A Reminder

Long before sunrise, the sky is clear - a perfect spring day. It's 5am and I'm headed out, driving 300 miles nonstop to the North Fork of the Payette River in Idaho. Up and down three passes and through seven river drainages, that drive has exactly two thousand one hundred and seventy-one sharp corners with guard-rails and cliffs and overhangs. I ought to know, in the last 20 years I've ripped the rubber off of four sets of tires and counted every one of those corners a couple hundred times. But I keep going back because it's the greatest drive in the world to the greatest river in the world. This morning I'm high as a kite and flooring it the whole way, barely on the road with a smile that won't stop.

Over Lolo pass, I dodge a deer and one startled bear munching clover beside the road. Play chicken with a moose - I'm the chicken - and watch a beautiful sunrise through the misty fog on the Lochsa River. The water’s high and cold and the sun’s just up over the mountains, warm through the near-freezing air. I can see my breath when I stop for a few minutes and clamber down through the boulders. A ritual toast to the rivers of the world, "Here's to life!" I shout, and drink deep from the icy clean water, mixed from the melting of a hundred winter snows up along the divide. Then it's up the bank and revving down the road with a spray of gravel. Every river I pass - the Lochsa, the South Fork of the Clearwater, the Salmon and Little Salmon - every one of them is pumping and high, with swells and waves rushing past. And the sky above me is deep deep blue and beautiful, running past the ragged trees on the ridgeline.

It's a manic drive, and three hours later when I whip down past the Cascade reservoir, I look over and can see that all the release pipes are going full bore. The overflow channel is a solid flume of white shooting hundreds of feet through the air and below, the riverbed is flooded. And then I know for sure - the North Fork's going to be good. There's an energy in the air as I fly down the highway beside the river, the asphalt whipping past. Down into the canyon and over the old cement bridge, peering and trying to guess the flow. What is it? 5000 cubic feet a second? 6000? Damn the river's high again and raging. We're in for a great day...

The North Fork of the Payette is one big romp of a river. It cuts a narrow canyon straight south out of the center of Idaho from the mountains around McCall down toward Banks, a little north of Boise. On its way, it falls a good 3000 feet before it gets to the dry rolling hills at the bottom, and most of that is in one big plunge from Smith's Ferry to Banks. It's a thumper, and the best full-on river-running in the world. 15 times as steep as the Grand Canyon of the Colorado and a hundred times as wild. You don't need to say much to the guys who have paddled it - they know exactly what you're talking about when they hear you say The North Fork.

The railroad hems the river in on one side and the highway on the other. The river naturally has a narrow riverbed, but when the highway and railway engineers started rolling big boulders down into the water, things got pretty squeezy down there. The sharp boulders look like they could decapitate you if you go upsidedown, and they can. The river is no more than 40 feet across in some places and it almost seems like you can touch the other side - except what is in between is this brawling, frothing monster. The dam engineers like to keep the flow down for irrigation below, and through the summer you're almost always guaranteed a good level - about 1500 to 2000 cubic feet a second. That's a level when the riverbed is getting filled and fast, the boulders are covered - sort of - and there's nonstop action with big ledges and breaking waves and holes. You pinball down in your kayak getting bounced all over the river, and even good paddlers from elsewhere find it pretty disconcerting. You're not supposed to run a river that way, seat of the pants and blasting along.

At those flows the rapids are big class IV+ and V, and I'm talking western style, which means just about any other paddlers in the world would consider it solid Class V to V+. Many of the small number of people who run "top to bottoms," the full 15 miles of Smith's Ferry to Banks, consider it a milestone of their careers. The problem is once you've been on the river when the water really gets up like it is today, you have to redefine what "Class V" means and normal flows just don't cut it anymore. There's a kind of absurd redefinition of reality in looking at things that way, but you have to see it to believe it and that's just the way it is.

