The Middle is the Hard Part

Floating along the Green River + learning from 'Finding Nemo'

When I was about eleven years old, I took a trip one summer weekend with my family to the mountains of western North Carolina, where we stayed in an old cabin without air conditioning and, for the most part, did things outdoors the whole time: fishing, canoeing, hiking, and the like.

We arrived on a Friday night, settling in after dinner for s’mores around a campfire. There, we learned what we’d be doing for most of the next day: floating on inner tubes down the Green River, which flows through the mountains near Asheville.

Even now, I remember that Saturday like it was yesterday — the sun was shining, the skies were blue and cloudless. And the river, true to its name, was green, flowing fast, and cold.

At the spot on the riverbank where everyone in our group was putting in, I noticed that some of the other families who’d also come along on the trip were tying their inner tubes together with rope, to stay connected as they floated down the river.

My dad started tying ours together the same way, but I balked.

“I don’t want to be tied up,” I told him. “I want to float down the river on my own.”

“You sure?” he asked me.

“Yeah, I’ll be fine,” I replied. “This’ll be way more fun.”

(Or… so I thought 🤔 )

So, we put in our inner tubes, with my mom, dad and sister all tied together and floating together, and me floating alongside them. I held on, but I was tethered to them only by my fingers.

We floated for a while along a calm stretch of the river, bouncing here and there off the big rocks that stuck out above the surface of the water. On the banks, I remember seeing people who’d stopped along the way, their Igloo coolers buried part-way in the sand.

A little later, the water started getting noticeably faster, as we left the stretch of the river that was deeper and calmer and moved into one that was rockier, where the water rushed over around the boulders, of which there suddenly seemed to be quite a few more of.

I’d still been floating alongside them the whole time, letting myself float away here and there, and then pushing off a rock to find my way back.

But then, we came to a point in the river where we’d decided earlier to stop and get out for a bit, and have a snack and something to drink. My family, still all tied together, floated effortlessly over to the side, bumping up on the sandy riverbank.

I didn’t see them make their move soon enough, though, and before I knew it I’d floated away from them. Each moment that passed, my inner tube floated further and further away from them, as I was still in the middle of the river where the water ran the fastest.

As you might expect (!) inside my alarm bells started ringing. I can’t remember exactly what I thought all these years later, but I remember feeling distinctly worried — like, “uh oh, what have I done?”

I tried using my hands as paddles, to get myself back over to the riverbank. But I couldn’t flap them fast enough or powerfully enough — I was only eleven, so my hands were still kinda small — and I just kept on floating further and further away from them.

Scenarios started running through my head of where, exactly, I might find myself floating toward — was there a waterfall around the bend that I couldn’t see? Would I ever see my parents again? How far down this river am I actually going to float?

I’m happy to tell you, friends, that I made it out! (I’m writing this to you now, right? 😀)

As it turns out, I got really lucky. A friend of my parents who also was on the trip and also floating down the river that day saw what happened and sprang into action — he’d brought a paddle, which he was able to use to quickly get to me, tie my tube to his, and bring me over to the riverbank.

(Needless to say, I never did that again…)

It’s been years since I thought of that day. But it popped back in my head not too long ago, when my son and I happened to catch a bit of Finding Nemo, a movie we’ve of course seen like a dozen times since the first time I showed it to him.

We were watching the scene near the end of the movie, when Nemo’s father Marlin and Dory have found themselves trapped in the mouth of a whale, right when they’d arrived in Sydney Harbor, the moment when they thought they were thisclose to actually finding Nemo (who’s stuck in an aquarium at a dentist’s office):

MARLIN: We’re in a whale! Don’t you get it?

DORY: A whale?

MARLIN: A whale! ‘Cause you had to ask for help! And now we’re stuck here!

DORY: A whale. You know I speak whale.

MARLIN: No, you’re insane! You can’t speak whale! I have to get out! I have to find my son! I have to tell him how old sea turtles are.

DORY: [whooping] Hey. You OK? There, there. It’s all right. It’ll be OK.

MARLIN: No, it won’t.

DORY: Sure it will, you’ll see.

MARLIN: No. I promised him I’d never let anything happen to him.

DORY: Huh. That’s a funny thing to promise.

I love, love, love this scene, as much for the characters as for the acknowledgement of the contradiction we all live with, every day — which the characters point to without even realizing it.

Dory tries to assure Marlin, “it’ll be alright, sure it will, you’ll see” while also noting that when he promised his son that he’d “never let anything happen to him,” that that was “a funny thing to promise.”

That’s it, isn’t it? That’s the tension we can’t escape.

A moment or two later, the whale tells Dory that they need to get to the back of its mouth so they can ride the water rushing through its blowhole, and escape — but Marlin, terrified, doesn’t believe it:

MARLIN: What is going on?!

DORY: I’ll check! What..

MARLIN: No! No more whale! You can’t speak whale!

DORY: Yes, I can!

MARLIN: No, you can’t! You think you could do these things but you can’t Nemo!

[roaring and whistling]

DORY: OK.

(Dory let us go)

MARLIN: Dory, no!

(Marlin grabs Dory)

DORY: He says it’s time to let go! Everything’s gonna be all right!

MARLIN: How do you know?! How do you know something bad isn’t gonna happen?!

DORY: I don’t!

Even now, even though I’ve seen Finding Nemo probably twenty times (or even more) over my own son’s eleven years, that moment still takes my breath away. Because despite all the assurances we give ourselves and our kids, despite all the hopes or assumptions we might have about how things might work out, we really don’t know.

We don’t know if we’ll reach our goal. We don’t know if our child will be, or stay, healthy. We don’t know if we’ll get that job we want. We don’t know if the relationship we’re in will work. We don’t know what the doctor will tell us at the next visit. We just don’t know.

Sometimes, that’s exciting — it’s fun not to know how things will go, especially if it’s at the starting line of a race, or from the top of the high dive at the pool. Butterflies like that can be fun.

It also can be really g*ddamned scary, you know? Even though it was just for a second or two all those years ago back on the Green River, there was a brief moment where I realized, “this might be about to go way sideways.”

So, I thought I’d ask, have you ever experienced a moment like this? It can be anything — how did you feel? What did you do?

As always, you know I love hearing your stories, and I hope you’ve had a great week so far, with some great runs thrown in. Keep in touch and let me know how your running/life is going.

Your friend,

— Terrell