Making it

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This is the mug wall at Marial Lodge on the Wild and Scenic section of Oregon’s Rogue River. Getting your mug on this wall means you made it.

You’ve packed and unpacked rafts and drift boats. You’ve set up chairs, served lunches, and always eaten last. You’ve instructed, cajoled, fished guests’ flies for half-pounders and even fished guests out of the water themselves, all while piloting craft down the river. Through China Bar and Big Boulder Rapids, Winkle and the chute at Windy Creek. Down the zero-margin Rainie Falls. You’ve rowed and rowed and rowed some more.

You’ve still got Mule Creek Canyon and Blossom Bar to go, a test on every trip. In fact, they’re up in just a few minutes. Many a cup of Folgers in the dining room has been sank contemplating the day’s perils, breakfast sliding down to meet a stomach already turbulent, boiling with fear like that bottomless emerald water.

But you’ve made it, so far.

And you’ve made more than just a track on the map.

The mug wall has always represented more than just the accomplishment of becoming a guide on the river. Like its sister outposts on this distant section of the Rogue, at Marial there’s little contact with the outside world. Nobody’s ever just passing through. Anyone who’s here, you’re part of a bigger story. Making a mug and hanging it on the wall doesn’t just mean making it as a guide.

It means making a living doing what you love.

Making a community, becoming a person who matters.

Making memories, for your crew and your guests.

Making a difference, leading how we all preserve the river and its ways.

When I think about wilderness areas like the Rogue, I don’t just think about the natural elements. My mind goes to human places like the Marial, networks that radiate outward, that sustain local economies, and offer the kind of human care often in short supply.

When we lose these places—to resource extraction and despoiling, to private greed and closures, to habitat loss—I don’t just think about what we’re losing in the natural world. This, the oldest kind of social network, the primal cultural pull that drags us out of comfort and down the river, voluntarily, into and through peril, is lost too.

Here’s to those with mugs on the wall, wherever they hang. The journey forward is less frightening knowing you’ve started the next leg here before.

I wrote this on the whiff of a memory, remembering these mugs, half a decade removed from an epic trip. I shivered that morning as I sat in the kitchen, not from the cold, but from the anticipation of the rapids directly downstream. Our guide ran them flawlessly in a wooden drift boat older than me, even through Mule Creek Canyon, where the river constricts so tight he could scrape both sides of the volcanic canyon walls with the oars. It’s a feat I think about very frequently.

It turns out, as of this September, Marial Lodge is up for sale. You and your best friends should buy it. It will change your lives.

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