About 50 years ago the dam builders did their best to put a bridle on the river, building the Cascade dam, and another dam way upstream at McCall, right at the headwaters. But there's a limit to the bridles you can put on a river like this, and in the spring when there's lots of snow in the mountains and it starts melting, there isn't much the Bureau of Reclamation can do at the Cascade Dam except open the floodgates and pray. The highway borders the river the whole way down, and you can scout most of the run from your car. It won’t do you much good though because the thing just goes and goes, and unlike most rivers, you have to take it in big bites. A little scout here or there doesn’t do much good. You’ll blow by the eddy you thought you could make and be in no-man’s land in no time at all, because the whole river is one big rapid. It's solid white from start to finish - 15 miles of huge waves, exploding and mashing water, with the lower five considered manageable, while the upper ten miles is Another World. Every five or six years when the water starts pumping like it is today, everything hikes up a couple notches, and all but a couple of the most serious locals stand on the bank in silence, shake their heads, and then drive to something that looks within the scope of sanity.

I meet up with my friend Greg, taking for granted we're going to make a run. Greg's a good man, an intellectual who somehow got into paddling a long time ago. A reporter, writer, cabinet maker, a thoughtful guy who likes a challenge, whether it’s shaping a block of wood into a crafted four-drawer dresser, or taking on a wildthing of a river.

We put his car at the bottom and drove mine up the canyon to the top, pointing and comparing assessments of the rapids along the way. He and I have run the river together lots of times over the years, but if it's class V at the normal flows, when it gets four or five times that much water in it you're in a different realm. At 6000 cubic feet a second, you have to start scratching your head. Is it Class VI? Class VII? Class VIII? Who knows? The numbers don't matter even if other people knew what you were talking about. It's solid romping water - 30 or 35 miles per hour, 12-14 foot breaking waves and holes and full-on. Let's just say, you better be paddling real well or you'll be dead in a hurry. Even at the normal levels there are plenty of lost or ruined boats, boats wrapped around boulders, paddles destroyed. And since hard plastic boats can take a beating, soft human flesh doesn't do so well either. There have been countless deep bone bruises, teeth knocked loose, stitches, dislocated shoulders, and several deaths. The fact is, there probably would be a lot more carnage except that when the water gets up, the thing looks so mean that just about nobody wants to tangle with it. But to some of us the heart of the beauty is in the power of that river, rolling wild and free.

Greg and I put on at the top and paddled downstream, rounding the opening set of corners and heading into Steepness, the first rapid. On a normal river, you come up on a rapid, get out and scout, then run the thing. But here, Steepness begins with a good half mile of manic whitewater - totally continuous and huge at the level we had. Exploding waves, shuttering gusts of water as we come down, two ping pong balls whacked from side to side keeping pace with the cars up on the highway.

I don't know how to describe it, but close your eyes and feel the thing. It explodes, writhes underneath you, thrashing and punching at you. You roll with everything you can, and weather anything you can't roll with. When you start out, your reflexes are always behind because everything's happening twice as fast as anything you've ever seen. No matter how fast you react, the river’s always two steps ahead of you. It's like playing your kid's video game, the one with the realistic 3-D images and the jet motorcycle that goes 150 miles an hour. The world whizzes by at breakneck speed, you hit a ramp and jump 200 feet into the air, hurtling a quarter mile through space then ripping through the top of a palm tree. Uhhhhgg! That's what it's like, if you know what I mean, only the North Fork is real. And the tree isn't some fake soft-fronded palm, it's a 60 foot long, anvil-hard Ponderosa pine blocking a corner of the river as you pound down straight for the thing, ready to wrap your boat or break your arms, tear your head off, and most assuredly drown you.

People think that all the power and crashing means you have to be aggressive and attack, but that’s not so. The water is the vessel of all opposites, hard but supple, complex and simple, and you can never forget that. You sometimes get carried away by the excitement, but you have to pay close attention to each reminder because otherwise it'll kill you. It takes a clear head and calm nerves to run a river like this, you can't fight it or oppose its force. All that chaotic wildness has to be worked with, smoothly, without hurry. You have to match everything you do to the mood of the water, threading yourself into its power. If you do it right you'll become a part of the flow of Nature herself. You don't conquer or tame that beast, you just try your best to live with it for a little while. But there’s never any malice in the water’s action. It just is, and it can’t be anything different. If you find yourself wishing it was something different, then that just means you have more to learn.

