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< March-April 2007
	Gray Matters
Letting Go Our most profound moments are often realized from the seat of a kayak By Doug Ammons

It’s a good bet that we each remember the instant we got hooked on paddling. For one person, it might have been crossing a smooth lake, levitating across the water and feeling the freedom of a new world. For another, it was hurtling over that first horizon line into the rapid beyond. Regardless of when it took place, it was an instant of truth where we confronted something new and unknown. There was a rush—and for a moment we couldn’t tell the difference between joy and the grab in our throat—but we knew without saying that it was a new path. And from that point on, nothing seemed the same.

To me, that instant holds the key to much of life’s promise because it encapsulates the single step where we move from what we know into the vast unknown. It may be the smallest step into the gray zone, but if we follow its different forms across our lives, it’ll provide as many lessons as we could possibly wish to learn.

If you ever teach your children how to paddle, it will carry you right back to the heart of that first experience—and remind you of how much you now take for granted. Many years ago I took my oldest daughter kayaking for the first time down a river. She was about 8 years old, a natural athlete, strong, coordinated, and almost fearless. Of course, she had paddled in pools, ponds, and lakes many times, and they had worked their magic on her. She was already hooked. But a river is a very different place, even a little Class I float like the Clark Fork River above Missoula.

We floated along in the current as the river cut gently between the cobble bars. Her pigtails flapped, and she had a smile so big it hardly fit on her face. We saw two beavers and startled a great blue heron along the bank. With a few ungainly strides, she took wing and flapped slowly away downriver like a giant pterodactyl. There was no question that we had entered a supernatural world.

The jolt came when she impulsively decided to get over to the side of the river. She forgot what we had practiced, forgot she was in a different realm, and did what any good land-based thinker would do—quickly turned the boat and paddled straight for the side. At that moment without even realizing it, she entered the gray zone and came face to face with a profound fact: Things are different out here. The upstream edge of her kayak caught, and she almost flipped. The paddle spun out of her hand, and the current swept the boat downstream, barely staying upright. From fun to terror in zero seconds flat.

That’s the problem with, and beauty of, whitewater kayaking: More than any other sport, you can immediately find yourself in the gray zone without realizing you have crossed a line. Compare it with the safety and controlled environment of sport climbing. The step comes again, but in a different form. The first time I took her climbing was on a little sport route. Harness on, anchors set and checked, rope tied and checked, I had her climb up three feet, and then lean and test the rope. All fine, she laughed and swung around. “This is fun!”

Back on the ground for an instant, she then whipped up the holds like an orangutan until about 20 feet off the deck, she passed into the gray zone—suddenly realizing where she was—and froze:

“It’s too high!”

It was amazing to watch the beautiful flow of pure movement collapse into paralysis and a cry of, “I’m scared!”

Suddenly the minutia of physics became huge: “My foot’s slipping!”

“It’s okay,” I calmed her. “Everything is okay. I have you here with the rope. You can just climb down.”

“I can’t! I’m going to fall!”

“No, I have you. Remember, we checked the rope, so just lean on it a little.”

I snugged up the rope again so it was taking most of her weight. “There, feel that?” She gingerly leaned, stepped off the holds, the rope stretched a little. “Oh, it’s a swing,” she laughed and her confidence returned. Amazing what a little security can do.

After talking her up to the top of the 40-foot cliff, I belayed her down.

“I made it!” she stated proudly with both feet on the ground.

“You were great, kid,” I said. “You know, it’s okay to be scared, just don’t let it control you. Figure out what to do and do it.”

That little climb hosted some great lessons.

The problem in kayaking is that the pace isn’t yours to set. There isn’t any rope to snug up or time to sit and think. Things can happen fast even on a slow river. The critical thing is, merely sitting in a kayak on water already has disconnected you from the solid things of the world.

You’re on your own even when you’re with dad.

Yet it is also amazing how quickly kids learn to play in that world. They can step blithely into the gray zone while adults fight against all those years of learning to be safe. Everything in the adult is screaming, “Watch out! You’re going to get hurt!” while kids don’t know enough to worry. Their blessing is for uninhibited learning. The curse is being unaware of danger.

Another one of my daughters showed this. After watching me work with a friend, she wanted to paddle. “Here, hold the paddle like this,” I said.

She brushed me off, “I know.”

“If you want to turn the boat, take strokes on the same side…”

“I know! Leave me alone.”

She paddled right across the pool, turning circles around the bemused college students. But when I took her out on the river for the first time, she had other worries. Everybody finds their own limits, the places where they wander into their own gray zones, and you can never guess ahead of time where that might be. Sitting in the kayak with me hanging onto the cockpit, she peered over the side and looked suspiciously down into the water.

“Are there fish down there?”

“Sure, they’re looking for bugs to eat. I’m sure they’re scared of you.”

She ignored me and asked, “And snakes?”

“Well, maybe along the bank.”

“That big rock scares me.”

“It can’t do anything to you. It’s just sitting there on the bottom.”

“I’m not going upside down in this river,” she announced. “There are fish and snakes in it. And I don’t like that big rock.”

Sometimes, the gray we see hides the things we seek. She eventually learned to roll and came to love being on the river. The first time we headed down the Blackfoot, she saw the sun reflecting off all the little swirls of current and shouted, “Everything is moving! It’s so beautiful!”

Joy and inspiration don’t come from comfort. They come from the same place fear does—from confronting something different and larger than ourselves, and not knowing what will happen next. The steps come in a million forms. They happen in climbing, skiing, kayaking, and they continue into our normal life. That is probably why adventure sports are so compelling. They present life in a microcosm, simplified and elemental, symbolically carrying life’s biggest questions in a primal form. There’s control and letting go, feeling safe and being scared, standing in the known and stepping into the unknown.

We need faith in ourselves and the abilities of our children through all our little lessons in the gray zone—a trust that we will learn the things we need to climb, paddle, and live a full life.

Doug Ammons has been a world-class kayaker for 25 years and is author of The Laugh of the Water Nymph, available at www.dougammons.com.