(this article was published in the KCCNY newsletter and on williamnealy.com)

Over the past few weeks I’ve been surprised to hear how many people didn’t know that William Nealy had died. News of his death seems to have spread rather slowly around the community and I think there are a number of reasons for this.

As painful as every drowning is for the community, it’s more familiar ground. When I hear a kayaker has died, my first assumption is that the person died on a river. But William killed himself, and many of us, including his wife Holly, are still not sure why. Suicide is a scary place to contemplate, especially when someone as beloved as William goes through with it. My memories of him are very happy ones so they won’t give any insight into why he left us, but I think it is important that we remember the part of him that we all knew and loved.

Like so many paddlers, I first met William through a book, The Whitewater Home Companion: Southeastern Rivers, Volume I. I was a pre-beginner, if that’s even possible. I wanted to be a kayaker but somehow I was going to have to get over this fear of being upside down under water. I looked at William’s cartoon dudes rolling, and somehow being submerged seemed more cute and less scary. Since his beginner boater characters looked as freaked as I felt most of the time, it gave me the sense that there were others out there like me, and that his gallows humor had captured us all … that he was one of us, and he made it okay to feel like a big dork.

I was also working on a documentary about the whitewater community, and William was the first person I wanted to find and interview. His humor completely spoke to me and I thought it would be the ultimate to meet the man himself.

I called Menasha Ridge Press, his publishing company, and told them about my project and about wanting to interview William. I didn’t know if William was reclusive, if he’d want to talk to me, and I was worried that he might think I was some groupie that was just trying to make up an excuse to meet him. I didn’t hear from him for a while.

It was a few weeks before I started my trip south to start shooting when I got a phone call from him and his wife Holly. They had been out of town and had just gotten my message, and yes they wanted to be in the project, and did I want to stay with them? Wow! I jumped out of my skin I was so excited. A few days later Holly sent me a complete set of his kayaking books and a genuine Nealy map to his own house. Very cool.

A big mystery still remained. What did William Nealy look like?

I’d seen his self-portraits in his books, and there’s kind of a mysterious picture of him on the back of Whitewater Tales of Terror -- with glasses, a hat, and a scruffy beard, William was still in disguise.

The one thing that I had been told was that he had stuck baby doll heads around the perimeter fence of his property. Creepy, but very William.

The directions from the map were perfect, of course. I drove up to the fence. There was indeed a baby doll head. I buzzed the buzzer and waited to be let in. I looked down the drive and there he was, a little over six feet, red-haired and freckly. The vestiges of his old-school-bearded-long-haired hippie days were gone. He looked rather clean-cut actually. He was warm and welcoming and a little quiet but very friendly.

One of the first conversations we had was about how often people in the community wouldn’t recognize him. One time he gave a talk at a paddling event and he claimed that people literally didn’t recognize him until he put a beer on the podium. With the suds he was now the legendary William (not Bill) Nealy.

To know William Nealy, you have to meet Holly. William and Holly are a perfect example of how a couple completes each other. For William’s Yin, Holly is his Yang. She is vivacious where William is subdued, she is loud where William is quiet -- Holly is a dynamic, amazing, strong, beautiful woman and she was the most important person in William’s life.

Here is how William described meeting Holly:

My first conscious memory of Holly was when I was about 11 and a half, 12 years old, and she and a friend of hers sashayed into our yard where a friend and I were playing with matches and gasoline and they told us that what we were doing was terrible and dangerous and confiscated our matches. And in the struggle that ensued the old-fashioned friction matches once in her purse caught on fire. Her purse burned up and she ran down the street screaming. That was pretty much our first person to person interaction.

Then she dated basketball players and crap like that, and then she finally ended up dating a drummer in a rock and roll band, and I was a drummer in another rock and roll band and when he couldn’t make it to band jobs I would fill in for him. So after a while he had me taking care of his girlfriend when he was out of town on band jobs so she wouldn’t stray. And next thing I knew we were together and poor Johnny was out one girlfriend.

