I was sitting in my kayak in an eddy along the Payette River last summer, getting jostled and slammed by several dozen other paddlers in bizarre little multicolored boats, elbowing their way to the head of the line for the surf wave. Then they would get on the wave and ride it frontwards and ride it backwards, and twirl their paddles like majorettes in heat. The wave had a name, like Bob's Wave, or Supersurfer, or Kick Your Bad Ass, or something. I don't remember. Mostly I remember feeling like Nanook of the North, confused by the bright colors, strange shapes, the aggressive attitudes, the sheer mass of plastic and flesh, and the utter obsession of surfing that stupid wave. I just wanted to go boating. I come from a different era.

I try not to be too Neanderthal, despite my increasing decrepitude. I try to pay attention, to keep up. I actually bought a new boat a couple years ago. It was hard to find one big enough for my size-13 feet, which stick up at right angles way down at the end of my long arthritic legs. Hard to find a boat that I could get a week's worth of food and camping gear in. Hard to find a boat that didn't look like a cheap K-Mart shower-shoe. But I finally found a new boat "for big guys." It was, to my mind, radically small, about 75 percent of the length of the old Hollowform kayak I grew up in. It was blow-molded for superior strength, roomier because it did not need interior pillars to hold its shape. It had a full high-volume back end where I could stuff gear. It felt great, handled beautifully. It was a soft blue that did not hurt my eyes to look at. It even looked like a real boat. "Rad," I thought. "Is that the word? Rad? I'm rad." So I was disappointed, sitting in the eddy with all these weird floating devices swarming past, to be glared at as if I had just landed a dirigible in their midst. Perhaps I had. Perhaps, when I wasn't looking, kayaking passed me by. Or perhaps I was just paddling in the wrong direction.

I started paddling in the early 1970s just as the Hollowform kayak was introduced - the first plastic kayak. Unbreakable, they said, with none of that nasty, itchy, splintery, and quite fragile fiberglass. I was among the gang of two or three dozen kids at Prescott College, in central Arizona, who bought them for $129.95 apiece. Of course we promptly broke them all, and made several trips back and forth to the factory in Los Angeles getting replacements, until they came up with a compound that was stronger than we were. People have been making fun of Hollowforms for decades now, calling them Hollowlogs, Supertankers, and such, but in their day they were a full-on revolution. We ran them hard and we ran them heavy. We were expedition boaters. To us, if a river wasn't long enough to spend several days or a couple weeks on, it was pointless. The paddling was fun, but we looked at the boats more like really cool floating backpacks. We kicked them full of gear and headed downstream. The Hollowforms were as commodious as they were tough.

On a few longer trips, like Grand Canyon, we would try to get someone to row a support boat, lightening the loads in the kayaks, so we could play harder and get homogenized in the big rapids and holes and waves without losing as much gear. But for the most part, it was far easier to whip a trip together without a support boat, and often the stream was too small or technical for a support boat to follow. We learned to surf a little on waves when we weren靖 too overloaded, but the novelty of trick-boating was minimal compared to the thrill of running those rivers, getting clobbered in those rapids, and just spending weeks out there wallowing in it all. All the kayaks in those days were built to racing specs - a full four meters long and a half-meter wide. That's how kayaks were supposed to be and few of us questioned it. As large and cumbersome as the old Hollowforms appear today, they were designed such that you could enter one in the National Slalom Championships. In fact, I did that in 1976. I had gotten it in my mind that to have the most possible fun on the river, I should learn the finer points of paddling. So I went off to racing camp in California, living in the back of my Studebaker pickup and paddling every day with the big boys like Tom Johnson, Chuck and Bill Stanley, and Chuck Lyda, national champions all. I shouldn't say paddled with - more like, I paddled near, or behind, or in the way of. We ran slalom gates for weeks on end, raced downriver courses, and worked on the intricacies of tight maneuvering. I paddled enough and raced enough that through sheer persistence I made the list of the country's top-100 paddlers. I was number 100. That allowed me to enter the Nationals, wherein I placed last among those who finished. In my Hollowform. Everyone else was in lightweight fiberglass racers. (Three people swam, so at least I beat them.)

