological clinician and experimentalist, set up the professional licensure in Montana and has clinical license number 1,” he says with a smile. “She also teaches Tai Chi Ch’uan and sings Bach and Brahms beautifully,” he adds. It is easy to see where Doug gets his multiple interests. It runs in the family.

As an editor Ammons has to stay involved in myriad ways. He has the intellect and knowledge to do that, with degrees in mathematics, physics, and psychology (all with high honors), and a masters and Ph.D. in psychology. He did research for 15 years on paleoclimatology, the earth’s ionosphere, and solar physics. He worked with the geologist who was reinterpreting the geological history of Yellowstone Park. He once was a guest researcher in solar physics at the Space Environments Laboratories at NOAA, and talks freely about the solar sunspot cycle, interplanetary magnetic field, tree rings, and the chaotic nature of the earth’s climate. It’s not all technical either, as jokes abound in the subjects that come into and out of the conversation. In his work as an editor at the journals, he draws on his multifaceted background in statistics, learning, math, physics, geology, cultural history, anthropology and perception. He reads and evaluates, offers suggestions and looks for holes in the logic of more than 600 manuscripts that cross his cluttered desk every year, and three times that many expert reviewers. The job requires him to communicate with hundreds of scientists scattered across the globe.

His office looks like a Class VI rapid rolled through it.

The floor is littered with stacks of books, disheveled journals and papers of all weights and ages. Floor-to-ceiling bookshelves line every wall, holding titles such as The New Cognitive Neurosciences and a four-volume blue-spined series titled The Human Brain. Bouquets of Post-It notes sprout from most of the books, thriving in the brightly lit sanctuary. Opening any of the books shows them to be heavily dog-eared, with page after page of annotations, underlining, and comments in the margins. He is obviously not a passive reader.

“Science is the ultimate tool for understanding,” Ammons says, scanning the room as if expecting nods of affirmation from the silent volumes. The classical guitar in the corner near him, and sheet music of Bach fugues and flamenco music piled on one side, speak to yet another of his many passions.

“When I get flooded by too many thoughts, I pick up the guitar and play. There’s nothing like a quiet, beautiful Renaissance fantasia to calm the mind. Or, for the last year, I’ve been learning flamenco – so that’s in the opposite direction, great rhythms, different techniques, pounding away on the gut bucket. Some days I’ll combine Bach with Paco Pena – the best of both worlds”, he says, referring to the quintessential baroque musician and a current flamenco great.

His voice is calm and comforting, and you can almost see him craft his sentences. He uses his intellect not in a threatening way, but shares his experience and knowledge with confidence. His accomplishments in sports and science both are the result of analytical thinking, rigorous practice and determination, and his verbal skills reflect those characteristics. Ask him a simple question and he’s guaranteed to incorporate things you never heard or thought of. The journey is interesting and there’s an illuminating point at the end, and usually several others along the way.

Ammons, who turns 51 March 14, grew up in Missoula on Keith Avenue, a couple of blocks away from the campus where his father taught psychology. Dr. Robert Ammons took his seven kids hiking and exploring all over the region. During the warmer months they paddled in folding canvas kayaks, Doug’s first introduction to kayaking back when he was five or six. “No whitewater,” he says, “my usual job was to keep my gramma feeling safe.” Years later, up on Flathead lake Ammons and his brothers and friends used the kayaks to find places to cliff jump, with Doug specializing in flips with twists. “About 70 feet was the highest we ever went. It hurts too much beyond that.”

As adolescents, the brothers and sisters worked together on long-term science projects administered by their father, who taught them to have open and investigative minds. “Any topic was open to discussion and exploration,” Doug says, “there were never any limitations – except you were expected to think clearly and well, and have lots of questions to pursue. An eager imagination was encouraged.” They wrote poetry to each other, hiked, backpacked, and swam together. Doug was one of the top swimmers in the state and region, qualifying for nationals multiple times, and yet also winning the state science fair. The research projects led to places like the backcountry of Yellowstone National Park, where they collected preserved fossilized wood to analyze the trees’ million year old growth cycles, and also helped the park geologist map the stratigraphy in the process of his reinterpretation of the Park’s geohistory. Or, to Coppermine on the Arctic coast for a solar eclipse, or to the basalt layers of the Columbia Gorge and desert of Oregon to dig up more fossilized wood to extend their paleoclimatology back to tens of millions of years ago.

