Reflections Along the DesPlaines River

By Kevin Harmon

The book is the result of a journal I kept to record the kayaking and fishing/camping trip I took with my son and nephew along e-course of the Des Plaines River in and around the Chicago area. The book would serve as a gift to them, while also being a motivations book for me and hopefully others. It’s also a book for the lover of fishing, paddle sports and the outdoors. It focuses on the outings the three of us learned throughout the 110-mile trek. It's a book about bonding and a man’s search for answers to questions and is a true account.lt also looks at life through the lens of two seven-year-old boys, who were surprisingly up for the challenge of the trip, which was their idea, hoping to re-create a Huck Finn type adventure, about the Author

• Language: English
• Publisher: Kevin Harmon
• Release date: Mar 25, 2016
• ISBN: 9781310522369

Kevin Harmon

Kevin Harmon is currently a contributing writer for Inside Publications and Midwest Outdoors Magazine. He has worked as a writer and reporter for over thirty years covering sports and health and fitness and travel for the Kansas City Star, Syracuse Post-Standard, Indianapolis Star and the Post-Tribune of Northwest Indiana. His work has also appeared in Chicago Parent/Chicago journal. Windy City Sports, outdoor Illinois, Americas Fitness, Chicago Amateur Athlete, Creative Age Publications, Massage Magazine, Massage and Bodywork and Canoe and Kayak magazines. He is a certified personal fitness trainer and also has worked as a personal chef. He attended the University of Wisconsin at Platteville, Lake Land Community College and the cooking and Hospitality Institute of Chicago. He resides in the Chicago area and is the father of one son, Taylor.

Book preview

I would like to thank my son and nephew for their inspiration in making this book become a reality. This is a gift to them, to hopefully use as guidance and provide memories from their childhood. I would like to thank my brothers Keith and Tony for their support and love, my loyal friend Barbara who served as my editorial assistant and who was there pretty much when I needed her.

I would like to acknowledge all the mental health professionals that have helped guide my thinking over the years, more specifically therapists at the Rushville Treatment and Detention Center and Dixon Correctional Center, Dr. Doris Davidson and Dr. Mark Jacobs in Chicago and Father John Cyr. This book was written also in memory of my mother Jean and grandmother Jessie, who I’d like to acknowledge for keeping me focused on writing during times I wanted to give up. May they rest in peace.

AUTHOR’S NOTE

I initially wrote this book as a gift to my son and nephew when they were older and to put all the journaling that I did during our kayaking, camping and fishing trip on the Des Plaines River into a motivational story. The book is about kayaking, fishing and a love of the outdoors, about bonding, determination and being open to absorbing life lessons when they come your way, in this case, while embarking on a 110-mile trip down a river. It is about a man’s search for answers to questions that have plagued him his entire life, his attempt to relive a troubled youth vicariously through the efforts of his seven year-old son and nephew and the people they met along the way. It’s about adventure and three people meeting a challenge.

My target audience for this non-fiction book is adults of all age, with a particular nod to younger ones trying to find their way through the world, outdoor enthusiasts, and it’s intended to be a book that a whole family would be able to read, and gain insight and get motivation from.

FIGURING OUT WHAT REALLY DRIVES YOU

It’s safe to say that most people in life are driven by something. Sometimes it’s something good and sometimes it’s something bad. I was lucky to figure out what drove me at an early age - writing, playing sports and being involved in fitness activities and cooking.

As I’ve gotten older and more reflective and introspective about my life, I’ve found myself asking myself what drives me today, and is it the same things that drove me yesterday? Writing and fitness activities still drives me, writing does too, as well as cooking and being around people smarter than me to challenge my thinking. Adventure and excitement drives me. These were the easy things to figure out.

I’m driven by guilt, spending a good portion of my life running from it as well as shame, and I’ve allowed my past to control my present and my future. I’ve also been driven by resentment and anger and have held on far too long to hurts and never really got over them. I’ve been driven by fear and insecurity as the result of traumatic experiences in my life. I’ve been driven by the intense desire for external approval from others as the result of a life-long struggle and search for appropriate self-esteem. These things were a little harder to figure out.

More importantly though, I’m more driven these days by knowledge, personal understanding and living my life with purpose. I’ve figured out the hard way that identifying my purpose has helped me to simplify life and stay focused and motivated on things that are most important. Purpose produces passion and nothing energizes like having a clear purpose.

To know myself, I mean to really know and accept myself, drives the hell out of me these days and I’ve found that life is a lot easier when you know and accept what drives you.

