Advanced Creeking Clinic (WV) – Sandi Metz
| River: | Other |
| Skill: | Advanced |
| Trip Date: | 04/03/2004 |
Instructors: Sharon Myers, a mountain of paddling sized up as a women’s medium;Spencer Muse, a beautiful paddler, a gentle soul, and a triumph of dedication and perseverance over aptitude.
Students: Russ Scheve, Kurt McKissick, Michele Pagnotta, and me, Sandi Metz.
PRELUDE
I just returned from Creeking Class and felt an urgent need to write this story. It started out as a trip report but it didn’t manage to remain one. I’m not sure what it is now, perhaps just a paddling tale.
If I may, one disclaimer. There are times in this story when I feel very nervous. Ok, scared. Others were sometimes near me when I felt scared and I tell this tale as if they had the exact same feelings as I did. Perhaps they did. Perhaps they did not.
If they feel misrepresented by this account, my apologies in advance.
Ok, you want to know how I really feel? It’s my tale. If they want to set the record straight, they’ll have to write their own stinkin’ story.
SYOTR,
Sandi Metz
DAY 1 – Back Fork of the Elk. 5.8 ft, 49 degrees.
We meet. Six separate people, a tale not yet told.
This is creeking class, so we talk before we put on about class-like things. I express an interest in leading. We put on and suddenly there I am, out in front.
It’s class II, easy reading, easy leading. I find unexpected pleasure in being in front. I want to do thisto learn to feel ok about doing it. I want to be better at reading water, to be forced to be self reliant, to make my own decisions. I want to do this for serious reasons. I didn’t realize how much fun it would be, how it would bring everything into focus, seeing nothing downstream but river.
I flip in the first small rapid. I roll up looking across the way at a potential undercut that would be easy to wash too close to. I paddle away and then look around to see if anyone noticed. Michele, who is behind me, must not have, because she takes the same line, flips the same way and rolls up looking across at the same undercut.
An inauspicious beginning.
I also flip in the second rapid. This rapid is so small that I cannot even recall it now.
Very inauspicious.
Maybe it’s the new boat. I’m paddling a borrowed boat and I’m confused by it. It’s talking to me in a language I don’t understand. I do little experiments, trying to find in this beast the sweet predictable reliability of my other boats. It continues to speak to me in Swahili.
We run perhaps two miles of repetitive but routine class II’s. Clean green water, shallow, all to ourselves.
We know there are ledges. We are here on the Back Fork of the Elk because of the ledges, 6 or 7 or 8 drops of 5 or 9 or 12 feet and we are impatient for them. It should be enough; we are in our boats, in this place, wearing our fleece and our helmet liners and our poggies and we want drops. We stop for a snack and Kurt starts a chant, Buddha like, low and rumbling in his chest. Lllllllledges, lllllllledges, lllllllledges. We laugh and agree that it’s perfect, it can’t help but work. I am razzed for failing to produce any ledges and Russ takes over in the front.
We round one bend, and another and then we hear noise. That noise you all know, the one that makes your heart rate rise and your tongue stick a little in your throat. The noise of water losing gradient.
Now the story gets confusing, even to the teller. The steady, even flow, the rolling moving picture of the river trip gets interrupted and chopped into separate, starkly outlined bits. Now it’s not a movie, it’s a series of sudden snapshots.
What we hear is clearly the first drop. Sharon moves to the front of the group. The guidebook says to run this drop on the right and we intend to get out and scout on that side.
Above the drop on river right is something, some river feature, maybe a shelf that’s half the river wide. It requires us to approach the last pool above the drop from river left. From upstream, we must start on the left and catch the eddy behind this shelf to ferry across to the scouting spot on river right. It is not a difficult move. It seems simple and Michele and I (there’s a good reason why we are in this class) are far too casual.
I drop down into the top pool and initiate my eddy turn. I see Sharon on the bank, getting out of her boat to scout the rapid. I see Russ, in front of me and now above me, in an eddy that’s half the width of the river. I realize with escalating alarm that I am far too low, that I am not in the eddy but instead on a leaky sheet of fast moving water that is washing me backwards towards the drop. I have made my turn a boat width wider than Russ and now I am fighting with every bit of strength in my legs and my back and my forward stroke to get up into the eddy and avoid being washed over. May the river gods forgive me, with what little breath I have to spare, I am cursing.Michele comes in behind me. She makes her eddy turn; she is now a boat width to my right. I see her coming, from the corner of my eye. I think we are going to collide. I watch her hesitate, just a fraction, that infinitesimal easing off that is part of our dance with boats, and I know, though she as yet does not, that she will not make this eddy.
