Playing with the “If it Rains” Club

On the flat rocks below the suspension bridge, someone’s red and white candy-stripe towel dangles limply over a log, the only indication that, yesterday, dozens of students were swimming in the gorge, sunbathing on the rocks, and trying to forget that classes have started.  It’s raining only lightly, but by tonight, the towel might be washed away over Ithaca Falls, on its way to Cayuga Lake with the rest of the debris that will likely flow down Fall Creek—everything from whole trees to lawn chairs and kids’ toys.

A few larger raindrops hit me as I walk to class—one on the head, a few on my shoulders—and soak through my sweaty t-shirt.  I think about getting out my umbrella but I’m already almost late to class and only halfway across the quad from Goldwin Smith.  Yesterday the Quad was full of people—barefoot crunchy hippie types throwing Frisbees, girls in their short summer skirts talking to each other and on their cell phones, a few moms with kids, a couple of dogs—but today it’s almost completely empty.  The remnants of Hurricane Frances swirl overhead like a bad mood, the gusty winds having blown in the rain and the reminder that we’re now two weeks into the semester, time to stop playing around and start doing some work. 

On the way up the stairs into the building, I overhear a kid I’m pretty sure is a freshman on his cell phone, talking to his mom and whining about how horrible the intro chemistry class is.  Then he switches to the weather: “For real… Ithaca sucks so much!  I hate the rain!”

I have to agree with him—but only about chemistry.  I spent my first three years at Cornell, like most people, hating the rain.  I enjoyed it when I could be inside, curled up with a book in the Ecology House lobby pretending to be productive, but more often than not, I found myself coming out of a windowless lecture hall all the way across campus to discover that the weather had changed from sunny to downpour in less than an hour.  A friend of mine and I once got chastised by a janitor in Warren Hall when we “borrowed” two huge, ultra-strong trash bags from a cart in the hallway to use as ponchos. 

My friend Vijay loves the rain—but then, he enjoys being antisocial, dirty, and as far away from civilization as possible.  He spent the summer in the Canadian tundra studying Snow Geese, wearing rubber boots, twenty dollar Helly Hanson bibs, and a parka every day, getting rained, snowed, sleeted, and hailed on and loving it.  While he was chasing goslings around puddles, I was in the Ecuadorian Andes trying to climb mountains and being repeatedly kicked in the teeth by bad weather.  On El Corazon, our first acclimatization hike, my boots, repeatedly coated with Nikwax waterproofing treatment, started seeping through twenty minutes after the rain started and I spent the rest of the day hiking in puddles.  Worse, I discovered the utter inadequacy of “waterproof-breathable” clothing—my two hundred dollar jacket kept me about as dry as a cotton t-shirt.  This is IT, I swore.  Screw being a mountaineer… one more year at Cornell and I’m moving to someplace warm and dry with spectacular sandstone rock climbing. 

 Yet here I am, back at home in Ithaca (and Ithaca really does feel like home by now), waiting like a kid who’s been promised ice cream for Frances to dump whatever rain she has left on us.  I’m almost disappointed when I come out of class and it’s not raining any harder than before.  Back at my apartment I click immediately to the National Weather Service’s forecast for Ithaca and practically start to twitch when I read that the chance of precipitation is 100 percent for Wednesday and Thursday.  The radar doesn’t look as promising and I should know by now never to completely trust the weather report, but I’m still optimistic.  If we get even half of the forecasted rain, Fall Creek will be going crazy, which means sometime in the next few days, I’ll be whitewater kayaking just upstream from campus. 

 

When Outside magazine ranked the top forty colleges where students can study hard and play hard outside in last September’s issue, Cornell came out fourteenth.  Not bad, I thought (from the perspective of the climber that I am), for a rainy little town in central New York, a would-be climbers’ paradise if only the rock weren’t crumbly shale and if only it were legal to climb the ice in the gorges in the winter.  Cornell’s blurb told me what I’d learned early on my freshman year from reading the t-shirt and discovering it for myself: Ithaca is gorges, and there are plenty of places to hike, swim, and play in and along the gorges and down to the streams’ outlets in Cayuga Lake, where sailing, kayaking, and windsurfing are only a few of the possibilities. 

What the article didn’t mention seems to be a gem of knowledge confined to a small group of people who love it when it rains: Cayuga Lake isn’t the only place to paddle a boat; when the gorges really start to fill up with water, the whitewater paddlers come out to play on the local creeks and even right here on campus. 

