Paddling in the Dark – Terrain.org

The numinous heart of nature was on full display that night, and we all felt it.

  
It was late, almost dark. The campfire’s embers had died down, and the time had come to head for our tents. After paddling nine miles into Duncan Canal on a wilderness camping trip, this was our final night before heading home to Keene Channel Lodge. 

Earlier in the day we explored the expansive Castle River estuary on the incoming tide, moving among leaping coho salmon headed for the rich spawning grounds above Castle Falls. Huge flocks of surf scoters worked the entrance to the flats, scattering in raucous confusion at our approach. A few sea otters also worked the shallow shelf fishing for Dungeness crab. These otters are recent migrants back into Duncan Canal after Fish and Game biologists reintroduced them on the outer coast of the Alexander Archipelago in the 1960s. Unlike the commercial Dungeness crab fishermen in the area, I welcome their return—a success story in our efforts to recover endangered species. I tip my hat to their confused gaze as we pass these emblems of a lost wildness, gaining a fresh hold on their ancestral home. 

Castle River Bay forms a large intertidal zone that empties entirely at low tide, leaving a huge expanse of boulder-strewn flats. The currents were swift as we entered the bay with the approach of high tide, though the water remained deceptively shallow even far from shore. Glacial erratics—enormous boulders deposited randomly across the flats when the glaciers retreated from the lowlands several thousand years ago—loomed close beneath the surface, often ambushing our kayaks as we swept over them at five knots. We had to stay vigilant and quick to adjust our course when they appeared. Only during the higher stages of full moon and new moon tides is the water deep enough to navigate into the river itself. We had little time to linger when we reached the tidal lagoon below the falls. Large schools of coho, pink, and chum salmon had gathered in the lagoon. I grabbed my bear spray as we beached our kayaks to hike farther upstream, conscious that we were not the only ones drawn to this river by the salmon. 

That evening, back at camp on Cloverleaf Island, we lingered around the campfire after dinner, enjoying a long sunset as it gave way to unusually brilliant stars. The stories kept coming, and we let them come, the calls of loons joining our voices in the deepening dusk. By the time we turned toward bed, the darkness was complete. We gathered our scattered gear with the help of flashlights and wandered down to the water’s edge to brush our teeth. 

The phosphorescence was intense that night, with bright flashes of bioluminescence stirred by the splashing of our boots. This phenomenon occurs periodically during the summer months with blooms of marine plankton that emit light. I had rarely seen it so brilliant. And such a clear night as well! Witnessing a fully deployed Milky Way in Southeast Alaska, where moisture in the atmosphere often mutes the night sky, is equally rare.

“We have to go for a paddle!” announced Dan, my longtime friend and halibut fishing partner. I had never done a paddle in complete darkness with a group before. Rarely on my own, in fact. Dan’s proposal caught me off guard. Would it be safe?  And frankly I was exhausted, more than ready for bed. As I weighed the potential risks and benefits of Dan’s audacious idea, I saw Gordon coming toward me in the darkness. I had been holding him in close awareness on this trip. His wife, Kathy, died just three weeks earlier, following a long fight with breast cancer. Gordon was nearly drowning in his grief. When he reached me he spoke softly. “Kathy loved bioluminescence,” he told me. “She thought it was the perfect metaphor for the dying process.” After a slight pause, he said, “If it’s all right with you, I would really like to go on this paddle.”

That was good enough for me. I had met Gordon 12 years earlier during a meditation retreat at Spirit Rock in Northern California. Since that time we had become close friends. An Episcopal priest as well as a brilliant mindfulness teacher, he had brought several groups of clergy and students to Alaska, coleading Inside Passages retreats. But Gordon is a participant, not a coleader on this trip. His choice to come, so soon after Kathy’s death, had been seriously in question. For years the two of them had led a thriving Insight Meditation group in Nashville, and Kathy had continued to teach fearlessly alongside Gordon almost to the end. 

Seven hundred people filled the chapel at Vanderbilt University for her memorial service, and despite his years of preparation for this moment, Gordon’s grief at her passing was seismic. He initially canceled his plans to come on this trip when she died. But Kathy had other ideas. Her last instruction to him was to make this trip to Alaska as planned, and to bring his 24-year-old son, Alex, with him. 

If it was Gordon’s desire to go on this midnight paddle, we would go. Everyone else seemed keen to go too. This would be a new experience for all of us. Once we’d changed back into our paddling clothes and assembled the necessary gear, we made our way by flashlight to the beach behind the spit, where our kayaks lay pulled onto the grasses above high tide. I devised a plan that I hoped would allow us to do this in relative safety. We would circumnavigate Cloverleaf and Castle Islands, keeping close enough to shore to have some inkling of our route in the darkness. There were ten of us, four double kayaks and two singles. Dan and I, with the most experience, would take the singles. Before we launched I had each boat count off, one to six. Once underway, I would periodically ask them to stop and count off, to keep us close together, and confirm that everyone was safe and accounted for.  