“It’s all connected – the geology, biology, and physics. Each facet is a window into the past,” he says, “In the petrified trees, even though they are solid silica, some of the original structure is so well preserved you can see the cell walls – imagine seeing back into a few weeks of the life of a tree 30 million years ago,” he says with a wistful look on his face. Following up Doug’s forte in solar physics, they visited observatories across the Southwest, Mt. Wilson, Big Bear, and Lockheed’s observatory in California, Sacramento Peak in New Mexico and Kitt Peak National observatories. In each place, they got dubious, then astonished welcomes from the professional astronomers, who were amazed that this little group of teenager siblings was doing serious, professional level scientific research on solar physics, the ionosphere, and the geomagnetic field.

Many projects required exploration of the outdoors, but the kids didn’t have to leave the house to pursue knowledge. A renovated two story garage was called “the lab”, and housed an observatory filled with telescopes built by Doug, microscopes, dozens of cameras, two dark rooms, spectroscopes, and dozens of instruments to measure different aspects of the weather, humidity, cloud cover, barometric pressure. On the roof was a directional antenna for recording NOAA weather satellites decades before anything like the internet existed. The trees surrounding the house were festooned with antennas for the 24 hour a day solar flare recording, using low frequency radio waves. The rooms in Ammons’ home were affectionately called the catacombs—with only narrow pathways through the clutter giving access to scientific journals from multifarious fields, literature, radio gear and music. Starting as a fifth grader, 10-year old Ammons counted and photographed sunspots daily, and carefully recorded his findings in a journal, the formal start of the whole show.

“It was expected that we all should get straight A’s through school, and that we all would get Ph.D.s,” Ammons says. Four Ammons siblings did, and of those who didn’t, two hold multiple masters degrees and another is a medical doctor.

Ammons practically grew up on campus and calls himself a “university brat,” a nickname for studious academic offspring. “Most of my friends were the sons and daughters of university professors or other white collar professionals. It was just the nature of the neighborhood.” He scoffs at some of the academic aspects, “I don’t believe in pure academics. Books are wonderful in certain ways, but too limiting by themselves. For many years as a kid I assumed that everybody who was smart was an academic. Then I discovered how wrong that was. In addition to professors, my dad always had this bizarre assortment of people coming through – diesel mechanics, backhoe operators, radio technicians, businessmen, athletes, foreign students, would-be prophets, musicians, writers, self-taught scientists, and frankly I found them a lot more interesting than most of the academics. Academia is great, but often breeds conformity, and frequently it generates disconnection from the real world – the old ivory tower syndrome. That can lead to interesting ideas, but people spin out into their own universe if they do not have a connection with reality.”

So another aspect of the “education” was work – such as moving houses. “My father got into buying up houses about to be torn down, moving them to new lots and fixing them up. I worked part time with his partner, jacking up houses with four 30-ton hydraulic jacks, and rolling them off their foundations. We’d drive them to a new location, pour foundations, then set them up again. It was dangerous. If my dad had seen the times when one of the 30 ton hydraulic jacks failed and the house settled down, with me diving under the edge of the foundation, or the time when one of the three-quarter inch chains snapped and a 3 ton iron beam nearly cut my leg off, he probably would have shut the whole show down.” Ammons smiles impishly, “but I never told him.”

In six-and-a-half years at UM he finished with three undergraduate degrees with high honors – and the requisite straight A’s - in mathematics, physics and psychology, with extra classes in geology, literature, zoology, and physiology. He taught himself how to play classical guitar and often spent all night practicing Bach fugues, Scarlatti sonatas, and Renaissance lute music. During that, he also swam on and anchored the varsity Grizzly swimming team, which won three Big Sky Conference championships, plus giving research papers at scientific conferences. “I liked the variety,” he says simply.

He could have gone anywhere for his doctorate, but since he liked Missoula and wanted to work with his father, he stayed and completed a master’s and doctorate in experimental psychology. “I love the Missoula area, it has everything I like to do. I didn’t want to go some high stress place and have to learn all the departmental politics. My older brother got a full ride to graduate school in psychology at Duke. My younger brother got a full ride to Cal Tech in mathematical physics. I wasn’t interested in going back east or to Los Angeles: I stayed here and loved it.”

