Live
your life like a river,
becoming a part of every place you touch
and taking with you a piece of every place
you pass through.
To
give interested readers a taste of the writing, here are excerpts
from several stories:
From:
“The Horizonline”
…Since
that first day on the Lochsa, I've paddled a lot of rivers. Kayaking
has shown me a lot of fun, a lot of seriousness, and a simple fact:
life is full of horizonlines. They come in all shapes and sizes -
accidents and jobs, people, marriage, and children. Time is the
current that pushes us toward the edges of what we know, usually
faster than we can cope. And flowing water is the current of time
made real. I know that fear comes from doubt about where those
horizonlines lead. I also know that the truths of life, large and
small, are what lie beyond each one.
From
“Counting Coup Along the Yellowstone River”:
…Kayaking
teams are strange mixtures of personalities and ours was no
different. On the one hand, paddlers are strong individuals, each
the captain of his own ship working with the river alone. On the
other hand, if you’re going to paddle with people in a
difficult place, it had better be a close-knit crew. When it works
well, a team is the perfect democracy, but when it doesn’t,
it's civil war. Our little group was one of those peculiar matches
that made a very good team.
McD
was a big guy who liked to move along his own path, and at 6 foot 4,
wiry and muscular, you weren’t going to get in his way. One of
the top expedition paddlers for many years and a long time big wall
climber, he had the whole package for weird descents. He was a
poster-child for quirkiness though, with mannerisms such as taking
pride in his healthful eating (only whole grains and veggies),
avoiding all fats and meat. He offset this by stuffing chewing
tobacco in his mouth, stealing my chocolate chip cookies, and smoking
an occasional cigarette. He reminded me of another pal who always
ordered vegetarian pizzas – with sausage. A smooth, cool
reserve gave McD a level head no matter what broke loose. It also
kept the world at arm’s length, although certain friends were
allowed entry.
Where
McD was herbivorous, Rapid Rob loved meat and grease. Where McD was
reserved, Rob loved to chat. And if McD was quirky, Rob matched him
quirk for quirk. He was a homebody who had paddled the globe.
Someone who inexplicably got in a dither making everyday decisions
but was lucidly clear on difficult rivers. He also was the original
“been there, done that” guy in kayaking – been
North and South, all the way East and all the way West, with first
descents in Alaska, South America, the Himalayas and points between.
He had even been to the Park years before and done the first descent
of the Yellowstone's Grand Canyon, although the trip through the
Black Canyon was aborted due to one of the earliest coups counted by
the Park Service. As in many other places in the history of
kayaking, Rob helped define the game here, which by the time we
showed up on this trip in the fall of 1986, already had a fair
history…
…It
should never be said that the park rangers don’t have a sense
of humor in their own warped way. They sprung their trap so the
humiliation was maximized, waiting until one friend had packed up his
boat, changed into his kayaking gear, and was squatting down to
relieve himself in the bushes. Suddenly, on flashed the
searchlights. "Hold it right there!" shouted the
rangers. I don't think he could have held it if his life depended on
it. They threw the book at him and his embarrassment was complete.
To top it off, he was also fined for "littering". With
attitudes like that, it is no wonder the kayakers and the rangers
take all this personally, even though none of them know the others.
The battle goes on with the Yellowstone River as the prize, as each
tries to count coup on the other.
From:
“A Line Worth Drawing”:
The
world is a tunnel. GETRIGHT burned the wordless laserbeam in my
head. Two quick strokes to angle sharply to the right as I flushed
down the funnel, one more for speed into the bottom. Crushed
downward by tons of water in the breaking diagonals. Stay in
control. GETRIGHT. The boat reared and I felt it begin twisting and
shooting upward in a towering backendo. Can't land upside down.
