What the Main Salmon River Taught Me
Lessons from a week of kayaking in the Idaho wilderness
Every Tuesday through my funemployment, I publish a blog post as part of my self-guided learning program. Last week, I wrote about the story behind my passion project: For the Women Retreat.
How I decided to spend a week whitewater kayaking
Less than 4 years ago, I visited Montana for the first time for a volunteer trip. The program seemed straight-forward: show up in the river lodge 40-minute outside of Missoula, learn how to kayak, bring a positive attitude, take care of the participants on the river and in the house, and have a good time.
Little did I know on my drive to the lodge that the week would have many subtle but profound influences on my life. For one, I was so stunned by the beauty of the Big Sky Country that I’ve been coming back at least once a year since then. More, I learned that I love serving and supporting others through outdoor adventures. And most importantly, I was awe-struck by the program leads and the kayaking guides who live doing what they love.
When the volunteer week came to an end, they told me to come back and check out a whitewater kayaking trip that they organize every year on the Main Salmon River in Idaho.
“Of course,” I said while waving goodbye, “See you next year.”
Same river, different people.
It took me 3 more long years to come back and realize how my attitude around water has evolved.
When I was 6 or 7, my mom signed me up for weekly swimming lessons in the neighborhood pool. The instructor was an old skinny man, and with 20 more kids in the pool at the same time, he was strict, unforgiving and grumpy at times. And I wasn’t a natural and didn’t enjoy not being able to breathe naturally under water, so I wasn’t doing so well in class. After the first week, I cried on the way home and begged my mom to stop bringing me to class.
My wise mother knew that swimming would be a life-saving skill, so she bribed me to stay through the end, and a few brutal weeks later, I barely passed the test and never developed a kick for swimming.
Yet, I fell out of my kayak and swam every day last week on the river. I still didn’t love swimming, but somehow, I was a lot more okay with it. I wanted to keep up with the group. I trusted that I would be rescued and wouldn’t swim for long. And being okay underwater when I was strapped onto my kayak was 75% of the battle to get better at kayaking.
Lesson #1 from the river: People come, evolve and go. The river flows the same.
Understand real risks and overcome perceived ones.
Wednesday was a big rapid day for all of us. Before we geared up and set out to conquer 10 rapids in 20 miles of whitewater, one of the instructors Peter sat us down on the beach for a pep talk.
“What’s a risk on this river?” he asked, “You’re going to hit your head on a rock at the bottom of the river? It’s a perceived risk, not a real one because this river runs so deep that you won’t hit the bottom.”
Our attitude and performance are often chained by what we perceive to be risks. If we can understand what’s the actual risks, we can identify the perceived ones and bias towards overcoming them.
Lesson #2 from the river: Study the surroundings to understand real risks; then identify and overcome perceived risks.
Develop skills outside of an adventure.
After paddling through a big rapid on Day 5, I turned around and proudly declared to Peter, “My kayaking skills improved a lot during this trip!” He gently laughed and said, “You don’t develop skills on this kind of trips. You acquire experiences. They aren’t the same thing.”
It’s true that one can acquire skills through an experience, but the skills need to be developed and sharpened in a comfortable and conducive learning environment, not in an adventure.
Whitewater kayaking is an adventure sport. In the dictionary, the word adventure is defined as an exciting activity or exploration of an unknown territory. And there are risks — potential losses — involved in going on an adventure.
In 1985, outdoor educator Simon Priest came up with a diagram to correlate risks and competency in an adventure experience. The exploration stage is where the task is easy, and one can even experiment in the middle of the task, whereas a misadventure is when the negative consequence is larger than the positive. And the sweet spot is what he defines as a peak adventure when risk is equal or close to the level of competency.
The more we become proficient and competent, the greater slide of peak adventure we get to experience. In Peter’s words, I have to practice my paddling skills in much calmer water in order to truly grasp different types of paddling strokes, so the next time I face the rapids, I would know better what to do.
Lesson #3 from the river: Adventure is essential, but we have to develop skills through exploration and experimentation.
The week in the wilderness flew by, and I’m back in the civilization appreciating flush toilets, hot showers and soap.
But there’s so much to be missed from last week: the river running next to our tents, the stars hanging far behind trees, the people cooking and chatting by the camp stoves, and the waves pushing us beyond our limits.
The river is home to so many metaphors, and I recalled a quote by Tennessee Williams. He once said, “What’s straight? A line can be straight, or a street, but the human heart, oh, no, it’s curved like a road through mountains.”
Like a mountain path, a river flows like a human heart beating to bind people together, to pound loudly until we know what’s real and to send us home in order to come back for more.
Follow Back and Forth as I journal through my funemployment every Tuesday. AMA @kuanluo.
