Young men and women and water

A lot of people think the swim test is going to kill them. Not Anthony Lehman. The 18-year-old was supposed to die over a year ago. Now he’s waist deep in the Kern River, and its arctic-cold snowmelt is flushing his face with life. At a signal from the shoreline, Lehman and the 22 other young job seekers fling themselves into the current, and churning whitewater sweeps them downstream. The frigid shock disables breathing for a beat. Sooner or later, most of the swimmers get panicky. Some signal for the instructor stationed on a mid-river boulder to fling a rescue rope.

Lehman relaxes. He plays with the powerful force as it plunges him over boulders, drags him underwater, spits him to the surface like a cork.

When he finally slogs back onto the bank, the Kern has pasted his thin goatee -- the scraggly, precious proof of adolescence almost escaped -- against his chin.

One applicant hugs her shoulders, her lips a blue telegraph of deep chill.

“I didn’t really notice the cold after the first couple of seconds,” Lehman says.

He knows that if he can just survive this river’s test, if he can outperform his competitors, he’ll metamorphose into the closest equivalent of an immortal the small town of Kernville knows: a river guide.

Adventurers and adrenaline junkies have been bounding down rivers on rubberized rafts for decades. Sometime around the Age of Aquarius a prescient few realized that with the right approach, more timid folk and their dollars could be drawn to river running too.

By the early 1980s, the whitewater economy had blossomed. This year, 400,000 people will pay $200 million to California whitewater outfitters and the hotels and restaurants along the state’s river banks. Competition roils the industry.

“You get a 50-person group, and they’ll shop heavily between outfitters,” says Bill Center of Camp Lotus on the American River. “There’s real money at stake now.”

Every spring, Bob Ferguson, owner of Zephyr Whitewater in Columbia, north of Sonora, sends a crew to the King’s River to erect enormous tents with dining facilities, cots and separate rooms for guests on overnight trips. Another California outfitter brings a sommelier into camp for wine tastings.

“Now people want electrical outlets in camp for blow dryers,” says Ferguson. “If there isn’t a hot-water shower in camp, some people won’t come.”

As river runners soften, guides become increasingly important.

In the early days, anyone with a surplus World War II raft and a supply of cutoff jeans could become a boatman.

“There was a big hippie element,” says Ferguson. “Clients and guides were pretty similar -- hardy, outdoorsy people looking for the scariest, wildest rapid available. It was a lot of fun.”

And not without its dangers. Then as now, a boatman’s main responsibility was getting the raft (and its passengers) down the river with as little damage as possible. “The actual danger of rafting is pretty low,” says Tom Moore, 49, founder of Sierra South, the Kernville-based rafting company whose ranks Lehman and the other competitors aspire to join. “The perceived danger is much higher. It’s kind of like a play we put on five times a day. A guide needs to be part of that production.”

It’s not all theater though. Sixty-four people died rafting between 1994 and 1998, according to the latest study by American Whitewater, a river sports advocacy group. That statistically small number attests in part to regulators’ and insurance companies’ insistence that whitewater outfitters abandon the lunatic stereotypes.

Professionalism, however, has not destroyed the mystique. In small towns, where everyone depends on the river for income, there is no more prized summer job than “boatman” or river guide.

Each spring, as rafting companies across the western Sierra foothills gear up for the coming season, veteran guides arrive to patch rafts and repair aluminum rowing frames. Aspiring boatmen swarm. And Moore spends thousands of dollars selecting and training his crew.

To guide on wilder rivers and overnight trips, outfitters usually require applicants to complete apprenticeships, and a few states require licenses. But Moore is president of the local school board and wants to hire from his community. He mainly picks local kids familiar with the relatively calm portion of the Kern that his company trolls.

Which is why 23 college and high school students stand shivering on the banks of the Kern, hoping that Sierra South will select them for one of 18 entry-level guide positions.

“My livelihood depends on a bunch of teenagers,” Moore says. “It’s terrifying.”

Lehman, who lives in nearby Wofford Heights, learned that the company was looking for guides last summer. It was his first trip to town in a while.

A year earlier, after a month of fatigue, he was diagnosed with aplastic anemia. His bone marrow, for unknown reasons, had stopped producing blood cells. The disease kills up to 70% of its victims.

But he made it through the year, and after months indoors, receiving countless blood transfusions, he wanted to be outside. He wants to be a river guide.

So do Sean Leitch, 20, Melissa Wallstrom, 16, and the guy she’s dating, 16-year-old Cody Farnum.

To pick the next crop of river gods, seasoned guides are spending a full day watching recruits demonstrate rescue techniques, show that they can read a river, play act their way through difficult interactions with passengers and then take turns guiding the rafts down the Kern.

From the start, the instructors are impressed with Wallstrom, a cheerleader at Kern Valley High.

They’re not so sure about her boyfriend.

