Mental stress and its physical consequences

In the month since my last post, my body has been making its unhappiness painfully clear.

About four weeks ago my right big toe became swollen and inflamed.  This was the second time this had happened during the summer, and it was quite a bit worse than the first time.  So I went to my local minor med clinic to see what was going on.  The doctor who saw me gave it a quick look and said, "That's gout."

I was rather stunned, because I had never seen myself as a candidate for gout.  I'd always associated gout with consumption of too much deli meat, and such is a negligible part of my diet.  But the doctor said all lean meats present the potential for causing gout, as do fermented food and drink like bread and beer.  I don't drink beer nearly as often as I used to, but I do buy bread from a local bakery and have a slice or two with supper most nights.

The doctor wrote me a couple of prescriptions and sent me on my way.  Over the next several days the pain and swelling in my toe eased.

But my body was just getting warmed up.  That Friday evening I felt a hint of sickness coming on, and the next morning I woke up feeling sort of crumby (yes, crumby, like crumbs).  I went down to the riverfront for my usual Saturday morning paddle, thinking maybe I just hadn't slept so well and a little physical exercise would snap me out of it.  But after a long, slow session of stretching on the dock, I decided I just didn't have it in me to get in the boat, and I came home.  After lunch I lay down in bed and, my condition worsening, I stayed there all afternoon.  I got up long enough to prepare and ingest a tiny supper, and got right back in bed.  I had a horrible night of sleep, during which I woke up several times with fever, headaches, body aches, and alternating chills and sweats.  Twice I had to go to the bathroom and throw up.  Once the sun was up Sunday morning I made a small breakfast, then returned to bed, planning a return trip to the minor med place Monday morning.  But by mid afternoon I started feeling as if the worst was over: the fever broke and the aches weren't so bad.  I slept a lot better that night and by Monday morning I was feeling well enough that I decided to skip the minor med.

I had a lot to do.  My sister had come to town just after Labor Day with the intention of getting our mother's house cleaned out.  She had taken the lead on that project, while I was focusing on the financial- and probate-related chores, along with paying off our mother's bills and canceling services we no longer needed and stuff like that.  But cleaning out a house does require some muscle power, and I knew I would need to lend a hand.

By the following weekend we were ready to move the bulk of the furniture out of the house and into a storage unit we'd rented.  My brother-in-law and my niece flew in to help, and I recruited a friend of mine as well.  That Saturday was the brutal moving day, and fairly early in the day I managed to hurt my back while wrestling with a large hutch.  For the rest of the day I endured stabbing pain in the lower-left area of my back, and I had to let the others handle the heaviest lifting.

This was certainly not the first time I had hurt my back in such a way, and I knew it would work itself out in a few days.  But I was flat-out miserable that Saturday evening, and while the pain did ease over the next couple of days, the area was tender for at least another week.

Finally, the discomfort that I've had in the right side of my neck since February has been as bad as ever in the last couple of weeks.  I've been popping a lot of pills that my doctor recommended that are a combination of ibuprofen and acetaminophen, and those have helped maybe a little, but I remain at a loss for where to find long-term relief.  In recent days a couple of friends have suggested acupuncture, so maybe that'll be my next step, just as soon as I dig myself out from under the mountain of chores related to my mom's passing--getting rid of random stuff, canceling various services she'd been getting billed for, gathering estate documents for the probate process... it's a little overwhelming.

And indeed, I think all these physical woes I've been having can largely be chalked up to stress.  For me, life has revolved around the decline and death of my mother for pretty much all of 2026.  I'm looking forward to moving on from it all, and settling into some new version of normalcy, but I'm not quite there yet.

