WHY WE MUST NOT PANIC
When I was fifteen, my father told me I wasn’t allowed to panic. I wouldn’t be able to canoe down the Delaware River with him, my sister, and her boyfriend if I didn’t take an oath. This oath required that I keep my cool or miss out on what every teen claiming to be cool must experience: an afternoon braving river rapids. I held up my hand and made the promise. I would not cry out if the boat rocked back and forth as I got in. I would not hyperventilate if a tree branch grazed my forehead. I would not scream for help if the canoe overturned, dumped me against rocks, and pushed me under. I would simply be placid, even if the river was not.
Only a few years before, I’d tubed down the Jordan River, where John the Baptist once baptized Jesus. Everything on the Jordan was gentle, and I felt like I was gliding on the wing of a butterfly. The river lapped against my inner tube while I tapped at its surface, disrupting it until the reflected sky of cumulous clouds became rings of white and blue and rock-brown. Everything was at peace. Until it wasn’t. Until I somehow tubed beneath a cluster of branches overhanging cool water. Somehow, I had glided into the bramble, which scratched my scalp, tugged at my arms, and caught at my legs, until I panicked and was stuck, so stuck that I stayed there and the inner tube swept upwards, vertically, where a branch nudged it backwards until the rubber donut fell over me like a laughing mouth.
I was swallowed up, pressed downwards beneath the water where I struggled to find a nonexistent river bank. Somehow, head plunged deep in the holy river, I managed to find my way to a whirlpool circulating beneath a steep muddy cliffside. There, a force — a ravenous belly — pulled me down.
Down and around, down and around, suction, mud, my fingers seeking the steep riverbank, mud beneath fingernails that could not grasp because I was not strong enough. The river was taking me down.
I yelled and screamed and coughed into the water, to the surface and then below, until yes! Yes! The last of my group, the only male counselor overseeing our trip — the one with a cold sore on his lip, the one who flirted relentlessly with our female counselors — heard me, saw me, had the strength to get to me. He pulled me out with one arm and steered us clear with another, our tubes connected because somehow he had grasped my lost inner tube. With the super adrenaline of a superhero, he lifted me up and nearly threw my coughing body onto the stray tube where I could breathe and cry a little as he told me I was okay.
But was I okay? Was the world okay? What did it mean to be sucked under, to be funneled downward into the spiral of panic that a whirlpool creates? Was this why my father told me never to panic? Panic, after all, caused people to miss the point, get caught up in branches, fuck things up.
I would do better on this Delaware River excursion. I would prove myself to my father and the river itself. I would stay as calm and focused as a raptor circling over prey. I would master the situation, even if things got bad. So, I threw myself into the canoe trip, paddling down gentle rapids, stopping to take dips in calmer sections, moving along. My father and I took turns steering our canoe while my sister and her boyfriend strayed behind in theirs, only to catch up when we stopped for lunch.
Our picnic was brief. My father looked up at the sky. The forecast had been fine that morning, but the darkening sky and the lowering temperature was reflected off my father’s forehead, where many lines deepened.
“It’s not looking too good. We should go — “ He said. We packed up our sandwiches, got into the canoes, and began paddling. We hadn’t gotten far on the river when we heard the first deep rumbles. A cold drop fell on my arm, followed by another and then another on my cheeks. Again, another rumble. The mighty force in the sky was speaking to us. It flashed bright white, and we knew that if the flash grew closer, striking the water, we would sizzle as if in a pan of oil. Fried. Our heads would fry.
Yet, I remained calm, cool, true to the oath.
Another bright flash and my father began to hyperventilate as he steered our canoe towards a rocky bank, where he barked at my sister and her boyfriend to hurry the fuck up. He yelled. His face turned red. He scrambled up the bank, pulling our canoe behind him, turning it over, talking of climbing beneath it because we were out in the open, exposed. Bright flashes broke overhead, loud rumbles shook the ground, wet and cold suddenly slicing into our faces where the wind blew. My sister screamed that she would not get under the canoe — It was death to do so. It was conductive metal, a magnet for the end of all ends.
So, we found some flowering bushes fifty feet from the river. We shivered as sleet fell where once the temperature had been in the low 80s. Blue in the lips, we four huddled, knees to chests, waiting through the pounding of the elements. It took a long time. So much rain. So much ice. So many flashes of light. So many deafening rumbles. Or maybe it happened in the blink of an eye. But then, that is how every life ends: with a blink, a last breath, a car swerving into another, a finger pressed against a stray ant.
But then, the sky opened. It brightened to gold at the edges. The clouds drifted above the river. They almost smiled, relieved to be done with the fight. We could live. We hadn’t sizzled. We had been dunked deep into the nature of things. We had faced the possibility of an end, and we had come out, still breathing.
Still breathing. I hadn’t hyperventilated or panicked. I had proven myself. My father congratulated me. “You didn’t panic,” he said. “I did, but you didn’t. You were cool as a cucumber.”
And now, in the middle of a pandemic, the epitome of a time filled with whirlpools of panic and recycled information, I remain true to my oath. The panic of the pandemic has not gotten to me. Masked and vaccinated, I am still alive after a year and a half. I can see clearly, for now, swimming the river through the storm, drifting in and out of my house. But I am still. Still as the Jordan River, where I was once unofficially baptized.
