ROCKS ARE HARD

Lessons from a life on the river

Rocks, part 1

If you read enough books, watch enough movies and TV, you begin to doubt everything. The foundations of knowledge seem insubstantial. Everything is relative. Nothing is certain. 

And then one day the realities of the world come back to you with considerable impact. 

Picture this: Four of us come to a blind drop on the Jacques Cartier river in Quebec, a spot where the river passes through a narrow gap between rock and shore and falls cleanly out of sight. A perfect horizon line.

As I pull into the quiet water along the rocky bank, my friend Doug Gordon, in the lead as usual, climbs back down from a height of rocks above. “I remember this one,” says Doug, the only one of us who has run the river before. “It’s no problem. Just go over heading a little left.”

Now, I have sworn to never run a blind drop without getting out and taking a look for myself. But this is Doug. Doug, who’s not only smart enough to have zipped through Harvard in three years, but who’s also been on the U.S. whitewater team from 1981 to 1987. A smart guy, a reliable guy, and my best friend. What’s more, the lead-in looks easy. Okay, I’ll make an exception. 

I take a few deep breaths, spin my little craft around, paddle for the edge, angle left. My bow drops suddenly, and for a moment I’m free-falling; the pool below is farther away than I expected, but that’s no problem...

Here’s where the reality part comes in. One moment everything is great, the sun is shining, I’m in my element, all’s right with the world ... then, CRACK!

I hit so hard that I break the knee straps that hold me in position in my decked canoe. I slam forward into the front of the cockpit rim. Before I know it I’m upside down, there’s foamy water fizzing all around me, I’m hurt, and I don’t know what’s coming next.

Well, yes, I roll the boat back upright again, somehow -- it’s hard without knee straps -- and I get myself to the bank and crawl out and moan and groan and complain, and Doug walks over and says apologetically, “I forgot to mention that little rock on the way left.”

🌊

Now, consider the reality of that little rock on the left that I so accurately speared. Consider how non-subjective that rock is. After I came back from Quebec, I mentioned that rock to others who had run the Jacques Cartier. “Oh, yeah, I know the one you mean,” they said.

Physicists inform us that rocks, all solid objects, are mostly space, and I’m sure that on some level, they’re right. But we don’t live on that level. On our scale of things, halfway between the size of the nucleus of an atom and the size of the universe, rocks are solid enough. (Physicists I can’t answer for; I’ve never collided with a physicist.)

The next time somebody said to me, “You create your own reality,” I thought of that rock on the Jacques Cartier. Is that rock a shared illusion? Is it nothing but “mind-stuff?” A “linguistic convention?”

No. I went out there, beyond the edge of civilization, testing the waters, and I’ve come back from the river to tell you: Rocks are hard.

Mind Like Water, part 1

 It is very annoying to be told what revelation you are supposed to have, or will inevitably have, or must have already had. “It’s so wonderful that you can be one with the water like that,” someone will gush. Or you overhear a fellow whitewater fanatic saying, “You can’t fight the water, you have to yield to it.” Go with the flow, conquer through surrender, merge, lose yourself, be one with the all, you’ve heard it....

 Yes, it’s annoying. So it is with some reluctance that I admit, there is some truth to all that. A lot, in fact. I mean to say -- well, it’s true. You conquer the water in the same sense that a mouse running through the stalls without being trampled conquers the horses. You go along, you get along, you yield. And in case you start thinking that you’re hot stuff, invulnerable, the river always has a new surprise to remind you of your place in the scheme of things. (At this point I could tell you the one about the young Olympic medalist wrapping an open canoe on a rock in a dead-easy rapid, trapping and nearly drowning the unsuspecting journalist who was his passenger -- but I -- er, he -- would perhaps deny it.) 

In chaos theory, the theory of large and complex systems, there is something called the butterfly effect: the flapping of a butterfly’s wings in one place can cause a hurricane somewhere else. Small inputs can have large results. This is how relatively small, weak paddlers can deal with the big, powerful forces of wildly careening water. They drop themselves in at just the right angle, with just the right speed and spin, throw in a few well-placed strokes of the paddle, and are shot unharmed into the pool below. At least that’s the idea. It is also congruent with this theory that it rarely works out exactly the way you planned. “It’s all physics,” one of my coaches used to tell me, and of course that’s true. But it isn’t billiard-ball physics. Everything is in flux, waves surge and recede, whirlpools form and die. As Heraclitus pointed out twenty-five hundred years ago, “You never step in the same river twice; the water has changed, and so has the man.” Analysis is good, it helps you picture what is happening, but once you get into your boat, the time for analysis is over. Every run is different. You have to react to the moment. Let it happen, don’t make it happen. All that stuff. 

