An Experience Worth Repeating

Ask a few kayakers what they enjoy about their sport and you’re sure to hear more than a few times, “Getting away it from all.” Certainly compared to the busy work-driven lives of many, rivers can deliver on removing you from the masses and bringing you solitude. Here in southeastern Tennessee, that experience is a little different. Sure we have a great river running through the heart of a National Forest and the nearest town is small even by small-town standards with just two traffic lights and a few stop signs. Removed it is, but a wide open river it isn’t.

Within a three and half hour drive of more than 20 million people, the Ocoee River is one of the primary centers of whitewater culture and rarely a place you’ll find yourself alone on the river. My river friends in Chicago routinely drive 20 plus hours roundtrip for a weekend on the Ocoee and that’s not as uncommon as you might think. And in addition to the many kayakers, you’re paddling among rafters too. Not just a few rafters either, lots of them – more than 300,000 last year.

So I started thinking about it, “Why do paddlers keep coming back to the Ocoee?” After all, more remote rivers are flowing not too far away and for that matter, other activities and people are competing for your time, attention, and resources.

For kayakers, as much as people like getting away from it all, paddlers enjoy sharing their river pursuits with other like-minded paddlers. It is an intensely personal sport but one that’s very easy to share with friends on the river, particularly one that attracts so many different styles of paddlers from so many different places. The Ocoee is a special river that does cut across those lines.

But after living here for 15 years, I’ve observed something else too. If the Ocoee was a river where people just enjoyed the activity of kayaking, then the numbers of paddlers would have dried up years ago. After all, the rapids, rocks, and water flow on this river remain unchanged. But, more people kayaked this river last year than ever before and many of them were the same people I see paddling this river every year. Why? In a sport that loves its unpredictability and not exactly knowing what’s around the next bend, there’s something pleasant about something familiar – whether it’s the river itself or another a paddler you’ve been seeing on the same river for many years.

It’s a powerful perspective on change – not necessarily change in the sport, equipment, or the river but how a lifestyle pursuit becomes the lens for how we see the changing world around us.