Re: [Paddlewise] Helping a new paddler?

Tom, if you can, keep the boat.  Don't sell the boat.

There have been a few really important threads on PaddleWise in the few years of its existence which have gone far beyond the interesting and potentially "fascinating" issues of Greenland paddle crafting and electric bilge pumps (mea culpe).  One of these, Tom, has been your sharing of an incredibly difficult, painful and protracted post-trauma return to a life that most of us take for granted.  Many of us who have been on the list since its early days have begun to appreciate, through your posts over time, how the human mind regenerates and repairs itself after extraordinary trauma --- and how that, too, can apply to sea kayaking.  In your case, we have seen a battle of mind over mind, and we've shared in --- and I'd suggest we've been enriched by --- the progress you've made in getting back to the water.  What you did for this newbie in the backwards skirt is what this list is all about.  Don't sell the boat, Tom.

Your post, and the uncomfortable drama of Doug and his confrontation with Storm Island --- and with his survival, his struggle with making that ordeal meaningful and important to others on and off the list, his bruised interpersonal relationships with his friends, and his impatience with "the system" and the vagaries and apparent bureaucracy of the press --- is another thread that ties us together.  If that makes us uneasy, if it's unpleasant or it makes us uncomfortable, it also makes us a lot wiser --- which is exactly the agenda that Jackie wanted to create in PaddleWise.

Paul Hollerbach's unforgettable first-person documentary of his own impending death in a storm on the Hudson River is another one of those intensely personal narratives which grabs you and holds on and hurts. The openness and candor of these threads sometimes make us very uncomfortable as witnesses.  But we learn from threads like these, and what the authors pay in giving up of themselves in communicating these sometimes horrendous experiences is paid out to the readers and participants on PaddleWise in incredible dividends.

Don't sell the boat, Tom.  The currents will come back --- the tidal and the river currents --- and the ones in your head which are still eddying out on you.  You knew the guy's skirt was on backwards, right?  You knew he was holding his paddle backwards, right?  You helped the newbie, and, in that, you perpetuated the spirit of PaddleWise.  So don't sell the boat, Tom, and stay with the list.  Please.  The price that you and Doug and Paul pay and have paid keeps the lights turned up bright on the PaddleWise porch.

Jack Martin


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