Annoying, but true: Go with the flow.

Mind Like Water, part 2

There is one more word to be said on this topic. You think you’ve learned the lesson; you think you understand whitewater, deep in your bones; you time your strokes with the waves; you lean just so when you enter an eddy; you think you’re one with the water ... and then along comes Richard Fox.

Fox, a Brit, won a lot of races, including five World Championships, but even when he didn’t win, he was always the one to watch. Fox had the distinction of being the least rhythmic whitewater kayaker on the circuit. One moment he would leave a blade in the water for five or six seconds and just stir it around, as if feeling for something under the surface; the next he’d throw in a blur of frenetically quick strokes as if pursued by a shark. Often he would fail to alternate sides, with his double-bladed kayak paddle, instead taking two or more strokes on one side like a canoeist. Most paddlers have an internal rhythm, and though on whitewater they do adjust to the river you can see the effect of their regularity fighting against the chaotic syncopation of current and wave. Not Fox. It was as if he had no pulse, no rhythm except the river’s. Hardly a touchy-feely kind of guy, on the shore; but no one was more in tune with the river.

Disconcerting. There is always more to discover. Even when you think you’re one with the water -- you think you’re yielding -- you think you’re entirely in the moment -- you think you’re one with the world -- you could be more in touch, you could be closer. More alert. Like a Fox.

Body Unlike Water

For every yin, there is a yang.

One with the river, one with the water ... and not. 

My brother and I are camping along the Upper Yough (“Yock”) in the Maryland panhandle. The Upper Yough is a perfect training river, complex and continuous, challenging without being daunting. Each morning we drive up to the Sang Run bridge, and one of us gears up and paddles off alone, while the other drives back to our campsite. We alternate days.

(By the way, Never Boat Alone is a very good rule ... now back to our story.)

It is late autumn. A cold rain falls. Yellow leaves drop soundlessly; many trees are entirely stripped, though the oaks hold fast to their mounds of russet. Today it’s my turn on the river.

Three miles in, the rain becomes a steady downpour. Then it rains harder. Even the eddies and pools are frothed by the rain, beaten into a rough spiky stubble. It is becoming hard to see. 

And then, absurdly, it rains even harder.

I pull deep into a calm eddy and sit, hunkered into myself, blinking out from under my helmet. The air is half water; I breathe carefully, through my nose.

And as I float, content just to breathe, shivering a little, while water pours down from above, and water rushes by before me, I suddenly become aware of the contrast in temperature between the outer world and the inner body. I am one little self-contained spark of warmth in the chill wilderness. I look at my hands, loosely holding my paddle, I see the water streaming over them, and I marvel at how impervious they are to the downpour, how warm and vital they are, separate from everything around me. How wonderfully distinct. How precious.

When the deluge mitigates to a mere downpour, I paddle out and down the river again, flowing with the water around the rocks, falling with the water over the drops. But I am not the same as the water. I am distinct. I am alive, and I know that I am alive.

I am not water. I am not rain. I am warmer.

The Elusive Moment

Surely one of the best places to search for the sacred Now -- to be more aware, more in tune, more one with the all -- is in a rapid. It is hard to be absent-minded in the midst of agitated water and foam-girt rocks. If your mind wanders, a jostle, a splash in the face wakes you up to the present moment. It’s here, and now, it’s under you and all around you, it moves you, that ineffable moment, that communion with the real, that baptism into presence, that direct and sacred contact with the world ... and then, SURPRISE!, you suddenly realize that you’re just about to blunder unprepared over a featureless line of water like one of those invisible-edge swimming pools, onto who-knows-what-below -- or, perhaps, about to be pushed into the branches of one of the river’s most feared dangers, a fallen tree. 

How could this happen? How did you miss the danger signals? You were fully there, weren’t you?

It was natural, really. You were focusing on the here and now -- while the danger signals were over there, and in the future. You were so much in the present, that you failed to look up.