Greg and I ran Steepness and down through Nutcracker. Then Disneyland, Double S-turn and Slide, one after the other through the meat of the run. Huge geysering mauling drops that never stop, they just go and go, one after the other. It's like a roller coaster cruising down a broken, mangled railway - one endless, massive derailment in action, pounding and shuttering and shaking the ground as you scout carefully along the bank for most of a mile, and then at some point you say, "I know the line" and get in and become a part of that pounding and shuttering and shaking. It's our element and we're on, rapid after rapid. Bad Jose, NoWhere to Run, Bouncer Down the Middle, Pectoralis Major. After a good three hours we came to Jacob's Ladder and Golf Course, the crux of the whole run.

Jacob's is a long gradual left turn, one of the narrowest and steepest parts of the river. And the most intimidating. At 6000 cfs, the water funnels into this flume and when it hits the first ledges, humps up into exploding waves that break violently all the way across the river, way up into the boulders on the right bank. Miss the move, and you'll be surfed up into the rocks and ripped apart. The word is - don't miss that move! Then it drives down a straightaway at 35 mph to slam into a river-wide hole ten feet high. If you get through that, it lunges down another huge drop and slams into this Thing. You could sort-of call this Thing a hole, but really it looks like the water's gushing out of the earth itself in a huge mounding pile the size of an 18-wheeler. Then, you have a half mile of Golf Course, winding, exploding, with 12 foot deep holes and logs along the side. Enjoy.

We stood at the bottom of Jacob's Ladder and scouted.

"So, what would you call this, Professor?" I asked Greg.

Greg rubbed his neatly trimmed bread and hmmmed and then hmmmmed some more. Finally he said, "It's class Six-plus. The limit of controlled navigatability." A pause and another hmmmm. "I guess it might be possible to wash through something harder and still be alive, but..." he let the sentence dangle in the air because there wasn't much point in finishing it. Then he added, "I'm not trying it."

He waved toward the end of Golf Course, a long way downstream. "I'm putting in at the bottom."

"Well, I'm running," I said. "Watch for me."

Kayaking is "free soloing," like climbing without a rope. You push out into that current and deal with what's there, come what may. There's this great purity because it's always just a one-shot deal. You get one chance and one chance only and you have to lay your best shit on the line, and in water like this - it's everything you got. So all the thinking and pondering has to come before, all the considering of safety and lines and weighing and assessing the moves. You've got to answer the question, "Can I do it?" And if you say yes, then you pull into the current and deal.

I dealt. Down the lead-in to Jacob's, cutting through the breaking waves and driving straight into the close-out hole. As I hit, I flatten myself on the deck with a paddle feathered out just a little so it doesn't get ripped out of my hand, and I submarine through. A quick spin back to the left and the river gives me a straight flush into the Thing. It's towering over my head and thwwuuup, I'm into the center of it - all froth and deep deep deep until I shoot out the backside, then, spinning and cutting and rodeoing through all the unbelievable stuff in Golf Course. It just comes and comes and I twist and move with the coiling water, my boat gets shot completely into the air, punching through the endless exploding waves and holes.

A long way down, after 80 seconds of sheer bizarre dealing, I pull the eddy where Greg is, with muscles screaming for rest. I bob there, breathing heavily and hanging onto the branch of a tree that has toppled over into the water. Greg looks upstream, then back at me.

"Commendable paddling," he says.

"Thanks," I say between pants.

We both know we're through the worst. It's still another 6 miles out of the 15, but we're through the hardest by far. We're feeling good, everything's gone smoothly and I let down a notch. Another mile downstream, after a well-named rapid called Screaming Left Turn, we eddy out at the top of the Jaws sequence. It's a long rapid, the river flushing back and forth for turn after turn, piling up on one side gnawing against the rock walls, then up the other side into boulders and over ledges. There's just this one big rapid left, then we're to the lower five miles, and bigtime Class V fun to the take out.

