Archive for September, 2008

How come I end up where I started
How come I end up where I went wrong
Won’t take my eyes off the ball again
You reel me out and you cut the string.
– radiohead

Here’s how it used to go. You took a rolling class in the winter. Coaches jumped in their whitewater boats and showed off whenever they had a free moment (and some times when they didn’t). Then they send you off to do hip snaps. You did hip snaps off the palm of the coaches hand, off another student’s boat, off the side of the pool. You put a paddle float on the end of your paddle. The coach spoke to you about this position and that, then dunked you. . . again, and again, and again. You would be underwater while arms from heaven pulled and twisted at your body making you feel like a drowning marionette. 2 hours later you left the pool tired, sore and disappointed trying to convince yourself you had learned something. It’s really amazing so many of us survived this circus to learn how to roll at all.

Yeah, that method sort of the standard. But it was up to you to go home and spend hours, weeks and months trying to comprehend and retain it all. “Fifteen steps, Then a sheer drop”. Think about it. If you just spend big bucks on a rolling class and you go home feeling like you still have to buy more books and videos to learn that first roll. . . something must be wrong.

Let me bring you songs from the wood:
to make you feel much better than you could know.
Dust you down from tip to toe.
Show you how the garden grows.
- tull

I’d always wondered. Two bridges about a half mile apart. If I had to guess, I assumed they went over the same stream. Sure you could check a map, but what fun is that? So yesterday it was time to explore a theory. While in the end I learned that was one stream did indeed connect these bridges, what I underestimated was the lost world in between.

Devil’s Lake State Park here in Wisconsin is a popular destination with well over 1 million visitors each year. Still like all natural areas, the tourists tend to keep tight to the public areas and rarely wander into the vast forests and hills. Beyond the pavement and gravel trails the world still feels young and un-discovered. It’s within these hills where I often go to get my head together. A place to find a quiet peacefulness that has been mostly peeled away from the surface of the earth.

Out in the Steinke Basin to the east of the lake itself, the land rolls through swamps, forests, glacial moraines and the remnants of what was a productive farm. The trails pass through a variety of mini-ecosystems, each with their own character and often vastly different as you turn each corner. A lone windmill spins in the breeze marking the place where a farm once stood. Here lilies planted over a half century ago still bloom. Their gaudy beauty seems somehow out of place against the backdrop of this mostly recovered natural landscape.

A popular trail heads south through the basin toward the hills to the south. It is on this trail where I’ve often stood upon a small wooden bridge and let my gaze linger on a small picture perfect waterfall just below. Each spring the ice cold water rushes down the rocks in a thunderous roar. By autumn the water often slows to a trickle and disappears into a small stand of marsh grass and cardinal flowers. On the far side a small trickle of water escapes the swamp and meanders through loose stone before slipping into a dark curtain of Oak, Maple & Basswood forest. A pang of curiosity had often tempted me to follow.

Of course you have to be careful of those pangs and the piper’s merry path they want to lead you down. These days we tend to be so jaded that we don’t recognize the inner voice of Pandora who couldn’t leave the jar alone. Even trekking off into an “urban” wilderness has risks. It’s too easy to write off a seemingly half mile stroll. Yet ask a whitewater paddler what difference a half mile can make, or a wilderness rescue team what troubles a half mile of forest can cause. You still have to be careful.

It’s a good idea not to be too over confident and to take time to run through a check list of possible risks even in a seemingly benign situation. Just couple years back a 14 year old got lost while hunting with family in these woods and spent a chilly November night sleeping in the leaves before walking out onto a road the next day. A fun day out can suddenly complicated by a simple twisted ankle or wrong turn. Not to mention the area supports a strong population of rattlesnakes! With that in mind I brought a compass, noting a main road would be north of us the whole way. I also carried a GPS which as I had expected lost it’s signal as soon as we slipped under the forest canopy.

Not far into the woods the stream bed opened to a wide swath of loose stone as if some giant had drug a plow through the woods. There was a suggestion of ominous power written under the dappled sun. Broken branches hung in the trees marking the high water of the floods earlier in the year. It was hard to imagine just how high the water was that funneled down this path! Trees along each side had been ripped from the earth, while new cliffs and corners were formed. In places where lone trees had fallen and were pinned against others, seemingly tons of stone were held back to create new dams, waterfalls and holes that must have been amazing when the torrents flowed.

Along the way we found small pools water where small fish darted below the rocks. One couldn’t help but wonder how they made their way to these pools. Often the only sign of flowing water was the sound of a goggle echoing in the stone beneath your feet. Tree frogs and toads would often leap away from your steps. A clutch of snake eggs hidden in a small hole under a tree suggested the destruction of the floods caused them to try again. Of course the low slung sun did not bode well for the new family.