But that’s part of the present, isn’t it, those danger signals on the horizon? Yes, they’re part of the present. But to see that other part of the present it is necessary for you to change your focus -- to look up and imagine what is about to happen, not just to feel what is happening this instant. The now is directly connected to that future -- connected by the water that flows from now to then. To see all that is now you must give a thought to the future.

Watch the experienced river-runner’s eyes. First they focus for an instant on the water just ahead -- then they look up, taking in the entire rapid in one sweeping glance -- then they glance back at the water just around -- then they focus on the middle distance, at an upcoming rock, perhaps. The mind would prefer a single focal point, or, failing that, a decision-rule to tell it when and how to change focus; but no decision-rule can capture the appropriate play of the eyes. If the river-runner can stay in contact with all of the present’s aspects -- including those that are not immediate -- present and future can  be joined in one ongoing activity. Running a rapid can be a single action, expressive of a single overarching intention, rather than a series of snapshot instants. Even the entire day’s outing can be experienced as one extended moment.

The present and the future are linked; the present is never frozen, but is always sliding off into another present. To try to cut oneself off from the future, then, is not even to be fully in the now; for the now itself is not cut off, it is the seed of the future in the process of blooming....

Do not cut off the moment. Seize the day, yes; but -- Seize the day whole.

Fear, Dread, Uncertainty, and Other Good Things

The great thing about whitewater sport is the immediate, decisive, objective feedback it gives you. There is nothing quite like a swift rap on the head, or a thorough underwater thrashing in one of those recirculating water formations that we so prosaically call “holes,” to point out the errors in your thinking. And you can count on the river to give you a straight answer, without regard to how beautiful or homely you are, how charming or disagreeable. Fast, reliable, unequivocal feedback -- what an ideal laboratory the river makes, to compare different approaches to the decision-making process. Reason versus instinct, for example.

There is little disagreement that instinct is sovereign on the water. “Look, see, do,” is the phrase that my racing partner, Lecky Haller, used to mutter just before the countdown, and that three-word injunction holds true on the open river, too. “Paralysis through analysis” sums up the accepted wisdom on over-thinking. Even Hamlet throws introspection aside once he clashes swords.

I believe that if you were fully aware, at all moments, of all aspects of the elusive now, that instinct would tell you when you would need to pull into shore. But in the real world there are lapses. And so a few decision-rules are necessary to interrupt instinct’s sometimes over-enthusiastic flow. (Otherwise, again, you might ‘go with the flow’ right over an enticing waterfall -- and right onto the rocks.) Never paddle over a blind horizon line, or around a blind corner, are a couple of handy decision-rules. Sometimes you have to break the flow, climb out of your canoe, and take a good hard look. 

“Do I try it, or do I walk?” is one of the questions you have to ask yourself. You’re standing above it all, when you ask this, you’re not in your boat, you’re thinking ahead. And if the rapid is long and complex enough, you must imagine each step, and what could go wrong, and what you might do if this or that happened. 

Sorry, guys, but this is what they call "analysis." Sometimes you just have to do that damned analysis stuff. If you don’t, you risk paralysis through insufficient analysis.

All the while that you are standing there, analyzing, you can also, separately, feel a growing instinct about the run, a gut-feeling that in its various forms could be expressed as “it’s fine, no problem, piece of cake”; “I’m nervous but I want to do it”; or, most simply, a feeling of fear or even dread too deep to be verbalized. 

In my early years, I would simply follow my instinct; whatever I felt like running, I would run, and when I had the urge to portage, I portaged. But I couldn’t help noticing how unreliable my bank-side instinct really was. I’m still surprised at how often my instincts are entirely, 100% wrong. Recently I stood on the side of a rapid that my mind told me was dead easy: no particular complexity, and no “consequences,” as we call them. And yet I was unaccountably afraid. Why? I would be stupid to run the rapid without understanding this why, for there was a chance that my subconscious was noticing some hidden danger, or some weakness in my own physical apparatus that day, that my conscious mind had so far ignored. On this particular day, I finally decided that I just wasn’t used to the look of a big-volume river, and that my analysis was correct. And so it proved; the rapid was as easy as I’d thought.

Often, instinct is wrong in the other direction: beware the decision influenced by a camera, or by an attractive onlooker. 

