Big Lost Dog in Bed


Part two of the Big Lost Dog Story
Big Lost Dog was whining, so I sat down on the floor and gave him a hug. He put both paws on either side of my neck with his head resting on mine, and hugged me back. Then gently removed my hat with his mouth and stole away with it.

A few minutes later, tired from his night of Grim and Ancient Wandering, he elected to sleep in bed with me. I didn't invite him he just jumped right up, and here he is.

My normal bed-residents are skeptical:

Homewrecker

From out of the blizzard, out from the smoking winds and swirling snow, this guy showed up without warning at 9 o'clock tonight, tail wagging.



He wouldn't stand still enough for a decent portrait. I've never seen such a jovial creature! And naked as a jay bird, no collar! I suppose it does get pretty lonely up here, and it's nice to have a big friendly guy like emerge from the great white.

But what to do with this big dog? First it ran around the house like a maniac for like two hours, literally vacuuming up all of poor Hometeam's little toys. He could take four or five of her toys in his great jaws at once. He destroyed her Square Squirrel with 16 Squeakers and then moved onto my hats and scarves.

Despite the lack of tags, it is handsome and well fed, silky and muscular and it can sit, shake, and dance on two legs. And he smells like shampoo? He does! He's obviously no stray. And he's making a royal wreck of the house. But I'll have to calm him down, somehow, and hang out with him inside by the fire tonight. It's 15 below and the house is being battered by winds....I mean, what would you do?

Respectfully, Eustace


Top: Eustace Conway
Bottom: Matt Smink as Eustace Conway in a classroom assignment by my American Literature Class

On a recent visit to Boone, NC, I decided to move there. Upon making that decision, I experienced the very best of omens. My very first day there, I walked into the only Thai restaurant in town, and guess who should march in after me but "Davey-Fuckin'-Crocket!" That's right, Eustace Conway: The Last American Man himself!

I recognized his warm, windblown face and wild main of hair immediately. I had been teaching his biography, The Last American Man by Elizabeth Gilbert, for the past year. In case you didn't know, Elizabeth Gilbert also wrote Eat, Pray, Love and is something of a big deal.

I have taught Eustace's incredible life story in three separate classes. I've made my kids run around in the woods, sleep outside, set up photo shops, make traps, write letters, write essays, write journal entries and, in doing so....reconstruct their entire world paradigm, just from reading this book. We've read articles about Eustace, had classroom debates, googled him, google imaged him, and youtubed him. He is the catalyst of my famous "Squirrel Bone Pop Quiz."

And now there he was...walking in the door....being seated right behind me....ordering the seafood special! I put down my fork. I got up. I had to! I walked right over and introduced myself. He was just as Gilbert had described him: gleam in the eye, warm enveloping handshake, a broad smile that made his eyes disappear beneath smile lines....the kind of smile you might just do anything for....even dig up squirrel bones in January. (If you don't know what I'm talking about, go read the book.)

It was more than surreal. I know some personal things about this man, some of which are highly controversial. I've had many arguments with my students about all the unforgivable ways he has treated his employees and his women (as teenage boys, they are quick to jump to his defense.) But standing there conversing with him was a complete thrill nonetheless. I told him all about teaching and how I was moving to Boone and something about my birthday, I'm not sure why. I was a bit star struck. Not that I'm a total rookie with celebrity sightings- I've stood behind Brittney Spears on an escalator once- but this was way better.

As soon as I got back home, I mailed him a letter, determined that one day I was going to work at Turtle Island, his nature preserve home. And Lo and Behold, today he wrote back:



The last hoorah


I'm outside the city of Pucon, Chile, on my hands and knees on the dirt on the side of the road, fingernails digging into the dirt, throwing up. The tension in my skull is momentarily relieved. I can open my eyes without the evening sun gouging them. When I climb back into the car, Matt, Dave and Andy are silent. Someone rolls down their window.

I don't mind vomiting from a migraine. Besides providing a slight- albeit temporary- relief, I find it proves a certain point that is difficult to otherwise get across: just how cruel the pain inside your head really is. You can be curled up in fetal position on the couch, a sweatshirt tied around your eyes, hands clenching and unclenching in some sort of primal pain response. You can be crying, silently, and breathing in quick labored breath, or sitting in a cold shower with the lights off and your clothes on and still you get the same response: Headache? Do you want an Advil?

