Episode Details

It was a bad line from the start, that much was obvious.

We had been good about setting the raft square into the rapids, but this approach looked bad, this looked dangerous. Expletives started rising.

There’s a huge gap in my memory. But I do remember that at the bottom, our raft started taking in hundreds of gallons per second from the falls. Everyone was gone and my side rising up, up, up, out of the water. I slid backwards, head-first, into the drink.

I swirled around down there for a good long time. My life jacket finally brought me up, but that’s when I learned we had only just started. I managed to be nearest to the raft, which had now flipped entirely upside down.

Our guide stood on top of it now. He unwrapped the cable from his waist, clipped it to the base of the boat, then looked at me. “Help me pull in the others,” he said. Help you pull in the others? The raft is flipped and no one’s in it! He jumped off the raft while tethered to it, using his weight to flip the raft and right it.

He climbed that same cable to log-roll himself in and then didn’t so much pull as threw me in behind him. It was now just the two of us in a raft that seats eight, and we were leaving the rapids for greater falls that he warned us would probably take us out if we couldn’t get to the cove in time. There was no swimming for it; we needed the oars. So, there was work we had to do.

Pro tip: don’t ever pull anyone into a raft with your arms. The angle is awkward and they’re entirely too heavy. What you do instead is grab on to their life vest, set your elbows into your chest and then do your best to fall backwards. Your leverage is what will pull them out. I did this with Mike first. He floundered in the boat a bit, so I raised myself and saw my roommate on the other side of the raft. I got him in, too. Then I got Jared, then Stephen.

We were way late getting to the shore, but proved to be safe enough.

On the beach, no one said anything. We pulled the raft up and out of the water but kept silent. On the portage trip down, Jared started screaming at Stephen, his little brother. It was his way of letting Stephen know he was terrified for him.

Our guide finally broke the ice. “Y’all look a little gun-shy, eh? But you ain’t gun-shy, are ye?” He was smiling. He did it on purpose, y’see. And we all knew he did it on purpose because he told us he was going to, right before we approached the rapids. When he did, he was smiling like Gornemant.

This was not an initiation, although I suppose it could have been. It remained demoted as an orchestrated crisis because I didn’t know the steps to initiation. No one told me the steps. Not my parents, not my grandparents. Almost none of us know the steps anymore.

In School of Lost Borders parlance, the first step is what they call Severance. There’s something that nudges you off the well-trod road into town and gets you bushwhackin’ it through the wilds. This could be a formalized thing with a vision quest group, or someone could simply walk into your living room and quietly say, “I’m pregnant.” Either way, you’ve left the road.

Next comes crossing the Threshold. You’re going to do or experience something that brings the whole of you—body, psyche, mind, spirit, soul, whatever you’ve got—out into some kind of in-between. You’re no longer with the revelers at Tara anymore; you’re out there in the lone dark, cooly holding that spear tip up to your forehead. Prepare as you might, remember what Iron Mike said: “everyone’s got a plan until they’ve been hit.” You’re going to be in over your head, you won’t know for how long and it’s going to be gnarly.

If initiation or rites of passage are talked about at all, these two tend to monopolize the conversation. A lot of bragging goes on about Severance and Thresholds via dry fasts and pilgrimages, or retreats and missionary work if that’s more your crowd. But believe it or not, these two are