Notes From the North Country

Years ago, when I was first kayaking, I learned about a life philosophy that I immediately adopted.  One of the most accomplished men I ever met, an ex-kayaker, wrote that what separated the truly successful people he’d known — at Harvard, in the Marines, in the Olympics, and in the White House — was a specific mindset.  He called it “fascination with the process.”

To be fascinated with the process means you’re doing things for the right reason.  It’s not about the results, it’s about the pursuit.  Ironically, you tend to get stellar results; you work harder, think deeper, and achieve more — not because you lust after fame and fortune — but because you truly love the work itself.  You revel in the details.  You enjoy the behind-the-scenes.  You do the digging.  You’re passionate not about racing in the Olympics, but about training for the Olympics.

Back in 2001, I was a young racer passionate about training for the Olympics, but living in the slalom backwater of Vermont, I had no idea how to go about it.  So I was ecstatic when Scott Shipley, the winningest American kayak racer of his generation, published a how-to guidebook specifically devoted to winning whitewater slalom races.  Finally — a book that would show me the secrets of the yearly training plan, of how hard I had to work, how often to train, and a thousand other details I couldn’t wait to dig into.  My expectations could not have been higher.

But you know what?  That book that I bought and hauled back to my dorm room to dissect, Every Crushing Stroke, turned out to be even better than I expected.  It wasn’t just a training manual — it was a revelation.  Sixteen years later it remains my favorite book about whitewater kayaking.  Many boaters have never heard of it, and that’s a shame.  Why?  Because Every Crushing Stroke is that rare sports book that not only teaches you how to win, but how to live.

It’s is a book about “fascination with the process.”

***

Let’s start with the writing.

Normally jocks’ books — the ones who write their own books — are disappointing.  They fall back on cliches and warmed-over game summaries and usually end up revealing very little of anything.  So I was surprised at what an engaging writer Shipley, a jock and an engineer by training, turned out to be.  Yet every page is alive with fresh, original writing, and burns with infectious passion, as Shipley sketches out his boyhood dreams:

“Not once in all that time did I crave the riches of a pro athlete or the recognition of an Olympian.  I wanted to be like my heroes.  I wanted to drive to Jonquiere in my green Cathy Hearn-style Pinto and I wanted to launch myself out of the starting gate like Austrian Norbert Sattler.  I wanted to be the fastest kayaker in the world.”

Soon enough, he does — and Every Crushing Stroke is a coming of age story both for Shipley and for the sport of whitewater kayaking itself.  Shipley is a paddling zeitgeist; he pops up everywhere in the last 30 years of boating history.  He learns the sport in homemade gear from his father, a 60s-era US Team member who “believed in roughing it and learning the old way,” then enjoys a riverside seat for the 1980s innovations in slalom boat design and paddling technique — stern squirts and pivot turns — led by the new crop of dominating American racers like Cathy and David Hearn and Jon Lugbill.  Later, Shipley’s there for two of American slalom’s high water marks: the 1989 World Championships and slalom’s dramatic reinclusion into the 1992 Olympics.  A year later, he’s back again for the 1993 Freestyle World Championships — now considered a watershed moment in freestyle boating — where he finishes second, despite not having learned any new freestyle moves until just weeks beforehand.  His career retrospective stops there, but many of the training workouts depicted in the book were refined during the middle and later 1990s, at a time when Shipley was again on the forefront of the Olympic-driven movement in slalom toward still greater professionalization in training.  And of course after the book was published, Shipley has again been on the cutting edge — this time as designer of many of the world’s best artificial whitewater courses.

But back in the 1980s, Scott Shipley was not a normal kid.  He was fascinated — obsessed — with the process.  Most kids enjoy racing, but not the hard work of training (at least, not without a coach or parent around).  But Shipley — largely coachless —  *loved* to train.  He begins hanging a single slalom gate on the sound near his house in Washington State, practicing unsexy technique drills over and over.  His workouts become more regimented, more serious, and more and more honed in on turning weaknesses into strengths.  “Every race was a test I invariably failed,” he writes.

What kind of teenager is that focused?  One who is incredibly competitive, and yet totally immersed in the pursuit of excellence.  Again, Shipley’s passion comes through in the writing itself, as he remembers his childhood training partners, a hodgepodge collection of Seattle-area boaters who stoke his competitive fire, yet nurture him at the same time:

“I grew up with an overwhelming desire to compete, to be faster, to beat people.  Every workout and every race I was focused on attack, attack, attack.  If I was slower than my target, I would dig deeper to paddle better and faster on my next effort.  The great lesson I took from these early years was the respect we all shared despite how competitive these workouts were.  At the tick of a watch we were desperately racing to beat our training partners, yet moments later, when the watch was off, we would help each other.  We were teammates in the truest sense.”

Soon Shipley is the best junior in the country, then in the world.  After winning the Junior Worlds — the first American kayaker ever to do so — he’s 18 years old and lasering in on the top few grown men in the United States — one truly great one in particular — and that’s where this book gets really good.

Sometime around 1990, Shipley moves to the small town of Chilliwack, British Columbia with the goal of winning the 1992 Olympics.  Chilliwack is the kind of place where young men have gone to transform themselves for hundreds of years.  For some men, it’s an army barracks.  For Shipley, it’s a dead-end town with a big river, a rough-and-tumble environment that Shipley can’t help contrasting with many of the modern facilities his European competitors enjoyed:

“This was our gymnasium, nothing less and nothing more.  We lacked any sort of conventional clubhouse or training center.  We changed our clothes in the dirt beside our cars, and we trained in the stadium that God gave us.  What a stadium it was, though . . .”