William and Holly had a home that was filled with love. Every picture, every piece of art they made for each other was a testament to it. William was surrounded by love and he adored Holly, no doubt about it.

They have had their rough times along the way and they would be the first to tell you that, but Holly was a big believer that strife is part of what made their relationship strong. Holly was also William’s manager, confidant, and protector. William, like many artists, was too tough on himself when it came to his work, and Holly could interface for him with the outside world about his book projects and drawings.

William let me interview him for three hours on everything from boating in the 70’s to the "tupperware holocaust" (the move from fiberglass boats to plastic). He talked about how he got into drawing, the differences between men and women boaters, running class 1 – 6, and beer:

If you’re thinking about white water or you’re in the sport, probably the most important thing to understand is that it’s pretty much a warrior society, especially at the high end. It’s a pure meritocracy kind of thing. The big bad warriors operate up here in their big bad universe, and then there’s all the rest of us down here, which is good because it pushes the limits of the sport and the learning curve. When you’re a beginner, you paddle up to class 3, class 3+, and if that’s all you do you can become a really good boater, and if it were the 60’s you’d be a famous boater, although they were running a lot of class 4 up to low class 5’s in the 60’s, but if you go higher up you begin to meet more of your celebrity boaters, and the priests and priestesses who have run the big drops and have run the rivers in Africa and run great falls at 20 feet, and lived. So if you do it and survive, you can be a guru . . . .

A lot of your really serious boater types are probably kids who should have been wearing protech helmets. They were probably trying to fly off their garage roof with cardboard wings and falling out of trees and doing all sorts of dangerous things like that, and I think a lot of people when they get into boating, it really resonates with a lot of the really wacky play things in childhood, only it’s a bit softer. Hitting the water is better than splatting the ground.

When it came to shooting William paddling for the documentary I wasn’t sure what he would want to run so we met up with Paul Bonesteel (co-creator of Johny Utah) and Daniel Murphy (co-creator of Loss of Altitude) to shoot the water footage.

I assumed William would want to paddle something gnarly, so when we got to the Haw River in North Carolina, I was a little surprised. The Haw is Class 1, 2 and depending on the level pushing 3 at one drop. And William, the author of Kayak! was paddling a canoe… and an open one at that. (William was having some back trouble so the open boat was his chosen craft at the time.)

I’ll admit I was kind of disappointed, but that was yet another implicit lesson I learned from William in a long list of them, that it didn’t matter what we were paddling, it just mattered that we were out there on the water.

This past February I ran the same stretch with William in kayaks. The water was so low we started following a goose down river figuring it would know where the water was. William got a kick out of the moment. "It’s like a cartoon, you know you’re a boater when:" you start following a goose’s line downstream. It was working rather well until the goose gave up looking for navigable water and flew away. Another perfect Nealy moment.

After the river we had some beers (mine with alcohol his without) and watched a video, Wicked Liquid 2. He was in awe of the South African boys and their "cunning stunts" (the subtitle of the video, and one that William had also used himself in a cartoon and had gotten some flack for). He was as jazzed about watching these guys go off as any of us would be. William didn’t really classify himself as one of these "big bad warrior" boaters. He was just like the rest of us, but brilliant at drawing our foibles.

He said one of the reasons he drew maps of rivers was because he could take a river that intimidated him and break it down and draw it in a way that would make the river seem cute and friendly. We owe William a lot for helping us navigate the rivers he mapped, diagramming paddling technique, dissecting hydrology, and just making us laugh.

Even though we may never know why William decided to leave this world, we can look at what we do know about him in his life, and what he meant to all of us as a humorist, hydrology teacher, map maker, and cultural anthropologist of kayaking. He has left a unique imprint on this sport. Even if you never met William you already know him from his drawings. His essence is in every bug-eyed paddler, school-bus-sized hole, and frothy-foam pile he ever drew. He's in every detail.

I miss him.

-Kate Geis