Notes From the North Country

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.

Over the last week I’ve had the chance to watch some of the world’s best young paddlers.  The International Canoe Federation makes it absurdly easy to watch video of the Junior World Championships in Whitewater Slalom almost as it’s happening.  Watching these teenagers whip their short boats around, switch hands with their canoe paddles, and finish in under 90 seconds sometimes makes me think I’m watching a different — and far more exciting — sport than the one I “retired” from eight years ago.  I must’ve watched four hours of coverage.  It was great — mostly.

The only thing wrong was that the United States didn’t do very well.  In fact, we were shut out of the medals in both the Under-23 class and in the younger Junior class in all five disciplines.  In several of the most competitive classes — such as men’s kayak — we didn’t even qualify a single boat for the finals.  In other classes — such as C-2 — we didn’t field a single boat in the entire race.  Meanwhile, countries that are a fraction of the size of the U.S. — such as Slovakia or Slovenia — put many more times our number into the race, into the finals, and onto the podium.  What gives?

Although the United States has produced some remarkable slalom racers over the past fifty years, this problem is nothing new.  As long as we’ve had slalom racers — except for a brief period of all-around dominance from 1989 to 1996 — we Americans have been wringing our hands about why the Europeans are so much better than we are.  There have been a lot of causes proposed over the years — lack of funding, lack of infrastructure, removal from the broader boating community.  Some in our sport have even, paradoxically, blamed slalom’s inclusion in the Olympics on its decline in popularity.  The problem is, most of those smaller European countries face the same issues, and their slalom programs are doing better than ours.  So why then?

Do we lack whitewater courses?  Please.  Our country is bursting with World Cup-quality courses — Dickerson, Charlotte, Oklahoma City, South Bend, Wausau, the Ocoee, and Deep Creek.  

Do we lack coaches?  Certainly not at the highest levels.  Silvan Poberaj and Rafal Smolen are, as best I can tell, still the two heads of the sport, and they’re experienced Olympic guides.  They know how to train the best in the world.  They know how to win.  

Do we lack tradition?  Surely not the country of Shipley, the Hearns, and Lugbill — not to mention Clawson, Chladek, Weiss, Evans, Giddens, the Hallers, Jacobi and Strausbaugh, and McEwan!  

Do we lack sheer numbers of young people interested in paddling?  Are you kidding?  Have you been to the Green or the Potomac in the summer?

So what is it?  What is the persistent problem that has plagued American slalom racing since the late-90s?  Last week, watching these kids at the Junior Worlds one-stroke their way down the Bratislava course in Slovakia, it hit me like a hydraulic to the chest:

The United States has too many good rivers!

That’s right.  Our problem isn’t scarcity, it’s surplus.  We don’t have too little, we have too much.

How so?  It’s simple: if you grow up with hundreds of good natural rivers, with loads of interesting, challenging rapids and beautiful scenery, you won’t be inclined to spend your time looping back and forth on a concrete ditch like Dickerson, or past plastic lego rocks, dodging rafts at a tourist hub like Charlotte.  Why paddle 400 yards of class III- at Deep Creek when ten miles of the Upper Yough is a stone’s throw away, thick with camaraderie, running all summer?  Why spend your time on class III when you could be running class V?  Why do made up moves when there are so many real ones available?  Above all — why spend your time training, when you could be doing?  

American slalom has faced this challenge for decades, whether we know it or not.  There’s simply too much else to do.  

My own story is case in point.  I took up paddling late, at 18.  That fall, as I went off to college in Vermont, I quickly realized that I was going to have to fight the temptation of abundant natural rivers all around me if I was going to keep up with my slalom training.  Within a reasonable drive from campus, there were hundreds of natural rivers.  Drive an hour and a half  I could surf one of the world’s best river waves: Lachine.  Fifty minutes south and I could boof my way down the best creek in New England: the Big Branch.  Twenty minutes after class I could chase ten friends down the class IV+ New Haven or class V Middlebury.  Just five minutes from my dorm I could lap an 18-foot waterfall that ran every month of the year.  

So you can understand why forcing myself to do flatwater gate loops that fall was hard — or even driving to a shallow class II slalom race in October like the Farmington when I could have been shotgunning beers and tearing down big, fluffy drops with my college buddies at Moosefest.  I probably boated with fifty different guys, a lot, during my first few years of college, and very few of them had ever run a single slalom gate.  That’s a change from a generation ago.  Today, with short boats and plentiful river access, if you want to get good, you don’t have to run gates.  You just need to run rivers.  And here in the United States, we’ve got them in spades.  They are some of the world’s most famous: the Green Narrows, the Little White Salmon, the North Fork of the Payette, even the Grand Canyon.