Having rejected instinct, for a time I relied purely on my most careful analysis. That didn’t last very long. Analysis quails at the complexity of powerful rapids; lots of room in your plans must be left for improvisation, leeway, fall backs, “Plan B’s,” “if everything goes wrong I’ll kick out of the boat and swim down and I’ll be fine.” If this last is not the case -- if analysis gives any credence to fear -- then the boat-on-the-shoulder route is a very fine one. 

And so, it has finally been pounded into me that I have to use my whole brain, not just one part. Your instinct is one of the facts, it’s part of the situation -- it would be just as silly to ignore an instinct as to ignore one of the boulders over which the water flows. Nothing can be excluded. 

Unfortunately, this means that there is no easy, preset decision-rule for decision-making, no handy formula. It’s not only true, that you can’t step in the same river twice -- you’re not even the same person twice. Every situation is unique; each time you must take all the available facts into account and then make today’s individual decision. You have to make friends with what is, what really is, both the reality that’s inside you and the very real rocks out there. 

And then ... you decide.

More Fear

You hear a lot about what a negative thing fear is, but the kind of fear I have been speaking of -- real, immediate, physical fear -- is a very good thing indeed. Sometimes, yes, you want to overcome your irrational fears -- but don’t get too much in the habit of overcoming. Many fears are rational. Fear is a signal to pay very good attention, to open your eyes very wide. Fear is trying to tell you something; you may decide to overrule your fear, but first: Give fear a good hearing. 

Olympics

There has to be a moral coming out of my Olympic experience.

Or does there?

For the record, I raced twice in the Olympics, in 1972 (Munich) and 1992 (Barcelona). The first time in C-1, the second in C-2 with partner Lecky Haller, a former C-2 World Champion. The Whitewater Slalom events were not held in the intervening Olympics. 

I remember those races. I could point out the trees under which I lay, between runs in 1972, trying to recover from the crazy excitement of racing in front of 20,000-plus spectators -- at least ten times the biggest crowd I'd ever experienced -- where the team doctor found me to give me a gate-by-gate printout of the first run results. I could tell you how I hit Gate 4. Those were memorable days. Important races provide all the adrenaline of risking your life, without the risk. In that sense, they are cheap thrills. I love that.

I raced reasonably well in both Olympics -- and Lecky was stellar in 1992, heroically saving our bacon when we popped out of "Hulk Falls" going the wrong way. But neither was an "ultimate run," to borrow the title of a Bill Endicott book. Here's evidence: In 1972, the medal winners were called back to do exhibition runs for a group of IOC officials, including the IOC President, Avery Brundage. (I don't think he ever knew it, but the paddlers had named a particularly obstructive rock "Avery Brundage.") This time I had what we call a "clean" run. I'm sure it was slower than my race run, but I had no time penalties. Given that I had gotten that Bronze medal with three pole touches -- which at the time added a whopping thirty seconds to my score -- it's safe to say my best run down the course came two days after the race, when the pressure was off. 

Funny, eh?

And I probably raced better in '92 than in '72, despite the yawning gulf between results. (The rest of the world's perception that third puts you into the history books, while fourth is footnote material at best, creates that gulf.)

When I say I probably raced better the second time, I am defining "racing better" as achieving a higher percentage of my potential. In objective terms the difference was much clearer. I was a far, far better racer at 39 than at 19. I had to be, to be on the team at all. The sport had not stood still.

But notice that "probably." I'm not positive I raced better. Twenty years, many sports psychology books read and studied, hundreds of races, marriage and the birth of four children, double the life experience -- and maybe, just maybe, I raced a little better.

I think the reason for the merely small improvement is that the right frame of mind -- the "sweet spot," the "zone" -- is right there in front of you. It's not complicated. Subtle, yes, but not complicated. 

I played some ping-pong, both times, in the weeks before the Olympics, not something I do a lot. I was at the perfect level to play with a bunch of other casual players: fellow team members like Eric Evans, Wick Walker, Eric Jackson, and various foreign paddlers whose names I can't recall. I found that playing ping-pong was a good way to remind myself of the necessary balance between "making it happen" and "letting it happen." Any immediate physical feedback will do. Try too hard, and you blow it. Don't try hard enough, and you blow it. 

