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Zeljko Kelemen is at the wheel of the burgundy van. A big man with the body of an aging athlete, his sad eyes slope across a square face. He pulls over and we climb out to look down onto the Karona River, near the town of Slunj. Serb rebels had dynamited tremendous cliffside rocks into the river in an effort to destroy a Croat's mill. Amid the detritus of the dynamiting, Zeljko points out a wire hanging across the river, a reminder of pre-war whitewater slalom kayak races.

"When I think of these wars, I am very sad, very angry," he says as we walk along the river on a cold morning. "I never had any prejudice against anyone. Neither did most of my friends. Like most of the rest of the world, we watch these wars only on television ... and are just as confused by them as you are." Employed for the past 11 years by Croatia's largest tour agency, Kelemen is a trained pilot; he had volunteered to fight during the war, but was never called. Instead he spent the war years exploring in Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia and other Eastern European countries, looking for runnable rivers.

In 1989, two years before war broke out, Kelemen founded the Riverfree Club in Zagreb. Its mission was -- and is -- to preserve rivers in their free-flowing condition by proving their commercial value as tourist and recreation resources. Post-war, he is an intriguing mix -- part promoter, part conservationist, with the soul of an entrepreneur trapped in the body of a former Communist-state citizen. An English major during his school days, Kelemen is today a worldly 47-year-old. During our three days touring Croatia, he amazes me with such capitalist witticisms as "advertising without marketing is like winking at a girl in the dark."

Surveying the country from above the Korona River, Kelemen is moved to relate war memories. When fighting first broke out, he says, he had tour groups returning from river trips whose routes were blocked by skirmishes between Croat regulars and Serbia rebels. During the war he loaned rafts to the Croatian army. Because the bridges had been destroyed by rebel bombs, the rubber boats were used by soldiers to cross the Korona into Serb-occupied territory and then ferry the wounded back. "I never saw those rafts again," he murmurs.

Kelemen's most dangerous river trip, he recalls, had little to do with rapids or undercurrents. In June of last year he and friends made a first descent of the Una River, tracing the Bosnia/Croatia border. "We knew the roads, bridges and railroad were damaged or destroyed and that some land by the river was not yet cleared of land mines," he says. Reaching the river was easy, they just followed the local fishermen's trail. But what they didn't expect was to have to portage around a 20-meter waterfall -- through a field laced with mines.

"The mines were marked, but grass had grown up over the markers," he says. "Nobody said a word as we tiptoed through the grass, rafts balanced on our heads." This trip got the attention of the local media and soon afterwards Bosnia army units cleared the remaining mines and rebuilt the road. In August the first Una Regatta was held, with 300 participants. And thanks to Kelemen's efforts to publicize the river, discussions of damming the Una have been taken off the agenda of Bosnia's electric company.

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The day before our Korona trip, we sat in a Zagreb restaurant near Croatia's Parliament. During the war, bombs had landed just 100 meters away, hitting the presidential palace. Polka music played over loudspeakers in the background as we talked.

Neither environmental activism nor river-running are common pastimes in the Balkans. Kelemen knows he's a bit of an odd fit, but he's used to that. As a teenager he chose a high school that specialized in languages "because I was better at English than math" -- and because it was near an outdoor hockey rink. When it came to university, he started out studying English, then, with the encouragement of teachers, switched to aeronautics school; "mostly they trained people to work at airports," he recalls. Pilot courses followed. Still, all he really wanted to do was paddle. (Fittingly, he never considered following in the footsteps of his father, who worked for a company that made parts for dams.)

Brought to his first canoe club by his older cousin when he was just 6 years old, Kelemen began competing in canoe and kayak races at 15, on the Sava River, which flows through Zagreb. "For 10, 15 years that club was my second home. Every day I would spend the whole afternoon at the club, then go into town with my friends. Our passion was competition. But if there was a good disco nearby, I would do very badly in the race because I would have stayed in the disco all the night. We weren't getting any money for it; we just did it for fun. We built our own fiberglass boats, made our own spray skirts and paddle jackets. It was more recreation than sport."

After a mandatory year in the army, Kelemen needed only 50 more hours to obtain his commercial pilot's license. But it was winter and the flight school was closed due to bad weather. To earn his beer money, he took a job at a travel agency. "I liked it and forgot about the flying," he explains.

Since then he's worked in tourism, though never giving up his love of paddling. At one point he took a job with a hotel in Karlovac so that he could be near the confluence of four rivers and paddle every day. Sheepishly, he admits his passion for rivers cost him his first wife and occasionally makes it hard on his second. He lives with her and a second daughter in his mother's Zagreb house. The small yard, garage and even its rooftop balcony are filled with canoes, kayaks and the detritus of a commercial rafting business. For the past decade he's run the "adventure" desk for Atlas Tours -- Croatia's largest travel agency -- focusing on canoe and rafting trips across the former Yugoslavia.

"I was lucky," he says, sipping a Coke. "The same cousin that introduced me to canoeing and to adventure also introduced me to Huckleberry Finn and Robinson Crusoe. Those things changed me forever."

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