Being intimate with people is an act of trust.
Guiding is profession centered around intimate and vulnerable moments.
No matter our best intentions, we are all deeply human in learning how to hold those moments carefully for ourselves and for others.
When you don’t have good modeling on how to discern whether or not someone is taking care of your body or your heart in spaces that are inherently vulnerable, it’s easy to become confused and cling to any scrap of attention someone shows you.
It’s just as easy to be ashamed of the attention you get when you weren’t intentionally looking for it.
Of all the topics about the river that I’ve wanted to write down and start to put into words, the situations that violate our sense of safety and trust in wild spaces feels by far the most tender, most vulnerable, and hardest to shift.
These two snippets are half-baked and have much larger stories around them that extend beyond the river corridors. Take them as snapshots and postcards and know there are thousands of words about both I don’t know how to say, yet.
The First of Many
It started with a craft beer poured discreetly into my opaque, company branded cup. Three quarters of the carbonated bread cozied in easily. We let the foam settle out, topped off the rest, and secured the cup with the tight-fitting lid.
Next was an adventure swim. The guides all run to the top of the beach, our beers hiding in the pouch of our PFDs. Tilting the beers upside down and thrusting a thumb or the tip of a river knife into the curated air pocket while beer foam mists us with a preemptive kiss. We count to three, click open the top and let cold froth run down our faces and throats before jumping into the current to carry us down stream to change into dry clothes and make dinner.
Once plates have been scraped we we slide into the home stretch. He pours me a shot of Rumplemints. I don’t know anything about what “proof” means and figure all alcohol is calibrated to 100.
Sometime around dusk, I’m facedown in my sleeping bag while he tosses little pinecones at my head—laughing at my inability to keep up with him. He implies I can’t keep up with the rest of the crew either. I doze off swatting pinecones mindlessly away from my face.
I am a smart adolescent. I am determined not to end up in the dirt two nights in a row.
I space my next night’s drinks out more carefully, skip the Rumplemints, and instead throw pinecones into the water and rocks from the boats along side him, rather than in his direct line of fire. In the arms of the dark, I find myself swirling in an off-centered conversation with a slightly older, but similarly aged co-worker who dates one of my best friends at the time. We stay up late every subsequent night together. I can’t tell if he’s showing me the ropes or if we’re flirting. Tasha’s1 name burns in my mind when we sit close enough that I can feel the heat radiate off of his muscular, boat-pushing arms in the thick summer night.
On the last night, after working several weeks together in a row, we wind up sitting close enough for our arms to be pressed together in the presence of the Ponderosas. He asks me to put my sleeping bag next to his. He implies we should make best use of our short time left under the stars together as the season comes to a close. I’m finding myself slipping into the temptation of it all, but as an inexperienced 17 year old, I’m confused.
Am I irresistible to the point where someone would consider cheating on their girlfriend with me? or am I simply, conveniently here?
Does this mean anything to him? or is this what it feels like to work in vacation industry and I’m the one who needs to toughen up and accept that this is how it is so I should take what I can get? Will he forget it as soon as we leave the takeout ramp?
At this point in my life—I have already been caught in a treacherous eddy lines of what I know now was an abusive first “relationship.” It’s the type of water feature an experienced person looks down the straightaway of a canyon and see’s ‘Ah, yes, better stay off of that wall. Nothing good happens over there.’ But as green as I was, my only other experience of getting consistent attention came from a boy much older than me, who never bothered to break up with his girlfriend. He’s call and text me late and night even after moving in with her. He’d show up at my window whether I wanted him to or not when he was home for college break holidays or when he was around for weeks in the summer. He told me he loved me, and that I was special and that nobody else made him feel this way.
When someone tells you they love you at that age, or that you’re unique and special—you believe them. You’d do anything to feel seen, and heard, and loved. Even if later you cry so hard you puke about it a few times.
That must make it real, right? Strong?
I thought so.
So while I sit here and find myself nauseated at how obviously similar the situations are as I look upstream (and the dozens of others since then), I couldn’t see it at the time. All I saw was a similar rapid. I didn’t know then you can choose to take different lines down the same turbulent whitewater. So I chose the only line I saw.
Why wouldn’t I?
Here was someone who was interested in all of the same things I was. We worked hard outside together. We laughed together. We got things done well as a team. It was fair to say we were attracted to each other. I wanted so badly to have a partnership of my own after watching all of my friends have their first kisses and first I love you’s and naively daydream about what was next.