But it’s not about the amenities — it’s about a man named Richard Weiss.  In Chilliwack, Shipley serendipitously falls in with the kind of training group we all dream about: a bunch of up-and-coming Canadian and American racers who just happen to move there at the same time, all of whom want nothing more than to put aside everything in their lives to dedicate themselves to winning a berth in the Olympics.  They live the way broke boaters have always lived: they sleep in treehouses with no running water or lights, cook outdoors, and brave the Canadian winters in leaky drytops and shorts — all for the chance to train on Chilliwack’s world-class whitewater and nip at each other’s heels in the increasingly sadistic workouts they put themselves through.  The dynamic among the boaters quickly becomes a once-in-a-career mixture of fire-breathing competition yet mutual support, a spawning grounds for innovation, with all of the boaters bringing different things to the table, and bringing out the best in each other.  U.S. Team member Brian Brown is there.  So are Canadians Larry Norman, Patrice Gagnon, and David Ford, the man who’d go on to become a World Champion and a many-time Olympian.

But it is Shipley’s relationship with his one-time mentor Richard Weiss, the American champion, that really gives the story poignance.  Shipley is training to be great.  Weiss already is, having garnered second place at the recent Worlds.  Up close, Shipley is even more awed by his commitment, his humility, and his super-human strength.  Keeping up with Rich Weiss in a kayak was not easy, even for Shipley, the most gifted young paddler of his generation.  The first time they train together, Shipley is stunned: he becomes so exhausted fending off Weiss from passing him that he has to climb out on shore to rest.  “That was when Rich offered to design the next course.  I kid you not, Rich was only half done with the workout.”

These two men, training to beat each other, end up bringing out the best in each other — and they are both thoroughly fascinated with the process.  Shielded from what Shipley hints is the groupthink of many other top American racers, Chilliwack becomes the laboratory where this young group questions everything they know about paddling, takes it all apart — from forward strokes to draw strokes to race day procedures — scrutinize it as a group, test hypothesis, and they put it all back together again.  Meanwhile they’re indifferent to the harsh winters, seemingly immune to exhaustion, and — this is meaningful — largely coachless.  This is significant, writes Shipley, because it requires they assume responsibility for their own training — and soon enough they’re asking of themselves sacrifices that no coach would ever reasonably expect.  They become, as Shipley calls it, “the purest form of fanatics.” Sure, they’re chasing Olympic gold, but it’s about more than that.  They’ve stumbled onto something even better than winning: a perfect group for pursuing excellence together.  It’s something that few of us get to enjoy in our lives (and which Shipley freely admits he spends the rest of his career trying to recapture).  It’s a vision, an ideal.  I know it’s stayed with me ever since I first read about it here, and I’ve tried to find it for myself in both my slalom training and in my professional pursuits ever since, but I’ve never gotten quite as lucky as Shipley and Weiss.

As I mentioned, this is a poignant book.  Shipley doesn’t just relate his fascination with the process — he also evokes the dramatic highs and lows of an Olympic pursuit.  For example, he writes of the “coldest, most inhumane and most definitively final event in sports” — the 1992 Olympic Trials, with the “kill or be killed” mentality that sees Shipley win his Olympic berth, but several of his hard-working teammates miss the Games.  Later he describes the exuberance of making the Team, the orgy of fancy dinners, plane flights, free clothing, and Hilton stays courtesy of Team USA, followed by the utter agony of missing a gate on an otherwise flawless run at the 1992 Olympics — then having a host family he’s staying with shortly afterward question his dedication when he (for once) decides to sleep in.  It’s hard to read, knowing how much the guy put in.

Then there is the fate of Shipley’s great friend and rival, Rich Weiss.  After the 1992 Olympics, their training group disbands, and Shipley writes of how the stress of constantly competing against each other subtly pushed the two men apart without their realizing it.  Before they can truly reunite, and not long after finishing sixth in the 1996 Olympics, Rich Weiss drowns while practicing for an extreme race.  “I hope his legacy shines from the pages of this book,” writes Shipley.  As a reader who’d never have known any of these memorable Rich Weiss anecdotes except for this book, I’d have to say Shipley’s goal was successful.

I remember getting chills over and over again while reading this book for the first time.  I still do.  Great books leave you with lasting visions, and some of Shipley’s have stayed with me for my whole racing career and beyond.  I think of the great British champion Richard Fox “charging through the pack with little or no resistance” during crowded Savage River training sessions, the crowds of paddlers “seemed to part like the Red Sea in order to allow the champion through,” or Shipley, Brown, and Weiss swapping sides in their slalom boats on the giant Skookumchuck wave, “soul surfing” in the evening light, or perhaps my very favorite passage in all of whitewater literature: the moment at the 1989 World Championships when the unbeatable American C-1 team suddenly emerges into view on the Savage River in front of thousands of American fans:

“The mist was especially heavy on the Savage that day and the entire race had been plagued by a thick fog low to the river.  The fog was so thick that at first we saw nothing.  This was a two hundred second long course, and all we could sense were the cheers of the crowd as the gang drew steadily nearer.  Those cheers became a roar around us, even was we squinted into the fog for any sign.

“The first thing to break the low-lying fog was Jon (Lugbill)’s fist.  It was his top hand protruding above the mist and it hammered angrily into and out of the fog with each pounding stroke . . .  Finally the three of them surged out of the fog on a full speed sprint, deftly wove through the three or four gates within view, then disappeared into the fog on their way down the course.”

That description still gives me chills.  There it is: the exact moment when American slalom hit its absolute apex.  Lugbill lays down the Ultimate Run, then the Americans take a victory lap and come out of the fog like the superheros they’ve become.

And then, just like that, it’s over:

“With their passing, so too passed the peak of their era.  They belonged to another time, they were champions of the old school.  With the finish of that day’s race began a new era.  No longer were we concerned with World Championship medals; all eyes focused now on Barcelona and its Olympic Games.”

