Here's something to read: Chris Duff's
On Celtic Tides: One Man's Journey Around Ireland By Sea Kayak. And, here are two passages that I like quite a lot from this non-fiction book. The first passage presents action and the consequences of action. The second passage moves us from the physical to the emotional, though the physical and emotional are constantly interwoven together and with the intellectual and even the spiritual in this fine book. Duff makes me want to pay more attention to the world around us, especially the natural world, but he also makes me want to get out the kayak and get wet even as I want to explore my Celtic heritage, to visit Ireland myself.
Mostly, I want to feel the salt and the burn of being out on the sea. I like solo outings, though on a much humbler scale than anything in this book. Here are Duff's own words I want to share:
From Chapter 5: Abbey Refuge:
After an hour getting tossed around like a cork, I entered the narrows between Dursey Island and the mainland. I was drained and it felt good to close my eyes and let the current gently spin me in a circle. Rough water paddling was exhausting. The physical exposure seemed to strip away all the protective emotional layers, and I felt as worn as the rocks on the outer coast. In the thick of big breaking waves, it was a constant measure of controlling the flight or fight instinct: too little adrenaline and I won't be aggressive enough, too much and I'll burn up energy too fast. The inclination is to pour on the power and try to get through the rough stuff fast. It doesn't work. The boat charges ahead, then plows into the oncoming wave or crashes into a trough. The only way is to slip into low gear and grind it out. Slow and steady, not fighting the power of the waves but letting them break on themselves. Dig in, a brace or back stroke here or there, then dig in again. It can be frustratingly slow and fatiguing.
After a brief rest in the channel, I turned and headed back out. Moments after leaving the calm, I almost went over. An inflamed tendon in my right wrist made gripping the paddle shaft with my thumb impossible and I couldn't control the angle of the blade. I had ignored the pain in the rough waters on the outside of the island. Now, without the distraction of breaking waves and a pitching boat, I was keenly aware of it. A wave tossed the boat over on its side and I sliced the edge of the paddle, rather than the back of it, into the water. A last-second hip flip with my right knee jammed against the inside of the cockpit kept me from going over. Despite the tendinitis and the near capsize, I was encouraged by my reaction time. It was instant and automatic, the way it had to be.
Getting thrown over and hanging for that millisecond on the edge of the boat was a reminder of just how tenuous my grasp on the trip was. I had to be "on" one hundred percent of the time and it was wearing me down. It hadn't been a massive wave that had almost upended me. In fact, it had been a ridiculously small one that I hadn't been paying attention to. I had come down off the adrenaline high of an hour earlier and I was focused on a cove a quarter mile in front of me, looking forward to getting out of the boat, into warm clothes, and already thinking about how much food and water I had in the rear compartment. I hadn't been attentive to the moment -- the worst mistake I could make. It wouldn't have been a big deal to have gone over, but it was a reminder of how a month of paddling had both honed my reactions and also begun to take its toll.
From a bit later in the same chapter . . . I like how this section builds off of the previous passage and how it builds in itself, as we move from the beginning here to the final paragraph here:
Kenmare River is actually a bay, longer and wider than both Bantry and Dunmanus, but for some reason, certainly Irish, it had been given a river status. I had wanted to paddle into the town of Kenmare, twenty-five miles up the bay, but after my experience with Bantry Bay and the westerly winds, I changed plans. It was almost mid-July. I had lost a lot of time sitting out bad weather and was less than a third of the way into the trip. Clearly this wasn't going to be a repeat of the previous summer, and I couldn't afford to get trapped by the winds again.
That was the trouble with big trips and exposed waters; so many miles and so much to see, but the weather always dictated the pace. If I explored every bay and island along the way, I could find myself a month behind schedule and running into bad weather on the last leg into Dublin. On the other hand, the fall could be fine and I would be kicking myself for not taking more time early in the trip. Time and weather were a gamble.
As I paddled across Kenmare River, I had plenty of time to think of the demands of the journey. The sky felt like a wet gray sponge waiting for a shift of wind to wring out its weight of trapped moisture. An easy four-foot swell did nothing to pull me out of the low that had crept up and hung like a shadow over my emotions. My mind and body felt disconnected, out of harmony with each other, for the first time in weeks. I was two or three miles from land and wanting desperately to crawl into the warmth of the bag, somewhere out of the wind, and just sleep off the physical and emotional drain. I wanted to be warm and dry. I want to eat the breakfasts that I dreamed about and see things familiar. I missed home and was tired of being on guard, of constantly worrying: food, water, tides, the weather reports three times a day, summer slipping by and still eight hundred miles to go. Four miles per hour if the seas were flat. The trip suddenly felt too big.
I remembered a retired lighthouse keeper warning me about the waters around Malin Head, some three hundred miles to the north. An Irish banker I had met two days ago in Allihies had told me how rough the seas were in County Sligo and how the winds were always so cold.
Why did people always do that? Why did they tell me of a fisherman who had drowned just two weeks earlier, or of waves bigger than any I had seen so far? Were they trying to distance themselves from something they did not understand? I had heard the same warnings when I was paddling up the Mississippi River, and in Nova Scotia's Bay of Fundy, in the Bristol Channel, and the Pentland Firth in northern Scotland. People were always quick to point out the hazards and just as quick to label me mad for attempting something they did not understand. Most days I could handle the doubts that people so freely shared, but on days when the trip had worn me down, their disbelief burrowed inside and undermined my confidence. People didn't realize that what I needed to hear was encouragement not stories of an impenetrable coastline or severe weather a hundred miles to the north. They had the comfort of returning to a warm, safe house after telling their tales, while I was left with the task of sorting out what I had been told. The irony was that I couldn't cut short these stories people wanted t0 tell me, because hidden in the telling there might be a bit of truth that I needed to hear. The trick was to separate the truth from the teller's emotions and balance that with my own knowledge and abilities. When I was low, the deciphering didn't work as well.
Where were the highs that I had felt just last week?
And so forth.
Duff, Chris. On Celtic Tides: One Man's Journey Around Ireland By Sea Kayak. New York: St. Martins Griffin, 1999. Print.
(Thanks, Hugh, for the forty-ninth birthday present.)