She slips backwards, out of my sight. I fight forwards and, in agonizingly slow increments, make my way upstream. I hear, over my right shoulder, an echo of my own curses, though louder and more emphatic. When I reach the safety of the eddy and turn and look behind me, Michele is gone.
Russ and I are frantic. We look to Sharon like frightened children and see her fumbling in her boat with glacial, crystalline hands, trying to make frigid fingers perform the surgery of unclipping a rope from a carabineer. She concentrates on the task at hand, ignoring our cries (what, did we think she hadn’t noticed that Michele had washed over the drop?), emerges with the rope and stands upright, peering intently across the river.But Sharon does not throw the rope. She watches and watches and watches and suddenly it’s apparent, even though we cannot see what, that something down below has changed.
She turns to us in the eddy. Kurt has now joined Russ and I. She calls to us, ‘You can get down right here, go, go, and get Michele’s boat!’
We react as if we are deaf. It looks very scary. It’s making a really loud noise. Who knows what monsters lurk below? We are cold and huddled like barnyard chicks. If a hawk had flown overhead we would have scurried beneath our mother. We do not know how to go. Sharon calls again, this time with more urgency. ‘Come here, come here, you can get down right here, you must go and get Michele’s boat!’
I have had many teachers. Sharon has always been one of them. She is a keen judge of skills and rivers and I have always depended on her to know where I fit. Time after time I have been on rivers with her where the look of something scared me witless. I know she will tell me if something is too hard for me, and I also know that if she says that I can do it that I have the skills. I have absolute trust in this, even when I am terrified. She is a good paddler and has a clear eye and knows what I am capable of before I know it myself. This has been demonstrated to me again and again. I know, even when I am afraid, that she will send me only to places that I can go.
So, her tone, that second command, breaks the trance I am in and I do it. I go.
I paddle to river right, turn and point my boat over the lip, take a forward stroke and am gone, sliding down a set of bouncy steps, into the unknown, unseen pool below.
Ah. Not so bad. I am here.
HERE is a pool between two ledges. Yes, goodness, there is another ledge, right there, close;, my (perhaps) faulty memory says no more than 15 yards downstream. I am relieved to see Michele standing on the shore on river left.
Her boat is nowhere in sight. I turn and look downstream. Her boat is still nowhere in sight. I raise my eyes to the downriver bend, convinced that I’m going to see it making its speedy way off into the distance. Still no boat.
It’s a cold day, it would be a nasty walk out, and I have finally caught it, I too am infected with the urgent need to rescue this boat.
I look at this next ledge. The drop seems enormous. Sharon and Spencer and Russ and Kurt are coming, I know, but the boat, where is the boat? I look at the drop again. I call to Michele, ‘Come and scout this, tell me where to run this drop’.
Michele has a thousand yard stare, the look of fresh adrenaline mixed with shocking cold and she is not quick to reply. I yell again, ‘Michele, come here, tell me where to go’. She walks forward to the edge, looks over the drop and tells me sadly, ‘It’s whitewater everywhere’.
It’s whitewater everywhere? IT’S WHITEWATER EVERYWHERE? Well I know that, throw me a bone, woman, and give me something, please, just one little bit of useful information and I swear, I will get down this drop and find your boat.
I feel grumpy with her, and stressed and anxious, but then I realize that maybe she actually has given me useful information. I mean, she may not be thinking clearly, but if there were a massive hole or a tree or a house sized rock, surely she would have noticed it, right? It must be all the same, this ledge, there truly is nothing down there but whitewater and so I am going, I pick a spot and I paddle forward and my boat is in the air and I hold my paddle high and I land and the boat goes down and then comes up and I am there I am down, it is done.
Her boat is right beside me, in an eddy. Stable too. She probably saw it from the top. She may already know that it is safe and not going anywhere. I have asked her the wrong question. There is a reason why I am in this class.So all is well. They come, one by one, the other boaters. My attempts to move the boat to where Michele can reach it have been spectacularly unsuccessful. I have dislodged it from the eddy and am wrestling it into the hole when the cavalry arrive and other folks take over. Sharon has somehow teleported herself across one river and two ledges and she is here, right here, beside Michele. She is helping her drain the boat and we laugh and make fun of each other and tell Michele that she is a trooper.