I've always been my own worst enemy in the stress department.  Here's just one example from this past week: we had a big box of unopened packages of adult diapers to get rid of, and my sister told me the Salvation Army had a donation bin for such products and asked me if I would take it there.  I said I'd be happy to, but when I arrived at the Salvation Army I could find no donation bin, and when I went inside to ask the front desk where it was, the man looked at me like I was crazy.  There was another man standing nearby who said "Oh, I know where you can take those!" and proceeded to direct me to a church that he assured me would be "delighted" to have the diapers.  The church was somewhat off my normal route, so the diapers sat in my trunk for a couple of days until I found time to get over there.  The lady I spoke to there was in fact not "delighted" to receive the diapers, explaining that while she'd be willing to accept maybe one package, she was afraid any greater quantity would just sit around unclaimed for months.  She was very nice and eager to help, however, and after a few phone calls she told me that Catholic Charities of West Tennessee would accept the diapers.  Again, the place was a bit out of my way, so it wasn't until the next day that I made it to Catholic Charities.  There, an official-looking lady saw me wandering around the parking lot with my big box of diapers and instructed me to leave it by the back door, even though there was a sign there that said "Do not leave items outside the door; they will not be accepted."  I did as she told me, and was glad to be rid of the diapers at last, but there was still that nagging feeling of unfinished business because I hadn't actually placed the donation into somebody's willing hands.

Most people would have taken the whole business in stride, but for me, every minute those diapers sat in my trunk added to my overall stress level.  I'm afraid that's just how I'm wired: when I'm given an assignment, I can't rest easy until it is complete, and when I have one like this that appears simple but isn't, it gets under my skin.  And this isn't the only one: I thought it would be very easy to cancel my mother's credit cards, but those companies all needed to see copies of the death certificate first.  Sigh.

All this stuff has interrupted my paddling routine some, but I'm happy to say I'm still maintaining what can be called a routine.  I got in the boat several times this past week.  On Wednesday I paddled down to the mouth of the harbor to find an upstream-moving barge rig perfectly positioned for me to paddle right out to it.  It was generating some BIG waves that were moving fast, but not so fast that I couldn't catch them with a well-timed sprint.  Unfortunately, I didn't quite have the confidence in my stability to sprint with maximum power, so I missed a bunch of the best ones.  It wasn't until I'd fallen back into smaller waves that I was able to catch a few, and by this time they were getting spread out to my left and right.  I managed a handful of decent rides, but catching one of those big beauties would have been epic.

I paddled again Thursday and Friday, and all was quiet out on the river, so I just paddled steady and enjoyed the break from all the stresses of life on dry land.

For more information on what this blog is about, click here.

Monday photo feature

Like I said a couple of posts back, at this time a year ago I was paddling, floating, drifting through the one and only Grand Canyon that the Colorado River has cut through the Plateau Province of North America.  This is just one of many photos that my buddy Rob Lieb captured between August 27 and September 11 of last year.

For more information on what this blog is about, click here.

Seeking the ever-elusive balance

I continue to get in the boat a few times each week.  Some days I'm rarin' to go, and other days I don't feel much giddy-up at all.

This week we've had a run of very hot weather.  We've hit 100 degrees Fahrenheit at least a couple of times.  Going out and paddling is sort of my outside time for the day when it's like that; the rest of the day, especially when the temperature peaks in the afternoon, I'm sticking to the air-conditioned indoors as much as possible.

The oppressive heat motivates me to get good and wet.  This is definitely the time of year for practicing remounts.  And nothing feels better in this weather than a cool hose bath on the dock after paddling.

Of course, the most fun way to get wet is surfing some wakes.  I had a couple of opportunities to do that earlier this past week; one barge rig in particular was generating some very nice waves.  But these waves reminded me how important balance is: a number of times I let waves get away because I was too off-balance to execute the strokes I needed to.

Balance is something I've always struggled with to some degree.  Or, to put it another way, one of the ways elite paddlers separate themselves from everybody else is through their ability to execute strokes even when their bodies are in the most awkward, off-balance positions.  It's not surprising to me that a lot of world-class paddlesport athletes did some gymnastics when they were younger, or diving, or some other activity that requires some acrobatic maneuvering.  U.S. slalom racer Casey Eichfeld, who is currently hoping to make his fifth Olympic team in 2028, did some ballet dancing when he was a kid.

That's not my background at all.  I was never that kid who was always turning cartwheels, or doing backflips, or showing off tricks from the high diving board.  Even doing a simple dive was something I couldn't really manage: throwing my whole body into an upside-down position was just beyond me.  Aside from that, I wasn't really athletic at all until I reached middle school, when I found that endurance-oriented sports (namely distance running) were what I was good at.

