My favorite book was recently adapted into a movie. But don’t bother seeing it, the Hollywood hacks butchered an iconic river book into a predictable love story—the wrong kind of love story, as in, not love of rivers.
David James Duncan’s 1984 classic The River Why was handed to me by a guide from another rafting company on the scout above Cataract Canyon’s Number 5 rapid. The worn pages spoke to me as they had to the many guides who’d read it before.
A quick look at the book makes you think it is about fishing, but it’s not. It’s about rivers, coming of age and looking for the meaning of life. Yes, there is some fishing, but don’t let that get in the way. Gus Orviston, the main character, hermits up in a remote Oregon valley to sort out his life, and one day, hiking high above his adopted fishing stream, he sees the river’s course scrawled across the valley. To his surprise, in a sort of cursive river writing, he plainly sees the river’s path spells the word “why”.
River guiding is a form of purgatory. It is somewhere between inferno and paradise; suffering and enlightening. In return for spending time in beautiful places, pulled by the current, one gets long days and responsibility disproportionate to the pay, a lack of everyday conveniences, and having to deal with clients. From my experience, these folks fall into a 10:1:1 ratio. For every 10 somewhat anonymous nice clients, there is one individual that is totally amazing and one total pain in the ass.
The trying trips are when this ratio is weighted on the back end. The strange trips are when the ratio is 0:5:5 and there are only five people in the raft.
I had such a trip in the Green River’s Canyon of Lodore. My boat included a 250-pound, heavily medicated manic depressive firefighter; a young woman just released from six months in the hospital on suicide watch; a 60-year-old woman with 20 percent vision; the female owner of a Charleston strip club; and the manager of an army boot factory inGeorgia. One fell asleep in the raft several times a day, one couldn’t be trusted to go beyond eyesight and one didn’t have any eyesight. The strip club owner was exceptionally coarse and the last was exactly as you’d expect of an army boot factory manager. They were a rag tag breakfast club, individually annoying and exceedingly exhausting.
At the time, pure suffering; in retrospect, enlightening. Taken as a group, I wouldn’t have traded them for anything. It turned on its head what I thought river guiding was all about.
David James Duncan is such a writer that the reader is pretty sure The River Why is his life story (that is, until one reads his novel The Brothers K and thinks that, too, must be his life story). It is funny and intimate, the type of narrative that makes you feel like you are inside the story. Gus thinks that this river that spells “why” is taunting him to find the meaning of life, until he slowly realizes it is not asking, but telling him, Why. “This,” writes Duncan, with what I imagine to be a wide sweep of the arms to include the river and all it touches, “all of this, is why.”
The challenges of rafting moderate whitewater seemed pretty inconsequential compared to the life histories of the cards in my raft. I was mature enough to realize that guiding was not all about me; until then, however, I did believe it was all about the rapids, the challenge, the hash marks on the map. But a blind lady giggling with surprise as we crashed waves, a suicidal girl finding the courage to try guiding the raft through an easy rapid, a strip club owner asking if it’s okay to say the Lord’s Prayer at sunrise… For these folks, it wasn’t about the rapids, but about the river, the current of life, carrying them downstream.
My 0:5:5 made me realize that this, all of this, is why.
This story originally appeared on page 18 of the Early Summer 2012 issue of Rapid magazine. Read the entire issue here.
