“Yeah.”

“And the ridge, and those other clouds. What a picture. What do you think–do you include the ridge and the clouds, or zoom in on just the little cloud and the moon and the star?”

A hypothetical question–we had no camera.

“Why not include everything?” said Tom. “Why draw a line around it?”

I looked over. Brother Tom, driving, sat sprawled, his seat as far back as it would go, one rawboned hand lightly holding the wheel.

“I don’t know,” I said. “Just–for fun.”

“We don’t have to cut things up. We don’t have to take them to pieces.”

I looked at the moon again: a thin crescent moon with its star and pink cloud keeping pace with us while tree-topped ridges rose and fell between.

“So many people,” Tom went on, “only see things the way everyone else sees them. Pre-digested. They don’t think anything is actually real unless it’s on TV, or if there’s a photo. Or a story.”

I waited for him to go on; his last sentence hung in the air with the pitch of incompletion. But the minutes unrolled with no further comment.

Perhaps Tom had concluded that by talking at all he was interfering with the experience. I tried to think of some safe topic of conversation. Failing, I turned away, rested my head on the cold, vibrating glass and watched the silhouettes of trees and signs speed by like–no, not like anything. Like themselves.

I woke in full daylight, to a discord of chirping that seemed to herald a spring morning, rather than late fall. Tom was not in his sleeping bag. Pulling on jeans and a sweat shirt I climbed out of the van’s back hatch and walked upriver.

The road was an orange-red gash through the pine forest, a startlingly bright color to northern eyes. From a low area on the left, from beneath a chill swirling mist, came the sounds of gently flowing water, bubblings and churnings plus an occasional percussion of plops. The sun was hidden somewhere in a pearl-gray sky; the tops of the pines trembled only slightly.

Too cold to linger long, I jogged back to the van. Tom sat in the sliding-door opening gently spreading peanut butter on too-soft bread.

“Maybe we should hit a restaurant for breakfast,” I suggested.

“Notice any last night?”

“I guess not.”

“I think we’re pretty far from any town. Besides, you probably want to get an early start.”

“I guess. You know, I was hoping it was going to be warmer here. I think we’re going to have to go farther south.”

“Think so? If we go much farther south we’ll run out of mountains.”

I didn’t answer.

“We’ve left the snow behind, anyway,” he added.

“Yeah.” I moved his crutches, sat beside him, reached for the bread.

“What are you going to do today?” I asked him.

“I don’t know. Poke around, I guess.”

He would stay dry all day. For a moment I almost wished I could trade places with him, injured knee and all.

It wasn’t long before I dropped my decked canoe onto the water, snapped my sprayskirt on its cockpit rim, and took up my paddle. There were many strokes ahead of me.

During the first miles I picked a dry line down mild rapids, while the mist dissipated and the sun became a bright spot in the still-prevailing haze.

Then a well-defined eddy beckoned. I planted a paddle deep into its solid stillness, swung myself around to face upstream, and then drove out into the current again. Now that I had turned one way my muscles required a corresponding stretch on the opposite side; I soon found an appropriate eddy. Then the first side again. Back and forth. As the river began to fall more quickly I paused in the center of each eddy to look ahead, twisting around in my boat. Often a single glance was all I needed, allowing me to flow back into the current without entirely losing momentum.

At a deeper, more serious note from the river I pulled against one shore. A vertical gap in my view downstream marked a steeper drop. I stopped and climbed from my boat, making the awkward transition from water to land-animal.

Three choices. I could carry around. I could run the drop before me, to plunge into a bubbling pool, with unknown consequences. Or I could scout a side channel that flowed off to river right.

I shivered in the mist that rose from the churning water before me, and again felt a shrinking distaste for all that turbulent wetness. I could easily pick up my boat and carry around; the pool below the falls waited only steps away. No one was there to judge me, to coax me; no one was there to impress. The only thing that I had to do today was to deliver myself at the take-out before dark, where food and shelter waited. In fact–what was I doing here at all? Why go to all the trouble to get myself into a situation in which my only goal was to get myself out again?

Take away the prop of other people, the support of their gaze, the stimulus of their conversation–was there anything left?

I looked up at the sky, around at the undramatic brown hills, and felt a crazy, disconnected freedom. I could scream, sing, shout, run naked…. No one was there; no one would pass this way for months. How strange it seemed, that of all of the places on Earth, I was in this particular one. I looked back up the river. No trace remained of my passage. Yet here I was, somehow. Still shivering.

Looking back at the drop I saw, in one sweeping glance, the proper line. I imagined how it would feel, how the strokes would fall, how the waves would jostle me. Then, without ever having come to a conscious decision, I trotted back to my boat.

Swooping with the water as it curved, then smacking into the boiling pool below, seemed so natural, so inevitable, that it was almost dreamlike. The imagined run and the experience had blended.

More rapids, more drops, more decisions. Rocks and water, hills and sky were my only audience. All the attention I would have given to companions fell only on these–and on myself. The day grew warmer, the sun brighter. Once I tried sunbathing on a flat rock out of the wind. Still too cold, the sun too hazed. I had brought no lunch. One part of me wanted only to put the miles behind me, to find food and warmth and companionship at the end of the run. Another part wanted nothing, was lost in the wordless isolation of the day.

In a calm stretch I pulled my boat onto shore and wandered up a small rise, between oaks and beeches and dogwood and rhododendron, to relieve myself. Away from the river I became aware of the calls of birds, the rustle and scamper of small animals, the soughing of wind in the trees. I walked further from the river, aimlessly exploring.

Who owned this land? Did anyone ever visit it?

I put my hand on a white oak tree and looked up, feeling its strength of trunk, its spread of bare reaching limbs. I laid my cheek against it as if to plumb the secrets of its woody heart.

The chill drove me back to my boat, where I was grateful to again fold my bare legs into its thin fiberglass protection. The sun, a white disc showing through the wooly overcast, had already passed its zenith. I had no watch, but I could feel the afternoon drawing on as I continued down the river.

Again I was forced to scout, again wondered why I should run a tricky ledge. Why bother? The desire seemed to come not from my mind but out of my hands, my arms, my back. This morning my body had demanded symmetrical turns. Now it urged me to put into motion the strokes I imagined while standing on shore.

Look. See. Do.

The river took on a new rhythm. The rapids became more continuous, the surrounding hills steeper. Now I threaded down among large, dark, worn rocks, half submerged, that brooded silently amidst the rushing waters.

I came to a rapid where the only clear channel lay between two large boulders in midstream. There was no good way to scout from shore; I paddled back and forth above the drop, snatching glimpses over my shoulder when I could. A smooth green path of water led over the lip between them, exiting below as a gush of white foam.

Finally I swung my canoe around and shot through the gap. Losing my balance I put out my paddle in an instinctive brace–it rasped over the rock–then with a “Crack!” that vibrated through my arm I tipped over.

I fell as through a mirror into another world: a cold, wet, unfriendly world where I could not breathe, could not see, could not hear. Stupidly not understanding, I tried to use my paddle to right myself. Failing, I realized that I held only a splintered shaft in my hands–the blade had broken off. I tried to roll up with my hands only, a maneuver that was easy in a swimming pool; failing again, I pulled my spray skirt from the cockpit rim, pushed my legs from the boat, and swam upward.

Light. Air. I grabbed the end-loop of my canoe and hung on grimly, looking from bank to bank in indecision. As I hesitated, the current washed me gently against a flat rock that just broke the surface. I crawled up onto it.

For some moments I lay, while the water drained from my clothes. But I couldn’t rest for long. I had to find the paddle blade. With miles still to go, I needed it.

I rose and gazed downstream. Not far below me the river fell away abruptly over and around an irregular line of boulders. No paddle.

It might have hung up somewhere in the drop below; if not, it was now washing downstream. I had to catch it. I had to try.

With a struggle I emptied my slippery water-filled craft, slid it into the water below the rock and stepped in. Without bothering with bracing or spray skirt I hand-paddled to the left bank, jumped out and, hoisting the canoe to my shoulder, tried to run along the bank.

But it was impossible to run amongst the jumble of boulders. In the next eddy I could find I climbed in again, pushing fully into the knee braces this time and attaching the spray skirt around me. From close-by, upstream, came the pulsating roar of the rapid I had just carried around. Downstream the waves were mild, and scooping at the water with both hands I made good time through them and around a bend.

There, above the next rapid, I saw the blond flash of freshly broken wood. Bent forward I dug away, harder and harder, as if sprinting for a finish line, as if thousands of spectators were cheering me on. I snatched up the broken blade just at the lip of the next drop.

Crude though it was–a blade with only six inches of splintered shaft for handle–it yet served far better than my hands. The rapid proved easy.

When the water slowed and deepened I rested, leaning forward on my front deck. Before me lay a long, quiet pool. I had reached the reservoir that filled the river valley with its unnatural flood.

The sound of rapids upstream became louder as I drifted around to face them. A patch of vivid blue appeared in the sky above the hills upstream. The first clear sky of the day. For one moment, seeing the sky, the hills, the trees, the river, it seemed that a great message was about to be given to me. I sat very still, floating, waiting in suspense.

No message came.

I breathed again. That scrap of luminescent blue emphasized the relative gloom of the shaded river. It must be getting late. And I had–what was it?–I tried to remember from the map–two or three miles of flat reservoir to cross before I reached the take-out.

Through experiment I found that the best way to use my stub of a paddle was to switch from one side to the other every few strokes. The splintered wood chafed my hands. My back ached. My legs cramped. It seemed much longer than a few miles. The riverbed widened into a lake that still did not reveal my brother or any sign of road.

I made for a light patch amidst the dull shoreline: a beach, I guessed. Slowly I crawled across the surface of the water. A dark spot resolved itself into Tom, sitting motionless. Watching me approach, no doubt. Now I existed in someone else’s eyes.

I paddled straight in, running my bow onto the rough pebbles. Tom sat against a little tree stump, his crutches beside him, looking at me with mild interest. The moment came when he should have spoken, asked a question, wondered at my plight … and the moment went by in silence. My turn … somehow silence was the proper answer.

Silence to silence went the conversation as I climbed stiffly from my boat, hoisted it, and waited for Tom to push himself to his feet.

Still without speaking we made our way along a path through blackberry bushes. With one word, any word, I would have fallen back into everyday life. Instead I remained suspended. The diffuse light of the fading sunset, the water dripping from my boat, the ground beneath my feet, the bushes, Tom–I was acutely aware of them all. At the same time I was aware of my own awareness. I could look both ways–from outside and from inside–bounded and unbounded–framed and frameless–present and storied.

As he drove out the gravel take-out road, Tom threw out a long arm to point across me.

“Moon’s up,” he said, with a quizzical smile.

The moon gave only a fuzzy glow through the haze: unworthy of photographs, not suitable for framing.

“Oh, moon,” I said. “Oooooh moon!” I howled, and we laughed as the gravel clicked and the van swayed and the boats creaked above.

The decision to continue rescue efforts is personal and based on careful consideration of the risk to oneself and the likelihood of good outcome for the victim.  Many boaters would place themselves in harms way given the slightest chance of successful rescue, and I’m sure some would even risk harm to recover the body of a friend. Nobody can argue with those decisions, as long as they are based on an understanding of the chances for successful recovery. While most boaters have an appreciation of the risk involved in a rescue, few understand the relationship between survival and time submerged. I have heard everything from scaling back efforts following the “1-minute window” to pursuing rescue up to an hour in cold water. Medical professionals were present for last week’s rescue, and their decision to continue the rescue was based on a variety of factors.  While contemplating what I would have done, I realized my knowledge was limited to a recollection that children can survive extended periods submerged in cold water, and that Rod Baird survived 6 minutes submerged under Hydroelectric Rock on the Chattooga(2). The following is an exploration of the subject to aid myself, and others, in similar situations.

