Getting Your Feet Wet

By Kate St. Vincent Vogl (New York City)

In white water rafting, you can feel the water’s power as you step down onto the raft, as the vessel strains against the eddying current. Or maybe the boat, too, can’t wait to quit the dock for the journey the river offers. It’s a rush, after all, to ride a force that can wear through or carry thousands of pounds of stone. You can feel the river coursing beneath a raft, you can feel the current urging you inexorably forward, the way you’ve always wanted to go.

I grew up by a creek, close enough to leave my socks tucked into my shoes at the banks and take those first tentative steps across the broad flat stepping stones and then onto crunching pebbles, the chill of the river rising over my feet. The best part? You could slosh down to the waterfall, hold your hand in the curtain of water, and wonder at the power of what came coursing through your fingers.

Even better to get a chance to ride on it. For a team building experience, our corporate legal department packed their bags and forged our way to the Nantahala River. A waterfall I could ride, a river to run through. They gave us life jackets and warned us we’d get wet. “You all strong swimmers?” the river guide asked.

Who wasn’t? What else would you do in the summer but swim until your fingertips pruned and your body shook from water chills. I climbed in the rubber raft and sat, only to realize a film of what had to be recently melted snow coated the seat’s surface. I tried to settle against the shock of the chill. I braced myself.

A co-worker in the back asked, “I’m not going to get wet back here, am I?” The guide shook his head, laughing -not because she wouldn’t, but because she would. There is a certain inevitability about a river. We are drawn to it by its constancy, by its change. To push off from a dock in a mere raft, we entrust ourselves to the flow, as we are certain we can and will navigate our way over the rocks we don’t yet see, over the falls we may encounter. And through that, we can be certain: we will get wet.

“I’ll be safe back here?” the woman asked, her face pinched. She tightened her life jacket, her oar flat across her knees. And I’d already plunged mine in the water. Surprisingly solid, the water would not yield if I tried to push forward. The raft began to spin around this axis, away from the dock. I slid my oar out of the water. “You ready?” I asked my boss behind me.

Because I certainly was. Oars flanked to attention above the water. Our river guide called out a rhythm, called out a cadence, and our boat took us sashaying down the river until we found an even beat to straighten our course. Just in time for riffled waters. We lifted our oars and let the boat slide over stones and I could feel rock edges underneath and through the raft. A skirted rush over the bumps, a splash up the side as we skidded into a smoother pass. I’d flinched, expecting frigid water, but we were sliding now down the river and a brisk spray was merely part of the ride.

Scrubby bushes crowded the banks as the river cut its path through Southern pines. An intimate setting, not like the expanses of the Platte River, beyond which long fingers of snow trace through the crags of the Rockies. Nor was this anything like my white water trip through the Snake River with its walls of striated granite resigned to its primordial upheaval. Here, on this North Carolina run, I’d found a grown up version of the creek I’d explored long before. Though an Appalachian stream, this was familiar territory. This was easy.

This was nothing.

Around the bend, where the sky opened up and the river split between two spreading arms, water roiled into rapids.

A drop.

“Left! Left!” the guide called from the back, but I could not pull the j stroke against the solidity of the water. Stroke, and stroke, and push through push through until we drop into the falls and the raft almost folds upon itself and the woman in the back is not in the back but in the water and rushing by and we spin and twist and thump and somehow someone reaches for her.

We are one, or almost. The one who wasn’t looking for an adventure had found one, just now being pulled now back onto the raft. She is, in the end, safe.

But she is soaked. If only she’d wanted to get her feet wet.