But around that same time I found that I really enjoyed navigating rivers in a canoe.  Some of the people I was doing it with paddled kayaks and knew how to roll, and that made me want to learn to do that, too.  I spent the next few summers trying to get my roll down, and the sensation of being upside down, heels over head, was not easy to deal with for this non-acrobat.  But eventually I figured it out, and my whitewater skill level took off from there, once I was no longer so worried about swimming whenever I flipped.

Mind you, I still would never be mistaken for an acrobat.  The ability to roll is really just the bare minimum for paddling whitewater at a high level.  Because the surface of a whitewater river (and also the ocean, which I would get into paddling later) is not flat, a paddler must constantly adjust his center of gravity to stay in control.  Elite-level whitewater (and ocean) paddlers have a keen awareness of their positions in three-dimensional space that I've just never been able to achieve.

But before my readers smother me in pity, I'll just note that years of trying my best have resulted in at least a modicum of competence.  When I paddled a double surfski with Jasper Mocke in South Africa last January, Jasper remarked that I was much better than their average camp attendee at moving my hips with the motions of the boat and not resorting to braces to keep myself balanced.

This story has a familiar moral: you never know what you might achieve if you just keep going at it.  Even though these days my life is full of all the usual fallout from a death in the family--cleaning out the house, sorting out personal effects, probating the will, all that stuff--I'm still making time to get in the boat and, at the very least, go through the motions.

For more information on what this blog is about, click here.

Paddling here at home, and thinking about paddling out in desert canyon country

The pain that's been present in the right side of my neck since early February shows no signs of going away.  Most of the time it's a low-grade sort of thing, but once in a while it gets really bad--for several days last week, it was quite a bit worse than usual.  And in recent weeks I've also noticed some "floaters" in the vision of my right eye, along with some occasional "lightning" when I twist my neck a certain way.

I guess I really ought to seek some kind of medical attention.  Having spent a good bit of this year navigating the healthcare system on my mother's behalf, I just haven't had it in me to look for answers to my own issues, too.  And besides that, I'm pretty sure this is all related to the impinged nerves that an MRI revealed three years ago; the treatment options for that are few and not very appealing.

So, for now I continue simply to live with it.  The bright side is that I can still paddle without any detectable hindrance.  I continue to follow my usual Sunday-Tuesday-Thursday-Saturday paddling routine most weeks.  If there's barge traffic out on the Mississippi, I paddle out to explore the surfing opportunities; if all is quiet out there, then I just paddle steady for 40 minutes or 50 minutes or an hour.

One thing I've been reminded of lately is how much better I feel, in terms of mood and energy level, after doing some higher-intensity paddling.  Hard, fast efforts generate endorphins, of course; and in the case of surfing barge wakes, you also get an adrenaline rush from riding a big wave that's powerful enough to toss a surfski around like a toothpick.  So I always feel sort of a glow when I return to the dock after that kind of activity.  Long, steady paddles certainly have their place, but I usually feel more beaten down afterward.

In other news...

This past Saturday, the 29th of August, there was a catastrophic flash flood that raged down Bright Angel Creek, which flows into the Colorado River at Phantom Ranch in the Grand Canyon.  If you check You Tube and social media sites, you can find plenty of photos and video footage of the debris flow emanating from the creek's mouth: it included bridges that had been washed out, buildings from the Phantom Ranch area, lots of logs and sticks, and, sadly, at least a couple of human bodies.  The flooding was caused in part by heavy rain that fell in the burn-scar area of the Dragon Bravo Fire that took place in July and August of last year.

At this time last year, I was engaged in my 16-day paddling trip through the Grand Canyon.  The events of this past weekend have led me to contemplate the challenges my party would face if our trip were on the same dates this year.  Our Launch Day was August 27, and so August 29 would have been Day Three.  We camped at Nankoweap (Mile 53.5) at the end of Day Three last year.  That's 34.6 miles above Phantom Ranch, so we wouldn't have been directly endangered by the flash flood.  But in the wake of the flash flood this past weekend, the National Park Service temporarily halted all river-running parties.  So if we were on the river at this time, we would have had an unplanned layover day, and instead of passing Phantom Ranch on Day Five, we'd be doing so on Day Six (today, the second of September).  Instead of using the spigot at Phantom Ranch for replenishing our water stores, we would have to do more of our own filtering with the equipment provided by our outfitter, and that's a tedious, time-consuming process.