But for me, the point was to get better at maneuvering the boat, which I did. So did my buddies. We were young, aggressive, and no one was telling us what could not be done. For '70s kayakers in the stinking desert, we were pretty hot spit, simply because we were the only ones doing it. If we saw another kayak on the highway, we'd pull alongside to find out who it was. We made roof racks out of 2x4s on the tops of Day's VW bus, Fritz's old Volvo, Wayne's ancient but immortal Chevy Vega, and assaulted the intermittent streams of the desert Southwest. There was no Spandex or Lycra. Some of us had tattered wetsuits. We cobbled paddling jackets out of nylon cloth and neoprene. We haunted the library's collection of topo maps, Xeroxed the river sections, and laminated them in clear contact paper. We drove to the rims of desert canyons looking for prospects the next time the weather got foul. Our timing was good. During the late '70s, there were several heavy winters followed by wet springs. We were luckier yet that most of us were by then out of college but still had not thought much about careers, marriages, or other such avoidable catastrophes. We lived to ski in the winter and to paddle when we could find water. So when the rivers rose in the spring, we were ready. Sort of ready. A few classic scenarios might clarify our style.

Salt River, late-'70s. Day one. Wayne breaks the right blade off his paddle and thrashes the rest of the way to camp, canoe-style. The next morning, on a climb in the limestone cliffs above camp, we find an old mine. Wayne spots an ancient shovel, sans handle, brings it to camp, slips it over the shattered end of his paddle, duct tapes it in place and uses it for the next four days of class-big whitewater.

Same river, different trip. Day one. Goff bashes a hole in the floor of his Hollowform. Pulling ashore we realize we have made some serious packing errors. The food, for instance, is still in the back of Wayne's Vega, roasting in the desert sun at the takeout. So is the repair kit. Fortunately, due to an incident a few years earlier, when one of our pards paddled a kayak deep into another guy's torso, we had since taken the precaution of duct-taping tennis balls to the pointy tips of the boats. Around the fire we slowly unwind the duct-tape from a few tennis balls, heat Goff零 kayak to smoking hot, and press the duct-tape to both sides of the wound. Two days later we have eaten what few edible items we could find in our boats - an old package of petrified hot dog buns, a greasy baggie full of old cheese and sand, and one can of garbanzo beans. We figure we can paddle out that night, but the river is too nice and the hunger is holding steady. We stay an extra day.

Heading north to paddle Westwater Canyon on the Colorado, we parallel Chinle Creek for some miles. It is flooding. We stop, dig out the Chinle Creek map we had made years earlier, talk about it for five minutes at most, shuttle the Vega down to the far end of the San Juan, and stuff our gear in the kayaks. Hoping the flow will hold, we launch in calf-deep water, and camp that night half-way through a portage at one of the eighty-foot waterfalls. Magnificent. But it turns out the meanders on our topo map are generalized - what does not show up are the billion mini-meanders that made up each big meander. The forty miles turns out more like eighty and we paddle the final twenty miles of the San Juan in the dark the next night.

Wayne and I sneak on the river above Westwater Canyon one evening and paddle down to the beginning of the larger rapids by moonlight. We camp at the Little Dolores, have a whiskey dinner, and sleep soundly. That night rats pretty much clean us out. The only thing left in the morning that rats couldn靖 stomach is the peyote and one rotten banana. Not very filling but it makes for a great day paddling out.

Scratching down the Escalante, six of us are on not quite enough water to clear the shallows. Being too lazy to get out of the boats, we frogwalk along, dragging across the jagged sandstone gravel. Brian, the biggest of us, is the only one in a fiberglass boat. He hits harder, scratches longer. On day four, he wears through the fiberglass and sinks. We take an old rubber Army camera bag, filet it and Barge-glue it to the bottom of the boat. It works, sort of. Well enough. A week later we paddle across a short stretch of Lake Powell to the Hole in the Rock Trail, and carry, drag and curse the boats up a thousand vertical feet to the car. Who picked this stupid take-out? I did. The next day Wayne and I launch on the Paria. When the water is up, you can't rest.