Learning to paddle has been on my personal “to-do” list since I started hanging out with the Cornell Outing Club before classes even started my freshmen year.  The club includes an active group of accomplished paddlers that I’ve often referred to as the “If it Rains Club” because they’d announce trips that would happen “if it rains.”  Usually the trips were for intermediate to advanced paddlers, though, and if beginner trips happened to fall on a sunny weekend (since rain isn’t always as necessary for easier runs), no question, I was going climbing instead.  I was a loyal member of the “If it’s Not Raining Club.”  As it turns out, it was not raining my first day on a river this summer, and I spent the entire hour and a half drive to the Salmon River near Pulaski, New York wondering why I wasn’t going climbing on a brilliantly sunny Sunday late in July.  A couple of miles of whitewater and a few hours later, I’d forgotten rocks and spent the entire hour and a half drive home wondering why I’d waited so long to start paddling. 

Though kayaks and canoes have been and remain an important mode of transportation for people around the world, what we were doing on the Salmon was hardly a pursuit borne out of a need to go somewhere.  The goal was pure fun; possibly the only good reason to get from point A to point B was to get back to our cars so we could get home, and no one was in too big a hurry to do that.  Though going through the rapids was fun, hanging out and “surfing” in them was even better, and we stopped frequently in eddies near waves and holes to play.

“Playboating” is just what it sounds like—using a boat to play in the waves.  Though no one was throwing any really crazy tricks in “Titanic,” a hole just before our take-out, dozens of paddlers were taking their turns peeling out of the eddies on both sides and surfing, sometimes using just their hands, and often spinning on the wave’s foam pile.  In bigger water, the repertoire of what paddlers can do in the waves includes an amazing variety of skateboarding-inspired maneuvers, including spins, flips, cartwheels, and even aerial tricks.  Kayaks themselves have become specialized for playboating too; I won’t even pretend to understand what’s going on when my paddling friends talk about the newest boat designs and the prototypes they want to demo soon, but who wouldn’t want to paddle a boat made by a company named Bliss-Stick or called the “Fun,” “Big Wheel,” or “Pocket Rocket?” 

I spent a while at Titanic trying to get myself (in one of the Outing Club’s Riot “Boosters,” a boat slightly too big for me, with a name that’s not nearly as fun sounding as, say, the Fluid “Flirt”) into the hole and up on an edge enough to surf.  I wasn’t too successful at first, but I surprised myself when I was able to roll the first time the wave spit me out upside-down instead of having to be rescued.   I threw myself in the hole repeatedly and eventually surfed for a few seconds.  I was, to say it like a paddler, “totally stoked,” not to mention completely hooked.  Within a few weeks, I had the link to the website for the USGS river gauge at Fall Creek at the top of my internet “favorites” list and couldn’t help feeling a bit excited when the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration started predicting an active hurricane season.  Paddling on campus—that sure beat Ithaca’s climbing potential!

 

Frances spits a few showers on Ithaca on Wednesday afternoon, but not as much rain as I hoped.  More rain Wednesday night and Thursday afternoon brings the creek up by Friday morning, but by the time I’m finished with classes and meetings around five on Friday afternoon, the gauge is reading just above 500 cubic feet per second, about the minimum for surfing the wave at Flat Rock, just below the dam near the smaller suspension bridge in Forest Home.  I’m bummed that the flow is down, exhausted and getting a cold, so when I meet my friends Beth and Brendan at Japes, the Outing Club’s clubhouse on Beebe Lake, they have to work to convince me not to go home to finish my math homework.  I stop whining about matrix multiplication as soon as I’m in my boat, and my mood starts to improve as soon as I slide over the dam—a big waterslide for boats. 

