In Part One of Paddling to Provenance, Rob cuts his teeth as a fishing guide on the Deschutes. But eventually, as new horizons become old hat, Rob finds himself increasingly drawn downstream, to the sea. 

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I left guiding on the Deschutes in the mid-eighties and moved north to the San Juan Islands, which I considered a stepping stone to the Canadian coast. Here, I stepped into a kayak for the first time but was put off by both the technical complexity of the self-rescue protocol and the inescapable views of the trophy homes that rim the islands.

I bought a tiny seven-foot raft and rowed it completely around my home on Orcas Island. But mostly I continued traveling back to Oregon and out to Idaho, the John Day, Owyhee, Grand Ronde and Salmon, exploring the river canyons and narrating our adventures for magazines and this here blog.

I had a buddy, best friend and longtime fish/boating partner for these exploits. Steve was a director for Snohomish County and could always get the needed time off. I worked part time on the island and had friends who would cover my gig in my absence. Steve and I would plan each season’s outing together, usually a project in the spring, summer and fall. I was good with the logistics and advance work and he bankrolled the operation.

Ultimately, this period satisfied my need for variety and some degree of adventure. But the desire to get to the wild sea coast was always in the back of my mind.

Enter one stunning, Nordic blonde… and future wife.

Pamela escaped SoCal to homestead a tract of land, well off the grid on a lonely hill on Lopez Island. Her resilience and determination to settle onto the land parlayed well to a love of paddling the sea. She’d even hand-built a Hooper Bay kayak that sat in the rafters of her home in the off-season. She invited me on an annual trip with a group of her friends, a nearly month-long kayak journey along the remote outer coast of Vancouver Island. It felt fated.

Immediately upon picking up the sinus rhythm of ocean swell our first day out, I landed a salmon on a trolled fly and both the fish and I were hooked! The water was vibrant and full of life, a refreshing tabula rasa for energetic states. Whereas the extent of a river is pretty much what you’re looking at, the ocean is volatile and capricious. And there were storms, nearly as awesome as the sea itself!

With my feet still wet, I launched a year later from a beach on my home island. Looking to circle the big island this time, I paddled counter-clockwise up the inside to get my sea legs and back down the outside with the prevailing wind and current. Several more solo trips in subsequent years fleshed out the possibilities of the experience. I hitched a ride on a friend’s seiner to southeast Alaska and paddled around Chichagof Island. The following year it was back down to Haida Gwaii and cruising the western coast of Moresby and Graham Islands.

The takeaways from these solo journeys were much as I had hoped: a lonely, yet blessed wilderness seashore experience, facing my old bone-deep fear/veneration of the sea and fishing like out of a dream.

A certain amount of character growth was involved, and developing the ability to control panic was at the top of the list. I faced up to my deepest fear as I rounded the big island at Cape Scott. A field of huge waves boomed against black rock reefs, sending pennants of white foam skyward. Jockeying the boat through this intimidating display of raw power, it felt as if the breakers were chasing after me! It was the result, I think, of the anthropomorphization I had bestowed upon the ocean as a boy, crossing the North Atlantic in a small troop transport ship during a winter gale.

The idea that the ocean had malicious agency was a tough illusion to dispel. But weeks (or was it months?) later, I was puissant paddling in active seas. I could recognize the pattern, not react blindly and slalom safely around the breakers. Knowledge was, indeed, power.

This salt phase of my boating life was wild and lonely, challenging and rewarding, occasionally exciting and very often tedious. Fishing was a necessary imperative and one I thoroughly enjoyed. Funny, how it was though. The juice I typically got from wetting a line was muted out here. Just sitting my boat within spitting distance from breaking surf was excitement enough. Ironically, fishing had a more grounding effect, providing a chance to settle in and focus on something I enjoyed doing.

The boat, a huge sit-on-top kayak, was more freighter than sporty, but I was okay with that. It was safe, if slow, and carried a serious amount of swag. One of the advantages of the freighter-style kayak was, of course, to bring more stuff. On board I had a traveling library, a game or two, photographic equipment and an arsenal of fly tackle.

