The White Salmon Boat Library has been making my world go around. I’m a daily visitor to this riverside cabin, with boats and safety equipment cozied up inside its walls, drying out after a good day spent on the water. The WSBL is just next door to the BZ Corner put in–center of the region’s whitewater universe. This liquid universe is accessible to me only because of the WSBL’s sliding scale membership fee, which breaks down the barriers to entry when the costs of equipment can otherwise feel insurmountable to newcomers.

In addition to providing a variety of boats, the Library also loans out well-organized equipment, encouraging those new to kayaking to bring along essential safety gear, which they may not have even known they needed until they saw it on the racks of the WSBL.

Just before putting on the river with a crew of new faces, we had a group huddle about what equipment we all carried in case of a rescue. A forgetful kayaker was lacking a throw rope, so I gave him my personal throw rope and made a quick trip to my favorite next-door neighbor, the WSBL, to check out a rope for myself. The finale of our run saw us dropping over Husum Falls.

One by one, we went over the falls into the boiling cauldron below, each of us getting stalled out in the landing, but staying upright. That is, until the last person in our crew—the kayaker who’d forgotten to bring his throw rope—flipped and swam in the recirculating hydraulic. Thanks to my last-minute throw-rope check out, we pulled him to shore scared but unscathed, and recovered his gear.

The entire experience spawned an illuminating debrief on safety and the WSBL’s resources, which leave us no reason to ever be on the river unprepared. At least in White Salmon.

My initial foray into the world of paddling was through packrafting in Alaska. I wish that something like the WSBL had existed there and then. Without experience, guidance, or access to the expensive boating gear that I didn’t even realize was standard fare, I went forth into the wilderness, epitomizing the stereotypical new packrafter that makes seasoned boaters shudder.

While I did make it down many remote glacial rivers in solitude with little more than a bare-bones pool toy, a flimsy PFD, bike helmet, and rain gear borrowed off a commercial fisherman, I quickly learned that I needed to educate myself and come up with the funds to acquire a drysuit, proper equipment, and take rescue training.

Over a few subsequent years of long-distance sea-kayaking expeditions, I refined my safety equipment. By the time I went to Alaska last year to focus on learning river running, I was prepared. No longer was I sporting the old rubber fishing bibs and boots that (red) flagged me as an ensuing disaster to any potential paddling partners. The transition from solo adventuring brought an added benefit: learning wisdom of the water from boaters who possess a lifetime of experience. I wish I’d had their guidance and a model of shared community equipment early on, but I’m grateful to have found it now.

By the time the snow was flying in the North last year, I’d paddled on 35 different Alaskan rivers, but I was nearly out of money, and my hard won paddling equipment had succumbed to the wear and tear of thousands of miles of saltwater voyages and a long season of chasing whitewater. With winter on my stern, I hitchhiked and hopped freight trains south to White Salmon, where some friends I had met on a sea kayaking expedition let me sleep in their sauna. Soon, I was taking care of their pets and their house while they left for winter.

While not a paid gig, house-sitting was my chance to live in a sweet spot on the river and borrow a car to go boating. My friends sweetened the deal by telling me about the White Salmon Boat Library just down the road. The WSBL would soon become my church.

Library membership—and their sliding scale system—has given me the means to have a daily paddling ritual. I showed up broke, my backpack stuffed with a badly leaking drysuit and inflatable boat, and now I’m lucky to be learning to kayak, fully outfitted. In trying out the fleet of kayaks, I’ve been able to make a steady progression from paddling stable creek boats to going for harder moves in slicey boats. Even when I came down with pneumonia and couldn’t paddle, the White Salmon Boat Library kept me busy with projects, fixing up some of the donated boats that were in disrepair.

Through what I learned about rebuilding and repairing boat outfitting, I’ve since Frankensteined together a derelict creekboat from a friend’s backyard, tested it by taking it down some of the region’s class IV runs, and it’s now ready to donate to the library to help fill the gap in available medium-sized kayaks.

While the WSBL is already a tremendous resource, it still needs support and sponsorship, donations of quality drysuits and safety equipment, gifts of intact boats in a diversity of sizes, and financial assistance to stay afloat. Let’s help keep the White Salmon Boat Library, buoyant heart of this boating community, pumping whitewater through our veins.

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Guest contributor Kevin Danielson is a writer and adventurer, currently located somewhere around Glacier Bay. When not house-sitting for friends or singing the praises of the White Salmon Boat Library, he is writing, sharing, and living stories about sea kayaking adventures, packrafting, and riding freight trains.