There you are, brain swelling until it bursts over and over, and someone offers you a pharmaceutical normally taken for muscle aches. It's is ludicrous. If you could, you would remove the sweatshirt and tell the person politely just how misguided they are. If you could, you'd ask them to go get you a hack saw so you could cut open the roof of your skull, give yourself a skylight into the brain, to relieve the pressure. You really would. But you can't talk, and you can't move.

But when you throw up, it's a new ball game. Your migraine thrusts itself rudely into the lives of others, comes out in the open. It's especially poignant when you are sharing a confined space with other people, such as a car, especially when you are driving back to another small cabin with a shared bathroom. Especially when your having to pull over and double over on the side of the road is making them late for something. Suddenly, they have to deal with your headache in a very real way. It's sort of satisfying.

Back at the our cabin, the 9 kids running around with sticks and a BB gun shooting at dogs, I walk with a scarf tied around my eyes to my bed, hands out in front of me, feeling along the walls. The kids want me to come play with them. I tell them no, as usual, that I'm not feeling well. As usual.

The modicum of relief allowed to me at the sacrifice of my dinner is gone. My head is filled with metal butterflies beating their barbed wings, banging around my skull looking for the way out. I can't help but buzz with bad metaphors. This thing in my head wants to be named, wants to be recognized. Just as I think the butterflies cannot beat their wings any faster, they open terrible mouths and sink their rows of shark teeth into my brain.

The butterflies are sharp and vicious- the stabbing, the fine bladed knife etching a story into my gray matter one letter at a time. But there is also another kind of pain, the dull, pulsing pressure. Picture a ball, the size of a baseball or a fist, rolling around the base of my skull. I tilt my head to the right, just the slightest bit to reposition on the pillow, and ball of pain rolls to the right, bangs to a stop. I turn my head to the left, it rolls heavy to the other side.

A parade of images is marching through my head. The dog I saw on the sidewalk today, blood seeping from a hole in its head. The dog wasn't exactly dead yet. It made the flies happy. There is sand in the sheets and the hot water is broken. Yesterday Andy washed his clothes with a stick in a bucket, later on I stood shivering in the same bucket throwing teacups of cold water over my hair. I think of stupid, irrelevant things. The bones in the chicken we were served at the Achibueno, the way I picked around them, the ligaments that we pulled out of our teeth. The time we ran out of gas on the highway and Dave, Andy and Matt ate from a bag of leftover turkey and bread, grease everywhere, using the hood of the car as a picnic blanket. I had lay in the grassy ditch near the highway, hungry, a headache swirling behind my eyes. I began to think, I'm losing my edge for this lifestyle.

The bloody crusade in my brain continues and I'm helpless. Tino opens the door a crack to check on me but I whimper for him to shut it, the slice of light seeping in unbearable. He goes away. I kept thinking about the girls, how they stayed home from the river one day to bake with me and I was late, I had forgotten all about it even though I had promised them. I think about the way my heart scurried like an animal in my chest the time I was stuck in an eddy about a huge, unrunable rapid in a canyon, how I spit with fear and cried.

I try to take control over my thoughts. I count the days until I go home- 7 days? 8? If I have to lie here in my bed until then, I will. I think about my home, clean sheets, evening light on snow. Everything clean, cold.

When it's dark enough, I take a sleeping pill. I wilt into a strange sleep. The headache lasts for three more days. On the final day, we throw a birthday party for Clay. We're at a hotel in Villarica, playing croquet and making ice cream. It's a lawn party. There is wine barrell hot tub, still cool, the water heated by a wood stove. I curl up in it, lay motionless under the water for three straight hours. By this time the water has warmed sufficiently. The kids join me and we're all having a good time.

By this time, of course, I've come to a realization. For a year I have been travelling with the school throughout Chile, Canada, the Southwestern USA. I'm so good at my job. I've been so happy. But I'm not up for it anymore. I don't feel good, ever. Something must be wrong with me, and I have to go home.

My Vegetables

I've discovered my superpower, and it's got nothing to do with kayaking. I seem to have the ability to break down the distance people cloak themselves in to mask their self consciousness, and allow them to just relax and enjoy themselves. And this case, pretend to be a vegetable soup.

