Goodbye, My Brother
By Kurt Mullen
Originally Published in Paddler Magazine
My wife and I threw the bikes back on the roof rack, left the hotel in Morgantown behind, and drove another hour through West Virginia to meet the waterfall that had killed my brother July 24, 2005. It had been two years since his accident, and the only image I had of the falls came from a picture a stranger had published on the Internet. I didn’t take into account that the falls, shot at close range and from below, were magnified in that photo. So, in this solemn stop of a 10-day road trip, it took a lot of peering up and down a stretch of the Tygart River in Valley Falls State Park to realize that the serene 10-footer in front of me was the watery monster I had always imagined.
John, who was 37 then, took his first paddling lesson in a pool near his home in Northern Virginia four years before his death. He spent most of his time on the Potomac River after that, and made the most of an opportunity to write about his sport at The Washington Post, where he was a copyeditor and a once-a-week writer for the sports section.
In 2004, he was a long shot for a seat on the U.S. whitewater slalom team bound for Athens. But he trained hard for it anyway and competed with the best in the sport at an Olympic qualifying event in South Bend, Indiana, in April of that year. Hanging on at that level earned him an authenticity that few writers—particularly sportswriters—can ever claim with their subjects.
By the summer of 2005, he had focused his ambition on river running. To test his progress, he headed to Vail for the Teva Mountain Games—another chance to compete with the best. That trip was a remarkable one for him, because the talent there inspired him to practice harder. And at the same time, an experience on the Oh-Be-Joyful Creek near Crested Butte convinced him to be more realistic about his abilities. He left his boat at the top of that run for someone else to use, and walked away. It was an important exercise in restraint for him, and he related this in his Sunday outdoor column, Outside Line.
A few months later he traveled to Valley Falls with a friend. He landed the first drop off-balance and flipped over in his boat. Upside down and holding his breath, he tried three times to roll. He failed and swam. When he came out of his boat, he was too close to the falls, and the high water drove him down and pinned him beneath it. He was unconscious and heading downriver toward the second waterfall when he finally surfaced.
Like water, grief at high levels can re-circulate and keep you pinned in place. To break out, it seems you have to get past asking why something bad happened to someone you loved. You want to reject a brutal fate for this person, but in time there’s no choice but to accept it. When you do, you can look more intently at the life as it was lived than at the way it happened to end.
I was thinking it was time to leave Valley Falls when my wife pointed to a man and a woman walking from the parking lot with kayaks on their shoulders. There was a dry sandstone ledge to the side of the waterfall nearest me, and they paddled to it. The woman got out on the ledge and took a video camera out of a yellow plastic case. The man got out and looked over the falls. When he got in his boat again and paddled upriver, I let myself imagine it was John paddling. The kayak paused, turned, and the man calmly paddled toward me again. In my double vision of the past and the present, I watched him go straight for the horizon line, past the woman with the camera, and over the falls. I did not expect the chill that shuddered through me when he landed on the other side. The woman threw him the camera case and, moments later, ran it herself.
She ran the second waterfall, too, and I walked down to talk to her. She was from Canada, she said. She’d taken a couple weeks off work for some adventures in these parts. I asked some general questions about creeking. When she started talking about technique and safety, I knew John would have liked her. She was in her boat still and clearly riding a moon shot of adrenaline. It reminded me of the last time I saw him a couple weeks after the Teva Mountain Games in 2005, and just a month before he died. “Sometimes, if there’s a lot of water going over, it’ll pull you back in,” she said. I might as well have heard John saying these words himself. His was an accident, one that happened when he was really living. It put me in mind to break away from our conversation before she could ask me what I was doing there. I didn’t want to spoil the glimpse she’d given me of the way he lived by describing to her the way he had died.