On the other hand, how many famous whitewater rivers in Slovakia can you name?  What about in France?  How about Britain or Germany?  The fact is, apart from Corsica or Norway, Europe isn’t really known for its concentration of world class whitewater.  Instead, their whitewater sports center around scant resources: the man made rivers like Bratislava, Augsburg, or Tacen that run consistently and that play home to slalom training clubs.  It’s only natural that they’ll get more into slalom than we are: there’s simply less to do.

Why else do so many famous European boaters come to the U.S.?  You only have to search the latest extreme kayak videos online today to find Europeans like Spaniards Gerd and Aniol Serrasoles screaming down American creeks — the same way that you didn’t have to look far to watch Steve Fisher, Mike Abbott, or Corran Addison on our rivers a generation ago.

And it’s not just that we have the rivers.  It’s also that running them is easier than ever.  For one thing, the boats today are far shorter and easier to paddle than they were 30 years ago.  These boats have in turn opened up a whole swath of new rivers and new freestyle moves.  This, tied with a growing number of dam release rivers, has conspired to make the sport easier to get into and easier to get good at.  The Internet has made it easy to check online river gauges and to download information about put-ins and takes-outs, as well as to coordinate meetings with new paddlers.  All told, it’s way easier to run a wide variety of whitewater rivers than it was 30 years ago, all of which pushes American boaters away from slalom racing and toward recreational river running.  

Consider, for a moment, the Tale of the Two Jacksons: Eric Jackson, most famous and visible kayaker of his generation, and his son, Dane Jackson, most famous and visible of today’s.

In the early 1980s, a young Eric Jackson saw U.S. Slalom Team member Hank Thorburn surfing stylishly on the Kennebec River in Maine and caught the racing bug.  In 1984, Jackson moved to Brookmont, Maryland, where he lived for the next twelve years, training to make the U.S. Slalom Team.  A naturally competitive person, Jackson saw that the one entree into the upper echelon of the sport was through slalom racing.  The pinnacle of what he could hope for, he achieved: racing at home in the 1989 World Championships in the United States, and at the 1992 Olympics in Barcelona.  

As time went on, the sport evolved, and Jackson evolved with it, winning the 1993 Freestyle World Championship, and eventually traveling the country in an RV, competing in the ever-expanding network of rodeos and downriver races that spread like wildfire in the late 1990s.  Soon he capitalized on this himself by starring in a number of kayaking videos that glamorized these pursuits, starting his own kayak competition series, and eventually his own kayak company, Jackson Kayaks.

On the other hand, his son, Dane Jackson, who is arguably the best all-around paddler of his generation, has hardly seen a slalom course.  Where his father spent his twenties chasing a berth on the U.S. Slalom team and found the best competition in officially sanctioned international races against the likes of slalom luminaries like Richard Fox and Scott Shipley, Dane has spent his twenties so far competing in extreme downriver races like the Green Narrows Race as well as extreme slalom races that have come into existence, such as the North Fork Championship, held on the North Fork of the Payette– where he has found competition among guys who have, like him, had little experience in whitewater slalom.  

When his father first moved to Maryland to train slalom in 1984, river running in the United States, especially in the East, was at a standstill.  Rivers like the Green Narrows and my later stomping grounds, the New Haven and the Middlebury, had yet to be run.  Rivers like the Upper Yough or the Gauley were popular, but still the province of a handful of experts.  Other rivers were hard to catch because you weren’t sure if they had water.  It wasn’t easy to meet dedicated groups of expert boaters unless you met them at slalom races or festivals.  

By the time Dane came into his twenties, it couldn’t have been easier.  Unlike his father, he didn’t need slalom.  Nor do most of our young boaters nowadays.

The fact is, just like in skiing, slalom racing is born of scarcity.  That’s because, as fun as it is, it’s a training device for running “real” rivers.  As such, if you have actual rivers you can train on, you don’t need slalom as much.  It’s no surprise that ski slalom has flourished in the eastern United States, where our lack of terrain turns us to new ways to train ourselves and to have fun.  It’s no coincidence that our two best skiers of their generation, Bode Miller and Lindsey Vonn hail from New Hampshire and Minnesota — two places not exactly known for bountiful powder skiing.  It’s hardly surprising too that the one area in the United States with a consistent involvement in youth slalom kayaking is Washington, D.C. — home to a lot of paddlers, but (especially in the summer), not a lot of whitewater.  It’s no surprise that slalom interest is high there.