We join a father and son, Jim and Galen, whom I’ve met once or twice working programs for Cornell Outdoor Education, and all take turns paddling up the eddy into the wave and surfing as long as we can.  Galen, who’s nine, begs to stay longer when Jim says it’s time to go home for dinner, and after a phone call home to mom, Jim gives in.  As the light starts to fade, the five of us decide to paddle downstream, where Beth and Brendan want to scout the dam under the one-lane bridge and the last drop over the waterfall into Beebe Lake.  We take our time going down the creek, talking and surfing.  Galen is catching every wave he can and getting really psyched.  I lose my concentration going over a ledge and flip over, then get my paddle knocked out of my hands by the rocks on the bottom when I try to roll.  I spend the next few seconds getting thoroughly knocked around and being very thankful I’m wearing a helmet, then finally give up on the roll, pop off the neoprene spray skirt, and swim out from under the boat.  I find an eddy where I can stand up to empty out my boat, and after a few minutes of looking, Brendan recovers my paddle.  When Jim, Galen, and I get out of the water a few minutes later above the dam, my heart rate is still up and I’m a bit annoyed with myself for not hitting my roll, but I’m in a much happier mood than before.

We haul our boats up from the creek and stash them in the trees near the one-lane bridge, watch Beth and Brendan drop over the broken dam (getting funny looks from the drivers going past), then jog to Beebe Lake and over the stone bridge to the popular jumping ledge to watch them run the falls into the lake.  It’s dark enough to make scrambling around near the edge of the gorge a bit sketchy, and the sight of Brendan’s boat floating under the bridge freaks out a couple who happen to be walking around the lake.  Jim, Galen, and I materialize out of the shadows at the same time, still wearing neoprene spray skirts, booties, and PFDs, only adding to their confusion. 

“Who are you guys?  What are you?” the man asks, and I can’t help but start laughing.

“Did he come from in there?” the woman continues, gesturing toward the cloud of mist in the gorge behind us, all we can see of the waterfall. 

“Yeah,” we say, “we came from up near the dam in the Plantations.”

“That’s crazy.  Why?” the pair asks.

            We shrug, laughing.  “I don’t know… it’s super fun,” is the best I can offer. 

            I wake up to brilliant sunlight the next morning, slightly bruised and still smiling despite the lengthy to-do list that starts writing itself in my head as soon as I’m awake enough to think.  I can hear Fall Creek from the windows of my apartment near the suspension bridge as I’m making breakfast, and I know the water will be down until the next big rain, which might come from Hurricane Ivan in about a week.  Before I can start my homework, my phone rings; I’d missed my parents’ usual Friday evening call while I was on the water.  My mom asks what I’ve been up to, and I can almost see her shaking her head, amused, when I tell her about running Fall Creek, flipping over, and intriguing the couple on the bridge.  Since I started climbing seriously three years ago, my parents have heard their share of adventures and misadventures, seen more than a few photos that make them nervous, and watched and contributed to my growing collection of strange and expensive gear.  I know what they’re thinking now: another dangerous hobby with more expensive toys. 

            “Twenty-one years old and you still just want to play outside,” my mom says, with a tone that indicates she knows that probably won’t change anytime soon. 

            “What about your classes?  Are you actually doing any work?” my dad chimes in on the speakerphone, and I give him an exasperated “yes!” even though I know he’s joking. 

            We talk for a while longer about school, my younger brother’s college search, the politics of my hometown, and whatever else is going on at home until we reach the inevitable question: have I thought any more about what I might do when I graduate in May?  Not really; my career and life ambitions seem to change more frequently now than ever, but I have started to define some common themes.  I’m intrigued by islands, oceans, ecology, and conservation, and I mention the idea of doing graduate work in the Caribbean, and maybe even applying for a Fulbright. 

            “There might not be anything left of the Caribbean after this hurricane season,” my mom says, and it’s a more poignant reminder than she intends that while I’m out playing on the creek with my friends, thousands of others are beginning to put their lives back together after storms that left them with next to nothing.  A few minutes later, putting off my inevitable work, I click to the Weather Channel’s home page and feel a mix of guilt and excitement as a graphic pops up showing Ivan’s expected path—right through Jamaica, Grenada, and the Cayman Islands, then straight through Florida and up the East Coast. 

I close the page and open Microsoft Word to start working on an essay.  As much as I’d like to forever be a nine-year old, nearly unaware of disaster and innocently begging to stay out and play, I can’t ignore all the work I have to do and all that’s going on in the world around me.  Graduation and the “real” world after Cornell await just out of sight downriver, a series of the biggest holes and waves I’ve yet to encounter, and the features and currents are bound to change as storms roll through.  Still, there’s no point in punching through the whitewater just to get to the takeout; too much fun and too much learning come from figuring out how to be happy when it rains and taking time to stop and play in the waves on the way.