After 12 months of traveling with New River Academy, I hereby present my greatest accomplishment. One of the boys in here even refuses to smile for photographs, but here he is, under my influence, pretending to be a root vegetable.

This is no joke. This truly is what I am most proud of in all the world.

Chasing Waterfalls


Hi all, I'm checking in from a pizza place in Pucon, Chile after a day of chasing waterfalls. Or, more accurately, chasing one waterfall: Salto Coilaco. It's only a 9 minute drive away from our home in Pucon, but today it took us hours of exploring and a few painful hikes through brambled fields. When David last ran the photogenic 30 footer, you could drive right up to it. It was the classic park and huck. Since then, the upscale area surrounding the river had become a gated community, closed off to all kayakers. Less park and huck, more park and try your luck, or park and tuck (under many barbed wire fences) or park and- fuck! no waterfall access!

David even got chewed out by a Chilean troll, whose job was to literally sit next to the gate and deny access to hopeful, doe-eyed American paddlers. We all assumed the gate was locked, but David hopped just to check and, finding it unlocked, made an elaborate show of pushing it open prove he was right. That moment commenced the biggest Spanish cuss out we'd ever heard: ¡Yo le vi toca la puerta! se va! se va ahora! usted va, ahora! usted tocaba la puerta! hoja, ahora! You touched the gate! I saw you! get out of here! go go go go go! leave now! Dave did his thing to try and make friends with the guy to get some beta, but he didn't get far. As we drove away, we could still here him shouting. "Well, what were we supposed to do?" Piped up Stephen from the back. "We had nothing to pay the troll toll."

To make a bad story shorter, we eventually found a sneak by pure luck and lots of directions from fishermen. We passed through a sunny field, climbed a few barbed wire fences, and found ourselves in front of the ice cold cascade, illuminated by a bar of brilliant sunlight.

Here are my photos:
David Hughes the first to drop in
Send it!
The incredible Matti Hill
Alex Anderson with a near melt down
Wavesport's own Taylor Cote

They're crazy, and they keep getting crazier.... my blurry, close-up-cropped series of Stephen Forster making life interesting:






Recirculation of Identity


I had a vivid dream last night. I was packing for an ultimate tournament with Riot. The clarity in which I dreamt was diamond clear- I recognized the car I was packing, the field, my teammates. I was in a state of high anxiety: I didn't have my uniform, or the black Under Armor I used to wear beneath it; in reality I don't even own cleats any more. I was so burned out on the sport after the 2007 Finals between Riot and Fury when we lost, badly, again, to the same girls I'd been losing to for the past 6 year, that I trashed my cleats at the Sarasota airport and have never wanted for them since. Still, I had the distinct feeling in my dream that I was wobbling precariously between lives- I wanted to play with Riot, simultaneous knew I had no chance of getting there prepared, or being in shape enough to even keep up for one point.

To make matters all the more symbolic, I was packing my ultimate gear in my NRS Drybag, the one I am living out of now. When someone inquired as to why I was using a drybag instead of a Gaia Gearbag, I got irrationally livid. "Because this keeps everything dry! This is what I use now! Remember all those years of playing in the rain and soaking wet gear? Why did you never think to use a drybag?"

In college and the year that followed, I let ultimate completely consume me. It was my identity:
To use an extended metaphor in my current jargon, if the sport was a river, than I jumped in head first, without a personal flotation device. I endured many years of increasingly technical rapids, had the time of my life, went over a few waterfalls I definitely should have portaged, got worked in the hole at the bottom until I was nearly a goner, and finally was jammed into an undercut, out of which I finally extracting myself by simply standing up, taking a breath, and walking away.(C) Zoe Ross

Now this may sound painfully melodramatic, but when something consumes you, it consumes you, whether its drugs, or work, or bad men, or illness, or a sport. For me, ultimate was all these things (if you will be lenient and allow me to consider ibuprofen, legally prescribed painkillers and Poweraide as drugs.) When you are consumed, something else has taking over you, and is dictates your goals, your friends, your wardrobe, your plans for every evening and every weekend for six concurrent years.