And I remember something now, something that I had forgotten before I went. Even though I am afraid, I can go, I am good enough and strong enough and brave enough to go. I can do this. I am a paddler.
—————————————–
We paddle on. At the third drop, we acquit ourselves with a bit more style. It’s a 10 or 12 foot drop, imposing to us all, but especially so to Michele, who, unlike the rest of us, has not yet run a drop. Well, at least not while looking forward. She went backwards over the first and then was reunited with her boat below the second, so she has not had the benefit of a gradual introduction. This is the first drop that she will stare right at and choose to go over and it’s a doosy.
Sharon goes first and we watch her carefully and she comes to no harm. It reassures us to imagine that our own runs will be similar. And at least this one time, they are. It is a long way down but it is easy. It requires just courage, not skill, and we find, after varying degrees of self examination, that we all have enough.
I go, and then Russ and Kurt, and finally Michele girds her loins and does it and comes up beaming and laughs and tells us that “ oh yeah,”, she definitely gets it now, these drops they are big big fun.
There are more drops, but I have a mild form of river aphasia and so I don’t remember them. They run together for me, these last three or four. We scout and pick lines and get in boats one by one and urgently search for landmarks that we cannot find and finally commit to something and go, long sliding falls into aerated pools below.
Somewhere, maybe on the big third drop, maybe later, Russ takes the heroes line. He runs left and makes an impressive boof across the edge of a Volkswagen sized hole into an eddy, as cool as you please.
We are almost done, nearly at the takeout, when we arrive at the last rapid. We students scout it and agree upon a line. When Sharon arrives, she, of course, selects an entirely different line. She suggests that we are all welcome to run our chosen line but predicts that if she runs it, she will flip and get trashed.
We are kind of attached to our line and don’t lightly give it up.
Sharon gets in her boat and demos her chosen line. She moves river right, comes down by the slanted rock, crosses the curling wave, launches over the drop and lands on the top of the big foam pile and is done. She runs a class IV rapid without splashing water on the deck of her boat.
We all take her line. It makes us look like better boaters than we are.
This is the reason we are in this class.
DAY 2 – Middle Cranberry 3.7 ft, 29 degrees
We wake, a painful hour earlier on daylight savings time, to fresh snow. The Summersville forecast calls for more snow with highs in the low 30s and 18 mph winds.
The Middle Cranberry is now above minimum. We are going.
Sharon reminds us that no one has to go.
We drive to the take-out and get dressed in everything we own. I put my dirty clothes from yesterday in my dry bag for spares. It’s snowing hard and windy, but the wind is blowing downstream and we console ourselves by saying that at least it will be at our backs.
Sharon reminds us again that no one has to go.
She also tells us that the only reason we’re able to go today, despite the snow and wind and extreme cold, is that the section we’re running is only 3 miles long and the road runs beside it the entire way. We can get off if we need to. This is a teachable moment and she takes it. It is made clear to us that we cannot do this kind of trip under these conditions unless we can get off and get warm at any point.
So, of course we all go.
I lead for a while. Eeek. This is far more intense than the Back Fork of the Elk. We go through III’s, one and another and then another. The break between rapids gets shorter and shorter. Sometimes I wait in the front for Sharon to catch me before running a line. I like this being out front, this feeling of leading, the one that climbers call being ‘on the sharp end of the rope’. Everything is brighter and louder. I can taste and smell the river and I am completely in the present. But it gets harder and harder and I need more and more confirmation of my lines and a point comes when Sharon says that it’s time for her to lead.
I am very grateful.
Now we are in a long class III. I don’t know how long. Fifteen or twenty Nantahala falls, perhaps, back to back? A quarter of a mile? Remember, I have that river aphasia, so I cannot be trusted about this, but we spend a very long time navigating this rapid.
We are finally creeking. We are doing the dance, passing each eddy back up the river, hand-to-hand, boat-to-boat. Sharon is leading; Michele is next and then me. Kurt is directly behind me, followed by Russ and then by Spencer. We arrive in our eddyies and then we check: Where do I go next? Is the person in that eddy ready to leave? Is the person who is linked to me from behind in their eddy? Can they see me? Are they ready to come to my spot? We make eye contact and nod and then we go, a looping ballet of peel-outs and ferries and eddy turns. We are a thing of beauty. We become a new creature on the river.