Greg smiles, gives a little nod, and peels out of the eddy. I wait a few seconds - not long enough - and paddle into the rapid 30 yards behind him.

When you head into a huge rapid, there's always this sense of disbelief. If it's really a big rapid, the river drops off the face of the earth; all you see is a horizonline of humped up dark water, and you feel like you're like revving your car straight for the edge of a cliff. You come up on it and the whole rapid is somewhere on the other side, unseen, crashing away below. All the power of the world seethes beneath you. You feel it welling up and accelerating, pulling at you like a bronco in the stall, muscles tensing, ready for the gate to open. The bronc's will is to break away and not be chained, to fight every limitation and barrier and kick and snort and go like a hellion any way it can. A bad bronc might have some bad attitude toward you, he might feel those spurs and think and wait and set you up, and then do you. But this bronc is liquid and weighs thousands of tons and doesn't think and doesn't care. So you hang on the expectancy as you paddle toward that horizonline. Then, you slip over it, the bronc's cut loose and you're out of the gate.

I follow Greg over the horizonline, and suddenly, we're hurtling along as fast as a runaway car down a steep mountain, bouncing and slamming and jumping. Huge waves launch up before me. Whoosh! over the top of the wave, the explosion at the crest kicking me out of the air and I balance and fly. For an instant I can see far down the river, then the water shudders with a huge twist and a surge shoves me one way, then lurches up, grabs and rips at the paddle. Greg's far ahead, popping up, then gone. Then I'm up at the top of another wave and Greg pops up, his boat skipping away to the right and I hunker down and brace because I know that I'm about to hit a big hole. I crest the wave - and there it is- an erupting white wall. I'm jammed into it and my reactions are all reflex. I get small, with my head on the deck of the boat and the paddle feathered into the hole, shoulders hunched so they won't dislocate from the force. I dive down, it bucks me wildly and like Greg, I'm shot, skipping far right across the surface of the water by a manic driving power.

It's wonderful, full-on, we're cooking. Then suddenly I'm right on Greg's tail, and shocked we're so close. Jesus! Get away, I think, or he'll get caught in a hole and my boat will break him in half. A split second decision. I spin the boat and try to put some distance between us. If I come down on him when he's caught, I'll either kill him with my boat, or he'll kill me. Little thoughts fly through my mind, get away, get away, spin and move away.

The river takes any little thing you give it and hammers you over the head. A wave catches and throws me, kayak and all, 15 feet through the air to the side. I land and the water's all rushing bubbles, gusting into my face and sucking at the paddle. We’ve still got another long corner before the crux - but anywhere in here I could slam a rock and get knocked out, paddle ripped out of my hand - Get up! A quick sweep of my paddle, and I'm upright and moving. Then, damn, Greg shoots upward out of a hole and right across my path.

I'm backpaddling again, trying to get away, but the river is pounding down around the corner right above the crux. We have to get right, the whole left side plunges over a big ledge into this nasty, bullshit place we call the Dome Hole, one of the biggest holes on the river. I spin back right and start making my move, but out of nowhere Greg's shot in front of me again and I’m backpaddling to get away. Another wave explodes underneath me and I'm airborne, flying upside-down way to the left. I land head down, immediately start rolling, then I'm crushed into a rock. Stars explode in front of my eyes and this huge, sharp breaking, cracking pain explodes in my head and shoulder and back as my body's crumpled around a rock, narrow and sharp on the front, cutting the water apart like the prow of a ship. For an instant, I can feel the water smashing me against the rock, crushing and crushing and the pain's overwhelming and my head's filled with lights and then I wash free upsidedown, stunned and seeing stars with a sharp metallic taste filling my mouth.