Training for the Olympics is an unbalanced thing to do. It's extreme, it's quixotic. It doesn’t make a whole lot of sense as a career choice. No one should do it unless they enjoy training. Yet within the extremity, once again, balance still counts.

Do the right preparation. Think the right thoughts. Prime your unconscious with what you want to happen. And then, in the starting gate, confidently let yourself loose. 

The waiting is hard. But what a great feeling, when the countdown is over, when you take the first strokes, when countless imaginings turn into a simple reality, when you are allowed to settle into the heightened present moment. 

Win or lose, they can't take that away from you.  

True Stories

From the starting pool of the Gull river race course you can’t see the river. All you can see is a flat lake, and the dam that closes off its outlet. Over the edge of this dam kayakers are disappearing -- as if they are offering themselves, one by one, at minute intervals counted off by an electronic tone, to an insatiable god of the waters. A faint mist wafts up from beyond the dam.

I stand on the far shore, watching this scene, feeling unnaturally frightened.

This isn’t like me. It is normal for me to be nervous on race day; in an hour and a half we too will be counted down. But frightened?

It can’t be the drop itself that is spooking me; I’ve paddled over that dam, with my doubles partner Lecky Haller stroking close behind me, five to ten times a day all week. And it can’t be the race itself, can it? Yes, it’s race four of the World Cup series -- but I’m hardly new to the racing scene; I’ve done this for years. What is it, then? The feeling is most like stage fright -- but there can’t be more than a few hundred spectators, strung out along the course, for we are two hours from the nearest city. 

Then why? I can’t explain it. I feel panicked. I want to run away; I want to go home and hide. 

Instead, I tell myself a story -- a simple story, a true story. “You’re in a whitewater slalom race,” I say. “The rules are....“ Patiently I explain the rules. “That’s the game,” I go on. “We’ve all come here to play this game. In ninety minutes you’ll put on all your gear and get in your double canoe in front of Lecky and pick up your paddle and they’ll count you down and you’ll paddle off and go through all those gates as best you can. Got it?”

I got it. It worked, my little story. It was this that I was doing, not anything else. The unnatural panic subsided.

Ninety minutes later, when I paddled up to the lip of the dam and, just before dropping over, could see the river ahead, there was no devouring god below, merely the familiar race course, the hanging poles: the playing field of a game that I knew how to play.

🌊

I tell myself little true stories all the time now. “I am driving a car,” I remind myself. “I am paddling on the river, and that is a bear.” “I am walking across a busy street.” “This is my daughter, this person to whom I am talking; my daughter, whom I have known since she was born.”

It’s good to keep the basic facts in mind. And I, for one, need to be reminded.

But I have also found I must be careful with stories, even the simplest stories. It’s so easy to tell yourself false stories. Silly stories, like: “I can’t stand it when he treats me like that,” “If she doesn’t call, I’ll go nuts,” “I’m much more important than he is,” “I can only be happy if we win this race.”

So I tell myself stories -- and I try to make them as accurate as I know how. 

Tell true stories.

🌊

One last thought about that morning on the Gull River -- one lingering question. Was there something real, which that untoward panic was trying to warn me of? Was there something true, on some metaphoric level, in the fancy that we were sacrificing ourselves to a false god -- a god not of the waters, but of the public eye, of the history books, of an unreal dream of glory? Should I have listened more closely to that panic? 

I wonder. And I repeat to myself: There is always more to discover.

Eighty Percent

Race day of the Punch Brook Slalom began with a cold rain that turned to sleet and then into a thick, wet, unrelenting, wind-blown snowstorm. Heavy flakes plopped into uplifted eyes, making us all gaze down at the ground or water as we walked or paddled, looking up in quick glances only. Snow plastered the rhododendrons into white mounds, outlined tree branches, over-carpeted last year's leaves. Somehow our memories of the day before -- count them, 72 blessed degrees Fahrenheit, it had been -- made the wind and snow and cold the harder to bear.

I wore my huge puffy down jacket and pants, and was warm enough, really. Most of the other competitors sat in their cars between race runs, heaters blasting. But Devin...

My son Devin, fifteen years old, was racing in three different race classes that day, two runs per class. On his first run of the day, in his decked canoe, he paddled into gate one -- and his boat flipped upstream, dunking him underwater.

Roll, I muttered, roll.