The book is all the more poignant knowing how it ends for Shipley.  Although he basically leaves off his own story after the heartbreaking 27th place at the 1992 Olympics, I bought the book in 2001, maybe six months after I’d watched Shipley again “lose” at the Sydney Olympics and then give one of the saddest, most downtrodden interviews I have ever watched on television.  I remember thinking, “The guy finished fifth in the world.  What’s so bad about that?” But a year later in Every Crushing Stroke, Shipley meditates on what the stakes really are at the Games:

“Perhaps in the eyes of . . . those who truly matter in your life — you have accomplished something.  To the rest of America, any result outside of the medals is a defeat.”

It’s quite remarkable for me to go back and watch his runs from Sydney, or even his runs from the Atlanta Olympics, where he was the favorite, but finished outside the top ten.  Scott Shipley was really freaking good, and I always felt bad for him that he was never able to win the Olympics or the Worlds — given the way he devoted his life to it.

But after reading the book, you get the sense that he’s trying to teach you that, even though it still hurts, somewhere deep down it doesn’t really matter.  Although he writes beautifully of the agony of Olympic defeat, it’s pretty clear from the rest of the book that the value he derived from his years chasing pure excellence alongside his friends went far, far beyond gold, silver, or bronze to some deeper place that not even defeat could touch:

“Like the D-C C-1s, my time has come and gone . . .  In the sum of my career I was never an Olympic Champion as were none of those paddlers I idolized so early on in my paddling . . .  Like them I take pride neither in the results themselves nor the medals I’ve brought home, but in the efforts that preceded them.  I hang my hat not on that final destination but on every crushing stroke it took to reach it.”

This is where you realize that this book is not just about kayaking.  Scott Shipley was fascinated with the process, and after reading this book, so was I.  To be in a constant pursuit of excellence is a lesson that I took with me first to the race course, then to writing, and later to a career in education.  I think of the daily lesson plans, the conferring with colleagues, the early mornings and the late nights grading essays as just another extension of the passion to succeed that Shipley, Brian Brown, and Rich Weiss first showed me from their days in Chilliwack.  This is a wonderful coming of age story and an illuminating how-to guide.  I think that all paddlers, not just slalom racers, should read it.  Because it’s not just about the best way to race — it’s about the best way to live.  

It’s a great read.

***

Being a parent must be hard nowadays.  

In addition to having to worry about online predators, cell phone addictions, and an Oval Office resident who is basically a 70 year-old poster boy for every behavior we hope children shed by the time they’re seven, you’ve also got to worry about American corporations trying to drive you insane.  

This past week I showed a fascinating, scarring documentary called “Consuming Kids:  The Commercialization of Childhood” to my Media Literacy class.  Although it was made back in 2008 and although I’ve seen it before, it has somehow become more revelatory for me with time.  Here’s the basic premise: babies are born innocent and pure . . .  until the ad industry gets hold of them.  Then they try their damnedest to turn beautiful children into hysterical consumers lusting after an increasingly expensive parade of mindless games, toys, and junk food.

Continue reading “Who Really Raises Our Kids?”

Last weekend, for the first time in almost thirty years, I turned the TV off during a good football game.  I felt sick to my stomach.  And it had nothing to do with Colin Kaepernick.

It was a college game, and in the span of about 20 minutes, I watched two different young men get hit so hard that they had to be carried off on stretchers.  Both times the game stopped for ten minutes, as players circled around and dropped to a knee — a gesture that’s explosive during the national anthem, but dead-somber during an injury stoppage.  Some players clasped hands.  It was like a prayer vigil.  I’d seen gesture before, but never really thought about it.  But now it was clear:  It was like they were praying their teammate wasn’t dead or paralyzed.

And so — for the first time — was I.

Continue reading “Why I’ve Been Turning Off Football”

***

A few years ago, I was eating lunch on Mt. Lafayette when I looked up to see a small plane bearing down on me.  

Normally you hear a plane long before you see it.  But this time the only noise — other than the din of forty hikers gone quiet — was a gentle swish.  

Just as I was about to lunge behind a boulder, the plane banked right in front of us, cutting an impossibly tight, searing radius.  Then — swish! — it was gone, tearing back down the Franconia Ridge.

“What was that?” the man next to me asked, open-mouthed.  “A drone?”

“No,” I said, “a glider.”

Continue reading “Surfing the Mountains”

A few weeks ago, five high school students posted to social media a picture of themselves wearing KKK hoods in front of a burning cross.  Not surprisingly, Betty Andrews, president of the Iowa/Nebraska NAACP, one of the oldest civil rights organizations, came out forcefully against the photo.  

What was odd was a single but important phrase she uttered in her denunciation.  It’s one I’ve heard a lot over the past few years, always in response to controversies like this one.  She said:

“We have to be really careful in crossing that line when free speech does become hate speech.”

Hate speech.  On the surface, it’s not an odd statement.  The image is hateful.  But the problem is that here in the United States, “hate speech” and free speech are one and the same.  In fact, you could say that “hate speech” doesn’t actually exist.

So why is everyone talking about it?

***

Maybe it’s because hate speech is a crime in a lot of other countries.  

Consider the following:

• A British man was prosecuted for carrying posters saying “Islam out of Britain — Protect the British People” and “Don’t come over to this country and treat it like your own.  Britain first.”

 

• A Belgian man was found guilty of passing out leaflets urging, “Stand Up against the Islamification of Belgium.” This was not an ordinary man, but a member of the parliament!  His punishment?  Community service and disqualification from holding office for ten years.  

These people didn’t bomb any churches.  They didn’t lay hands on anyone.  Their crime?  Expressing negative opinions toward protected groups.  

Hate speech.

Maybe the prevalence of hate speech laws in other countries is one reason why so many Americans assume we have those laws on the books here too.  Maybe that’s why you hear things like, “That’s not free speech, it’s hate speech” every time there’s a controversy.  Maybe it’s a confusion with hate crimes (which are illegal in the U.S.).  Or maybe it’s just simple ignorance.  Some people actually think we have hate speech laws here.

