Simple earth formula: rushing water carves canyons even through rock.  Cliff walls spring up wet and black, with soil and clinging roots, squeezing, churning, and channeling as the water dives down.  Spots of softer rock wash away first, chunks of harder rock break away and roll downstream.  At every obstacle the water swoops up again with bursts of foam and bright reflected sunlight.

Formula gone awry: a rolling rock becomes wedged at the edge of a drop.  Under the beautiful sun – and a jungle canopy in a place called Ecuador perhaps – a sieve forms.  A kayak-sized hollow.  A gargling mouth in the side of the cliff.

Jagged walls and smooth boulders form this creek I’ve come to ride.  After several good jumps, we swing around a corner and look ahead for the way to go down.  I wanted a better look for myself and that’s when I read the river wrongly.  Across on the right, I read the way the water seemed to slow, almost to a standstill, through the ripples running over shallower water.  I read it easily, confidently, like a handwritten reminder from a friend.  Ferrying across, I looked down behind me, twisting over my shoulder to see down into a cavernous sieve gulping water into the very face of the cliff wall.  Not the way down.  Turning back to the eddy, I saw that I had been swept already to the very edge of what had seemed to be an eddy.  The shallow, rippling water formula was—in this awkward place—gravely flawed.  From this new perspective – back to the wall and the booming sieve – the irregular bit of water seemed not to slow at all.

My sprinting was inspired: I imagine my desperate churning changed even the sound of the sieve’s gulping.  Still that dark mouth, like a cosmic black hole, drew my boat over its edge.  I was nothing to the river: like a grape popped into its mouth, effortlessly captured.  I fell heavily for a few feet until my back, protected by my lifejacket, struck the cliff face and my boat ground to a halt against the lip of the sieve.  And like a harmless grape stuffed greedily into the ever-swallowing mouth of the river, I became…wedged.  My face and chest were pressed against the front of my boat, effectively trapping me into the kayak; my eyes clamped in darkness.  For a few seconds there was no movement to my boat or body, only the roar and weight of water.  I felt the unfamiliar swoop of panic, and then I moved slightly.  Beneath an avalanche of water I fell, gaining speed.  Tumbling and lost in the dark.  I started sweeping with my hands, my paddle gone, and this I know because suddenly I could see bubbles jetting up towards light.  Clawing up to the surface with a desperate handroll, I saw the world as though through a quickly expanding lens.  The features of the gorge and jungle were sharpening and the faces of friends materializing. The light off the cliffs cast deep, sharp shadows and water rolled off me, back down to the boils and the dark.

For the next two hours, I was scared, and then I wasn’t.  And then I was.  And am.  I don’t want to go alone and unseeing, adrift in a darkness that hides the world I’m leaving behind.  I want to see this beautiful world for every moment that I’m living in it.  I want to stay afloat but still part of the formula.  Water rushing through an Ecuador-jungle valley—the bursting surface flecked with glittering sunstars.  Water carving canyons.  And a boat on water.