Roll he did, on that run, and later in the morning he rolled again on his second run. And later, in kayak, he flipped once more.

This third time, long seconds passed before he finally struggled up. 

After his run Devin came up to me, his face red and lined with cold, and said that, since the canoe and kayak rolls are different, he had become confused underwater. 

"I don't think I'm going to take my second run, Dad," he added. "I'm out of the race, anyway. And I'm so cold." 

You certainly don't have to, I told him. But, I added, go back to the car and warm up; you might change your mind later.

Of course, I wouldn't be writing this if he hadn't rallied to take his last run of the day, through the thickest snow squall yet. And, though in the final standings Devin finished in fifth and last place among the kayak juniors (it was combined runs, that year), he went away knowing that that last run was the second-best of the day.

We packed up, we drove off ... and then it came over us.

There should be a word to denote that special euphoria, that divine nonalcoholic drunkenness that comes at the end of a long, active day on and in cold water and snow, when you are driving home through the blizzard with the car heater blasting, eating a sandwich or energy bar and drinking a hot drink from the gas station, trading stories from the day's racing while your fingertips throb with the flush of renewed blood and your face glows and your toes can wriggle once more. Warmth! Life! Food! And that boundless superiority you feel over the inhabitants of every house you pass, those poor pale spineless creatures who spent the day in overheated rooms, watching the shadows of real life in the flickering glass of their televisions. First or last, we'd been there. We'd shown up.

And as that renowned rugged outdoorsman Woody Allen said: Eighty percent of success is showing up.

Nothing on the Rocks, part 1

We didn’t come to Tibet for enlightenment. We came to run the river that had carved what many call the deepest canyon in the world. We came to add our names to the roster of famous Himalayan explorers. We came to make our mark.

The mark was left on us.

As soon as we drove into Tibet from Nepal, we knew that we were in for trouble. The river was only slowly receding from a fifty-year high. Bridges were gone, roads washed out. Should we put off our attempt until next year? But unlikely that we would get another National Geographic grant. Should we wait until the river receded? But it was October; the snows might soon close the high passes.

And so we put on, the four of us, and started down the river, while our two support teams struggled to reach their assigned resupply points along the way.

On day four, in a careless moment, I slid into the water with my sprayskirt unattached. A frightening swim ensued, and I lost my boat -- only to have it recovered the next day, a dozen miles downstream, by two religious pilgrims, the sanctity of whose quest did not preclude a bit of sharp bargaining for the price of its return.

Reunited on the water, resupplied with fifteen days of food, we embarked on the crux of the expedition, away from all paths, into the deepest section of canyon, between two 20,000-foot peaks.

In this gigantic landscape the eye kept being fooled, seeing everything as much smaller than it was -- and then wave and whirlpool ballooned in size as you approached and experienced the real scale of things. Thoroughly intimidated, we paddled down the sides of the rapids, avoiding the main flow. Often we took out and walked.

Our hundred-pound boats were slippery, awkward burdens, best carried hanging off one shoulder. And where the river banks were not cliffs or slabs of rock, they were piles of boulders that seemed freshly deposited by the summer’s flood -- raw and unstable as a freshly dug construction pit. Man-sized rocks shifted and tumbled at the lightest touch. Piles of smaller stones collapsed and slid underfoot. We had trained for the river, and we had hiked, we had rock-climbed -- but nothing had prepared us for this. Even the slightest mistake, even a sprained ankle would be a major setback, here a week’s or more pathless hike from the nearest village. And our food was limited. We had to keep moving.

As I scrambled, climbed atop house-sized boulders and pulled my boat after me, lowered it down again, teetered across rock slabs, forded side-streams, crouched to slide through waist-high game trails, fell, got up again, struggled on, a phrase began repeating itself, quite on its own: “Do nothing.” I would pause, catching my breath, becoming aware for a moment of the overloud booming and roaring of the rapid below me, daunted by the terrain ahead, when an inner voice would say, “Do nothing.” Do Nothing -- and a solution to the huge puzzle that lay ahead would present itself. Do Nothing -- and I would lift the boat again. Do Nothing -- and I would go on.

Why would “do nothing” provide inspiration -- why did it act as a call to arms? I cannot say.

