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(Oci-One Kanubi) writes:

Dave Manby typed:

In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure-dome decree :
Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
Through caverns measureless to man

Now we paddlers have taken to creating our own pleasure domes though
this time it is not the marvellous sex that Coleridge wrote about in his
poem but we want to alter rivers to make our own play parks.

Where is kayaking heading? We have got to the stage where we are
building waves specifically for freestyle events next we will have the
rapid covered to keep the rain out and the heat in.

[snip]

I have been disturbed by the trend to commercialize paddling over the
last decade. Here in North America, Eric Jackson and Coran Addison
have been at the forefront of the effort to fund paddling
"professionals", and I have never liked the concept.

Part of the reason is that they want to grow the number of boaters to
increase the market for their products. For the rest of us, this
means more crowded rivers, among other things. I am always ready to
help and encourage a newbie in the sport, but I would just as soon
limit that to those who find their own way in, not the posers who are
sucked in by an X-Games broadcast.

I don't disagree with your sentiment, but I don't think things will
play out the way that you describe. First, as much as it may seem
to a long-time whitewater paddler that the sport has become
incredibly "commercialized" (whatever that means), it really doesn't
occupy a big place in the public consciousness -- and a bunch of SUV
ads don't change that. "Hey, Chip, what shall we do this weekend?"
"Gosh, I don't know, Jennifer, there are so many choices: we could
go on a wine tour, or shopping for antiques, or -- I know! Let's go
WHITEWATER KAYAKING!!!" Don't think so. The ads are about image,
but the message they're sending isn't, "Go out and buy our SUV --
and, by the way, go whitewater kayaking." It's, "If you buy our
SUV, you'll be just as cool as the people in this ad, without ever
having to actually DO any of this."

Now, a few people will be drawn to try the sport by those images.
But -- and this is my second point -- I strongly suspect that the
large majority of them simply cycle right through. They buy a boat
or take a class, and for a little while, they're all about being a
rad dude whitewater boater. But what you're seeing is plain ol'
custy behavior, and after they've bought the figurative t-shirt,
they'll move on to the next thing. Really. You see 'em for a
season, maybe part of a second one...then they kind of fade away.
It's a small, small number that stay with it, and so there IS no
exploding river population coming out of this.

Last weekend I was with a party from the Winston-Salem/Greensboro area
of North Carolina on the Tuckaseegee River. We pulled out at a beach
below the best surfing spot on the river, at what I am told is the
traditional lunch and potty stop. But this weekend no one could go
into the woods to take care of personal maters, because there were
newly-posted No Trespassing signs. Seems a new owner had taken
possession in the last year. Barry Kennon, pro C-Boater. Posting his
land against paddlers. We learned the identity of the new owner from
a crew of young Kennon groupies who were out there moving rocks around
in the river bed to make the rapid more interesting so they could hang
gates (we didn't ask if Kennon intended to get permission from the
owner of the land on the opposite bank, to string cables from his
trees). They had built a significant cobble dam on river left to
channelize the flow. I wonder if Barry Kennon sports an anti-dam
sticker on his vehicle?

I wonder if you dimed him out to whatever passes for a state
environmental agency?

Something similar happened on the Nantahala River a few years ago,
when rodeo boaters rearranged Quarry Rapid to create a rodeo hole
where the entire river threads a steep narrow sluiceway ... to the
detriment of the thousands of Class II paddlers who flock to the
Nantahala every year.

See above.

What else has changed? I used to think of the Nantahala Outdoor
Center as the paddlers' Mecca. Now I think of it as Walmart On the
River, though many of the employess still are kind and generous
boaters who are helpful to any boater of any skill level. But how
'bout the acquisition of Dagger and Perception by Watermark? Dagger
and NOC were founded as labors of love by boaters. Now NOC seems to
me to be an unfeeling profit-driven enterprise, and Dagger, founded as
a canoe maker, has stopped making open canoes. I don't think they
LOST money on open-boat manufacture; the profit margin was just not
enough for them. Meanwhile, over at Perception, the real boaters have
bailed out and started Liquid Logic.

Let's be honest, Richard. ANY business is a profit-driven
enterprise. It has to make some profit in order to survive. If
pursuit of profit per se makes a company soulless, then a lot of us
are going to hell.

I think it's hard for any kind of business to grow and still retain
focus. Perhaps, in the corporate world, this is what we really mean
when we say "soul": a kind of clearly defined focus that allows you
to identify what the business is really all about. It may be that
any company that's grown and diversified beyond a certain point
simply cannot have that kind of "soul".

Somehow, these corporate sponsorships, bottom-line manufacturing,
big-money competitions, recruitment-oriented river festivals, all seem
to me to dragging the sport into an ugly place.

Dragging it how? Where and how, exactly, does the ugliness come in?
There were corporate sponsors at Deerfield Fest; there were
corporate sponsors at the Whitewater Symposium. I don't see how
they contributed any uglines.

Yeh, some young friends of mine are pro rodeo boaters. Yeh, I respect
the David Browns, Bob Footes, Ken Kasdorfs who scratch out a living as
instructors and expedition guides. But I really think the volunteer
organizations like American Whitewater (preferably without corporate
entanglements), and club-based instruction and safety programs, are
the direction our sport should be taking. How old-school is that?

Not very. Plenty of old-schoolers get damn curmudgeonly over a big
national organization such as AW.

On the up-side, if you build a rodeo hole in an already-trashed urban
stretch of river (the rodeo dudes need convenience, eh?) it will keep
the squids all concentrated in one place where they won't trash up
pristine mountain rivers.

Richard, this is really beneath you. It really, truly is. I have
always thought better of you than as someone who seizes on a few
superficial features and stereotypes an entire category of paddler
as "trash". That's the comment of a sour, bitter old curmudgeon --
not the Oci-One I know.

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Mary Malmros
Some days you're the windshield,
Other days you're the bug.