On The Wet Exit
It’s freezing out, and my bulbous hot pink Gnarvana is wedged inside my Subaru because I can’t be assed to hoist her onto the roof for such a short drive. The Silverthorne Rec Center is only a few minutes away.
I pull up around back, by the pool entrance, where open trunks spill their contents onto the frozen asphalt—playboats, paddles, neoprene skirts. Steam curls from the surface of the warm water inside, an inviting contrast to the bite of the mountain air.
A teenage lifeguard rolls his eyes as I wrestle my creekboat through the double doors, its plastic hull thudding against the frame. I set her down on the deck and wait for my turn with the hose. That’s when I notice: mine’s the biggest boat in the place.
I climb into my kayak and slide into the water. Two dudes in Rockstars are practicing all kinds of rolls, seamlessly transitioning into cartwheels. I paddle around beneath the water polo net, feeling out the blade after months away, before making my way to the far side of the pool to gingerly work on my hip snap. After about fifteen minutes, my head is still dry. But I didn’t come here so it could stay that way.
I capsize, set up for the roll, and—no dice. My ear breaches too soon, teasing air for a moment before the boat heaves back down, dragging me with it. The old claustrophobia creeps in—the skirt sealing me in, the cockpit suddenly coffin-like. My fingers find the grab loop, and I yank.
A moment later, I’m standing waist-deep, my kayak flooded, my face hot with embarrassment. The playboaters keep spinning, oblivious. Nobody but me cares that I had to wet exit.
The wet exit is the first skill you learn in a skirted kayak: tuck, tug, tumble. Until you master the roll, the wet exit is your best friend. It’s really no big deal, like yard sale-ing on a powder day. But your first? That one stays with you.
Mine was over two decades ago, in a murky pond behind my high school gym. My school had the rare distinction of fielding a canoe and kayak team, and for our junior class trip, we had the privilege of paddling a southern stretch of the Colorado River for a week. In preparation, the team—led by my 10th-grade English teacher—sealed my classmates into kayaks and flipped us one by one.
My partner failed to warn me. One second, he was telling me to “kiss the bow.” The next, I was thrashing upside down, my nose flooded with foul pond water.
“What the hell was that?” I screeched when I finally surfaced, gasping like a drowned rat.
“That’s kayaking,” he grinned. “The wet exit. See? It’s natural. You just knew what to do.”
I wasn’t reassured. Instead, I decided that kayaking wasn’t for me. When the coach asked who wanted to paddle what, I immediately chose a skirtless canoe. It was decided that I’d be paddling with my best friend, and the horrors of the wet exit training quickly faded.
We launched on the morning of September 11, 2001.
When we loaded our boats, we only knew that the first tower had been hit. Even if we’d had phones on the river, they wouldn’t have had service. That week—lighting campfires under indigo skies, swimming rapids, and laughing through canyons—remains sealed in my memory as if stashed in a forgotten drybag.
At the take-out, there was no denying that civilization had lurched. We stopped at a Wendy’s on the way home and saw the images of the skyscrapers smoldering on TVs and the front pages of newspapers. Our childhoods were gone with the current, swept downstream toward an invisible ocean far beyond Mexico.
All these years later, dripping at the edge of the Silverthorne pool as I drained my boat, that first uncalculated wet exit resurfaced. But so did the pull of the Colorado River—the current that mercifully eddied us out of a world on fire, letting us be kids for one last week. Returning to the water in my thirties isn’t just about learning a cool new sport. It’s about reaching for that pre-9/11 girl, the one who graduated into an idea of a world that no longer existed.
I didn’t get my roll that first BYOK session. But I did swallow my pride. I called my partner over and asked him to stand by. He held my boat steady so I could walk through the motions and righted my kayak when I couldn’t. I put on my noseplugs and goggles, tuned out the steezy playboaters, and found I could stay down longer. I could be still. I could wait.
My roll remains a work in progress. Some days, it’s there. Others, it isn’t. But rolling, longtime paddlers tell me, is just one of those things. When it’s there, it’s effortless, reliable. And then, sometimes—seemingly out of the blue—it vanishes. When that happens, and you can’t bring the boat back up, there’s always the wet exit.
“It’s no big deal,” they say with a shrug. “You just have to get back in the pool and work on it. As long as you do, it’ll always come back.”
Maybe that’s why I love kayaking even more than skiing. Skiing was chosen for me. Kayaking, I chose. And while it’s daunting at times, learning these skills as an adult feels like reconnecting a circuit severed when my illusions of what adulthood was going to be were shattered all those years ago. It’s proof that you can go back and try again—this time with the wisdom to go slow, to be kind to yourself, to ask for help. At fifteen, I didn’t have that understanding. I was reacting to the shock of life—the cold pond, the crumbling of buildings I thought were indestructible, and a global order that had seemingly shifted overnight.
But that’s the thing about paddling—and rolling, in particular. It teaches you that getting knocked off course and finding yourself upside down isn’t an accident. It’s part of the deal. Sometimes you fight to roll up. Other times, you pull the cord and start again. Either way, you get back in the boat.