As I’ve been learning in my reading over the last few weeks — they couldn’t be more wrong.

***

I got the anecdotes above from two books I’ve been reading:  Floyd Abrams’s fascinating new book, The Soul of the First Amendment and Aryeh Neier’s masterpiece, Defending My Enemy.

Abrams, a widely respected First Amendment attorney who has litigated cases from the Pentagon Papers to Citizens United, had me — an admitted free speech junkie — hooked from page one.

Neier’s story is even more remarkable:  a German Jew saved from certain death in a concentration camp by a matter of days, Neier was president of the ACLU at a time when they famously defended Nazis’ right to march in the Jewish town of Skokie, Illinois.  His 1979 book, published a year later, has become a modern classic in the free speech realm.

What both books taught me is the sheer improbability of the First Amendment.  The United States in the 20th and 21st Centuries promises citizens protections for speech almost unheard of in the world’s history.  Ours is the government that protected the rights of the Westboro Baptist church to picket soldiers’ funerals.  Ours is the country that just last year protected a music group’s right to trademark an ethnic slur as a band name (“The Slants”).  Ours is the country that not only allows people to make hateful slights toward ethnic groups, but elects that man president.  It’s quite remarkable protection compared to most anywhere else in space and time.

But it wasn’t always like this.  It was fascinating, for instance, to learn that up until the mid-20th Century, the First Amendment was largely toothless.  Newspaper editors were routinely sued and jailed for libel.  Men like Eugene Debs went to prison merely for speaking out against the government.  A man in Minnesota got jail time for questioning the war effort, telling volunteer knitters, “No soldier ever sees these socks.” The excesses of the McCarthy era are well known.

But then, sometime after the Red Scare quieted down, the Supreme Court began protecting speech more and more strongly — just in time for the burgeoning Civil Rights movement, when the First Amendment protected, for example:

 

• . . .  One hundred and eighty-seven students arrested for demonstrating racial inequality outside the South Carolina State House.  The state claimed they’d committed a crime — breaching the peace — because they’d angered onlookers.

 

• . . . Twenty-three black students arrested in Baton Rouge for picketing segregated lunch counters.  They’d apparently produced “muttering” and “grumbling” from white onlookers — which again amounted to disturbing the peace.

 

• . . .  The Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. when he and fellow demonstrators were beaten by cops on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama — who neatly claimed they’d do so to stop protesters from entering a dangerous area where they’d be unprotected from the white mob.

Each time, the state tried to prosecute the minority group, and each time the First Amendment blocked the measure.  Something that opponents of that disgusting KKK photo would have cheered.

Sensing some irony?  

That’s right:  when Betty Andrews of the NAACP — one of the country’s most venerable civil rights organizations — cited a difference between free speech and “hate speech” the other week — she tacitly endorsed weakening the very same First Amendment protection of a minority voice that had once allowed her cause to flourish.  Both Neier and Abrams teach that censorship happens from both sides of the political aisle.  To be born human is to be born wishing to censor your opponents.

***

We live in a time and place that simultaneously protects our right to say offensive things to an unprecedented degree, yet demands a higher and higher social cost for doing so.  In my lifetime, we’ve gone from “gay” and “fag” being routine put-downs to a time when using either word in the workplace could be cause for termination.  We’ve gone from Chevy Chase and Richard Pryor hurling ethnic slurs at each other on a Saturday Night Live skit to a time when jobs are lost for much less (such as a Silicon Valley engineer fired for making a joke about laptops with giant “dongles.”) We live in a time that is ever-more sensitive to the nuances of discrimination via language.  We live in a culture of online shaming.  You say something offensive nowadays and more often than not, you’re going to pay a steep social price.

But we also live in a time of unprecedented social transgression.  There is an entire wing of our country that delights using the most taboo, the most crude, and the most offensive language possible.  Donald Trump won the presidency in part by thumbing his nose at “political correctness” — the types of word-watching that many in his base have grown tired of — but also by simply saying the most crude, shocking things any politician for president has ever said.

The two sides are completely at odds, and the fights rage over the use of language.  

But you know what?  I’ve spent the past year thinking that this was a bad thing.  And of course it is — if we’re not listening to each other.  But as far as hurling words, as far as debating what’s okay to say and what isn’t, even as far as name-calling and vilifying — in some sense, it’s not as bad as I thought.  Why?  Because, as I’ve learned from studying First Amendment history, one mark of a liberal society is that we do our fighting with words, not with violence.  We need unfettered free speech in order to get it all out there.  The First Amendment is grounded in an understanding that the stronger idea will usually win in competition in the marketplace.  From unfiltered speech, from the clash of divergent viewpoints, no matter how crass, comes truth, or at least consensus.  We need to be able to fight through our speech — our words, our public expression, our banners and signs — so that we don’t have to pick up real weapons.  It’s the ultimate steam valve release for a vibrant, vigorous democracy.  

Right now we have that ability.  Yet speech restrictions like hate speech take that away from us — they muzzle the debate, force some ideas underground where they can’t be seen in the light, where they can brood and fester.

But even more than that, people who call for speech codes or who invoke “hate speech” scare me because they seem all-too willing to toss censorship authority to our government.  College kids acting on administrators to serve as petty censors under a corporate-academic framework is one thing (like the Emory students who insisted the words “Trump 2016” be banned from campus).  But grown adults advocating for hate speech protections on the part of the government seem to me dangerously myopic.  Because who’s going to decide what’s hateful and what’s not?  It won’t be an enlightened tribunal of spiky-haired hipsters from Park Slope with Buddy Holly glasses sipping craft beer.  No, it’ll be the U.S. government.  And I don’t think I understood the extent to which our founders didn’t trust government to determine truth until I read Abrams’s book.  The founders, Abrams points out, specifically worded the First Amendment in the negative:  not “All citizens are guaranteed freedom of speech” but instead “Congress shall make no law . . . abridging the freedom of speech.” The Constitution isn’t in the business of making sure that marginalized groups aren’t bothered by people’s speech; it is in the business of ensuring that government doesn’t try to limit anyone’s free speech — lest next time it be your own.

