I've spent some recent weekends satisfying my cabin fever by making a short weekend trip to visit some friends who work as raft guides at Cherokee Adventures on the Nolichucky River in Erwin, Tenn.

Raft guides are a different breed. They speak a different language. "So you doing the upper tomorrow?" they ask one another at the end of a hard day's work. "The upper," I discovered, is the part of the river with the challenging rapids, the part of the river the guides most enjoy. "The lower" is for amateur rafters like myself who would rather just coast down the river than actually have to use some upper body strength to fight the rapids.

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