I found this little ditty on the wall of a Facebook club called, "Raft Guides Make Me Wet." While the name of the club already glorifies rafting and those who do it professionally (based out of their vans and tents by the river, of course), the following lines of pure poetry really just drive the point home!When a boy is born, like all river guides, he is inspected. If he had been small or puny or sickly or misshapen, he would have been discarded. By the time he could stand, he was baptized in the ferocity of whitewater. Taught never to retreat, never to surrender, toward the death on the river in service for Absaroka was the greatest glory he could achieve in his life. At age 7, as is customary at Absaroka, the boy is taken from his mother and plunged into a raging violent river. Manufactured by 300 years of raft guide society to create the finest guides the world has ever known, The RGS, as it is called, forces the boy to fight, starves him, forces him to steal and if necessary to kill. By rope and paddle the boy was punished, taught to show no pain, no mercy, constantly tested, tossed into the wild, left to pit his wits and will against natures fury, it was his initiation, his time in the wild, for he would return to his people a river guide or not at all.
