Riding A River of Tango

                 It takes two to tango but it is not tango without tango music. When I began dancing tango I found the melodies disconcerting and laborious. My initial attraction to this dance was the proximity that it put me to members of the opposite sex. After eight years of single parenting I found that I was unable to deny myself the chance to hold a woman in my arms and move with her to the music.

               When the initial euphoria wore off I found myself asking why I kept coming back. I was hooked and it was a mystery to me as to how the barb was set that kept me searching for more dances with different partners in cities far and wide. I was forty-eight years old and my two daughters were in college. I was free to do other things than laundry and cooking meals for princesses.

               What made my obsession even more perplexing was that I always looked at dancing as an effeminate activity and an affront to my machismo. I had difficulty talking about it to my friends and was somewhat ashamed to admit what I knew I had become: a dancer.

               When I was young I worked as a whitewater river guide on various rivers of the Appalachian Mountains: the Lehigh, Upper Hudson, Youghigheny, Nolichucky and Moose Rivers. I never stopped being a river runner and raised my girls to be river rats and adventure seekers. When river guides dance it is not pretty and it is best to stand clear: arms flail, legs fly and the sound of their voices will crack your ear; it is the unbridled expression of a very passionate person. The rhythm of the river flows in our veins; it is the melody we hear and it dictates how we move in spontaneous response to the pulse and surge of the unpredictable current.

               I was in the process of writing a book when my tango obsession grabbed me. The hand that grasped me was a familiar one, it was my own, the one I used to pull customers back into the raft after they had fallen overboard. I didn’t know it at the time but I was drowning, lost in the River of Life and I had slipped below the surface, overwhelmed by my responsibilities as a father, worker, friend, neighbor, brother, son. Inevitably my book changed course and covered two topics: the river and tango. It eventually would be released as ‘River Tango’.

               Back in the raft I could steer and there were rough waters ahead of me. I lost my job, my investments tanked and my roof sprung a leak. My problems seemed insurmountable but I was no longer alone, I had a dance partner wherever tango dancers gathered and the rhythm of the music affected me like a river flowing through my heart and soul.

               I left my home in Pennsylvania and headed south to the Carolinas to work as a contractor in the telecom industry, renting out my house to a neighbor for next to nothing just to keep it from becoming an abandoned building to be vandalized by the young punks in town. I danced tango in Charleston, Raleigh, Wilmington, Charlotte, Atlanta and Asheville. At that time I still did not know why I was so compulsive about attending the tango events, called ‘milongas’, but eventually the clouds parted to reveal the answer; it was the music.

               Tango is like sex. Anybody can do it once they find a partner. Even though the two participants are inexperienced they can still make it happen. So it is with tango, if you can walk to the music with another person you are dancing tango as long as the music playing is tango music. The key is tango music. It is the sex drive of the dance that motivates a person at the subconscious level to constantly seek it out. It is the vehicle by which this cultural, anachronistic import has rapidly repopulated itself around the world.

               Tango music is to dancers what anti-oxidants are to the human body. Anti-oxidants keep us young and healthy. Tango music is what draws dancers together and it keeps them moving to the melodies long after their muscles have become fatigued and their brains addled.

               Dancing tango is a journey into your soul on a river of rhythms and melodies. The only way to steer on this voyage of self discovery is with a rudder comprised of self-honesty. By being true to myself I was able to learn about the other half of our species. It took me three years of tango to learn how to hold a woman. To do it I had to exude my manliness and be relaxed while doing it.

               All of the things I learned I already knew. A lifetime of misinformation had gotten me to believe in things that were false. To be honest with myself I needed to become a better person, to quit stereotyping people. I needed to be unbiased in my opinions of others. Only then could I be alone with a woman in a crowded room and be able to tune everyone out so I could hear the music, so I could get into sync with my partner.

               I had to learn where my point of balance was and how to direct my momentum to my advantage. It was like learning how to maneuver on the river all over again only now I was riding down the rapids towards my own center. Once there nothing else matter, only my companion and the music. I didn’t care if she was skilled or a novice, all I needed to do was to hold her and move to the song in complete harmony with her.

               As I navigated the River of Tango the obstacles I encountered ceased to be problems, they became rhythms in the melody of life. I danced around them and eventually I started to become the center of my world. I could make sense of the chaos and could adapt to the fluctuations in the events of my life like a dancer navigating a crowded dance floor. The stress in my life decreased dramatically.

               All the while, as I explored who I was I kept moving, I kept dancing and working in different cities, moving west to San Antonio, Austin, Albuquerque and finally Durango. Here I found a river waiting for me, the Animas River. Here I found love and happiness. 

               Now that my first child has graduated college I find that I am not an old man looking to the end of his life with trepidation; I am alive and washed clean everyday by the events in my life. I look forward to the struggle to maintain balance in my relationships, in all my endeavors and on the dance floor. I know I will not fail because failure doesn’t exist for the person who does not try to conquer life, who moves with the flow instead of against it. I hear the music and move to its rhythm because I am a dancer.