What really worries me when people start talking about hate speech is the idea that these people — most of whom are committed leftists — want to toss the authority of policing people’s speech to a government led by Donald Trump.  Do you really want to trust Donald Trump to decide who is offensive and gets thrown in jail?  In fact, Trump’s politics demonstrate the tenuousness of free expression.  Trump’s base has taken particular delight in flipping the script on identity politics, casting themselves into the role of white victimhood.  Looming behind any righteous censorship coming from the left in the name of protecting minority groups is the clamor of the right, citing the very same victimization and wishing to censor right back. 

Abrams writes of a Canadian citizen who was tried for protesting a local public school’s teaching about homosexuality.  He was found guilty under a law that prohibits speech that “ridicules, belittles, or otherwise affronts the dignity of any person or class of persons.”

Stop and think for a moment.  “Ridicules any person”?  Can you imagine that law in Donald Trump’s (tiny) hands?  I’d be in jail for that last joke.

Saturday Night Live?  Illegal!  

Alec Baldwin?  Deported!  

The New York Times editors?  Minimum security out in Utica!

Do you really want to hand Trump the right to determine whose words are criminal?  Really?

Of course you don’t.

That’s why we don’t mess with hate speech laws in this country: it sounds noble, but one crack in the concrete and the whole dam bursts open and suddenly you’ll be getting sued or jailed if you criticize your neighbor, your senator, and especially your president.

Aryeh Neier lost a lot of friends and a lot of supporters when he — a Jewish Holocaust survivor — insisted on defending his sworn enemy, the Nazis.  “Is this what free speech is for?” his detractors asked.  “To let them stand up and say Jews should be killed in ovens?” But what Neier knew is that actually the First Amendment is the best insurance policy that Jews or any other group could have.  Time and time again the First Amendment has protected groups fighting on behalf of the Little Guy.  Any weakening of the First Amendment free speech protections could come back and bite you.  That’s precisely why Neier chose to defend the very people who’d tried to kill his family and he himself: because to defend his own future rights, he had to defend those of his enemy first.  

Perhaps it’s a quote by Thomas Jefferson, from his inaugural address, that really sums up the magnanimity of what we’ve built in this country, a place that does not prosecute hate speech, but seeks for a higher standard of conduct and of tolerance from its citizens.  Jefferson said:

“If there be any among us who would wish to dissolve this Union or to change its Republican form, let them stand undisturbed as monuments of the safety with which error of opinion may be tolerated where reason is left free to combat it.”

What an immensely hopeful statement.  Abrams and Neier have made me acutely aware of how much unpleasant, even threatening speech one is forced to hear in America.  All the same, when I read statements like that and reflect on how robust our free speech protections are, I realize there’s nowhere I’d rather live.

What do you call a married couple that canoes together?  

Divorced.

Years ago I saw a couple standing along the Deerfield River in western Massachusetts, dripping wet in their boating gear.  The woman’s eyes were red.  She stood with her arms crossed, her back toward the man she was with.  They weren’t talking.  He wore a haunted look and all but flung himself in front of my car with his thumb out.  A few minutes into our ride, the silence was awkward.

“What’s wrong?” I asked.

Head in his hands, he let out a sigh.

“Don’t ever try to teach your wife to paddle.”

And for years, I didn’t.

Continue reading “How to Teach Your Spouse to Paddle (Without Getting Divorced)”

I like to play the music loud when I drive.  Really loud.  People who know my carefully cultivated professional image like to imagine that I’m enriching myself during my hour-long commute with urbane, sophisticated material: books on tape, informative podcasts, NPR.  But I don’t.  Mostly I just crank up the tunes.

My commute takes me through some of Vermont’s quaintest small towns.  Every time I drive through one of them, I have a special ritual I perform.  It’s a tribute, an act of homage to the small towns of the world.  I wish I’d started it a lot earlier in my life, because it represents something important, something that I never understood until I hit my mid-30s, long after I’d stopped kayaking seriously.  

But somehow it was kayaking and the perspective it afforded me — especially the clashes with cops and landowners that kayakers naturally get into sometimes — that caused an important light to flip on in my head.

And that’s what led to my daily ritual.

***

Let’s get one thing straight:  Most kayakers aren’t criminals.  Sure, Davey Hearn got arrested for paddling the flooded Potomac, Rob Lesser was chased through the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone by a park helicopter, and Don Weeden was hauled away from the Niagara Gorge in handcuffs.  But those were righteous men breaking silly rules!  That was civil disobedience, not criminal activity.  It’s pretty rare that boaters actually run afoul of the law.

More often it’s the landowners we butt heads with.  Stories of boaters being shot at near the Upper Yough put in back in the early days of the river are legendary.   I’ve never been shot at, but I owe probably the tensest five minutes of my life to a landowner run-in.  This man, who was truly terrifying — clearly on drugs or in need of them — ended up in the back of a police car himself that day!

Most regions have their share of sketchy landowners: riverbanks you don’t want to portage on, sensitive access points, stealth put ins, even whole rivers that landowners would rather keep off-limits (as the Ausable Chasm in New York was for many years).  In some cases it’s simple NIMBY politics.  In other cases, it’s whole areas where kayakers are seen negatively — the result of a real culture clash that exists between younger, liberal kayakers and older, conservative residents.  While some towns welcome kayakers as a source of revenue, many other places view us more warily: as drug-carrying troublemakers, disrespectful tourists, or rowdy interlopers.  Anyone who has boated long enough has a story of running afoul of either the police or some peeved landowner.  At the time, it doesn’t seem fair.  We’re just trying to kayak, right?  Kayaking is NOT a crime!