Ammons followed his father’s footsteps. He also somehow made time to blaze numerous trails of his own. But wherever those trails took him, from kayaking to Ishi Yama Ryu Battujutsu, Ammons always brought his scientist’s synthesizing mind and his quest for perfection. “The key in all things is to be able to switch perspectives – at one point be an analytical laser, and then relax and be completely intuitive. It’s the blending of those extremes that leads to creativity. Both are necessary, one without the other leads to deep imbalance. The greatest thing is simply to love to feel, think, and do.”

And beyond any individual trait, is the gift he happened into by chance. “I have the most wonderful wife,” he says genuinely. “She’s like a pool of deep, clear water. She’s the love of my life.” The look in his eyes as he says that tells even more than the words.

Robin Ammons, the granddaughter of a Montana homesteader, grew up in the Flathead Valley. After graduating high school early she moved to Missoula and earned a nursing degree. After working as an RN for some years, she got bored and decided to stay in school and pursue a major in psychology. She met Doug just before her first class. “It was an evening seminar. He was sitting on the steps of the old Janette Rankin hall, playing a flute.” She recounted the exchange. “I asked him where Dr. Ammons’ class was.” Doug was the TA for his father’s class and sized up the young lady.

“What are you majoring in?” Ammons asked her. “Psychology,” she said.

“No. I know all the psych majors,” the university brat replied.

It may have been one of the few times Doug Ammons was wrong.

But he’d found something else that interested him, and as usual he went after it with ardor—their romance evolved into marriage in less than a year.

Ammons had learned to do a kayak roll back in high school, but had only paddled for a month or so. Now, 24 years old, starting a family and enrolling in the doctorate program, a friend asked to learn how to kayak. It’d been seven years, and he’d only ever spent a few dozen hours in a kayak, but he said he’d help. “I taught him how to roll, that is, after I figured it out again. Then we went out kayaking, and I caught fire. It was the perfect thing, the perfect sport, it had everything.” The river pushed his life in a new and, to him, meaningful direction.

“You know, most people would think in terms of one sport leading to another sport, but in my case it was music and the classical guitar that led to kayaking.” Ammons had played the classical guitar ever since he heard a Bach composition played on the nylon-stringed instrument. “I was 16 or 17, visiting friends at a Renaissance fair outside of San Francisco, and we came upon this guy playing Bach,” he recounts. “I was transfixed. My first thought was, ‘that’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever heard.’ My second thought was, ‘I’m going to learn how to play that.’”

He got a used guitar, some music, and started teaching himself. He practiced fanatically four to eight hours a day through his undergrad and grad years until he could play everything he heard that he liked. “I had probably 150 pieces memorized, including several full concert repertoires.” But he was losing interest in the guitar when he started kayaking. “I was looking for a different kind of music by that time, and I found it in flowing water.”

The music and river connection came readily. “When I first started paddling I had this set of wild dreams,” he says. “They were all pure music, I mean the sounds were notes and chords, melody and harmony, with all different voices from all the different current threads in the river. The water itself was the flow of the music. So every lean of my boat, every paddle stroke, every movement and current thread was part of this beautiful new music – a melody line or some aspect of the counterpoint. And in the dreams I was with friends, surrounded by the feeling of the friendship in this bright, beautiful clear spring day with crystal clear water, so clear it’s as though I’m levitating in the air.”

The dreams recurred over the course of several months. At first he woke up confused, feeling weird. Then he had an awakening: Water was a manifestation of music. “I realized that flowing water is a richer kind of music,” he says. To Ammons, playing music and running rivers are both emotional endeavors, but the water has a life of its own. “With the kayak, you have an instrument where you can immerse yourself directly in the music flowing in the riverbed. It has sound, tremendous power, all these vivid images and feelings. It’s like paddling down Beethoven’s Ninth, or a rock concert, or sometimes the most beautiful, soft music…I felt all that at a deep, core level. It just blew me away and I had this deep insatiable hunger for more.” Doug Ammons was hooked.

Becoming an expert kayaker requires natural ability and the willingness to learn. People who excel spend every day they can practicing rolls, perfecting strokes and reaching for oneness with the element. The chronic overachiever wasted no time paddling the quiet pools. “I learned very quickly, everything was new and exciting. I had this intuitive sense of flow from my swimming and especially the music, and right away I felt it in a kayak on the river.”

