White-Water Baptism : At the Church of the Serious Rapids, a New Sect of Adrenaline Junkies Whoops It Up--Helmet-First

The road to the river sports a big red sign: Danger, Lives Lost in the Kern Since 1968--171.

The neophyte river boarder can’t help but think of that as he listens to the hungry growl of the first serious rapid.

High-riding rafters can see what’s coming. Kayakers sit low, but still catch an early glimpse of their fate.

Body boarders, on the other hand, view a river from the perspective of a soggy driftwood log. The rapid appears as an abrupt change on the liquid horizon, an edge-of-the-world line.

So the first-timer kicks hard with wide swim fins and flails with webbed neoprene gloves, feeling as confident and in control as an unwanted duckling in a toilet that’s about to be . . .

Krooooooooshh.

The current latches on. Granite boulders loom. The board rockets downstream.

From somewhere upriver, the boarder can almost hear the godfather and guru laughing and yelping the peculiar river whoop heard on their less-than-Imax-quality promotional video: Yaaa ca ca ca-caccca caaa!

Godfather Bob Carlson, who pretty much invented this thing called river boarding, and Jim Cassady, something of a legend in California white-water circles, are on a mission. Each has managed to carve a sanctuary from modern life in the realm of wild rivers. Now they have a plan to support that life in style, selling salvation to others in the form of a new water sect.

They believe rafts, canoes and kayaks diminish the effects of a river’s ritual purification--or, at least, they’re not as much fun.

In their ongoing effort to change the way people worship white-water, they invited a group of river guides, journalists and friends to try their supposedly blossoming sport on the lower Kern.

On the morning of the trip, Carlson steps from his yuck-yellow 1972 International Travelall into a dirt parking lot outside the headquarters of Whitewater Voyages.

About 30 guides live here, just off the main drag in the sunbaked town of Lake Isabella. Some sleep on the ground amid a herd of dusty cars and vans sporting license plates from Idaho, Colorado and Oregon, and bumper stickers such as “Commit random acts of kindness and reckless acts of beauty.”

Others inhabit a couple of dumpster-sized aluminum trailers or live in a dilapidated bunkhouse.

Carlson and Cassady had both hung out here in the early ‘80s; Cassady managed Whitewater Voyages and Carlson peddled and serviced the raft pumps he’d invented by piecing together PVC pipe and plumbing hardware.

Gradually, they came to exemplify what happens when the lust for fast-moving water edges from passion to obsession to raison d’etre.

White-water aficionados talk about Cassady the way the beatnik literati used to speak of wild man Dharma bum Neal Cassady.

In a voice fusing sarcasm and reverence, Melissa Toben, a tan woman with the casual confidence of a sun-blissed, water-addled, no-worries, rapid addict, but who happens to earn her living as a Superior Court judge, explains.

“He’s a river guru,” she says as the group scrambles about preparing for the trip.

Cassady had done social work in Compton and taught school in Long Beach before he saw the movie “Deliverance” and bought his first canoe in the early ‘70s.

He moved on to kayaks and was paddling the Stanislaus one afternoon when a rubberized raft brimming with paying passengers roller-coastered by.

He and the guide talked. “He said he got paid to do it,” Cassady recalls. “He said he got free food.”

Cassady took up guiding, working for several outfitters that were luring frustrated city folk onto wild rivers.

That life sucked him in, leading him to rivers across North America and in far-flung locales from Costa Rica to the Soviet Union. He branched out, selling rafting gear from his Pacific River Supply store in El Sobrante, and co-writing, with Fryar Calhoun, a classic guidebook: “California Whitewater.”

*

Rapids are rated on a scale of I to VI. VI means, roughly, “Don’t do it, stupid.” V means, “Go ahead if you’re an expert, but you may wish you hadn’t”; a drunk in an inner tube just might survive a Class I.

White Maiden’s Walkway is a Class IV in Cassady’s book, “a long foaming ride,” with a big rock at the bottom.

Kenny Bushling, a 25-year-old Lake Isabella native and guide for Kern River Tours, takes the “probe” position, leading this tour of the Kern. He took up boarding after spotting Cassady and Carlson frolicking in a rapid that gives traditional paddlers the willies.

The expedition sets off with eight boarders trailing behind an oar boat brimming with photographers, an inflatable “banana boat,” an inflatable “splash yak” and a videographer’s hard-shelled kayak.

Grasping the board’s handles, Bushling kicks into the current’s tongue. The river latches on. He rockets downstream, pulls himself forward on the board, kicks hard, and pushes into the current’s tongue.

The neophytes--with Carlson, Cassady and an experienced friend interspersed through the ranks--watch Bushling disappear, then follow one by one. Most of the first-timers skitter ecstatically through the first frothing waves.

Then they lose control, get thrown, go sideways, and, with their faces etched in mild panic, tumble helter-skelter down the rapid, becoming even more intimate with the 2,500 cubic feet of water pouring over the rocks each second.

At least three aspects of that experience leave positive impressions, though.

Even in the roiling chaos, no one loses his board.

Even those who connect with rocks don’t get hurt.

Even those who gulp mass quantities of water manage to clamber back on their boards and escape into the sanctuary of an eddy.

