off the pavement / By Seth Naman

Salmon River Race

A band along with DJ’s, rappers and turn tables lit up the otherwise quiet air on Friday night. Three kegs were emptied in short order but the party continued late into the night — or early into the morning, rather. River people were getting loose and loving it. I heard the next day that the faction that “won the party” went to bed around six in the morning.

After a group photo around noon – nobody wants to race early in the morning after dancing and drinking late into the night – all the racers readied their crafts and situated their costumes. Fake hair in a variety of colors, capes, face paint, plastic swords, eye patches and other accessories adorned the competitors.

The mass start was pandemonium. I struggled to get around rafts and catarafts. Oars and paddles and angry hungover pirates churned around me. As I attempted to pass a black and yellow cataraft, the paddler made no attempt to let me around, even though we both knew that my passing him was inevitable. Nine foot oars flying in the air like the clumsy wings of a baby bird, he laid one of the blades right into the back of my helmet, hard. I shot him the stink eye and skated by. Well, just like the day before, a solid thump to the cranium energized me and I was ready to charge.

I went to the right with several other boats at the first fork in the river, while Dan and others went left — this proved to be a crucial error. Dan and Chris Hatton, who owns the Somes Bar Store, pulled out in front and I was running in third place behind them. I watched Dan drop into the first rapid, Bloomer’s Falls, fifty or so yards downstream of me. At some point thereafter, two other kayakers slowly passed me. My brief hope of placing in the race faded to a distant number five. Midway through the race, I began to lose sight of the fourth place paddler; with no one in front of me to follow, I had to recall the lines that I attempted to memorize the day before. I replayed them in my head, repeating the names and visualizing my path through them. At the rapid called Cascade, the backside of a large lateral wave coming off the bedrock wall on the left seemed impossibly tall and steep as I crashed down through the whitewater.

I knew when Dan pulled out in front at the start, nobody was going to catch him. After I crossed the finish line and climbed up on some rocks to watch the racers paddle through Freight Train, I slapped him a high five. We watched bright rafts full of crazy pirates and loud and happy superheroes stream by. One raft smashed another into a bedrock wall then passed the beleaguered craft just a few yards upstream of the finish line. Kayakers not willing to try so hard, probably because they gave it their all the night before, trickled through.

The race was roughly 45 minutes of hell — arms and stomach and shoulders burning, sitting in a cumbersome kayak with a seat and outfitting so loose I felt like I could fall out at any moment. I can’t wait to do it next year.

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