FAYETTEVILLE — Audience loomed large for Jay Young as he worked on his history of whitewater rafting.

Young knew his book — “Whitewater Rafting on West Virginia’s New & Gauley Rivers: Come on in, the water’s weird” — would be read by more than the occasional tourist. It was going to be the guides and industry insiders who would ultimately serve as the book’s most astute readers. Many lived in his community, and some he already counted as friends.

“I didn’t want to screw it up,” he says at his home outside Fayetteville.

What’s more, the relative youth of the rafting industry meant that his “historical” subjects were for the most part alive and well.

“Rather than sifting through archives for obsolete documents, I could sit down with these guys and talk it out and record the conversations,” says Young, who works in the industry as the manager of digital marketing for Adventures on the Gorge.

It was ultimately his inside connections with those in the industry, along with his writing experience, that convinced his publisher, History Press, to give him the contract. Though he never thought of himself as a writer of nonfiction, when he received word that the press was looking for someone to do a history of whitewater in West Virginia, he knew the gig was right up his alley.

During the early, experimental days of whitewater rafting in the state, Young says the rivers attracted free spirit types who cruised into remote pockets of Fayette County on motorcycles and set up rogue camps. Accommodations, let alone resorts, were sparse to nonexistent.

“There was a mini, one-and-a-half-day celebration of life happening here every weekend,” he says. “You’d come in here, drink a bunch of beer, risk your life, get off the river, drink a bunch more beer to celebrate, and go home.”

That routine might sound familiar even to today’s rafting revelers, but in those days, a make-it-up-as-you-go attitude lent a certain rarefied atmosphere to the sport.

One of Young’s favorite stories is that of Turkey Raft, a “garage-built, homemade, truck-tire-innertube, wood-flooring-constructed oar rig” built by paddler Bob Morgan. A group attempted to run the New River with the experimental craft in 1969. It disintegrated on the way, but one of the innovations that arose from it — the stern-mounted oar rig — lives on.

Young says he is struck by “the spirit of exploration that would drive a group of people to build this jerry-rigged boat and put it on one of the most challenging rivers in the world.”

Besides feeling a great-er connection to history when he runs Fayette County’s rivers nowadays, Young says through the process of writing the book he became aware of how deeply the threads of the whitewater industry run in his community.

“They run much more deeply than you know,” he says. “Everywhere you look, there are people who might not look like they have anything to do with it, but it turns out that old redneck on the porch might be one of the first to have run the river.”

Young’s book brings history up to the present, a time when the state’s rafting industry is both shrinking and centralizing as fewer visitors show up each year and rafting companies merge to create large, all-inclusive resorts.

This “resortization,” Young says, is partly an attempt by the industry to respond to changing vacation patterns. It’s the “Disney, Myrtle Beach, cruise ship demographic” with a week or two of vacation time that they seek to capture, whereas previously the model was based on weekend getaways.

The industry crested in 1995 with 225,446 visitors; by 2009, that number had dwindled to 139,731. Some believe this may be due to adventure-seeking customers who have mov-ed on to new adventures after a few runs down the river.

But among devotees, there’s no substitute for a run down the Gauley, the East Coast’s premier run. Even when tragedy strikes, as it did last week with the death of a West Virginia woman on the upper Gauley, their devotion is unflagging.

Young chose not to include material on river deaths in his book, but he says such events deeply affect the individuals involved. Merely as someone whose job it is to attract boaters to the sport, he wondered whether he was somehow implicated in the death. Even so, he says it won’t stop him from pursuing adventure sports.

“To stop doing the things I love because there’s danger involved would be tantamount to saying I didn’t really understand there was danger involved in the first place,” says the experienced climber.

“I’ve always felt if I really want to have the best life I possibly can, there are times when there need to be consequences to my actions. I like that aspect of these sports. Without that, I don’t think I’d be as interested in them. It makes everything more vivid. It puts you in the moment and gives you a heightened sense of awareness that I can’t get in any other aspect of my life.”

It’s this perspective — that of the raft guides themselves — that Young would like to capture in his next book project, which will be comprised of what’s known as “raft guide stories,” tales both tall and true.

He’ll be blogging about the project on his website, ironarchmedia.com. Anyone with a “crazy story from back in the day” should feel free to get in touch with Young via his website.

Though rafting still feels “modern” in a lot of ways, Young’s book reminds readers that it’s important to recognize that Fayette County’s rumpled “river rats” are also part of a unique and ongoing history. 

“The history of rafting on the New and Gauley Rivers,” Young concludes in his final chapter, “... is still there for us to see if we just turn around and look at it before we disappear around the next bend.”

Jay Young’s book may be found online or at a number of local outfitter stores, including Waterstone Outdoors and Ca-thedral Cafe in Fayetteville.    

— E-mail: cmoore@register-herald.com