Day one on the Paria, Wayne is floating sideways, looking at the map when he hits a rock and flips. Map gone. We camp in the narrows that night and get ready to cook dinner. Packing up that morning, Wayne had asked me three times if I had matches. I assured him each time. But now it turns out I don靖. I end up hiking a mile up the gorge in thigh-deep mudwater to the last hikers we had passed. I lie, telling them my matches got wet, and bum a few.

We hope to be out the next day, but we come to a series of portages. About five miles worth of them. We adopt a system of putting our spraydecks on the boat and sitting balanced atop them. At the portages we rig six-foot leashes to tow the boats through the boulders. That works slick until, in one stretch of fast water, my leash catches in the rocks and sends me flying into the boulders. But we make it out, just one day late.

Paddling down the Dolores, our last trip before McPhee Dam goes in, we thunder down the gorge to the confluence with the San Miguel. We notice Kim is lagging behind, and we pull over to wait. When she catches up she is a waxy shade of gray-green. "I feel terrible," she says. It could have been something she ate. The peyote breakfast perhaps. "Want to stop?" we ask. "No, let's just drift for a while and see if it passes." We float for a few minutes and pass under a small one-lane wooden bridge. Kim is a ways back, spinning in circles. Just as she goes under the bridge, a decrepit pickup rattles onto the bridge and stops. The old cowboys look downstream at us. We nod. Under the bridge, Kim's condition reaches crisis. Kim does everything loudly. When she sneezes it is deafening. She spins slowly out from under the bridge and erupts in a screaming projectile explosion, covering her boat, her spraydeck, herself. And again. The cowboys burn rubber.

Four nights later on the Colorado we are cooking the last of our last food, a pot of spaghetti, in a small pot balanced on the fork of a burning log. Just as we are about to eat, the pot flips 180, extinguishing the fire and the meal. Whiskey for dinner again.

On our second descent of the Little Colorado gorge [for details of the first descent see MG #76/77] we get to the biggest drop, Atomizer Falls, named for the mist of mud that boils out of its maw. This is where I nearly drowned on the first descent. We'd agreed before reaching it this time that we would portage it, which we do, and camp at its foot. That night, whiskey-brave, dope-dumb, and safely below it, we make plans for how we'll run it next time. We see the line, man, we see the line. The next morning as we pack to leave, Brian carries his empty Hollowform to the top - the boat I loaned him for the trip. And he pushes it out into the current, unmanned, into our whiskey-line. The kayak greases the run. We curse him, then all carry our boats back to the top and run the line. It works, but the following summer we hike up to Atomizer when it is not flooding. It is a beautiful clear blue pool of springwater. We swim out to where we dropped the falls in our kayaks only to find a huge outcrop of jagged travertine just beneath the surface, less than a foot from where we had landed. We had been inches from fatal vertical impingement. It makes us wonder how close it has been, how many times.

Things aren't always that smooth. We try Chevelon Creek in high flood. The first day we catch eddies behind huge Ponderosa Pines whose trunks have not been wet in eons. Streams in flood act strangely, as if the water is just not used to making those moves, and Chevelon is knocking us around pretty hard. We are running one waterfall when Alan flips and cracks his head open on a sharp shallow boulder. Still conscious, he rolls up and we all pull in below. He is a bloody mess. We stop the bleeding, dry him off, and discover an ugly but patchable gash across his forehead. We get out the boat repair kit, paint-Barge contact cement on the skin surrounding the wound, then cut butterflies from duct tape and close the wound. After a night in a blizzard, we evacuate, climbing out the side of the gorge and hiking across the desert toward Holbrook. At the hospital, the doctor is quite complimentary.

