Flutterby™! : A Man of Rubber: A True Story of Love, Adventure & The Art of Staying Flexible

I think the best reviews are the ones that give you a feel for whether you want to read the book, and a taste of what you'll get out of it. I'm struggling with Gary Harper's memoir "A Man of Rubber: A True Story of Love, Adventure & The Art of Staying Flexible", because this book is so much about explaining the context for a time and a place in my life that was the source of so much personal growth .

When I finished the ebook I threw off a quick typed-on-my phone review on the Kindle app. Gary just messaged me about using those words in a larger review, and I felt like I had to give it a little better treatment.

I think it was spring of 1989 that I was walking through Hamilton Place Mall in Chattanooga Tennessee, and saw Chris at a folding table covered with High Country flyers advertising rafting on the Ocoe. I'd been down once, it was fun, but I was not the sort of high energy twenty-something to be a passenger. So I asked "how do you become a guide?", was told "show up Saturday morning and ask for John Miller", and the descent began. It was at least two years before I stopped having nightmares about swimming Slice-n-Dice.

I have ... grown and matured a lot ... since then. There are personal connections I haven't kept, there was socializing at the time I did not do. All of the people I guided with are amazing people, but it's now, 3 decades later, that I'm learning how many more amazing people there were (and still are) in that scene, and how much that world was in transition and new right before I got there.

I think I mentioned previously David Brown's "The Whitewater Wars: The Rafters and the River Trip that Saved the Ocoee & The Gauley River Battle", about the fight for access to whitewater, and "Man of Rubber..." is a more personal story, focusing on a path through the business of whitewater, and capturing a bit more of the time and the place.

My time there was 6 years after the Benton Fireworks Disaster. The thumbtack board at the general store had someone advertising moonshine for barter. I was a weekend guide, and a damnyankee besides, so there were huge swaths of what was going on around that I was completely unaware of.

"A Man of Rubber" is a story that fills in a lot of gaps. It starts with a tale of big water on the Grand Canyon, a style of whitewater I've never done and likely never will, though the notion of "above Crystal again" is a philosophy I can definitely take into life.

It's told by someone who's clearly in love with all kinds of paddling, and with Southeast Tennessee, and who made his home in a place where I was only really a tourist, both physically, and in the ways that he's contributed to the technologies of whitewater.

It talks about the technology of repurposing roofing materials to make rafts better for whitewater, about the evolution of whitewater raft design, and how the design and manufacture of the dry bag that still carries the most critical bits of my bug-out kit came to be.

It's a story of personal growth of someone who chose to make his home in the mountains (literally, that stair rail is amazing) with the help of family, and of how he followed small ideas to turn them into big things. And seeing my friends referenced and thanked in the text reminds me of how much of that space was, and hopefully continues to be, a real community.

And it's got everything else you'd want out of a memoir, success over health challenges, whitewater disasters, and triumphs, literal flying.

As I skim back through it, I'm reminded of that old saw about how you "never paddle the same river twice". A few years ago I went back and took a commercial trip down the Ocoee, got a chance to show Charlene what that time of my life was about. Even if my world flipped inside out and I could manage the logistics to go back to it (and endure the likely months of physical pain it'd take to get back into shape enough to do it again), I'm not the same person I was then, it'd be a very different experience.

But it sure is fun to go back through and think about what might have been.

https://www.amazon.com/Man-Rub...-Staying-Flexible/dp/B0FM8BRYDM/