FEAR AND LOATHING FOR FUN AND PROFIT

In late August, 1982, while backpacking in West Virginia, I learned of an outfitter who ran whitewater trips on the New River. One weekday morning, I hiked to a small building where rafters registered for trips. The walls displayed pictures of helmeted paddlers with their eyes bulging and mouths agape, surrounded by distinctly active stacks of foamy water. The brochure claimed the river had Class IV and V rapids, the roughest type. It seemed fun and exciting.

I bought in. After making us sign forms waiving liability claims for serious injury or death, the three-person staff issued appropriately-sized life jackets and helmets and paddles. We carried these into an old school bus and rode to the riverbank where we would begin our daring expedition.

I was 24. The rest of the rafters were women in their forties or fifties who knew each other from their workplace. The rafting trip was a team-building day out of the office. My fellow river riders were good-natured and friendly but didn’t strike me as athletic or adventurous. On the winding, hour-long ride through the hilly woods to the raft trip’s starting point, they joked nervously about their imminent immersive experience. To them, this whitewater stuff seemed dangerous.

When we arrived at our launch point, our two guides imparted an earnest safety lesson in which they sternly warned us of the serious risks we were about to face. They told us factually unspecific stories about people who had drowned on parts of the river we would be passing through. As the trip unfolded, they called these places by such nicknames as “Double Dunker” and “The Black Hole.”

They gave us various pointers about how to stay safe, emphasizing that if we were jolted from our rafts, it was critical not to be knocked unconscious by hitting our heads on big rocks; in such an instance, we were instructed to raise our arms up over our heads. They showed us how to use our paddles and stressed that, when we reached rapids, it was imperative to follow their directions and to work as a team to protect not only ourselves, but our raftmates. Our mutual survival was said to depend on obeying their expert orders and our commitment to team and task.

With the pedagogy concluded, we buckled and tightened our jackets and donned and chin-strapped our helmets. The raft guides looked carefully at the group and divided us into two teams, including the guides, five to each raft. We carried the rafts into the knee-high river and clumsily embarked and shoved off. I had visions of the intense rapid-running canoe scenes in the movie, Deliverance. I think my fellow travelers did, too.

But in the first half-hour the current was about as fast. i.e., slow, as one of those Lazy Rivers at an amusement park or public pool. We were barely moving forward. Eventually, we saw some whitewater ahead. Though the guides spoke in ominous tones about the peril we were about to face, the ripple didn’t look or sound challenging from that distance. Nonetheless, as we got within twenty yards of the purported rapids, the guides stoked panic by shouting, like soldiers going into pitched battle, “Row, Row, Row!”

Swayed by this war cry’s power of suggestion, the women shouted along until, fifteen seconds later, very mildly white water yielded to flat, shallow green river.

The rest of the trip followed this pattern: long stretches of boredom followed by short bursts of overhyped but very unchallenging foam. At many points, we had to get out of the raft and pull it forward to free it from scraping the very shallow river bottom.

Toward the trip’s end, we reached a spot where the water deepened noticeably. We stopped and the guides pulled out sandwiches and snacks. There was a boulder on the river’s right-hand side. One of the guides scaled the six-foot stone and jumped in, incongruously calling out like Tarzan. I followed him, without the exclamation. I enjoyed the small drop and cooling off. But jumping in wasn’t daring or exciting. One or two of the women followed.

The scenery and my fellow river runners were nice enough. But we were clearly in very low-water season. Some photos and warnings may have made sense following heavy spring snowmelt and rains. But the late summer wasn’t remotely dangerous. The trip was overrated. It wasn’t the least bit scary.

Yet, staying on hype-task until the day trip’s end, the guides expressed, without a hint of irony, how perilous our collective our day had been. They suggested that we almost tipped various times and how badly that could have turned out. The paddlers bought this notion, retelling unconvincing versions of imaginary brushes with disaster.

The collective refusal to accept that the river wasn’t nearly as dangerous as it was touted to have been made the length and cost of the trip to the hinterlands seem worthwhile to the day tripping paddlers. The paddlers could go home and tell everyone how their guides’ expertise and coolness under fire and their teamwork had enabled them to avert disaster. Or at least kept them from going to the hospital. Or tipping over. Or something.

Some thrillseekers who heard the rafters’ breathless accounts would become motivated to put such a trip on their bucket lists.

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Extremely exaggerated fear and the need for obedience were needed to sell the raft trip and countless other fear-driven products to a sheltered culture alienated from physicality and risk, and hungering for a pseudo challenge. A false memory of how dangerous a virus or some nearly flat water had respectively been enabled people to delude themselves into believing the effort made for the Covid mitigation on the one hand, and the raft trip on the other were worth it.

If you remove “river” or “whitewater” from the above story and put “virus” or “Covid” in its place, these two experiences resemble each other: the greatly overstated exaggerated peril, the PPE, the jargon, the need to follow the experts and the takeaway that we dodged a bullet and that it all could have turned out so much worse.

And it could have. If we had filled a flotilla of rafts with 90-year-olds from nursing homes and heavily dosed them with kidney-stopping meds or sedatives, one of them might have died.