So it’s my belief that as long as we have so many good, “real” rivers to run, our young paddlers will be attracted river running, not to slalom racing.  Their coaches and mentors too will be more apt to drive them to a dam release river to practice eddy turns rather than make the extra effort to hang gates or to drive to shallow, class II slalom races.  Our kids will continue to see the Dane Jacksons of the world, plunging down the Green or the Payette, as heroes, not the young up-and-coming slalom racers like Tyler Smith or Sage Donnelly.  It was no different when I was coming up.  The best two boaters in the United States, in my opinion, in the 2000s were Rebecca Giddens and Scott Parsons.  Meanwhile, almost none of my friends had heard of either of them.  But they’d surely heard of Tommy Hilleke, Steve Fisher, or Nikki Kelly.  Meanwhile, lots of European kids will continue to take their first strokes on man made courses like Bratislava or Tacen, and the older kids they look up to will be the Jessica Foxes or Miquel Traveses.  

What does the future hold for U.S. slalom?  It’s hard to say.  Perhaps someday we’ll go through a slalom renaissance, sort of like the one we had in the mid-1970s or the mid-1990s.  Maybe slalom boats will keep getting shorter, to the point that the top racers are basically paddling fiberglass RPMs or Braaaps — so that the gap will close between what racers are using and what regular paddlers are using.  Perhaps slalom races will evolve to be held on more popular rivers, doing fewer gates, making it both easier to compete and easier to run these events — along the lines of easier versions of the North Fork Championship.  You’re already seeing this in some places, such as a new slalom-style race down the Cribworks Rapid on Maine’s Penobscot River, slated to be held this summer.  Will this draw more people into the sport?  Who knows?

For the time being I’ll take pleasure in watching the incredibly high levels of skill of talented young paddlers like Fox or Trave — no matter what country they’re from.

I’ve got a confession to make: I’m a teacher, but I’ve always skipped graduation.  

Even though now I’ve been a high school teacher long enough that I no longer possess a shred of coolness in my students’ eyes (“Miley Cyrus?  Isn’t that Billy Ray’s daughter?”), I hadn’t actually attended a single graduation at the high school where I work until just a few weeks ago.

Why, you ask?  Am I just another lazy teacher?  Some union rulebook-thumping clock watcher who’d rather listen to “Achy Breaky Heart” than linger at his desk after 3 o’clock?  Or am I too emotional — the stereotypical mushy educator who’s afraid he’ll start crying in public while watching his beloved students walk across the stage?

Neither!  First of all, I’m not concerned about staying late at work, although I don’t do this as often as I did during my first few years teaching, when I logged Wall Street stockbroker hours (albeit for Walmart stockboy pay).  As for being mushy, anyone who knows me knows that I am about as emotive as Sylvester Stallone.  The last time I cried, toys were involved.

So why haven’t I attended a single graduation?  

The simple answer is, I’m always busy.  Graduation happens on a Friday night at the end of the school year when I’m usually up to my eyelids in grading final exams and papers.  When seniors are donning robes, I’m usually about as guarded with my free time as Donald Trump’s attorneys, and hanging around school until 8 pm for graduation isn’t usually a priority.

Also, graduation isn’t really meant for teachers.  It’s for the kids and their families.  It’s for Little Johnny’s parents to be able to sit in the bleachers and say,

“Wow, can you believe our boy is graduating from high school?”

“Well, he spent most of high school out in his car smoking a bong the size of a small maple tree.  So , no I can’t believe it, actually.”

For teachers, graduation is strangely redundant.  Chances are, we’ve already said our goodbyes.  We’ve already had the kinds of heart-warming moments that we educators live for, such as informing a kid that although he is in danger of failing your class because he forgot to do any of his homework during the fourth quarter of the year, and also during the other three, all he has to do is to show up for the final exam and not vomit on it and he will get to graduate.  You don’t need to attend graduation when you’ve had that kind of connection with a kid.

We already know about next year’s plans too: the college nursing program, the military enlistment, the year-long internship playing World of Warcraft in your mother’s basement.  We don’t need graduation to learn about this stuff.

We’ve even given out gifts to some of our students.  This year, taking a page from legendary NBA coach Phil Jackson, I decided to give out books.  My students shook my hand and said “Thank you” with looks that said, yes, they’d definitely be checking out the Sparknotes version this summer.  It was just like in class.

Then there’s another small issue that usually keeps me home: high school graduation is about as exciting as watching lettuce grow.  This is especially true during the 15 or 85 minutes they spend reading off every kid’s name and handing out diplomas.  As a sensitive, empathetic educator, you definitely want all kids to be recognized for how unique they are — just not individually.  You clap enthusiastically for the first few, then you think, “Can’t we just skip ahead to the Zs?”

It’s even worse if they give out any awards.  As a teacher, you know how much these mean to kids.  But as someone sitting on hard bleachers, you’re thinking, “Who gives a shit about the Community Service Award?  You know what would be a community service?  Not giving out any more awards!”

Then there are the speakers.  Ours this year was U.S. Senator Patrick Leahy, who, thanks to a strange echo in the gym, sounded like he was trying to talk while eating a turkey sandwich.  I wish we’d had subtitles.  I think he was saying, “PLEASE don’t vote again for the guy who looks like he tans at Vermont Yankee.”