GETRIGHT is all that matters. The whole universe is nothing but
GETRIGHT. Reaching back with my paddle as I erupted into the air, I
spun the boat into an airborne pirouette -and
landed perfectly upright moving fast toward the right bank. Two
sharp strokes and a quick turn back to the left and I was on line,
whisked past the edge of the hole and into the rearing, bucking
diagonals at the bottom. I sped into an eddy a short distance above
the ramp, shouting at myself. I botched that so bad. Jesus, I was
off-line. Why didn't I scout carefully? Why didn't I look at those
ledge holes more closely? I could have died in that hole or what was
below. I was so ridiculously, stupidly, idiotically off-line…
From:
“A Little Ride up the Alsek River”:
…We
followed the river upstream, skimming the big boulders that shoved up
out of the current, and within a few short minutes we were headed up
into the notch at the lower end of Turnback canyon. We swung back
and forth and looking ahead, could see the notch coming closer and
closer, and I heard Gerry say, "That's looks like a pretty tight
fit..." and whoooom Makkonen split the first gap, right
in between the cliff on the right and the 100 foot high outcrop of
rock on the left. Gerry couldn’t help himself and blurted out,
“Oh my God--” as the cliffs roared by with a quick
whumph on either side, the rotors just clearing the edges and
I clenched my seat with both hands and Charlie lowered his camera and
stared forward as we headed right for the cliff wall in front of us.
Makkonen
swung the chopper up on edge and took the corner at a full bank,
rotors thumping, the machine shaking and its struts flush up against
the wall and the water of a huge class V rapid flashing by at arm’s
length right outside my window. I don’t get scared very often
and I can't say I was scared right then, but I suddenly thought,
“He's going to kill us. We’re going to die.”…
From
“The Tahiti Room”:
"We
had a whole new damn sport! We made up rules, things that made good
sense. Can't swim, gotta climb. If ya come up for any reason, gotta
start over. Gotta keep your head and hands under the water, no
coming out into the air. Pretty soon, we started picking places
where the current was stronger, and then we saw what the big game
really was. Current's like gravity, you know? and easy
slopers in calm water are mega-rasper friction lines when the current
starts crankin'. Hell, you got gravity on tap! Pick your own line
with your own custom gravity, 'cept it ain’t even, it was
flowing gravity, if you know what I mean. Moving! It's got
bite and push and life. For Christsakes, it was river gravity
and river gravity ain't like anything you ever seen.
"And
then, it all came together. We were sitting there on the scuba tanks
one day after a bunch a climbin', taking off our flippers and wet
suits, and somebody says, “Hey, we should look for the Tahiti
Room.” At first it was a joke, you know? and we all laughed for
a while and nobody took it seriously but the idea was in the air, and
after a few minutes, we all looked at each other and said, “yeah.”
From:
“Alive:
Downstream
the canyon curved around a corner to the left and went out of sight.
In summer he liked it when the sun was overhead on these turns,
reflecting off the smooth boulders and bedrock. And after one of
those long summer rains, when he did a run late in the day and
everything was still wet, it sat in the sky right off the hump of the
ridge and blew his eyes out as he paddled into it. The light would
run with the ragged water, shimmer and jump, then disappear over the
big series of drops below. It was too bright to see but he looked
anyway, paddling down with eyes watering from the brightness and
making moves right into the sun. That's what was best. He could
feel the light like the water. Sensing the moves and paddling on
feel alone down waves and waterfalls of light. On runs like that, he
sometimes eddied out above the big series to look at it snake away,
so beautiful and bright. "Like a band of steel," he had
always thought. "Just like the sun on a band of steel."
From
“The Games of the Mayan Gods”
Set
free from gravity we reach into a different world, where Gods might
live forever but mortals cannot. The Maya called it the Place of Fear
and Awe, and if we enter, we can only hope to be there a few moments
when we are at the height of our care, knowing the consequences for
any mistake will be violent and final.
I
swept the paddle as my bow shot off the edge, separating from the
powers of this world. And there, suspended for a fleeting instant
between the sky and the water, our world and the Underworld, I played
the games of the Mayan Gods.