It was a new moon that night, so the stars shone especially bright in the clear sky. The moment our paddles hit the water, it erupted in eerie, luminous patterns of light. Every point of contact with the water set off fireworks, suspended somewhere between the thick stars above and their vivid reflection in the depths beneath us. Our paddle strokes spread sparks across the becalmed sea, with our kayaks trailing a river of fire in their wakes—random explosions of light—while we remained invisible to each other.  

I took us east toward the long fetch of open water in Duncan Canal. Refraining from speech, as was our custom on the paddle, the silence magnified the darkness through which we traveled, the only sound the dip and swirl of nearby paddles. We seemed to be moving through the reflected stars, garnished by the added streams of bioluminescent fire. A chill had fallen into the night air, bearing a hint of unease, despite the unusual calm that was cradling us. I well knew how quickly this calm could be ruptured by the arrival of a squall or sudden change of weather.  

Yet the night had not finished bedazzling us. Rounding the east end of Cloverleaf Island, opening out into the exposure of Duncan Canal, their appearance was so sudden that I heard gasps in the darkness around me. Northern lights!—in all their weird, shape-shifting majesty, spiking upward toward the heavens, pulsing and shimmering, vanishing and reappearing in another part of the sky. It is rare to see the aurora borealis in summer here, with so few hours of actual darkness. But there they were, dancing with the Milky Way and with the bioluminescent shimmering on the night-clad sea. We were bathed in a festival of light unsurpassed by anything I had ever witnessed. And to think we might have missed all of this if I had given in to the impulse to be safe and comfortable. How many such miracles do we miss every day of our lives for lack of attention, fear of the unknown, or complacency?

The forested edge of the island cast a faintly looming, ghostly shape that was just enough to keep us on our vague course. Otherwise, each stroke was an act of blind faith, moving into a darkness laced with nothing but stars above, stars below, and the exquisite fire produced by the wake of our boats. 

“Stop! Count off.” 

“One.” 

“Two.” 

“Three.” . . . 

“Is everyone okay?” 

Shouts! Acclamations! Astonished murmurs. Resting our paddles now, we drifted north with the flood tide for long minutes, past the towering cliff of High Castle Island and the strange, limestone-clad shapes in the cove behind it. Resuming our paddle around the north end of Castle Island, along the heavily bouldered shallows of its northern shore, we stopped frequently to call off and voice superlatives. Nearing the end of our long circuit, we were guided back to our camp by the fading embers of our campfire. Landing on the dark spit behind camp, Gordon would later tell me, his son Alex exclaimed, “Dad! That was the coolest thing I have ever done!”

After meditation the next morning, during breakfast, I invited the group to share impressions from the night before. What stood out as most vivid? What touched our hearts?  

Gordon would later recall that conversation in a dharma talk he gave in Nashville following his return from Alaska. He titled his talk “Paddling in the Dark,” and his words tell a powerful story. I quote from Gordon at length here:

The next morning, Dan Kowalski, an Alaskan fisherman, said there were two words that came to him that captured this experience. One was “luminosity,” and the other was “numinosity.” The luminosity piece was obvious, but Dan said he noticed that the closer he was to the shore, the greater the luminosity was. He said, “I like to flirt with the edge.” And he was flirting with the edge until his boat just slammed into a rock. And he said that slamming into that rock was an incredibly numinous experience for him. And the definition of numinous is something that is awesome, but it’s also terrifying. 

So I think those of you who got to be around Kathy those last weeks of her life saw how luminous she was. Coming home for me was the “hitting the rock” part, the numinous part, because I hit the rock of grief. Capital “G” GRIEF. I didn’t really see the rock until I hit it. I knew that the rock was out there, but I thought I was negotiating the rock of grief pretty well. 

My teacher Philip Moffit likes to say about retreats that they’re always other than what you expect. Now there is the longing for the life I once had, a wishing to GET. IT. BACK. And the longing for another life that’s not here anymore. A good friend said to me, “You know, the way that you and Kathy did her dying was about as perfect as it could be done.” And that was my own experience of it. That friend went on to say, “That experience was not sustainable.” The perfection of luminosity. And now it’s time for the perfection of the numinous…

There is this prophetic passage in the Bible, where God calls the Prophet, and the Prophet says, “I am not up to this!” And God says, “I’ll help you….” Like paddling in the dark, this is not something you want to do without company…. It is reassuring to hear the paddling of the other boats…. And quite honestly, I simply cannot imagine surviving without the boat of practice…. Sangha, community, is not an option. It is a lifeline. 