So as I mounted the stage myself, I was thinking about all these reasons I never attended.  But now I was on the stage because I had one reason I did attend: I had a role.  

Like all teachers at my school, I’m given a small group of students to host in my homeroom every day from their seventh grade year until their graduation (or until I’m transferred to a prison school in New Mexico for trying to show “13 Reasons Why” in class.) My group was graduating this year, and so I was to stand on stage when their names were called, and to shake hands with them after they collected their diplomas.

As my first homeroom student, a tall young man, came across the stage, time slowed.  Here was a guy I’d known since he was 12 years old and immature and now he was a confident young man headed off to his first-choice college.  It was as though the entire six years of knowing him passed before my eyes as he approached.  As he came up to me, he put his hand over his heart in a gesture of thanks.  I did not expect this.  We decided in a split-second not to shake hands.  Understand: I am definitely not a hugger, at least not at school.  I am almost unfathomably awkward in these meeting and goodbye situations, am somewhat reserved by nature, and as a public school teacher, I’m deadly aware of avoiding unwanted physical contact or of showing favorites in any way.  But right then, a formal handshake with this young man who’d meant so much made absolutely no sense.  We shared a bear hug on the stage.  With that, he was gone, and the next student was coming toward me, triggering the same wave of emotions, the same sense of six long years encapsulated into a single ten second stage walk.  I hugged him too.  With each of the rest, the same wave of emotion flooded over me: the sheer awesomeness of how far each of them had come in six years, and the remembered gratitude at choosing a profession that allowed me to experience such moments.  It occurred to me that I’d labored for six years not over the production of goods or the making of money, but over the development of human beings.  Then, just like that, the last student had crossed the stage.  We hugged, and then they were gone, literally and symbolically walking out of high school for good.  

These days, with a high school diploma guaranteeing less and less economic security, it’s easy to dismiss high school graduation as amounting to very little: just a blip on the horizon of college-bound achievers, or a wholly inadequate stopping point for their poorer classmates.  It’s tempting to read high school itself as little more than a perpetrator of existing class disparities: a loading place for well-off kids to pile on AP classes and extracurriculars, while their peers languish in remedial courses before saying goodbye to formal education and disappearing into a life of hardship.  But to cynically castigate American public schools in this way is not only to ignore their successes with combating poverty, but is to fundamentally miss what makes them unique.  In an era of soaring college tuitions — it’s interesting to remember (as I frequently remind sticker-shocked college applicants) what a noble idea publicly funded community schools are.  The notion that a man like me (who does not have children) pays equally for another man’s children to attend high school at a reasonable rate is wonderfully civic minded.  And while any high school must bow to the inevitable socioeconomic disparities within its student body, the best high schools try as often as possible to heterogeneously mix their students.  The last two Vermont governors, both wealthy and powerful men, have resided in our school district, but so have the sons and daughters of the kind of poverty and addiction that these governors have sought to alleviate.  In an era when we increasingly do not listen across party lines, public schools are, as a colleague of mine once said, “the last places in America where we have to listen to each other.”

Seen in this light, a high school graduation like the one I attended this June is the epitome of the adage about raising a child: “It takes a village.” A high school graduation is much more than about teachers or about families.  It’s about communities.  It is truly a community event — or it should be.  In a time when the weaves of so many traditional social fabrics — churches, neighborhoods, even families — are being pulled apart, the richness of a community-based rite like high school graduation seems even stronger and more important for our children.  As a teacher who commutes some distance to educate these students — a hired gun — and one who teachers older, ostensibly more independent students, it’s easy to forget just how much a part of this community I am myself.  And as a professional educator just trying to survive the busy last few weeks of the term, it’s sometimes easy to forget how big a role teachers can play in shaping the very towns they work in.  Sharing a hug with these students on stage, feeling the simple power of marking time by means of ritual, shuddering at the awesome responsibility I’d been entrusted with as a teacher and adviser for six years — all of it refreshed in me the feeling that public education is a worthy enterprise in the United States.  It’s amazing that all it took was staying a little late on a Friday evening and attending graduation to remember all this.  Graduation is a really good event, I think, for all teachers to attend. 

Even if you don’t plan to hug anyone.

Maybe I’ll go again next year.

Three weeks ago, all adults in my school district — teachers, staff, and parents — received an email from our director of guidance:

“I want to inform you of a trending Netflix series called “13 Reasons Why” [which] revolves around 17-year-old Hannah Baker, who kills herself and leaves behind audio recordings for 13 people she says were in some way part of why she killed herself.”

The email, which was three pages long, described the show’s controversies:

“The show has been highly watched by young people and has received lots of media attention. Because the show takes up issues related to suicide and sexual assault, there have been strong (and strongly mixed) reactions from many viewers along with several professional and advocacy groups.”