I'm hurt bad, and I know it. The water's washboarding across a shelf of boulders, piling along and slamming into every one, The line's over to the far right, and I’m way left and hurt and I know the Dome Hole is just downstream. My mind screams, It's shallow shallow shallow, you'll hit again. Get up! I crank up a roll with pain piercing through my neck, shoulder and back, and I'm just upright as my knuckles rip across the top of another boulder, tearing the skin off the back of my hand. I’m looking down at the blood sprouting bright red from the knuckles and bone but I don’t have time for any of that, no time, no time, get back right.

The river's turning to the right and the water's piling high up onto the left bank, waves are breaking onto me and won't let me turn. Got 40 yards, just a couple seconds to move right. I sweep hard to spin the boat. There's a sharp grating of bone-on-bone and I gasp as a lightning bolt of bright pain stabs through my neck and shoulder. I sweep again and there’s another bright flash and a wave of nausea as the bones run ragged and scraping across each other and a little voice says, "broke your collarbone in half...” The thought is there but it's just another fact of the millions that don’t matter in a world rushing by faster than I can reel in.

The water doesn't stop, it never stops and I'm washing away and my head's ringing and I'm fighting to stay upright, but the boat's slamming over the washboard rocks at high speed, just skipping and ricocheting, and the boat's flexing and my head and shoulder and back are white hot pain. The Dome Hole. It's just downstream. I know it's there, and I'm calm but I know it's there and the whole river is ramming me right at it. My balance totters, pain shooting all the way all through my shoulders and down into my lower back and hips.

The metallic taste fills my mouth and I sweep a third time and there's another explosion of bright pain. I'm not mad, not frustrated, not scared, I'm just thinking, Make the move. But the water is flushing me way left, and I'm bearing down on the corner and suddenly, I know I can't make it. I glance and see a big curling wave on the crest of the ramp above the Dome Hole and know I've got one chance to take a stoke and catch the wave enough to surf a little back to the right, away from the gut of the hole. I’ve got maybe a second watching it coming and setting my backstroke, then I'm swept up on the wave and it breaks down on me and I stroke and - nothing happens. My right arm doesn't work; it's paralyzed. I'm willing it to work, but my neck and shoulder and arm just scream back at me with another explosion of pain. Time freezes, then the curling wave lifts me up, spins the boat effortlessly, and flushes me backwards down the ramp into the biggest hole on the river. And I'm calm, so calm, just looking up into the blue sky and all I can think is, I'm in for it now.

I hit the bottom, and the water drives me down and the huge, flushing plunger of the river cartwheels the boat end-for-end like a kid's toy. I can feel the boat airborne and I twist it strong, cranking my body to the left as the boat flies out and twists to land upright, and for an instant I'm balanced, then I'm sucked back down into the gut of the thing and feel it driving me deep, and then the boat surges out of the water, rising and airborne in another cartwheel and I hang my weight back and twist and drive the boat with my knees as it flips through the air. I land up high on the backwash, I can feel I’m way up near the balance point on the crest and I know this is it. I dig my paddle deep into the bursting water and pull. I pull and pull with my bad arm as the hole yanks and rips my paddle and that grating bone pain explodes in lights flashing through my body. Waves of nausea flush through me, and my arm and back are locked up and I can’t move them but I keep pulling and pulling with everything I have.

And then I wash free.

My balance is almost gone, and I'm fighting to stay upright, spots dancing in front of me, nausea pulsing and my whole right side has seized up. That grating bone pain pierces deep, deep inside me, and I know I'm broken up, hurt bad and thinking, If you black out you’re dead. Just try to stay upright. Another 150 yards, around the next corner there's an eddy, the only chance I've got.

I can hardly keep from flipping, everything is seizing, muscles spasming and refusing to work, my body's gone rigid. And the bright piercing pain is everywhere now, I can't even move my paddle on my right and so I lock my arm down against the deck and brace left and get hit again and again down through the last big holes and breaking waves of the rapid, totally at the mercy of the water, trying to stay upright because I’m sure I can’t roll if I go under again. If I wash down past the eddy I'll flush into another big rapid below it that's a half-mile long and I can’t do it and can’t swim in this shit. Got to make the eddy.

