Rapid Rituals: Reflections of a River Guide

I was a whitewater river guide well before I became an anthropologist. Working as a professional raft guide on the Penobscot River, in northern Maine, began as a summer job when I was a college student at the University of Maine at Farmington. Over the course of thirteen seasons of guiding customers down some of the most epic class 4 and 5 rapids in North America, this summer gig transformed into something more. Over time, this job became an integral part of my sense of belonging in the world.

In many ways, my dueling careers—one as an academic, another as a raft guide—could not be more disparate and disjointed. Yet, I somehow doubt I would have survived graduate school had it not been for the annual revitalization rituals on the “healing waters” of the Penobscot River. I doubt that I would have weathered the troubled waters of academia if it hadn’t been for my friendships with the vagabonds and adrenaline junkies of the whitewater paddling community. Guiding in the North Maine Woods is my sanctuary away from the incessant buzz of city life and the profane traditions, arbitrary rules and hierarchies, and alienating tendencies of the neoliberal university. Whenever I felt too overwhelmed in the pursuit of a career, too exhausted to go on running the capitalist rat-race, I would find the river—at once serene and exhilarating—waiting to embrace me as I am.

In this article, I reflect on some of the things I’ve learned over the past thirteen seasons as a river guide, and how these lessons have informed my subjectivity, my worldview, and my spiritual life on these sacred lands and waters. Indeed, guiding on the mighty Penobscot River is an old and venerable tradition. I would be remiss if I did not pay my respects to the vocational ancestors—the guides, fishermen and women, and hunters of the Wabanaki nations who skillfully navigated the currents of the Penobscot and Kennebec River systems many centuries before settler colonialism (Ranco 2006).

In his book Walden, the transcendentalist philosopher Henry David Thoreau (1854) wrote: “I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.” Shortly after finishing Walden in the 1840s, Thoreau ventured further North in search for the kind of “authentic” wilderness experience which he failed to find in his cabin near Concord, Massachusets. In 1846, and again in 1853 and 1857, Thoreau traveled to the remote Penobscot watershed which flows in the shadow of Katahdin (Great Mountain). He hired local guides to lead him down the waterways which meander through the forests of Maine. On his second and third journeys, Thoreau hired Joseph Attean and Joe Polis, two native guides, to steer him down these ancient Wabanaki river routes (Francis 1969). According to Chief Kirk Francis (1969), Thoreau became fascinated with America’s indigenous peoples, and particularly the Penobscot, for he believed that they embodied the transcendent human condition—”living deliberately” in accordance with nature—which Euro-American industrial society could no longer provide. While Thoreau’s descriptions of Attean, Polis, and other indigenous persons perpetuated myths of the “noble savage,” I cannot help but feel a sense of kinship—albeit a distant, murky, and non-consanguineous one—with the Penobscot guides who enabled and enlivened Thoreau’s account of his riverine expeditions in The Maine Woods (1864).

My own journey as a Penobscot river guide began in 2010. I had just started college, and I found myself in need to a job which allowed me to spend my summers outside. I attended high school in Bingham, a small town in the Upper Kennebec Valley. I initially thought I would become a guide on the milder (Class III-IV) Kennebec River, but the local companies never responded to my applications. However, Dan McDonald, a science teacher at my old high school, owned and operated a small rafting outfit on the wilder Penobscot, and he gladly took me on. After two weeks of training—paddling the rivers, learning the hydrological features of the rapids, honing my guide strokes, developing my commands, etc.—I passed Maine’s rigorous exam and began guiding people down the West Branch of the Penobscot.

