Preface
We called our home the Blue Ghetto. For two months each spring it accreted along both sides of a dirt road you could walk the length of in two minutes. At one end of that scrap of road was the backside of Three Rivers Lodge, the backwoodsy resort that largely comprised the town of Lowell, Idaho. At the other was a wall of dense, dark, dripping green: the Clearwater National Forest. Alongside, screened from easy view by willow and syringa, ran the reason for it all: the Lochsa, a steep mountain river that swells each spring with snowmelt and rainfall, pounds through dozens of powerful rapids in just a few miles, and then, just downstream of the lodge, folds with deceptive peace into the famed wilderness Selway.
The denizens of the Blue Ghetto were professional whitewater raft guides, career guides, as we liked to point out to one another. We were not working summer jobs until something better came along. We were living the life. We might not own much, but neither were we owned. We might not be eligible for credit cards, but credit cards looked like bad magic, the real-life lamp with the prankster genie inside.
So the ghetto in Blue Ghetto was ironic. We were proud of our poverty and what it bought.
The blue was literal: on the Lochsa in the spring it rains. And rains. We strung cheap blue plastic tarps over our camps. The tarps made blue skies over each camp. The twilight shadows which pooled beneath turned even our faces blue.
It was a glorious mess. Our cheek-by-jowl camps were usually mud-sticky and puddle-mined, protected by shallow trenches which prevented water from actually flowing through the camps. Some pitched their tents on salvaged wooden pallets or slept in trucks backed up to the ubiquitous tarps, each festooned with boating gear that never quite dried.
As you might expect, our tiny enclave was well endowed with eccentrics. There was for instance Dave, who in his mid-20s had yet to own a car, didn’t know how to drive, and didn’t want to. He hitchhiked to every destination he couldn’t reach by bicycle, including, somehow or another, Tibet.
Dave had attended college in northern California. When housing costs had threatened to make school unaffordable, he’d simply pitched his tent in woods behind the student union.
There was Lonnie, who had a Master’s degree in something esoteric. An accomplished storyteller, Lonnie liked to kick off his sandals before beginning a tale. He’d scuff his feet into the grass or sand as though cleaning a battery terminal. Finally hooked to his source, he’d fold his body into an angular origami squat, swivel his long neck to capture each eye, whether 4 or 40, and begin.
Carol had thick dark hair that she kept in elaborate cornrows and ropy braids. She chewed tobacco and sang like a whiskey-bent angel. Her laugh was easy and raucous. You could hear it clear across the river. Those tobacco-flecked teeth, weathered skin and bulging biceps notwithstanding, the impression she left in her wake was that a mischievous child had just skipped by.
We played a drinking game. Orders from above said guests were not to know about it or, better yet, that we were not to play it. But of course orders from above were considered optional at ground level and the game thrived.
It went like this: at days’ end, any guide who had flipped a boat in the rapids owed the other guides a 12-pack of beer, deliverable upon our return to Three Rivers. But if a guide dumptrucked, in other words if his guests went swimming but the raft remained upright and the guide himself managed to stay on board, the other guides owed him a 12-pack.
It was of course the dumptruck bit our boss did not want guests to hear about. He had a point, so we humored him enough to stop chortling about free beer after “carnage” occurred, but we didn’t stop playing. We called the post-flip walk to the resort store “the walk of shame.” We did not stop chortling about that.
Rafting clientele like running rivers for lots of reasons but our clientele, the people who had picked the Lochsa, wanted a wild ride. On the bus ride to our launch we passed photos among the guests. The images were of rafts twisting into the air as though propelled by land mines; rafts dumping their human contents into roiling chaos; rafts plowing so hard into boulders that they folded into bulbous L shapes. Carnage pays, we liked to tell each other.
But this book is not about the Blue Ghetto or the Lochsa. Nor is it about me, except indirectly. The reason for describing all this -- the Ghetto, those guides -- is because if you stand there with me, on that muddy dirt road beside that lovely wild river, you may see how we might have felt ourselves special, exempt in some way from rules other lives are bound by. Not that we would say so and not that we thought ourselves invincible. That’s different. Occasionally a guide blew out a knee in a violent paddleboat toss or split a lip on the back of a guest’s helmet. You expected that.
But picture it. We threw ourselves at that river every day and most days it tossed us all harmlessly skyward like well-loved children. After a while that does something to you.
