{"id":24329,"date":"2021-02-28T01:00:51","date_gmt":"2021-02-28T09:00:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/community.nrs.com\/?p=24329"},"modified":"2022-07-06T16:14:08","modified_gmt":"2022-07-06T23:14:08","slug":"confessions-of-a-river-guide","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/community.nrs.com\/duct-tape\/2021\/02\/28\/confessions-of-a-river-guide\/","title":{"rendered":"Confessions of a River Guide"},"content":{"rendered":"

Some people in the rafting world are fortunate enough to be born into those revered rafting families<\/a>. I\u2019m sure you know the type. Their idea of a family vacation is hopping on Ruby Horsethief for two or three days with the whole gang and letting four-year-old Charlie row her own boat. River time to them is just as ordinary as some families\u2019 trips to grandma\u2019s house.<\/p>\n

I envy these families because I have always been a part of the latter grouping of rafting folk: the working class.<\/p>\n

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I was ushered into it as a professional endeavor that later morphed into a hobby. Raft guiding fell into my lap when many of my friends guided and I found myself at the boathouse every other day, playing music and enjoying the scene. Guiding had never crossed my mind until one of the owners told me I might as well be getting paid for all the BH hours I was accumulating. I think I had only been on a raft five or six times by that point. I then fell in love and started rafting for a paycheck. It wasn\u2019t long before I was also choosing to take rafting trips and not get paid.<\/p>\n

This generalized two-party system obviously has dissenters who fall somewhere in the middle. What interests me the most, however, is how professional river guides view multi-day trips. Why is it that we have the curious habit of engaging in our professional lives during our free time? Few other occupations have this tendency to vacation while doing the very same thing they do for work.<\/p>\n