Currents


A LCHEMY


HOW THE RIVER GIVES US THINGS MONEY CAN’T BUY FAIR TRADE


AFTER DELIVERING A KEYNOTE ad- dress on risk and choice at a university kinesi- ology conference, my host walked out to join me on stage and presented me with a penny. Standing center stage in front of an audience of professors and practitioners, I was com- pletely confused. He promptly asked for the penny back and, in


return, gave me an elegant, custom-built, long- bladed knife wrapped in a handmade birch bark sheath. The gift was beautiful. The penny ex- change was very strange. I learned later that in many cultures around


the world there is a tradition, or superstition, about the giving and receiving of knives. A knife as a gift brings with it the symbol- ic risk of severing a friendship on the knife’s 24 PADDLING MAGAZINE


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 Can-


yon 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 engine 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 bow- line. I impressed myself by calmly unzip- ping 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. Another knife of mine plopped into the


Middle Fork of the Salmon as the rookie guide who borrowed it to adjust his oars at the put- in gapped the hand-off. Mortified, he turned pale as we watched the knife flutter in the swift current, then bounce along the bottom and out


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