Addiction to sea kayaking

August-September 1995

This is an article from WaveLength Magazine, available in print in North America and globally on the web.

by Paul Kaufmann

"Our bodies and brains were born in the sea. We return there now, not to rediscover but to reenter the viscera of the planet to remember the forgotten depths within ourselves. Through the mysterious process of evolution, we have somehow learned to enclose all of this, the wild and varied life of the sea, within our own bodies. We may walk upright on dry land and even leave the earth itself, but we can never escape the sea. We must continually reconstitute its liquids and salts inside ourselves to keep alive organs that move with the unhurried peristaltic rhythms of sea creatures that bound in the eternal waters." -- George Leonard

Dear Abby: I'm 65 years old, have been kayaking on San Francisco Bay for 29 years, am now exceeding 700 trips and finding it increasingly difficult but don't know how to stop. I'm addicted and need your help. What should I do?

Dear Paul: Don't stop! This is a healthy addiction and helps you survive on shore. It's your healer.

Is it really an addiction? Sure seems that way. I'm usually a solitary beginner before breakfast, continue until my body can't tolerate more, and often feel residuals the next day. I don't feel well without a weekly fix, though recently imagining my morning shower as sun-distilled sea may postpone the craving. I'm also aware of many compulsive aspects in my style: my Waterboy pump-tube (with constant ice water), VHF radio, radar reflector, and shipshape kayak are purportedly for safety and comfort -- they are, yet there is a neurotic feel to the additional pleasure I get from these contrivances. And is talking to a seal normal?

I've usually thought of addiction as a problem, so "healthy addiction" sounds like an oxymoron. But if I consider the benefits paddling has brought into my life, Dear Abby must be right. Recently I came across William Glasser's book, Positive Addiction (mainly about running), and am convinced that some addictions are healing. My 50 year old Webster's has a remarkably positive definition for addiction: "strong disposition or devotion to some practice or pursuit...habitual attachment or consecration to some object." Carl Jung points out that "alcohol in Latin is Spiritus, and you use the same word for the highest religious experience as well as for the most depraving poison." Though most books on addiction focus on genetic, familial, and societal etiologies, I suspect kayak addiction also stems from gravitational, oceanic, and existential depths...

As a native San Franciscan, perhaps I was slated for this fate by my genetics. When I had two lobes removed from my right lung in 1968 the doctor excitedly told me I had an azygos lobe, a congenital malformation in the mesentery of the cardinal vein formed during embryonic development found in only 1-2% of Homo Sapiens but normal in 100% of pinnipeds (seals and walrus)! Even after nine months of preparation and skills acquisition I was unable to complete a wet exit from my mother's saline womb because of entrapment by a placenta previa, so a Cesarean rescue allowed me to get a gulp of air and hear my first fog horns of August -- the soul music of the bay.

My favorite book during adolescence was "Enchanted Vagabonds", about a couple who kayaked along the Pacific Coast to Panama. Solo wilderness experiences started as a teenager hiking the San Gabriel Mountains behind Pasadena, and I learned the principles of the margin of safety at Stanford as a charter member of the Alpine Club. I experienced my first kayaks as cook on the original Sierra Club river trips on the Yampa and Green, but the ultimate synchronicity was finding our home in the Marina of San Francisco, only two blocks from the bay.

After this long incubation, I suddenly became addicted in 1964 following the birth of our fourth child, when the need for solitude took on a new meaning. I took the fatal plunge and my life has never been the same.

Paddling in San Francisco Bay is unique because the tides in this almost completely enclosed large body of water produce very strong tidal currents. Using the powerful forces of the flood and ebb curents, back eddies and winds, makes each trip much easier.

I'm fascinated and healed contemplating my gravitational connection to the cosmos. I love to think about the sun and moon pulling the water under me, or the centrifugal force lifting the sea when I'm on the opposite side of the earth. If the moon is new or full my body weighs about one drop of water less!

The earth's rotation brings more than sunrise -- it produces the Coriolis effect, like an ice skater who spins faster if her "diameter" is reduced. Thus the sea level is about inch higher on the south shore of the bay because like our skater, water with less diameter (closer to the pole) rotates to the right in the North Hemisphere, clockwise, to obey the law of the conservation of angular momentum.

Copernicus defines gravity as "the nostalgia of things to become spheres", so I'm literally linked to the origin of the universe, the Big Bang, and the star stuff we are all made of from supernovae explosions once upon a time. Sitting on -- or usually one inch below -- these tremendous forces simply cures something deep inside orienting me to my tiny place in the flow of life.

Though going solo contradicts the first rule of kayak safety, the isolation is truly healing. Carl Jung states that "Solitude is for me a fount of healing which makes my life worth living. Talking is often a torment for me, and I need many days of silence to recover from the futility of words". Irvin Yalom notes that "It is the facing of aloneness that ultimately allows one to engage another deeply and meaningfully". Alfred North Whitehead comments that "Religion is what the individual does with his own solitariness...and if you are never solitary, you are never religious". And Erich Fromm adds that "The ability to be alone is the condition for the ability to love". If this sounds a bit too philosophical, Oscar Wilde reminds us that "Only a superficial person needs to look beneath the surface". So I simply enjoy being alone, not having to worry about, yell at, or talk to another kayaker, and just listen to the waves, wind, birds, seals, horns, and distant city sounds.

