It was the sort of phone call that begins and ends with a shudder. The mere inflection of the voice on the other end of the line foretold bad news before he ever uttered the words: A friend was dead, found that morning in the river.
The cause remained a mystery, although foul play was quickly ruled out. It appeared he had simply slipped and fallen into a cold mountain stream as he scouted out a spring fishing spot. It took more than a day to discover his disappearance, another night to discover his body, longer still to determine just what happened.
Whatever the cause, we would never see Jeff again.
Whether fate or irony, I happened to be on my way to the river when I got the news. By name, a different river, although the waters of the deadly stream flowed into it not far from my planned paddling destination. And for some time after my arrival, I could do little more than sit alongside the flowing water’s edge, pondering my friend’s spirit.
This death by river always seems so unnatural, despite the reality that it has nearly happened to me. Come spring, I’ve always looked to the river as the source of life, of renewal, rejuvenation. Just as often, I suppose, it simply serves as a source of reflection.
I thought of Jeff as I paddled out to the wave that had pulled me there. In the river, we call them standing waves, the kind that form but never truly break. They rise up as the water passes over rocks on the riverbed, seemingly endless as they grow with the swell of the stream.
It’s an illusion, of course, since nothing ever stands still in the river. A standing wave is as lively and dynamic as anything imaginable, replenishing itself instantaneously, if not infinitely, until eventually receding to a ripple as its lifeblood ultimately evaporates.
Even then, its energy moves on through the world downstream, carrying the same life with it, forming new waves, new ripples all the way to the ocean, where the cycle regenerates in a different form. It’s a cycle that has never been broken.
For the moment, though, its power was concentrated beneath me, and I contemplated its source and destination. Morbid as it may seem, my friend had given his life to this river, perhaps to the very water that passed beneath me at that moment. In return, the river gave life back to me, through the rush and invigoration of surfing moving water, through exercise and energy I could feel.
There’s little consolation in the untimely death of a friend, nothing really that can compensate for such a loss. Mostly we take comfort from other friends, shared experiences and thanks for the time we had, appreciation for the time we have.
For many of us, those experiences were shared in the outdoors — with the outdoors — and nature plays a significant role in the healing process. We hike, bike, boat or ski, connecting with the people and places that make us who and what we are.
The people, sadly, won’t last forever. They are like the wave in that sense, temporarily offering the illusion of permanence in your life before moving on. But we can continue to carry their energy, to draw what we can from it and share it with the world.
And the places, well, they’ll be there for a while longer than us, even if we can’t necessarily vouch for the condition they’ll be in when the people are done with them.
I like to think that the positive energy of people like my friend Jeff goes at least a little way toward tipping the scale in favor of the natural world we sometimes explored together. Symbolic, I suppose, of the interconnectedness of all things. I shudder to think what life would be like if we lost them both.