What this book is about is a subculture that still, in memory, charms me with its innocence and exuberance. It’s about two men named Clancy Reece and Jon Barker, two of the best raft guides that subculture ever produced. It’s about adventure and risk and freedom. It’s about death. And those rare people who, like Clancy and Jon, never unchoose a life defined by such harsh and lovely bargains, who never tell themselves it’s time to “grow up.”
I can remember exactly when I began to unchoose that life. I was standing in a phone booth staring dry-eyed at the Lochsa while a stranger’s voice explained why Jim Yetter hadn’t returned to meet me at Three Rivers.
The next day I received a letter. J. Yetter, Banks, Idaho, said the envelope’s upper left corner. I watched the hand which held the envelope begin to shake. You see, I already knew – that telephone voice had told me – that Jim was dead.
Long-limbed, blond and beautiful, Jim had been a guide for another Lochsa company. He had taken a boatman’s holiday to kayak the infamous North Fork of the Payette. There he had drowned.
This was perhaps my second summer as a guide. As an inexperienced oarsman, I worked family trips on moderate, class III rivers. Class III water can look intimidating to the uninitiated but its obstacles require no great skill to avoid. The waves may be large but they are predictable.
I had been sent to the Lochsa to see what serious paddle boating looked like and, I presumed, so the boss could see if I had class IV-V potential. The Lochsa scared me. What I had heard about the class V North Fork, where Jim had gone to play, was that it was harder and much more dangerous.
In the letter Jim wrote that he had broken his paddle that day in a tough rapid. Without a paddle in water so churned it seemed mostly air, he had been forced to wet exit from his kayak and swim for shore. Amazingly he had escaped injury. The next day, he wrote, he would try the section boaters called the middle five, the most difficult, dangerous stretch of the North Fork. Assuming he could find someone to boat with.
I later learned that he did find a paddling partner and they did boat the middle five. Everything went well until the last rapid and what went wrong there nobody will ever know, because Jim’s paddling partner didn’t see it. What he saw when he turned around was Jim’s kayak completing the run upside down. When Jim didn’t exit the kayak or roll upright after what seemed enough time, the guy paddled over and spun the boat up. Empty cockpit.
After a frantic search the paddler located Jim– possibly alive at first, but only in a technical sense because Jim Yetter would never get the chance to breathe again. He was wedged under a submerged log, maybe three feet beneath the surface. The way the story came down the grapevine the guy could reach Jim with his fingertips but couldn’t budge him. He couldn’t budge the log either. At some point he scrambled up onto the highway for help, which is the same as saying he had surrendered to inevitability. Every boater knows the rule: one minute to unconsciousness. Five to almost certain brain damage, then death.
It was evening before the body was retrieved. Somewhat ironically, the dangerous “strainer” log kayakers had been warning each other about all season was also removed, as though it was at fault and could no longer be tolerated. Or as though the river, having proven itself too dangerous, at least on that one day, in that one rapid, for that one man, needed one of its many risks removed.
By then, Jim’s letter was en route to me.
There is a part of that letter I will never forget. Among the talk of broken paddles and nasty swims, Jim had written this: he was having the time of his life.
That autumn I drove to the North Fork, found the rapid he had died in, and climbed down the steep bank to the water’s edge. I opened the letter and reread that line. By now I could find it in an instant, between the second and third tired fold on page two. Then I slipped the letter into a crack between two rocks. And although I couldn’t have said why, standing there I swore an oath that someday I would kayak the North Fork.
At that point I had never kayaked a class V river. Nor had I thought much about whether I cared to, except that it was what good boaters did and I intended one day to be good.
I eventually did run the North Fork. By then I was a full-fledged Lochsa guide as Jim had been. Up or off, as climbers say, and by then I’d been guiding some five years. Few women worked the Lochsa in my day. But over a couple seasons I’d studied and practiced that style of river, then worn my boss down to a definite maybe, then demonstrated the necessary skill.
I did my job competently on the Lochsa, had no more than my share of swimmers, several perfectly glorious dumptrucks and no guest injuries more severe than a bloodied nose. But I often guided sweating with fear. Some nights I dreamed a swimmer from my raft had been sucked under a log and no matter how hard I tried I could only brush his inert form with my fingertips.
One day a young man tumbled from my paddle boat into a big hydraulic below a rock. Boaters call such hydraulics holes because of the way they tend to pull anything at the surface down, cycle it back up, pull it back down. Some who have reason to know how it feels call the experience of swimming these holes getting “washing machined.”