“If you have experienced significant depression, anxiety or suicidal thoughts or behaviors in the past, this show may be risky for you to watch.”

Nor was ours the only worried school district.  This same kind of letter has been sent out this spring by principals and guidance counselors across the U.S.

In other words, “13 Reasons Why” is something rare nowadays: a show for teens that still has the capacity to scare the hell out of their parents and teachers.

Naturally I was curious what my juniors and seniors in Media Literacy class thought of the show.  So the day after the email went out to their parents, I asked them if they’d seen it.

“Oh, my God!  Can we talk about it?”

“We should do a unit on it!”

“Just binge watch it, Alden!  I watched all 13 episodes in one night.”

I asked them if they thought the show glorified suicide, as some critics have claimed.  

“Nooo!

“No, it doesn’t!  But it’s SO realistic!”

“That’s so wrong!”

Any good teacher knows that outrage, or at least passion, is a great place to begin real learning.  So I asked the students, “How can we study these themes in class?”

A bright student raised her hand.

“‘13 Reasons Why’ is really about mental illness.  But — they don’t show it very well.”

“Maybe we could study how mental illness is shown in the media?”

With that, I scrapped my plans for the next two weeks and sat down that evening to watch Episode 1 of “13 Reasons Why.”  My wife, who’d read Jay Asher’s 2007 young adult novel on which the show is based, was game too.  I wasn’t expecting much, but what I found was even more excruciating than I expected.  Part of it was that I’m a teacher; shows about teenagers committing suicide are not exactly the way I like to wind down in the evening.  I still go to bed sometimes worried that I’m going to get “the call” about one of my students wrapping his car around a tree on some Vermont country road after a few Budweisers.  But it’s more than that.  Forget a car crash; “13 Reasons Why” is like watching 13 car crashes.  The first episode is hard to watch, the second is brutal; by the third you ask, “How many more of these are there?”; by the end, you wish you’d never looked.

***

Let’s face it: for most of us, high school is brutal.  In conversations with other adults, I’m often struck by how many of us would rather simply forget those years, almost like a bad relationship we broke off the day we turned 18.  For a few lucky souls, high school was a high point: popularity and romance came easily; awards were won and so were games.  These people — and how we hated them! — were like the royalty.  It’s no wonder schools crown homecoming kings and queens: there’s a rigid social caste with a clear hierarchy that most of us struggled to fit into.  You feel like you’re under a microscope at all times; everyone’s watching your every move.  You’re incredibly self-centered, yet live and die by what others think of you.  You want very much to stand out, while also fitting in completely.  

The best shows about high school capture this.  My favorite, ABC’s TV drama from the late 80s / early 90s, “The Wonder Years,” was particularly good at reflecting how life felt at 15 years old: the way a small moment — a low grade on a test, the girl who you like looking right past you in the hall, or your mother saying hi to you during a fire drill (yes, dear lord, it happened on the show) — could feel like the absolute end of the world (or at least your life).

Unlike “The Wonder Years,” “13 Reasons Why” doesn’t take the small moments of cruelty and blow them way out proportion.  Instead it has truly awful events happen, one after another, to the same character until she can take it no longer and neither can we.  After the first episode, where a compromising photo of her is sent around the school, you start to flinch every time you hear the theme music at the start of a new episode, because you know that some fresh torture is awaiting this poor girl, Hannah Baker.  

Toward the end of the series, it starts getting ridiculous, as the writers start piling on more and more cruelties per episode, as if wanting to tamp out all doubt as to why Hannah killed herself.  It wasn’t mental illness; it wasn’t some ambiguous haze of depression rooted in a troubled childhood.  Hannah comes from a fairly stable home with two good parents; she’s played by a gorgeous actress and given the same hyper-intelligent dialogue (peppered with references like “Orwellian”) that is wholly unrealistic for a high school sophomore.  It’s like the director is saying, “There’s only one reason why she did it: cruelty.” It’s a 13-part car crash, and it’s too much.  On one implausible evening late in the series, poor Hannah has her own disastrous sexual encounter that causes her to reject the one boy she truly loves, witnesses a friend’s rape, gets into a car accident that causes another friend to abandon her, and — as if that weren’t enough — her accident directly leads to a classmate’s death in a separate car accident that evening.  It’s madness.  Teenagers will lap up this melodrama; I cringed.

The show’s premise is gimmicky, its plot is both repetitive, yet convoluted.  The recently dead girl, Hannah Baker, tells the story in voice-over, and each episode is devoted to one person who is “responsible” for her suicide.  For a few episodes, it’s fine.  After 13, it’s monotonous.  But at the same time, the plot is crowded with so many subplots that I was left scratching my head more than a few times.  Each episode toggles between past and present, and the main tension in the present day scenes — that the popular kids who bullied Hannah don’t want their secrets to come out — feels forced.  A good TV show should never allow us to see the machinery of its plot devices at work; “13 Reasons Why” is so clunky that I could never lose sight.

