The most dangerous thing that can happen to us guys is not a waterfall, nor a boulder choked, class V creek. It’s chicks and babies who kill paddlers!” wrote Reactionary columnist Ben Aylsworth in the Spring 2001 issue of Rapid.
Eight years later, now married with two little kids of my own, I have a completely different perspective. Aylsworth’s opinion at the time was too shortsighted (not to mention bitter and sexist) to see the lives of his paddling buddies come full circle.
Whitewater boat sales and participation peaked around 2001, not because of the super Ego, but because the last of the largest group of the population—the baby boomers—were still enjoying the golden whitewater years of their mid-thirties. Soon after, Ben would write, they were sucked from their boats, resurfacing in Lamaze classes and in minivans en route to soccer practice.
To be fair, these years are also the busiest time in most careers and a time when many paddlers are purchasing and trying to pay for their first houses. Paddles are traded for rakes, paintbrushes and drywall trowels. If you want to catch up with your thirty-something paddling buddies, try the tool rental desk at Home Depot. I have an account.
This special Love Issue is here to show those paddlers running scared from commitment that love doesn’t have to be as restrictive as a river-wide strainer and that there can be whitewater at the end of the wedding aisle and birthing canal. In this issue you’ll meet river kids and whitewater couples who are making it work.
My own family’s secret has been establishing Rapid and our lives in the Ottawa Valley. It was a conscious decision. We decided we’d rather live and work at the rivers than spend our weekends driving to them.
My son Dougie and daughter Kate, now four and two years old, have been swimming and paddling in class II rapids since they were born. Dougie has 35 river days scribbled in his log from last year alone. The kids have their own kayaks, paddles, canoe tripping barrels (one specifically for stuffed animals), fishing rods, sleeping bags and Therm-a-Rests. We have two tandem whitewater tripping boats and we split on a 14-foot raft (think giant playpen) with Rapid’s River alchemy columnist Jeff Jackson and his family.
There have never been more kids’ courses, boats and gear.
Some people argue that it is a result of this new gear that more kids are on rivers.
No doubt the availability of smaller gear and boats is making parents realize that they can start their kids younger. But I believe there is a second element at work. The RPM dads (and moms) of the late ‘90s have grown sick of soccer and are coming back to the rivers, bringing with them the offspring of the first whitewater boom.
Even if only half of the whitewater boomers get back in their boats and bring their families to the rivers, river paddling will be 50 per cent bigger than ever before.
Why should you care? Because today’s river rats will be tomorrow’s river advocates and environmental policy makers. When you look at it that way, babies don’t kill paddlers; paddlers’ babies save rivers.
This article first appeared in the Early Summer 2009 issue of Rapid Magazine.