The Natural Course of Prolonged Submersion

Death or severe disability by drowning is caused primarily by lack of oxygen to the brain. Fatal neurological injury normally occurs within 5 to 7 minutes of submersion, and almost always occurs following 12 to 14 minutes.(3) Survivors may suffer a spectrum of disability ranging from memory loss to persistent vegetative state, as damage to the brain progresses inward from the cortex (higher brain functions) to the brainstem (heartbeat, respirations, reflexes). Challenges following resuscitation include fatal brain swelling, damage to the kidneys and lungs, and electrolyte imbalances which can cause cardiac arrest. Several studies have demonstrated the relationship between submersion time and survival (5,6), including a case series of children that found the risk of death or severe neurological disability to be 10% for 0 to 5 minutes, 56% for 6 to 9 minutes, 88% for 10 to 25 minutes, and 100% for greater than 25 minutes.(7)

Submersion time over 5 minutes makes intact survival unlikely; however, there have been rare cases of survival following prolonged submersion, including the longest case ever documented, a 2.5 year old girl submerged for 66 minutes in 5°C (41°F) water.(8)  One physician writes, “Reports of such ‘miracle’ cases in the medical literature, although fascinating, can readily introduce a false optimism because of the limited reporting of the dismal outcome in the majority of prolonged submersion victims.”(9)  There are 500,000 fatal cases of drowning per year worldwide(10), and exposure-adjusted, person-time estimates for drowning are 200 times as high as such estimates for deaths from traffic accidents(11). Despite this frequency, a 2011 review of medical and news reports with documented submersion time and age found only 43 cases of survival with near-normal functionality following prolonged submersion (> 4 minutes).(4)  Two-thirds were children less than 12 years old, and the remaining adolescents and adults were noted to be small in size. Only 4 survived prolonged submersion in water greater than 6° C (42.8° F), and all were submerged less than 30 minutes. The authors state that “this is likely to be a reflection of the fact that such survival is extremely rare in water warmer than 6 °C, rather than indicating that we have missed a large number of incidents in our search of the literature”, although the possibility of undocumented cases has been raised (12,13).

Cold water lengthens the survival time by two mechanisms. It triggers the mammalian diving reflex, which halts breathing and conserves oxygen by slowing the heart rate and moving blood to vital parts of the body. This response is stronger in children than adults.(14) An opposing “cold shock response” may predominate, which leads to a faster heart rate with potential fatal rhythm disturbances(15). This response also causes immediate aspiration and swallowing of water, which quickly cools the heart and carotid arteries leading to “selective brain cooling”.(4) A reduction of brain temperature by 10° C decreases energy consumption by 50% and doubles the duration of time the brain can survive without oxygen.(16)  This “therapeutic” hypothermia is accelerated by surface cooling in children and small adults with higher surface-area to body mass ratios and less subcutaneous fat.  Panic by the victim (breath holding and vigorous attempts at escape) and protective gear worn in cold water work against these principles and may prevent therapeutic hypothermia.

Relationship between water temp and submerged survival time for the rare instances of survival with full recovery outlined above. From Tipton 2011

Technical Guidelines for Rescue Attempts

There is no universal consensus on rescue efforts in prolonged submersion. A group of experts published the following based on the cases outlined above: “if water temperature is warmer than 6 °C (42.8 °F), survival/resuscitation is extremely unlikely if submerged longer than 30 minutes. If water temperature is 6°C or below, survival/resuscitation is extremely unlikely if submerged longer than 90 minutes.”(4)  They made no differentiation between children and adults given that there have been rare cases of adults surviving prolonged submersion. The possibility that cases of survival longer than 30 minutes in water warmer than 6°C  exist, but have not been identified, has some promoting between 60 minutes (US Lifesaving Association) and 90 minutes (The Joint Royal College Ambulance Liaison Committee) of rescue efforts regardless of water temperature.(12,13) The original authors point to a lack of evidence supporting such guidelines, adding that “when conditions are extreme, rescuers may be put at risk without foundation.”(17) Regardless of differing views, all agree that it is the responsibility of the commander to tailor efforts to the situation at hand, and specified timeframes are simply guides “likely to be of most use when rescuers are placed at high risk by continuing a search and subsequent rescue attempt.”(17) As another medical professional writes: “It is important to emphasize that the victim first needs rescuing and it is the decision to continue these attempts beyond the ‘likely’ survival time that is important for the commander. If the casualty is still awaiting rescue and is beneath unstable ice, in large seas or in the depths of a cave then we would hope rescuers would think carefully about the likelihood of survival versus the risk to those whom we know to be alive right now – the rescuers.”(18)

Practical Guidelines for Rescue Attempts

In dangerous swiftwater environments, the likelihood of survival should continuously be reassessed by the trip leader or individual leading the rescue. For the average person trapped underwater, intact survival is most likely if rescued within 5 minutes, and unlikely following 10 minutes. Cases of survival longer than this are rare, but efforts may be extended in controlled environments with acceptable risk. Guidelines vary between 30 minutes for water exceeding 6°C (4), to 90 minutes regardless of water temperature (12). The one consensus is that likelihood of survival decreases greatly with time submerged, and this should be considered in light of the risk to the rescuer.

Situational awareness is key, and each rescue will be unique. Accessible location, experienced team, and low risk to the rescuers make prolonged efforts more reasonable. Water colder than 6°C and small size of the person entrapped may increase the length of survival. Rivers in both rainfed and snowmelt regions may be colder than 6°C in the winter, but typically exceed this temperature in the spring, summer, and fall (see figures below the Conclusion section for average temperatures based on USGS data from a variety of popular whitewater runs(19)).  For example, from March 10th to 16th this year, the Little River fluctuated from 4.4 to 10 °C (NOAA).  Of course, rivers vary widely in temperature due to a variety of factors (distance from source, air temperature, reservoir release), and each river should be considered independently for the implications on rescue efforts. Lastly, whitewater is dynamic, and the possibility of air pockets should be factored in to any consideration of submerged time.

Conclusion

The rescue attempt that spurred this discussion was certainly conducted within accepted timeframes for possible survival, and it is admirable that the team persisted through difficult conditions to give their peer a chance, however small. Nobody can fault such selflessness, and I hope a similarly skilled crew is present should I ever become entrapped on the river. I also hope that each rescuer would be able to make an informed decision given the circumstances and consider their risk against my chance of survival. I would never wish for heroics that are not founded in purpose and reason.

Frequency of kayaking and seasonal differences between snowmelt and rain-dependent regions, based on averaged USGS data, from Moore 2010.

References:

1. American Whitewater Accident Database. Accident #3693. http://www.americanwhitewater.org/content/Accident/detail/accidentid/3693/. Accessed March 19, 2013.
2. Chattooga River Fatalities and Near Fatalaties Since 1970. http://www.fs.usda.gov/Internet/FSE_DOCUMENTS/stelprdb5302792.pdf. U.S. Forest Service.
3. Orlowski JP. Drowning, near-drowning, and ice-water drowning. JAMA. 1988; 260: 390-1.
4. Tipton MJ and Golden FS. A proposed decision-making guide for the search, rescue and resuscitation of submersion (head under) victims based on expert opinion. Resuscitation. 2011; 82: 819-24.
5. Szpilman D. Near-drowning and drowning classification: a proposal to stratify mortality based on the analysis of 1,831 cases. Chest. 1997; 112: 660-5.
6. Manolios N and Mackie I. Drowning and near-drowning on Australian beaches patrolled by life-savers: a 10-year study, 1973-1983. The Medical journal of Australia. 1988; 148: 165-7, 70-1.
7. Quan L, Wentz KR, Gore EJ and Copass MK. Outcome and predictors of outcome in pediatric submersion victims receiving prehospital care in King County, Washington. Pediatrics. 1990; 86: 586-93.
8. Bolte R and Black P. The use of extracorporeal rewarming in a child submerged for 66 minutes. JAMA. 1988; 260: 377-9.
9. Suominen P, Baillie C, Korpela R, Rautanen S, Ranta S and Olkkola KT. Impact of age, submersion time and water temperature on outcome in near-drowning. Resuscitation. 2002; 52: 247-54.
10. Peden M MK, Sharma K. The injury chart book: a graphical overview of the global burden of injuries. Geneva: World Health Organization, 2002.
11. Mitchell RJ, Williamson AM and Olivier J. Estimates of drowning morbidity and mortality adjusted for exposure to risk. Injury prevention : journal of the International Society for Child and Adolescent Injury Prevention. 2010; 16: 261-6.
12. Perkins GD. Rescue and resuscitation or body retrieval—The dilemmas of search and rescue efforts in drowning incidents. Resuscitation. 2011; 82: 799-800.
13. Perkins GD. Reply letter: Rescue and resuscitation or body retrieval. Resuscitation. 2011; 82: e5.
14. Gooden BA. Why some people do not drown. Hypothermia versus the diving response. The Medical journal of Australia. 1992; 157: 629-32.
15. Shattock MJ and Tipton MJ. ‘Autonomic conflict’: a different way to die during cold water immersion? The Journal of physiology. 2012; 590: 3219-30
16. Szpilman D, Bierens JJLM, Handley AJ and Orlowski JP. Drowning. New England Journal of Medicine. 2012; 366: 2102-10.
17. Tipton M, Golden F and Morgan P. Drowning: guidelines extant, evidence-based risk for rescuers? Resuscitation. 2013; 84: e31-2.
18. Ramm H and Robson B. Reference editorial – Rescue and resuscitation or body retrieval. Resuscitation. 2011; 82: e3.
19. Moore RD, Schuman TA, Scott TA, Mann SE, Davidson MA and Labadie RF. Exostoses of the external auditory canal in white-water kayakers. The Laryngoscope. 2010; 120: 582-90.

“Screaming Meanies” on the Little River. Photo by author in 2007.

That was a crowd in those days. How little we could have imagined that the annual draw-down from the Summersville Dam would one day become the “Gauley Fest”: one part each of circus, party, and trade show, with attendance in the thousands.

It was a chill October morning. Someone was pumping up a Coleman stove; others were conversing in low tones. Though we were out of sight of the Summersville Dam’s discharge pipes, we could hear the tremendous sound–not exactly a “rumbling,” but a peculiarly deep static–as the three great pipes, twenty feet across, unceasingly shot their jets of water at sixty to ninety miles per hour into a churning pool below. We had slept to that sound, dreamed to it.

“Come on,” said Tom to me. “Now’s the time.”

The sun had reached us, on our elevated plateau, but the valley below lay deep in misty shadow.

“You guys going to breakfast?” someone called as we opened the doors to our van.

“We’re going to put in,” Tom called back.

“What’s the big rush?”

“We’re doing the whole run today.”

“The whole twenty-two miles? Today?”

“That’s right.”

“What’ll you do tomorrow?”

“We’ll run it again tomorrow.”

The rest would split the trip into two days, hiking up a trail half-way down to camp with their shuttled cars.

“Hey, you haven’t run this before, have you?” asked someone else.

“No,” said Tom. “But it’s better to go alone, anyway.”

“What are you, anti-social?”

“Not really,” said Tom, with a grin that said, maybe he was. “But it’s more fun on your own. It’s like a first descent.”

Suddenly a knobby, balding head thrust out of the open hatch of a nearby cab-back pick-up. It was John Sweet, National Canoe Champion and a hero, a giant of the sport. A lean, wiry research chemist from Penn State, John was an expert in every aspect of boating, from the new fiberglass construction to the sliding pry stroke. It only added to his mystique that Sweet was the only whitewater paddler anyone had ever heard of who, it was said, couldn’t swim.

“You’re starting down without us?” Sweet asked. John already knew we were planning to do the trip in one day; we had arranged a shuttle with him the night before.

“Yeah,” said Tom. “We don’t want to be led down. We want to see it fresh.”

I watched John anxiously for his reaction. I had been nodding my agreement after each of Tom’s statements, but inside I wasn’t so sure.

Sweet would lead the other group. He was one of the few who had ever seen it before, having been part of the first canoe and kayak descent, two years previous. One of the few rapids that was then named was “Sweet’s Falls.”

“It makes sense to start early,” said Sweet. “You’ll have a long day. You’ll have to scout a lot in the upper half, though. And watch out for Iron Ring. You should carry that. Make sure you carry Iron Ring.”

