Fergus chooses sides

Bad dog! Bad dog! You were supposed to jump up and bite her on the butt! Of all the times to start behaving himself. Oh well, at least I don't have to do the hip-hop video.

Before Fergus went and ruined the whole weekend, we were having a pretty good time. We kayaked a section of the French Broad river that was a bit harder than we'd tried before - only wimpy rapids, but the water was high and we haven't gotten around to buying splash skirts for our kayaks yet, so Leslie swamped her boat twice. She contends it's worse to have to swim the rapids with no boat, while I felt my own trip downstream still stuck in my own boat while clinging desperately to a several-hundred-dollar kayak that seemed destined to become a sunken monument to ill-considered recreational pasttimes, with my own paddle clutched impotently under my arm providing no navigational support whatsover, should be considered the more impressive feat. We both survived, and she got a bruise, so I guess maybe she's right.

The section of river we were on was right above the section on which we trained to become whitewater rafting guides this past spring, so we stopped in to say hey at the outfitter. Most of our classmates have successfully gone on to become guides, but we kind of dropped out near the end of the training. The officially claimed reason was that Leslie was traveling too much so we weren't able to get enough practice, but at least in my case it was really because while whitewater rafting is a lot of fun, having responsibility for the safety and enjoyment of a boatload of paying customers seems suspiciously like work, only without actually earning any money, so I was glad to give it up. We really enjoyed the training though - for one thing, river guides are a lot of fun, although I'm still not sure whether being with them at my advanced age made me feel younger or older. Plus, we were able to buy a bunch of river gear wholesale, which enabled Leslie to get this photo of me that makes me look all outdoorsy and adventuresome.

On a completely unrelated note, I was in the parking lot at Lowes today in Greensboro when a kind of hillbilly looking guy came up and asked me what the sticker in our car window that says "I don't ski with bigotry" was supposed to mean. It refers to a local brouhaha in the mountains last winter during which the conservative Christians who run a local ski resort fired their professional photographer after they found out she had married her partner in Massachusetts, and especially within the Asheville city limits it's a pretty safe bet that most anyone interested in an issue like that is probably going to share a progressive viewpoint. Down here in Greensboro, though, you're quite a few notches further into the Bible belt and I was wondering if this guy was going to want to make an issue of it. But when I told him what it was about, he said, "That's good to know - I don't ski but I wouldn't ski there." I must remember not to judge hillbillys by their pickup trucks.