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What I Learned on My Summer Vacation

Last summer, I got the opportunity of a lifetime. I was selected to spend 5 weeks in the heart of the summer teaching whitewater kayaking for the Chewonki Foundation, in Maine. This wasn’t just any trip, though. It was called Northeast Rivers, and we drove around in a giant van the boys dubbed “Poon Jesticle” (they were 15) and paddled all of the best rivers in the Northeast—the Ottawa, Lachines, Rouge, and Rapid. Even now, the names of these rivers fill me with joy at all of the good times we had.

There are a lot of things that I learned this summer, having been given the opportunity to spend five weeks paddling with boys. The things that I learned ranged from the obscene (curse words that I never knew existed), to the obscure (conspiracy theories surrounding the death of Notorious BIG), to the profound (a reminder how much joy and difficulty teenage years inevitably bring). Of all the things that I learned from the boys, though, the one that I most hope to take and incorporate in my life and in my paddling was the low-key, egoless fun that the boys brought to the river every single day. In a paddling world that feels increasingly driven by photos of ever-higher waterfalls or bigger blunts on giant waves, it was truly a relief to spend time with great paddlers who were often content to put on goggles and float around staring at “weird fish” underwater.

The boys’ search for fun bordered on the ridiculous. At any given time during our sessions at Smooth Ledge, on the Rapid River in Maine, there might be three kayakers, a boogie boarder, and a large inflatable dinosaur named “Tao” piloted by three boys in the eddy waiting for their chance to ride. They were particularly fond of what they called “multi-dimensional freestyle” (a term they took off the back of one of the Pyranha boats), which, to them, meant cramming the maximum number of boats onto a feature and then passing paddles back and forth, flipping each other over, and trying to shake hands. At one point, one of the boys asked Dan and I if he thought other kayakers would laugh at him if he wore a full-size swim mask out onto the wave, and then before we could answer, simply said, “Never mind, I don’t care.” He looked ridiculous in the eddy on release day until he hit an air loop with the swim mask on.

One time on the Ottawa River, we were starting at a jumble of difficult whitewater called Coliseum. Some really good paddlers on the side of the river were also staring at it, and couldn’t decide if they want to go or not. After all of my boys styled their lines—absolutely tearing this rapid apart—the older couple decided to try it. I wanted to tell them that paddling like a 15 year old is not necessarily easy, but they had already peeled out into the current.

And so, in conclusion, what I learned on my summer vacation is that paddling is fun—and so is boogie boarding, and swimming, and riding dinosaurs through whitewater. Swimming through whitewater is also tolerable if you can laugh about it afterwards. It was Alex Lowe that said “The best climber in the world is the one having the most fun.” By that standard, I had the opportunity to paddle with the best in the world, and I hope to take at least some measure of that spirit of joy with me.