What the River Returned

I have spent most of my life returning to rivers in some way. Not because I fish, or that I am particularly good at paddling. But because rivers have always had an uncomfortable habit of telling me the truth. As a child in Milwaukee I sat beside one without understanding why I was drawn there. Years later, another waited beside my first home in Georgia. My honeymoon was spent floating on one. 

Eventually another one drowned me. 

The Needs of the Many Outweight the Needs of the Few

I had enlisted in March of 2001 before graduating from High School, with a delayed entry date to October 2001. The world changed on September 11th, and I went from joining in peace time, to watching as all of a sudden my mother was sobbing and falling apart. Surely, she thought we were going to war, I watched with a blankness. Unsure of what anything meant. I already knew I was going into linguistics having tested high on the ASVAB-the military aptitude test-and having tested into the cryptology and linguistics testing. I had dreams of picking an Asian language. Having it be the launching point for some nomadic travels later on in life. 

The needs of the military came ahead of my nomadic desires. I was selected for Persian Farsi at language school in Monterey Bay California. That is where I met Tom, who was learning Arabic while in the Army. He was a wonderful man with a golden voice. I can still hear clearly in my memories the day he sang as Curly Mclain in ‘Oklahoma’ in the production at the wharf in Monterey Bay California where we met. Music and the theater provided a welcome respite and a calm sense of normalcy to everything that was going on. 

The nature of the crypto-linguistics program and our languages meant that thankfully we were able to be stationed together, which included the primary option of being stationed at Fort Gordon Augusta, Georgia. We were engaged by the time we moved there. Wedding plans were in order, and then my first deployment orders came. With the level of uncertainty of the Iraq war and how things were going, Tom and I opted to abandon the wedding plans and have a small ceremony locally a month or so before my deployment. 

The diversion for the Augusta Canal from the Savannah River. I spent a lot of time here when I lived in Augusta.

Our families came, a friend of ours was ordained online and acted as the signing official, and for the grand expense of $500 we made a wedding happen. The ceremony was hosted on the Augusta Canal, a small offshoot of the Savannah River. During my free time I worked as a docent at the museum and hosted tours on their boats and spent my time on the river as much as possible. The home we purchased was only a mile or so from the river, and while it was known to have water moccasins, alligators, and sometimes loggerhead turtles, it was a magical river to be in. 

There were times when I was feeling a bit off then, unsure of my footing but not quite sure how to put into words why it felt off. The river felt right. I could go float on the water in my kayak, or even sit by the edge and throw sticks and leaves in and just watch them drift by. That somehow made sense. 

It made sense in the way that a river that once ran behind a home I lived in as a child in Milwaukee made sense. I can’t remember much about that place or that time there, other than the river. I used to climb down into the banks and play, turning over rocks, poking at things, often by myself. I don’t remember any friends, I don’t remember much of school anything else… but I remember what it felt like to feel free and at peace there at the rivers edge. I found out that a few years after we moved that river swelled and broke its banks and wiped out the house we lived in. They converted the whole area to a park. Nothing of the area I once knew remains. 

Canoe trip with friends on the Chattahoochee River. I am the second from the left. I can only remember the name of the person to the right of me, Meryl. The rest, have gone into the ether.

For our honeymoon we opted to go camping up into Northern Georgia, taking with us the kayaks. We found a cute little campground with 6 spots along a river. We took turns running a small section of the river and then shuttling each other back. Tom lost his wedding ring on that trip and we laughed it off, it was a cheap ring so we thought nothing of it. He never ended up replacing it. Turns out that the weekend we were camping there happened to be the annual trip for a group of friends that always go to that spot to go fishing. They invited us over to share in their bounty.

I have this fuzzy image in my memory of being next to their RV in the tiny wooded campground with the river running next to us, eating a piece of fresh caught fish, sunlight glittering off the water, I can hear the water, I am talking to the guy next to me about how I just got married and I am waiting for my new husband to come back drifting down the river and about how he already lost his ring in the river. There is laughter. I am thinking beautiful thoughts, and I am also afraid. At this point I had already made some poor choices in life and I am on the cusp of heading off on deployment. The shot glass of Gentlemen Jack looks so sharp and clear. 

A New River, A New Current, A New Start?

Catting some rapids in the Rockies with friends, I was on the other boat and shot this photo of them.

After we both left the military we moved to Boulder, Colorado to make a home. I was working on my degree and Tom was working. I used the opportunity to ski as much as I could and really get involved in all of the outdoor community that the Front Range had to offer. My mind however was not right. There was a lot of turmoil and angst, and things were off kilter. I tried to throw myself into the water to find my peace. The river and the lakes are unforgiving and ruthless in their judgement. 

I had signed up for a Swiftwater Rescue Technician course that spring. I threw myself into training the way I threw myself into most things then, with enough intensity to avoid sitting quietly with my own thoughts. I skied, climbed, paddled, and studied. Outwardly I looked like someone building a life. Inwardly, it was beginning to come apart.

Tom had decided to leave his job and pursue graduate school. We barely spoke except to navigate the routines of sharing a house. We hadn't been intimate in months. I was drinking too much, cheating on him, and carrying around a resentment that seemed easier to hold than the truth. I was angry at everyone except the person who deserved the closest examination. A few weeks before the rescue course, I went skiing with Tom's father, Marc, and his grandmother, Jackie. The mountain had thawed and frozen into sheets of hard ice. It wasn't a day for pushing limits. I remember telling Marc that I wanted to take it easy. He had other ideas. I'd seen his temper before. If someone questioned his judgment, he took it as a personal challenge. Jackie and I peeled off onto an easier run, only to meet him later at the lift, furious that we hadn't followed. Eventually, against my better judgment, I gave in. It seemed easier than another argument.

