When I first met my boyfriend, Matt, he nonchalantly told me, “I enjoy paddling.” It was summer then and the region was caught in a drought, and I got used to our favorite weekend activity of heading to the woods for hiking and biking. Then one day it began to rain. And rain. Oddly, Matt was excited. “What’s wrong with you?” I asked him after the third consecutive day of rainfall. “The lower Big Sandy might be running,” he said with a note of glee in his voice. That was how I learned of his infatuation with kayaking.
As our relationship lengthened and deepened, we weathered the vicissitudes of the skies. On sunny days I had a date; on rainy ones I didn’t. I learned about rivers, and how you could tell a rapid’s danger level by its name. There is the relatively kind Bastard, the more vivid Meat Cleaver and, my personal favorite, I’m Coming Home, Sweet Jesus. Nobody ever names a rapid Please Stay Left. Sometimes before he went out Matt would inform me, “This is a river people die on.” Or, if it was not, I was assured that “nobody is going to die today,” the emphasis clearly on today.
The fact remained that if I wanted to see Matt more often, I would have to get into a boat. My first complaint was with the clothes: fuzzy rubber trousers, a rubber neoprene wetsuit top, a nylon paddling shirt, a “dry deck” with attached skirt, a life jacket and a helmet. What had happened to dates that required lipstick and a pretty dress? I didn’t feel like a woman, I felt like an astronaut.
But I persevered, and so did Matt, who bravely tried to teach me. We quickly learned about the “no-significant-other rule,” which states that no significant should ever teach the other anything. As I turned in circles in my boat, I grew frustrated; as I grew frustrated, I directed it at Matt. “Don’t get mad at me,” he said. “I’m not mad at you, I’m mad at the boat,” I answered. “Then why are you yelling at me?” I boiled over, he hit his limit and neither of us was having any fun. Two hours later I was disoriented, wet, cold and accusing him of trying to kill me. He was wet, cold and accusing me of not listening. We agreed that perhaps someone besides him should teach me.
Which is how I ended up in a line of other unenthusiastic girlfriends at the Turkey Bash. We practiced paddle strokes, bow rescues, catching eddies and leaving them. By lunchtime, two of the women had quit. The other woman and I enviously eyed the escapees onshore. This was about a lot more than surviving a difficult class. This was a decision about whether we wanted our relationships to survive. We stuck it out. When we left the river at dinnertime, we had yet to paddle downstream, the essential activity and reward of whitewater, but we both felt oddly elated and victorious. The next weekend, when I arrived at Matt’s apartment, he handed me a present: my very own paddle.
I still wish Matt were passionate about something less dangerous, like baseball or poker. I’ve grown to accept as much as I can this uneasy part of love: the fear of losing it—of losing him—forever. So I wait anxiously for the post–run text message, which reads simply OFF THE RIVER.
WE now paddle some rivers together, which usually involves a lot of my flipping and swimming and a lot of his being saintly and collecting the wreckage. On the Cheat Narrows, near Morgantown, W.Va., I predictably flipped and swam through the class-three Calamity rapid. Looking back at the video of it, I discovered a surprise that made my heart ache with love. The videographer had captured Matt’s reaction: he had leaped into his boat, fastened the skirt, slid down a steep rock face and raced to my rescue. Suddenly Matt became my very own Indiana Jones, with a helmet instead of a cowboy hat. A few weeks later, we paddled the narrows together again, and this time I was able to release myself from a state of constant fear to look occasionally around at the scenery. The sun was setting behind me, casting a ruddy glow through the trees and across the empty, peaceful water.