This interweaving of the human and the wild is the hidden element that unleashed the power on these trips…

It was so striking to me that Dan landed on the word numinous to describe his experience of our night paddle. What that singular word points toward is exactly what I always hoped these trips in Alaska’s wilderness might bring to life for the people who came. My first encounter with that word, as a student at Harvard Divinity School in 1974, was itself a moment of revelation. It offered me a language for talking about something deeper and more primitive than mere religious identity, something ineffable and universal to our human experience of the sacred. The word numinous was coined by Rudolph Otto in his 1917 book Das Heilige (The Idea of the Holy). Reading Otto’s book during my first semester at Harvard offered me a new way of thinking about my own evolving spiritual quest and the awe of my experiences as a young commercial fisherman in Alaska. Those experiences of the numinous—the inseparability of awe and terror—more than anything I had experienced within a church sanctuary, had drawn me on the quest to Harvard in the first place, and years later drew me to leading these wilderness meditation retreats.

When I reflect on that experience with Gordon a decade later, and when I listen with fresh ears to Gordon’s dharma talk that grew out of it, I can feel how deeply he was able to harness the full power of that moment through the lens of his grief. He was able to penetrate into the miraculous qualities of the experience partly because he was so much closer to the “terrible” that was contained in it, and partly because of the strength of his practice. The numinous heart of nature was on full display that night, and we all felt it. What Gordon necessarily brought to the experience, and helped the rest of us to more deeply apprehend, was the equally numinous wildness of the human heart, in both its awesome and terrible manifestations. 

In his poem “Oceans,” Juan Ramón Jiménez wrote, 

         I have a feeling that my boat
has struck, down there in the depths,
against a great thing.
                                                And nothing
Happens! Nothing… Silence… Waves…

          —Nothing happens? Or has everything happened,
nd are we standing now, quietly, in the new life?

The rock that Dan hit that so jolted his soul, and the rock of grief that Gordon hit when he returned home, are perhaps the same rock. We float over it times beyond counting, without knowing it is there. Until we hit it. It is a collision that changes everything.

What Gordon experienced that night, at a peak moment of grief in his life—the rock he hit—finds each of our boats eventually, in its own way and its own time. But usually suddenly and without warning. Whether we become victims or students of that numinous experience is then up to us. For Gordon, the moment was unusually stark, and his response unusually courageous. In that way he became our teacher, and continues to be mine. 

Many other people on my trips through the years became teachers in this way, driven to the outer edges of their own lives by comparable losses, sensing because of that fact the full-spectrum encounter that these trips offered—its vastly more-than-human dimensions. Many, like Gordon and like Alex, would later tell me that their trip had been among the most powerful experiences of their lives.

Looking back, I see more clearly now that this was almost never my doing, though I did my best to set a bountiful table.

The place itself did the work, and the way we endeavored to enter the place—human nature meeting wild nature, inner depth meeting outer depth, in a closer-than-usual approximation of the primordial wilderness that brought our species into being. That wilderness is still coded into our genes at a place deeper than conscious knowing. This interweaving of the human and the wild is the hidden element that unleashed the power on these trips—this willingness of participants to simultaneously “go in” and “go out.” As much as anyone, Gordon taught me, more times than once, not to set the limits of the numinous too narrowly, or try to control or channel it for my participants. 

If we had gone out on that edge only as “experience gatherers,” only for checking Alaska off our bucket lists, then that is what we would have achieved. An item checked off our list. Those who were really changed by the experience were and remain my biggest teachers. Through the work of mindfulness in the context of Alaska’s wilderness, I did my best to crack open a certain hatchway, a portal of possibility, on each of these many dozens of expeditions I led over a quarter century of my life. And yes, there were many times when I had to push through my own backlog of fear and anxiety to do this. There was no escaping the element of risk. It wouldn’t have been worth the effort otherwise. 

But it was up to each person who showed up to step through that door, to enter that portal. And most of them did. That inspired me over and over again. Every one of us is ultimately paddling in the dark, finding our way across an unknown sea. That is the human adventure—not knowing what life will deliver, yet choosing to meet it with hearts wide open, one courageous paddle stroke at a time.

Kurt Hoelting grew up by the Salish Sea, working summers in Alaska< as a commercial fisherman and wilderness guide. A Zen practiioner, he founded Inside Passages in 1994, a sea kayaking guide company in SE Alaska, blending his love of wilderness exploration with an equal passion for exploring the “wild within.” This essay recounts one of those expeditions, and is included in his 2025 book Apprentice to the Wild, published by Empty Bowl Press. Kurt makes his home on Whidbey Island.

Header photo by Martin Solhaug Standal, courtesy Pixabay. Photo of Kurt Hoelting by Paulina Olbrychowski.