The show trades in almost anachronistic high school cliches: varsity jackets and cheerleader skirts, lonesome cafeteria tables, beer-soaked house parties, clueless parents and teachers, jock- and goddess-worship in the halls and the cafeteria.  At its most basic, this is a classic high school bullying story in which the popular kids oppress the outcasts and justice must be done.

Then there are the two infamous scenes: a rape (another one) and the climactic suicide.  Both are most horribly, most graphically filmed.  Suicide is an event that, when shown to those who are already vulnerable, can inspire copycat suicides.  The cinematic realism of this scene is a large part of why the show has mental health and school officials up in arms.  

And though my students argue otherwise, “13 Reasons Why” really does glorify suicide, for two reasons: first, it presents the illusion that a dead girl can enact revenge and control things from beyond the grave.  This is a romantic notion, but an incredibly false one; when you’re dead, you’re dead.  There’s no controlling anybody — and certainly no savoring it.  Second, the show presents the related illusion that the cute, sensitive boy you always liked will take up your cause and avenge your death by holding your tormentors to account.  This too is a dangerously misguided notion.

Then there’s the scene that makes high school guidance counselors want to hurl their TVs out the window.  In the final episode, Hannah reveals her rape and all but reveals her plans for suicide to her guidance counselor.  He informs her that because she isn’t sure of all the details, there’s nothing he can do.  He tells her she needs to move on!  This is insane!  Anyone who’s gotten within smelling distance of a public school knows that all teachers, counselors, and administrators (not to mention coaches, paraeducators, and even bus drivers) are what’s called mandatory reporters.  That means they have a *legal obligation* to report any whiff of abuse or assault to the authorities.  Any guidance counselor I’ve ever met has done hundreds of these reportings.  They’re utterly routine.  The idea that any guidance counselor would fail to report something as serious as a rape because he or she didn’t have all the details is so silly a plot device as it is to imagine that an emergency room wouldn’t accept you if you couldn’t tell them all the details of your accident.  It’s absurd.  

Equally absurd is a scene when Hannah’s teacher receives Hannah’s anonymous note expressing suicidal thoughts.  The teacher is portrayed as having done nothing to find out who wrote the note.  My students and I had a good laugh over this.  “Really?” I asked them.  “Really?  She had no idea that the one girl curled up and looking pained, the one person who wasn’t making rude comments as the note was read — she had no idea *that* was the suicidal girl?  And you’re telling me she didn’t recognize the handwriting?”

But could it be enough to keep the next suicidal teenager from seeking help?  That’s the question all of us in education are worried about as a result of the show.  It was especially hard to watch as a teacher because the adults on the show — other than the guidance counselor — are portrayed as present, competent, but completely unaware.  It’s hard to believe that so many adults could be that unknowing, but it didn’t take more than a single episode for me to wonder how many incidents of cyberbullying are going on every day that I’d have no way of hearing about among my students.  

The one bright spot for me was the acting.  The cast is wonderful.  The two main characters — Hannah and Clay — are played by wonderful actors who have great chemistry.  Clay, in particular, is preternaturally brooding and haunted; he strikes it just right in getting across that mixture of boy and man, of confidence just beginning to find itself, that Hannah (and I’m guessing many high school girls watching) find irresistible.

If anything, the actress who plays Hannah is a little too pretty and is made to be a little too socially competent for you to believe that she’d be the target of such ridicule.  Many other high school dramas (Laurie Halse Anderson’s “Speak,” for instance) resort to making their heroine look plain, or damaged, and to giving her awkward, desperate-to-please dialogue anytime she’s around the cool kids.  The creators of “13 Reasons Why” on the other hand, don’t stoop.  Hannah Baker is unapologetically beautiful and articulate.  When her friends abandon her or boys treat her as an object, it seems unrealistic that they’d be anything other than what Clay is: utterly bewitched.

I’ll also mention the actor who plays the worst of the villains in a villain-heavy show: Bryce, the rich kid rapist archetype (Land Rover, mansion, star athlete).  While most teenage rapists are played as volatile and dangerous, Bryce is a likable, good-hearted backslapper.  Even the scene in which he beats up Clay ends with them clinking glasses of scotch.  It’s disarming, and does demonstrate the degree that the show goes to in order to flesh out the backstory of even the most odious characters.  That’s a bright spot.