What is it about salt water? Joseph Conrad writes that "Everything can be found at sea according to the spirit of your quest". I wonder why contact with the bay allows me to breathe fresh air in the city? Perhaps Carl Jung offers a clue: "A person not related to nature is of course neurotic because he is not adapted to reality". But George Leonard describes it best in his chapter on scuba diving: "Our bodies and brains were born in the sea. We return there now, not to rediscover but to reenter the viscera of the planet to remember the forgotten depths within ourselves. Through the mysterious process of evolution, we have somehow learned to enclose all of this, the wild and varied life of the sea, within our own bodies. We may walk upright on dry land and even leave the earth itself, but we can never escape the sea. We must continually reconstitute its liquids and salts inside ourselves to keep alive organs that move with the unhurried peristaltic rhythms of sea creatures that bound in the eternal waters. Even if the body itself, organs and all, should be transformed, its transformation would be in the nature of a sea change, inexorable and profound."

Perhaps the most therapeutic of sea kayaking is the danger. We usually skirt around this when discussing safety technique, but that often used quote from the Blasket Islands expresses it directly: "A man who is not afraid of the sea will soon be drowned, for he will be going out on a day he shouldn't. But we do be afraid of the sea, and we do only be drowned now and again". Which brings up death.....

But how can confronting death enrich life? Edward Edinger, a Jungian analyst, says it clearly: "Practically all of us, deep down, have a residue of inflation that is manifested as an illusion of immortality. There is scarcely anyone that is thoroughly and totally disidentified with this aspect of inflation. Hence, when one has a close call with death, it is a very awakening experience. There suddenly comes a realization of how precious time is just because it is limited. Such an experience not uncommonly gives a whole new orientation to life, making one more productive and humanly related. It can initiate a new leap forward in one's development, because an area of ego-Self identity has been dissolved, releasing a new quantity of energy for consciousness." Death simply reevaluates values by trivializing trivia.

The sports writer Sol Roy Rosenthal explains this in terms especially relevant for ocean kayaking: "All dangerous sports have their transformative aspects in terms of boundaries crossed, limitations transcended, and perceptions gained. A certain amount of risk is a basic evolutionary need of our species, an essential ingredient in every life. Tension between high skill and carefully calculated risk is what creates exhilaration and health. All forms of exercise are excellent, but risk exercise is essential. We need no roundabout theories to explain the fascination with death and the salutary effects of calculated risk. We simply must remember that. from the vantage point of embodied consciousness, death provides us with our clearest connection with the eternal." I wonder why we don't experience all this while driving on a freeway -- when kayaking is probably safer.

Irvin Yalom offers another perspective: "The terror of death is ubiquitous and of such magnitude that a considerable portion of one's life energy is consumed in the denial of death. Death transcendence is a major motif in human experience. Robert Jay Lifton has described several modes by which man attempts to achieve symbolic immortality. Consider their pervasive cultural implications: (1) the biological mode -- living on through one's progeny, through an endless chain of biological attachments; (2) the theological mode -- living on in a different, higher plane of existence; (3) the creative mode -- living on through one's works, through the enduring impact of one's personal creation or impact on other; (4) the theme of eternal nature -- one survives through rejoining the swirling forces of nature; and (5) the experiential transcendental mode -- through 'losing' oneself in a state so intense that time and death disappear and one lives in the continuous present." The last two are present on every kayak trip, and sometimes the previous modes as well.

The essence of the deeper meaning of ocean kayaking is beyond words. There is a Zen saying that "Real Zen you don't talk about." And the Taoist sage Lao-Tse simply asserts that "Those who know do not tell, and those who tell do not know." I think each of us must experience paddling in our own way, which is the main teaching of Mahayana Buddhism, the emphasis of which is upon "enlightenment by the most direct means possible, accepting formal studies and observances only when they form a part of such means." Or as Carl Jung puts it, "Craving for alcohol is the equivalent on a low level of the spiritual thirst of our being for wholeness, expressed in medieval language: the union with God."

These last quotes highlight the futility of mere words. But the kayak being of Eskimo origin, including an Inuit adage feels necessary. Remembering that only male Eskimo were hunters, James Houston writes in Spirit Wrestler:

"A Kayak is like a woman. A young hunter enters a kayak in excitement and by instinct, and when he leaves its manhole he is like a child emerging from his mother's womb. Sometimes a kayak seems dangerous and lonely, a place occupied by just one human being, a man's own grave, rolling on the edge of an endless sea. In a kayak a hunter faces his greatest perils -- and also out there alone on the sea, experiences his greatest joys. The hunter and the animals he seeks seem to join and become part of one another and of all the life there is."

Paul Kaufmann is a physician, psychiatrist, and Jungian analyst. He is the author of Paddling the Gate. Most of this volume, now out of print, was reproduced in Seekers of the Horizon, Sea kayaking voyages from around the world, (1989), edited by Will Nordby.
ISBN 0-87106-634-3.