Body Memory

The third day of Wildbranch we went canoeing, the fourth, we practiced fly catching. (This post of jo(e)'s fits nicely.)

People talk about body memory, the ability of one's physical self to learn and remember tasks without the prodding of the conscious mind: things like knitting or playing the piano or riding the proverbial bike. The day we went canoeing was therefore a trip down memory lane for my body.

About seven years ago I went on an expedition to Australia, an expedition in which we spent two months on a remote river, learning canoeing and outdoor skills as we went. Since then, I had only canoed one other time, an afternoon with a colleague and his children in Minnesota.

Yet, clearly, the body remembers. Remembers, and rejoices. When I took the PFD off the rack in the dim storage room at Sterling, I was wearing a copy of the shirt I wore all those weeks in Australia. The click of the PFD's buckle as I put it on, and the way that the shirt bunched slightly as I did so, brought back those memories of doing that very thing day after day, in all weather and moods.

Later, paddling the canoe about the "pond" (which is what they seem to call small lakes around there -- to me a pond is muddy, filled with frogs and turtles, and small enough to throw a stone across) I felt the memories rush back into my body: here is how your wrist turns a paddle. Here's what a pry feels like, a turn. Here's how your body sits up straight and how cold water feels when it runs down your arm.

The body also learns, and I suspect it of learning, quietly, on its own, when you've stopped paying attention. When I played softball in high school, I stunk. I couldn't hit the ball worth beans, and catching was an iffy prospect. So I avoided it in college, since it had become optional. Yet the last weeks of my senior year, my dorm had a softball game. And I had become good. Not great, not amazing -- but suddenly I was capable of hitting a ball more often than not, catching a ball more often than not.

The same thing happened when we were practicing and learning to fly cast. My previous attempt, made in a meadow outside of Yellowstone, I remember as a farago of whipping lines and my repeated accidental efforts to take out an eye or strangle my neighbor with an errant gesture. So I was rather wary of joining in with the group of people on the lawn intently lashing their lines back and forth. People walked behind them, dodging the lines, and babies crawled across the grass in determined pursuit of monofiliment. (No one was hurt during any of this.) But, in the interests of doing new things, or, rather, being willing to embarrass myself doing old things incompetently, I gave it a try.

And, whatdoyouknow, it worked. Clearly, my body had been sneaking out to fly fish all these years, and I never knew it. (Of course, it doesn't hurt to have a patient, experienced teacher, either.)