Respect for Water
For many years our summer vacations, mine and kids when I was a single mom, then with Mark and the (even more) kids once we were together, were camping in the mountains.
We went to Western North Carolina for my 4oth birthday and while we were there two tropical storms diverted to the Western side of the Appalachians rather than coming up the coast. Basically we went toward the storms rather than away from them.
It rained so hard the kid’s tent collapsed on them and we spent the week, all 8 of us, camped in a small pop-up. It was fine.
We also did a lot of tubing on the Oconoluftee.
I have always known the ocean, had immense respect for it and the creatures thereof.
I did not understand mountain rivers and their power until that trip.
I love tubing through fast water. Wading in fast water. Riding the speed.
Well, I decided to ride the storm flood on an inner tube. 3 of the children were down and 1 of them had an arm in a cast which we wrapped with trash bags and duct tape. Yes, we have that redneck ingenuity. Sometimes, too, the attitude.
The river was flooded and fast and churning and brown and yet, to me, it looked like fun!
I hopped in, the kids behind, and we went for it. My youngest son lost his tube early on. The two girls were behind me. I looked at them immediately after I saw that I was heading for a washing machine—the flood waters were gushing over a huge boulder that is normally not under water, and on the far side of the boulder the water circled back on itself, a vertical whirlpool the size of a VW bug.
I knew then that I was going to die right there in the water, right in front of my horrified children and husband, and that is was my fault and that my two oldest daughters were also going to die. I screamed and signaled and was relieved that one of them managed to paddle out of the current, though it wasn’t very helpful to know that my eldest daughter was probably also going to die in the same washing machine as me. On the same day.
I have a lot of Cancer in my natal chart. Sun. Moon. IC. North Node. Water is supposed to be my element. I had been a fool and now the water was going to claim me.
I went, unavoidably, over that boulder and into the churn. And, predictably, I was held under the water by the force and volume of the water pouring over the stone. But, somehow, I found purchase on the face of the rock and shoved with every bit of power my equestrienne thighs held and POP! I shot out like a cork, bobbed to the surface, and turned to see Elizabeth go over and disappear.
Maybe it was now that I started screaming and Aleia paddled to the bank. I can’t remember. What I know is that the only thing more horrible than knowing my idiocy was going to cause my immediate and ridiculous death, was knowing that I had lived and that I was not going to be able to help my kid.
Well. She, too, bounced to the surface, madder than a wet hen, and I waded the river to reach her and help her back across. I don’t even remember where our inner tubes went or if we caught them. We had lived. I don’t know that my husband was even aware that this was happening, 60 yards upstream and fly fishing.
It was a lesson of some magnitude about respecting the power and force of water and also of owning that power and force within myself. There is sometime good sense in damming up the flow and then releasing it in a controlled fashion. I can generate electricity that way. If the dam breaks though? That’s some scary shit and there’s not always a boulder to push off of to come back to the surface.
Water deserves and can demand respect, even when it is your natural element. Going with the flow isn’t always healthy or smart and sometimes we need to avoid the flow altogether and have the sense to stay on dry land.