I’ll also mention that I love the diversity of the cast.  The first girl who makes eyes at Clay across the gym is African American, and so is Hannah’s first friend.  Interracial couplings among teens and their parents are assumed to be normal; so are six-and-a-half foot Asian basketball stars, gay characters of all shapes and kinds, and friend groups that appear to include every ethnicity.  If there’s plenty of bullying and slut-shaming in “13 Reasons Why,” there’s very little of the traditional race- and sexuality-based bullying and segregation common in most American high schools.  I’ll take that, at least.

***

One of the most agonizing things about high school is that, at the time, you think that’s all there is to the world.  Many are the high school misfits, pushed the margins, who go off to Boston or to San Francisco for college and flower, suddenly realizing that there’s more to life than competing over the sexual attentions of the quarterback.  That’s part of what gives so many tales of high school alienation their poignancy — we the audience can see how unappreciated is the sensitive boy or the nerdy girl by his or her classmates, and how wrong they are.  We know it will get better, but it often seems as though it won’t when you’re in it.  

Hannah Baker’s mindset must have been something akin to this as she began her descent toward suicide.  The problem is, we’ll never know.  The show never really takes us inside her head for the descent, instead focusing our attention on the horrific external events in her life.  We’re spared psychological insight and, really, after a few episodes, it’s almost impossible to identify with Hannah, because so painful.  

We ended up doing the unit on mental illness in class.  We studied the way the media misrepresents mental illness.  “13 Reasons Why” was a perfect case study.  “13 Reasons Why” gives us 13 horrifying reasons why Hannah did what she did, but painfully little insight.  

In the end, “13 Reasons Why” ultimately misses the real reasons why.

Last year I posted twice about the North Fork of the Pemigewasset river: the wilderness creek boating adventure of the White Mountains.  Unfortunately, the spring of 2016 was a bust: we got almost no rain between March and October, with some parts of New England experiencing a serious drought.

I spent the whole year hoping the North Fork would run, and it didn’t.  Then I spent this spring wanting to run it, and for a variety of reasons, not being able to.  Still, I found myself excited to see what was in there, and I wasn’t going to let a lack of water stop me.  I decided to hike in this past Saturday to scout the run.

With my wife headed out the door early on Saturday morning anyway, I set a plan get up early.  I’m an early riser by nature.  I’ve never been able to sleep much past 8 am, even if I’ve been up all night.  I tend to regard the mornings as my best, sharpest time; as for the evening, I tend to agree with famous literary critic Samuel Johnson, who had a line from the Bible engraved on his watch: “The night cometh, when no man can work.” So with a sunny day and the prospect of a beautiful hike into an alluring river before me, I had no trouble rousing myself at 6, downing a cup of tea and some energy bars, and jumping out of the car at the Zealand trailhead by 6:30 am.  There were dozens of cars in the lot with dew on them — these must have been people spending Friday night at the popular AMC Zealand hut.  A lone female hiker was just setting off as I curled the car into my parking space, and after 15 minutes of lacing my boots, loading my pack, and wolfing another energy bar, I set it as my goal to pass the woman before the first stream crossing.

As first sunlight crept into the gorge, I quickly blew by the woman and ribboned my way up into Zealand Notch via the network of boardwalks spanning streams, bogs, and beaver ponds.  The trail was flat and my legs, folded up most of the week beneath a desk, wanted to GO.  It was all I could do to keep myself from breaking into a run at the excitement of being in the woods again, headed toward a remote river with rapids I very much wanted to discover for myself.

It’s pernicious, really, the effect of a week spent behind a computer: too much screen time makes your neck hurt, your shoulders slump, and worst of all, your attention span dwindle to zero.  I’d spent the week grading student papers, preparing lesson plans, answering emails, and in between those tasks, checking the Washington Post for the freshest political news story breaking out of Washington’s most tumultuous week.  Pinging — that’s the word for it.  I was pinging from website to website, task to task.  I’d open an article and then immediately leave it, open a new tab, and tell myself I’d read it later.  So many websites are devoted to getting your attention, to getting your clicks — but in doing so, they destroy your attention span.  I click on articles and stories and then I don’t even read them.  I flit from site to site and scroll through endless Facebook photos without any enjoyment.  It’s almost entirely devoid of pleasure — a compulsion — finally, an addiction.  And now, deep in the woods, I felt the incredible rush of peace and tranquility as I got away from it all.  The sights and sounds suddenly manifested themselves around me: the singing of birds, the bright colors of trees and flowers, the warmth of the sun, the rising mountains around me, the rushing of a brook.  Ahead the Pemi Wilderness, the largest track of land with no roads in the White Mountains, was like a great blanket folding protectively around me.

Soon I was in new territory for me — crossing through the depth of Zealand Notch and pausing to look up at Zeacliff, the guidebook-cover view where I’d once hiked with my wife on our tour of the Bonds two years before.

