Essay - Dirtbag Diaries (“The Shorts”)

In case you’ve never listened to it, I highly recommend the podcast “The Dirtbag Diaries.” Their content is thoughtful, nuanced, and a great balance between lighthearted and fun, while also at times driving at the toughest issues that face our outdoors communities.

They do an annual all-call for submissions called “The Shorts,” which essentially involves listeners submitting personalized essays, and then the producers selecting several submissions to refine and have the listeners / authors read aloud as standalone podcast episodes.

I’ve always wanted to write a submission, and our first Bright Shadow retreat in 2024 inspired me to finally do so. My writing wasn’t ultimately picked as a featured piece for the podcast, but that’s ok… it’s about the journey and I get to share the writing here! It all happened exactly as it was meant to…

Good lines,
Chris

**Warning - this essay is written in a raw manner, and does contain references to death by drowning, drug use, and some foul language. Please only proceed if you feel like you’re in an ok state to read those things**

The first time I lost a friend to the river is etched in my memory like it was yesterday.

I was 19 years old and standing outside of my freshman dorm building in Asheville, North Carolina. I was socially awkward and romantically naive, but already one of the best whitewater kayakers in the world. I had been to quite a few continents for competitions and training camps, had just upgraded from a beat-to-hell Honda Civic to a shiny Subaru WRX wagon with triple the horsepower, and while my friends worked summer jobs, I got paid by my sponsors to chase alpine snowmelt, huge waterfalls, and my dreams.

I was on top of the world in life, but something felt off that night. It was the day before Thanksgiving, and a cold wind blew eerie clouds across the full moon. I had as close to a premonition as I’ve ever experienced in my life… there was an irrefutable disturbance in the Force. I stared at the moon for longer than would have seemed normal to an onlooker, and then shivered, tried to shrug off my spidey sense, and packed for the holiday visit to my parents’ house an hour and a half away.

On the drive, I got a call from my close friend Chris. He and some other buddies had been on the Green River Narrows that day at high water, while I had been out filming on a different river with the Lunch Video Magazine (LVM) crew. The Narrows is an iconic benchmark run in class V kayaking, and for our river tribe, Gorilla is the most famous rapid in the world.

“I don’t know how to tell you this man, but Brian is gone. We saw him catch the eddy below Chief’s, but we didn’t see him again after that. We have no idea where he is. It’s fucked up.”

I didn’t know what to say to him as my mind raced to process the situation.

What could have happened?!

Did he miss the portage eddy above Gorilla?

I should have been there… there are very few people on Earth who might be able to run that rapid at that flow, but I’m one of them. I could have helped…

I had a searing visual of the last moments of Brian’s consciousness on this Earth. It’s possible that he missed the portage eddy, got hammered in the first of five huge back-to-back drops in Gorilla, and then had to punch out of his boat and swim though the absolute apex of fury in the Narrows… the Notch and the Pad. The river squeezes down to a mere five feet wide, accelerates, and then plunges over a roaring 15 foot cascade onto a rock shelf. From there, the guttural, unyielding power of Nature ricochets from the vertical plane to the horizontal, and storms into two hellacious keeper holes. At normal flows this iconic class V+ rapid shakes the ground you stand on to scout. This was probably five or six times the volume of normal flows. The power is indescribable…

Brian was smart and a good paddler. He didn’t sign up for that ride, but he probably knew in that moment that he was headed into the dark, cold depths of a liquid hell. And I couldn’t shake the sorrow of how lonely he probably felt. He knew that there were no other groups on the river, and noone downstream. His friends were upstream and unaware that things had gone awry for him. And he probably had an idea that this might be it.

I got home and didn’t know what to tell my parents. I was rationalizing to myself that somehow this would all work out… that Brian was holed up in a cave calmly smoking his bowl and waiting for the cavalry to arrive and get him back across the river. But in my heart I knew he was gone.

And this was confirmed the following day when his body was found.

Chris never kayaked again.

I felt like the foundational bedrock of my life had cracked. I had moved to Asheville for this river and fully redirected my life. I made awful grades in high school (likely due to being undiagnosed ADHD - a journey I explored much later in life), but once I achieved balance in Asheville with paddling, school, and friends, everything seemed to be clicking into place. And the Green was the hub of the wheel.

How could this temple that I love so much take a person that I love?

My brain felt like it was short-circuiting as it attempted to make sense of the shock. I existed outside of my body… in a semi-removed twilight zone.

We did our best to honor Brian, and UNC Asheville graciously flew six or seven of us college kids up to Michigan to attend the funeral with his family. I didn’t know how to act, but after the formalities we unleashed what felt like a nuclear reactor of pent-up energy in an epic bender just across the border in Canada. We got our loaner car towed, and once we got it back I puked on our way through border patrol. And again on the flight back to Asheville. The numbing effects of substance felt good at the time.

And I did all that I knew how to do… I got back on the river. It felt like that’s what Brian would have wanted.

But unfortunately his death was not the last one… far from it. And I kept finding out in the worst way possible; logging into social media and seeing cryptic goodbyes and notes of love to another friend who had passed. This would lead to a frantic search about what the fuck had happened, and then a resignation that I would never see that person again. That my last time high fiving them in the parking lot or talking shit to them about their race time would be it for us.

A Cascade of Loss

And the losses accelerated…

Matt, James, Isaac, Richard, Fraz, Ed, Don, Stephen, Boyce, Alan, Eric, Shannon, Jeff, Juanito, Javier, LouLou…

It was dizzying. I had lost so many friends that I would forget about individuals for long periods of time and then be jogged by a visceral memory that they were part of.

