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Outside Magazine October 2004

Outside's Guilty Pleasures
Class VI Sex
Admit it, ladies: There's nothing like a man with an oar

By Ms. X

CITY GIRLS GO ON WILDERNESS RIVER TRIPS for the same reason British girls visit Italy in E.M. Forster novels: to kick off their confining shoes, feel the heat of the sun on their skin, and learn a thing or two about raw male energy. At least, that was my intention, and it was plenty easy to realize.

Without meaning to, my father set the stage. He remarried and decided that rafting the Grand Canyon with his new bride would be the perfect honeymoon. He pulled me along, and I gladly went, fully hoping to get some action of my own. I didn't have much experience yet; my most compelling squeeze to date had been a prep-school boy from Model UN.

After that, how can a girl not be moved by the sight of a man who has virtually no gender insecurity even while he's wearing sandals? A man with an oar in one hand and a beer in the other, who can recite a few lines of wilderness poetry and comes with high-definition lateral traps?

In river guides is to be found a population of Real Men. They're competent with a hatchet. They will safely see you through Hermit Rapid at 12,000 cubic feet per second. They're skilled with complicated knots. And no man can spend the bulk of his adult life coursing through a canyon unless he possesses something almost as irresistible: a deeply romantic nature.

So it was with a man I'll call Joe. He'd been rowing the Grand for more than a decade and was as faithful to it as an altar boy to his home church. He was tanned and tousle-haired. He was languid, but quick and strong when the river demanded it. He was peaceful. He was happy. He was simple. He was exquisite.

But river sex is not just about the boatmen, delicious as they are. It's about the strong lure of the river itself. Joe walked me back to my patch of sand after a day of rapids and a night of drift-net beer and brilliant stars. When he grabbed my elbow and kissed me, I was gone.

Dad had no idea; he was having his own nocturnal adventures. So were the cook and another boatman, as well as a middle-aged divorcée and yet another boatman. A pagan mood swept through camp like a flood. Whatever rules once governed client-guide relations were waiting out the high water with the humpback chub.

Of course, to borrow a phrase from that other den of vice, Las Vegas, what happens on the river stays on the river. It would be as ill-advised to bring Joe back to civilization as it would be to bring Paolo the grape crusher home to meet the Queen Mum.

But until we part, pass me another grape.

Next Page: The sweet science of chopping a huge tower of wood

MS. X is now a happily married mother of two.

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