Well, I don’t know. They had to run to the boats, dig their emergency bags out of the rigging, cut off my clothes, and no one timed that. Some people said I was gone for four or five minutes. Some said ten. Me? I like to go for the big numbers. But I really don’t know. I was dead at the time.
The secret to river rafting at 73? Always keep moving. My father is 86 and still goes to the gym daily to lift weights and walk the treadmill. It's a bit of a social club too - but he primarily goes to keep moving.
Effective advice!
Yeah, I mean there might be some survivorship bias here but my Grandmother always said something similar. "When you stop walking every day, you'll stop being able to walk!" - she's 90 now, and still does a circuit in her neighborhood at least every couple of days.
I do think there's something to it though - in Western society in general we don't do enough exercise, and the culture of retirement is to slow down and relax even more. Since it's so hard to regain muscle mass as you get older, I can see how it might be a "use it or lose it" kind of situation.
My father is getting up there now, and lived surrounded by older people for a while.
He kept saying "whenever an elderly person starts sitting down in a wheelchair for the first time, they're not getting back up".
Even just breaking a bone and sitting down for a few weeks just completely shatters the patterns of regular movement, and the patients just end up becoming more and more sedentary, then getting more issues due to that, and it spirals out of control.
Whitewater kayaking is the only extreme sport I've seriously tried so far that I outright quit. I learned how to sweep roll (when you are upside-down in a kayak and flip upright), I learned how to hand-roll, ran several class III rapids, surfed kayaks in the Atlantic hurricane swell, and I was working on a special recovery roll that I can't remember the name of when I decided to quit and never do it again. I've rappelled down into huge caves on single ropes, towed my hang glider thousands of feet into terrifyingly active Texas air, and swam in icy underground water, but whitewater kayaking is the only one that inspires real fear.
I think it's something about the pace at which you die. When you fall down a hole in a cave, you go splat at the bottom and die in seconds, and when you fall from the sky in a hang glider (which I've done), you have about thirty seconds to think about what's happening and then you actually have a reasonably good change of not dying when your glider hits the ground. When you get hypothermia, which I've caught a mild case of, it can take between thirty minutes to five hours to really die. But when you get smacked by a loud, cold, angry river, eject from your kayak, and end up trapped in tree branches and held under to drown like an animal, the river assaults you in a way that I do not have the eloquence to describe. The current is terrifying, the water hurts, the strength is drained out of your limbs in seconds, and often you're only a foot or two from breathing perfectly well. It doesn't feel like you should be dying--your body isn't broken, you haven't had a prolonged struggle with nature, you just go from alive and happy to dead and nothing in about a minute.
WW kayakers also die for no reason at all. Hang glider pilots fly on days they should have known not to launch, or they try things they're not ready for. Cavers forget to inspect their equipment or get rained in. But whitewater kayakers from beginner to expert go out on a sunny day with great conditions, make a miniscule mistake they never could have trained for, and are mercilessly executed by the river. You can see it and hear it in the videos of WW kayakers "swimming" rapids, when they've had to jump out of their boat--they're terrified, because they know that if they fall into a hole or get sucked under the pourover there is very little anyone can do for them.
It goes without saying that it's by far the most fun of all the others, but it's just not worth it.
I definitely had a decade of my life where whitewater kayaking was my drug of choice, and I agree 100%. I think one of the things that we have so little intuition for is how massive water is. I don't even know if that is the right word, or if we have a word.
As a point of reference the standard for an Olympic artificial whitewater canoe/kayak course is something like 12 cubic meters per second (you might hear kayakers saying cumets).
A cubic meter of water literally weighs a ton (1000kg).
12 m³/s is approximately equivalent to a continuous stream of nose to tail Chevy Suburbans (3t each) at about 50 mph.
Real rivers typically have far higher flow rates --- 100 m³/s 3,500 ft³/s is not unknown
The first time I found out the weight of water was when I had the bright idea to lay a tarp down on my driveway during a snowstorm so I could drag the snow off to the side instead of shoveling it.
What was the most extreme rapid you ran? Did you have any close scares with death?
I went kayaking with my mother down a still river that was only 3 feet deep and ran into this cute little whirlpool that sucked us right in and tipped our kayak. It looked harmless but once it's black hole like gravitational pull got us I couldn't fight it, even with all my might. Water is scary. Here's a crab getting wrecked: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nce9QNK7ITY
One weekend she was doing training. The second day things went wrong. People fell out of the raft and had to be recovered. The raft flipped over twice. They were running late. At dusk they found their takeout under water. Half mile down the river in the dark on a sharp bend in the river a guy managed to grab a tree branch. A woman climbed over him and got a rope on it. They pulled themself to shore and tied off. Found a flat spot 40 feet up a steep embankment and spent the night. Daylight revealed a waterfall and cascade just around the bend.
She said she found out later about a dozen people died that weekend up and down the west coast. And she was done with rafting.
Another friend does canyoneering. Couple of years ago on a trip he missed, a friend was fording a river carrying a rope. Rope tangled him up on a submerged tree. He drowned with his friends watching from the rivers edge.
