Fear

I’ve realized these topic-oriented posts are not so much about ‘teaching’ or ‘telling,’ but simply a debrief of an experience or a lesson learned. I’m ok with that.

I took my brothers kayaking this past week. One had been through eight days of training a year and a half before, the other had never been. It was interesting for me to watch their responses.

Cold water does something to you. Warm water is different. When it’s calm it can be comforting, friendly. Truly cold water is always a shock, and it can wear you down very rapidly. Experiencing that cold water while swimming a rapid generates a strong response.

There is a difference between knowing information and being sure, somewhere deep inside yourself, that something is true because you’ve experienced it. That’s part of what experiential education is all about. In the context of kayaking, the information you’ve been told (or assumed) is that your PFD will keep you afloat, that the wave train is the best place to have to swim because it’s deepest, and that the whitewater position is better than thrashing about wildly, as is natural. You’ve also been told kayaking is fairly safe, with few deaths compared to some other ‘extreme’ sports. Does all of this information cause the average first-time (or second or third-time) boater to be any less afraid when they’ve just exited their boat and are swimming cold, roiling water? No.

This is obvious from the looks on the faces of the many people I’ve seen who come to the surface for that first gasp of air after wet-exiting. If I could have taken snapshots of all the faces I’ve seen with that expression, I’d probably hide the album somewhere deep in a closet, because honestly, that expression is not pretty. Later we laugh about these experiences, but our laughter is often empty and weak, for what we faced for those seconds is terrifying.

Why is it that we could state that the likelihood of drowning is almost nil, yet for those seconds we may be certain we are about to die? Are we afraid of death in that instant? No, I think we are afraid of the cold, the dark, the distance between us and the air above the surface, the loss of control. Being underwater is not conducive to life. We do not often put ourselves in places where, if we do nothing, we will die. Being underwater is one of those places. To do nothing is to die. Our bodies know this, our brain is screaming it at us.

And so we act. We wildly reach for the surface and gasp in that breath of air. After the second and third breath we begin to believe that maybe things are going to turn out ok, and the terror begins to slip away. The blackness that had briefly overshadowed our mind (or was it simply that we are thinking of so many things that we can’t concentrate on any one?) lifts, letting us look around, beyond the waves, beyond the fear. We swim towards shore. We shiver, we laugh with our friends, grateful to have escaped.

Then we get back in the boat and do it all again. Even though the haunted look in our eyes is still there.