The whole thing happened, as crises do when you have rehearsed for them, with a curious stretching of time. As the raft caught and began to buck, I watched this man begin to tumble into the most powerful part of the hole. I watched myself decide my soon-to-be swimmer was, for the next few moments, more important than my pummeled, hole-caught raft, watched myself slam my paddle blade under a thwart and lunge to hook the shoulder of his lifejacket, all before he could finish falling. My hand wrapped solidly around the fabric.
It was a nasty hole. If I had missed my grab he would have been yanked under like a fishing bobber. He’d have been released, to be sure – keeper holes exist but they are rare and this was not one of them -- but not before a scary and perhaps painful swim. Now he’d be back in the boat before he could register that he was wet.
But that’s not how it happened.
My swimmer was yanked under so hard that I was pulled half out of the raft after him, my arm submerged to the shoulder. His sunny yellow helmet was an indistinct greenish blob in the aerated mess of the hole.
From that awkward position I pulled for perhaps 15 seconds with all my might. I might have been trying to haul a tree from the ground. I began to count silently.
On four the raft broke free of the hole and the young man came easily to the surface. I dumped him onto the floor where he lay, sans pants and one shoe, eyes squeezed shut, gasping and coughing. Then his lids flew open and he stared at me, in the grip of an emotion I had never before seen but instantly recognized: mortal terror.
That look rattled me, but when I told the story I made the whole thing into a joke, on him for thinking that losing his pants had been a brush with death, on me for allowing my paddle boat to run one of the biggest holes in the river in the first place.
I was still special that day, one of the charmed, if just barely. That changed in June of 1996, when word ripped through the guiding community that another of ours was dead. At first no name, just “a guide.” Then more information: one of the oldtimers, a real dinosaur.
Word was that the guy had been on a boatman’s holiday as well, only his was a speed run down the Idaho’s longest wilderness river, the Salmon. The Salmon is not normally a difficult river, but this was a booming high water year. On the Lochsa we’d been canceling trips for safety.
Extreme high water or not, the news didn’t make sense. Rivers are notorious for slamming the foolish ass over teakettle, and even more notorious for giving the undeserving a pass. But although we all paid lip service to water’s caprice, none of us believed in our hearts that rivers killed the respectful, which we all said we were, and especially not the consummately skilled, which is what it meant to say the man was a dinosaur. He was one of those who, to our way of thinking, had earned his place.
Then I heard a name I knew. Clancy Reece. A dinosaur’s dinosaur. The guy who’d trained the people who had trained me. Their hero and mine. I hadn’t known him except to say hello at boat ramps, but like everyone in Idaho rafting at the time, I knew stories. I knew, everyone knew, that Clancy loved a river challenge. People were saying that he and a lifelong friend, a serious adventure-boater named Jon Barker, had been trying to set some kind of record when he died.
Someone said this: He must have been having the time of his life.
I guided for several more summers, but that day I knew there would be an end to it. I was not a career guide after all. I know now that there are very few career risk takers of any stripe.
Years later I went to hear a climber and extreme snowboarder named Stephen Koch. After his slideshow -- full of edgy images of him flying down narrow chutes steep as rainspouts, each thin ribbon of navigable snow walled by ragged rock or emptying into thin air -- an audience member asked why he took such risks. He’d been nearly killed in an avalanche on Wyoming’s Grand Teton. Despite needing physical therapy to recover from injuries which included a broken back, he was snowboarding extreme terrain again within a year. Since then he’d attempted a very risky, alpine-style ascent of Everest, just he and a few friends. Because of the likelihood of mishap in that extreme high elevation environment, Everest is nearly always attempted siege-style, with a virtual army of backup personnel and gear, and yet the mountain still kills at least two climbers in a typical year. Unexpected storms have been known to wipe Everest hopefuls off the roof of the world by the handful. How could Koch say he valued his life, the audience member asked, if he took such risks with it?
“I do not risk my life,” Stephen answered. “I take risks in order to live. I take risks because I love life, not because I don’t.”
Listening to the reaction of the crowd, which ranged from boisterous whistles of approval to disapproving silence, and feeling that entire range echo in me, I realized I wanted to write about Clancy Reece. My hero the river dinosaur, all those great stories I’d heard, but even more, the guy himself, whom I was suddenly pretty sure I knew nothing about. And the powerful friendship that, possibly more than risk, had put him on the Salmon river at floodstage in 1996. And what had happened to Jon, who’d had to live with the aftermath of that day but, like Koch, never left his adventurer’s path. Most of all I wanted to write about a life based on freedom and risk and a kind of eternal, uncompromising childhood; and whether, if Clancy could look at it all in hindsight, he would have -- or could have -- unchosen any of it.
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