A river Taught me
For a while, a period that was maybe a decade but a period I remember as longer than a decade , I read rivers for a living. The Grand Canyon in high water, where Lava Falls comes at you like a thing you’ve been sentenced to — a horizon line that erases the world. Hance at forty thousand - a staircase of haystacks that don't break so much as detonate. Cataract Canyon and Satan’s Gut. And the Zambezi that’s big , pushy, explosive . The Middle Fork in June when rapids formed in the trees - or in August when they lay around like a boneyard.
River waves don't breathe. That's the thing . They stand in one place and seethe, fed by gradient and volume, holding their position against the current like something tethered there to wait for you. There is less rhythm to read, no set rolling in, no cadence you can count off and trust. Just water folding back on itself , hydraulics that recirculate whatever they catch, pourovers like green tongues that turn out to be doors closing. I learned to read — the boil line that means something deep is moving, the lateral that will stand your boat on edge if you hit it wrong. The river isn't malevolent exactly, it's just indifferent in a way that feels like malevolence when, in its arc, the only thing you can see is the sky. On a river, no matter how fierce the wave, the only path is through.
Nicaragua's waves don't want anything from me, and that took some getting used to. They arrive from somewhere far out in the Pacific, organized and patient, having traveled days across open ocean to meet this particular stretch of volcanic sand. They come in sets, spaced like breath, and you can feel the rhythm in your chest before you can see it on the horizon. You sit on your board between sets and the ocean is just thinking, gathering itself, and then the dark line shows up and lifts you, asks a question, and gives you the time to answer it. The wave at Playa Colorado will hold its shape down the line for ten, twelve, fifteen seconds — long enough to make a half-dozen decisions, long enough to be wrong about one of them and recover. The wave is not trying to drown you. It is doing what it has done for a few million years, and you are briefly invited.
There is a thing that happens in your body when you've spent years bracing against water that meant it. A vigilance that doesn't switch off. You stand above the rapid scanning for the move below the move, the consequence of the consequence, the worst thing the river could do and your answer to it. It demands a vigilance respectful the travelers, the family, seekers. But it's a heavy thing to carry, and after a while you forget you're carrying it. Nicaragua's waves were the first water in a long time that asked me to set it down. Paddle out, sit up, breathe. Watch the horizon. Trust the set. The Pacific isn't going to spring something on you that the previous wave didn't telegraph. It rolls in like a sentence with proper grammar, subject and verb and a clean predicate, and all you have to do is read along.
The river taught me how to survive water. Nicaragua taught me how to dance with it. Both lessons matter. I wouldn't trade the canyon years for anything — that kind of attention to consequence becomes the spine of how you move through the rest of your life. But there is something specific about a wave that doesn't wish you harm. Something the river, for all its grandeur, could never quite give. Out here the water has rhythm. Out here it breathes. And after years of reading menace, it turns out you can also learn to read welcome.