During his first months on the river Ammons dove bow first into challenging Class V rapids in Idaho. Six weeks after starting, he was regularly paddling the Lochsa river at its highest flows, and had run Class V+ Dagger Falls on the Middle Fork of the Salmon. After three months he did his first run of the North Fork of the Payette in southern Idaho – one of the premier class V runs in the world, starting a 25 year love affair with that river. After his first run with a local, he soloed the lower half, and spent the rest of the summer and autumn driving down to paddle it more. He never slowed down. Within two years he had already rocketed up to the highest levels of the sport, winning major competitions in freestyle rodeos, planning and doing first descents, and starting to go on expeditions with people like Rob Lesser and Bob McDougall – two of the top expedition kayakers in the world who he met and made friends with on the NF Payette.

Through the late 1980s, he went through a multiple season span where he either won or got second in every event he entered while competing against the best freestyle and rodeo kayakers in the US. “It got so it wasn’t interesting at that point,” he says. “I wanted to learn more and competition wasn’t the place to do it.” He tossed the rodeo competition in 1991 and focused on first descents and expeditions.

The first descents came rapidly throughout the mountains of Montana, Idaho, Wyoming, and up into Canada. He did classic runs all across the western US, as well as other Class V and VI rivers in Mexico, Alaska, northern Canada, the Himalaya and South America. He did hundreds of runs on the North Fork of the Payette, running it at more levels and in more ways than anybody has ever done. “It’s one of the best rivers in the world, right next to a highway, with a season that goes from spring through fall. It’s the ultimate training river for hard class V, and at the highest flows, it is as difficult as anything in the world. It’s class VI+ then, with twelve foot exploding waves going 30 or 35 miles per hour.” Other experts were content to simply run the river at the lower levels, but Ammons went far beyond that, doing such things as running a “top to bottom” (the full 15 miles) five times in a single day - almost ten thousand feet of whitewater in about 14 hours. He ran it at peak flows when nobody else would put on, did it solo, and he even threw away his paddle and handpaddled the entire river – and not just once, but three times in a single day for a full vertical mile of whitewater in a day. “I tried to find every way I could run the river, to learn as much as I could from it. That’s an ongoing project.”

Kayakers classify rivers and individual rapids from Class I through VI. A kayaker isn’t likely to get seriously injured in Classes I-III, but “the definition of class V is that if you mess up you’ll probably get hurt, or die,” says Peter Coyle, a kayaker who sells paddling gear at Edge of the World on Higgins Avenue.

After one gnarly high water run on the North Fork of the Payette, Ammons called his wife from the emergency room, but she took the call with admirable stoicism. “If he calls from the ER it’s after the fact,” she says. “And I trust Doug is as safe as he can be.”

“I got crushed against a boulder,” he says, dislocating his collarbone, ripping muscles and cartilage down his back and ribs. He rolled up in the middle of the chaos and fought his way to an eddy, although he was hurt badly enough that he couldn’t get out of his kayak by himself. The injuries slowed him down, but he was soon back on the water, headed to Nepal, navigating treacherous rapids with his boat.

Miraculously he balanced his day job as an editor, time with his growing family and paddling. “My feeling is, if you really want to do something and you don’t have enough time, figure out how you can do some aspect of it. So I focused on the most interesting, challenging, and aesthetically beautiful trips distilled into the least amount of time,” he says.

He spent weekends paddling the North Fork of the Payette River in Southern Idaho, driving home Sunday night, sleeping three hours and showing up ready to edit scientific articles at eight the next morning. He did dozens of first descents throughout the west, pioneering extreme steep creeks, often hiking in for miles over ridges. The best paddlers in the West became his friends . He went on expeditions with them to the Grand Canyon of the Stikine river in northern Canada, and Alaska’s Susitna and Alsek Rivers, navigating first descents in remote parts of Nepal and running unnamed rivers in Bolivia and beyond, but he wasn’t simply chasing whitewater. He was reaching for experiences that last longer than the instant gratification offered by adrenalin-fuelled thrills.

As a scientist he knows that human endeavors are constantly evolving, and Ammons is amazed by the skills of the younger guard. What he doesn’t appreciate is what he sees as a narrow media-driven, professional focus on the sport. To say that he’s aged to an old fart who is sour that young pups drop 100-foot waterfalls is not only too easy, but wrong.

“Personally, I like to seek a deeper perspective, but it seems these days much of the sport is focused on surface spectacle, and that’s becoming more pronounced as it goes mainstream and professionalized. People all have their own goals, but for all the amazing skills the top people have and the remarkable places they go, they sure aren’t able to articulate what any of it means. And if all it means is getting paid to play their little sport, then you won’t find me there.”