The head pulled back in again.

Our Ford van thumped and clunked as we eased our way into the shadows, around the switchbacks, down to where the river steamed in the cool air. We suited up, dropped our slalom boats into an eddy that pulsed with the power of the current beyond, snapped on our spray skirts, soaked our hands for a minute in the water’s summer-stored warmth, then paddled out into the current, yielding ourselves to the power of the Gauley.

We scouted often that day, stumbling down the jumbled rocks of the bank, or scrambling up the backs of mansion-sized boulders to peer downstream. Each time we climbed from our boats and considered the puzzle of a new rapid, trying to guess at the nature of underwater obstacles from the particular shape of an exploding wave or the direction of the water’s bubbling recoil, trying to calculate the vectors of its dividing and intersecting currents, I asked myself: is this Iron Ring?

Tommy seemed less concerned. As was usual, the loquacious late-night wrangler over Nietzsche or Kierkegaard was transformed into a taciturn boating companion. His expression was rapt, elsewhere. My questions–will you go right or left? Is this one it, you think?–seemed irritating interruptions to a drawn-out conversation he was having with the river. He answered reluctantly. I knew why. To Tommy, words were out of place on the river. Words acted as an obscuring veil; only in silence could the raw experience be directly felt.

The run was twenty-two miles, the entire distance studded with rapids. Twenty-two miles is usually considered a full day of paddling. Twenty-two miles spent scanning for an iron ring at the top of each rapid on the Gauley river seemed Herculean.

I was not just searching for a steep rapid with a big hole at its end; I was looking for an actual ring–for that evocative name, Iron Ring, did not spring from some creative paddler’s brain. I was looking for a hunk of rusted iron that had been bolted into the bedrock of the river bank when the river had served as freight transportation for the product of these ancient hills. It was an anchor point to help lumberjacks clear the log-jams that commonly piled up at the lip of that particular drop.

The Gauley river, named after some long-forgotten West Virginia settler, was part of the drainage system of the mighty New River. The New is–naturally, given the name–one of the oldest rivers in the world, second only, some claim, to the Nile. The forests around us had been in existence for 250 million years, having escaped inundation when the Atlantic Ocean had formed a mere 160 million years ago.

Of course we didn’t know all that, at the time. We had heard it was good whitewater; so we were there.

We didn’t know its age, and yet–somehow–we could feel it. As a very crude, general rule, newer rivers run steadily downhill through beds of smallish rocks; older rivers gather themselves in quiet pools and then plunge suddenly over and between larger rocks or slabs of carved bedrock.

The boulders of the Gauley are particularly large. The smaller are like cars; then there are the delivery trucks; then the semis; then the truly house-sized. Like enormous prehistoric beasts they slumber amidst the swirling waters, towering above this new, brightly colored form of aquatic life that float, or dart quickly about, in their shadows. What cataclysm shook them down from what surrounding mountains, ages ago? (The “mountains” were worn now to rounded lumps of hills, their tops set far back, miles sometimes, from the river banks.) Or dug them, perhaps, out of the obdurate spine of the world. We did not know their story, but their size, the much-handled smoothness of their shapes, spoke to us of their high-piled years of patient endurance. They waited–for what? For us?

We never found the ring. We paddled every rapid of the twenty-two miles–Tommy leading most of them–and never found the iron ring.

We laughed and whooped it up, when, light-headed with hunger (we never brought lunch, in those days), we saw the road again, signaling the end of the run. What was so tough about Iron Ring? we gloated. We never even noticed it!

That evening, at the campground, we traded stories. We heard of lost paddles, swims, involuntary surfs in keeper holes. And, of course, we publicly gloated. What was so tough about Iron Ring?

At this point everyone looked to John Sweet, of course.

Maybe it’s not that hard, Sweet conceded. No harder than the rest. But it’s more dangerous. If you drop into that pour-over at the bottom, that might be it. You might die. It’s not worth the risk.

That sobered us. It sobered me, at least. I could not tell with Tom. I could never tell with Tom.

Was it the glasses that made Tommy so hard to read? Thick, horn-rimmed glasses, held together with strips of duct tape, behind which he blinked out at the world with an air of abstraction, an innocent untouchability which seemed to render him impervious to cold, hunger, danger, or disapproval. He didn’t see what others saw, the obvious, the surface; instead his special x-ray lenses permitted him to see straight through to the hidden essence of things.

I was still a teenager; Tom was twenty-four, the clear leader of our group of two. I was an enthusiastic follower: when Tommy said, “Let’s see it fresh, for ourselves,” I tagged along and did my very best to see it fresh, per instructions.

But here was another expert to listen to. And I listened carefully, to a detailed description of just where Iron Ring was, and just how to recognize it.

The next morning I had it repeated to me, just in case.

And I found it.

Again, we left before the rest, determined to have our own, unfiltered, unsullied experience on the river. We didn’t have to climb from our boats as often, now that we had seen it once. Though, of course, every run was different. Even the most highly trained and well-prepared racer, on a slalom course he may have run hundreds of times, which has been studied on video and analyzed for him by crowds of helpful coaches, still finds it impossible to trace the same line with the same strokes twice in a row. The waves seethe and froth, build and break into foaming white-caps, then flatten again into smooth green lumps. The eddies, too, swirl in one direction, then the other; the water level rises and falls along the banks; tall dry rocks receive an occasional splash on their very peaks from some playful jet. The surface of a rapid shifts and shivers like land in the grip of an unceasing earthquake. There are fractal patterns, too complex for calculation; there are probabilities; but there is never peace. A river is the world’s most dynamic playing field.

I found it, the iron ring set in the rock at the entrance of a short, violent rapid. Whose rough hands had set it in the rock sometime in the last century?

Iron Ring. I held it in my own hands. A heavy, cold piece of dark metal, eight inches in diameter, made of octagonal stock almost two inches thick, pinned so firmly by a bolt of the same material that it seemed a natural extension of the bedrock. Just a thing. And yet, it seemed to radiate a kind of unearthly power, as if it were a talisman, a magic token, the finger ring of a giant who lurked just over one of the surrounding ridges.

A thing; also a rapid. We hadn’t looked for the ring here, the day before, because this rapid had impressed us as less difficult than several we had already negotiated. There was an unobstructed passage down the right side, through a series of cresting waves. Some of these, breaking almost constantly, angled left, feeding into a good-sized pour-over that dropped into a steep hole.

The guru of the river had declared this one a killer hole.

We had judged the rapid no problem, the day before. Start right center, cut a little right near the bottom; no fancy maneuvers needed, no problem. Today it looked different. What if you flipped over?

Can you walk a beam six inches off the ground? Sure. How about sixty feet?

As usual, though, Tommy seemed unimpressed.

For once, I led the way; I couldn’t wait. Fear transformed into action, I drove right, right, far more right than needed, until I saw the hole go by.

Yes.

I had just turned eighteen. That might explain the strength of the feeling that flowed through me, saturating my every cell. A feeling quieter, stronger than exultation. I didn’t feel like shouting, whooping: I felt completed, as if I had just been reunited with some long-mislaid piece of myself.

Catching the first eddy I could reach I turned upstream to watch my brother.

There he was. He hadn’t waited to watch me. There he was, floating down–backwards. Directly upstream of the hole. Looking first over one shoulder, then the other. I caught a glimpse of his face; it showed only his normal, bemused interest. His paddle moved in a casual rhythm.

“Go!” I shouted, meaninglessly. He could not hear.

It could not happen. It was not possible. He began to paddle away from the pour-over–not fast, just deliberately–but the waves were pushing the other way. His boat lifted for a moment as it rode over the buried rock, seemed to hesitate as if at the very last moment it might slip around–then fell into the hole. Something within me fell along with it.

Instantly the boat was upside down.

“Tom.”

After staring for a moment I looked around, trying to shake off the numbness of my dazed horror. There must be something I could do, some way to effect an heroic rescue. But the hole was well off shore; I couldn’t reach him from there. And I couldn’t fight the current back up to where he was. There was nothing I could think of. Gone, gone. I was alone on the river. More completely alone than I had ever been.

Death. It could not happen. It could not. My brother. Tom. Could it really happen, like that?

I could still see his kayak’s white hull, bobbing in the intersection of the two currents. Falling water drummed down on it. And as I watched, the hull worked its way from the center of the hole toward one side. Then the current began to tug on one end. It moved farther and farther, the down-flowing current improving its grip with each surge, until the kayak bounced out one side of the hole and floated downstream.

Then the craft jerked, twisted–and there Tom was, water streaming from his helmet as he rolled. In a moment he pulled into the eddy alongside me.

“God, Tom.”

“Pretty good hole, eh?”

“I thought you were dead!”

“You did? No kidding. Actually, it was–kind of neat.” He smiled as he said this, perhaps at the inadequacy of the conventional phrase. But when all words were inadequate, the most worn cliché will do. “I could feel the current, under there,” he went on, “and I sort of pulled on it, with my paddle angled so it would pull me the right direction; I kept pulling, and I came out the side.”

“I saw, I saw that. God, but Tom–God you scared me.”

“The rest of the run was full of incident. In Sweet’s Falls I broke my C-1 and, after rolling up and thus satisfying my sense of honor, was forced to climb from the sinking craft and swim it to shore. Yet after the emotional convulsions of Iron Ring, it was all anticlimax.

We talked to John Sweet again, before the long drive back home. We had to tell him. We had to ask, what about this killer hole? We caught him at the take-out, amidst the “crowd.”

Poor John–but that’s looking back. At the time we had no sympathy for the plight of the veteran who, after a run or two down a river, has “guru” status forced upon him.

“Well,” he said, his voice rising several notes and becoming even more nasal than usual, “well, the hole might not be so bad. It’s against the shore, there, where it’s all undercut, that it looks like a death trap. We saw it at a lot lower water level, that first time–maybe it’s not so dangerous now. At this level, it’s all pretty well covered, and there’s not much push that direction. But I tell you, there are a whole bunch of jagged, undercut rocks in there. I think the loggers used dynamite to clear out the channel, and that’s where the rubble ended up.”

Though we hadn’t seen any of this, we nodded and looked appropriately grave.

“I’d have to look at it,” said Tom later, out of John’s hearing. “You’ve always got to see it for yourself. You’ve got to see it fresh.”

Seeing it fresh: that was Tommy’s specialty. Tom was the first to explore the innards of that hole, and, over the years, he has been among the first to plumb the secrets of rivers from Mexico to Newfoundland to Bhutan, even pushing the edge of the runnable in his own backyard, on the Great Falls of the Potomac.

Seeing it fresh. Talking to the river gods, one on one, deep in their secret places. Seeing things, feeling things, beneath the surface, beyond the reach of ordinary vision.

I’ve tried his glasses. They don’t do anything for me.

“He’s pinned” a panicked voice rang out.  I turned and looked back at Witt.  He was vertical but not moving.  Water slammed against his back.  In an instant, the boat collapsed violently and Witt was buried in a liquid avalanche.

We ran up river to help, but it was hopeless.  I will never forget his hand.  It reached up to the surface desperately.  He was still alive and reaching, praying, hoping that somehow we could get a rope to that weakening hand and rescue him.  He struggled for a couple of minutes before going limp.  I could not see his hand after that.

Hours after the water was turned off we extracted Witt’s body with the help of a rescue crew.  His femurs were both broken in half, his legs limp and deformed like bags of jelly.

The second drowning I witnessed was five years later on the Russell Fork, a notoriously deadly class 5 run in Kentucky.  The rocks there are like Swiss cheese, full of holes.  John was an older man and he was rag dolled in a hole for minutes and minutes.  Eventually he flushed out, still in his boat.  A friend pulled him out of the kayak and onto shore.  CPR was initiated, but it was far too late.  John’s skin was a blue-ashen pale.   His life was over.

In both instances, I paddled class 5 the following day.

My Dad got me into kayaking when I was only a kid.  We lived thirty minutes from the Nantahala in North Carolina in what seemed like the whitewater epicenter of the universe.  What more could an eleven-year-old boater ask for?  I spent several years learning the basics, and by the time I was thirteen I was ready for the Ocoee.