We continued down the slope as hills rose higher and higher on each side of the path forcing us to continue jumping stone to stone on the stream bed itself. In time the sounds of voices in the distance told us we were in fact coming to the end of our journey. I could extrapolate that a popular hiking trail that I was familiar with must have been just a short distance away. The stone swath began to thin and fall in sharper descents cause us to do a bit more jumping and climbing than actual walking until at last the land leveled out again and the flowing water that had continued under the stone was once again revealed.

In the end the GPS grabbed just enough data to tell us that we had actually hiked just under 2 miles as we followed the twists and turns along the way. Much longer than the half-mile “as the crow files” distance. As we walked out of the trees onto the manicured grass and paved parking areas we could feel muscles tightening and a sudden pang of hunger. We were, exactly where we thought we’d be. We relished in the little victory. It was time to go home. We had come to the end of another little adventure that made a typical autumn Saturday just a little less ordinary.

Yeah, yeah, yeah – up the hill backwards
It’ll be alright
– david bowie

In Greenland Rolling there are really 2 main rolls. Back recoveries & Forward recoveries. All the other funky stuff from there is just based on tuning up these two main rolls.

As I mentioned in the last post It’s not about the stuff in your hands. It’s all about body movement. My own learning curve has got me focused at the moment on forward recoveries. In a forward recovery you move a bit away from that full body “twist” I often refer to in layback rolls. To be sure, you still twist but you punctuate that twist a bit with a crunch at the end. It’s a crunch because while your lower body is twisting the boat up, your upper body is laying forward on the deck instead of backward. Oh yes, flexibility becomes a big factor. I’m not a thin guy, but neither were many of the Inuit hunters who came up with this stuff. They were however in good shape, well balanced and flexible.

The first introduction we usually get to the forward recovery is when we learn a reverse sweep roll (I have a video here). The momentum of the roll and the long extended paddle give us every opportunity to get it right. On the other hand, dependence on the paddle will usually mean we blow the roll and sometimes break the paddle! It’s probably a good idea to keep working on those layback rolls until we become really aware of our bodies and less dependent on our paddles and hands. The reverse sweep will quickly tell us where we are with that. Again, for the most part the paddle has to be made irrelevant. We concentrate on rolling the boat up with our body. Lifting our knee up while bringing our torso down to meet it in a classic abdominal crunch. At the very end of the roll we sort of drag the paddle at a right angle across the deck which does provide a bit of lift, just enough to stabilize ourselves back over the boat.

My personal work out at the moment is to slow it all down. I want to kill the momentum as much as possible as to keep the focus on good body control. I’ve also had to work pretty hard with Yoga, crunches & sit-ups to build that core strength and flexibility that will allow me to be successful. To practice the forward recovery without the help of the momentum I work from a chest scull. In a chest scull you place the extended paddle in front of your body as you go chest first into the water. You let your body go deep, then angle your blade up to the surface. You sweep your paddle back and forth or “scull” with a slight angle on the blade which will lift you to the surface of the water. In time you will get comfortable with this and can raise your head and shoulders right out of the water and breath. To recover, you again twist your lower body, snapping your knee up as your bring your torso to meet it in a crunch, sliding your paddle across your deck as you return to an upright position. The trick here is to slow this down as much as you can, keeping all your focus on the body and the boat. Again, the blade is an afterthought. Yeah, it’s easy to say!!

Remember, this is not an issue of how heavy or thin you are. It’s strength, balance and flexibility. Don’t let yourself believe you can’t do it. You can.

I’ll just erase you from my memory
Put it all behind me
Because you are erased
All erased…
– annie lennox

In Yoga’s Warrior Pose you balance your body between legs placed far apart. Your hips steady the framework as you do your best to distribute your weight evenly between your legs. When you roll a kayak and first come to the surface and for a moment there similar balance between the part of you in the boat, and the bits of you out of the boat. Then momentarily you bring all your energy to just one side (the bits in the boat) and roll up.

Some people are lucky. They can learn traditional rolling quite easily. They just “do”. Others (like me) have to break down and understand things over long periods of time, then have little epiphanies. It’s sort of a fits and starts way of learning but it works. So it’s natural that when I teach boat control and rolling I focus on the feel and not so much the rigid 1, 2, 3’s. I’ve come to believe that if the mind and body can connect sensually then the rest is cake. A good roller has to be well tuned with their body, even if they are unaware of it superficially.

I think we first truly begin to come to terms with this sensual understanding when we start learning our layback norsaq (or stick) rolls. At first we tend to learn reach out away from the boat and smack the Norsaq down onto the surface of the water. We use that tension to brace off of as we twist up. In time we may not “splash” but we still find ourselves pushing down on the stick. Then we learn to sweep the norsaq. Again though, we are focused heavily on what’s going on “out there” away from the boat. Well, we’re stick rolling right? Yes and no. Certainly there are rolls that depend on the stick, but to keep moving forward in our technique we have to understand that the stick just happens to be there. It’s irrelevant.

