I have extensive
video footage of the people and events described in
this book. When Anything Worth
Doing is
released, I will post one or several clips on
YouTube, like this sample, linked back to this
page.
"For seventeen years now, I’ve been a boatman. I take people down whitewater rivers in the west. Through the summer, I pretty much live on the River. Set up a kitchen at a different camp each night, lay out a bedroll to sleep on the River bank above the River running, below the stars shining.
I’m supposed to be there. I feel very much at home, at ease and comforted, between the songs of the birds and water and the silence of the stones and the canyon.
Still, when I went to put the boats in the water, I’d look upstream at where I hadn’t been. At the end of the trip, I’d look back downstream and know it went to the sea. See?"
-- Clancy Reece
Clancy Reece was a
bear of a man. Stories about him tend toward the
Bunyanesque (there was the night back during
Vietnam that he and Navy shipmates painted a giant
pink peace sign on the bow of the USS Neches. They
accomplished the trick hanging upside down by ropes
tied to their ankles). Clancy was a shade tree
philosopher, a poet, a boxer, a 30-year whitewater
boatman and an artisan fisherman.
Jon Barker, 17 years Clancy’s junior, had been raised by a whitewater outfitter. From childhood he was obsessed with rivers and arcane river knowledge. He was competent on danger’s knife edge yet humble about his escapades, happiest alone on rivers (one of his long term “projects” was to run every tributary to Idaho’s Clearwater river. He dragged his boat miles across farmland to access these tiny, sometimes unnamed streams). It’s easy to laugh at his obscure obsessions but even easier to admire his consummate skill and will-do attitude.
Clancy was Jon’s childhood hero, then his friend.
Together and separately, Jon and Clancy ran their favorite rivers almost every way rivers could be run. They ran from mountain source to sea. They ran at floodstage, when a river is at its most magnificent -- and dangerous. They ran under moonlight and midday sun. During the 100 year flood of 1996 they attempted a 24 hour rampage down the mighty wilderness Salmon. Tragedy struck. Jon Barker survived but despite agonizing effort to rescue his friend, Clancy Reece drowned.
Clancy used to say, “Anything worth doing is worth overdoing,” usually before he and Jon launched another epic. He was kidding…sort of. To a degree both admirable and unreasonable, this maxim guided both their lives. Like archetypal heroes these men didn’t compromise and never quit. But there is also something of the ridiculous in their pursuit of peak experiences and adventures, something that epitomizes an age in which anything is possible and therefor everything, including the impossible, is assumed.
Jon Barker, 17 years Clancy’s junior, had been raised by a whitewater outfitter. From childhood he was obsessed with rivers and arcane river knowledge. He was competent on danger’s knife edge yet humble about his escapades, happiest alone on rivers (one of his long term “projects” was to run every tributary to Idaho’s Clearwater river. He dragged his boat miles across farmland to access these tiny, sometimes unnamed streams). It’s easy to laugh at his obscure obsessions but even easier to admire his consummate skill and will-do attitude.
Clancy was Jon’s childhood hero, then his friend.
Together and separately, Jon and Clancy ran their favorite rivers almost every way rivers could be run. They ran from mountain source to sea. They ran at floodstage, when a river is at its most magnificent -- and dangerous. They ran under moonlight and midday sun. During the 100 year flood of 1996 they attempted a 24 hour rampage down the mighty wilderness Salmon. Tragedy struck. Jon Barker survived but despite agonizing effort to rescue his friend, Clancy Reece drowned.
Clancy used to say, “Anything worth doing is worth overdoing,” usually before he and Jon launched another epic. He was kidding…sort of. To a degree both admirable and unreasonable, this maxim guided both their lives. Like archetypal heroes these men didn’t compromise and never quit. But there is also something of the ridiculous in their pursuit of peak experiences and adventures, something that epitomizes an age in which anything is possible and therefor everything, including the impossible, is assumed.