The truth is, the social echelon in the Seattle ultimate community is like a caste system. The only way you can move up is to be really good at throwing a 175 gram piece of plastic. Eventually, I began to see a flaw in this paradigm. Now, I am lucky as hell: ultimate gave me 6 years of friendship, travel, hilarity, a Patagonia sponsorship I still have and a ripping six pack that's merely a memory. And besides a few poor relationship choices, and the time I chose practice over taking care of my terribly sick sister, I certainly don't regret anything. But my life was so incredibly one dimensional. While I did and always will fascinate myself, to anyone else on the outside, my friends and I were a terrific bore. We talked nothing but frisbee, the positions and plays, and the banal gossip that came with it. We wore team gear and Gaia gear, lined the rooms of the our houses with discs, spent ridiculous amounts of money on plane tickets, and played through stress fractures, broken bones and pneumonia.
(C) Scobel Wiggins

The week after left my cleats in a Florida trash can, thereby making my divorce final, I was faced with my first evening off in years. I realized I'd better find something to do, quick, so the recirculation of the ultimate hole didn't suck me out of my mirco-eddy were I floating, clinging to the rocks. So I revisited a sport I had once been part of my life when I was 15, just out of curiosity. I went to a Seattle Raft and Kayak roll session in the Meadowbrook pool and sat there in an Everest, too scared to try a wet-exit.

Fast forward two years and here I am in Pucon Chile- the absolute epicenter of hot kayaking these days. When the sun shines, the snow melts off the volcanoes and the waterfalls are pumping, in the evening the liquor flows and the decisions are bad. Pucon he kayaking den of inequity. Or so I've heard. Even if I wasn't here teaching and taking care of a flock of teenagers, I would be too exhausted to tap into the kayaking social scene. It's not that I don't love the sport. It's that I don't love its baggage. It's many many truckloads of NRS expedition weight dry-bag baggage.
(C) Zoe Ross

To once again be enclosed in a community that determines your worth based on how well you huck a piece of plastic makes me feel like I'm right back where I started. The kayaking Greats are here for the season- sponsored by Nike and Redbull, they have written guide books, produced movies, claimed first descents, been profiled in Outside and Men's Health, pop up in international commercials. Occasionally they stop by our base and sit around to discuss their latest big-water accomplishments. Some of those runs- the Palguin, the Trancura- I've even been down myself (albeit at lower water). But I have nothing in common with the big guns of the sport, and never will, and sitting around trying to sound like someone I'll never be does not appeal to me like it once might have. I'd much rather read a book or take a nap.

Am I growing wiser- or just older- or simply more jaded towards any one group of people? I am hesitant even to dip my toe into the waters of the traveling-kayaking lifestyle, because I know its power. Someone is given a pair of shoes by a company and suddenly they're 'sponsored', which puts them on a totally different level than the 'unsponsored.' If they're sponsored by kayak company X, then it's a huge deal for them to even be in a picture standing near a kayak company Y boat.

If ultimate is a river that can sweep you away in its current, than kayaking is a steep creek that will pummel you down the rocks and suck you into a sieve- literally and figuratively. And the longer you survive in its torrent, the higher your ego will inflate, and for some, the more powerful your sense of superiority. And then you either become a total dude-bro asshole, or you run something you shouldn't and you die. At least, that's how I see it. I have been known to generalize.


(C) Matt Smink

Live to Wimp Again

(C) Matt Hill
It is raining and cold. A cloud of mist accompanies every word I speak. I bought a thick wool scarf in town, threaded with iridescent silver, and I wrap it around my shoulders as if it were a luxurious fur. The students sit in a ring around the tremendous fire in the Quincho and play Hearts and Uno. When it rains, the rivers rise into giants, and we draw inwards.Except between the hours of 3:00pm-7:00pm, approximately. That is when we seal ourselves into creek boats the bright, speckled, tangerine and lime colors of jelly bellies, and we go and play with the giants. They toss us with their powerful arms, or we slide down their throats into their canyon stomachs: David Hughes runs Gargantua del Diablo, "the Throat of the Devil" on the Rio Claro (C) Matt Smink

Los Nevados is a full on class 5 committed canyon run that is pumping right now and we're not doing it. But we are running the entrance rapid, a 100 foot slide that is frequently featured in paddling magazines because of it's sheer size and mediagenicy. A 100 foot bumpy slide like a wild toboggan ride, mostly clean, that you can hike up and run again and again, with no worry of the dangerous canyon that follows. Incredible.