***

But here’s the thing.  Now that I am a landowner, I get it.  Especially because I own land in a vacation town in the White Mountains.  While not quite as touristy as Lincoln, New Hampshire, or North Conway, New Hampshire, Littleton, New Hampshire still catches thousands of tourists every summer weekend.  And while most are respectful, some aren’t.  They think they own the White Mountains.  They tailgate, they park wherever they want, they clog up the hiking trails, they order local merchants around like serfs, and — worst of all — they like to stop on the side of busy highways just to take pictures of brightly colored leaves!  It’s weird to be on the other side of it now.

It makes me think back to some of the behavior I participated in as a kayaker years ago.  Simple, basic stuff.  For example, I was always surprised by what felt like the frosty reception boaters got in Friendsville, Maryland.  It felt like a constant undercurrent of complaint from the town, a complicated balancing act that river advocates had to play with pissed off residents and town officials, an implicit threat to yank our take out and perhaps our river access too.  I didn’t get it.  Weren’t hundreds of boaters flooding town every weekend, infusing much-needed cash into the gas stations, restaurants, and campgrounds?  Weren’t we about the best thing going for Friendsville?  Why were they so uptight?  I was once screamed at by a local in the street after I parked my car in the wrong place.  There was no talking him down.  He was incensed.  What was the big deal?

But now I get it.  It was exactly that kind of arrogance — “we’re the best thing going for Friendsville” — and all its attendant behaviors that pissed the residents off so much.  Looking back at it, I was acting just like the kind of tourist that I hate.  Where I’d parked left me blocking part of the street.  But even more than that, it was the way I did it that enraged the guy: like it was my street.  Same goes for the drinking on the main street near our cars.  Sure, we tried to do it discreetly, but what other main street in any town do you know that has 100 people drinking beer along it in broad daylight?  If the bikers who roll through Lincoln, New Hampshire ever did that, I’d probably have an aneurysm.  If they were changing clothes outside on the main road next to their bikes, I’d probably lose my mind.  If they started parking on my street like they owned it, I’d be out there screaming at them too.  I get it.  Finally.

Years ago they ran a sting operation at the Upper Yough where they pulled everyone over who was speeding on the road to the put in.  There, right in front of a small Christian church, were pulled over about 15 boater cars with D.C. and Maryland plates.  In retrospect, it could not have been a more perfect divide between Red and Blue America.  At the time, I thought it was unfair: the cops were officious, the speed limit — 25 — was silly, the townspeople self-important.  But now I understand how they felt.  As much as we boaters identified ourselves with Friendsville and all the other small river towns like it, we were only visiting.  We didn’t live there.  And we weren’t always the most respectful guests.

That’s why I’ve developed my ritual.  It’s simple: every time I drive through a small town, I turn the music down.  Why?  Respect.  Ever hear a car drive by at night with the volume up loud?  Even with the windows up, it’ll rattle your walls.  I don’t want to be that guy anymore.  I used to show up at the river with loud music blaring.  I still do that, but once I get near houses, I back it off.  You know those old public safety messages about driving slowly around road workers: “Let ‘em live”?  That’s how I feel now: let ‘em live in peace.  

Ultimately I believe that turning down the music, having your beer in the pub, not in public; using the facilities, not the bushes; and driving it like you own it, not like you stole it — all go a long way toward keeping kayakers respectable in river towns.  We don’t want to go getting a bad rap.  While we’ve  enjoyed considerable success over the last decade in ensuring reliable river access and river releases, all of that can vanish if we start getting bad P.R.  We want to be seen as the responsible ones, not the out-of-state jerks who play their music loud and think they own everything.  Many of the river access victories won by groups like American Whitewater have come through forging alliances with locals.  We boaters often pride ourselves on being environmentalists and good stewards of the land.  But that’s not enough.  We need to be good visitors of the towns around the land as well.

So that’s why I’ve started turning down the music when I drive through towns.  It’s a small thing to do that probably doesn’t really make a difference to anyone, but to me it’s a matter of simple respect.  Just look for me somewhere in eastern Vermont.  I’ll be the guy cruising through town with a line of impatient cars behind him, the one with the music turned down nice and low.  You won’t even hear me.

Let ‘em live.

Because it’s late August and school is about to start, I wanted to share some wisdom with all you young boaters heading off to college.  If you don’t have a car but still want to bring your boat to campus, you’re going to have to figure out a place to store it.  This is the story of what happens when you get really, really desperate.  This is the story of why you should never store your boat at a frat house.

Continue reading “Why You Shouldn’t Leave Your Kayak at a Frat House”

 

Back in high school, we had a couple of Jamaican guys on our team.  They were the best players in the league, but also the most willing to take dives and then complain to the refs.  I loathed it.  “If I had half your talent,” I’d mutter from the bench, “I’d quit falling down and just try to beat my guy.”

Years later I remember angrily switching off the 2006 World Cup because every play seemed to end with a grown man falling down without being touched, then writhing around like a child.  It wasn’t soccer, it was acting.  In basketball, there’s an even more fitting word for it: flopping.

The reason it bothered me more than legitimately dirty play like holding jerseys or throwing elbows is that diving is quitting.  By going to the ground, you’re letting your opponent take the ball with no one covering him — and betting that the refs will bail you out.  You’re not only dishonest — you’re giving up.

Continue reading “Adam Clawson: An American Great — and Why You Should Never, Ever ‘Snit’”

Last Monday’s post about the tepid state of U.S. Slalom spread around the Internet like wildfire, catching me by surprise, and inciting some spirited debate.  Clearly a lot of people in the U.S. still care deeply about slalom, which is fantastic to see.

The question I tried to answer was:  “Why would an average adult, getting into kayaking and confronted with a plethora of amazing rivers, easy-to-paddle kayaks, and abundant formal and informal instruction, care about slalom?”

