When I first started floating down rivers—in inner tubes and on air mattresses—I learned to stay in the heart of the current because that was the fastest, funnest ride, especially when it formed “the tongue” leading into a rapid and its standing waves. So hanging out in the heart of the current became, without thought, my SOP when floating down a river.
But Alysia and I discovered a stretch of the Sacramento that we have come to love. After floating it many times, we are less interested in the ride, passing through, and more interested in becoming part of the world of the river. That has led me into a whole new way of going down a river, one I’ve come to call bank cruising.
Instead of playing with the heart of the current, I play now more with the eddy line, that shear line between the back eddy and the downstream current. On the bank side of the eddy line, the water eddies upstream. The current side of the eddy line often has some of the slowest flowing water. Bank cruising is hanging out there, just on the current side of the eddy line.
It means going down river, slowly yet steadily, very close to the bank, very quietly, so I can just focus on this world slowly going by. I don’t want to disturb any living things that I possibly haven’t seen yet so I want to move my paddle as little as possible. We are trying to blend in with the river—float slowly by the otter foraging on the bank or the turtle basking on the log or the twenty turkey vultures taking bird baths in the shallows or pass by without disturbing the twenty five mergansers already asleep on the six rocks clustered in the river. Therefore I want to move as little as possible and let the river do the work. That’s where the fun comes in because there are just as many water dynamics going on as out in the heart of the current but they’re soft and subtle, slow to come. I look ahead and plot the slowest course with the least paddles. I’m practicing a subtle, fascinating navigation.
One of the main principles is being clear in what my direction is, where I want to go because it’s hard to navigate if I’m not sure where I want to head. In bank cruising, where I want to go is right along the eddy line on the current side. That is my direction. This is important because if I start heading towards the eddy line, I can slip into thinking that I need to get us going in the opposite direction, away from the eddy line. If I think that, then I will keep turning the boat until we are turning away from the eddy line. But that’s not my direction. I can stop turning much earlier than that, back when I feel that the turning has enough momentum to bring us around to where the boat is facing just slightly away from the eddy line, just enough to gradually bring us back into the proper position with the eddy line. This sense of direction requires fewer paddle strokes to maintain. I glide more quietly.
So the first lesson of navigation is that having a clear sense of my direction can protect me from the temptation to turn too hard and thereby create a destabilizing oscillation requiring much paddling. I feel like this lesson could be important when navigating through a turbulent period of history such as ours when economic instability coincides with a proto-fascist government which a growing percentage of the people realize has no moral authority and is, in fact, morally culpable. In such situations, one can easily focus on “turning away” and become invested in lots of paddling “the other direction.” But the direction we wish to go is that which is aligned with our highest moral good.
Another fascinating aspect of river navigation is realizing that the river is not all flowing in the same direction and speed. Different parts of the river are moving differently. There are swirls and eddies and divergences. Often, a part of the river a foot away will move the boat in the way you want. Lots of paddling isn’t the only way to make an adjustment. Sometimes I just need to move the boat into a different pattern and the river will then do much of the adjustment for me. So I learn to look ahead and see the river offering many paths that change as I change. There are far more possibilities before me when I move beyond “just me paddling” and include the network of currents within the river.
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