Rapid Transit

 After Karen E. Bender’s, The Man Who Hated Us and Then Forgot

This was the time I had a tough training run on the Arkansas River in which I dumped my crew of fellow trainees into Three Forks rapid, into rocks and, unknowingly, into rebar, sharp and ugly metal. Two of the crew were unnerved from the rebar, the rest from the amount of rocks they had to swim through before I got them back in the raft. Two hoisted themselves back into the boat as I reached for the others. 

Lifting myself back in the raft was something I had yet to accomplish. In that strange out of body way of stepping back while in the middle of a difficult moment, in the midst of adrenaline pumping, I noted, it is very important to get yourself back in your boat. I pulled the mostly male crew, only one woman other than me, up and in, grabbing a leg, a lifejacket, as they swore. And glared.

During training, there comes a point where each trainee believes they know better than the other how to run a rapid. When your crew is dumped from your raft on a rapid they consider textbook, although there is nothing textbook about a river, it is all they can do to keep from taking over. 

News travels fast. They heard this back at camp before we retuned. 

I didn’t listen to the swearing. I didn’t know what rebar was. I didn’t really care much about anything other than regrouping. They heard this back at camp as well. Everyone was shaken up at lunch knowing the big rapids of the run were still to come. 

The wooden picnic table at which we ate lunch was crowded with half glances of anger and mistrust. I knew they didn’t want to get back into the boat. I took a walk to the portable toilets, a portable metal hut that was big enough for me to hide behind out of sight. I was also shaken. Not by the rapid. But by losing my crew’s confidence. 

I don’t remember who, I think I remember a woman, came out of the toilet, looked at me standing alone and asked how I was. I was upset. My crew would not listen. They were younger and stronger and felt angry at being in the water. I understood that. I would not want to be in the water. But we had Three Rocks and Spikebuck rapids directly ahead and those were much harder than what we had just paddled. We were heading into the most challenging part of the run and I needed my crew. 

She told me I needed to get it together. 

That I must think:

I am in charge. I am the guide. This is my boat. Deal with it, and with me.

This was vital advice about how to captain a boat, and I remember the feeling more than the words, and I remember the gender more than the person. What reached me was a matter of fact smile, and a nod, as if to say, “you got that? Because you better get that.” I took as long as I could without being away too long to get this feeling in my stomach. I came back to the lunch table and to my crew. 

This was the time I talked. “We are going to paddle and we are going to paddle together.” 

I had run Spikebuck successfully under worse conditions, when we were all wet and cold from the rain and didn’t want to get wetter or colder. The rain was nearly sleet by the time we put in that afternoon, yet all rowed hard when I called for it.  That day I had run Spikebuck to the right. I busted through the lateral wave at just the right point to catch a little of the eddy which set me up with some time to adjust, to look ahead for the tongue over Spikebuck and to maneuver around some of the rocks that had been poking up.

The crew pushed away from the picnic table, stood up, clicked shut life preservers and without a word, got back in the boat. They paddled for me at Three Rocks and the boat rode on rails. We moved smoothly through Spikebuck. We made a good run though all of the tough stuff.  

Our bus driver, who watched all of our runs from the road above excitedly said to me on the bus ride back, “You knew exactly where you wanted to put that boat!” 

Bam Bam, mid 20’s to my late 30’s, tall, good looking, boyishly irreverent, outspoken, and sometimes unexpectedly perceptive, would be the only one of the rookies, which included my boyfriend, to talk with me later, would seek me out, would say, “You ran that perfectly. And you kept calm all through lunch. We were all freaking out and unnerved and you kept it together and we never knew if you were even thinking otherwise. And you really knew your run!” 

Finding out my crew paddled on my having “kept it together” was high, high praise. I had not felt calm. If they thought me composed, it was a surprise to me. Bam Bam’s exuberance and incredulousness amused me, but always the one most candid, it seemed appropriate he would be the one to speak up.

This was the time I went from my worst to my best moments on the river in hours. That evening, exhausted, in the local bar, Bam Bam bought me a beer.

JL Silverman is an MFA creative nonfiction student at Chatham University. Her work has been published in the Griffith Observer, The Huffington Post, and the medical journals Imaging Economics and CLP. Two of her poems were published by Ekphrastic Review.