I made my point by contrasting today with 1984, when Eric Jackson was in this very position — a 19 or 20 year-old photo boater wanting to take his paddling to the next level.  Back then he saw a birth on the U.S. Slalom Team as a legitimate goal to shape his life around, a goal that I argued few top boaters would be interested in today.

Some people, especially current or former racers, disagreed with my analysis, but many others, particularly non-slalom paddlers, agreed.  To them, slalom racing seems a lot like eating your vegetables: they’ve heard it’s good for you, but they’re not about to start.  Or they see slalom racers as elitist, an insular clique in glass boats, distrustful or condescending toward outsiders.  Even though it’s fun to watch, to a lot of people it’s boring or exclusionary.  I don’t think either one is fair, but I’ve heard it over and over, going back many years.

But here’s the thing I’ve been thinking about over the last week . . .  

It doesn’t matter.

Why?  Because I put it in the wrong perspective.  Last week I was writing from the perspective of an adult paddler.  And that’s who was commenting on my post, mostly.  But that’s not really who slalom really belongs to.  While it’s nice if adults race, here’s what I’ve realized in the past week:  slalom, like most competitive sports, is and always has been mainly about kids.

Think about ski racing in the United States.  How many adults do you know who actually ski race?  That’s what I thought: Zero!  Why?  Because why would they?  The idea that any grown-up would voluntarily confine herself to a roped-off gate course when there’s so much freedom and fun to be had on the regular mountain or in the backcountry is patently absurd.  Besides, even if you are interested, the opportunities to race are both scant and costly.  

Yet even though most adult skiers don’t race, the U.S. boasts not only a healthy ski racing program, but a dominant one.  Many of the country’s best racers are not only Olympic and World Cup medalists, but household names:  Lindsey Vonn, Julia Mancuso, Ted  Ligety, Mikaela Shiffrin, and Bode Miller.  Sure, U.S. Skiing has more than its fair share of problems, but compared to whitewater slalom, in which we’ve won exactly one Olympic medal in the last five Olympic Games, it’s a juggernaut.

So the question is:  How can we be so strong in ski racing when it’s just as foreign to the average skier as whitewater slalom is to most normal kayakers?

The answer is: because it’s a youth sport.  It’s not about adult participation.  It’s about kids.  Ski racing is a teaching mechanism and a means of not only winning medals, but of introducing kids to the sport and producing lifelong skiers.  Last week I discussed situational obstacles to canoe slalom’s growth: too many rivers, too easily accessible, with too much else to do.  I said that slalom doesn’t work in that environment because it requires scarcity.  But I forgot about the group who have the greatest scarcity of all — a scarcity of freedom.  I’m talking, of course, about CHILDREN!

Think about it: if you’re twelve years old, you’re not exactly torn with anxiety about what to hit this weekend:  the Yough or the Gauley?  That’s because you’re TWELVE.  You can’t drive.  You can’t paddle class V because your parents probably don’t even want you paddling class III.  Kids — as they are fond of telling me in my high school classroom — have NO FREEDOM!  That’s why they’re perfect candidates for slalom training — whether on snow or on easy class II whitewater.

We adult boaters are prejudiced.  We sometimes think that any form of organized competition is a violation of the freedom and soulfulness that we turned to rivers for in the first place.  Slalom — why would I want to do that?  But most competitive sports are geared toward kids anyway, right?  How many adults do you know who play in a soccer league?  What about a lacrosse league?  Not many, right?  That’s just the way it is — you play competitive sports when you’re young because they’re fun.  Your parents like them because they teach teamwork, confidence, leadership . . .  and they get you out of the house for a few hours.  You play them when you’re a kid, maybe you play in high school, or perhaps even in college, then you go off to college and you discover beer and creek boats and pretty soon you’re living in a van down by a lot of different rivers and the next time you’re at soccer practice, it’s 15 years later and you have a whistle around your neck and eight little kids pestering you to be the one who takes the throw in.  That’s just how it is: adult participation doesn’t matter in competitive sports. I mean, it’s nice, but that’s not what it’s about.

That’s why it doesn’t matter in ski racing if adults don’t do it.  It’s just sort of understood that ski racing is a youth sport.  Just like in soccer, some of them get good and go to ski academies, or even college race programs.  Some of them even make it to the Olympics.  Surely, plenty of insults are lobbed at ski racers: they’re elitist, cliquey, hoggers of the best trails.  I’ve had run-ins with them on my home mountain, which they sometimes think they own.  But nobody questions why the sport is around, or whether it’s healthy in the United States, the way they do in whitewater.  That’s because it’s perfectly clear that racing is a youth sport, and a hell of a lot of fun to watch on TV every four years.  That, to me, is slalom’s proper place — whether in skiing or in whitewater.  That’s why I was wrong last week — slalom doesn’t have to justify itself to adults.  The Eric Jacksons (or Alden Birds!) who join slalom at 19 are always a minority, just like they would be in baseball or basketball.

And I was wrong to talk so much about medals, although medals are nice, because the benefits of slalom go far beyond wins and loses.  In addition to the benefits that I already discussed — teamwork, confidence, leadership, making friends, slalom breeds lifelong participants.  Sure, some kids who race drop out, especially if the program is too intense, but a lot of them stay in the sport, and might not have joined any other way.  I can’t tell you how many people I know who got into skiing via ski racing.  Sure, they don’t race anymore themselves, but they volunteer at ski clubs, they organize, they coach, and they sign-up their kids.  Most of all, they’re still skiers — and they might not have been without race programs.  In boating, I’m one of them.