I would have never said it out loud at the time—I have a hard time saying it out loud now—but there is almost nothing I want more in the whole world.
So when he asked me to move my sleeping bag next to his, I’d love to say that I had the tools at the time to be vulnerable enough to state the obvious or ask for what I needed.
“I don’t think I can sleep next to you, Michael2. I’m starting to really like you and this would be wrong to do to Tasha. If we are doing to do this, you and Tasha would need to break up, first.”
or even,
“I really like you, Michael. I really want to kiss you, but I don’t want this to just be because I’m right here.”
or most responsibly
“We shouldn’t be doing this. I’m sorry, I’ve made a mistake and this isn’t supportive to my friend?”
But…I didn’t have those skills, yet. I had barely completed my first Wilderness First Aid. I didn’t yet have fourteen badges in “Clumsy Behavior Men Do to Get In Your Pants That You Repeatedly Fall For And Lean Into Face First.”3
I didn’t know how to be vulnerable and I certainly didn’t value my own needs, or get healthy forms of attention. So instead, I aggressively smashed my beer can into his, spraying foam everywhere.
“You’re drunk!” I said laughing, “You’re just trying to hook up.” Desperately hoping he’d protest and profess his undying love for me.
“Plus,” I continue, “What about Tasha? Aren’t you guys in love or something? She really likes you.” I emphasized.
He flops a drunk arm around me and starts to rub my shoulder, my neck, my lower back.
“How can I resist? You have got to know how sexy you are right? And besides, it’s different out here. Tasha doesn’t understand it the way you do.”
I feel the desperation sift slowly into the warm delusional hug of being special.
I protest long enough to lie to myself about not being a convenience. I protest long enough to defend myself if Tasha should ever find out. I protest while I finish my beer, and let a confused teenage boys hand explore my body until we both head over to his sleeping bag.
“Okay, but we’re not having sex” are the last things I say before we fool around under the stars for the remainder of the night.
We don’t have sex in the way a heteronormative teenager might consider sex. I don’t know how queer I am at this point and how my emotions are tied up in any kind of sexual, connective act. I don’t realize the harm I’m doing to my self-esteem, my sense of safety, or my sense of self. Even in my natural teenage urge to explore—I understand why so many parents struggle to have these conversations. Most of us don’t have this dialed as adults.
I wake up in the morning to find he had moved his sleeping gear in the middle of the night. I am alone, in a weird and lumpy root patch beneath large Ponderosa pines with a fleece blanket he left for me. The entire next day he doesn’t look at me or speak to me in front of anyone. He grazes my body in the rig-ride back to Salmon under the cover of a dirty, ripped Carhart jacket.
5 months later, he and Tasha break up.
I spend weeks looking at my phone, checking my text messages to see if he is doing this for me. My teenage heart death grips on the hopes that this meant something to him and he’ll be reaching out any day now.
He never calls.
We fool around secretly and drunk for a few more summers.
We never talk about it.
I never tell Tasha.
I become slightly more skilled in my boat, recognizing I don’t always have to hit the wall at the bottom of the rapid. Recognizing that if their ammo can has a photo of another woman I am unwilling to engage at all. But for at least a decade, I run this rapid sloppy and sideways dozens of times.
Entering each rapid hanging on the words that I am special or unique,
Exiting each time feeling worse than I started.
It starts somewhere before seventeen, and probably ends somewhere after thirty one, but this was the first of many as a guide. A situation so commonplace no one bats an eye.
The Dad
My face burns with shame as I read one sentence after the next.
I create a copy of the email, put it in word document and hide that in a folder I title “In Case of Emergency” on my computer and hit the delete button without responding.
I go to bed that night, but I do not sleep.
What will I say if anyone finds out? Especially my outfitter.
Dear Dagny,
I’ve been thinking about our family trip on the Main Salmon with you all so much recently. The beautiful mountain air. The effervescent water. The warmth of the sun and sand. Chuck4 is doing well at Duke and is planning on applying for medical school soon. My daughter Belinda5 is doing well, she’ll be a freshman in college next year and my wife and I will be empty nesters again. I’ve been hoping we could all come out on a trip again but it just hasn’t seemed to work out.
