TEN YEARS AGO I sat in a duct-taped faux leather office chair and wrote, “The internal voice of adulthood is no longer a soft whisper as I ponder what I should be doing with my life at 27 yeas of age. I want a career in the paddling industry and Rapid is the fantastically naïve idea I’ve been looking for.”
I tell the story of Rapid’s conception often. As a paddling instructor and raft guide with no writing experience, almost everyone asks me, “How and why did you start a whitewater paddling magazine?”
It started at a roadhouse bar (as do many conceptions) after a mid-winter paddling show. Someone sitting at our table suggested we start a kayaking magazine —
“Well, you love paddling and have a camera, don’t you?”
We slid the mustard, ketchup and pitchers of beer aside and with a bucket of Crayolas we sketched the first year’s worth of editorial on the paper tablecloth.
We thought our new whitewater magazine would be called, The River Rag. We envisioned a slightly trashier newsprint Ottawa River tabloid wrapped around a “fun, hip, adrenaline-junky style magazine with intelligent, informative and comprehensive coverage of whitewater news, issues and events.”
Six months later, when it came time for a real business plan and the first issue, I wrote, “With the faint hope of my parents’ income and romantic images of paid-for paddling trips, boats, gear, a Suburban, hot-ass camera equipment and smok’n computer, the project begins.”
I borrowed $2,000 from my mother to buy my first Apple computer. Then I proposed marriage to my ex-girlfriend Tanya. I loaded both into my rusty Isuzu Trooper and drove to a rented cabin in the Ottawa Valley where we would set up shop and begin our life together with Rapid.
I didn’t know it at the time, but I was following the lead of another great publisher, Hugh Hefner. Hefner and I (although with a slightly more modest magazine) agreed on two things.
First, we were creating lifestyle magazines that we would want to read. “My market strategy was to put together a magazine that I myself would enjoy as a reader,” wrote Hefner. “I edited the magazine for myself.”
And secondly, we knew we couldn’t create them in sterile downtown office tower complexes. Each of us had to live the lifestyle of our magazines. For Playboy it was a mansion, bunnies and silk smoking jackets, and for Rapid a remote cabin, boats and floral board shorts.
Looking back over the past 10 years, we’ve remained true to Rapid and its readers.
Rapid is still located in Palmer Rapids, on the Madawaska River. Rapid remains North America’s only whitewater magazine — so you don’t have to filter through sea kayaking, lakewater canoeing or kayak fishing (we’ve since started other magazines for that) to read about rivers. And even now with two children I manage to paddle as much as ever. The secret I realized, like Hefner, is to surround yourself with what you love.
We’ve covered a decade’s worth of World Freestyle Championships. We’ve run hundreds of canoe and kayak technique columns and test paddled almost every new design since ’99. Not to mention almost being sued by a power generation company for publishing photos of someone running one of their dams (across one of our rivers).
In the early part of this millennium we saw whitewater participation peak and dry up almost completely. At the height of freestyle’s glory, I saw the blank stares of regular-Joe paddlers and predicted the return of river running, calling it freeboating. Over these years other whitewater paddling and river magazines have come and gone. And now—speaking of conception—we’re seeing another generation of paddlers taking to the rivers—the children of our very first subscribers.
Hefner once said, “Certainly it is a life well-lived and I wouldn’t trade places with anybody. My life has been so rewarding and so satisfying, I would be hesitant to change anything.”
For whitewater, for Rapid, and for me these last 10 years don’t mark the end of an illustrious legacy, I sincerely hope they are just the humble beginnings.
Thanks for reading Rapid.
[Please note the incredible self restraint exercised in this editorial against referring to anything we’ve done in Rapid as kayak porn.]
This article first appeared in the Spring 2008 issue of Rapid Magazine.
