Today is the anniversary of our friend Megan Thompson’s untimely death on the Oconaluftee River in the Smokies last winter.
I almost forgot the day but a news story reminded me – the one year anniversary of war beginning in Ukraine, which happened actually at around the same time. In fact my last message to her – after the fact – was about heading home because of the war.
Megan was a COVID boater, one of many who started out in 2020 when outdoors was the only way to socialize in person. Her entire career in the sport was less than two years, but of course she came across as much more experienced than that when I met her in spring 2021. She had charged hard into the sport, learned and classed up quickly, dedicated the time and effort to doing it right. She brought this level of enthusiasm that a lot of us only aspired to, and I think quickly became a low level role model for it.
Megan’s death impacted me very deeply for a few reasons. She and I weren’t super close friends, by normal metrics. We had only met in person a few times, though we interacted a lot online. But she was part of this particularly devoted subset of the community that made a point of putting whitewater kayaking at the center of our lives. When she died, on a hazard we all knew about on an otherwise unremarkable low class run, it hit me deep on a “she was us” level. Each and every kayaker who heard the story saw how it could have been any one of us. Megan wasn’t the most experienced, no, but we all related to her. We had all made similar decisions at some point. “Watch out for that wood in that rapid” was a warning all of us had seen before, and going for it anyway was a choice almost all of us had made at least once. And when we heard the story I think each of us experienced the story in our minds firsthand. We all visualized it happening to us, and we all viscerally knew how real it was.
Megan was a good person, and a good member of our community, our tribe. She was not reckless but smart and respectful of the water and of the idea of a smart and safe progression through the sport. She didn’t really do anything wrong. Yes, critics could armchair quarterback how maybe she underestimated the hazard or overestimated her skill, or how the whole crew got in over their heads without realizing it. For me, the “what ifs” included that I was a qualified boater, someone with good SWR knowledge, and I had chosen not to be there for my own reasons. I was forced to wonder what could’ve been different if I’d been there. If her line would’ve been just a bit different if I’d been in the crew and nothing would’ve happened at all, or if another rescuer might’ve made the difference to save her after it did go wrong. I had bailed not because I thought the run was too dangerous, just not worth the hassle. I didn’t feel like a class 2 run that would involve a lot of little portages would be worth the hassle of having to find daycare for my dog and delay some work tasks. It wasn’t that I felt the run was deadly, it was that I thought it was inconvenient. And that kind of rocked my mental world a little.
My thinking about the sport has shifted in a few small ways and I’m not sure they are all for the better. Mentally, my focus solidified on rescue, instruction, and safety. I had been in the process of reassessing for a while, and after my own series of near misses culminating with an ambulance ride five years ago I was already dialing back and losing interest in the thrill seeking aspect of the sport. Instead I was struggling internally with whether to keep going at all, even as, on that trip, I was house hunting to more deeply commit my life to the paddling community. For me it had been kind of a Hail Mary, committing more deeply to account for my waning faith, like how some people start going to church more often as they start to lose certainty in their beliefs. And Megan’s death cemented a path for me.
It hit me hard and took a few days to really process. My first move was to get back out, just on class 2 at first. I wanted to practice safety drills and ropes but instead just took a mellow day to ponder the river. The day after that I went out on Kitzmiller for a personal first descent, and chose to walk the biggest rapid, being very mindful of every choice as I did. I went back home and immediately started looking for more training. I re-took the same SWR class I’d taken before, and noticed along the way that I enjoyed participating in the instruction side of it. The instructor agreed that I should pursue more of that. I went looking for a river kayaking instructor course, though work conflicts prevented me from making one work until the fall.
When the festival season started in April, I found myself avoiding them. I wasn’t sure why but I think I just felt overwhelmed. When Cheat Fest came I drove down to it, then changed my mind and took a random road trip instead, paddling a class 1 creek in Arkansas instead, and then I flew out west to take a Wilderness First Responder class.
Now, a year later, I’ve taken the classes to be a little more “certified” for safety and instruction, though not at the high level I might prefer. I’ve come to realize that the place I want to be in this sport is with the Megan Thompson’s of the sport – the enthusiastic beginners who could use a mentor and someone to set safety. I’m never going to run elite class 5 like the Stikine and I am fine with that. My goalpost has been moved to simply finding my place in the community in class 3 and 2 helping people safely learn and grow and experience this joy for themselves. Kayaking is ultimately about finding your place and learning to cooperate with natural forces beyond our control. The river is bigger and more powerful than any of us, and our way to enjoy it necessarily entails understanding that we are only floating through, driven by a current itself driven by forces bigger and more powerful than ourselves. To kayak down a river is to partake of fundamental forces of nature, to ride along in the cycle of water from ocean to mountaintop and back again, driven by the sun and the gravity of the earth and the moon. These are forces we need not try to control, but can nonetheless harness and ride to experience something most people never do. To ride a rapid through turbulent water, using the current and your skill to navigate around deadly rocks and holes, is to experience nature in a powerful way that is wholly different from just looking at it. This is a beautiful and priceless thing that we engage in, something worth sharing. Is it worth dying for? Maybe not. But among the ways to meet mortality, it’s not the worst. It’s not without purpose or beauty. Her life was not wasted, it was savored.
Megan will now forever more be a part of the lives of those who knew her, and her death itself will always be a part of how we interact with this sport that connects us to each other and the world. Let us remember and celebrate.