So I power up the camera and push the delicate lenses into their foam bedding in the Pelican Box. I pull on fleece pants and contemplate the upcoming trauma of pulling on a broken dry top, already soaking from three days hanging from an Ash tree in the rain. Then I spy Matt and Andy slithering from their room to the couch in their sleeping bags. The door opens and David steps inside, hair plastered to his forehead from the downpour. He says something about maybe taking the day off from the river. And then the bomb drops: Andy's got Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince on his is Ipod.

A few minutes later, Tino comes out of his room suited up in a dry suit, looking like a power ranger. "You guys ready to go?!" He's all motivated and then he sees us lying on the couch in different positions of comfort. He stops in his tracks. "WHAT?" I decide to slink off to the kitchen to avoid this confrontation. Tino is the coach. He has to go kayaking every day, no matter how freezing and miserable it is. The rest of us are not the coach. We don't have to do anything. "YOU ASSHOLES!"

I wait till Tino is out the door before returning to the living room with my hot chocolate. Unfortunately, he is not yet out of hearing range when I jump on the couch and say "Alright Andy, Harry Potter me!" The door yanks opened. Tino sticks his helmet-head inside and says in barely a whisper, "Did you just say...Harry Potter?" We look at him. The guilt in the room could crush us all.

"...and the Half Blood Prince." I reply.

Matt, David, Andy and I remain dormant for the rest of the afternoon, half asleep in our goose-down sleeves watching magical movies, rain drumming the tin roof. A few kilometers away at the entrance to Los Nevados, the slide is running record high. The kids zip down with madcap lines. Eric hits the rooster tail, does a mid-air cartwheel and crash lands on his head. The video camera collects rain under the lenses and is rendered useless. Taylor's elbow knocks against the rock wall and fills with fluid.

In life, there are some times when you have to push yourself. Then there are those times when you have earned your rest. (Unless you're Tino: no rest for the weary. Good on ya, buddy.) Learning that balance, the perfect ratio of sleep to waking, whitewater to greenwater, is the key to life. My cousins taught me early on their NOLS course motto: Live to Wimp Again. Some advice you just have to take to heart.

Marathon on the Achibueno

(C) Matt Smink
The water of the Rio Achibueno is the cool, minted blue of Crest toothpaste, and cold as a recently melted glacier ought to be. My dry top, my armored shield against the ice, is recently broken from the rescue in the Rio Claro canyon. I add two layers of fleece on top of my union suit, pull on the useless dry top, cinch down the many straps of my PFD and hope for the best. With my boat hoisted on my shoulder I head down to the river, seal myself in, mess with all the outfitting, and push off into the river.(C) Matt Smink

The rapids begin. And they do not stop for another nine miles. It is the longest, busiest, most continuous river I have ever paddled my way down. It is studded with granite boulders varying in size from Dinosaur eggs to hippos to sports utility vehicles; the river weaves through them like a tongue flicking between ginormous gap teeth. I am very lucky, as Tino is my personal escort for the run. Together with Zoe, we catch every micro eddy, navigating our way through the maelstrom with precise paddle placement with Tino literally shouting at us directions for which blade to use and where.Around halfway through, I notice a tangible difference. Something has shifted in my brain. I look a the river with a certain logic; I know where I want to go, how to fly through slots and doge the hole at the end with a late boof stroke, how to hang on and surf out when I get worked, how to cruise into the eddy with a powerful stroke and correct angle. I'm no longer a pinball at the mercy of the torrent and granite. Tino keeps watching my lines and throwing his fist into the air. He's proud of me.
....And then I swim. Three times. I haven't swam on a river in 6 months, not since I went right instead of left on Middle Keeney's on the Lower New. I haven't swam yet in Chile this time around. I haven't swam three times in one run since the Green, my true first river run ever. Why, then, is this happening? And after my epiphany of true understanding and Liquid Logic? The culprit is my lack of hand roll. On each swim my paddle, my mechanism for rolling and control, is ripped out of my grasp. The first time is stupid. The second time, two hours later, is more forgivable. The rapid is bony and steep, I thunk directly over a pour over, and although the the hole kindly ejects my boat and I, it keeps my paddle as a souvenir. I am in calm water by the time I pull my skirt and flounder to surface, gasping.And the third time? By now the sky is dimming and the temperature has dropped. With the busted neck gasket on my dry top, I am shivering and soaked. I'm following Tino like a dog, cursing every inch of water as I pull through it. This river was supposed to be 6 miles but it turns out to be 9 miles. It's been hours and the rapids have not relented. I face them now not with fear but with irritation and anger. When I flip over on a terrible line through a long class 4, my knuckles grind over the granite, my hands jam under rocks and pop out violently as the current rips me along. I grit my teeth and hold on as my head cracks against the rocks. Finally my paddle gets caught and I pull my skirt. When I emerge, I grab onto Matt's stern and he drags me through the remainder of the rapid. Up ahead, Tino is doing the same for Zoe, who has a big gash over her eye. Tino is looking behind him as he paddles and I see him mutter 'oh, no...' I turn around to see Tracy going through the same rapid, the same terrible line. She must have been following us. She's on her head as well, the bright blue underside of her boat banging comically like a duck in trouble. But she manages to hold on and right herself. Later on, her neck will swell and tighten from the beating, and she won't get on the Achibueno again.