The Ocoee is a class 3+ play run, but, at the time, it was a rite of passage.  I stood atop the long concrete ramp that leads to the water and stared at the maelstrom of whitewater in front of me.  I was intimidated, scared but excited.  I don’t remember anything else from that day, but I have a vivid image of the view below the ramp.  Beautiful, enticing, rushing water led to a bend in the river.  Beyond that the river was unknown to me-but I wanted to go there.

As time passed, I became a better paddler.  I ran Section 4 of the Chattooga as a sophomore in high school.  I was comfortable in class 4 and 4+ whitewater, but my Dad would not let me step up to class 5.  At the time it seemed unfair, but I appreciated his conservatism later because it taught me patience.

I graduated from high school and got a job as a raft guide with NOC.  It rained during the spring raft guide training.  A group of us went to the upper Nantahala and ran the Cascades.  At the time it was the steepest thing I had run.  Big Kahuna, the crux rapid, felt like it was 28 feet tall (it’s about 8 feet tall).  It was the first time I had to look up to see upstream.  The rush and sense of accomplishment hooked me.  I loved being in control and so intensely focused that nothing but the water, gravity and me existed.

A natural progression occurred. Paddling difficult whitewater 200 days a year paid off.   I became an expert hair boater.  A year or two after the drowning on the Green another experience changed my life forever.

It was a cold December day.  My buddy Obie and I were running the Green.  We knew the water would be high, but we did not expect the raging monster that we found at the put-in.  Arriving at Gorilla, Obie began the portage.  I stayed in my boat.  “What are you doing, man?  Are you fucking crazy?” he said.

“I can do this.  Will you hold a rope for me?”

I ferried across the lip of the entrance, boofing clean into a big eddy.  I looked over at Obie, and he held up his rope to show me that it was frozen solid.  I was on my own.

A second ferry and I hit the meat of the Notch with all of my conviction.  I typewriterred into the main flow and took a couple of quick strokes before flying off the main drop, a narrow 15 footer.  Exiting the flume I punched a couple of large sliding holes and dropped into a final eddy.  I had never felt so alive.  I had entered the world of big time class 5 and 6 whitewater.  I never looked back.

The next ten years held countless river days, countless adventures.  There were solo runs on the Cullasaja, Linville, and Taureau; doubles and triples of the Taureau and Linville; class 6 descents of standard portages in NC, Colorado, and California.

One day I found myself alone, vertically pinned on the Cullasaja with the entire river pouring onto my back and head.   I did not have an air pocket.  I was doomed.  But, as suddenly as I had pinned, I popped off the rock and continued on my way with sore legs and a broken boat.  The next day I returned to the ‘Saja, solo, and ran the same rapid that had nearly killed me.

My greatest fear was not death.  My greatest fear was losing my edge.  My greatest fear was shoulder dislocation.  I lived to paddle and paddled, literally, to live.

In the shadow of all the insane boating, I led a normal life.  I graduated from paramedic and nursing school, working in the field for over 10 years.  I married and had a beautiful little boy.  We named him Ryland.  I was aware that as I forged my way through life, running difficult water, my responsibilities were increasing, but the idea did not bother me.  Nor did it change the way I paddled.  I became a little more conservative as I aged-it’s inevitable.  But I was still running class 5+ whitewater consistently.

Last August, rain fell in New England.  My main paddling partner Alan Panebaker and I ran Glover Brook.  Glover is steep, shallow and blind.  Full of wood and pin rocks, it’s a true gnar run.  We approached a blind slot, and I hopped out to scout from the top.  I glanced downstream and everything looked clear.  I got back in my boat and shouted some directions to Alan.   As I ferried into current, I felt a twinge in my gut; “something ain’t right,” I thought.  But it was too late, I was committed.  As I dropped over the edge, I stopped dead.   I could not tell what was wrong, but I knew it was bad.

“What the fuck?” was all I had time to think before I was ripped from my boat.  I swam under a log breaching the slot.

“I should be dead,” I thought as I gathered my gear.

“If you had stopped in there, I would just be standing on the shore in a panic right now” Alan said grimly.

“Yeah, there’s nothing you could have done for me, that’s for sure”.

The close call did not have a lasting effect on us.  We were immediately back in our boats running class 5 and 5+ whitewater.  We laughed at danger.

Maybe we should not have.  Alan died a month later.  I watched him broach and pin against a sieve with a tree in it.  He fought for his life, but he was on his own and there was nothing he could do.  He flipped and went into the sieve.  We were below him in a walled out, smooth granite bowl.  By the time we got back up to the sieve he was nowhere to be seen.  We weren’t even sure he was in the sieve but threw ropes into it with fading hope.  He was there, but his hands never grasped our ropes.

An hour or two later, with more manpower, we were able to move the log around and free his body.  He floated through the rapids before coming to rest in a large recirculating eddy.  I ran to my boat horrified, and paddled up to my friend.  He was the pale blue hue that is unmistakably dead.

“Ohh Alan” I groaned under my breath as I clipped my tow tether to his lifejacket.  I ferried out into the flow and Toby grabbed his body.  I caught an eddy and clambered onto a rock to help.  We pulled Alan’s cold body out of the frigid, clear water.  I lay across the top of him, hugging him.  I looked up and saw tourists taking pictures of us with their smart phones.

“This can’t be real.”  I was in a daze hiking out of the gorge.  I called Alan’s girlfriend fifteen or twenty times before finally leaving a message.  “It’s Adam.  Call me.”

We drove to her house that afternoon.  I quickly got drunk on a bottle of Knob Creek whisky. Its warm burn was the only thing I could feel.  Everything else was a surreal numb.

When we arrived at her house, we hugged and cried.  I apologized over and over.  “I’m so sorry.  So sorry.  I never wanted it to be like this.  I never wanted to make that phone call.”

Buddy, Alan’s dog, barked nervously like he expected Alan to walk in the door any minute.

The next ten days were a blur of alcohol and logistics.  We corralled boats and gear, called family members and friends, planned a memorial service.  We drank and drank some more.  It was the hardest week of my life.  I can only imagine how Alan’s family felt.

Now I sit here, trying to make sense of the senseless.  There is no moral to this story.  Alan, Witt and John were in the wrong place.  They died.  I have many other friends who were in the wrong place.  They died too.

I love the sport.  It has taken me to places physically and figuratively that most people will never see.  And there are more good lines than bad ones-more near misses and close calls than fatalities.  Kayaking dangerous whitewater is often forgiving.  The problem is that when it’s not, the toll is too high.

If there is a place where kayaking’s collective lack of social controls is being tested, it might be the Green River in North Carolina. For how steep it is, the Green is an unbelievably forgiving run. But that forgiveness is routinely being tested by huge crowds of paddlers, some seemingly lacking the basic skills to run any river safely. In June, a video was posted on YouTube showing some gut wrenching lines on the Narrows: one paddler takes a header off Gorilla, another misses the eddy on the lip of Sunshine (a class III move at most) and drops off the center backwards, another paddler swims in the class III runout.  Two of the Southeast’s best (and best known) paddlers, Isaac Levinson and Pat Keller, posted comments, in a discussion that meandered from Facebook to BoaterTalk to the YouTube comment section, calling out the video as an example of dangerous and unacceptable behavior. The callout was unusual, but it was the reactions that were perhaps more telling in what they reveal about attitudes in the sport, as well as the mentality that our collective indifference to matters of style, technique, and safety have helped to bring about with regard to how a paddler progresses in the sport.

One paddler in the YouTube comments section wrote, “I don’t know who died and made Pat and Isaac god, but they sure are a bunch of dumb shits!!! Tell me that they came out of the womb paddling class 5. Everyone has to start somewhere…” Much has been made about how advances in equipment and technique now enable paddlers to run whitewater in a season or so that once might have taken a career to achieve, but for paddlers who took up the sport in an earlier era, the implications of comments like that are jaw dropping: for some portion of the paddling population, the Green is now regarded as a place to start, and taking hair raising crashes as a stepping stone. That mentality has serious implications, though, for everyone’s safety and for the ability of new boaters to progress in the sport.

 It is often suggested that the genesis of surfing’s aggressive attitude towards loose behavior in the lineup is the fight for scarce resources in an inherently dangerous environment, and it may be that changes in the sport of kayaking are pushing toward a similar dynamic. While growth in kayaking participation overall has largely plateaued, creeking is gaining in popularity, and moderately difficult runs like the Green are starting to see crowds that wouldn’t have existed a decade ago. But while a crowd of marginal paddlers at your local playspot is annoying, crowds on class V whitewater are undeniably dangerous.

That danger manifests itself in a way that is perhaps unique to kayaking, and in a way that might account for some antagonism toward boaters insistent on paddling over their heads. In kayaking, there are a lot of ways that things can go wrong. Most of them, though, lead to a brief and urgent window during which another boater can step in and potentially save someone’s life. A pin, a swimmer being recirculated, a long swim threatening a flush drowning… in all these situations, urgent action can be the difference between life and death. And in all these situations, too, that urgent action is likely to call on someone else to immediately put his own life at risk. In the surf, outside of the unique dynamic of tow-in surfing, someone getting beat down is basically on his own. If someone falls climbing, there’s either someone standing at the end of the rope, or there isn’t. But in kayaking, when someone is in trouble, someone has to act, boldly, and immediately.

One of the most admirable characteristics of the kayaking community is this: when someone is in trouble, anyone present will step up and in an instant put his or her own life at risk to save a complete stranger. On a more pedestrian level, paddlers are almost always there for each other when it comes time to help someone who’s swam or unpin a boat, even if it isn’t a life threatening situation. When someone is paddling over his head, he undercuts that dynamic, both by being much more likely to need help and by himself probably lacking the necessary skills to help someone else. Even when it doesn’t entail undue risk, stopping for an hour to deal with unpinning a boat or helping a swimmer across the river interrupts the flow of the run and of the day; nevertheless, most kayakers value being a part of a community where helping out is the norm and wouldn’t want to see the river become an environment where people callously blow by other boaters who could use a hand. If kayakers have to choose between preserving the all-for-one safety ethos on the river or preserving the everybody-come-along vibe in the parking lot, I think most people would unquestionably pick the former.

It seems at times, as well, that the community’s willingness to accept a high level of carnage as normal has lead to some mistaken ideas about how paddlers progress in the sport. Contrary to YouTube commenter opinion, most top kayakers did not start kayaking on the Green River Narrows. “I started kayaking when I was 10, and I started paddling more frequently when I was about 13,” Rush Sturges explained to me. “I ran my first real Class V when I was 14 years old. Leading up to that run (it was Cherry Creek Proper) I was running a LOT of Class IV. I ran the local grade IV section on the Cal Salmon many times that Spring and Summer to prepare. I was very nervous before putting on the river. I had certainly hyped up what Class V was going to be like, and when I finished the run, I walked away with a smile on my face. Rather than being at the edge of my limits on the run, I was actually super solid and didn’t miss a single boof…. I personally am thankful I spent as much time and effort [as] I did on Grade III and IV before finally stepping my game up. I was super fortunate to grow up around competent kayakers, and I think that had a lot to do with it. I didn’t even have a swim until I was 20 years old on Upper Cherry Creek. I’m not trying to brag by saying that, just pointing out that time spent preparing on easier stuff is time well spent when you decide to raise the bar.”

The best athletes in any sport are often those that started young, but consider this possibility: maybe in addition to all the other benefits of beginning at a young age, kayakers who start early turn into better boaters because they are often forced by someone—a parent, an older mentor—to paddle easy whitewater longer than they might want to or really need to. As John Weld put it, “When you’re 13 years old, you’re going to the Lower Yough whether you like it or not.” It truly is a common experience of the best paddlers that, whether through the influence of an older mentor, a lack of good or consistent whitewater, slalom racing, or some other factor, these paddlers have put in a lot of time working on hard moves on easy water.