Farnum is a baseball star at Kern Valley, one of the most popular guys at school. His uncle works for a company that produces rafts, and he’s been swimming this river his entire life.

“It’s like he expects to be chosen,” an older guide says. “He’s kind of cocky,” one of the appraisers tells Moore.

Moore’s blond hair has turned almost white, and he frequently replaces hip sunglasses with bifocals. Otherwise, he doesn’t think he has changed since he came to Kernville, population 1,600, two decades ago seeking the perfect river.

The whitewater economy took Moore by surprise. Then he capitalized on it.

Today, the Kern is an epicenter of California whitewater and this season 25,000 people will rodeo through its largely tame rapids on Moore’s rafts, with Moore’s guides calling out orders: “Paddle right! Paddle left! High side!”

“Remember,” Moore warned the appraisers that morning, “for most of these kids, this is the first time they have applied for a job. Be gentle. Getting rejected still hurts.”

As the shakeout trials begin, Leitch is quiet. He’d had trouble sleeping, he says. Nerves.

Wallstrom is more confident: “It’s more exciting to tell people I’ll be a river guide, than, you know, working in fast food,” she says.

Then there’s Farnum, the boyfriend. “If I don’t get picked, it’s because I have a little bit of stage fright,” he says. “But I think I’d be a great river guide.”

A guide’s job is twofold -- keep clients safe and entertained. Gregariousness is as necessary as sunscreen. On the bus ride to the put in, Leitch, the quiet one, sits wearing his wet suit and booties, going over his “bus talk” to himself and muttering softly as his competitors are called up to introduce themselves.

“Sean,” an instructor yells out. Leitch is shorter than some of the girls auditioning. He practiced this 30-second speech last night, alone in his room. Now his mind goes blank. Nothing comes out. He turns red and sits back down.

“The thing I love about this job is how many kids we’ve trained to become adults,” Moore later says.

A few years ago a group of cops got rowdy on the water. An 18-year-old guide, hardly big enough to fill a life jacket, told them to keep it down, ordering the officers to watch their paddles. Moore has helped raise a Kernville generation. They’ve become doctors, lawyers, accountants.

Almost every week one of them stops by to say hi -- one of the chosen.

Over a lunch of nachos and Cokes, the older guides review the newest crop of applicants.

“Cody is still cocky,” an instructor says, referring to the baseball star. “He said something rude to another group.”

The quiet applicant, Leitch, comes up too. One guide can see his enthusiasm, but wonders if he can inspire a group.

Another candidate’s maturity is debated.

Lehman isn’t mentioned.

After his medical diagnosis, it seemed like everyone talked about Lehman, all the time. But almost no one could speak to his face.

His body wasn’t producing white blood cells, so he couldn’t leave his house or spend time with anyone younger than 15, because they might carry deadly germs. Friends would come over, but Lehman had to talk to them over a wall.

“One day a young lady came by and I said, ‘No kissing!’ ” says Kelly Lehman, Anthony’s mom. “He was so embarrassed. But if she had even the slightest infection, it could have killed him.”

Two years after learning of his disease, after chemotherapy, his blood cells started to return. No one is certain why. His condition is in remission but can return anytime.

Any hesitancy about life seems gone forever.

“I’m not worried about what these people think about me anymore,” he says, surveying the other applicants. If he were to start worrying much about anything, he could easily talk himself back into isolation, he says. “I just want to, you know, be a guide and meet other people.”

“OK, let’s give them all one more chance,” Moore says after lunch. Actually, they’ll get two more chances -- two more trips down the river.

On the first, Farnum takes the lead guide position. Baseball cap firmly on his head, the seat of his wet suit squarely on the boat’s slick stern, he grins and shouts to a fellow applicant whose paddling he deems inadequate. “C’mon. You gotta put your back into it!”

Leitch’s boat is quiet as he guides. “Three paddles forward,” he says confidently as the raft slips down the tongue of a rapid. The boat shudders and bucks. Whitewater crashes over the bow. “Good work!” he says when his crew of co-competitors finally paddle into flat water.

On the bus trip back to Sierra South’s offices, an older guide stands, balancing as the bus lurches. “We’ll be making the cuts when we get back,” he shouts. The raucous, adrenaline-activated group goes silent. The guide smiles. “Anybody not nervous?”

A few paws go up, including Farnum’s and Lehman’s. Farnum looks around to see who has noticed his raised hand. Lehman looks ahead.

A few minutes after the bus deposits them back at the office, one of the veterans starts calling in applicants.

Leitch comes out looking glum.

“I have a quiet personality,” he says. “I knew that was going to be a problem.”

Farnum is smiling. He was chosen.

So is Wallstrom, his girlfriend.

When Lehman gets home, his mom is at the door.

“Well, did you make it?” she asks.

“Did I make what?”

His face, his arms -- every part of his body projects accomplishment.

He turns to his little brother. “I’m going to be a raft guide.”