Proceeding downriver from Phantom Ranch, we'd be encountering all kinds of floating debris in the eddies, along with fragments of those washed-out bridges and buildings and other random stuff that could present a variety of safety hazards.  And having lost a day of progress through the canyon, we'd be harder pressed to make the takeout at Diamond Creek by Day Sixteen.  Surely the N.P.S. would understand if we had to extend our journey into a 17th day... but then again, I have no idea.

Let's just say I'm glad we got our trip in when we did.  I remember being very concerned about the impact the Dragon Bravo Fire might have on our trip last year, but in the end we had very few problems.  The flash floods that took place during our time on the river were nowhere near as severe as last Saturday's, and they occurred when we were not nearby.  About the only evidence we saw of such an event was the dark-grey color the river was running when we woke up the morning of Day Thirteen.

In short, we enjoyed good luck.  I believe most river-running parties in the Grand Canyon manage to get through it with no serious issues, but the events of last weekend are a reminder that the dynamic processes of our planet always move forward with no regard for who might be around.

For more information on what this blog is about, click here.

Monday photo feature

I mentioned a lot of parents in yesterday's post.  Here's one of them, Myriam Jerusalmi (mother-to-be of Jessica Fox), pictured in Sports Illustrated after winning the women's kayak class at the 1989 world championships on Maryland's Savage River.

For more information on what this blog is about, click here.

Living a legacy

In a typical week I paddle on Tuesday morning, but this was anything but a typical week.  My mother's funeral took place on Tuesday morning, and the morning after that we had the "committal" (interment) ceremony out at the cemetery.  I finally got back in the boat Thursday, and I paddled again yesterday and today.  The sessions were unremarkable--just some steady paddling, a mental health break from all the goings-on.  I also did some bike riding Monday and Friday (when I got another flat tire😠).

Navigating the business of laying my mother to rest, I thought a lot about the extent to which our parents shape the people that we are.  There's no question that my mother and father had a profound influence on the person I have become: how I think, how I talk, how I interact with others, my moral compass... everything.

But seeing as how this is a canoe & kayak blog, I'll focus on my identity as a paddler.  How did the people my parents were lead me into a life of paddling boats?

There are famous examples of great canoe & kayak athletes begetting great canoe & kayak athletes.  British whitewater slalom kayaker Richard Fox, whose competitive career spanned the 1970s, 80s, and 90s, was regarded as one of the greatest the sport had ever seen as he piled up five world championships along with many other medals in international competition.  He married French paddler Myriam Jerusalmi, herself a world champion and top-ranked international competitor.  The couple moved to Australia to accept coaching positions, and one of their daughters, Jessica, has become perhaps the greatest whitewater slalom athlete of all time.

In the world of ocean kayak racing, 17-year-old South African Sam Mocke is one of the most promising young paddlers, and he too is the progeny of internationally successful canoe & kayak athletes: father Dawid Mocke was one of the world's top ocean surfski racers a couple of decades ago, while mother Nikki Mocke was a flatwater sprint kayaker on South Africa's 2008 Olympic team.  Both remain actively involved in paddling or paddling-adjacent activities, Dawid the operator of the Surfski School and Downwind Camps (like the one I attended this past January) and Nikki an organizing force in the local surf lifesaving club.

I'm pretty sure I there's nothing coincidental about Jessica and Sam's success and who their parents are.  They both "grew up in the boat" under the constant supervision of the world's leading experts.  And they're not the only ones: in paddlesports, and for that matter in all other sports, if your parents were elite-level performers, there's an awfully good chance you'll be one, too, if you choose to follow in their footsteps.