More than just putting in time on easy whitewater, learning new skills requires pushing it hard on easy whitewater all the time, and it may be that this is an easier mindset to adopt for younger paddlers(for example). It isn’t just a matter of “feeling comfortable” on easier water before taking the next step; it’s about consistently pushing it on easier water—taking the hardest lines, catching the smallest eddies, boofing every rock; learning to make judgments about what moves are makeable and which aren’t; and learning to deal with the repercussions of missed judgments in whitewater with less consequence than in class V. That sort of learning is hard to achieve in a setting where a paddler is basically hanging on for his life.

Pat Keller explained the steps he took to get better when he was starting in the sport this way: “[C]linics clinics clinics, slalom, clinics clinics clinics, foamies…. freestyle freestyle freestyle, clinics clinics clinics (you get the picture)…. Every step on the way up that ladder is important. Take time to know with each one if you are ready to proceed. Willing is easy, knowing is what’s hard.” Runs like the Green are undoubtedly a key step towards becoming a solid boater, but there are surely quite a few steps to be taken before a new boater gets there. “[T]he Green has become the Mecca of honing the skills to become a solid creek boater,” Pat says. “More and more paddlers are climbing that ladder of skill, and the Green is certainly a cherished step for all those who take it. But it must be climbed to with much respect for the dangers along the way.”

All of this is a lot less sexy than just “firing it up,” though. Your Facebook friends are going to be a lot less impressed with that attainment it took you a month to finally make on the Lower Yough than they are with a picture of you rolling over the lip on Metlako. But paddling better, not just paddling harder water, is something that takes time. And taking beatings on difficult whitewater in the hope that one day the beatings will stop is not, for most paddlers, a viable path to success.

For most paddlers who’ve been in the sport for a while, the advantages of encouraging new boaters to progress incrementally seem obvious: fewer incidents to deal with, better safety on the water for everyone, fewer risks to access because of events on the river leading to negative attention or calls to search & rescue, a stronger sense of community. The less obvious issue is how, as a community, to achieve that. Most paddlers are understandably (and commendably) reluctant to insert themselves into other people’s risk taking decisions. As Rush puts it, “My gut feeling is that if someone is putting on the river with you, it’s his or her responsibility to know if that run is suitable for them. However, I am not afraid to tell someone that they should evaluate their skills before putting on a run, or ask them what types of similar runs they’ve done previous. Ultimately, kayaking is up to the individual and there is NO ego when it comes to making sure you are as safe as possible on Class V.”

It may be that the changes the community needs are as simple as recognizing your friends when they draw creative lines on the river or paddle well rather than just “going big.” Inclusion in the Rider of the Year competition of a “Best Line” category, recognizing “styled lines” alongside categories like Drop of the Year could be a step in that direction. A few less high-fives for surviving sketchy lines and being willing to encourage friends to take a step back when needed probably wouldn’t hurt, either.

In the end, the idea is to encourage community by cutting down on the sort of behavior that makes stronger boaters want to abandon weaker ones to fend for themselves or discourages new boaters from sticking with the sport. Hopefully we can all encourage up and coming boaters to progress in the sport safely and incrementally without resorting to slashing tires in the parking lot.

Then again, maybe surf-style aggression is on the way, whether we like it or not. The top comment on the YouTube video, “Carnage on the Nars”? “[F]ucking lame. Stay the fuck off the Green.”

Most paddlers are aware of the annual Gauley Festival in September with its predictable flow releases and raucous partying.  At my first Gauley Festival, I remember sitting in my boat just below the dam waiting with great anticipation for the water to be turned on.  At the prescribed time, there was a series of loud beeps and then water shot out of pipes below the dam, filling the river.  I loved it.  It was water when I wanted it and at the level I wanted and right on time.  It wasn’t until years later during my career as a scientist that I realized, filling rivers when I wanted and how I wanted might be a false victory for the rivers we love.  While I later learned that the Gauley releases are done to drawdown the reservoir for flood control purposes and paddlers just happen to benefit, further the festival celebrates the protection of this run from two proposed projects that would have inundated or dried it up, it was my introduction to dam release river paddling.

As whitewater paddlers, we celebrate recreational flow releases as victories.  A year into my graduate studies in river restoration, the victory of recreational flow releases began to hollow.  At first, the pejorative terms leading aquatic ecologists gave recreational flow releases, like “w”recreation, put a sour taste in my mouth and left me defensive.  After all, dams stopped water and recreational releases kept some water in the river during the end of the paddling season, water that would have been diverted out of the river or used for hydropower which certainly wasn’t ideal.  Compared to the dewatering common with dams and all of the impacts of hydropower on flow timing, I assumed recreational releases were an improvement.  But my colleagues in freshwater ecology were sewing doubts in my assumptions.  As a scientist, my proclivity for evidence and example lead me to research on the foothill yellow legged frogs on the Feather River in California.  Here ecological needs for an endangered species, whitewater paddlers’ interests in flow releases, and hydroelectric interests collided in a complex game of winners and losers.  This story begins with an awareness of the natural flow regime, something paddlers are often keenly aware of, and ends with over a decade of negotiations between paddlers, hydropower interests, and advocates for the endangered frog.

The Natural Flow Regime

On the most general annual cycle, in the Western U.S. streams are dominated by a flush of snowmelt in the spring and in the Eastern U.S. flows peak in the late fall when deciduous trees drop their leaves and less water evapotranspires, and, therefore, more reaches the streams.  Scientists refer to these patterns of annual flow as ‘natural flow regimes.’  The concept of the natural flow regime was clearly articulated and illustrated by LeRoy Poff, a scientist at Colorado State University, who also coined the term, natural flow regime.  The natural flow regime is important to understanding aquatic species life histories and adaptations.  Many species including fish, macroinvertebrates, and riparian plants synchronize their reproduction and other life history traits in relation to the seasonal flow regime.

When a dam is built, the impact on the natural flow regime is drastic.  The high flood flows are reduced and the low flow during summer periods are increased and made more consistent (Figure 1).   Conservationist’s early attempts to mitigate the impact of the dam on the natural flow regime saw them push for the establishment of minimal flow requirements.  To find this minimal flow conservationists and scientists worked to determine how much water is needed to support a species.  With the benefit of years of data, scientists and conservationist are learning that the issue may be more nuanced than simply letting a certain minimum of water out of a dam.  In the case of some aquatic species the timing of the flows is as important as the amount of water.  This is the case for the yellow-legged frog in California.  The timing of their reproduction and the vulnerability of the eggs to scouring by sudden high flows- such as recreational flow releases- made them an ideal case study for my shaken faith in dam releases for paddlers.

Figure 1. Hydrograph of the Green River, Utah with pre-dam flows before 1963 and post-dam flows. The high flood flows (blue) are fewer and less pronounced after the dam, while summer flows are higher and more consistent. Data from US Geological Survey, published in Trends in Ecology (Feb. 2004, Vol. 19, No. 2).

Impacts of Recreational Flows on Yellow-Legged Frogs

Foothill yellow-legged frogs, Rana boylii, are listed as a California Species of Special Concern (Figure 2) and have disappeared from 66% of their historic range in the Sierra Nevada Mountains.  Males and females live most of the time in smaller tributaries where there is abundant riparian cover keeping the stream cool, but frogs can’t complete their life cycle in dark and shady tributaries.  Tadpoles, unlike adult frogs, are herbivores. They require warm sun-lit patches of slow moving water to scrape algae and diatoms off rocks. Male frogs are the first to migrate from tributaries to the mainstream of the river were they congregate at historic breeding areas (bars and pool tail-outs) that are used year after year and what biologists’ call “leks”. The frogs broadcast their territory with a low-pitched raspy series of notes, grunts, oinks and  rattling  that can only be heard with an underwater microphone (To hear the frog calls check out this link).  Females travel to the mainstem a little later when the water temperatures are between 12-15 degrees usually from late May to early April. Females travel farther than males, the record is over 7 km based on a female with a radio transmitter in Tehama Co (work done by Ryan Bourque). In the North Fork Feather, there is also a radio-telemetry record of a frog crossing the channel at high flows, probably crawling on the bottom to get from the tributary on one bank to the cobble bar where the breeding site is on the opposite bank.  The spawning occurs in synchrony with the declining spring runoff from May to June when the flows are declining in what hydrologists call the spring snowmelt recession.  Depending on her age and size, a female frog lays between 300 to 3000 eggs in a clump along the sides and undersides of cobbles and boulders.  After 7-30 days, depending on temperature, the eggs hatch into tadpoles.  Tadpoles then develop over 2-3 months into frogs over the summer.  When the rain comes in the fall the young frogs move into the tributary streams for the winter, completing the cycle from tributary to mainstem river and back to tributary.

Figure 2. A yellow-legged old female frog full with eggs takes a break by a pool in a small tributary of the South Fork Eel River. (Alessandro Catenazzi, Flickr Creative Commons License).

In the Sierra Nevada, the hydropower utility Pacific Gas and Electric (PG&E) paid Garcia and Associates, a research firm, as part of the relicensing requirement to study yellow-legged frogs in the North Fork of the Feather River in two reaches of river, one with recreational flow releases (Cresta) and another without (Poe)(Figure 3).  They found that the timing and frequency of recreational flows do not match the life cycle of yellow-legged frogs and result in negative impacts to their reproductive success (Kupferberg et al. 2011).  Even though the recreational flow releases are not as big in magnitude as a spring flood flow, the timing later in the season causes higher mortality because the egg jelly adhesion is lower and the eggs wash off the rock and tadpoles are not strong swimmers.  The impact on the population is detected three years after the egg and tadpoles scouring because of the lag time required for a young frog to reach reproductive maturity (Figure 4).  In the case of the Cresta reach with the recreational flows beginning in 2002, the impact and decline of the population was detected three years out (Figure 4).  The Poe reach, with no recreational flow releases, showed an increase in the population over the same period.

Figure 3. Annual hydrographs from 2001 through 2002 and 2005 through 2006 for the Cresta reach of the North Fork Feather compared to the Poe Reach (light grey is the time of frog breeding and dark gray is the earlier breeding in the Poe reach. Graph from Kupferberg et al. 2011.

Figure 4. Decline in egg masses on the Cresta reach of the North Fork Feather from 2002 until 2010 compared to the increase on the Poe reach. There is a three-year lag in response to the 2002 recreational releases due to the reproductive timing of the yellow-legged frog. Graph modified from Kupferberg 2009.

Through field observations, scientists found that males select breeding sites at wide and shallow channel cross-sections.  Females lay their eggs in areas with low water velocity, behind or under rocks.  These behavioral adaptations help protect their egg and tadpoles from changes in flow. When I asked one of the main researchers, Sarah Kupferberg, about recreational flow schedules, she recommended the timing and duration of recreational flows avoid the breeding and rearing season. She suggested a minimum flow to prevent the eggs from stranding and drying out and a maximum flow to prevent scouring the eggs off the rocks and tadpoles being swept into deeper water where fish predators lurk.  Further, the ramping rate or the speed that the flow is released from a dam would not be too fast or quick to scour the frog eggs or to strand tadpoles in pools when the flows were dropped.

In talking with Sarah about her research, she asked me why whitewater paddlers do not run the rivers in the spring during the snowmelt peak.  After all my years of paddling, I still had to think about this for a bit, but it quickly became clear that recreational releases allow paddlers to run rivers when they want and paddlers usually want to run rivers on the weekend in the summer when it was warm outside.  She and another professor suggested hydroelectric utilities like PG&E pay for drysuits for paddlers so that we would be warm and satisfied with paddling in the colder spring months when releases would fit with the natural flow regime.  The comedy of their suggestion aside, their underlying question was intriguing: why don’t paddlers- a usually, anti-dam, pro-river-conservation group, want flows that are more natural?

Paddlers’ voices are heard most markedly through their advocacy groups of which the most prominent when negotiating with dam authorities is American Whitewater.  Their mission statement is “to conserve and restore America’s whitewater resources and to enhance opportunities to enjoy them safely.”  American Whitewater(AW) is at the nexus of recreational flow releases and conservation, and has a strong history of negotiating releases that are ecological in nature.

