A Celebration of Life for Sarah Elizabeth Ruhlen

Sarah Ruhlen, the young guiding light of the Carolina Canoe Club, passed away on August 3, 2022. She was 26 years old. Sarah had a special place in the club but also in the much larger paddling community. As her life touched so many people it is difficult to overestimate her influence. Her parents, Rich and Terry, did a wonderful job raising Sarah and their generosity and nurturing extended beyond their own family. Sarah was a gift to the world. She was a paddler’s paddler but she had a pixie-like quality of materializing in multiple places and touching numerous people. She claimed many “river parents” and they claimed her as a daughter in return.

This daughter/parental bond wasn’t a casual assertion. Sarah spent many days in the Nantahala/Bryson City area paddling, working, learning and teaching. While she was in town, she frequently stayed with one of her sets of river parents. Her birth parents encouraged this sharing and her adoptive parents relished her stays. Not many people are as welcomed for long visits as Sarah was. Sarah’s generosity flowed freely too. Her home was open to any friends, new or established, who needed a place to crash, or a meal, or a loaner boat, or an ear to absorb their woes or joys. Everyone felt Sarah really listened, she really shared their being.

On September 24, 2022, Terry Forrest and Rich Ruhlen held a Celebration of Life for Sarah. The Celebration featured many speakers who nurtured or trained or goofed or paddled with Sarah, as well as friends who cried with her over life’s inequities. Jim Mazzola, one of Sarah’s river parents, said he felt Sarah was dealt a bad hand, that she was born with a lot of bad parts, defective physical systems that left her with diabetes and a tendency to illness and injury, but she was not born with a bad heart, a weak mind or a feeble will. She excelled at many skills: photography, baking, writing, joking, editing and most of all, paddling. Sarah was not only highly skilled but she was devoted to including people of all types and levels into the joys of paddling. When new people accompanied Sarah, they never felt she was condescending to paddle with a lessor. She enjoyed their enthusiasm and newfound skills as much as they did and she was quick in showing the right perspective on missed lines or flips or reasonable challenges not attempted.

While the sun set gloriously over the pavilion at Smoky Mountain Meadows, the speakers had much to recall and joys to share. Here are some of their comments. A complete audio/video recording is included in the link at the end of the article.

Rich Ruhlen

Sarah was an only child, and sometimes I think that children that grow up that way, sometimes wish for a larger family or a wider circle of love, so I think that’s sort of what she devoted her life to… to enlarging the circle of love to include all the people that she loved, which is all of you and the people who loved her back, once again, all of you, plus the people who couldn’t make it here tonight. I don’t know how she did it, I’m not that way, but somebody, maybe all of you, taught her how to be loving the way she was. I think all you guys were responsible for making her the person she was and I thank you.

Bob Brueckner

Sarah had a mischievous bent. …while I was away paddling, she would go into my tent and put either monkeys or parrots into my sleeping bag. I would never know what would be in the tent. The other thing she would do would be to give you something. I never knew why but she gave me a Star Trek communicator, with a little green light that flashed.

This comes from an article she wrote for the ACA back in 2020. It talks about her thoughts about the club. “I liked the actual paddling well enough but what I loved were the people, all these second sets of parents… my second family.”

Helene Elbein

I had the pleasure of being given the gift of Sarah and somebody she called mom. She would always have lovely, irreverent things to say, which always made me laugh.

When you are on the river and you feel the spray, that spray is Sarah. When you are out at night and you feel the breeze, the breeze is Sarah. All those things that you notice that are so touching and so memorable if you allow them to be, are Sarah tapping you on the shoulder, letting you know she is here and she is now living through you and what you do with the time that you have.

Larry Ausley (Larry is dressed in an Easter Bunny suit, a Sarah favorite.)

I am honored to wear this thing tonight.

Sarah is the key that opens all locks. She could go anywhere, be with anybody and be welcomed.

She could handle any situation. Take it in stride and say, “what next?”

Mary Goff

Lessons to be gained from Sarah: Don’t take a single moment for granted. Tell your loved ones how much you care about them. Don’t be afraid to look foolish. Do something today that would make Sarah raise her hand to high five you. Do something without the promise of reciprocity. Do whatever it is with passion and with reckless abandon. Do it because Sarah is watching you and she is rooting for you.

Chad Christopher

Everyone raise your hand who has received a small plastic animal or a snack from Sarah on the river. That’ll tell you everything you need to know about Sarah.

Be impulsive… don’t put off. If Sarah thought of someone she immediately called them or sent them a text.

Grief is an art and there is no right way to do it. I think one thing Sarah would want us to do is to be impulsive, to do the things we know we ought to do but we put off, because if anyone knew how to live life it was Sarah.

We had a game at work of summarizing an event in a short phrase. At her first aviation event, I asked Sarah her impression and she ventured, “Old white men taking dick measurements.”

Donna Kestner

Rich was kind enough to take Sarah and I down a new little creek one time and he had a swim into a strainer and Sarah and I didn’t know what to do for him so we helped him out a lot by standing on the shore and laughing. He did not get a rope that day. He never let us live it down either but we had a lot of fun.

Sarah also spent a lot of time at my house cooking, so I’d like to believe I had an effect on all the baking she did but I did not. There was a lot of baking done at my house. It was always just a pleasure to have her over… sometimes I had to wake them up to come clean up the all the dishes that they had dirtied but it was always a lot of fun and such a blessing.