Storms were not so much endured as reveled in. I carried the best alpine tent in existence: a 3P/4S The North Face VE 25. For reference, I endured hurricane-force winds on a tiny islet off the west coast with a buddy who was using a vaunted Swedish tent design. His busted up in the middle of the night while I came through unscathed.

I was gone so long on these journeys that I felt effectively there, something that was always missing with the busy leaving-and-preparing-to-return logistics typical of shorter trips.

At one point, having paddled for several hours, I noticed my mental loop was still tied to old business. Old communications from months earlier at home. Moreover, I sensed a vacuous quality about the thought trains, the compulsive rehashing of old information. When I turned the scanner off and surrendered to paddling the boat, I found myself completely present… albeit briefly. The mind is not so easily denied!

That said, I discovered a kind of paddling samadhi as the weeks and months rolled by, whereby I became one with the act of propelling myself across the surface of the sea. Positive samadhi describes a deep and active presence with what one is doing. Absolute samadhi is a similar state of at-one-ment when one is inactive in deep meditation.

I had moments of the positive state back on the river as well, when I would drop in at the head of a rapid, pick my line and meld with the boat in the current, responding intuitively to pressure and flow. Or during the long hours spent trying to lure a steelhead up from river bottom, wading slowly through the water, rhythmically casting and swinging my fly across the surface of the river and slipping into the zone.

After three years of soloing, I was done. It had been glorious to travel alone along the ocean’s rim and to sleep at the edge of the brooding, temperate rainforest. But I had reached the end of the road. I would spend another decade bringing my friends out to paddle the hottest sections of coast and running our favorite river canyons in Oregon and Idaho. But they lacked the threshold of discovery that had meant so much. 

I know that for many people, boating is a lifelong passion. They look forward to getting out on the water until the day they haven’t the strength left to pick up the paddle. I can appreciate that.

I’m 77 now and my last river exploration was of the Upper Owyhee, three years back. No doubt I’ll pick up a paddle or a couple of oars a time or two before I’m toast. But I have essentially jumped ship, pun intended.

What was next? An important aspect of my time on the water had always been about pushing the envelope, meeting the next challenge, making the next discovery. But the time for that was past. So, I thought, what might be the next crusade germane to someone at my stage of life?

The realization hit me like a bolt of lightning.

I could see how the path of my life on the water, flowing from river to sea, fresh water to salt, mirrored another path I had been following all along, patiently waiting for the right time to come to the fore. In a word, it was zazen, a path to insight into the true nature of being. Just as the sea is home court to our planet’s water, to anadromous fish and to our ancestors that first crawled out of it some 340 million years ago, it is also a profound metaphor for the return of a species gone far out on an evolutionary limb. Perhaps it was time to crawl back and embrace the trunk.

I would miss the visceral thrill of intense water sport. Yet it was clearly time to begin to wind things down and embrace the subtlety a spiritual practice would require. Time to get out of my head, downsize my agendas and learn how to be. I knew myself well enough to know how immense a challenge this would be. Thankfully, my wife is a model for that—being—and a master of gardening samadhi.

Much earlier in my life, in the heart and soul of the sixties, I was fortunate to have the direct experience of reality from mentored LSD sessions at university (no, not on the curriculum). I knew what it was like to transcend ego and stand naked at midnight in Mission Bay. To scoop water in my hands and let it drop back into the sea again. Not as I would ordinarily do, not at all, but rather as God pouring God into God.

Of course, that lasted only so long before my ego took back the helm. But the insight was seminal to what I practice today. And so, after hanging up the paddle, I was thrilled to discover there was still plenty more water to cover, albeit on a different sea.

These days Pamela and I take dinner and wine to a local beach. Ocean proper it is not, just an arm of the Salish Sea. But we look out across the channel, and I point and tell Pamela where I paddled the last leg of an epic journey to the very beach where we are sitting. And she recalls moments from some of her many trips with friends to the west coast. We have told each other these stories before, but it does not matter.

 

There is a consequential yet satisfying quality of having run the course. I still experience an occasional pang of nostalgia when I wish I was planning yet another long trip on a distant coast, but it gets fainter with each visit now. And so, I settle for the scent of rotting seaweed and salt water and the lapping of waves, and it is enough.