And I believe this points to an even bigger issue that I see in paddling: the lack of kids.  I started paddling when I was 18, and over the years most of the people I know seem to have drifted into the sport sometime between 18 and 27.  Last fall I took a paddler I’d been coaching to a popular river festival here in New England.  At 17 years old, he was the only teenager on the river, apart from one 14 year-old who we heard much about before we met him.  And this was not the Green Narrows.  This was a friendly class III river.  Nor was it sparsely attended; hundreds and hundreds of boaters filled the eddies.  Contrast this with your average ski hill, where you’ll commonly see a sizable mix of helmets in the liftline rising only up to your thigh.  Ski past the race hill and you’ll see a dragon’s tail of 30 kids snaking down the gate course.  Ski past the terrain park and you’ll see teenage boys in oversized sweatshirts, skiing without poles, and pointing GoPro cameras at each other as they hit the rails and tabletops.  You’ll see whole families, four across, getting on the lift together.

In paddling, all of this is rare enough on most rivers as to cause me to do a double take.  I know it’s not true that there are NO kids in paddling.  There are certainly SOME.  And there are certainly SOME families who do paddle together.  But compared to skiing — and compared to what we could have — it’s not that many.  And we’ve just sort of gotten used to it.

This is a shame.  Paddling is not only fun, but it can foster a lot of the qualities that we hope kids develop as they get older.  If there’s a better vehicle for teaching self-reliance than a kayak, I don’t know of it.  Plus, it’s not that expensive, especially compared to skiing.  Then there’s the broader context: participation in whitewater is down from its height in the early 2000s.  Considering the lack of kids you see on rivers, it’s hardly surprising.

It’s no secret that the whitewater boating culture in the United States largely venerates risk, adrenaline, and danger.  I wonder sometimes if this has to do with why there are so few kids or families in the sport.  My impression is that the broader public sees our sport as a dangerous one, not a family sport.  Sometimes I think that even we see ourselves that way.  I taught my wife to ski after we’d been dating not even a year.  It took me three more years before I dared take her on a river.  Even though she was a college swimmer, she was scared because she thought paddling was dangerous.  Think about it: how many whole families do you know who paddle class III together?  I know, I know, there are a FEW who do, but it’s a hell of a lot more rare than in skiing.  When did that become common in our sport?  And what does it say?

But there is one place I can think of where I do see families paddling together:  local slalom races!  They may not appeal to the aspiring Eric Jacksons anymore, but they do have a family vibe.  And if we want to grow the sport and to make it more receptive to families and to kids, I think that’s a good place to start.

But slalom races themselves aren’t recruitment or training tools, no more than soccer tournaments are.  Here’s what you really need if you want to grow the sport for kids: clubs.  

Clubs — especially slalom training clubs — are a big part of the secret to European slalom success.  Many European countries have strong, well-funded clubs that recruit kids from a young age and train them.  That’s hardly surprising; a lot of youth sports in America — especially individual sports like swimming or skiing — operate this way.  Want to get into swim racing?  You join a swim club.  Want to try ski racing?  You join something like the Franconia Ski Club, which trains hundreds of kids at my local resort, Cannon Mountain.  Parents love this set-up because their kids get coaching and use of the mountain, develop their skills in a safe environment, and get a chance to make friends with kids their own age.  Plus, it’s convenient — you can offload your child (or children) in a single place at a set time, then picking them up later, without worrying about them roaming the mountain unattended.  Plus, some clubs provide loaner equipment when you’re starting out, so that you can see if you like it before you commit to purchasing (thank you, SWASA Ski Jumping in Salisbury, Connecticut!)

And for it to work, you really need it to be centered around a competitive sport like slalom racing, not just roaming around rivers.  That way, it’s got a purpose to it, a goal.  Everyone involved can see tangible results.  It’s focused.  For lack of a better term, slalom is organized.  Don’t forget too that racing is fun.  And it’s got a romance, a glamour: any kid in a boat is a future Olympian, a future Smolen or Eichfeld.  Even more importantly, any kid in a boat is . . .  a kid in a boat: a precious resource for our youth-starved sport, a future advocate for rivers and wild places.

What’s kind of remarkable about boating clubs is that the United States still has so many of them, given how easy it is to find paddling partners without clubs these days.  I think this speaks to a real void that clubs do fill — for organization, camaraderie, and advocacy.  I’ve been a member of several and we did a lot of good.  

But even when I was a member of the oldest, most successful slalom club in the U.S. — the Bethesda Center of Excellence, based just outside of Washington, D.C. — we did a lot of good things, but I don’t remember their being much of an organized youth recruiting or training program.  I don’t recall there ever being regular coached kids’ sessions.  My lasting memories from those years are of a lot of scruffy-looking twenties-age racers chasing each other around the Feeder and Dickerson, not of slightly concerned parents dropping off little kids for their first training session with the Under-10s.  I don’t remember any club coaches, just the U.S. Team coach, who trained the older athletes.  In fact, the club felt mostly like adults, not like a ski club pumping juniors into the system.  It felt like a group of 10-15 good adult racers, and not a whole lot of juniors below us coming up the ranks.  Given that this was the club that had once produced some of our best young boaters in the past, I think that’s telling.  I’m not sure what it’s like today.  

I’m not saying any of this is a panacea, and I’m not saying that it’s without problems, but I am saying that youth slalom can be a vehicle for bringing a lot of new boaters into the sport, because it fits the profile that other successful sports use.  And by making it more like other sports, I think slalom could help combat the perception of whitewater as a dangerous sport, not a family activity.  There are plenty of clubs and organizations doing good work on the youth paddling and youth slalom front today, and I think it’s a really promising direction to go in.  

I realize that the United States faces a plethora of obstacles to creating the same kind of vital slalom club culture as exists in some European countries — geographical distance, lack of funding and government support, and equipment that is too far outside the norm.  All of these are real issues to look at (especially, I believe, the length and design of slalom boats; ski racers use slightly different skis, but not that different).  But I do believe that youth slalom is a promising direction for our sport to go, an important one to consider if we hope to pass along our favorite rivers, to leave our wild places — and this wild sport of ours — in good hands for the future.