American Whitewater and the Feather River

In 2000, the Rock Creek-Cresta relicensing settlement determined the flow requirements and operations of PG&E’s hydropower dams on the North Fork Feather River.  Simultaneously, the settlement set the stage and required funding for research on the impacts of flow releases on yellow-legged frogs and established the first recreational flow releases on the Feather.  In 2000, American Whitewater conducted flow studies to determine the optimum flow levels for paddling.  As required, PG&E agreed to release recreational flows for whitewater paddlers once a month in the summer, beginning in 2002.  By 2004, an agreement between PG&E and AW was signed to set recreational flow release levels.  During this same time, frog researchers found frogs were declining due to the recreational releases.  Although the decline was not definitive in 2004, the Rock Creek-Cresta Ecological Resources Committee and US Forest Service suspended the recreational releases in 2006 because of the Special Concern status of the frog and the potential adverse effects.  In 2007, an interim three-year recreational flow plan for the Rock Creek reach and a one-year cancellation of the Cresta recreational flows was the consensus.

Paddlers were unhappy with the lack of water and conservationists were deeply concerned about the plummeting frog population.  David Steindorf, the California Stewardship Director for American Whitewater, expressed concern with the research on the frogs. He felt the sample sizes were small, with only 2-4 egg masses in some years, and small population numbers leading to potentially skewed results.  Further, he argued the tadpole data may not represent reality.  When scientists released tadpoles to detect where they moved in the stream and what habitats they preferred, they were only able to find half of the initial tadpoles. Despite his doubts about the science and initial conflicts between AW and the science community, Dave reassured me AW strives to put conservation on an equal footing with recreation and takes an integrated approach to modifications to river hydrographs.  To that end, American Whitewater has taken the position of  pushing for more natural flow recession limbs (down-ramping rates) on the Poe reach to prevent the kind of mass egg loss that occurred in 2011 when dam operators dropping flows too quickly.

When the dam required reliscensing, a new type of flow regime began to take form.  Parties, including American Whitewater and conservation groups, worked to determine a flow regime that would provide both whitewater recreational releases and ecological conditions supportive of yellow-legged frogs.  The collaborative project identified a solution: release water allocated for summertime recreational flows during the spring to benefit channel processes such as sediment transport and frogs.  A simple solution, but one that required entrenched interests to compromise under pressure and eliminated summertime recreational releases on the Cresta reach.

The science on the frogs occurred after the recreational flow releases and lead to learning on both the scientific and stakeholder sides.  AW responded responsibly on behalf of paddlers and frogs and continues to use sound science when evaluating flow modifications.  In many dam relicensing agreements, the model used to evaluate the ecology and flow release impacts is called PHABSIM.  Without going into the details of this model, the bottom line is that it does not incorporate all of the dynamism inherent in flow regimes and AW is often advocating for improvements to the hydrograph beyond what the model indicates.  AW relies on science, such as Poff’s natural flow regime, to guide flow recommendations, but as science advances as was the case with the frog, so does the approach to more sophisticated flow releases.

However, the elimination of recreational flow releases during the breeding season may have come too late.  Even though releases no longer exist on the Cresta reach, the frog population has yet to rebound.  There were additional factors affecting the frogs after the releases ended: in 2011 dam operations dropped the flow too quickly stranded eggs, in another year a car accident lead to channel dewatering to recover the bodies.  These extra impacts aside, the frog population may have missed a boom year for population growth during the years of the recreational flow releases, and it remains to be seen if the population on Cresta will sustain itself in the future.

The new flow schedule was implemented by PG&E in 2009 for the Cresta reach.  Whitewater paddlers lost recreational releases during the warm summer weekends since 2006, but gained more reliable springtime releases for geomorphic purposes (sediment transport and channel forming flows) not recreation.  The geomorphic release schedule is between May 1-7 with 800 cubic feet per second (cfs) and 1200 cfs the first weekend from noon on Saturday to noon on Sunday.  From May 8 until the end of May the flow is 600 cfs, June is 500 cfs, and July is 400 cfs.

In 2011, a follow on study on the impacts of flow releases on macroinvertebrates in the Feather River was completed.  This million-dollar research study was a continuation of the research on biological response to flow releases, and it detected changes in macroinvertebrate communities related to flow releases.  As was the case with the yellow-legged frog, this data will influence flow release timing and rates in another nod to the natural flow regime.  As before, there is a delay between the research and changes in river management.  AW’s Dave Steindorf summarized his feelings about the macroinvertebrate research as  “some bugs were happy, some didn’t care, and some were sad.”

In the next decade, dam relicensing projects will continue to provide an opportunity to reexamine flow regime impacts and set new flow regimes for the future.  River ecology research influenced the reliscensing releases on the Poe reach of the North Fork Feather, and is garnering attention in conversations about releases on numerous other rivers in the Sierra Nevada from the Pitt to the Kern.

As I grappled with the consequences of recreational releases, I skipped paddling on the Feather in 2009.   I knew the Cresta Reach had shown the impacts of releases on frogs, but I was not sure about other sections upstream and downstream.  I was starting to feel disingenuous as a paddler who might be harming the rivers I loved.  Often recreation and ecology do not align, but looking into the Feather River’s example buoyed my hopes as a model of ecological problem solving and collaboration.  Academics worked with utility biologists and forest service biologist to figure out what was going on, and stakeholders like PG&E and AW negotiated flows to protect the survival of yellow-legged frogs.

 Sources

Kupferberg, S.J. Palen, W.J., Lind, A.J., Bobzien, S., Catenazzi, A., Drennan, J., and M.E. Power. 2011. Effects of flow regimes altered by dams on survival, population declines, and range-wide losses of California river-breeding frogs. Conservation Biology, 26(3): 513-524.

Kupferberg, S.J. 1996. Hydrologic and geomorphic factors affecting conservation of a river breeding frog (Rana boylii). Ecological Applications 6(4): 1332-1344.

The simple story is that we used to make everything ourselves, but nowadays we make most of what we sell in China. On the most basic level, this change makes it difficult to even describe what IR is. When I’m asked my occupation on an application, the first thing that comes up as an obvious answer is “manufacturer”, but thats not really true any more. “Designer” isn’t quite right either.  We’re heavily involved with both of those activities, but neither describes us. The topic is also a source of constant interest for our customers. Hardly a week goes by without someone asking me or someone at IR the simple question: “where is your stuff made?”  Sometimes people are just genuinely curious about production, but more often than not, it’s a question meant to size up the moral integrity of our business. It’s a frustrating situation to encounter, mostly because I have seen all sides of this debate first hand and know the issue is not one argued using broad philosophical arguments about values. The full story of why we outsource production is primarily a direct reflection of what we wanted IR to be, and how we negotiated the playing field and rules of the game set before us to accomplish that. But beyond that,  Kara and I have also learned a tremendous amount about ourselves (both good and bad) and have seen first-hand some of the most serious challenges that face our country as a nation of people who traditionally have always made things. In many ways our story encompasses all of the intricacies of outsourcing in a microcosm.

In the beginning, though, I just wanted make shorts. I had asked for a home sewing machine one year for Christmas, and somewhere around 1995 or 1996, I had learned enough about sewing to try and tackle something more ambitious than the fleece hats and socks I was turning out by the dozens. I had always worn boardshorts (the linerless kind you wear surfing) while kayaking, and they seemed like the next logical step. They weren’t too hard to make, and they were not only more useful that fleece socks, they looked a lot more impressive as a finished product. My strategy was pretty simple. I cut up a pair of shorts I liked and traced out the individual pieces on cardboard to make patterns and then began the arduous process of trial and error while I figured out exactly how these patterns went back together. A few weeks later and about 30 pairs of shorts that looked like something out of high school production of Robinson Crusoe, I had made one pair of shorts that weren’t too bad. I was completely enthralled.

Humble beginnings, circa 1996. Home sewing machine and shorts patterns- what else do you need to start a business?

Almost immediately, I wanted to take it to the next level, and like a carpenter, I realized that I might need better tools. After some phone calls to an industrial sewing machine warehouse in Pittsburgh (this was before the internet, when research was a bit more arduous) I found out that to make a pair of retail- quality boardshorts, I need no less than 5 different kinds of industrial sewing machines. While the number of machines needed to make such a simple product was almost shocking,  I admit that I was secretly thrilled. Everything about it was exciting- not only that I could turn out something  with my own hands that looked like it was right off the shelf in a Patagonia store, but that I would have to learn to use all of these cool machines to do it.

The next step was to somehow convince my wife Kara that it made sense to get these machines, and I pitched it by saying that we could start a business making shorts for kayakers. I honestly didn’t really believe that it made any sense at all, but I really, really wanted to figure out someway to justify buying those machines, and a “business” was as good a scheme as any. Kara, to her her credit, was dubious, but luckily for me, I think we were both ready for some kind of change in our lives. Besides learning to sew, I was basically a kayak bum. Or  a “kayak instructor” with a penchant for travel. In the winter of 1996, for instance, following my 7th season teaching kayaking I spent 2 months kayaking Borneo followed by another couple of months in Mexico. Kara was at the same time wrapping up an 8 year stint on the US Kayak Team and dealing with a fraction of a second miss on the Olympic team. It was a great life in many ways, but at the same time we were getting tired of being dirt poor, and I think we were both ready for a new challenge- one that perhaps offered more of a future. We really had nothing to lose, beyond whatever the cost of the machines.

My basic argument to her was that we had both seen that kayaking was attracting younger and younger people, and we could make a brand of surf-type kayaking apparel for this new demographic. It actually wasn’t a terribly far-fetched idea- and the more I made my case, the more I actually started to believe it. Kara must have also, because in the summer of 1997, we decided (or more realistically, Kara agreed)  to spend every penny of our life savings- around $5000- on industrial sewing machines to make shorts. For a living.  We also agreed to rent out some space across town in an old Ford garage. Keep in mind at that point I had made one (1) pair of shorts, and we knew absolutely nothing about industrial sewing machines, much less pattern making or anything else related to running a business, but my thought was why should those details stop us? Once I could make a pair of perfect boardshorts, everything else would fall into place.

Every business needs about a dozen lucky brakes to survive, and I think if you don’t come from money (and Kara and I truthfully do not come from money) you really need to double that number. It turns out deciding to start a youthful, lifestyle-driven kayaking apparel company in 1997 was not only our first stroke of good luck, but perhaps the biggest and most important one of our company to date.  While I had casually speculated that kayaking was getting younger based on the students I was teaching, I was in no way prepared for what happened to our small sport between 1997 and 2002. It was a change that not only completely altered our sport, but also almost certainly saved IR from probably the most poorly thought-out business plan of all time.

It turns out that along with getting younger, kayaking was getting a lot cooler and as a result, much, much bigger. What had traditionally been a sport that you did with your Dad and the rest of the canoe club was starting to look a lot more like surfing or snowboarding. Movies like “KAVU Day” were suddenly portraying a distinct kayaking lifestyle that was based on travel to exotic lands and hucking huge drops and partying- an endless summer. This was augmented by the new generation of playboats that were absurdly short and had planing hulls- crafts that not only looked like surf and skate boards- but also allowed for tricks with names ripped right out of Transworld Skateboarding. As a result, participation was also exploding, with some stats showing 400% annual growth. Kayaking companies like Dagger, Perception and Wavesport were starting to offer dozens of new whitewater designs every 8 months- a stark contrast to boats from a different era like the Crossfire or Dancer that were on the market for years and years with little competition. Even national ad agencies picked up on the trend- the generic symbol in TV commercials for “youthful outdoor sports” became a whitewater kayak.

Maybe it was the excitement of starting something new, or the feeling that we were part of a new generation of kayakers that were changing the sport, or maybe even that we weren’t getting in the water every single day (it gets old, believe it or not), but those first few months were glorious. Kara was answering the phones and taking orders, ordering fabric and paying the bills for part of each day, and setting snaps and grommets and trimming shorts for the rest. For my part, I was sewing all day, totally engaged on how each machine worked, how patterns folded together to make a three dimensional object, and how to handle fabric in just the right way so it looks great coming out of a sewing machine. It was simple work, but it was our own business that we started ourselves, and on top of it all, there was also this unmistakable feeling that we might be onto something big. We were afraid to say it, but we were both thinking this is how Burton started.  I believe everyone in our industry thought that then- the growth was incredible.