I round the corner and there's the eddy ahead with the river rushing fast by it. The water swirls and surges, spinning the boat strongly. The eddyline pushes out away from the bank, welling up, and I'm doing everything I can to angle and cut through it. I turn the boat as best I can, but the current spins me as I hit the eddywall, it pushes me back out into the river and I'm swept downstream by the swift water. I'm concentrating and leaning on my left paddle blade, weakly sculling and trying to time my turn. Exhausted, muscles locked up, panting, I finally get the right angle and wash into the big moving eddy. The water sloshes back and forth like it's in a huge tank, and I scull and spin over to the bank and grab onto a rock with my left hand. I sit there fighting to stay conscious, concentrating on a piece of driftwood in the water as the spots and nausea and the whole world grows and fades in pulses. I made it. I god-damn made it.

Greg pulls into the eddy. "Jesus! What a rapid!" he yells out. He's half laughing, amazed at how wild it was. He hadn't even seen what happened to me because he'd been too busy dealing with his own epic. Then he notices I'm bent over. "Are you okay?"

"Broke my collarbone, I think. Can't move." He quickly gets out of his boat and stands in the water holding onto me. Dazed and nearly paralyzed, I kept concentrating on that little piece of driftwood in front of me, flipping and washing back and forth in the waves.

Greg helps me out of my boat and up the bank. We cut off my drytop and flag down a truck on the highway. Soon we're in Greg's car, driving down toward the hospital in Boise. I'm lying there with my eyes closed, letting the pain move through me, pissed off that I made the mistake of following him too closely and pissed off I didn't paddle the river like it needs to be paddled. I just didn't do it. And I almost paid everything for that.

At the hospital they poke me and do their CAT scans and X-rays and shoot me full of demerol. They find a dislocated collarbone, separated shoulder, ripped cartilage along my ribs and down my sternum, badly bruised shoulder blade, torn muscles from my neck to my shoulder and all down my back. The river stomped me. But I made the eddy.

That was five years ago, I've been back since and paddled the river many times. I'm as recovered as I'll ever be, and it's good enough I guess. My collarbone still pops and snaps, the shoulder still hurts. When I get tired, the muscles in my neck lock up. There are big knots in there, from all the tearing. You take your lumps and try to come away the wiser for it. I think about the accident every once in a while. Six inches to the right and I would have caught the entire force of the rock on my helmet, been knocked unconscious and drowned. Six inches to the left and I would have taken the hit on my back and been padded by my lifejacket. Life sometimes hangs on the details. You can make of that what you want.

I was on the water late that fall, three months after the accident with a group of friends. I couldn't paddle very well, but the water was low and not nearly as difficult. I wasn't healed and hadn't been in my kayak for all that time. After only an hour on the river I was hurting. But it was a great Indian summer day, and I love paddling and I love that river, even if it almost killed me.

As we got to Jaws, we eddied out in the swirling pool above. My buddies said, "Where's that rock? Show us that damn rock and let's dynamite the thing!" One of them swung his paddle around and yelled, "I'm gonna whack the hell out of it. I'll spit on it as we go by!" I laughed and let them go on ahead, this time with plenty of room. I hung back thinking about that day, still sharp in my mind and the pain in my shoulder. I ran the rapid cautiously, well behind the others, making moves cleanly and trying to find the same boulder.

I eddied out right above it - a car-sized rock, narrow and sharp on the front, cutting the water apart like the prow of a ship. I tried to imagine what I must have looked like there, pinned on the front with five times as much water bearing down, crushing me, breaking me. I remembered the franticness, the sharp bright pain, and closed my eyes with everything vivid in my mind. After a few minutes I peeled out into the current wondering should I hit the thing? should I spit on it? But as the river washed me by I reached out my hand and ran it over the boulder for an instant and said, "Thanks for reminding me."

***