“I guess I’m not all that interested in doing big waterfalls in a kayak. It’s fun, and a challenge to be sure, but it’s also a narrow, highly specialized skill. I mean, seeing an inner tuber running a 105 foot waterfall makes me question what it means to do it in a kayak. My personal answer is, I’d rather do things that are unique to kayaking and can’t be done any other way. To me, the best use of a kayak is as a space ship here on earth, using the water to go to places that are inaccessible any other way. Setting up to do a big waterfall, or ‘park and huck’, something that’s all over in two to four seconds, just doesn’t excite me much. The same thing goes for endless freestyle competition. I want to explore and push myself as part of a bigger journey. I want experiences that challenge and change who I am. Stagnation is the first step toward death. We’re all unfinished projects for our entire lives, and I take the river’s endless change seriously, as a life ideal.”

He gives a case in point of the media-driven focus. “A few years ago they [a leading extreme sports movie maker] sent a group of talented paddlers to 25 countries and made a six-minute film out of it,” he says. The result was a rapid-fire sequence of several hundred two-second clips with paddlers dropping big air into roaring whitewater. “It leaves you gawking, saturated, and also feeling like you’re about to have a seizure, but how much have you learned about the beauty of the sport, the power of the river and the cultures they visited?” he asks rhetorically. “Nothing. It’s all about them, and all about raw action.”

“Kayaking is more than masturbating. It’s okay to do something different, and the film captures the superficial sense of excitement – it’s fine as a statement. But it also makes kayaking into a frenetic circus ride, and that’s just about the shallowest aspect of the entire sport. There’s no story line, just action. It’s a porn film, and that’s what people have taken to calling them – ‘whitewater porn’. The kicker was, they planned to do a sequel and what was it? 35 countries and making an 8 minute film. It worked the first time, but the second time, it’s a self-parody.”

“Nearly all the films are like that - sequels of the 60s surfing film “The Endless Summer.” That was an all time classic – a couple of buddies traveling on a shoestring and surfing around the world, following summer north and south, before it had ever been done. But now we’ve got teams of professionals doing it on a company budget, every year, for the 100^th or 200^th kayaking sequel. It’s boring. It’s close to pointless. Of course the rivers are beautiful – at least what little you can see of them, and the skills are great. But there’s no scenery, no commentary, no culture, and no context. Just whitewater dudes doing hundreds of rapids to bad rap music. It shows how little imagination goes into them.”

Ammons knows what he’s talking about in this area. He has paddled in and helped make seven major documentary movies at the highest professional level, four of which won Emmy awards. He has done them for National Geographic, ESPN, Outdoor Life Network, and all blend sensitivity to natural beauty and culture with gushing whitewater. He has paddled in all of them, wrote scripts for four, helped shoot and edit three, won an Emmy award for cinematography, and even played classical guitar as background music for three. “Kayaking is all about flow. There can be frantic action, but that’s only when things are going wrong, or in a movie, to convey the intensity. My experience is all about flow. Every river is an epic journey that travels through space, culture, and time.”

Roger Brown, a four-time Emmy-winning adventure cinematographer who has filmed and produced for National Geographic, ESPN, Discovery Channel and ABC, has shot films with the legends of every adventure sport. Over the past 40 years, he has worked with the best people in the world in climbing, caving, kayaking, skiing, and hunting. He also has logged a dozen first descents on expeditions with Ammons, who is a favorite of Brown’s. Brown first met Ammons in 1990 while working on a National Geographic film in Wenatchee, Wash. Three of his four Emmy awards have come from films with Ammons. “A lot of world class athletes I’ve worked with are egomaniacs, but Doug’s not. He’s intellectually stimulating, has a great sense of humor, and is always laid-back,” Brown says. “And he’s also an outstanding kayaker.”

If conflicts arose among exhausted, stressed-out expedition members, Ammons was the natural mediator, he says. “I could always depend on Doug to get people to work together as a team. He was invaluable.”

Those qualities were a bonus. All of Ammons’ expedition partners say the same things about him. His various partners are like a who’s who of expedition kayaking history: Rob Lesser, Bob McDougall, Gerry Moffatt, Scott Lindgren, Charlie Munsey: “Doug is as solid a partner as you could ask for. He’s the whole package - a great paddler, teammate, and friend,” says Munsey.

