On Self Rescue

The summer I was pregnant, I didn’t run the Upper Green, the Chattooga, or any of my favorite whitewater rivers. I’d been scared.

Pregnant, I lost my balance. For weeks, I couldn’t rise from bed without the contents of my stomach rising also. In the early days, I felt stoned on my own body, a fuzziness around the edges of everything that happened. I lived from sleep to nap to sleep. My body’s resources had been focused on growing earlobes and bones. I didn’t trust the physical instincts I once had. Paddling in actual swift water felt undoable.

I had always been afraid to roll a kayak up from the river water in which it flipped, but I still spent several years learning how. The first time I tried to roll, five years before my pregnancy, I floated in a North Georgia sporting-goods store’s wave pool, with a hired instructor spotting me. I didn’t even