Once Little: Eau Vive.

It's my friend Margaux's birthday today. Margaux is from Johannesburg, she is beautiful, and her accent is sublime. She is now married and lives in Connecticut, and I miss her very much, but I always hold out hope that I will see her again. Inevitably, when I think about Margaux, I think about whitewater rafting.

Margaux and I met in Montreal in 2003, when we were both hired on to be rafting guides for a tiny, rag-tag company on a small river called the Rouge. I literally answered an ad in the newspaper and I was hired as a guide. When I called the number, I spoke to a guy named Luc, who was the lead guide for the rafting company. He asked if I was serious about wanting to guide and I said that I had been rafting three times (true) and loved it and had always wanted to try guiding (also true, but really, what else would I have said?). And that was it. He picked me up on a Friday night, along with two other girls, Margaux and Anne-Marie, and a guy, Jean Mathieu, who we ended up calling Jam Jam.

We drove the couple hours to the river, stayed overnight and for the rest of the weekend, we started our guide training. It was my favourite type of rafting: no motor, no big oar-rigs, just a bunch of people on a raft with paddles in their hands. After a couple of weekends, we shadowed other guides and after that we were on our own, guiding rafts full of rowdies who barely spoke English, and Margaux, Anne-Marie and I barely spoke French. It was amazing. In French, whitewater is called "eau vive" and I love that translation, since when you are on the raft, the only way to think about the water is as being alive. I didn't think it was possible to be terrified and exhilarated dozens of times in one day and I remember being ravenous at every meal, even though I never felt hungry until food was put in front of me.

One of the most incredible things I have ever done in my life was part of my weekend job as a guide. On one part of the river there is a series of very large and dangerous waterfalls. We had to exit and portage the rafts about a half-kilometer to get past these falls, but it wasn't possible to portage past the last and smallest waterfall. Our passengers would wait for us at the foot of this waterfall, which was about 15-20 feet high. We would re-enter the river by getting in the raft, sliding down a slope, and dropping about 6-10 feet into the water up river from the waterfall. Then, we'd paddle the raft from the front, lining ourselves up for the drop. At the last second, we'd stuff our paddle into the crease between the floor and side of the raft, grab onto the perimeter safety line (one hand on either side of the raft), and hang on as it plunged over the edge of the waterfall into the pool below. Our passengers would watch the entire thing. As soon as the raft hit the water, we'd grab the paddle and guide the raft to the river's edge to pick up our crew. After getting the hang of the waterfall drop, my only fear was blowing past the take-out, because it would have been so embarrassing! Thank goodness I never did. And every time I did this drop, all of my crew would say how unfair it was that the guides got to do the drop, but the passengers didn't. Too bad, so sad.

I earned close to nothing as a guide, but it was some of the most fun I have ever had. I loved it so much that when I moved back to BC, I really wanted to guide again. Not surprisingly, my "training" as a guide in backwater Quebec didn't hold up in BC, which has some of the most stringent regulations for guide qualifications (and so it should). So I decided to take a bonafide rafting course through a company called Kumsheen in Lytton, BC. I saved some money and paid the hefty fee and went to Lytton and took the course... and I hated every minute of it. I don't think I was in the right mindset for sure, but I also didn't take into account how different the rivers are in BC. And when I say different, I mean HUGE. The reality is that I am a small woman, and although I'm tough and strong for my size, I'm too small to effectively manage a full-sized oar-rig on a paddle raft (required for a lot of BC river guiding) and I don't think I could ever lift the motor on a power raft (power rafting makes up a large part of rafting revenue in BC). The paddle-rafting that I so love is only offered on a few trips and I had to be more well-rounded as a guide if I hoped to get a job. So that was that.

The good news is that I will always have the memories of being a guide and they remain vivid in my mind. And I have some great stories that I relish in telling. I look forward to rafting again, but not as a guide; I'd love to take my kids on a trip someday. They will love it.

I don't have any photos from my time guiding in Quebec, but here are some from my guide training in BC: