Being a river guide teaches you things. What a charismatic experience it is to take guests (some of whom this would be their first time in an inflatable kayak on whitewater) down such an extraordinary section of the Green River in Western North Carolina.
But this type of guiding is slightly difference than river guiding in a raft. Guiding in an eight person raft means everyone is in one place...in your boat and while you’re steering from the rear, you’re also giving verbal instructions for your rafters to paddle forward or backward to get your boat where it needs to go. If someone falls out there’s seven other people to help get them back into the boat.
Guiding trips of people down the river who are each in their own inflatable kayak is a whole different story. Ultimately, each guest is responsible for paddling their own kayak down the river while you show the way in your kayak. But it didn’t take me long to land in a place of frustration on many of these trips down the Upper.
As a guide, my job was to paddle the path of least resistance down the Green and each guest was supposed to follow in a single-file line. Like ducks in a row. Well, sometimes the ducks weren’t in a row at all. Sometimes...many times...more than I’d like to count…people took another path. And then they got stuck on rocks or fell out of their kayak or got hung up in tree branches on the riverbank or number of other things.
For longer than I’d like to admit...watching this unfold each day was frustrating...because this was totally avoidable. There was a known path down this river and through these rapids and why wouldn’t these folks choose to take this path? So many times, while paddling in the front of the group, I’d turn around and see guests literally ping-ponging off of each and every rock, versus following in the same line that I was showing them to go all the while avoiding the rocks. I couldn’t understand it.
I reached into the deepest parts of my patience bucket and did my best to calmly and politely assist these paddlers through the many complications we found ourselves in together (stuck on rocks, gathering up a paddle or a boat after they fell out, etc). All the while grimacing under my breath that this wasn’t how this was supposed to go. Until one day, one fateful day...it struck me.
“Rach, people are going to experience this river the way they are going to experience the river. It’s THEIR experience. It’s their choice. Let them have it their way. Let go.”
From that day forward my frustration all but evaporated entirely. Let people do it how they are going to to it. It’s not your experience...it’s there's. Let them have it how they want it.
Of course I guided trips after this “ahah” moment like I always did. Showing guests “the path of least resistance” down the river. But I let go of the notion that they needed to experience in “the known” way.
That’s just it isn’t it? We all have the freedom to experience life in any way we choose. The guide might be suggesting this way...but ya know what...I’m gonna go this way instead. Freedom to choose.
Naturally, there are consequences to some of these choices...to which we must take responsibility for having landed there….but ah the joys of whitewater kayaking!
Never a dull moment. Always a life-lesson to be learned.
And I have so much to be grateful for from these and so many other experiences life has brought across my path. What a fascinating world we live in! Live it to the fullest...however that may look or feel or be.
Happy Thanksgiving everyone! May it be full of joy and laughter, love and light.
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