A few years ago I sat down to make a comprehensive list. I wanted to have their names in front of me for those moments when I wanted to sit with them. Once in a while, I wanted to say a prayer for them individually and collectively. I wanted to think about their parents, their partners… their children.

26 souls.

And that is just the people who died on the river. I had other friends who had fallen off of a porch, been hit by a train, been murdered in their home during a house party, stung by a stingray, succumbed to substance…

That is not normal. And it’s not just about kayaking. I know that mountaineering, big mountain skiing, surfing, base jumping, and other sports have their own versions of this. Why is it that the most vibrant and brilliant souls far too often stay with us for a flash of beauty and contribution, and are then pulled from us and called to the other side?

My innocence had departed long ago.

Searching for Meaning

In 2016, I was asked by a prominent outdoor film festival to do a paid speaking gig on the subject of mortality in outdoor sports. I thought about this long and hard. I had no idea how to reconcile my and our continued participation in class V kayaking considering the statistical consequences. I had tried to square it in every way possible, and I just couldn’t. The tropes like “they died doing what they loved” or “it wouldn’t have happened to me” weren’t cutting it. I knew I could bring the audience into the depths of despair, but I had no idea how to lift them back out again. I guess some things in life just don’t make sense, and the mountains take the very best from us.

I turned the speaking invitation down.

I couldn’t bring myself to talk about this subject, and no one else could either. It was the unspoken yet ever-present undertone. Dancing with the taut muscle sinews of the Earth seemed to require a price… and a portion of our friends foot the bill.

Then I heard Laird Hamilton say something on a podcast that changed the game for me: “Bright light; dark shadow.” Bright light; dark shadow…

He was likely paraphrasing an expression by the mental health pro and philosopher Carl Jung: “The brightest lights have the darkest shadows.”

And the expression shook a resonance in me. I immediately knew what was meant by it, and I thought of so many creative and athletic geniuses who were plagued by their shadows while also gifting the world with their priceless talents. People like Beethoven, Robin Williams, and so many of the best athletes that I have ever met. Something was set in motion that would come to change my life...

A Path Through the Valley

As my wife Ashley and I welcomed one, two and then three daughters into the world, I switched my career to commercial real estate brokerage and investment so that I could be a better financial breadwinner and not have all of my eggs and identity in one basket. I loved the richness of my new life, but my long-held organizational coping mechanisms were failing with more complex and demanding responsibilities, and I was experiencing crippling and irrational anxiety. It seemed that a lifetime of head injuries, the compounding trauma of losing friends, and a foundation of neurodivergence might have created a fragile house of cards between my ears. I sought mental health and psychiatric help for the first time in my life, and my ADHD diagnosis kicked off a dramatic period of self-exploration and discovery.

It was so liberating to realize that my brain was different, and that I could take a variety of measures to accommodate for it.

AND that my difference might in fact be a superpower. My real estate business grew alongside my family, and a dream took shape. I had hit rock bottom, and mental health discovery and care had saved my life. There had to be more people like me! My relationship with the river and Nature was nothing if not a duality. It’s difficult to comprehend how something so life-giving can also be so destructive. And the burden is simply too much to grapple with in isolation. It must be processed together with like-minded people, and I could lead this by example. It had to be someone like me who raised their hand and said, “maybe we should talk about this?”

A Confluence of Purpose

I also knew it would require the guidance of a mental health practitioner who understood the complexities of our outdoor communities. I figured this individual would be nearly impossible to find. I received several potential names from friends, and my second call generated traction with a capital T! Sommerville B. Johnston couldn’t have had a more perfect clinical and experiential resume if it was created by AI. And with her guidance, the first Bright Shadow grief retreat was visioned and realized. A month and a half later, this idea jumped from the pages of my journal to a living, breathing experience that 14 people created together.

We based out of an old 25 room motel that my wife and I bought and rehabilitated with another couple who are lifelong friends and some fantastic employees. The property overlooked the Green River Gorge… a place that has shaped me, and where the ashes of Brian and other friends rest.

Against that backdrop, we leaned into group work, individual work, breathwork, yoga, sauna, cold plunge, ritual, ceremony, movement, love and support. Our past experiences bound us together. There were many firsts… first times receiving individual counseling, price tags still on fresh journals, and first times opening up about the most guarded secrets of our psyches. We were grappling with our shadows. Grabbing them by the horns. Learning that facing them head-on and loving all aspects of ourselves is the only path to enduring peace and an untapped well of joy. The fog was lifting and we were emerging into a state of vibrant color.

The way out tends to be through…

Why Gather?

As a society we are becoming less and less connected with physical community, ceremony and ritual. Our worlds are shifting into the virtual ether, organized community institutions are diminishing, and a void exists in our primal cores. A yearning that we can’t quite put our finger on. We are social animals and need to gather in times of joy AND sorrow. In the absence of tradition and community, we degenerate towards conspiracy theories, tribalism, and violence. We focus more on our differences than our similarities.

At Bright Shadow, we all showed up for ourselves and each other, and we did the work. I know we all came out of the experience with different things, but that container seemed to allow for a deepening. Contracts became covenants, careers became vocations, and we all learned that grief isn’t something that you “get over” one day. It integrates and processes through our bodies and hearts, and our shadows allow us to sit with others who are experiencing their own valleys in life. And grief is not just about losing people. It is incredibly interwoven with divorce, infertility, substance abuse, miscarriage, eating disorder, depression, longing for the life we thought we would have. Is there a more ubiquitous shared experience for participant members of the human race than grief and loss? Not that I know of…

Paying It Forward

I didn’t sign up for all of this when I started kayaking as a kid. But I got all of it and more.

The river is nothing if not a teacher. For me, it has given with one hand while taking with the other.

And the time has come to pay some of its lessons forward to the world…