My college roommate Jim Crystal spent his summers as a river guide. For years I heard the stories. The rapids and the wildlife and the people who came off the water a little different than they got on. I loved every one of them. I just never found the time to go myself. Not until I was fifty.
Some years back the company Jim guided for was headed for closure. Jim had the chance to buy it and keep it alive, so he did. It is called OTT, Orange Torpedo Trips, named for the little inflatable kayaks you ride down the river.
Around the same time Jim bought OTT, Brad Mehl came on as my partner at Patrick Lumber. Brad grew up on the Rogue River, rafting it with his dad and his brother, and he had guided for OTT himself back in college. He loves that river the way some people love a hometown. We had just clawed our way out of the bottom of the great recession, and we were looking for ways to pull the trading group back together. Brad suggested the Rogue lodge trip OTT ran. We booked our first one in 2014. Some piece of the Patrick crew has been on that river every year since.
Here is the thing about the Rogue. It is a cold plunge whether you signed up for one or not. You hit that water and your whole body wakes up at once, and the first thought through your head, every time, is that you wish there was a sauna waiting at the other end.
When I picture that sauna I picture the one at my health club. A few years back Finlandia Sauna redid it in vertical grain red cedar. The first month it smelled so fresh and clean it stopped me at the door, because it smelled exactly like the mill when we are sawing western red cedar. That bright, aromatic cut you can taste in the back of your throat. After a few months it faded the way those rooms do, settling into the mix of smells a sauna picks up when it is bolted to the showers down in a giant basement locker room. Still cedar. Still worth heading to. Just a little less of that fresh cut magic. The river and the mill, the same wood, the same smell, sitting at opposite ends of the same good day.
In the summer of 2017, after our good friend Jimmy Mac passed away, six of us ran the Rogue and then went straight onto the lower Salmon, seven days on the water back to back. Jim calls that one the Hostage Crisis. I did not really understand the name until day six, when Cris Schureman looked over at me and said, at least in jail you get a phone call. He was right. No phone works down in that canyon. You go with the gang or you do not go at all. A few came from Patrick, but most were OSU Beavers, and Jimmy’s son came along. We shared the old stories and built a few new ones, which is about all you can do and pretty close to everything you can do.
The next summer, in 2018, I took my boys down the Rogue. Nick, Jack and Zack. I think they loved it as much as I do. Watching the three of them build their own thing with each other, brother to brother, was worth the whole trip ten times over. Good food, big water, the best company there is.
One thing I notice when I look back at all of it. Jim, Brad, Tom Brugato and Cris have been on every single one of these trips with me. That is no accident, and it is no small thing. You want to know a man, put him in a boat for a week where the phone does not work. Thank you, my friends.