Travel and Transformation—Bronze: The Calm that Follows Whitewater
by Catherine Watson
In the physical and mental calm that follows whitewater, a friend and I, still dripping from the icy river, were relaxing on the front tubes of the raft, letting Nepal’s hot sunshine dry us off as the noise of the day’s first rapids faded behind.
”I never thought I would hear that sound again,” my friend said quietly. His tone was a blend of relief, gratitude and joy. I knew what he meant. I felt the same way, though my reasons weren’t as good.
My friend was coming back from the brink of death; I, from mere idleness. But getting through that rapids - a modest one, really, only a 3+ in anybody’s book had made me feel reborn too. The whole trip had, for that matter.
Eight months earlier, my friend’s doctors had handed him a death sentence. Richard - that’s not his real name - had borne the news well. He had arranged his affairs, resigned his obligations and, a deeply religious man, made his peace. He was ready. Then a miracle: The chemo took, to his doctors’ astonishment and his own. Remission had made this trip possible for him.
All I was coming back from was my own fault. Three years before, I’d left what for me was the best job in the world - because it was the world - and quit my work as a travel writer on a large Midwestern newspaper. It had taken me all over the globe.
I left because I wanted to write a book, but within a week of leaving, I’d gotten stuck - not so much from writer’s block as writer’s dismay: I saw how much dull, lonely work lay ahead and how little room (and money) there would be for the travel that had always nourished my soul. I went into mourning, though I refused to see it that way. Self-stranded at home, I quit writing, dawdled, grew depressed and blamed myself for laziness.
Then came the unexpected salvation of this journey. Floating down the Bheri River, on the way to ride elephants in the jungles of western Nepal, I felt like myself again. My old self. My best self.
The trip was a reprise in other ways too. I had done this same route 12 years before with my college friend Jim - the same guy who was now sunning himself in the back of the silver raft while we drifted through the quiet water.
It was Jim’s idea to do the Bheri again, and he had invited Richard, me and two other college friends, whom I hadn’t seen in 40 years, to share it. Jim puts his trips together the way some people do dinner parties, and they’re always successful. I couldn’t really afford it, but I decided to ravage my modest savings and go. It was the first time I’d been out of the country in three years.
I’ve always thought that raft trips make good therapy sessions, but except for the moment after that rapids, nobody talked much about personal concerns - except for one evening when the campfire conversation swerved into the dismal swamp of annuities and 401Ks and threatened to stay there.
Mostly, we just shrieked and gasped through the frigid rapids, enjoyed the scenery, ate the boatmen’s good meals, played hearts by firelight, shared Jim’s bottle of 140-proof Scotch (so strong it carried a danger-flammable warning) - and laughed. I hadn’t laughed so much since I left my job.
Whatever private epiphanies we had went into our journals. All of mine involved a rapidly increasing sense of deja-vu.
This wasn’t just the same river, it was the same rafting company we’d used before. It was the same time of year - late fall - so the water level was about the same too. I was even dressed the same.
From sheer habit, I’d brought the single most useful garment in my closet, a light-weight, down-filled, bright-blue bomber jacket, which I’d carried on international trips for 30 years, including my earlier trip with Jim down the Bheri. Putting it on each evening, as the air cooled and the dampness rose, was like putting on deja-vu itself.
As we relaxed and grew sillier, even our ages blurred. I forgot how old I was, and there were no mirrors to remind me.
Only the river looked different. The villages we passed were bigger, symptoms of Nepal’s ever-burgeoning population. And a dozen years of spring melt and monsoon rains had shoved more boulders into the rapids and rearranged the banks.
These were subtle changes, but they meant I didn’t recognize any of the beaches, not even the one where we’d come upon a cow stranded belly-deep in mud, and Jim and I had helped our boatmen rescue it. (We couldn’t drag it out by its neck, so we eased its legs free, one by one, tucked them under its body and then rolled the animal uphill, chocking it with rocks as we went, the way you chock the wheels of a truck.)
More and more memories like that came back from the first trip and braided themselves into this one, until the night we made camp on the only beach I recognized: a long, wide swath of cream-colored sand, just above a bend in the river, where sheer cliffs rose on the opposite bank, their faces sliced away by the water as if by a knife.
”This is Cremation Camp!” I said to Jim as we got out the raft. ”I know it is!”
I’d nicknamed it that because there’d been a cremation upstream when we were there before. Some of the charred logs had eddied into our beach at suppertime, bringing spiritual pollution, and our Hindu boatmen had leaped up from the cookfire in mild panic and shoved them away.
I’d sat up late that night, leaning against a boulder still warm from the sun, and tried to memorize every detail of the scene. It was Halloween, I remember - the same day we’d rescued the cow - and I was as happy as I’d ever been in my life.
Now I was happy again. On the same river. On the same beach. The coincidence seemed impossible. That evening, when the rest of the group were tucked into their tents, I sat up alone in Cremation Camp once more. And then time truly warped.
It wasn’t like being in two places at the same time. It was like being in two times at once - as if I were looking through two Kodachrome slides that almost matched, one taken then, one taken now.
Suddenly, I saw that time was the same as light - that it was traveling on into the universe like light itself, undimmed, forever. The past was the same as the present. Somewhere, out where time goes, I was still sitting on this beach 12 years ago, still leaning against a boulder, in the same blue jacket, at the end of a perfect day. I had never stopped sitting there. Had never stopped being that traveler.
My soul came back to me then. And it stayed. When I got home, I found I could write again. It was like being reprieved.
Just the other night, in a Minneapolis book club, the subject of rivers came up, and a woman started to quote the old saw: ”Well, you know, you can’t step….” Two other people chimed in to help her finish it, ”…into the same river twice!”
It made me smile. True enough, I thought, but sometimes you get to do it anyway.
