So, yesterday was quite a day. We spent a total of about 7 hours kayaking in Saltsburg. It was fun, as usual. And also quite eventful. The main event was me falling over into the river.

Twice, actually.

Actually, the first time occurred right in front of pretty much the whole town of Saltsburg. Which is funny. It was Saltsburg’s annual town festival, “Canal Days” and this meant that everybody was down by the river, buying caramel apples and listening to polka music, and buying figurines carved from anthracite coal. The river was low, and we had just come down the Loyalhanna River, and were crossing the confluence to get to the boat take-out over at Saltsburg for a little break.

My brother and his friend Darlene, both far more experienced kayakers than myself, made it across no problem, way ahead of me. I got hung up on a gravelly part of the river-bed where the water was particularly low. After struggling and struggling to either get farther upstream to pass this gravel patch, or just push myself across it with my paddle, I gave up and got out. Piece of cake, right? I figured I’d pull my boat the few feet back to deeper water, hop back in, and pow, I’d be off.

Instead, of course, once my boat was in deeper water and I tried to get back in, it flipped over, and sent me face first into the water. It was maybe 3 or 4 feet deep there. I got up, looked back to shore, and saw people lined up at picnic tables and farther up along the hillside, all watching me. Everyone who was watching the polka band also could see me. They just stood there and watched me struggle to grab my upside-down waterlogged kayak, and not lose the paddle down the river. Then my brother paddled back out and helped me get everything squared away.

Anyway, later we got back in and proceeded several more hours down the river to a small town named Apollo. Everything in the town is named after the Apollo space mission. There’s an “Astronaut Way” and some other streets with gimmicky names like that. Anyway, at Apollo, the take-out is obscured behind this huge stone outcropping which was created so they could bring heavy machinery out to work on the bridge which crosses the river there. So you have to paddle around this giant man-made outcropping.

There’s two ways to do this. The fast way, which is going right under the bridge, close to the outcropping, or the slow way, where you paddle way off the side and then cut across at another point in the river. The fast way has a quick current which is created by the river being blocked by this outcropping. The slow way is more normal, but also more paddling. Last time I took the slow way. This time I took the fast way.

Darlene had warned me that I had to paddle really hard at this one point to get past the current. No problem, I figured, as we’d been through many rapids with lots of waves and stuff, and I’d been out kayaking plenty of times by now. I followed behind her and Peter, and watched them cut through the current and paddle hard to the right. No problem.

So there I go, I get into the current and at first it seems fine. Really fast, but no sweat. I turn to put my paddle hard into the water, so I can pivot around and BAM! The right side of my boat tips down at the wrong moment, and there I go! Right into the water. At the fastest point in the whole spot. The water’s over my head by about a foot. I can’t swim, but I do have my life jacket on. However, it didn’t seem to do much. Or maybe I was just struggling so much I didn’t really notice. Anyway, I managed to push a few feet over, and got my footing. Another woman in our party paddled up behind me and had me grab onto her boat and brought me over to the edge of the stone outcropping. Which I then proceeded to climb up and out of the river.

It was all very sudden. Mostly it was due to my being unfamiliar with how the current worked there. But another part of it was my boat. It was a Liquid Logic brand, model “Tryon”. I wasn’t happy with it the whole way down. They are kind of weird stubby boats, which you have to do a lot more work to propel and keep on a straight course through the water. Plus they are very wobbly in the water. They sit too high up or something and if you rock back and forth at all, you feel it in the whole boat. As is evidenced by my getting tossed face-first a second time into the river.

At least that time, the whole town wasn’t watching. But not that I really cared that much the first time when they were. I realized how funny the whole thing was, and its just a town full of weird hicks anyway, so I wasn’t worried about my like “reputation” or anything. And the second time, I didn’t really mind it too much either. I don’t know. It was sort of fun, really. Once I got over the initial shock of “Wait, now I’m in the water, and I can’t really swim.” I didn’t really panic or anything, which strikes me as odd. Especially since, when I was younger, I would get panicky if I accidentally went underwater in like a pool or something. And here I was in a straight up river. But anyway yeah. It sort of felt triumphant to be crawling up this stone outcropping after getting thrown into the river the second time. And the water was nice and cool, and the whole thing was really invigorating, and I’m glad it happened.

In any event, 7 hours of hard kayaking had gotten me quite sore once again. Not as sore as the first time though. I ended up falling asleep for a couple hours at 11:00pm last night, and then waking up for a while around 1:00am. Right before I woke up, I had this dream which I recorded last night. In the dream, the last thing anybody said to me was “Neo lede” which was supposed to be Latin for “A leader is born.”

I looked it up, and it doesn’t really mean that at all. Not in real Latin anyway. I don’t think. But in dream-Latin, sure. So right, anyway, earlier in the evening, I had mentioned briefly that I had capsized my boat twice, in a letter to Rebecca. Curious about the word “capsize,” I did my usual routine of looking it up on dictionary.com. Of special interest to me was that it had some connection to the Latin word “caput” which means “head.”

Later, I was looking up the words “leader” and “born” in Latin, and Rebecca showed me a couple pages, each which contained multiple references to various ways of saying those things in Latin. Oddly enough, on the page for “leader” it used the term “caput,” since it has to do with the head, as in being the head of something, a leader. And when I looked at the page for “born,” it referenced the Greek god “Apollo” in one of the entries.

That’s just too striking of a coincidence for me. That somehow, the dream-Latin phrase which was uttered in my dream magically connects back to “capsized at Apollo.” That’s just fucking nuts. It leads me to believe the whole event was much more mystically/symbolically charged than I really realized. That it may have been some sort of spontaneous baptism, or something of that nature. A threshold which, now that it’s been crossed, something has changed about me.

Thinking about it this morning, I realized one more key factor in this symbolic unfolding: that my brother and I have been working on a stained glass window of John the Baptist, baptizing Jesus in the River Jordan. Mere days earlier, I had painted the face and body of John. Spooky. Everything around me seems very charged right now. And I like it.