Further Adventures Of... (Part Two)

After spending the morning climbing Red Tail Trail, as I talked about in my last blog, I wanted to spend the rest of the day with my family. And luckily, the weather cleared up and got really nice in the late afternoon.

The beach of rocks

I even managed to talk them into checking out the trails across the road, and playing near/in the river. 

Looks easy enough, right?

Have I mentioned that it rained hard all morning. In the mountains? Know what that does to a river? You guessed it. So we got over to the Saco River, and it looked beautiful as we walked out onto a big "beach" of rounded-off rocks. There was even a rock island in the middle of the river, with some rapids in between. I've been wading in streams all my life. I wasn't scared---but maybe I should've been...

So with Kathy and Lucy watching (sort of), I took off my shoes, rolled up my shorts, and began wading across. Immediately, I noticed that the current was much harder than I'm used to. But as long as I was standing still, it was fine. Splashing up onto my shorts, but fine (I should mention at this point that I'd brought three leg coverings on vacation: casual (baggy) bike shorts (wet from the morning), cut-offs that I was wearing, and a swimsuit (wet from swimming in the hotel pool.) So this splashing was concerning.
The real achilles heel, though, was the fact that the stones on the bottom were unpredictable, unstable, and sometimes sharp. If I'd worn water shoes, everything would've been fine, but as it was, I stepped on a sharp rock, instinctively pulled my foot back, and lost balance a bit. Now, in a calm stream, you could just put a hand down, and right yourself. But it turns out that in a river---and a slightly swollen one at that---it's not quite that simple. I was rudely and roughly shoved backwards, and began rather quickly descending the rapids. Now, as you may be able to see from the photo, they didn't last long. And they cerainly weren't all that deep. So it's not as if I was in real danger. But my dignity was another story. Also, my shins. I ended up with a slight abrasion on my right, and a rather large bruise showed up on the left a few days later.

In hindsight (that is to say, when I did it again, and then when Lucy wanted to try), I tried to go across the narrow---and therefore highest pressure---point. Even five feet up the river, the current was much more gentle, because the funnel/channel was wider. 

But I was soaked. What to do? In the back of my mind, I'd been considering something pro xc racers often do after a big race: an "ice bath" in a river or stream. You can read more about the practice HERE if you'd like, but as many of you know, my cycling life (at least as far as these sorts of high-performance training methods) is mostly a Walter Mitty sort of fantasy camp. But standing there soaking wet, with my only formerly dry pair of shorts literally dripping water, I made a decision, stripped off my shorts, put them on a log to dry (or try to, anyway), and found myself a nice spot to give this ice-bath business a try. After all, I'd hiked up a 1500' mountainside, and pounded my body on the way down until it was cramping (see part one), so surely this was the time to try it out.

Nobody was anywhere around, and even if they had been, the boxer-briefs I wear are practically shorts on their own!

But the point I'm getting at is not whether the ice bath worked (it seemed to, but was inconclusive), but that despite the nearly nonexistent risk, going in the river like that was... soothing. It felt natural and right. And it got me thinking.

I'm not saying I'm ready to join a nudist colony, but I do think modern society---and maybe America and New England with its puritan heritage most of all---fills us with layers of guilt, and confused notions about our bodies.

And nature perhaps helps us figure those things out just a bit.