Those old drives don’t go away easily, no matter how hard we wish them away. I’m driven by more positive joys now, stuff like having truly healthy, positive and stimulating relationships, spending time in my kayak and having a deepen sense of peace and contentment.

There are people who have spent their whole life never figuring out what drives them, so in that regard, I feel lucky.

This visual journey is about accepting and embracing that drive.

THE END RESULT OF JOURNALING

Little did I know when I was sitting in that therapist’s office way back when that his suggestion that I journal about my thoughts, feelings and behaviors could possible help me deal with what I was going through at the time. It turned out to be one of the better suggestions I was given.

Many writers I’ve read and talked to have confided in me that some of their best and most profound thoughts had come to them as a result of journaling. With my anxiety and struggles with paying attention to details at times left me wondering if I had the patience to journal consistently. I knew that I had many feelings that I struggled to make sense of and thought putting them down on paper in a journal format would be prudent and also make it easier to deal with those feelings.

It’s not as though there weren’t several life changing periods in my life that would have made it easier to start journaling. I suffered what I thought at the time was a mental breakdown. My mother, who suffered from mental illness most of her life and ironically had a breakdown of her own, died suddenly from cancer. There was my gambling addiction, my sexual addiction and my thoughts of committing suicide.

Journaling got me on the road to figuring it all out, how I arrived to where I was and how I let some negative consequences of life become an excuse and permission statement to do what I wanted, to hurt people who never did a thing to me. I’ve learned a lot while journaling over the years and it helped that it was an expectation during the various forms of mental health treatment I participated in for a variety of issues over the years. Journaling has taught me that troubled people are masters when it comes to deflecting blame from themselves and onto others. Journaling has taught me that it is impossible to be honest with yourself or anyone else when you are in the middle of addictive behavior and it takes a whole lot of courage and fortitude to be honest with yourself to begin with.

Journaling has taught me that being involved in obsessive and compulsive behaviors often substitute one thing from another easily and that healing and asking for help often means hitting rock bottom before that becomes a reality. Even though I was writing for newspapers consistently since I worked as a high school intern, I was one who always looked at journaling as a task. But by doing it, you can always see where you are at a given period or a given day in your life. One of the reasons I started was the thought of giving it to my son one day so he could really figure his father out when he got older.

Journaling helped me to be open to absorbing life lessons that came my way while also teaching me that worry clutters up tomorrow’s potential opportunities with yesterday’s troubles.

It helped me realize that if you don’t like something, change it, and if you can’t change it, change the way you think about it.

Spending time alone fishing or floating in my kayak, I figured out some of this stuff out too. Many people in my life didn’t know that fishing and kayaking were passions of mine as I was good at keeping my passions, both the ones that were good for me and the ones that were bad for me, a secret. To me, there was always something peaceful and tranquil about fishing or floating down a river that helped open up my mind and see life for what it truly was. Fishing also helped unlock my spirit, my katra - that inner voice saying to me you can do it!

This book would not have taken place without me giving a nod and respect to the practice of journaling, which turned out to be surprisingly easy to do during the down times while embarking on a kayaking and fishing adventure with two feisty and lovable little boys who without knowing it, managed to keep me grounded and purposeful.

I knew it would take quite a bit of discipline and commitment to journaling to do it every day of this trip, but I figured it would be good for me and something I could refer to for the rest of my life.

AN INTRODUCTION

I’ve always enjoyed exploring and explorers. Lewis and Clark, two of my favorite explorers, were paid by President Thomas Jefferson to explore, searching for the Northwest Passage. The duo took off from Pittsburgh Harbor, took the Ohio River to the Mississippi River to the Missouri River to the Yellowstone River to the Columbia River to just west of Portland. Reading about this trip really motivated me when I was younger to do something like that someday.

Fishing had always served several purposes for me. It’s given me a sense of peace, excitement, intrigue and accomplishment. It at times gave me a sense of clarity when I was living my life in a haze, a dark-clouded haze. I dealt with my boredom, anxiety, depression and thrill seeking in extremely maladaptive ways sometimes, to the point where I would be fishing and looking at my reflection in the waters of a calm river and asking myself what the hell is happening to me?

I often identified myself with other hard-living, thrill-seeking writers such as Thomas Wolfe, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Jack London, writers whose lives ended badly. Sometimes tragically. I was the only one who shared my uncle’s passion for fishing. He would take me to lagoons around Chicago, to Lake Michigan, Wolf Lake and the Calumet River, to angle when I was a kid. My uncle