We finally exit the bottom of the rapid and the intensity of the river settles. There are still many rapids, but they have space between them and we have the opportunity to gather in groups of two or three.
Michele has been boating just 9 months, if you can believe it, and she has found this river to be just within her reach. To this point she has made a number of impressive combat rolls. She is pleased and we are all impressed, but she finally gets so cold that her concentration suffers and her paddle becomes a menace in every eddy.
I get whacked in the head and have a second very narrow escape and then Russ gets whacked and then, well, you only have to get hit in the head by someone so many times before you get a clue and realize that they are cold, and so it becomes clear to us that it is time for Michele to get warm and do the rest of this river on another day.
We pull over to what I believe is the perfect place and help Michele and Spencer off of the river. They take Sharon’s car keys and leave to pull their boats up to the road.
At this point I feel the need to insert a personal defense into this story and say that I swear I thought the road was right there. It was not a cruel trick on my part to make you guys lug those creek boats up that long hill. Really.
At the very least, I hope the carry was warming.
The remaining four of us continue on, but the best, or worst, is over. We have time now to notice the snow, falling all around us. When the wind turns traitor and drives stinging sleet into our faces as we squint our way through unknown rapids, it seems only reasonable, and obvious, and even funny in a river story sort of way.
We reach the last big rapid, S-Turn. All of us feel sluggish and cold. We look sloppy and we are no longer very smart, but we retain enough sense to know that we should not run this rapid. We take out on river left and carry our boats down to a big flat rock from which we can launch into a small pool and run a foamy seam to get below the rapid.
Sharon, who kindly goes first as probe, launches off the rock, paddles out of the pool, drops into the seam, does a brief mystery move, and is squirted, 60 gallon creek boat and all, nearly entirely free of the river.
I do not like this line.
I look for another way, but I am tired and cold and I can’t get my spray skirt on by myself anyway, so I tell Russ that I am going and he buckles me in and I stay high up on the edge of the wave, away from the crease and so my trip down is uneventful. Russ and Kurt do the same.
See, we are learning. We are learning from taking this class.
We paddle on. A few more small rapids, but nothing serious. We work at moving forward to stay warm. It never ceases to be fun but I am ready, more than ready, when we see Spencer and Michele and the havens of our cars.
When we load boats, the water dripping off of them freezes in icicles that hang from our cockpit rims and backbands.
As we drive through Richwood, the bank thermometer says 29 degrees. It is still snowing.
=========================
It’s late and we’ve done it to ourselves again. We are cold and tired and wet and hungry and six hours and a meal away from home. It’s Sunday at 5 pm.
We fall madly upon what snacks we have and drive with heaters blasting to Tamarack, in Beckley, WV, where we stop for dinner. We arrive at 7, expecting to get in and out quickly, but we do not leave until almost 8 o’clock. We must, they are announcing their closing over the loudspeakers and sweeping up around us.
We sit; plates pushed away, chairs back, telling stories about each other, as paddlers do. We tell stories of hope and of fear and of disaster averted. We tell stories of the foolishness of our younger paddling selves. We tell stories to remind each other about how far we have come and we tell stories so that others can imagine their future skill by what they see in our paddling. These stories are our talismans against harm. We laugh and we laugh until we nearly cry.
We tell stories so we won’t have to part with one another and go home.
But finally we do, we get up and get coffee and drive. We are together on the road for a while, but one by one the others drift away. The dims don’t cast enough light for my tired eyes and the brights are made impossible by mesmerizing flakes of oncoming snow. Somewhere in Virginia the skies clear, the full moon shines and the wind picks up again. It blows so hard that it forces its way in through the car windows. We are buffeted about the road accompanied by a noise like the sound a child makes when squeezing air from the neck of a balloon. The motion and sound envelop us, and my semi-delirious mind finds it almost comforting.
I am riding with Sharon and we pull into my driveway, just the two of us in a single car, at 12:37 am. We gather what we can find of my gear and pile it on the porch and then we hug and she drives away. I stumble around, trying to be quiet, hanging clothes and rinsing muddy booties and emptying the cooler. I do only what is necessary and then I ease into bed, exhausted and jangling with caffeine.
When I close my eyes, I see snowflakes dancing.
Thank you, Sharon and Spencer, and my fellow students. It was a pleasure paddling with you all.
Sandi
Photos
The first group of photos is from the Back Fork of the Elk (3 Falls section). The pictures with the snow are from the next day on the Middle Cranberry.