Terrifying stories like those are the norm in the outdoor recreation industry. Risk management is almost always nonexistent, and people coast on the principle of "if it didn't go wrong before, if probably won't go wrong now". They made an excellent choice to take out at a random bend in the river, but one has to wonder how the company training them didn't tell them every feature for at least three miles past the takeout.
As for the canyoneering drowning--that sounds awful. Fording a river seems like such a simple task, but it can be so dangerous.
The first time I rafted, we were on the New River in West Virginia. We took a raft ourselves with a novice guide just for fun, and flipped in Class IV rapids. I've never been that scared before.
Not only was it a riveting read, full jaw-dropping revelations - it was also a brilliant black comedy! I wonder how the author could make me laugh so hard at what is perhaps the most serious moment in his life. It wasn't schadenfreude, just very clever writing
I died that December day on Tequila Beach. This created a great deal of consternation—and it has tended to complicate my relationships with others ever since.
The paramedic nodded at them: “You guys saved a life today,” he said. Which was news to me.
In their pages, men were attacked by savage bloodthirsty penguins at the North Pole (yeah, I know)
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Well, I don’t know. They had to run to the boats, dig their emergency bags out of the rigging, cut off my clothes, and no one timed that. Some people said I was gone for four or five minutes. Some said ten. Me? I like to go for the big numbers. But I really don’t know. I was dead at the time.
Great writing!
I do think there's something to it though - in Western society in general we don't do enough exercise, and the culture of retirement is to slow down and relax even more. Since it's so hard to regain muscle mass as you get older, I can see how it might be a "use it or lose it" kind of situation.
He kept saying "whenever an elderly person starts sitting down in a wheelchair for the first time, they're not getting back up".
Even just breaking a bone and sitting down for a few weeks just completely shatters the patterns of regular movement, and the patients just end up becoming more and more sedentary, then getting more issues due to that, and it spirals out of control.
(Anecdotal, obviously.)
I think it's something about the pace at which you die. When you fall down a hole in a cave, you go splat at the bottom and die in seconds, and when you fall from the sky in a hang glider (which I've done), you have about thirty seconds to think about what's happening and then you actually have a reasonably good change of not dying when your glider hits the ground. When you get hypothermia, which I've caught a mild case of, it can take between thirty minutes to five hours to really die. But when you get smacked by a loud, cold, angry river, eject from your kayak, and end up trapped in tree branches and held under to drown like an animal, the river assaults you in a way that I do not have the eloquence to describe. The current is terrifying, the water hurts, the strength is drained out of your limbs in seconds, and often you're only a foot or two from breathing perfectly well. It doesn't feel like you should be dying--your body isn't broken, you haven't had a prolonged struggle with nature, you just go from alive and happy to dead and nothing in about a minute.
WW kayakers also die for no reason at all. Hang glider pilots fly on days they should have known not to launch, or they try things they're not ready for. Cavers forget to inspect their equipment or get rained in. But whitewater kayakers from beginner to expert go out on a sunny day with great conditions, make a miniscule mistake they never could have trained for, and are mercilessly executed by the river. You can see it and hear it in the videos of WW kayakers "swimming" rapids, when they've had to jump out of their boat--they're terrified, because they know that if they fall into a hole or get sucked under the pourover there is very little anyone can do for them.
It goes without saying that it's by far the most fun of all the others, but it's just not worth it.
As a point of reference the standard for an Olympic artificial whitewater canoe/kayak course is something like 12 cubic meters per second (you might hear kayakers saying cumets).
A cubic meter of water literally weighs a ton (1000kg).
12 m³/s is approximately equivalent to a continuous stream of nose to tail Chevy Suburbans (3t each) at about 50 mph.
Real rivers typically have far higher flow rates --- 100 m³/s 3,500 ft³/s is not unknown
What was the most extreme rapid you ran? Did you have any close scares with death?
One weekend she was doing training. The second day things went wrong. People fell out of the raft and had to be recovered. The raft flipped over twice. They were running late. At dusk they found their takeout under water. Half mile down the river in the dark on a sharp bend in the river a guy managed to grab a tree branch. A woman climbed over him and got a rope on it. They pulled themself to shore and tied off. Found a flat spot 40 feet up a steep embankment and spent the night. Daylight revealed a waterfall and cascade just around the bend.
She said she found out later about a dozen people died that weekend up and down the west coast. And she was done with rafting.
Another friend does canyoneering. Couple of years ago on a trip he missed, a friend was fording a river carrying a rope. Rope tangled him up on a submerged tree. He drowned with his friends watching from the rivers edge.
As for the canyoneering drowning--that sounds awful. Fording a river seems like such a simple task, but it can be so dangerous.
The first time I rafted, we were on the New River in West Virginia. We took a raft ourselves with a novice guide just for fun, and flipped in Class IV rapids. I've never been that scared before.
I died that December day on Tequila Beach. This created a great deal of consternation—and it has tended to complicate my relationships with others ever since.
The paramedic nodded at them: “You guys saved a life today,” he said. Which was news to me.
In their pages, men were attacked by savage bloodthirsty penguins at the North Pole (yeah, I know)
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