A River Runs Through It

From The Oklahoman, November 18, 2007

John Harvey is just as happy to discuss the local flora and fauna as he is to talk about the Texas college student whose foot was torn off in a gruesome river accident that, incidentally, claimed the student’s life.

There’s a moral to the latter story: Respect the Rio Grande.

Harvey ferries tourists down the river on whitewater rafting trips as a guide with Los Rios River Runners. His smile is bright, and his eyes sparkle with good humor and delight. He’s very good at getting disparate people to work together as a rafting team—so good, it’s easy to picture him in another career as a motivational speaker.

There’s another job he’d be good at, too. He has the unmistakable swagger and booming laugh of a pirate. Stick a cutlass in his hand, dirty him up a bit, and he’d look right at home on the Black Pearl.

At the moment, Harvey’s raft, which does not have a name, is equipped with a full complement of travel writers, all of whom are in New Mexico on a media junket. Surrounding them is a virtual armada of rafts stuffed stem to stern with Boy Scouts.

Some of the boys have jumped or fallen into the water. Most splash around playfully, swimming back toward their rafts at an indolent pace. But one boy, smaller than the others, drifts on the surface in an orange life vest, paddling with one hand while holding the other aloft. The unused hand is encased in a cast, which in turn is covered by a clear plastic bag held in place with rubber bands.

The boy’s efforts aren’t accomplishing much except to spin him in slow circles, and as Harvey’s raft draws near, the boy pleads to be plucked from the water.

He is in no danger. This is a river bank where the water is shallow. A guide will pick him up there.
As Harvey’s raft passes by, he realizes the boy’s predicament and bursts out laughing. Suddenly, he is all pirate.

“Oops,” he says, shrugging his powerful shoulders. “I didn’t see his arm. Oh well.”

He is right not to worry. A few minutes later, the boy’s raft speeds past. He’s safely aboard.

“Sorry!” Harvey yells. “Didn’t see your cast.”

This stretch of the river is called the Racecourse. The rapids here are moderate, Class 2 and 3, but Harvey guides his novice paddlers through them with ease. A couple of times, he reaches out a steadying hand to keep someone in the raft, but for the most part, he just sits there telling stories.
Toward the end of the course, water pours over a tiny waterfall. Rafts go around it, then reverse direction to approach. At the right angle, with the right mixture of paddling and expert advice, rafts can reach a point directly atop the spilling water. Poised there, they can “surf” the falls, held in place by some mystery of hydraulic physics.

One by one, the Boy Scouts’ rafts draw near the waterfall. There’s an invisible barrier, a point at which rafts either break through the water flow and surf or are partially drowned and spit back out. The Scouts are rebuffed on each approach.

Then it’s the journalists’ turn. The water rages as their raft closes in, and suddenly Harvey is shouting: “Now! Now! Now! Paddle hard—as hard as you can!”

Six paddles plunge into the river, dipping and pulling together. Everything is chaos. The spray is blinding, and the raft bumps along like a plane in a lightning storm. Paddles clatter into each other. The synchronization is far from perfect, but it’s close enough. Harvey has guided them true.

“Stop! Stop! Stop!” he yells.

They do. Water is still pouring into the raft, which is tilted upward about 30 degrees, and the ride is still rough. No one is paddling, but the raft is held there. Surfing.

Six adults have just bested a flotilla of Boy Scouts, a feat as impressive as defeating a cat at Trivial Pursuit, but the journalists are joyful nonetheless, turning to each other with excited eyes and whooping as they hold their paddles aloft.

Harvey has done it again. He’s turned these strangers into a unified team. The pirate has a brand new crew.