Some of the other top athletes I know have family stories that are a little more subtle.  Siblings Davey and Cathy Hearn were both world champions and Olympians in whitewater slalom, and their brother Bill was quite good as well.  Their parents, Carter and Mary Alice Hearn, did not have notable competitive careers on the world stage.  But they paddled recreationally with the DC-based Canoe Cruisers Association, and Carter did some club-level slalom racing at a time when the sport was barely known in the United States.  The family made trips out West nearly every summer because Carter, a geologist, had fieldwork assignments there.  And so the Hearn children grew up around paddling as well as camping and other outdoor activities.  The idea of racing didn't really come into focus until DC-area native Jamie McEwan, whom they knew through their parents' C.C.A. membership, won the C1 bronze medal at the 1972 Olympics at Augsburg, West Germany.  For the next few years Carter and Mary Alice gave their kids all the support they could as they pursued their own slalom excellence.  For example, they enrolled them in a C.C.A. youth racing program overseen by Jamie's mother May McEwan, and sent them to the Madawaska Kanu Centre in Ontario to be coached by some of the world's top paddlers of that era.

Greg Barton, winner of world and Olympic titles as a flatwater kayaker, is another elite athlete whom I've come to know well, and his family background is not so different from the Hearns'.  Greg was born into a farming family in rural Michigan, and paddling was a big part of how the family had fun.  In the summertime they would head north to places like the Boundary Waters Canoe Area for a few days of paddling and camping and fishing, and Greg's parents, Mike and Kathy, were involved in North American style marathon canoe racing.  Through this racing activity the family met Marcia Smoke of Buchanan, Michigan, who had won a bronze medal in flatwater kayaking at the 1964 Olympics, and she was a major source of knowledge and inspiration not just for Greg, but also for his brother Bruce, who made the 1976 and 1980 U.S. Olympic teams, and his sister Connie, who raced in the junior world championships.

And so the Hearns and Greg Barton are examples of top paddlers whose parents were not champions themselves, but did lots and lots of "for fun" paddling and had contact with accomplished racers who went on to serve as mentors and role models for the kids.

And now we circle back around to little old me.  My parents were Sara and Elmore.  What were they like?  Well, I wouldn't describe them as sedentary, but they weren't especially athletic, either.  (My dad did run some track in school, but by the time I was born he'd settled into life behind a desk as a very busy lawyer.)  They appreciated the value of the outdoors, but they were not "rugged outdoorsmen."  On family outings they liked to get out and walk, but stuck to fairly easy day hikes in gardens and nature centers and similar "developed" areas.  For accommodations, we stayed in motels; we never, ever camped.

They did like to swim and be around the water, though, and we took a few beach vacations on the Gulf coast.  And their best friends had a cabin on a quiet section of the Spring River at Hardy, Arkansas, and that's where I got my first taste of canoeing.

The best thing my parents ever did, as far as my evolution into a paddler goes, was send me to summer camp in western North Carolina.  I spent the first several summers doing some hiking and camping and horseback riding and generally growing to love the outdoors.  Then in my fourth summer, at age 13, I'd become physically mature enough to handle the big open canoes that were the staple of summer camp fleets back then, and that's when I really started to see what paddling was all about.  The canoeing staff taught us the strokes and the skills and techniques for running a whitewater river, and from that point on there was no way I'd rather spend a day than out on a playful mountain stream.  When I got home from camp at the end of the summer my mother could see how excited I was about it all, and promptly enrolled me in an "intro to kayaking" continuing ed course over at Memphis State University.  The sessions were all in a swimming pool and mostly involved learning to roll (which I struggled to do), but it was as good as anything we had here in our whitewater-poor part of the country.

I spent another decade going to camp each summer, and that was my chance to develop as a paddler.  The camp's program was not racing-focused, however, so it wasn't until the early 1990s, by which time I was well into my 20s, that I ventured into the sport's competitive realm.  I quickly realized I still had much to learn, and I set about the business of doing so while posting often-humbling results in whitewater slalom races.

There were definitely moments when I wanted to wail in anguish, "Oh... OH........ if only my parents were paddlers too, if I'd gotten started at a younger age, or if I'd gotten to grow up someplace where I could have paddled more often... then I might actually be good at this!"