There are two ways to paddle the NF Pemi.  The “easier” way — both in terms of whitewater and in terms of hiking — is to do the hike I had just done, and to put on Whitewall Brook, paddling this river for a few miles into the North Fork.  I had relegated this idea in my mind for three reasons:

1. It dumps you into the North Fork downstream of the best rapids
2. Whitewall Brook itself contains no whitewater
3. Whitewall Brook — says anyone who has run it before — is usually clogged with beaver dams and fallen trees

Still, I couldn’t resist going for a look myself.  Here’s what it looked like: narrow, flat, and unremarkable.

After that it was back up to the trail, and then, in a shockingly short time, I found myself at the trail intersection for Thoreau Falls.  Last winter, I’d hiked here with my wife from the other side, from Ethan Pond, and on a 20-degree day, with feet and feet of snow on the ground, and precious little daylight, Thoreau Falls had sure felt a long, long way from anywhere.  How long had it taken us to get there?  Two and a half hours?  Three?  But I’d worn boots and microspikes then.  Now, wearing shorts and a light pack, I was amazed to have covered the same distance in just an hour and a half.

The other way to run the North Fork is to hike in to Ethan Pond — the way my wife and I had done it — and to put on the North Fork shortly below the pond.  Now if you could actually put on close to the pond, this would be worth it, but you can’t.  The river is far too small and strainer-filled to put on even a mile downstream of the pond.  When I’d scouted the year before, I concluded that you couldn’t really put on until about a half mile east of the Shoal Pond Trail junction.  But I could see on the map that the river wasn’t very steep between that point and the footbridge that crosses the river about a half-mile upstream of Thoreau Falls.  So I decided to start my scout here, at the footbridge.

I should note that on this day, the North Fork was clearly too low to have run in a boat.  The East Branch of the Pemi gauge was at 900 cfs and falling reasonably fast.

Here’s what I found . . .

Just below the footbridge were three or four bedrock slide rapids that looked really fun.  Here they are in order:

Then there’s the edge of the world:

That’s the horizonline for Thoreau Falls, a HUGE, much-photographed waterfall.

Here is what it looks like from below:

Reminds me of that huge slide in Yosemite that was on the cover of that old Scott Lindgren boating video, “Aerated.”

Boaters have speculated about whether Thoreau Falls is runnable in a kayak.  Here’s what I think:  If someone held a gun to my head, I’d seal launch in and run the bottom half.  If no one had a gun to my head, and I was having a really, really good day, and it was all roadside, I’d seal launch in and run the last fourth.  As it is, I think I’d just as soon skip the whole damn thing.

Directly below Thoreau Falls, the North Fork charges down seven or eight super-steep rapids.  They’re not generally as clean as the rapids above the falls, but like those rapids, they’re bedrock:

The rapids with boulders in them looked more marginal:

It was slow going, crawling through the thick trees on shore.  I even stumbled across an ancient rusted gas can far up on shore, proving that man really can intrude on even the most inaccessible land.  Eventually it seemed like I’d hiked down to where it looked like the gradient began to relent, but there may be more downstream that I didn’t see.  I do know that not far downstream, the North Fork joins up with Whitewall Brook, and the river relaxes to class II and III for some distance.

The rest of the run is still a mystery to me: almost ten miles of intermediate rapids, the longest stretch of whitewater in New Hampshire that nobody ever runs.  I can’t wait to see what’s down there.

My assessment is that it’s probably best to hike in as I did, from Zealand, even if you intend to put on the North Fork, not Whitewall.  Hiking up the AT from Ethan Pond is, in my mind, a waste of energy.  That hike is no shorter to Thoreau Falls than the one I did (both are about five miles), and the Zealand hike — provided that Zealand Road is open — cuts off about 900 feet from the Ethan Pond hike.  What I did is not exactly flat, but it’s not far off.

While the East Branch of the Pemi is not a perfect indicator, it’s not a bad one either.  At 900 cfs and falling, the river at Thoreau Falls was definitely too low.  I think you’d want the East Branch to be at least 1,300 cfs, and probably more like 1,800 — double what I had for the scout.

I am hoping to go back when the water’s up, but this time to take my boat.  Carrying a 40 pound creek boat for five miles is not ideal, but I believe the solitude, the exciting rapids, and the sense of adventure on the North Fork of the Pemi would make the carry-in more than worth it.  I also think that while it would be fun to run Whitewall Brook into the North Fork someday, the true heart of the run includes the big rapids at Thoreau Falls.  That’s what I want to do.

Ten or twelve class V rapids, followed by ten miles of class II-IV — where else in New England do you get that?

And besides, as I realized on my hike back to the car that morning, it’s not really about the rapids.  It’s about the leaving the road behind and getting into your kayak and going somewhere that it would be really hard to get into otherwise.

In the end, the North Fork of the Pemi is about the adventure.

I can’t wait.