California By Kayak

Finding himself upside down in life, MICHAEL JOSEPH GROSS escapes to Humboldt County to spend a week upside down on the Salmon River.

With the windows open, the Humboldt County countryside smelled like a Grateful Dead concert. Cannabis is to the economy and identity of this farnorthwestern corner of California as corn is to Iowa. My driver eagerly explained that he was moonlighting. His real job was growing marijuana. “Medicinal or recreational?” I asked. “It’s kind of a grey area,” he answered.

Grey areas cover Humboldt County. Coastal fogs roll in each morning, misting redwood canopies with life sustaining water. In summer, haze from forest-fire smoke fills high inland valleys. During the day, it makes the mountains look like ghosts, and at night it turns the moon the colour of old, yellowed lace.

Greys shape characters and perceptions, too. Long before ganja lovers decamped here, this land beckoned to gold miners, yeti hunters, and other eccentrics. They found and made a place where boundaries— between past and present, man and nature, wildness and civility—seem less clear than they are elsewhere.

I had come from New York City, during a year of struggles in work and in love. One of the only things that reliably made me happy then was taking white-water kayaking lessons in New England. So, I went to California’s true north, an eight-hour drive from the Bay Area, to search for an increment of mastery of this difficult, delighting skill: steering a small boat through a river’s rushing water.

My destination was Otter Bar Lodge, often called the best whitewater kayaking school in North America. A week on the river comes with gourmet meals, massages, a hot tub, and a bed in a rustic cabin, all on an off-the-grid resort built and run by a gracious pair of cosmopolitan hippies named Peter and Kristy Sturges. They are assisted by a 10-year-old Australian cattle dog named Beebee and a staffof kayaking teachers from all over the world.