By the end of the summer it was becoming clear that we needed to take the next step and hire some help.  Kara and I were working our ass off with no end in sight, and something had to give. So we brought in our first sewer- Bea McClintock. Three months later, we hired her daughter, Lisa. and then we hired another, and another. By the summer of 1999, we had about 8 people on payroll, and our product line had grown to include rash guards- our well known “Thick and Thin Skins”. We also had bought more machines, and what was once a source of immense curiosity was now turning into more of a chore. We had bought more machines to accommodate the new sewers, as well as new machines to make the new types of garments. Gonna make rash guards? OK- you’re going to need a flat seaming machine, a cover stitch and a serger. You’d better make that two sergers because production will back up there if you have just one. These machines can require a lot of attention, and even though I was still trying to sew full time, I was also the head mechanic. And some of these new machines- particularly the flat seaming machine- could be nightmares. I could spend 8 hours at a pop trying to get that machine sewing properly.

The Ford Garage, around 1998. Thats Bea McClintock in the foreground, daughter Lisa in the back right and Darla Lytle in the back left

As we started this almost absurd rate of growth, we were buoyed by an unusual aspect of Confluence, given how small it was.  From the mid-70’s until the early 90’s, Confluence had a sewing factory called “Faymore”  that employed almost 200 people. It was a contract sew house- meaning that, like most all sewing factories, they didn’t make their own brand of garments. Instead companies like Lands End and LL Bean “contracted” out jobs to Faymore if they could offer a competitive price. It was housed in the old High School building, and for the years it was open, it was perhaps the golden age of Confluence. The sewers there- or “operators” as they are called in the industry- were part of the Dickensesque sounding International Ladies Garment Workers Union (ILGWU), but the jobs they had were good ones- in many cases these jobs were a real bridge to the middle class. And this factory employed a giant percentage of the town’s population.

This golden age, though, came to an abrupt end in 1992 when NAFTA passed. Suddenly the bids that Faymore offered weren’t nearly as competitive as they used to be. The owners moved a majority of their business to points South,  Faymore shut down, and the high school sat vacant. This was a trend seen all over the country- one you can measure by looking at the  fate of the ILGWU over the years.  In 1969- the peak of  domestic sewing- the ILGWU had almost 500,000 members, but by 1995, a shrinking  ILGWU joined with the larger Textile union for a combined 250,000 members. Later on, in 2004, the shrinking union merged again with the restaurant and hotel workers.

In 2000, though, we were bucking that trend. In the beginning of that year we passed 20 employees- most of whom were sewing machine operators- and we needed to move to a bigger place. There was, of course, an obvious answer. The Faymore factory had been shut down for 8 years, but it was still set up for sewing. The power, air lines, everything you’d need to walk in and start sewing was still sitting there. In fact there were still dried-up coffee cups and half-eaten candy bars left on some of the machines. The owner was a gentleman in his late 70’s or early 80’s  who had once owned sewing factories all over the area, and  I think he was intrigued by the idea that we were hiring some of his old employees. After a brief phone call and lecture about the elevators, he agreed to rent us the whole building.

On the day that we moved into the Faymore building our new landlord came down to check it out. We had arranged a moving truck to bring all of the machines across town, and were frantically trying to figure out how to place everything and get it all wired and working, so we were somewhat oblivious of our landlord strolling around the cavernous, 18,000 square foot gutted, 30’s-era high school. I was also feeling really, really damn impressed with myself, and I was completely caught up in the moment. In a couple of years we had built this business and in the process become the pride and joy of our our community and local economic development agency by hiring all these people. Not just any people either- we were hiring sewing machine operators, showing how manufacturing jobs were still viable in the US. Not week went by where some local paper wasn’t writing an article about us, or we were asked to speak to a class about manufacturing. Nevermind that we were one of the fastest growing business in paddlesports.  Moving into the Faymore building was our manifest destiny and we were going to do it right this time. We were going to save the town AND reinvent kayaking.

After a bit our landlord came up to me and started talking about some details about the power and again with the elevators, which to be honest, were very sketchy. Then he started to ask me how many people I was employing. Perhaps figuring that by hiring some of the people he had let go we were relieving some guilt, I said 20, but was quick to add that there was no end in sight. “No end in sight. Huh.” was his reply. Not quite reading the situation correctly, I followed up with “Yeah- I love the idea that we make things, and the fact that we make stuff for our own brand rather on a contract basis gives us an edge that a contract sew house might not have. Besides, I feel we’re doing the right thing hiring all of these people”. I remember saying these words because it was the exact same thing I had said dozens and dozens of times to bankers, economic development people, students- anyone who asked about our business. It was my standard PR talk.  “Well”, he said, “If you want my advice, I’d wouldn’t make any promises.  You never know what can happen”.

Moving day. The first day in the Fayemore factory

I can’t recall my exact reaction to this but I know what I was thinking – Whatever. This was coming from a guy who had shut down 5 factories in the area, including the one were standing in. Besides, he made simple stuff sweaters and dresses, so of course he was getting crushed. We made kayaking gear which was really hard to do, and more or less impervious to off shore competition. In any event we moved into Faymore that day and started a real factory. Three phase power. Air compressors. A full set of machines that could make almost everything under the sun. In the summer of 2000, nothing could convince me that were on the wrong path. Kayaking was exploding, and we were right in the middle of it. Companies like Hobie were calling me to ask about licensing deals, and we started sponsoring gigantic cash prize events, like the IR Triple Crown. On top of all that, we now occupied the largest building, and we were the largest employer in Confluence.

If things had remained this good, there wouldn’t be much of a story. We’d be rich, and our factory would look like the one Steve Martin runs in “Father of the Bride”. In the end, this optimism and excitement lasted for about 12 months after moving into Faymore before reality started to settle in.  By the summer of 2001, we had over 40 people working at IR, with well over 30 of them sewing full time. We also had expanded our line considerably. With the help of Jess Whittemore, we had added skirts and drytops to our catalog, along with a whole host of accessories. However, despite the excitement of the new products and the insane growth we were experiencing it was becoming clear that what we were doing was not only unsustainable, but increasingly it was making Kara and me miserable. In the beginning, when it was just Kara, me, Bea and Lisa and a couple of other sewers, there was a real sense of teamwork- the absurdity of what was happening was energizing, and we felt like we were in it together. We were also on top of things- we were the right size for the amount of demand we had. By that summer, though, not only was that sense of camaraderie all but gone, but it was also clear that the basic structure of IR wasn’t working, and it was going to get worse.

The first issue was that with 30-some people sewing at IR, my job had almost nothing to do with kayaking gear- I was fixing, adjusting and setting up sewing machines more or less full time. I had been trying to find a mechanic for the past year with little success (that trade had left with NAFTA evidently), so I ended up enlisting  the help of an out-of-work, mechanically inclined bike mechanic to fill in. Even with the two of us circling the room, we could barely keep up with the demands. Only after everyone left in the evening could I even begin to start to worry about other things like sales and product design. The machines- which once were an object of such keen interest were now a complete albatross around my neck. In addition, these machines were expensive. Everytime we wanted to add a feature or sew something a different way, there was a real chance we would be spending over $3000 on a new machine to do it. Over the course of 4 years, I estimate we spent around $75,000 on machines.

The second issue was a deep, fundamental misunderstanding on Kara’s and my part about the difficulties of running a factory in Confluence.  When IR was small and growing, I had a very idealistic and naive understanding of how we would run IR, and it seemed that we really had walked into the perfect situation. A depressed, small town in Appalachia, an empty sewing factory, and dozens and dozens of trained, unemployed sewing machine operators looking to get back to work. We would build it, and they would come, happy to be back at Faymore and a new Golden Age. But the truth was much more complicated. For one, when Faymore closed in 1993 a lot of of the people who worked there moved on to new types of jobs. Certainly anyone who had any exposure to the news saw that sewing jobs (along with every other low tech manufacturing job) were flooding out of the country, and the women at Faymore had a front row seat for that spectacle. To wait around for the sewing factory to reopen was pointless.  By the time we moved into Faymore in 2000, Confluence had returned to pretty much the exact state it was in before Faymore opened- a small Appalachian town plagued by unemployment and no opportunities.

If we had been in a larger city, we might have been able to cast a wide net to find new employees, but Confluence is like a fishbowl on Mars- its a very isolated, small town.  So when it came to hiring large numbers of people (40 people, after all, was about 5% of the population) we really had to take the good with the bad. The good in many cases were women who worked at Faymore and had done well, but for whatever reason had not needed to move on when it closed. The bad, however, were just what you might expect from any small town with almost no employment opportunities.  As we grew and the “good” list was more or less tapped out, the prospects of who we were going to hire going forward were pretty dismal. In addition, the tired adage about the weakest link was holding true, and the quality of our products were always compromised by the worst employees. This, of course, is not a new problem for any business, but often times we would want to let a bad employee go, but we were stymied about how to replace them. The choices were usually limited to another 35 year old with no job experience lasting more than a few months, or me- which by then was out of the question unless it was an absolute emergency.  We were also driven to simply get product out the door- by that point Kara and I had borrowed way more money than we could ever afford to pay back if IR fell apart- and there was a ever-present, crushing pressure to ship product every day. We knew keeping a bunch of lousy employees on board was terrible for morale, difficult to manage and hurt quality, but as long as things were limping along, we really weren’t in any position to change it.

In either case, good or bad, there was also a social work aspect to the job that was a real grind.  I wish there was some other way to put it, but having 40 women from a small town working under one roof was really tough. These ladies not only all knew each other, but also knew everything about everyone in their extended families- which all seemed to intertwine at some point in the not-too-distant past. Everyday new tensions arose out of new fights, old fights, fights between people’s relatives, fights that went back years. On top of that,  I could see high-school cliques re-forming right before my eyes. People would team up to make the life of another operator miserable, or want to work next to each other, or get mad if someone got moved to another part of the sewing floor.  More often than not, the task of keeping production moving had nothing to do with how a machine was functioning or how a particular operation was done, but rather making sure that we had a good seating arrangement.  Kara- who had grown up in Confluence and had seen this same drama play out with the exact same cast her whole life-was particularly sensitive. I think that she expected after she left Turkeyfoot High School in 1987 she would never have to deal with this ever again, but lo and behold she was right back in the middle of it.

The truth is that the right person probably could have run that factory and run it well- after all, Faymore was built using the same raw materials- but that person was not me. Not only did I not have the right personality to wrangle the daily- no minutely- details in getting 40 people to work as a team, I never wanted that job to begin with. I started IR because I wanted to make kayaking gear- which was true- as long as it was just me making it. The lesson I was learning was that making something for yourself and making something for lots and lots of people are as unrelated as any two jobs on earth can be. It was starting to be clear why companies like Patagonia, Marmot, the Gap- pretty much every clothing company you can think of- really do not own any sewing machines.

Above and beyond the questions of workforce and job descriptions, though, there was a real time bomb ticking in the way that we were doing things that had to be dealt with. Understanding the problem requires a basic knowledge of how the ordering in our industry works particularly with what we call “preseasons”. Kayaking like most outdoor sports is seasonal with the bulk demand from our product coming in the Spring and early Summer. Moreover, IR like most outdoor gear  manufacturers sells over 90% of its products not directly to customers, but to retailers.  The last aspect of this supply chain is the length of time it takes to prepare all of these goods to get into the hands of retailers in time for the spring rush.

This whole system is tied together by advanced orders placed by retailers called “preseasons,” and it starts in August at the Outdoor Retailer show. Here, outdoor manufacturers of all types show their products for the upcoming season to 10,000 retailers from all over the world. The retailers then have until about October to place an order for the next year. Note that even though a retailer may place a preseason order in October, in most cases this order won’t ship and won’t have to be paid for until the spring.  These preseasons may represent 60% or more of what the retailer may buy for the entire year. It’s a good system- the manufacturers learn what they need to make and can start production early, and the retailers get a discount for placing these orders early, along with the knowledge that regardless of how popular an item is, they are almost guaranteed to get at least what they preseasoned.