Now, just a few days before my 59th birthday, I'm pretty much over such feelings.  If my parents taught me anything, it's that no activity I participate in should be about me.  Sure, I should try to do it as well as I possibly can, but I should always look for ways to make the activity better for all the other participants, too.  And the more success I enjoy, the greater that responsibility is.  (That's a big part of why I started up this blog--I hope that in some small way, somebody will benefit from the thoughts I share here.)

Meanwhile, my parents did everything I could ever have asked of the people they were.  They could have done more if they were expert paddlers, or if they'd known people who were expert paddlers; but they weren't and they didn't.  And that's okay.  What's important is that they cared, and they loved me and supported me in every way they could even though I was having to find my own way most of the time.

And even though I never got as good as the people I talk about above, you know... I'm good enough.  Good enough to go out and paddle my boat for a lifetime of enjoyment and physical fitness.  I'll still try to finish as high as I can whenever I line up to race with a few dozen other people, but the greatest privilege is simply being one of that few dozen.  As the narrator of the classic film Fast and Clean puts it, "The road to the top is started by many and finished by few."  There's plenty of dignity in traveling the road even if you're not one of the few that make it all the way.

The day will ultimately come when I join my father and mother in death, and the best I can hope for is that I'll be remembered for the same reasons they are: that I tried to make the world around me better, not worse, and that I lived life the best way I knew how.

For more information on what this blog is about, click here.

Whew, it's hot... but the river is rising

The Mississippi River is on a fairly dramatic rise: a week ago it was flowing at a little below zero on the Memphis gauge, but in the next ten days or so it's forecast to get up to over 11 feet above zero.  That might surprise many locals, considering it's been sunny and hot, with very little rainfall, here in Memphis in the last several weeks.  But up in the Midwest, particularly in Indiana and Ohio, they've had more rain than they can deal with.  As of this writing some 11 inches have fallen in parts of those states, with more rain in the forecast.  One site of catastrophic flooding is the White River watershed northeast of Indianapolis.  The White flows southwesterly across the state of Indiana until it joins the Wabash River, and the Wabash, in turn, flows into the Ohio.  And as everybody knows (or should know), the Ohio is one of the major tributaries of the lower Mississippi.  And so that floodwater from the Midwest will be bringing the river level up here at Memphis over the next few days.

On Thursday I got in the boat for the first time since the race last weekend.  When I reached the mouth of the harbor I found a barge rig coming upriver from beneath the Harahan Bridge, so I went out and did some surfing.  The waves weren't the best ever, but they were decent, and I got a few good rides.

My mother's funeral is scheduled for this Tuesday, and after that my sister and I will begin the long process of handling estate matters and cleaning out my mother's house.  I expect that to dominate my life for the next couple of months, but in these days between my mother's death and the funeral, I'm feeling like I have all kinds of time on my hands.  For months, chores related to my mother were part of my daily routine--grocery shopping, paying bills, speaking with doctors and nurses and caregivers, and just going over to her house and sitting with her as the final weeks of her life ticked away.  Now, suddenly, all those chores have vanished.

On Friday morning I got out for a bike ride, taking the Greater Memphis Greenline out to Shelby Farms and back.  This weekend we're having the highest temperatures of the year so far, with the afternoon highs exceeding 100 degrees Fahrenheit.  So it was a good, sweaty ride Friday, and maybe that was what the doctor ordered.  For the last month or so I've been having terrible luck with flat tires on my bike, and I got yet another one on this ride.  Fortunately, this flat didn't occur until the very end of the ride, just a few hundred meters from my house.

I was back in the boat yesterday morning.  There was no barge traffic on the river, so I just paddled steady for 50 minutes.  The sun was beating down, but at least there was a breeze from the south that offered some relief.  The only trouble was that I had to paddle the last two kilometers to the dock heading north up the harbor, with the breeze at my back.

It was already 90 degrees as I drove down to the river at a quarter past nine o'clock this morning.  I did much the same thing in the boat as yesterday.  Back on the dock I took a bath under the hose, but even as the cool water flowed over me, sweat oozed from my pores.  As I drove home around 11 o'clock, the temperature display in my car registered as high as 99 degrees.

For more information on what this blog is about, click here.