Regardless, I think about the trip we had together often. You are truly an amazing woman. Actually, I have been quite struck with you ever since we left that trip. It has really left me thinking about a bike-packing trip that I went on with my father when I was around a similar age. There as a beautiful older woman on the trip who was in her 40’s who “showed me the ways of the world” a few nights. I’ve been left wondering if that would have been something I could have done for you.
Maybe this is an odd thing to ask now, but as I reflect on the beautiful conversations that we shared I’m curious if this is something you were hoping for me to do. No need to answer this but if I had come to your tent that night would you have:
A) Let me ravage you and teach you the ways of the world ;)
B) Screamed and stabbed me with your river knife
C) Let me kiss and hold you but nothing else
D) Been scared and quiet but not asked me to go anywhere
E) Nothing
F) …I dont know! Something else I’m not thinking of!
I just know how impactful it was for me to be taught intimacy by an adult woman and think of you as someone to be honored. I hope you don’t take this the wrong way. No need to respond if you’re uncomfortable. I understand these things can be tender.
Anyway, I hope you are doing well in college. I would love to come on another trip with you all, it’s different out there, please let me know the next time you’re putting something together.
Respectfully,
Alan
I received this email at the age of 21. Five years earlier Alan and son were on a father-son trip to celebrate his son’s high school graduation and acceptance into Duke. While his son, Chuck, seemed relatively uninterested in getting to know me, his father stayed up every night with me around the fire until 2 or 3 in the morning.
At the time, being only 16, I was very unaware that this was inappropriate. As a “swamper” it was my duty to watch the fire until it went all the way out or until all of the guests went to bed—whichever came first.
Alan was intelligent and fun to talk to. We spanned all manner of deep conversation topics: books, philosophy, stars, camping, love, connection, action movies, music. It was my job to talk to people and be kind to them. It was my job to make people feel comfortable and welcomed on their own vacation. I was so young and he was probably in his mid 40s. It did not occur to me that this would be a situation to be wary of.
After the trip, he sent me a series of emails of pictures he had taken of me next to pictures of Blake Lively and gushed over our resemblance. I thought this was very weird at the time, but responded back with something simple like a “haha, thank you! Very flattering!” and left it at that.
Over the years since the trip, he would email me once or twice a year, reminiscing about the trip and updating me on how his kids Chuck, and Belinda both were. Each of them being my age, I again, thought nothing of it.
When I received the email above I felt like what was contained in it was my fault.
I must have led him on.
I must have been too friendly.
I was extremely worried that if they came back on another trip I wouldn’t be able to tell my outfitter without getting fired. I saved the email in case that trip happened and I had to defend myself more publicly or in case I ruined the trip if his family came.
It haunted me for years.
Although I am now much more able to nip this behavior in the bud unapologetically, it happens more than you’d think. I no longer have the excuse of not being of age to point to how inappropriate it is to proposition someone for sex in their own workplace. I also now have a hard time sharing my laughter and passion around various interests without feeling like I am asking for some nefarious attention. For better or worse, I am more guarded with guests—especially the ones that gravitate directly for me, regardless of their gender.
It’s Different Out Here
Not everything about guiding is a magical fairytale.
“It’s different out here,” people often say.
This phrase is spoken as if the wild landscape gives them permission to be the uninhibited people they’d like to be in their everyday lives.
The problem with acting uninhibited in only one area of your life is that it feels simpler making excuses to rely on the place to provide it. Believing that we can only be our most wild, vibrant selves in one setting becomes an addiction or a fantasy. Instead of noticing the deepest desires that bubble up in wild spaces, and then thoughtfully incorporating those realizations into choices and behavior into everyday life—regardless of if life is in the backcountry or the front country—we may tend to put the wild landscapes, and the people in them, on a pedestal.
More specifically, in the backcountry, the values we may hold in our every day lives might somehow evaporate the moment we push off of the ramp. We foolishly belive that our behaviors remain contained and unadulterated in an environment that is always eroding downstream. In the front country, the vibrant, passionate, intimate, curious behaviors we crave in ourselves and others get buried by our own perceptions of what we believe success to be. We drop our exploratory selves because it is painful to be vulnerable in a front country landscape that values efficiency over experiencing. It is harder in the front country to be confronted by the grief of our most authentic selves being rejected over and over again than to conform to the expectations set around us.
It makes sense that we compartmentalize ourselves depending on the setting. Being authentic wherever we go is hard work. It can bring up a lot of insecurity and pain.
