A humorous yet highly informative illustrated guide to river running and raft handling.
William Nealy drew cartoons about whitewater for his whole career, and The Raft Book is the one where he took on the specific problem of teaching people to run rivers in an oar rig or a paddle raft. The book is structurally strange. It is half technical manual, half cartoon essay, and completely uninterested in the usual pieties of outdoor instruction. Nealy treats rafting as a serious skill while refusing, ever, to treat it seriously as an identity. That tonal combination is why the book has been on boaters' shelves for thirty-plus years.
What Nealy gets that most instructional writers miss is that rivers are funny. Not the accidents — those are generally not funny — but the daily absurdity of what a river trip actually looks like from inside. The morning rig. The unnecessary arguments. The specific personality types that appear on every crew no matter where in the country you're running. Nealy had seen all of it, had drawn all of it, and when he wrote instructional passages he wrote them in the voice of somebody who had spent enough trips trying to teach novices to know exactly where the student brain gives up. That's where the cartoons come in. He'll illustrate a ferry angle, and he'll also illustrate the guy who won't stop explaining the ferry angle to everybody else, and both illustrations are pedagogically useful.
I hand this book to newer oarspeople who are starting to feel overwhelmed by the technical reading they're doing. Nealy is the antidote. The cartoons let the skills land differently — you can see a crux move in three panels where a paragraph would have lost you. And the humor is calibrated for retention. You remember the bits that made you laugh, and the bits that made you laugh are exactly the bits that keep you from messing up the same move on your next trip.
The book is out of print now, but copies show up. If you see one in a used store, buy it. It is specifically the book for somebody learning to run moving water, and the illustrations reward being studied even after you know the material. Nealy died young, and the body of whitewater-instruction cartoon work he left behind — this book, the Whitewater Home Companion volumes, Kayak, Kayaks to Hell — is genuinely irreplaceable. Nobody else worked in his mode, and when he was gone, the mode went with him.
Read it before your first serious whitewater trip. Read it again after. The second read makes sense of the first in ways you will not expect, and the cartoons keep being funny, because good cartoons don't wear out.
