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Next Tuesday

Twelve days ago I saw the ghost of my former self. For the brief seconds of the encounter I became aware of an understanding I created throughout the process of learning, along the path of my previous lifetime. I knew the secrets of the world. When the ghost walked away, I forgot it all. But in the time since, small fragments of that knowledge, familiar but indecipherable, have been unearthed from my subconscious. I don't know who buried them there, but it sure as hell wasn't me.

The most unfortunate part about seeing my old ghost was that I only saw it for maybe five seconds. Or rather, the most unfortunate part was the reason why I only saw it for five seconds. We were running a rapid called 'Diagony' in the canyon and I had already passed the last eddy, committed to the namesake slot. I shouldn't have been looking at anything but the current, shouldn't have been thinking about anything at all. Instead I was looking at a phantom on a rock on river-left, thinking about something that's been driving me nuts ever since because I can't figure out what it was.

Before my memory failed, my vision narrowed, and focused-in on a face I recognized from somewhere. The rocks and trees, and the water and the froth, and the air and the yesterdays and tomorrows, and the joy and pain and love and whatever else; the whole world, bright and dark, took a back seat to what went on behind the eyes of my former ghost.

Our eyes were locked as it watched me enter the rapid backwards. Then it turned and disappeared.

When I came-to I was stuck in a wicked blast in the ledge hole below the drop I didn't remember running. My bow caught, and after the wheels stopped and the power flips wound down, my boat settled into the trough, upside-down and sideways, with my body still holding in.

My mind was gone. Unconcerned by the outside commotion, it was examining the first of the fragments left behind: a vague notion of some fantastic proportion... most of the meaning lost in the translation from pure knowledge to the language of the mind… actually made incomprehensible by the nature of thought. There was a reason why I couldn't understand it. Douglass Adams knew all along: in examining the universe, it is impossible to hold both the ultimate question and the ultimate answer at the same time. I was on the brink, jeopardizing my sanity.

Eventually, though, lack of oxygen will push even an insane person to act with purpose and reason. My lungs were screaming to be paid attention to, and my body obliged by reaching out for an undercurrent and, eventually, working my boat out of the hole and right-side up.

Flashes of popping light shot across my vision. Colors appeared and changed in my peripherals, swirling crazily like a mad disco ball. There was, for a few minutes, a cloudy area off to my right that moved when I shifted my gaze. My head swooned and my mind reeled, in different directions, which hurt. My numb hands still somehow held my paddle, although I noticed that my helmet was gone as I drifted randomly into an eddy.

Tuesday's run was much better than mine. She even found my helmet. I must have had one of those looks on my face that said "...don't even ask..." because she didn't. I could tell she was biting her lip not to laugh. I had to lie on the cobble shore for ten minutes just to see straight. Tuesday played in a whirlpool while I tried to stop my head from spinning. I was struggling to clear my mind, but something kept interrupting my meditation, like an insect that wouldn't leave me alone. I did my best to forget what I couldn't remember in the first place. When I stood back up, I got dizzy for a second. After that I felt all right. I got back in my boat and worked to regain my focus on the river. The hardest rapids were still downstream.

As I peeled out of the eddy, a mental storm moved in, blowing dust, exposing another shard, dissolving my concentration. Like a San Francisco summer day, the clouds came without warning, ruining my already shaken clarity and calm. I went from warm to cold; from a debutante on Divisadero to a tramp in the Tenderloin; from victor to victim in less time than it takes to explain. I went straight down. As with most creeks, straight is not the line of choice. Especially through the Falls.

I grew up on the canyon. I cut my teeth there, so to speak. I've run every line forwards and some backwards, so this time my body did all right for a while, without the benefit of my conscious decision-making. I suppose I followed my instincts, whatever that means. That I stayed upright amuses me still. But I got lost. The boulder garden of the lead-in was a maze, and I didn't even get close to hitting the first big drop in the right spot. My final sweep was just enough to straighten my boat to the current, and then I went deep. The white bubbles of the reversal gave way to dark, green silence. When I emerged from the melt-down, I had enough time to roll and take two strokes towards river-right before shouldering into a huge reaction pile and dropping over the crux sideways, and with no speed.

I can't say how long I was caught in the hole, side-surfing a boat designed in the days when such moves were considered last-ditch tactics; a 7+ foot Topo in a 14+ foot hole so deep I couldn't see the corners even if I'd opened my eyes, which I didn't. My brain and body cooperated to work the sides of the hole, but no dice. The shoulders simply kicked me back to the maw. I pushed, pulled, twisted, turned, and generally thrashed around. I tried everything I knew, or had heard of. My brain was out of ideas. My body was slouching, and without strength. My boat still floated, and that was all I had going for me.

And again my mind was elsewhere, ignorant, probing for understanding, wondering how a lesson that seemed so clear at the moment of prior death could now be so elusive with the next end within reach. I felt like a starving wanderer. The revelation had lost none of its intrigue. I was in seemingly desperate need of some clue to the meaning of a single thought. And nothing else mattered: not the pounding my body was taking, and not the person I loved most in the world, who was watching but unable to help. Nothing could break through the high castle walls of my mind. It had retreated into its own depths. The familiarity of the thought was unnerving, like when you've got words on the tip of your tongue and you're so frustrated you want to scream. I knew this farthest reach of my mind; I'd seen this all before, but had no clue where, or when, or what it meant or what to do about it. Last time death had preceded the thought, and it all made sense. This time, the thought was serving up cold death on the half-shell, with a world of confusion to boot.

The fragments are no help. I have since learned this. They make the puzzle harder to understand. They remind me of that James Joyce novel that begins and ends mid-sentence, with an unfathomable blur of information in between. Individually, they are inane; put together they are confounding. Like an optical illusion, they don't seem right no matter which way I look at them; like a dream, they dissolve the more I try to hold on. The noise in my head at times has been unbearable, but nothing compared to this.

Much later- after the hole flushed me; after Tuesday had popped my skirt, pulled my limp body from my boat, and dragged it to shore; and after she had successfully coaxed my lungs back into a slight but precarious breathing rhythm- my next memory involves a massive bright tunnel. Conveyed gently from there to here, drawn from one end, or perhaps propelled from the other, I awoke a choking wreck. Tuesday was noticeably concerned. She had, however, few options. She could leave me, and head off in an epic undertaking to find help; or she could stay here, and wait. She stayed, she waited, and I was glad. She built a fire, removed my wet gear, tried to make me comfortable. She boiled water, made some soup, and held me close for warmth. She saved my life, without question.

We are even now.

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