I worked fulltime for seven summers, averaging around five commercial day trips per week, from late May to early September. I guided tourists down the river by day and slept in my 2-person tent by night. The minimalist lifestyle of being a raft guide was bliss. The West Branch of the Penobscot is a dam-released river, and the water levels fluctuate depending on the water levels in Chesuncook Lake, and on the demand for renewable, hydroelectric energy in cities like Boston, Worcester, and Providence. The two major flows are 2,400 cfs (cubic feet per second) and 3,200 cfs. Although, I have also seen the river dwindle below 1,800 and cascade at more than 11,000 under extreme hydrological conditions. At 3,200 cfs, the river is considerably more difficult to navigate than at 2,400. At lower levels, the rapids in the Ripogenus Gorge are classified as IV, but at higher levels, the feature at the top of the rapid—a river-wide hydraulic called “Exterminator Hole”—becomes more violent, transforming the rapid into a proper Class V. During my rookie season, I found out just how unforgiving Exterminator Hole can be. I was guiding a heavy boat, with ten paddlers with average paddling competencies, and I came into the “E-Hole” with a slight left-angle. The difference between holding an 11, 12, and 1 o’clock angle makes a world of difference. We dropped into the E-Hole right-side up, but we emerged upside down. Eleven people swam the Gorge that day, me included.

I had never swum the Gorge before, and I will never forget how helpless I felt as the icy waves crashed onto me, ripping the oxygen from my lungs, and how the force of the current yanked me downstream over rocks and drops, until I finally managed to swim my battered self into a calm eddy down below. I climbed on the upside-down raft, used my flip-line to right the boat, and began pulling my terror-stricken paddlers back onboard. After a few moments of floating in the eddy, trying to catch our breaths and recover our nerves, one man in his late 50s voiced:

“Man… [cough], I thought I was a goner for sure [cough].”

“Yeah, me too…[cough],” one of his comrades remarked.

As the guide, I tried to calm everyone down and to prepare our group for the next set of rapids, including another highly technical Class V, ominously called “The Crib Works.” However, this was no easy task, for I, too, had been utterly bamboozled by the rapid up above. How was I supposed to inspire confidence as a guide when my own confidence had just been flushed downstream?

In their ethnographic study of whitewater rafting, Arnauld, Price, and Otnes (1996) argue that the extreme sport of paddling rubber rafts down dangerous rapids and torrents resembles the magical rites that anthropologists have often written about (Turner 1969; Malinowski 1925). These are rituals in which professional guides initiate thrill seekers and pilgrims for “extraordinary experiences” into a kind of “communitas” with one another, bringing them nearer to a genuine experience of transcendence, of being spiritually immersed in the splendor of the cosmos (Turner 1969). Arnould et al. (1996, 42) write: “Guides believe that their demonstrations of technical competence, and most important, the immanent powers of the river itself, provide the basis for a relationship of trust with clients, which allows them to initiate clients into the deeper mysteries of river magic” (Arnould et al. 1996, 42). “During the rite,” they continue, “the white-water canyon…becomes a mediator between the invisible and visible worlds, where participation enacts the relation between men and women and the immanent or transcendent” (Arnould et al. 1996, 49). In my own experience, a single rafting trip can turn complete strangers into fast friends. Under the best of circumstances, people can become intimately bonded by the collective rite of passage of paddling down (or swimming through) some of the world’s most glorious rapids.

Not all rafting trips are this successful. When you spend an entire day in a small, enclosed space with random strangers, there are ample opportunities for negative interpersonal dynamics to develop, fester, and explode into seemingly insurmountable conflicts. As a guide, you try to keep everyone involved, and make everyone feel as safe and comfortable as the river situations allow. For instance, you may have a split group with overexuberant adrenaline junkies in their 20s and an older couple with physical limitations and/or an overabundance of fear. As a guide, it is your responsibility to facilitate a rafting experience which satisfies both the wildcats and the worriers, and this is no easy feat. Indeed, the skill and ability to foster such an elusive experience which accommodates all the paddlers in one’s boat often takes many seasons to cultivate.