I came to understand this better a few weeks ago by watching Dan Segal roll in Michigan. For whatever reason Dan’s concepts of rolling spoke to my thought process and opened some blind spots. I just needed time to let it soak in. The little epiphany began with understanding the Norsaq in practical terms. A Norsaq is basically a spear chucker. Once the spear. . . (I should say “harpoon”) is tossed there are ropes to deal with. There isn’t time to fool around with the norsaq, so a hunter may just put it in his mouth while he gets on with the task. If he suddenly ends up upside-down he just grabs the Norsaq and rolls. Thing is, who knows where he’ll grab it from. Maybe an end, maybe the middle. Maybe he would end up holding it by the wrong end and it would be inverted so the length of the stick is toward the kayak instead of away from the boat. Chances are a sweep or “smack” might just be out of the question. There’s the epiphany. The goal is not to use the Norsaq to roll. The goal is to keep hold of it WHILE your roll so you don’t have to go home and make a new one. So I’m not rolling with the stick, I’m rolling with a stick in my hand. Make sense?

Well, that brings your focus right back to your body. Ok then, there is no stick. There is no “hand”.  Erase them from your mind. It’s just your body hanging out there and you need to recover. This is where the sensuality and vision come into play. The roll then feels like Yoga. Your mind tunes into your body and simply shifts energy from one point to another. As you come to the surface of the water you just relax. You’re upper body follows the roll but does not really participate. The energy is expended below your waist, not above. You lay your arm with the norsaq in hand out there and forget about it. Then beginning at your toes the energy of the recovery moves through your body. With a twisting motion your knee follows your toes and is followed by your hips which bring your lower torso, then upper, then neck, then head back onto the kayak. Your inward arm can be laid across the back deck which acts as a counter weight, however in time you won’t need it either.

The idea that we roll with our body and not the paddle is always true from the moment we learn to roll. However big fat paddles and buoyant Greenland sticks tend to hide that truth from our brains. We sense it, but only to a level. As we move to stick & hand rolls it becomes more important. To get rid of the “splash & sweeps” we have to sharpen our focus even more. Each step of the way tuning further and further into the inner sensuality of the kayak roll.

. . . and speaking of creative paddlers it’s worth noting that traditional paddler, coach & artist Diane Carr along with artist David Barr have an exhibition coming up at the Marshall M. Fredricks Sculpture Museum from October 3rd through January 31st, 2009.

Diane has quite a resume’ which I’m happily stealing from the Marshall M. Fredericks Website :

(Diane) Carr taught painting, drawing and design at Macomb Community College, Mt Clemens MI; was a painting instructor at Wayne State University; a guest lecturer at Mott Community College, Flint, MI, Center for Creative Studies, Detroit, and Cranbrook Academy of Art. She was painting coordinator at Ox Box Summer Workshop in Saugatuck, MI and Visiting Artist, Wesleyan University, Bloomington, IL

Carr’s commissions include Skystone, an outdoor sculpture for the New Buffalo Welcome Center, MI and Sky Crystals, 4 wall sculptures for 15 ft. x 46 ft. wall at One23 Restaurant, Grosse Pointe, MI. Her work is in the collections of the Karmanos Cancer Institute in the Detroit Medical Center, The Detroit Institute of Arts, Dennos Museum Center in Traverse City, MI, and Southwestern Michigan College, Dowagiac.

Carr’s work has been included in more than 35 group and 6 one-woman exhibits in Michigan and Canada.

For this exhibition Carr has produced a new body of work titled “Sculptural Wall Gestures.”

***

Funny, the don’t even mention her rolling! Now the trick of course is to get one of my many paddle ninja paparazzi to get that opening night picture!!

Oh, and check out the photo here (the top piece).  Interesting. . . .

Blue, blue, electric blue
That’s the colour of my room
Where I will live
Blue, blue
- bowie

Happiness is a clean desktop. . . if only momentarily. After hours days and weeks of zipping emails back and forth Justine and I were able to finalize the cover for her new DVD, “This is the Sea 4″ which will be released in just a few weeks. Designing a DVD cover is really a pretty crazy process, sort of like putting a 1000 piece puzzle together on the living room floor. You gather all the bits together and then figure out how they all go together, while at the same time trying to keep some consistency within the series, all while telling a bit of a story along the way. It’s something I do enjoy about graphic art; You are given a blank frame or blank screen, some general ideas and set loose on a path of discovery. The thing I fret about is doing justice to the all of Justine’s months of work contained on the inside.

Preacher or poet who was it wrote
Give any one species too much rope
And they’ll f*ck it up
- roger waters

I came across this interesting article that offers some pretty wild ways to combat global warming. It seems if we just go back to screwing up the ecosystem (Remember acid rain?) we may have a solution to climate change. Read On!