Alchemy
FAIR TRADE
AFTER DELIVERING A KEYNOTE address on risk and choice at a university kinesiology conference, my host walked out to join me on stage and presented me with a penny. Standing center stage in front of an audi- ence of professors and practitioners, I was completely confused. He promptly asked for the penny back
and, in return, gave me an elegant, custom- built, long-bladed knife wrapped in a hand- made birch bark sheath. The gift was beau- tiful. The penny exchange was very strange. I learned later that in many cultures
around the world there is a tradition, or superstition, about the giving and receiv- ing of knives.
20 | RAPID
HOW THE RIVER GIVES US THINGS MONEY CAN’T BUY A knife as a gift brings with it the symbolic
risk of severing a friendship on the knife’s sharp edge. The same tradition says trading as little as a penny for a knife brings good luck and assures one will never cut oneself on the blade. For paddlers, knives can be a key piece of
personal protective equipment and guides who spend long seasons out on the river know it’s a certainty that at some point their knife will be dropped and lost forever. What is less certain is what the river will
offer in exchange. I lost one knife at the tail of Cataract
Canyon on the Colorado River as I was rigging an outboard motor to plow our raft
barge across Lake Powell. Adjusting the idle screw on the waterlogged outboard motor, my knife slipped from my black oily fingers and sunk out of sight. The en- gine fired to life the very next pull and the trip proceeded as planned. In my first season as a raft guide, I
got my feet tangled in my flipped raft’s bowline. I impressed myself by calm- ly unzipping a pocket, flipping open a hinge-blade and sawing my feet free of the rope, all while underwater and being dragged downstream. When I surfaced, I had to decide between climbing aboard the overturned raft and keeping my knife in my hand.
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