Rearview Mirror


Rearview Mirror RAPID’S FIRST 10 YEARS IN WHITEWATER


Smart business people say you need a road map to follow. Our style has been more piling in the truck and driving arm out the window, hair blowing and tunes cranked. Looking back on Rapid’s 10-year-long road trip, we’ve made some wrong turns, seen amazing whitewater, met amazing people and driven through floods and droughts. Since we started some things have changed, while others have stayed exactly the same.


Te very first cover of Rapid, a 16-page sampler issue, has a picture of Brendan Mark cartwheeling a Wave Sport X in Horseshoe of McCoys, Ottawa River. Too bad for 18-year-old Mark that we credited another Valley boy, Tyler Cur- tis. Both of who went on to very suc- cessful professional paddling careers and still live in Beachburg, Ontario. Mark is the Sales and Marketing Direc- tor at Heliconia Press and Tyler Curtis is currently in South America guiding for his company, Whitewater Chile.


In a review of the Perception Phat we said, “Te pronounced rocker enhances manoeuvrability while the defined chime and tapered volume at the bow and stern makes it very playful.” Chime? For the record, nowhere on the Phat creeker were tuned metal rods used for producing melodious ringing sounds when struck. We meant of course, chine—the part of the boat where the side meets the bottom. But even if you look that up it says that chine is a back- bone of an animal that appears in a cut of meat. We give up.


In the summer of ’99 we turned down tobacco advertising from the Export A Extreme Whitewater Rodeo Challenge held on the Ottawa River that October. While event sponsors tore a strip off us and accused us of “yellow journalism,” the bleeding gums and black lungs on the cancer stick cartons didn’t suit whitewater’s clean, fresh image. Soon afterward the Canadian government banned tobacco advertising from all sporting events.


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We’ve had some fun in our Gear Bag section over the years. Like when we introduced the Pic Fly Catcher as an alternative to Sex Wax for grip on your paddle. We said, “Te Fly Catcher is extremely sticky and wraps easily onto a paddle shaft.” True. “Once wrapped on the paddle simply remove the tube and pull the cord. Fly Catcher is safe, effective and non-toxic to hu- man or pets.” Only $5 for a package of eight rolls and available at hardware stores everywhere. Did we get letters! Sorry.


As far back as 2000, right in the middle of freestyle’s Mardi Gras parade we looked to the tarot cards, fortune tellers, and our Alpha-Bits and saw the future of whitewater spelled out in our bowl, Freeboating. Although our clever name didn’t catch, the all-mountain style of paddling did, as did the move away from just specially designed freestyle boats to boats that perform on the whole river. Besides, wouldn’t “freeboats” have been a marketing nightmare? Paddlers are cheap enough already.


Some stories are just too important to turn down. In 2001, we ran a tech- nique column for women, “How to Pee Standing Up.” In her query letter the author argued that this would level the playing field between the sexes more than smaller boats. Te article went something like this, “Make a vee shape with your first and second finger and pull back the labia…” Excreta. Excreta. Surprisingly, we didn’t receive one letter.


A couple years later, we put forward our own river conservation movement with the proposed ad campaign, “Stand up to save our rivers.” We called for the installing of urinals in every home in America. We calculated (assum- ing only men used them) that we’d save 3.3 billion gallons of clean water per day, the equivalent of five Ocoees, one and a half Frasers and six raging Upper Black rivers flowing day and night, 365 days a year. “If urinal not part of the solution, you’re part of the problem!” We’d even designed urinal pucks in the shape of whitewater boats. When we realized the concept didn’t have legs to stand on, we canned it.


RAPID


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