*

Carlson got his first taste of white-water when his mates on the UC Berkeley crew team took him rafting in the Sierra. A few years later, he bailed out of the school’s doctoral math program to pursue his new passion.

“I spent my federally insured student loan on a raft and never went back,” he says.

He still loved to poke around in the interior landscape of mathematics--Scientific American even wrote up “Carlson’s Icosahedron,” a Rubik’s Cube-like computer game he invented. But working as a corporate software techie on the “anti-outdoor side of life” had worn thin.

“I made my supervisor cry every day,” he says. “I was a force for destruction. I was so angry.”

During the mid-’80s, over beers at the Shady Lane Saloon in Lake Isabella, Groveland’s Iron Door, and similar river guide bars, Cassady and Carlson began sorting their theories of the river life.

They agreed that the closer one got to the river, the better the ride, the bigger the thrill.

They quickly discovered, however, that Boogie boards might better be called bruiser boards in the less-forgiving, salt-free, highly aerated river water.

So they experimented. Adding bulk to their boards and armor to their bodies--a helmet, life vest, wet suit, shin and knee guards are mandatory--they gradually dared themselves down some of the most challenging white-water stretches in the state--including Cherry Creek of the Tuolumne and the Forks of the Kern.

In their latest refinement, the boards are 4 inches thick, 2 feet wide and 4 feet long, from a squared nose to the sweeping tips of the swallowtail. They sport a hard plastic bottom for fending off rocks, a scalloped, rough foam top to grip a rider’s life vest, and four handles to accommodate white knuckles.

Now Carlson makes the boards and Cassady distributes them, and together they envision flocks of acolytes on fat plastic foam slabs cluttering the nation’s rapids the way Boogie boarders now frolic grunion-like over the world’s surf.

“A raft is like a big rubber bus,” Carlson says, tapping his board’s bottom with casual intensity. “With these, you design your own fun.”

Or, as Cassady quotes him in a column he wrote for Headwaters magazine: “Rafting is like bulldozing: plowing through the water flattening the waves. Kayaking is like fencing, a jab here, a poke there.

“Body boarding is like wrestling: full immersion, total connection with the river.”

*

By the second big rapid, even the new boarders make most of the right moves, blasting over waves and bashing gleefully through sucking holes with a modicum of grace.

As the river ho-dads focus on survival, Carlson and Cassady behave like otter pups, yapping and splashing and “surfing” the waves that form as the river courses over submerged rocks.

It doesn’t take them long, though, to see that one convert has already transcended their hot-dogging skills. They watch appreciatively as the younger and fitter Bushling scrambles like a water bug into waves that they couldn’t make, then, with some solid paddling, locks in.

The river’s tremendous power is neutralized as he glides effortlessly, the water spilling in an endless hypnotic rush over rocks glistening a few feet from his face.

Bushling is sufficiently devoted to the sport that he talked his boss at Kern River Tours into buying nine boards, and earlier this summer he led the first commercial river board trip on the Kern.

A few sore calves aside, everyone raved about the trip, he says.

Still, he thinks river boarding’s real appeal may be limited to young men and women with an itch to bust out of their surfer, snowboarder, skateboarder ruts.

Andy Sninsky, whose Long Beach Water Sports is the largest distributor of white-water gear in the lower state, believes the sport will take off, but he’s not sure how soon.

He’s had six of the $245 boards in his shop since spring. But while this spectacular high-water season has his rafts and kayaks flying out the door like punctured balloons, so far no maverick has bought one of these new vehicles.

Unlike raft paddlers, boarders are not imprisoned by their transportation. In long, calm stretches, the boarders kick lazily, swat the water and pull together in clusters where they talk and joke as the oak and sycamore canopy incessantly sweeps by.

Just as casually, though, they drift apart.

*

Only once does the joyful tone of the adrenaline-enriched trip plummet.

The unconfirmed local wisdom has it that of the scores of people who have died on the “killer Kern,” only two had been wearing life vests. Already this year, five people without them have drowned here, pushing the death toll to 176.

Paddling around a bend where the current flows like a languid jungle stream, a cluster of boarders spot two young men standing on a boulder, long manila ropes draped over their chests, mountaineer-style.

The boarders stroke toward the boulder, till they can see the men’s grief-filled eyes.

“Did you see a body in the river?” one shouts in halting English. “A human body? We’re looking for the body of my brother.”

For a half hour or so, the river canyon seems funereal.

Oddly, though, it doesn’t take long for the Kern to drain a person’s morbid thoughts.

Back at the guide house that evening, with the B-52s blasting from another room, Carlson and an SRO audience of guides get stoked watching the boarders crash gleefully through rapids and surf the waves.

Still, the video misses another side of the sport.

The footage doesn’t capture, for instance, one boarder easing away from the group.

He floats into a cave formed by the jumble of sculpted granite boulders. He flops onto his back on the board, stares past a mud swallow’s nest to a dazzling bolt of blue sky visible through a crack in the rock.

There is no epiphany as he drifts though a succession of reveries. But he does decide this river board thing is fun.

And he finally, momentarily, catches his breath.