I didn’t know Jeff West. Jeff died this summer attempting the first solo, one-day descent of the Grand Canyon of the Stikine River. I didn’t know Lynn Clark either. Lynn died 14 years ago this February at Little Picky on the Ottawa River. She was out for an afternoon paddle with friends. She was swept and trapped under ice. I attended Lynn’s memorial service, although I’m not exactly sure why. Paddlers were lined up out the door and down the street of the funeral home. I don’t remember saying anything to her family and close friends at the front. I’m not sure anything any of us could have said would have mattered. Lynn was an accomplished paddler and award-winning paddling filmmaker out for an afternoon with friends and then she was dead. What the hell was she thinking paddling then and there? How did she flip? Why didn’t she roll? Standing in line at a funeral home is not the time or the place to ask such questions.

If she’d not died, she’d have gone for a greasy pizza at the Country Kitchen and today she’d likely be paddling’s most celebrated filmmaker. If Jeff West was successful, he too may have gone for pizza and been famous, although being famous was not his was not his thing.  What drove him to attempt back-to-back runs on the most extreme river in the world? Only Jeff knew for sure.

A REMINDER THAT RIVERS HAVE HORNS

There was one moment in each of my favorite trips where I stopped and thought to myself, “What the hell am I doing here?” It’s happened on a portage that climbed and climbed, during a week of rain that resulted in trench foot, when barely making headway in 120-kilometer-an-hour winds, or, quite literally, just being a stranger in a strange land. It’s that undeniable, holyshit- I’m-in-over-my-head moment of total discomfort. Not to be confused with the sickening lurch of a backcountry, “Uh oh.”

On every trip that’s meant something to me—really meant something—there’s always a moment where I stepped so far outside my comfort zone that a panicky, almost painful sensation entered mychest. Hours of pushing an 80-pound bike weighed down with camping gea  up a steep Cape Breton road, only to crest it, enjoy a short-lived, white-knuckle 70-kilometer-an-hour descent and do it all again. A 30-kilometer day in a weeklong hike through Torres del Paine, where, only two-thirds of the way there by late afternoon, I threw off my pack, fell onto my back and raised swollen feet to the sky in absolution. Standing in the Wabakimi landscape I’d been tracing on a map in my living room for months, watching the floatplane disappear… 

This article appeared in Canoeroots & Family Camping, Spring 2013. Download our free iPad/iPhone/iPod Touch App or Android App or read the rest here.