Memory is powerful. Sometimes when I close my eyes, I travel to Sunlight Basin, taking one of the three different routes that converge on a difficult-to-access patch of glacier-carved land stalked by wolves and bison, tucked into the Northwest corner of Wyoming, nestled between the Montana border to the north, and Yellowstone Park to the west. The best part of these granitic remembrances, is the one-way out exit from the basin: down the Yellowstone River by whitewater kayak. If there was a proper metaphor for how prison tests a person, Clark’s Fork — a well-worn steep-walled box canyon section of the river known as The Box — might qualify. For a narrow few weeks in August each year when the water level is low enough, The Box draws the world’s expert kayakers to its challenging contours and forces. My prison soundtrack pulses with hand ball wall treble and screeching sneakers that skip trace across waxed floors; yet, the Fork’s smooth granite slabs — a different sort of wall — echo with the guttural German and melodic Norwegian voices of traveling waterman whose incantations complement the thunder of falling water.
There is a section of The Box aptly named Deliberation Corner, where our interloper presence is policed by a lip of daring rock that breaks off and falls menacingly close to those who venture too near the walls, as is delivering a punishment to those who violate the river’s natural law. To be sure, we are trespassing. Danger tightly crowds like a wasp’s pinched waist, where the walls block out the sun, the water is dark, and you can’t hear yourself breathe. Prison riots exude a similar sensorial overlay. The immediacy of impending death necessarily triggers the survival instincts, hyper-vigilance floods, the senses shut down, and you enter the tunnel. The trick is to rule the fear and tame the stress. Oddly, the same part of you that gets better at surviving The Box, has to somehow get good at rioting.
Within a river expedition team, I am normally “sweep,” an important position providing aid to any team members in need; yet, every time I think back to The Box now, the most skilled paddlers are already down river, and I am alone — there is nobody to sweep me — I have nobody to sweep but myself. Traumatic experiences in prison seem to have migrated into my memory, where the Wizard playing film editor in my mind’s eye projects onto my inner cinema screen, harrowing scenarios of impending doom, where I am thrown by the water, sense-blind, static vision, and submerged like a submarine into a cold, green world of pressure, hard bubbles, and muted chaos. My ears pop, the kayak lances and coughs in a banana-like rocker arc, bobbing, plunging, and kicking to the sky violently as I try to breathe without waterboarding myself. I nearly suffocate every time, left to wrestle a racing heart and ragged breathe for evidence that I still live.
No matter what brought it on, in every remembered river scenario — sometimes I dream about The Box — just as the current spits me out into a flattened section of temporary calm, I lock eyes with a beaver spying me from the riverbank, as if reporting my presence. I swear, it seems as if he has one of his limbs up to his mouth saying, “Shhhh, listen to the silence!”
Any time there is volatility around me in prison, I reflexively feel kayaked, thrown about, and quieted by an unseen beaver. The Box envelopes my senses, and something urges me to listen for the absence of sound, as if not hearing will enable me to better see what needs to be seen. The riots happen less, but when there is chaos, I can only see it. I’ve become wired to suppress certain things. My ears betray me.