Another wet spring we run the shuttle for an East Verde trip - a scary run we had done a few years earlier. We arrive at the put-in late that night, sleep by the car and get up in the morning to find the river dry as a bone. The otherwise wet winter has missed one entire watershed.

Throughout all the adventures there were several things that never changed. The equipment was minimal, the vehicles marginal, the food adequate at best. It was always about being there, being places you could not get to in any other way, being on that elemental grunge dharma voyage, being more than content with the barest essentials. We took pride in our minimalism, and were skeptical of paddlers who burdened themselves with the latest, greatest, costliest new gear. It was important to out-paddle these people. When the consumerist bumpersticker "He who dies with the most toys wins," started appearing on the Eddie Bauer Special Edition Ford Broncos piled with custom racks of new, glittering mountain bikes, windsurfers, designer kayaks, and hibachis, we gagged.

By the mid-'80s, most of our crowd had moved on to other things and the Hollowforms sat beneath the house or out in the yard composting. Meanwhile, recreational paddling exploded. Boats of all shapes appeared, chubby ones designed to carom down steep creeks, squirtboats designed to perform underwater, boats that only a contortionist or a masochist or a midget could even get in. The colors got brighter and the cars and SUVs that carried them got larger and slicker and more omnipresent. The grunge boating era came to an end when we weren't looking. In its place came the day-boaters who get off work and drive to the surfwave for an hour of paddling and waiting in line. Folks started to buy four or five boats, like a bag of golf clubs, one for each stream or function or mood. And like every outdoor sport, the toys became phenomenally expensive, and the accessory gear endless. The hot chrome Darth Vader helmet, the $400 ergonomic paddle, the new ultimate super-rescue lifejacket. A paddling jacket today costs more than an entire kayaking set-up did in the early '70s. (Yet when I ordered stowfloat bags for my new dirigible, it was such a rare request I had to wait three months. "Why would you want to put stuff in your boat?")

On the multi-day trips, kayakers are piling chairs, showers, shade cabanas, boom boxes, cocktail ice, spare kayaks, blenders, and all manner of high-tech crap onto the supply boats. Meanwhile, kayak manufacturers are sponsoring teams of young Turks to paddle their boats and carcasses off higher and more lethal waterfalls and push the edge on increasingly hazardous rivers in boats that just might be a little too low volume, that might spend just a little too much time underwater. The casualties among leading-edge boaters in the last ten years have been appalling. I am not saying that kayaking has become evil or uniquely corrupted. I am simply bemoaning the fact that it has gone the way of most everything else, highly commercialized, highly marketed, part of the same stuff-oriented watch-me society that is hell-bent to consume the earth before someone else gets our share. The paddlers are more concerned about the attributes of their hull than their own skill, attitude, or philosophy.

A few years ago, on the Pacuare River in Costa Rica, I watched a pair of kayakers in their flashy outfits trying to outdo each other in a gnarly hole just below camp. After they headed to shore, a young, barefoot Costa Rican mestizo in ragged shorts walked down to the shore. He had a piece of a log that was pointed on one end. It had two wooden stick handles protruding straight out the sides just behind the point. The kid boarded his log ‹ no life jacket, of course - and paddled madly with his hands, out into the hole. He surfed it for longer than the kayakers had. I'm trying to make a point here but I don't know what the fuck it is.

So there I sat in the eddy on the Payette. I had pulled in there because I had seen the cluster and thought "Kayakers. Hey, I'm a kayaker, too." But as I sat there wedged against the shore, battered by the stream of wave surfers, I started wondering if I really might be one of the last of the old brontosauri, lost in a stampede of these new hairy mammals, still lamely thinking that it was all about boating and being there, when it is really about things, and about tricks, and about outfits, and about wave-time. I felt my joints creak and my spirit sag. I slowly worked my blue dirigible backward down the shore, out of the bottom of the eddy, and floated around the bend.