Brown points out that on the trips they did together, the teams were all comprised of professional kayakers, but the paddling filmmaker talks highly of his friend’s Zen-like attitude in roaring whitewater. “He cruised through the damnedest things and made it all look effortless, rapids that everybody else would have to stay extremely focused on. Then he could turn right around in the next breath and have some observation about the geology, the Maya, or about Buddhism. He’s on a different level.”

“There’s a balance between being cautious and being aggressive,” Ammons says about running whitewater in one of the movies. “But it isn’t always clear where the balance point is. It’s your goal to find it in each and every rapid, and everything you do.”

There’s little doubt that Ammons is a natural athlete, but how is the doctor in experimental psychology able to hang with, and in some cases, outdo younger professional adventure kayakers? Part of it is that he trained for decades, but some of it is his approach: “There are hard and easy ways to do things. At the highest level of skill, one takes what was hardest and makes it effortless. I release the ego and learn from things around me.” It sounds easy, but Ammons absorbs and retains knowledge on a level that few people can match. What really sets him apart is that he studies whatever he’s trying to learn from multiple angles simultaneously, and engulfs it. Kayaking has obvious technical aspects—use the boat and paddle to avoid obstacles and get safely down the rapids. As a beginner, he spent time honing those skills and constantly analyzed them, every rapid, every paddle stroke, for years. He studied the river the same way, along with the decision-making process, always seeking a sense of flow.

“Along the way, everything blended together. That is actually an goal in one’s skill. The river flows around and through every obstacle, and when we reach a certain level of skill, we can blend with it in the same way. You have to understand intuitively what the line is both on and off the river, and that means feeling the flow of the river through every sense and muscle.” He talks about looking from the bank at class VI rapids, and once he feels he has literally poured himself into the river, he runs them. He becomes one with the river. He knows it’s more powerful than him, he never fights it. The river runs through him.

He aspires to this in all he does. “Everything fits together, so I’ll never pursue something to the exclusion of everything else,” he says. “I always want to find out how it relates to the other things I do. That belief is an ideal. A value.”

Ammons has spent years philosophizing about the physical, internal and external aspects of the river, and his book The Laugh of the Water Nymph explores some of the moods, relationships and experiences he’s had with moving water. He has two other books on the way, and three more beyond that in draft form. “I can’t get to it all, but hopefully I’ll find enough time to finish a few more of them.”

He didn’t know the art of crafting stories but approached it the same way he does everything, analyzing, experimenting, and seeking flow. He dove into reading and analyzing other people’s work throughout the adventure literature, science fiction, and even Shakespeare. “He’s more like a climber than a kayaker because of his philosophical approach,” Brown says. “Climbers have time to think on the wall—whereas there’s little time to reflect while steering through the rapids at break-neck speed. He’s an anomaly.” Away from the river, Ammons molds kayaking’s split-second decisions into lasting epiphanies.

Three of the book’s stories—“The Chen Cave,” “The Mayan Creation Myth and the Ballgame,” and “Agua Azul: The Games of the Mayan Gods”—weave Mayan creation myths and an adventurous expedition into the abyss of water-filled caves of limestone. Where others might get off solely on the merits of a wicked first descent of an underground river, Ammons wrote a wild story that also linked the expedition’s goals to ancient Mayan lore.

After several days of scouting the hard-to-reach Class V underground river, the expedition members decided it could be done. “It was one of the most absurd and dangerous places in the world to be with a kayak,” Ammons says with a big smile. “But it was a hell of a lot of fun.” The first descent was dark, surreal and roaring.

Mayan creation myths tell a story about two sets of twins who loved playing an intricate ball game. The first were known as the Maize Gods, and their loud playing annoyed the Xibalban—the lords of the underworld. So the Xibalbans killed them and buried their bodies deep under the ballcourt. Unfortunately for the Xibalbans, a daughter was impregnated by one of the Maize Twins, and she escaped the underworld and gave birth to the Hero Twins. After the Hero Twins grew up, they became avid ballplayers, which made the Xibalbans furious. Soon, the Twins were summoned for a life-or-death game down below, but their skillful play kept the game scoreless. Frustrated, the Xibalbans killed the Twins anyway and ground their bones into powder, which they tossed in a river. First reincarnated as fish-men, the Twins eventually evolved into humans and went back down to settle the score. Disguised as dancers they beguiled the Xibalbans, killed them, went back to the ballcourt and revived their fathers. Traveling by canoe, another set of deities known as the Paddler Gods gave the Maize Gods a ride from the underworld to the skies.

