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Up the creek.

Article Excerpt
Byline: Mark Baker The Register-Guard

GOLD BEACH - Feel like some summer spray, blue hair?

Keep in mind that this is not for retirees who are faint of heart - or, for that matter, anyone who's faint of heart. This is like being in a washing machine - that goes 60 mph. This is one sure way to get wet. Drenched. Soaked. One way for a 9-year-old Belgian boy to find himself spitting out an all-American curse word in a Flemish accent.

That's what you get for sitting in the front row, Emile Van Eyck.

His older brother, Louis, 11, uses a different four-letter word - ``Cool!'' - to describe the Mail Boat Hydro-Jet Trips that venture up and down the lower Rogue River between May 1 and Oct. 15.

The boys landed in San Francisco and hopped into an RV with their parents, Walter Van Eyck and Anne Sterckx. The family from Overijse, Belgium, then headed north, to Oregon, a place they'd never seen.

"Oregon is not known," Sterckx says. ``If we tell people (back home), they say, `Where's that?' They know California, but not Oregon.''

The family knows Oregon much better now. They were planning to board a plane back to Belgium today, but they'll take with them memories of the coast, Crater Lake and their exhilarating trip on the Rogue.

"It's amazing how they go over the water so fast," Walter Van Eyck says.

Mail Boat Hydro-Jet Trips is part of a tradition born in 1895 of necessity - getting the mail 32 miles upriver to Agness - and something the Belgian family found in 2007 by scanning the Internet.

Mostly a tourist attraction now, the royal blue mail boats run one of few remaining rural routes on which the U.S. mail is delivered by boat. Another operates on the Snake River in Idaho.

And the mail boats, as they are known, not only fly over the white-water rapids of the breathtakingly beautiful Rogue, one of the wildest rivers in the West, they twist and turn in circles....

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