Martha Mount

I was fairly new to kayaking then… and after our first day, we were standing by the car and trying to get out of our wet clothes and I was struggling with the, you know, the wet sports bra that’s stuck like spaghetti all over your shoulders and under your rib cage and you can’t get anything off…and in the amount of time I was doing this, little teenaged Sarah had ripped everything off and put on dry clothes; then she came over to me and said, “Put the dry bra on top and step out of the wet bra.” Such a simple thing but she took that moment, not like a surly teenager-she could have laughed and walked away-but there she was… she was there for me, giving me instructions just when I needed it and knowing when to step in.

I love her “Rules of Stoke,” especially rule no. 3, “Love others first. Be stoked on them, be stoked for them.” She always made me feel like she was stoked for me, whether it was changing out of a wet bra or accomplishing some paddling task. She made me feel loved.

I was always impressed by her multigenerational skills. She always hung out with all of Rich’s old paddling buddies and she had a wise sense about her from all these years with legends of paddling…. She was both her own age and some age much older and wiser…. she was the connective tissue between older and younger paddling groups.

Logan Kendricks

I was Sarah’s boyfriend. She was the most comfortable person I ever knew.

Right now, I see the sun shining through the trees, it’s so pretty out here, the evening air feels special, like she is here. Giving you a pat on the shoulder.

One of my favorite days with her was up at the Tellico. It was cold. She didn’t want to get in the water yet. She was going to hang around and get some drone shots. Between laps at Baby Falls I was walking up the bank and Sarah approached saying, “I just crashed my drone, over there, in the cave.” So I start swimming around trying to find it. It’s gone. Turns out they don’t float. I find Sarah and she has new information, “Hey, I lost my phone. It popped out of the drone controller.” It goes bounce, bounce into the water. We looked for an hour and a half before we gave up. That night, we were still able to sit down and have a nice dinner. She lost a few thousand dollars’ worth of gear that day and any other person would have been devastated but she knew how to roll with the punches.

Terry Forrest

Sarah was a very spirited child… When she was very young, probably three or four, we went out to Yellowstone. We would camp for a few days and then go to a motel to shower and regroup and then back to a different campsite. When we went to the hotel Sarah got absolutely wild. She was a spirited child and it was always a challenge to not break her spirit but still keep her under some kind of surveillance. She was running up and down the front of the motel, just crazy and I looked at her and I said, “If you don’t quit this and settle down, I am going to put you in this room in a Time Out.” She stopped what she was doing and her eyes flashed, and she looked at me and said, “You are not going to put me in Time Out. There isn’t a corner in this room.” And I looked around, and sure enough, there was no corner. It was a round room. I was so mad…. I stopped using Time Out after that.

Her illness progressed and she never let her sickness overcome her or her positive attitude. She was in her teens and one of her friends at NOC died on the river… Sarah wrote in her blog, “After a paddler dies a spirit goes to the waters to join the divine. One does not see the divine but rather feels encompassed by all the other past paddlers in the force of the divine. Paddlers do not feel haunted by these spirits but rather, protected. They feel they have gained fortification for life and in the deceased spirit, companionship. It is as if they can bring their friend with them on many more trips. In this way, to remember and honor their friend’s past and to be able to continue in their presence.”

Kirk Weir

Last summer, Sarah came to live with Debbie and myself for a couple of months and during that time our relationship really, really grew. At the end of that session it was almost like we had gained another daughter.

Sarah would have these “riffing” sessions at the end of each day and we would just talk these crazy ideas, much to Debbie’s chagrin and we would just go on for quite some time in the afternoon and during one of these sessions we realized Debbie had gone for a walk and we realized it was almost dark, and there’s bears and there’s coyotes out there. They could get her. We decided we needed to come up with a call that we could echo out and that she could respond to that we would know she’s okay. We decided the call had to be the call of the pterodactyl, which could be a “tuh-caw.” The answer would be “caw.” Throughout the summer we would be at the NOC parking lot, the Engles in Bryson, Lowes or somewhere else and this “tuh-caw” would ring out and it was maybe from Sarah or somebody else, because by now we had spread this theory out way more than just the four of us. … No matter where you were, if you heard a “tuh-caw” you had to answer it with a “caw.”

Wayne Dickert

Wayner: “Tuh caw!”

Audience: “Caw!”

Wayner: “There you go.”

Everybody was family. Relationship was so important to her, and so important to me and that’s why we thrived off each other, that’s why we fed off each because we got joy out of her joy because we recognized in her the beauty of those relationships.

A lot of us strive to do well in one thing. I was surprised to learn she was one of ten Level Five Canoe Instructors in the country, the only woman. The videos that she did brought joy to everybody, she brought joy to the community in so many different ways, so many different levels, so many different events.

She could bring a level of wisdom, especially for somebody at her age and speak a truth, that needed to be heard and do it in such a way that people could hear it and go, “Yeah. We can be better. We can be better if we do this.”

Her times of pain, her times of joy, could be brought together in this beauty of paddling, in this deep love she had for paddling, she could bring all that together and to speak a truth that almost nobody else could speak in the way that she did and have everyone come together. That to me, I think, was Sarah’s special quality