It is rafting season right now, which means the river is up and the town is crawling with these really neat people called raft guides.

Now, a raft guide, for those of you who don't know, is the person who sits at the back of a large inflatable raft filled with nervous people and makes sure nothing (too bad) happens to them when they go down roaring whitewater rivers and over waterfalls and stuff like that.

Guiding is a lot of fun, but it doesn't pay very well and it requires a lot of responsibility and athleticism. Hence raft guides tend to be young men between the ages of 25 and 40, living nomadic lives wandering from state to state as they follow the different river seasons. Often they live out of their cars, wear the same clothes for weeks on end, and rarely wash their hair. Despite this they are perhaps the best smelling men around, since their job requires them to get dunked in cold water fairly often.

Now, there are many fascinating things about raft guides (notably their arm and chest muscles, but that's for a different journal), but one of the funnest is their cars. Since the car doubles as their house it tends to be full of junk and oddments not usually found cars, (pillows, sleeping bags, camp stoves, spare sandals, etc.) as well as a great surplus of things that tend to accumulate in any automobile that is not owned by a single woman with OCD: things such as empty bottles, soda cans, loose change, and a variety of dead leaves in various stages of disintegration.

Despite all this the cars tend to run very well, since they are what gets a guide form river to river, though they often have peculiar quirks.

Aaron's car, for example, is a battered silver Mercedes with a hand-welded custom luggage rack on the back, and a modification that allows it to run on vegetable oil instead of gasoline. And that's just what you notice as a passenger.

I got to drive Aaron's car today because we had to go up the road to pick up the van that had taken the boat and all the customers up to the put-in that morning. I can't drive this van because it hates me and won't start if I'm behind the wheel, so Aaron let me drive his car back. As he was getting out of the driver's side so I could take over, he mumbled over his shoulder:

"She's all yours, just don't let her go over eighty."

"What?"

"Just don't take her over eighty," he told me. "And if you do, you'll probably want to get out; because if you go over eighty the engine will probably explode."

"Ah," I said. The road is a narrow two-lane highway that is very winding and steep. If you're going eighty MPR it's not just an exploding engine you should be worried about. "I'll be okay," I told him. "Any other tips?"

"Uh yeah," he said. "Don't knock into any of this cables here on the left; those are the converters for the veggie oil."

"Got it," I said as I slipped behind the wheel. Aaron walked away, but as I was struggling to slide the driver's seat forward (Aaron has about three miles of leg) he came back.

"Oh, one more thing," he said. "When you get back, don't turn the engine off until I get there." And left.

Driving back was an adventure in itself. The tracks that the driver's seat rested on had gummed up from years of having the same person drive the car, and even slid all the way forward I could only reach the accelerator pedal with my toes. I ended up having to hitch myself forward onto the edge of the seat, gripping the steering wheel tightly so I didn't slide back. The windshield was dusty and decorated with splatters of mud and bird-droppings, so I could almost see better by looking out the door window.

Needless to say, I stayed well below eighty.

When I reached our home base Aaron was nowhere in sight, and I remembered he had wanted to stop and get a sandwich on his way back. So I put the car in "park" and put on the parking break, being careful not to turn it off.

I sat and listened to the engine idle, and waited. Going through the spare change in the tray between the front seats I discovered several state quarters, a lot of dirt, and a cheap plastic medallion that had "Get Lucky" in relief on one side. There were also some used candy wrappers and a grocery receipt.

I waited some more. Idling engines have always gotten my nerves up: I think this dates back to when I was a kid and my dad forgot to put on the parking break when he left the engine running, and the car I was in began to roll away. I began to wonder if I had misheard—had Aaron actually warned me not to kill the engine before I got back? What could be so hard about turning off the engine?

I was justing admiring (out of boredom) the little bronze plaque he had mounted under the radio that said "Thank You for Not Smoking" when I saw him pull up in the van behind me. He came to a screeching halt, jumped out of the van, and ran over. I opened the door for him.

"You didn't try to turn it off did you?" he asked.

"No, no," I said.

"Good," he said. He reached inside and pulled the lever that popped the hood up.

Great, I thought. What's he going to do now?

"I have to turn it off manually," he explained as he reached his hand into the still-running engine to flip a hidden switch. There was a click, and the engine went off with a happy gurgle.

"Ah," I said, getting out.

"Thank you for not turning it off," Aaron said as we walked back to the van.

"Oh, of course not," I said with a laugh. "If the engine explodes when it hits eighty I'd hate to think what happens when you try to turn it off."

Aaron laughed. But I didn't ask him what really would have happened if I'd tried to turn it off the normal way, nor why his car needed to be shut down manually.

It was a guide's car, what more did I need to know?

~Æ, signing out.