But when we buy into this “splitting” of ourselves too much—backcountry versus front country—I believe it’s easier to behave in ways that are extremely harmful or thoughtless that greatly impact other people. We, incorrectly, believe our worlds to be separate.
I hear the phrase “it’s different out here” from guides just as much as I hear it from guests. It leaves me dissatisfied, even if I feel the weighty truth of the sentiment underneath.
The truth is, much of guiding is just as plain and brutal and confusing as any other ordinary life—we just happen to overlook some of the more difficult stuff in the foreground because the background is so idillic.
While one of these stories comes from an awkward and innocent teenage exploration or right and wrong and body, and the other story is just straight-up sexual harassment from an adult man to a naive minor—I still carry both with me often.
I don’t believe harm was intended in either case. Yet, harm still happened.
Uncomfortable situations that transpire when people inherently believe “it’s just different out here,” is a convenient way for us not to feel fully responsible for our own behavior. It’s as if this phrase suddenly absolves us of all responsibility for the stories that unfold in these spaces. There are not enough reflective stories discussing young people’s perceptions of themselves in backcountry culture. When we are repeatedly exposed to an immature handling of intimacy and vulnerability, we begin to believe there is something wrong with us when we are harmed by it. If more people started to share their stories around what was harmful and how they learned from it, we as a community might begin to understand that just because it might be “normal” does not mean it is “healthy”. It does not mean it is our only option of running difficult, interpersonal rapids.
Most importantly, we might stop blaming ourselves.
Our shame might be lessened and we might grow together a little bit stronger.
I would love to say that both of these instances happened only one time.
It’s more fair to say that both vignettes were just my first exposure, at 17, to what the realities of being a woman in the world were—but with very few other women in the space to guide or support me.
In the case of the encounter with the Dad, the clear “right and wrong” aspects of inappropriate sexual inquires were obvious. Over time, I was able to create more firm boundaries with myself and with people who approached me for sex in my capacity as a backcountry guide. I am now firm, and clear, and unapologetic about saying no. I do not go out of my way to make someone feel comfortable when I reject their advances.
In the case of approaching, or being approached by my co-workers when there is mutual attraction, I’m embarrassed to reflect that I haven’t grown up in that arena as much as I would like. I am still confused by this dynamic, and have been burnt by it more times than I can count. It makes sharing my romantic feelings for people (in both backcountry and front country settings) feel like a severe sunburn. It is difficult and demoralizing to admire the people you work with, share intimacies with them that you think are in good faith, only for them to ask you to keep it a secret or blatantly not talk to you or look at you for days after sharing intimate words or intimate acts.
It’s harmful and difficult to remember this is not the “norm” of what healthy intimacy or love looks like when it’s the majority of your intimate experiences.
But, I will say that I have grown and made strides in honestly in sharing my intent to be close romantically instead of just physically. I am better about protecting my boundaries the moment it starts to dip towards something that looks more akin to sexual or emotional convenience. However, the painful truth is, I’ve gone over this fool’s hill a thousand times. It comes from genuine hope that someday, someone with a similar passion for a place I love will want to love that place actively and intentionally with me.
It’s a hard pattern to put down. When I scan the horizon, I don’t see too many couples who navigate this intentionally in the ways that I would like to. More often, I see people normalizing the harmful pattern instead. And, those couples do exist. Because of my past, I am just not always great at recognizing them.
Like finding a new line in a rapid you’ve run a million times, you have to get bored or fed up with how you’re used to running it. You might have to smash your knuckles a few times before you get it right.
In the meantime, I try to remind myself that I’ve run hard rapids before. I’ve been smashed and swamped and shaken up by them. That getting back in my metaphorical boat is no different than the one that sits atop the Middlefork’s pristine water.
Here’s to continuing to drop in proud, looking for similarities of our best selves, rather than differences.
This has been January’s issue of “Every Rock On the River.”
Every Rock on the River: The Archives… is a monthly Pomegranate & Magpie substack segment that are memoir-style essays from my 15+ years as a backcountry whitewater guide. On the third Tuesday of the month I share a new piece of my story.
name has been changed for privacy reasons
name also has been changed for privacy reasons
I’m a PhD in this now. Not proud, just true.
Went back and changed names. Got nervous.
Changed names.
It's been really supportive to hear you share these heavier memories and experiences. Thank you for pulling them out of the shadows, so that others (I speak for myself obviously!) can hold the collective experiences, as well as our own, with more visibility, less shame and more compassion