The River…

Floating on the river of my life.

The river doesn’t care if you can swim. It doesn’t care if you are righteous or wicked, rich or starving. It only cares about gravity. It is a ceaseless, thundering muscle of water, pulling everything toward the sea, and we are all just debris trying to steer.

I have spent a lifetime on this water. Every morning, the ritual is the same. The sun bleeds through the trees, I open my eyes, and I step off the solid earth of sleep and jump into the boat. We all do it. We push off from the bank, grab the tiller, and invite others to join the cruise of the day. “Come aboard,” we say to lovers, to friends, to children. “ The current is fast today, but I know the way.”

For decades, my way was a disaster.

The river of my life was never a glass-calm sheet of blue. It was a murky, twisting run, choked with the skeletal remains of fallen trees lurking just beneath the surface—hidden traumas and sudden misfortunes waiting to rip the hull open. There were shallows where the water ran too thin to support the weight I was carrying, grinding the bottom until the hull’s planking screamed. And there were pirates, of course. Opportunists who saw a vessel drifting erratically and boarded with smiles that didn’t reach their eyes, stripping the cargo, stealing the charts, leaving me lighter but lost.

But if I am honest—and an old mariner has nothing left to lose but his honesty—the pirates and the rocks were the least of my problems. The true hazard was the captain.

I look back now at the wreckage of my middle years, the years of the joint, the drug baggie and the bottle, and I see a man possessed by a need to sink. Thirty-nine years ago it wasn’t enough to navigate the treacherous currents for decades; I had to make the journey impossible. I piloted boats that were magnificent disasters—flashy, overpowered, and dangerously overloaded. I invited too many people aboard, people who brought their own leaden anchors, and I lacked the boundaries to tell them to swim. I overreached the vessel’s capacity, ignoring the waterline creeping up the side, insisting that we could carry it all: the pain, the party, the noise.

And when the river got quiet, when the sailing should have been easy, the sickness in my blood took the wheel. I was a saboteur of my own buoyancy. I would go down into the bilge with a pistol and shoot holes in the keel just to feel the rush of the water coming in. I would pour sugar in the gas tank or take a sledgehammer to the rudder. I called it “living hard,” but it was just a slow-motion suicide.

Then came the sinking. It happened so often it became a routine. The water would rise, the engine would choke and die, and the screaming would start. Sometimes I took people down with me, and that is a guilt that no amount of ocean can wash away. Other times, I was alone, watching the bow pitch up toward the sky before the river swallowed the whole damn thing.

I would end up in the water, thrashing against the cold, dark weight of the current. I had to swim to shore, lungs burning, limbs heavy as iron. I would drag myself up the mud of the riverbank, shivering, coated in slick black oil and the grit of the river bottom, looking like a creature birthed from the silt. I would collapse there, staring at the stars, coughing up river water, swearing I would never get back on the water.

But the sun always comes up. The river keeps flowing. And you can’t walk through the dense jungle of the banks; you have to ride.

The tragedy of those years was not just the sinking, but the rebuilding. I stood on those banks, shivering, hung over and dope-sick, needing a vessel, but I had no blueprints. There were no shipwrights waiting to teach me the art of buoyancy. No mentors stopped their own cruise to show me how to caulk a seam or read a depth sounder. I was alone with the wreckage.

So, I lashed together driftwood. I built rafts that fell apart in the first rapid. I rented other people’s leaky dinghies, trying to steer lives that didn’t fit me, trying to be a captain I wasn’t. I tried to pilot “The Responsible Employee” or “The Normal Husband,” but I hadn’t built the hull strong enough to hold the pressure, and those boats sank, too. Down I went, back into the oil and the grit. Back to the mud.

It took a long time to learn that a boat doesn’t need to be fast, and it doesn’t need to be full. It took time to learn that the bullhorn I had that was always mouthing platitudes, shouting out clever or glib phrases, yelling obscenities, or whispering sweet nothings into a dozen ears was the real problem.

I said out loud what everyone else was thinking. And that was a huge mistake every time.

Now, I am an old mariner. My hands are calloused from the oars, and my skin is weathered by the sun and the stinging wind. My mouth is barely open. The boat I have now is small. It is a humble skiff, barely big enough for one, though there is room for a guest if they sit still and don’t rock the vessel. It is stripped of all the navigational equipment I used to think I needed—the ego, the ambition, the desperate need to be seen from the shore.

It still takes on water. The river is still full of rocks, and my eyesight isn’t what it used to be. Sometimes I scrape a hidden log, and the panic rises in my throat, that old familiar taste of drowning. But I don’t shoot holes in the floor anymore. I don’t invite the pirates aboard. And when the water comes in, I don’t burn the boat down; I just pick up the bailer and scoop the water out, one rhythmic motion at a time.

This little boat has, for 39 years now, held very little of what I used to call “life.” It holds no grand treasures, no heavy reputation. It holds only the present moment, a little bit of gratitude, and the quiet observation of the passing banks. I am drifting toward the delta now. The river is widening, the current slowing as it meets the great, consuming sea with a calm that only Buddhist-grounded clean time can bring.

I know I am fading away. The hull is thinning. The wood is gray. But for the first time in my life, I am not sinking. I am just floating, light and empty, watching the water hold me up, until the river and I are the same thing.

To an outsider, the image of an old man in a small, battered skiff, drifting slowly toward the twilight, might look like a portrait of resignation. It might look like a life that has shrunk. But that is only because they have never felt the bone-deep exhaustion of drowning. They have not swallowed the river water of chaos often enough to know that dry lungs and a steady keel are not a compromise—they are a luxury. This is not a survival story. It is a story of prevailing.

I have finally found the river that fits my boat. I am done trying to navigate the white-knuckle rapids of the Colorado, chasing the adrenaline high that I once mistook for feeling alive. I am done with the vast, industrial monotony of the Mississippi flats, trying to carry cargo I was never meant to haul. The river I float on now is narrower, yes. The current is gentle. But it is mine. And most importantly, I am no longer floating alone.

My high school friend and now wife, Susan, sits in the bow. She is the pathfinder that keeps this small vessel true. We float down this river every day, and we make do. We make do with the hull we have, patched and scarred as it is. We make do with the weather, adjusting our course rather than cursing the wind. There is a profound, quiet intimacy in navigating a river that doesn’t try to kill you. We point out the herons in the reeds; we watch the light change on the water.

For years, I confused the thrill of survival with the act of living. I thought that if I wasn’t bailing water, fighting off pirates, or patching a hole I’d blown in my own floorboards, I was bored. I was addicted to the crisis. But I have learned that boredom is just peace seen through a restless lens.

Now, I value the safety of this small boat more than the “glory” of the wreckage. Because my boat doesn’t sink anymore, I can pull up to the bank and let my family step aboard. My friends can visit without fear that they will be dragged into a whirlpool of my making. Creating a safe harbor for the people I love is infinitely more satisfying than the selfish drama of the near-death experience.

And there is a secret weapon tucked into the heart of this old mariner. It is the knowledge of what I have survived. I have swum through the oil and the grit; I have collapsed on the mud banks, shivering and broken, and I have stood back up. That history doesn’t haunt me; it insulates me.

I know now that I can endure almost anything. The small indignities of aging, the fading of the light, the stroke, the infection, the aches in the joints—these are nothing compared to the shipwrecks of my past. Because I know I can survive the boat sinking, I am no longer afraid of the river. I don’t need to control it. I just need to float, hand on the tiller, wife by my side, grateful for every mile of smooth water before the sea that welcomes me.