Georgia Biathlon

Ask Brad Spence if he remembers a scene similar to this:

It’s in the evening when you come home. You see wet clothes, covered in mud, at the doorstep. There is also a shovel. The canoe isn’t lying where it normally does. You think about the creek nearby.

It was a warm afternoon in Athens when I emerged from our host’s house and stood out on the back porch. The Oconee River is about 200 meters down the steep slope of the back yard, and as I approached the railing of the deck I noticed a canoe laying in the grass below. I told Skip I fancied some canoeing, he told me he was going to take a nap. So, I humped the canoe onto my shoulders and walked down the steep slope of the backyard to the water’s edge. I didn’t notice a paddle lying around. I walked back up the hill and circled the house, but there was no paddle. I went back inside and looked around in the garage, but there wasn’t a paddle or an oar in there either. There was however a spade shovel. Good enough.

To set the canoe in the water, I had to balance myself on a log and walk down the trunk about 7 feet. I balanced myself, picked up the canoe and counterbalanced, then walked out and set the canoe in the water. I went back and grabbed the shovel, got in the canoe and pushed off without incident.

The water was a little too shallow for me to navigate the canoe successfully without having to get out in certain places and lift the canoe off of mossy rocks. One of the time I did this I heard a rustling by the bank and saw a fawn struggling to stand. As I watched it became apparent that something was wrong with this fawn. None of its limb appeared to be broken, but its legs shook whenever it tried to stand, and it would make it a few feet before tumbling headlong, landing on either its head or side, depending on its positioning. I concluded there must have been some neurological disorder affecting it, which is typical of animals with Lyme’s Disease, as so many white-tailed deer are. As it became ever aware of my presence, it began to panic, and doing so caused it to make desperate lunges towards the forest, but between the muddy embankment and its malady it only succeeded in getting closer and closer to the water. I didn’t know what to do to help it. For a minute I considered killing it with my shovel to put it out of its misery. I then reasoned that it wasn’t my place to make such a decision. I knew that it would be dead soon anyhow, most likely from a predator, and it wasn’t my role to be part of that cycle, but if I stayed any longer the deer would surely wind up in the river, where it had a good chance of drowning, and I didn’t want to be the cause of that either. It is in my nature to help things that can’t help themselves, and I felt that by not doing anything, by letting nature take its course, I failed both the fawn and my true nature. Even whispering the Serenity Prayer to myself didn’t help to rectify the powerlessness I felt in that instant.

I turned around and paddled back upstream to the house. I got out on the log and steadied myself. Still thinking about the fawn, I lifted the canoe out of the water but in so doing lost my balance. Before I even realized what I had stepped back into, I was sinking. It took me maybe half a second to realize I was in quicksand, and by that time it was up to my mid-thigh. There were a few thoughts I had in that moment, the speed of the quicksand grudgingly slow in comparison to the firings of the synaptic centers of the brain. Reflecting back on it later, these were the thoughts I had:

1. DO NOT PANIC. Skip told me that in survival school he learned about the 3 seconds, 3 minutes, 3 hours rule; most people who panic die within the first three seconds of a situation, depending on their response to it.
2. DO NOT PANIC. Reiterated from Douglas Adam’s The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.
3. My good friends Nick and Andrea Pentz bought me a book years ago that chronicled what to do if caught in quicksand, and I utilized that knowledge next.

With the silt almost up to my waist, I pushed down on the log next to me and slowly, slowly, and calmly, emerged from the muck. I laid on the log and panted, exhausted but with the adrenaline still coursing through my system. I only had one thought then and in the fraction of a nano-second my thoughts left that bank in Athens, Georgia, crossing the state, the Atlantic, to rest in London, on the image of my love.

We’ve all read, seen, and heard about this phenomenon, and I wonder that, had I not been drunk in my previous life-threatening encounters, would I have experienced this before?

The prevalent theme in all journey stories and quest narratives surrounds the change the traveler makes during that journey, during that quest. Questions I’ve been asking myself for weeks, decisions I’ve been on the fence about, have been answered, as I hoped they would have been somewhere along this trip. I never expected I would have been hugging a log along the banks of a river when I had made them. Then again, it was along the banks of a river when Siddhartha Guatama discovered his Golden Path.