And so during the reign of the Maya, the play between good and evil was commemorated with the ballgame, the rules of which are long lost.

Ammons found symbolism in the myths and spun it into a moral in his book:

“As strange and mysterious as this lost game was, it is also inspiring—for what greater game can there be than one where we face life and death, with only our skills to protect us against chance and the vast power of the unknown?”

He says now, “Every culture has its games of creation. Adventure sports fill that role for us, where we immerse ourselves in nature, seek transcendence, and re-create our awareness of ourselves and the world.”

Over the last 25 years Ammons has navigated some of the most powerful rivers in the world. The Laugh of the Water Nymph has a few of those experiences while the other books on the way tell more of the stories. “The Water Nymph wasn’t intended to be a set of stories about expedition first descents, killer-fang rapids, or near death experiences. There are several of those kinds of stories in it, but always with a twist. Overall the stories were chosen to show the full range of experience with rivers and around them. The next books will give people a real dose of the hardest whitewater. I’m hopeful of finishing two this fall (2008), but the rest will have to wait until I have more time.”

As if the range of things above weren’t enough, Doug also has five children, and their influence runs deeper than his kayaking. “The most challenging things do not come in whitewater,” he states. “Parenting is by far the most difficult risk sport. Every parent out there goes through more anguish and difficult decisions than the hardest-core kayaker ever will. Deciding to run a river or rapid, no matter how hard it is, is easy in comparison.”

“As a parent, you’re committed forever, and you have to learn to release control right as the children are becoming most likely to hurt themselves. You really have no defenses. There’s no rope, no paddle, you can’t portage or rappel. Most top kayakers and climbers have no idea of what it really means to be committed, but every parent does.”

Doug and Robin, who is an attorney, live with their son and four daughters in a white house next door to where Doug grew up. Ammons’ kids have all kayaked, although none of them are as into it as their dad. “I don’t push them, I let them figure out what they want to do,” he says. Like his father before him, Ammons introduces them to things he finds fascinating. They cliff-jump in the river and invent games like underwater climbing. “We pretty much decided that any sport you can do on land can be done underwater, where it’s a lot more interesting.”

Although he loves spending time with his family, in prior years his demanding lifestyle often took him away, exploring steep rivers in northwestern Nepal and elsewhere, putting pressure on his wife. From their marriage in 1984 until his last major expedition, Robin Ammons was what she calls a kayak widow.

“That last trip almost put me over the edge,” she says now. Doug was gone for six weeks, leaving her with the exhausting task of balancing five kids and beginning law school. “He’s extremely busy, but we believe love is what’s most important—you can put that in capitals.”

About five years ago, Ammons’ health hit what he calls rock bottom and he had to recover onshore. “I found out there’s only so many tens of thousands of hours of sleep that you can miss and only so much stress that you can weather before your body says ‘fuck you,’” he says, smiling again. “In my case it was my heart.” His arrhythmic heart can get so bad that he can’t get up and walk across the room.

“I don’t have a barrier about pushing myself. My problem is that I can push way beyond what any sane person would do. My body and mind always did whatever I asked of them, no matter how stupid, hard, or exhausting. But at some point you reach its limit, and there you learn that pain is not necessarily weakness leaving the body—it may be dangerous inflicted harm and injury…that you won’t be able to recover from.” He shrugs his broad shoulders, “I learned that the hard way.”

Because of that, and because of his long list of other responsibilities, he spends less time on the river than he used to. However, as one might expect of him, even if one door closes he immediately opens up several more. As yet another path, he returned to martial arts after years away, studying kenpo karate and several other styles.

Originally, he reached black belt in judo after eight years as a adolescent, but the traditional Korean instructor wouldn’t give him the belt. Ammons says, “He felt that no teenager, no matter how good, could understand what the belt meant. I think he was probably right. If I apply that to kayaking, class V river running has some great similarities. A talented young man can get to Class V level fairly quickly, but he doesn’t really know what it means. You watch young black belts at a tournament and many of them swagger and use the belt as the opposite of what it is intended. They are showboats, feeling their oats, and their egos are front and center – all of which is the exact opposite of the ideal in the martial arts, and really, in any skill or activity. That was what my Korean master was telling me, although it took years to understand. There’s a lack of respect, and you see it too on the river among some of the guys who use class V in the same way. Getting to that level is a mark of cool, of arriving, of being a real kayaker, and gives them bragging rights, as if they are better than other people. That is the antithesis of my ideal. Anybody who loves the water is a real kayaker, and the level they paddle at is irrelevant. Actually, one of my good friends and a person who had a pure love for the sport was Ralph Yule, who died at age 81 after 45 years of kayaking. He loved being on the water, enjoying it, helping other people learn. I think about Ralph a lot, and I spend much of my river time with beginners on class II whitewater. I have a blast. Some of them are worried and ask whether it’s boring to me. But how can I be bored when I see sparkling water, when I’m with some bright-eyed beginner who is having the time of his or her life? Hard whitewater is something I love and have done a huge amount of. But it is a very narrow part of a beautiful sport.”