Nothing on the Rocks, part 2

I had to keep moving. I had to keep up. My brother had wondered aloud if I had trained enough for the Tsangpo challenge. Our friend, kayak racer Roger Zbel, had shown, on the drive in, that he was a tireless high altitude hiker. And then there was the omnicompetent Doug Gordon -- Ph.D. candidate, National Science Foundation Scholarship winner -- and also agile as a goat. I had to keep up with the others ... and this was why, I think, a second contrarian phrase added itself to the first: “Be no one.”

Don’t prove yourself. Don’t try to be anything. Have no identity. Be No One.

It was too much strain, being anyone. It was too hard, to prove myself. It was too dangerous, to try. And it didn’t matter. There was no one there to prove anything to. There was no one at all; there was only action. Do Nothing. Be No One.

With distant curiosity, I noticed that I was, in fact, keeping up.

Nothing on the Rocks, part 3

It was an all-day effort. We put onto the water, we paddled the easier sections, all the while careful to not go too far, to not venture into the engulfing mouth of the monster rapids. We took out on rocky banks on which the surf created by the river’s pulses broke as on a North-Atlantic shore. We shouted to each other to be heard over the sound of the water. We threaded our way along the boulder-choked bank. Sometimes, surfeited with the complexity of my immediate surroundings, I would fail to look far enough ahead, and would be forced to backtrack from a mistaken course -- or, in an instant of inattention, I would place a foot carelessly, and fall. And so it was, I think -- I cannot be sure, for it came of itself -- a third phrase surfaced in my mind: “See clearly.”

Do Nothing. Be No One. See Clearly.

That was how I made my way into the Tsangpo Gorge, with this mantra repeating itself in my head. Do Nothing. Be No One. See Clearly.

Nothing on the Rocks, part 4

And then a day came ... a day like another ... we paddled down along the left bank ... we scouted a steep rapid ... Doug decided to try it ... an unexpectedly tenacious hole ... Doug flipped ... inexplicably he failed to right himself ... he was swept out into the main current ... he was so tiny out there, so very small ... and then he was gone, swallowed by the ponderous, mighty, tumbling water ... gone, never to return.

In our disbelief, we searched. I with my boat, carrying  it, then paddling on alone; Tom and Roger on shore. In that enormous, noise-filled canyon we searched. Out of the constant river-sound the mind constructed voices and scraps of song. The mountains win again, sang the river, in the voice of John Popper. 

Sometime that day, searching, we crossed the theoretical deepest point in the canyon, the line between the peaks of Namche Barwa and Gyala Pelri.

At day’s end I left my boat and made my way upstream to look for the others. Night fell as I picked my way up the shoreline. The sound of the river went on and on. Nothing I could do would stop it. 

I was beyond tired. Had I missed Tom and Roger? Could I find them in the dark? Did it matter?

Do Nothing. It came to me, once more. There was nothing I had to do. I was completely free to stop where I was, to lie down on the rock on which I stood. And once more, from this I drew energy.

Be No One. And saying this, I felt the living self that was beyond all characteristics. I was a wraith floating effortlessly from shadow to shadow. I was motion.

See Clearly. There came a flickering yellow light, high on a bluff above the river. I shouted, but they did not hear. I turned, climbed.

Around their fire we wept.

🌊

Do nothing. Be no one. See clearly.

I cannot defend these phrases, nor recommend them to you, nor fit them into an explanation of the universe. They came to me, they meant something to me, they helped me. They help me still. I offer them to you for what they are worth: what I salvaged from an expedition on a river in Tibet.

Rocks, redux

Rocks are hard. The world is large and does not always respond to our wishes. The water keeps flowing.

Last Words

I come back from the river brimming with words.

Then I return to the river to escape from them.

I like words. Words are tools of memory, of imagination, of analysis. They help us remember. They help us conceive. They help us think.

Direct experience, however, is wordless. In the moment of pure experience, even the simplest words, even the mantras, are left behind.

And what are memory, imagination, or analysis without the raw material of experience? They are useless.

Granted, experience is all around us. We don’t need to go to any special place to find it.

And yet, for me, it helps, that special place, the river place.

The river is elemental. It is objective. It is fluid. It is complex. It is gentle. It is yielding. It is convincing. It is overwhelming. It is unforgiving. It is never the same.

No matter how harsh or relentless the river may be, I keep coming back, again and again.