Sharks and Waterfalls

At my high school graduation I received a card whose cover ran, “Once, you were a tiny drop of water. Then you became a stream, getting bigger and bigger, and now you are a mighty river, running towards the ocean…” I opened the card and read, “…where all the sharks live.” As fun as it is, of course, the analogy makes as much sense as a gust of wind fearing the birds. For this month’s blog I’m not even going to try to link my two themes, and instead give you two short entries. Waterfalls. Sharks.

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In Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, Annie Dillard writes eloquently of standing on a bridge over the rushing river below. Looking upstream, she writes, is to look at the future. This is the water that has not yet reached you. Perhaps it carries a fallen branch, a floating leaf, a salmon hatchling. It is always new and different. To look downstream is to look at the water that has already passed. The past.

This works beautifully if you are standing on the bridge or riverbank. But for seven summers I guided whitewater river trips, and these rivers have indelibly etched in my brain that the future lies downstream. With the exception of eddies--and, once, an epic poison-ivy bank scramble pulling a swamped baggage raft back up to catch the eddy at Saddle Creek--there’s no going back. Even when we pull over, to camp for the night or to scout the next rapid, the river’s pull draws my attention to what will come next: the water’s flow becomes my own.

To facing upstream is to risk blindly drifting into Wild Sheep or Granite, class IV rapids.

In retrospect, I have been navigating the last 3 months not as a spectator on a bridge looking upwards to the future, nor as a river guide looking downwards to the future, but as a soaked rat on a piece of flotsam, gazing back at the rapids and—oops!—waterfalls I’ve just come through.

In February we moved houses. Rather than take time off, both LL and I worked more than usual in the last three months. We both took on additional extracurricular activities beyond our paid work. But the current did not slow down for us just because we decided to be crazy. There were still bills to be paid, food to be purchased, meals to be prepared, diapers to be changed. I'm thankful to say that we were mostly able to make our two-year-old our top priority, and I don't think he is much the worse for the wear. But eventually such stress will tear apart even the sturdiest raft. We have at least identified the need to seek calmer waters and back-eddies, to rebuild before we go over any even bigger falls.

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A shark need to keep moving in order to breathe. This oft-repeated statement actually turns out to be true, as best as we can tell, for most sharks, most of the time. Those qualifiers might give one pause, yet all science has such qualifiers, whether we articulate them or not. The act of observing changes what is observed. Or, at the least, it is impossible to prove that it does not.

I digress. Sharks, movement, oxygen. I suffer from intermittent sesamoiditis, which sounds like some unbecoming disease contracted south of the border (doubly so), but is actually an inflammation (-itis) of a pair of tiny bones located directly under the ball of the foot. The simple equation is that more pressure causes more inflammation, so one would expect that being on one's feet, on a hard surface, for long hours, would cause inflammation and pain. This is exactly what happened during my residency training. For five non-consecutive months over the three years, I wheeled about the hospital on a "Roll-About"--picture a kid's scooter with the platform padded and raised to knee height--because it was too painful to stand.

The converse, however, is not consistently true: rest has not always healed my foot pain. Similar to the pain of plantar fasciitis (-itis of the plantar fascia running from the heel to the mid-foot), stretching the muscles and tendons that pull on my sesamoids has proved crucial in relief. Stretching requires movement. And whether or not piezoelectricity, the growth-stimulating charge that causes bones to become stronger with weight-bearing, plays a role, I have found that I do much better with daily exercise. It would seem that I need to move to be healthy.

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Perhaps as a shark I can better navigate the waters ahead. If life is a constant reframing of perspective, then maybe I was not nearly so avant-garde as I'd pictured myself with my river-guide-rather-than-brigde-dweller viewpoint. Perhaps, then, I need to stop trying to stay dry and start learning to swim.