As IR grew, we ran into a very fundamental problem. We were running out of time to make all of these preseason orders. If IR’s preseason order deadline was Oct. 1, that gave us until about February before stores in the South started wanting paddling gear. Take out holidays for Christmas, New Years and Thanksgiving, and you see that it’s not a lot of time to make literally 60% or more of what we need to make for the entire year. Given our situation, our only option was to start making inventory earlier- before preseasons orders were due. By 2001, we were starting to make inventory for 2002 as early as August on some products- way before we had any idea how popular they would be. In addition, consider that we had to buy the raw materials for these products, and in the case of some materials like fabric for paddling jackets, this could require three months to make.

Besides the guess work involved with doing this, there was a huge problem with the cash cycle. Look at it this way. In order to make enough paddling jackets to deliver for 2002, we really need to start ordering fabric in the spring of 2001. The fabric delivers in August, and we start paying people to make jackets. In October, the preseasons come in, and hopefully we guessed right on the number to make. If we made too many, we wasted money, and if we made too few, retailers are going to be furious at us shorting them on a preseason. In May of 2002, many of these jackets head out to stores in Colorado, where the retailers have “terms” or credit- they can pay us 30 days after delivery. Which means that if everything goes perfectly, we get paid in June. A full year (and then some) after we started paying for these jackets. On top of all of this, we were borrowing from the bank in the form of a “line of credit”- much like a credit card- that needed to have a zero balance at some point in the year. We were paying interest on all of this money that we were borrowing for over a year, and we would need to start building for 2003 before we had even collected for 2002.

You don’t need to be a financial whiz to see that this was going to collapse. By the fall of 2001, we had to really consider our options. The first would be to hire 150 people for the 3 peak production months and let them all go for 9 months, and re-hire them again. This made no sense on every level. The other option was to pick up different kinds of products that would round out our production year so we could keep around 75 people working full time, year round. This also was not attractive- not only did the idea of expanding our sew floor at that point seem a step in the wrong direction, but financially, we were in no position to borrow more money for a new venture. Moreover, the options were risky at best.  The first thing that comes to mind is ski wear, but skiing is so much more mature than kayaking it makes it almost inconceivable that we would be able to break into that market.

We also could have started to fill military contracts, and looking back, this was the most reasonable option if we wanted to keep running a sewing factory. To be honest, if we had taken that route- given what happened with the US military over the following 10 years- we might be very, very wealthy. What made this possibility even more real was that we were in Representative John Murtha’s district, and any political person can tell you that he brought untold millions in military contract work to our district as the chair of the House Appropriations Defense Subcommittee. Indeed, as word got out that we were “revitalizing the sewing job market” in our area, we were frequently solicited by guys putting together bids on military contracts- everything from socks to backpack straps to bullet proof vests.

Ultimately, Kara and I turned them down. The primary reason was that we still wanted to make kayaking gear and maybe even more importantly- create a brand and all that entails. While making socks would be easy enough, it didn’t sound that interesting. Also, and this seems so ridiculous now, we thought that kayaking would continue to grow, and it wasn’t out of the question that IR might be a household name in the not too distant future.

The last option, of course, was to have our stuff made somewhere else. By then, we had come to realize the shortcomings of trying to run a sewing factory to maintain a seasonal business, and how farming out the work would be the answer to so many of the problems. A contract sew house may have 1000 people working on the floor, and they take your job- say for a 1000 drytops, and they make them all in 2 weeks. Done. See you next year. They can also make another 5000 rash guards at the same time. Essentially, a contract sew house could make our entire inventory for a year over the winter- and to top it off,  we wouldn’t have to pay for it until it ships to us. The cash cycle collapses from 13+ months to 3 or 4. Lastly, and this looked sweetest of all, someone else would fix the machines and manage the sewing floor.

Honestly, our first instinct was not to look to China.  China seemed huge and difficult and expensive. We instead tried to find local- or at least domestic sew houses. To be truthful, this was not out of a sense of patriotism, either; we just thought given how complicated our products were, it would be easier to make them somewhere easy to get to. The problem with this was that besides the handful of factories specializing in items protected by the military or a lobbying group and huge tariffs, no one was sewing anymore in the US. I recall calling one factory in Pennsylvania, and after talking with the owner for a few minutes about what we were doing, he stopped me and said “Son, were going to go out of business within the year. I’m gonna save you the trouble and say thanks but no thanks”.  Our second choice was to look to Latin America- once again, not for any practical reasons, but more because we liked kayaking there. After a good deal of hunting around, we found a factory in Ecuador to make shorts for us. It’s a long story for another time, but for now lets just say it was a fiasco. Besides cultural differences on how we define “on schedule”, virtually none of the raw materials we need to make kayaking gear are  made anywhere close to Ecuador, and this resulted in long, Kafka-esque waits in hot customs offices trying to clear rolls of fabric coming into the country. The next obvious option was China.

One of the most common questions we get when people find out we make stuff in China is “How did you find a factory?” with the implication it’s not only very difficult, but fraught with potential scams and insurmountable cultural issues. The reality is that it was incredibly easy. In 2002, with pressure mounting to outsource at least some of our gear, I called our friend Bob Holding at Lotus (by then owned by Patagonia) and asked him where they made some of their jackets. He gave me the name of a Hong Kong based company with factories in Southern China, and after a few emails, I was on a plane to Hong Kong with patterns and some samples. We were on our way. Ultimately, the trail to making garments in China (and I am guessing pretty much everything) is a very well-worn path. If you wanted to make a whole bunch of something, and you have the money and the instructions on how you want it made, they will make it.  It’s really that easy.

Ten years later, we have done work in at least a half a dozen different factories across China, Vietnam and Taiwan, and we’re starting to get good at it or at least learn all of the ins and outs, and how to address the major problems you face when you make expensive, technical garments on the other side of the world. I honestly can say that the job we do now isn’t easier than running a sewing factory- designing, managing the production of, and servicing kayaking gear is a tremendous amount of work. You also lose a tremendous amount of control when you outsource production. When you run your own factory, you can micro manage every step of every process, constantly tweaking things to ensure quality. When you make stuff in someone else’s facility- particularly in a large factory far, far away, you end up simply making the best instructions possible and hope for the best. But on balance, I can say without question that it’s a far better job for us. Kara and I were never cut out to run a sewing  factory even if it was a possibility.

During these ten years we’ve also gotten a lot of flack for making gear in China, and, having told our story, I’d like to make a few points in our defense and perhaps clear up a few misconceptions. The first thing I’d like to point out is that making kayaking gear in China is not cheaper at least not for us. Most of the cost of what we make comes in expensive raw materials from Japan, Taiwan and Korea, which overshadows the savings in labor. Throw in travel, taxes, and the almost inevitable small repairs we have to make to garments when they come in, there is virtually no cost savings. There has been a lot of talk of manufacturing jobs coming back to the US due to this same issue, but as of yet, this trend has not really touched low-tech manufacturing jobs like sewing.

We also frequently get compared to other companies in our industry who still make products in the US. The response I have to that is simple: each company comes from a different set of circumstances that have to be considered. To begin with, many of these companies are much smaller than we are. There was a time in IR’s growth where we were completely sustainable. Our products we simple enough and the order volume was small enough that we could do it all in the time allotted to us. But for better or worse, we grew past that. On the other hand, the larger companies we are compared to are all in bigger cities with a much, much larger labor pool and, to be perfectly frank, sewing labor in the US nowadays almost exclusively comes from a non-white population- an option not available to us in Confluence.  In addition, these larger factories also make products outside of paddlesports to keep their floor busy year-round. Don’t misunderstand me, I have a tremendous amount of respect for the companies that do this, but Kara and I ultimately decided to stay focused on paddling gear, and this is something that is apparent in the DNA of our brand. We are kayakers, we hire kayakers, we deal with kayaking all day- thats all we do.  I strongly believe that if we were still running a factory, we would be a very different kind of business even if kayaking gear was still in the mix. The truth is that many of the larger paddlesport companies that have over a 100 people don’t have but one or 2 paddlers on their entire staff. This is not a bad thing- for one thing they’re a hell of alot better at running a factory than we are- it’s just not who we are.

The last issue we are saddled with is China’s record of poor labor conditions, human rights and environmentalism. The truth is that China’s labor and environmental situation is as complicated and multifaceted as it is anywhere else in the world, and I won’t pretend that I can untangle it.  Yvon Chouinard, the founder of Patagonia, has written extensively on this subject particularly on the environmental side of things and I’d offer his book as a good place to start on this subject for those interested. I can, however, offer a few brief observations. For one, Patagonia still makes many, many of it’s products in China. Secondly, we have made products in a factory partially owned by Patagonia, where the employees were protected by the Human Rights watch. This factory had the highest turnover of any factory we ever worked in- simply because the people wanted more hours of work than allowed. Lastly, we have worked side-by side with Chinese workers in their factories for countless hours over the past few years, and have never seen anything resembling a sweatshop, or even close to underage labor. I’m not saying these problems don’t exist;they’re just not ubiquitous.

Of course, China has huge, almost insurmountable problems just like we do here in the US. Even to an untrained eye, you can see that the cost of China’s billion-person industrial revolution is not only creating the largest middle class in the world but also an environmental apocalypse. I have travelled all over the east coast of China, and I’d like to think that if most Americans could see the environmental cost of cheap Chinese made products, they’d have second thoughts about what and how much they buy. And in the US, I have seen what the loss of domestic manufacturing has done to the US economy first hand at Faymore.  My god, as a nation we make make almost nothing anymore. The largest IPO of the decade was Facebook, which makes nothing and employees almost no one. What happened to the days when a car company was the most valuable stock on the market? In many ways, I think we are seeing the Pax Romana in the US: the long slow end to an empire driven by a country whose culture is based almost entirely in leisure.

How to fix this is anyone’s guess. As far as we’re concerned, the first step would be to find a highly skilled and sophisticated sewing factory in the US that was environmentally sound and could assemble our products at a cost that is commensurate with our demographic’s disposable income for sporting goods. In addition, our consumers would have to greatly reduce their expectations of paddling gear, for many, many of the products they currently demand are made with materials that are so nasty to produce they can no longer be made in the US anymore. This is clearly not a likely scenario.

Kara in a pile of early IR gear. The sign says “March 1, 1999.”

We started IR only 15 years ago, but the sport was so much simpler and smaller in those days. I think the sad truth is that just like starting a computer company in garage,  I’m not sure that you could start a paddlesports company on a home sewing machine in the basement anymore. In 1995, a urethane coated paddle jacket with one velcro pocket and a sewn-on woven label would put you on par with the best in the business. Nowadays, customers and buyers demand unbelievably sophisticated waterproof breathable fabrics with custom zipper pulls, stitchless pockets, or even small things like color-matched laces. All of these things require a huge capital investment and an enormous knowledge base to put together, not the kind of resources two kayak bums have at their disposal.

We were lucky though, and we were able to start IR with really nothing, and see it through to where it is today: a great company managing a lot of money and very sophisticated products with customers all over the world. I’m proud to say that we’re one of the most recognized brands in paddlesports. One of the greatest and most nostalgic aspects of this, though, is that at one point Kara and I made everything we sold. Just the two of us. And even to this day I still see shorts made from those years, and when I do, no matter who it is or whether I know them or not, I always tell them that those shorts were made when IR was just two people. Its a source of tremendous pride. I can’t tell you how many times I have wished for a simpler life like that: a job where we could make great garments one at a time, no China, no employees, no bank loans, just the two of us, and some sewing machines. It would, of course, involve a fantasy world where we could order 50 yards of fantastic custom-made fabric at a time and all the machinery needed to make these things cost almost nothing, but it’s still a great dream, and a reminder of who we are and how we started.