This story was originally written for Cass at Gearbay.com.

An essay, huh? Something lyrically metaphorical? A sweet sonnet poetically portraying the river as life and a wetsuit as the womb and a kayak as less plastic foot cramping appliance and more vehicle for self expression and inner peace? Maybe an allegorical ambuscade of ambitious amateur alliteration, an abstract apercu ascending a posteriori to an anfractuous apex of aperient aphasia?

Forget it, that stuff gives me a headache. How 'bout I just tell you a story about the time I broke Marvin's leg? (Name changed to protect the guilty).

Picture one of those delightful Fall Sundays on the Upper Gauley, you know the weather- cold gray gloom, a chill wind tickling the ears, an unpleasant drizzle running down the collar. At the time I was not the highly experienced and grizzled professional of today, no, on that foul, greasy Sunday I was but a rank trainee, just learning the lines in quest of "high-paying" meaningful employment as a Gauley River guide. The full guide perks- ruined knees, strained shoulders, neoprene rash and foot fungus- were still the distant dream of a young fool.

I was training with a small outfit based out of a sagging gravel-road doublewide. My boss was of the opinion that the best river education for newmeat was direct competition, trainee against river, a lone struggle downstream in a tiny glaringly-blue bucket-boat, made, I always assumed, from fragile Smurf skin. This exposure to the evil whims of whitewater was meant to separate the potential from the comedy relief. That Sunday it would nearly separate me from my life, but I at least provided some amusement. My boss, generous soul that he was, would always manage to find some poor misguided sap to sit in the boat with me to enjoy my awesome river skills. Usually the victim was in relatively good health, occasionally they'd even been near water before.

Until Marvin. Marvin was a real specimen. Thirty-five, still living with Mom and Dad in another ancient doublewide up the hill, half a mouthful of teeth, unemployed and unemployable, although he did claim to have once managed a porn shop in Washington DC. Marvin claimed a lot of things, but this one might even have been partially true judging by the video he showed us one evening. Overweight Mexican women and a Shetland pony- I'll leave the disturbing details to your imagination. Not sure who was more degraded, the horse, the women, or the viewers. Perhaps all women, all horses, and all television viewers are degraded by the existence of this video. Marvin claimed to have dozens of similar videos to show us. After that we started locking the doors.

Marvin drove the equipment truck, not a terrible driver even though he was so short he had to move the seat up until the passenger's face was smeared against the windshield. He didn't drink (something to do with his liver being on the wrong side of his abdominal cavity), but he smoked footlong generic cigarettes by the ashtrayful (something about staying alert). For a month the other guides had been pestering Marvin to go down the river, and he'd always offer to go down "an' do sum fishin'", but no way was he "gettin' in one of them rubber deathboats". I was an enthusiastic participant in this encouragement, never dreaming that he would one day agree and that, to my horror, he would end up in my boat. Marvin was not healthy, he coughed continually, he had an exotic curved spine, thick glasses and he complained constantly. Complaints were Marvin's only form of communication. His arms had bones and skin, and maybe some blood and cartilage or whatever, but no muscle. Not a muscle in sight. The words "muscle" and "Marvin" should not even be in the same sentence.

So there we were, floating into the mist, me sitting proud and tall, captain of my ship, master of my universe, happy and adrenaline-charged even though the immediate future appeared bleak indeed- Marvin hugging the floor like an eighty-pound sack of potatoes, complaining about the cold, and the wet, and the arthritis in his hands that kept him from grasping a paddle, and the smell of his wetsuit, and the dent in his truck from his last "deer hunting" trip (Marvin was a major proponent of the much-maligned roadkill school of sport hunting), complaining about his nephew, his nephew's girlfriend, his nephew's dogs, complaining about his glasses misting over, the size of his disability checks, the pain in his stomach, complaining about the sun and the moon and the stars.

Anyone who has rafted the Upper Gauley knows that most of the major rapids can be floated through, as long as the pilot hits the line, with the major exception of the inexplicably named Insignificant Rapid. Insignificant requires some vigorous paddling to avoid a half mile swim/drowning. I perfected my J-stroke that day. Marvin perfected an interesting safety technique, wedging himself face down under a cross-thwart. I left him there for awhile, as long as his head was underwater he was blissfully silent, but eventually I had to bail out the water and pry him loose and learn about his bent glasses, his intestinal distress and something or other about a missing vertebrae.

We managed to get down the rest of the river in some semblance of control, pinballing off of only 90% of the available rocks, surfing only half of the easily avoidable hydraulics. Marvin managed to stay in the boat through varying methodology, spread eagling on the floor, wrapping his arms and legs around the cross-thwart, hugging my leg, and, by the time we reached the last big rapid, Sweet's Falls, I'd even convinced him to throw in a tentative paddle stroke now and then. Remember, these were training trips for me, I had a pretty good handle on the lines through most of the rapids, but Sweet's Falls still confused me. I knew the line was right down the middle, too far left and you hit that little rock that catapults everyone into the water, too far right and you plummet off a cliff- I just wasn't sure where exactly was the center. My technique at the time was to sneak up on the right side until I could see over the drop and then paddle like crazy into the chute. This method has obvious flaws, which would soon become even more obvious.

We were too far right, sideways to the drop. I saw the chute. Three good strokes and we'd be home free. Unfortunately, Marvin had also seen the chute and dove for my legs. I got off one desperate paddle stroke, just enough to turn the boat in a lazy circle before plunging straight down. The impact snapped Marvin's ankle and tossed him into the water where he bravely swam in the opposite direction from the one I had suggested and ended up plastered underwater against a slick rock. I enjoyed a fabulous rodeo ride until the boat flipped.

Well aware of the hydraulic at the base of the falls' ability to hold a raft for hours, I wisely held onto the safety rope, hoping my body would catch flowing water and pull the boat loose. Good thinking, eh? Please remind me not to try thinking again.

The water was only three feet deep. The torrent beat me half to death against the riverbed, like a dog with a ragdoll. Like a third-world housewife pounding laundry. Like a blender with a fresh frog.

I valiantly hung on for several minutes (or three seconds), long enough to have my lifevest ripped loose and my paddle jacket hammered full of gallons of water. I floated a quarter mile downstream desperately trying to climb back into my vest and swim with sleeves bloated like Popeye's forearms, eventually washing up on a rock where I was interested to see that there were TWO identical boats stuck in the backwash under the falls. In fact there were two of everything. I looked at my hands and was amazed to see twenty fingers on what had earlier been normal appendages. Astutely discerning that I was concussed and suffering a massive brain hemorrhage, I passed out.

Fifteen minutes later I woke up with one of the other guides kicking me fondly and helpfully advising me that I was "making them look bad". The raft stayed in the hole for another 35 minutes before washing out soft and ruined. Marvin was in a cast for 6 months.The next week I purchased a better lifevest.

Say, who judges these essays? Would gratuitous brown-nosing pay? Because I surely would have bought the lifevest through an excellent website like gear-bay.com, if such a thing had existed fifteen years ago.