“Skill should lead to wisdom, but I think in our culture we have separated these. There are thousands of professional athletes who are incredibly skilled at one sport or another, and virtually none of them could be considered wise. They’ve put massive amounts of time into the technical skills, and almost nothing into the deeper qualities of what that effort means, in perspective. They get rewarded by money and people’s adulation, which distracts them from the most important aspect of what they could have gotten out of their time. The martial arts are my touchstone here: the literal meaning of “kung fu” is “energy-time” – the depth that comes from having spent many years developing your skill. Another meaning is “skill that transcends mere surface beauty”. “Kung fu” is not just a name for martial arts, the concept applies to everything we do – all sports, all activities. The problem with professionalizing sports – and I see it in kayaking too – is that it rewards the technical, surface skills, the spectacle and porn - with nothing underneath. The hungry young guys want to paddle endlessly, make films showing themselves kayaking all over the world, get sponsorship, be known, be seen on TV, all the surface rewards. Listen to them and ask yourself whether their comments reflect depth or adolescence. I think many are pursuing the sport in a way that stunts their growth as humans. Kayaking is their escape and fantasy, not a means of expanding who they are.”

“World records are another case in point, like the arguments we see about world record waterfalls. There aren’t any world records on the river. The soul of the river is endless change and cannot be quantified. People who talk about records are like the confused students of the Buddha – they stare at the sage’s finger while he’s pointing at the moon. Kayaking is just a little sport, and it’s just going down a river in a plastic boat. It’s fun, we love it, but the evolution is all personal. There’s no reason to treat it like some pedestal of courage or make good kayakers into two-bit celebrities. They don’t deserve it no matter what they’ve done. Ironically, the people I meet who are generally most articulate about the meaning of kayaking are thoughtful beginners and intermediates, not the experts. Skill in kayaking has almost nothing to do with insight. If anything, it often seems to arrest people into a perpetual adolescence.”

“In the martial arts, most people look at a black belt [Ammons is about to receive his third] and think it reflects the highest level. But actually, it is only the symbol of a beginning. You are now to the level where you can start learning at a deep level – which is a journey that will last your entire life. The realization should be that the journey is endless, that it requires humility, and that all the complexity and difficulty needs to be distilled into simple truths.”

In the mid to late 1990s, after following his children into kenpo karate twelve years ago, Ammons then also began practicing a Japanese sword style. After studying kenpo for years, an offshoot of southern Shaolin kung fu, Ammons began the parallel journey of becoming one with the razor-sharp sword, and he demonstrated deftness from the first.

In the very first seminar he was in, after literally only a few dozen practice swings, he did a perfect cut. The eighth degree black belt teaching the seminar stopped everything and said somberly, “This almost never happens even among experts. It takes a perfect cut, a perfect angle and speed.” He and Ammons quickly became close friends. There have been numerous other perfect cuts as Ammons has practiced over the last several years. Last week, he even made two successive perfect cuts in a row, which is unheard of and nearly impossible: the sword cut through the target and the first piece remained, then he sliced through the target again, and the second cut piece remained motionless, sitting in place.

“All the energy went into the cut and nothing went into the cut piece,” he says. “So it has no force on it at all, doesn’t even know it’s been cut. That’s the ideal. For that single instant, that one part of the line, the force, angle, and touch are all perfect. It leaves you with the feeling the target opened up and allowed the sword to pass through as if it wasn’t there.” He thinks for a few moments and sums it up in what could be a description of his entire career.

“It’s the same feeling you have when you’re in harmony with the river; the water can be exploding in chaos and power, but it all disappears. You move smoothly through the confusion as if it is the easiest, most effortless thing. I think that is true for all sports, all music and all activities. We spend years seeking a sense of purity and inspiration, and if we’re lucky, sometimes everything comes together in a fleeting glimpse of perfection.”

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