Later he ducked a rope into a closed downhill racecourse and motioned for us to follow. I knew I shouldn't. I knew the conditions were wrong. I knew I wasn't on the right skis. I knew I wasn't in the right frame of mind. And I followed anyway.

Three turns later I caught an edge.

The crash itself happened quickly. My shoulder folded underneath me as I slammed onto the ice, and when I stood up my right arm no longer obeyed me. At first there wasn't much pain, only a strange delay between deciding to move and my body responding. I blamed Marc immediately. Every ounce of anger I had been carrying found a convenient place to land.

The doctors called it a separated shoulder with nerve damage. As the weeks passed, the nerve response slowly returned, but the resentment didn't. By the time I drove to Montana for my swiftwater training, my shoulder had healed enough to paddle. My mind hadn't healed at all. I was still convinced the injury belonged to someone else.

Don't Ask the River to Flow Through You

Me at the end of the SWFR training course as we are heading out on the paddle down the Clark Fork.

After the training was done a few of us gathered together to take a kayak trip down the Clark Fork river. I was physically tired from the weekend; but my mind felt good and I was focused on trying to stay in the moment. We came to an area called the 3-bridges, and I ended up flipped over. I tried to right myself, but found my kayak pinned. I was upside down, the boat was not moving. I tried to eskimo roll again and my shoulder gave out. At this point I don’t remember much, I was gassing out. The paddle slipped from my hand, I found the handle on the skirt holding me in the cockpit and pulled it. I tried to push off from inside and swim out and was stuck. I couldn’t move. My right shoulder was now completely frozen in place and useless, the right hand clasped loosely around the skirt handle. Someone turned off the lights, and I gasped. 

I woke up with an extreme and violent cough, and a searing fire in my chest as water poured out of my mouth. My body was shaking and cold and I was on my side, and I was keenly aware of people around me. Water and foamy spit was coming out of my mouth and nose. I felt the water in my lungs, my stomach, and somehow everywhere in me. People were talking to me and I couldn’t make out what they were saying but I was aware of the sounds and aware that there was liquid. Slowly, the sounds became words, the words became structure, the structure became sentences. 

They told me I had drowned.

It took me a long time to understand that the river hadn’t taken my life. It had returned it. 

That is what they told me. That is what I heard. It took me a bit to process the words fully as more liquid came violently out of me. My brain started making the connections that I had just brushed close to my mortality, and as I sat there processing, a flood of emotions began to come like a tidal wave. I cried. The river had delivered me a message that I wasn’t fully prepared to hear.

It would take me a few months to fully process and come to terms with what really happened. But, as they say, hindsight is 20/20. The river that day delivered the message to me that I was focused on the wrong person the whole time. My anger, my frustrations, all of it, was not directed where it should have been; and if I wasn’t going to pay attention where I should, then the consequences are going to be severe.  

I don't whitewater kayak anymore, and.... I still hold the memory of the river in my lungs, and it still reminds me of what I did and I am ashamed.

When I look back at myself as the person that cheated on my husband, it is something I am ashamed of. It is something I take full accountability for. The pain that resides in my chest for what I did lingers like the searing pain I felt when I was coughing up water out of my lungs. It is not something I have ever forgotten. It is something I am keenly aware of to this day decades later. 

Drowning on the Clark Fork also reminded me of something else. 

Wars don’t have to change peoples character.

Tom didn’t make me cheat. 

Marc didn’t cause me to wreck my shoulder.

I still had a choice in all of that. The river didn’t teach me that, it just reminded me of it. 

I will never forget the lesson.... these days I camp by this river in winter often.

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BOOK: Brothers on the Bashkaus: A Siberian Paddling Adventure - Eugene Buchanan A book about 4 Americans that travel to a the former Soviet Union in 1993 to raft a river with 10 Latvians on some hand crafted rafts on some of the continents wildest rivers. It really is a testament to the complexity and duality of human experience.

SONG: Perfect - The Smashing Pumpkins

I thought I had feelings for someone I met while I was married. I was stupid and childish and an idiot. I chased a fairy tale instead of fixing the good thing that was right in front of me. The good man that was right there in front of me I did not do right by. I didn't pursue a relationship with this person, but nonetheless, I remember thinking to myself the lyrics just hit in a way. Both that I wanted to say to my husband and to this person I thought I wanted. Every time I listen to this song I now get stuck on the line "so far I still know who you are, but now I wonder who I was".

If you would like to see some more behind the scenes, go check out this post on substack

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Thank you for reading my post. This post/essay, like many of the ones I write, is a blend of my personal experiences, travel, memories, stories, and shared conversations. These solely represent myself and my opinions and thoughts. When it involves personal friends I have given them nicknames unless they have given explicit permission to use their given name. There are times that I am able to pull from what I wrote down in my journals at the time an event happened, others I am trying to recall memories that have been altered by brain injuries and a lifetime of simply living. I may not always get it right, so please forgive me for some unintentional variations.

I always welcome feedback and thoughts on my posts. Please feel free to send me an email or comment below.

Love from the road,

Nic & Rally