When I shore up on the rocks, my hands are bleeding and my right hand is completely numb. I put it in my mouth and bite down as hard as a demonstration for Tino. He looks tired. I wonder how much longer till the take out, and how I can paddle without a right hand. Without a choice in the matter, I fumble my way back in the boat and with my left hand, curl the fingers of my right hand around my paddle. Each bend in the river uncurls to reveal more white, spitting water, and no bridge.

By the time we do reach the take-out, the feeling has returned to my whole hand with the exception of my little finger. The whole crew is has fallen into an exhausted silence. I strip away the layers of wet fleece and neoprene and pull on dry cotton. I call the act of taking off wet paddling gear and shivering into civilian clothes "The process of becoming Human." It's a joyful but often arduous process, and I'm not fully human again until I'm under a blanket with something to eat and a book, fully dried and guaranteed safe.

One of my students and I climb into the back of a truck and bump along the 10 km home. We stop every now and then to explore the river bank and search for an earlier take out. We are met with no luck, and we never run the beautiful, diamond clear, marathon lower Achibueno again.

Sleeping with the enemy


One of my former students, Keegan, is here in Pucon for creeking season. He showed up at the staff cabin last night with a bag of Starbucks coffee. I took it from him in the same manner as one would remove an infant from a stranger, gently but urgently. I then whisked it into my room, crawled into my sleeping bag, and held it close to me.

A strange thing to do, yes. But in the zipped up den of my sleeping bag, the smell of coffee was so strong my olfactory system went wild and prodded awake my memories of college. I closed my eyes and thought about Zoka, on the corner of 56th and Meridian in Greenlake. This was the warm, aromatic, see-and-be-seen coffee shop where I spent the majority of my seven years in the city of emeralds. In the winter I would step in from the rain and disapear into the steam of an Americano, absorbed in essays, text books and meticulous notes. The clean, bright lines of a highlighter against a black and white page used to send shivers of delight down my spine. In the summer it was iced lattes and liquid ink from fountain pens, sitting outside in the cherry blossom breeze. I would wear a white shirt and the short, layered skirts that everyone wore for two short seasons when I was a junior. There is nothing special about this particular set of memories, nothing that sets it apart from the experience of anyone else who went to college in a nice city and had endless hours available to sit in a favorite spot and read text books.

But last night, curled like animal around a bag of coffee grounds, those memories seemed so alive and strange, the paradox of something being so bright in my mind yet so far away in reality.
I am the lucky one with a charmed life, but for the past few days my world has been colored by exhaustion, the turning of my own health and the ubiquitous fear of drowning. I stare into space more often than I have before. I fear the upcoming confluence of my life on Chilean rivers with my other life at home; at the same time I can't stop dreaming of it.

So last night I curled up in my filthy sleeping bag in my filthy skin, covered in bruises, one long scar running up my right leg and a tarantula bite on my ankle. I sleep wearing my fleece paddling gear, the only decently clean clothes I own. I breathed in coffee and hovered between the clean bright world in my past and the one I'm living now.

In the morning Tino and I made the coffee. It tasted like dirt. In taste, coffee never lives up to the promise made by its aroma. But this was particularly terrible. Maybe the lack of filter, the well-water, or the fact that I can't make coffee and never have been able to. But Tino and I sat there and drank it all and listened to the rain as it kept coming down. I thought to myself, I can't leave this. I thought to myself, I wonder where my raincoat is. I wonder what I'm teaching today in AP. I wonder if my gear will dry over the stove in time for this afternoon. I can't leave this.

