52 Miles

I made my return to the Gauley River. 

The Gauley is often a milestone in many paddler's lives.  Most never forget the feeling of their first time down, scared at 'Insignificant', wide-eyed at 'Pillow' and terrified in 'Lost Paddle'.  The river is a true classic.  Time passes in a paddler's life.  Bigger rivers and steeper creeks come to pass, but the allure of the Gauley remains.  It is a pilgrimage.  It is a sacred space where the community gathers and revels in all that it is.  The paddling community is made up of a unique breed of individuals from working professionals to bearded, dread-locked, back of my van lifestylers who breathe water instead of air.  They all have one thing in common though.  It is a respect, a fascination with an ideal that seems lost, or at the very least, hard to find in modern society.  It is a feeling of a life without walls.  It is a feeling of a life about possiblities.  It is a feeling of... perhaps quite obviously... life.  Simple, visceral, moving life.  On the river, things makes sense because things are real.  One gets to blend, and mesh with the very essence, the very core of the lifeblood of the planet.  In this environment, it is an easy mental exercise to let go of the constant neverending chattering monologue of you mind.  We are out there, because of this simple thing.  

We decide to go to the river.  We make a conscious choice to seek it out, to learn from it, to experience it. 
 
We paddled fifty two miles on Saturday.  It is known as the double-marathon, a logistical, mental, and physical challenge.  It was a long way to paddle.  It was a series of small moments strung together over nine hours of river time.  Almost all of it, I do not remember.

It was deep into the second marathon, that one moment in particular stands out in my mind.  We were out of the rapids.  Most of the rough stuff was over.  The river was calm.  There were a few small ripples on the surface.  The sun was beginning to dip near the tops of the trees.  We paddled straight into the evening light, squinting so hard we could barely see.  The trees shimmered alongside us in the breeze, and it was quiet.  The clink of my wedding band on the shaft of my paddle played a steady beat as the strokes melted away.  At times the sun was so strong, I could only manage to stare as far as the bow of the boat.  The water gently lifted the boat up and down.  We paddled in sequence like this for some time, rounding a bend, sliding onward, passing into the depths of a long shadow created by a high bank.   


There are reasons we go to the river.