Yet, there is a good deal of reciprocity involved in guiding. There have been those rare trips when I felt completely disrespected by the people paddling in my raft. As a black man in an outdoor industry that is dominated by upper middle-class white people, I have not always felt seen, appreciated, or respected for my skill as a guide. Braun (2003), Harrison (2013), and Fletcher (2014) argue that extreme outdoor sports industries developed from a broader culture of colonial domination—of nature and people of color—which characterizes the modern era. Braun (2003, 178) contends that: “The Freedom to take risks in nature is undoubtedly a white, middle-class privilege,” and that this post-colonial “risk culture” became “constitutive of white middle-class identities.” As a result, the “great outdoors” has been culturally usurped, refashioned into a space in which white people—and men in particular—fancy themselves conquerors, masters, heroes, or even demi-gods. In the process of whitewashing the wild, people of color have been systematically excluded from full participation and belonging. Braun argues: “the absence of this figure [of color] is not only, or primarily, an economic or sociological matter but an ideological matter: within the discursive terrain of ‘adventure’ in the United States today, the figure of the black or Latina adventurer has no proper place” (Braun 2003, 178; Fletcher 2014).

In the summer of 2022, I nearly quit commercial guiding because I had a group of customers from rural New Hampshire. These white New Englanders seemed rather dismayed when they met me in the morning. They casually used the “n-word” on several occasions and used various other micro-aggressive utterances to make me feel unseen and unwanted. At this point, I had been guiding for twelve years. For most of those seasons, I was the only African American raft guide working on the Penobscot River. Despite my years of experience and intimate knowledge of the river, I felt alienated by these random rafting customers. My authenticity as a “true” river guide was called into question—most probably because of my physical appearance. After the trip, these people drove off without a word. It took several weeks for me to recover from this untoward experience. I thought to myself: why do I bother? I didn’t need the money. I had a full-time career elsewhere, why did I put myself in the situation of having to guide ignorant bigots down the river I adore? Eventually, my pessimism about guiding receded, for the river always beckons. Also, I wasn’t going to let some white supremacists determine the course of my life.

Whitewater rafting was intended as my summer refuge away from the vagaries of the “real world.” However, over the course of thirteen seasons, I learned that spending 8+ hours a day in a rubber raft with complete strangers—cascading down objectively hazardous whitewater rapids in one of the most remote parts of the contiguous U.S.—is much more “real” than I ever imagined. Working as a professional raft guide on one of America’s finest class-5 rivers has taught me countless life-lessons, which I use to guide the winding torrents of life. As an early-career black man in academic anthropology, these experiences, stories, insights, and sensibilities have been the difference between sinking and swimming.

References

Arnould, Eric, Price, Linda, and Cele Otnes. 1999. “Making Magic Consumption: A Study of White-Water River Rafting.” Journal of Contemporary Ethnography 28 (1): 33-68.

Braun, Bruce. 2003. “’On the Raggedy Edge of Risk’: Articulations of Race and Nature after Biology.” In, Race, Nature, and the Politics of Difference. Eds. Donald Moore, Jake Kosek, and Anand Pandian. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Fletcher, Robert. 2014. Romancing the Wild: Cultural Dimensions of Ecotourism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Francis, Kirk A. 1969. “Thoreau’s View on Indians.” Penobscotculture.com.          https://www.penobscotculture.com/thoreau-s-views-on-indians.

Harrison, Anthony Kwame. 2013. “Black Skiing, Everyday Racism, and the Racial Spatiality of Whiteness.” Journal of Sport and Social Issues 37(4): 315-339.

Malinowski, Bronislaw. 1948. Magic, Science, and Religion and Other Essays. Glencoe, IL:       The Free Press.

Ranco, Darren. 2006. “Toward a Native Anthropology: Hermeneutics, Hunting Stories, and Theorizing from Within.” Wicazo Sa Review 21(2):61-78.

Thoreau, Henry David. 1864. The Maine Woods. Boston: Houghton, Mifflin & Co.

___. 1854. Walden. New York: Crowell & Co.

Turner, Victor. 1969. The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure. London: Routledge.

Author Biography

Sebastian Jackson is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of Virginia. His current ethnographic and historical research examines racial and ethnic formations, the politics of sexual intimacy, romantic love, and kin relations in post-apartheid Cape Town, South Africa.