Alive at the Achibueno





I have approximately three minutes for internet here, just time enough to post a few photos of the Rio Achibueno and life therein. Still to come: story of the longest, rockiest river in history, where it rained goats, where I swam more than once, where the tarantulas lumbered where my ultimate dream of reading for three days straight by a fireplace and reading was finally fulfilled.

Seltzer Boating :: Chilean Creeking

Matt Smink on the first drop of the Siete Tazas

I find myself in the city of Talca, in Central Chile, with only one night in a bright and loud hotel to record the past week of creeking excursions on the Rio Claro. I will keep the descriptions minimal, not only because of my dirth of time but because I am really proud of these photos- definitely the best I've ever taken.It's incredible how many faces and expressions that water can adopt. The Maipo was sultry and fast and wide, the color of darkened leather. The Maipo's salted waves turned from glassy green to aqua to navy, mirroring the weather.
But paddling on the the Rio Claro was like pushing your boat through pools and chutes full of seltzer water. The water sparkled, bubbled and glinted as if the creek were gem-lined. The waterfalls were glossy and smooth at the entrance, and then they carreened forward as if some really big person filled their mouth with a ton of water, cheeks distended, and then spit it out with all his of force.Eric Bartl dropping in

The first day was an expedition through the middle canyon, a section known as the Entres Saltos. While hiking and scouting that morning, we had spotted five smaller clean waterfalls we were eater to run. We put in directly under the bridge near our camp site and stated paddling down. It was a canyon, but for the most part you could scramble out on river right and walk. The canyon was laced with class 5 rapids that were mandatory walks for anyone with a brain. The rest of the rapids were fun, tight lines full of boofs that all ended in the most beautiful, safe pools. There were a few swims- none from me- and the rescues were pretty simple (alright, most of them were. One girl swam right above a little drop that I wouldn't have wanted to swim over, but they got her right back in her boat.)Italic
Haakon Samuelson setting up to plug the 6th drop

We ended up taking out before we reached the five drops we had been aiming for. A tricky double drop and waning sunlight stood in our way. It didn't bother me- I'm always the happiest one to reach the take out, even after such a blissful day of clear water creeking. That night I drank hot chocolate and read my book and fell asleep in my tent. And I woke up the next day ready to paddle the seven teacups.Zoe Ross in the seltzer. You can see her boat underwater in this photo

The seven teacups (siete tazas) is a run of seven beautiful waterfalls ranging in height from 3 feet to 2o, running through the black basalt chamber of the Rio Claro canyon. Once you drop in, the only way out is to run it. The walls curve out and then in, as if you were in the bottom of a light bulb. And speaking of common household imagery, it's as cold as a fridge in there.
Zoe Ross commits to the right side
We flew like a flock of angels down the falls, paddles and faces pressed up against sterns. The hole at the bottom of the slide tried to digest me but I survival surfed the out of it. I went over-vertical (aka ass over teakettle) off the the 17 footer. On the 20 footer I was so mesmirized by the fast approaching foam that I didn't tuck in time and Bam! Next thing I know my head sprang back and I bubbled around a while beneath the curtain before catching my roll. Tino said I looked as stiff as a toy soldier.

Halfway through the run....Experimenting with shutter speed

But whatever! I ran the Siete Tazas, and despite those small confessions I ran them pretty well, with no swims and limited misery!
Eric Bartl about to go deep on the 6th drop

The next day, we divided into two groups to run the sieta tazas again. While group number two set up to take photos and document every drop, group number one dropped into the river at a new, higher put in. I was in group one, and I sailed off the first clean drop at the new put in and followed gamely along behind the other technicolored ducklings. But we never made it to the siete tazas, and the photographers were waiting all day for a string of little bright boats that never came. It's a story for another day, but it's one HELL of a story. Melina Coogan dropping in to the disasterous upper "put in." Photo by Matt Smink

Finally, all the photos on this post (and on this blog, generally) are mine. (With the exception of the one above.) The final day at the Rio Claro, I shot from the wooden vantage points on the edge of the canyon to get these shots. Which means, of course, there aren't many of me. But I ran this shit! Alex Anderson on one of the middle drops