In honor of Danielle's birthday, I'm pulling a LiveJournal post from her 30th. While our lives are not quite as exciting now that we have kids, it's still a helluva ride.
-----------------------------
For Danielle’s 30th birthday, she decided she wanted to go whitewater rafting. This is something Chad and I had wanted to do for years. I only asked that we take a Class 3 run. I remembered the first time I rode a horse and said I was an advanced rider. I got a beautiful palomino and almost broke my neck.
Lesson learned.
We signed up for an 8-hour, Class 3 trip down the King River. Then, a week before the trip, we got a phone call that the water levels are no longer safe on the King and our group was being transferred to the Lower Kern.
“Is it a class 3?” I asked.
“Yep. Well, a Class 3-4, but the water is pretty low so they’re calling it the equivalent of a Class 3,” replied Adam.
So we packed our camping gear, new swim trunks and Tevas, and headed down to the Lower Kern River where we set up camping in a beautiful desert valley. We watched the full moon rising over a rocky horizon while sitting in the warm evening and went to bed without a tarp on our tent as the stars twinkled high above.
Bright and early Saturday morning, we arrived at the rendezvous point where we proceeded to sign our lives away. They fitted us for life vests and loaded us onto a bus. Twenty four minutes later we unloaded the rafts and caught our first sight of the rapidly moving water.
As the team leader went over the safety instructions, I paid close attention.
He spoke in exclamation points. Every sentence reminding us that he was an adrenaline junkie. “The water is the highest it’s been in 10 years! We’re going to give you a GNARLY ride down massive Class 4 runs!”
Wait. Class 4?!
“Just remember, if you take a swim and find yourself heading for strainers, Plan A is swim at a 90 degree angle away from the tree limbs. Plan B is hit those suckers and climb like a cat. If you don’t do one of those two things, you could very well die.”
Woaahhh…wait a minute. DEATH?!
“All right! Next thing to remember. If you get caught in a current that keeps pulling you under, take a deep breath, curl up in a fetal position and let yourself sink. The water will spit you out 25-35 feet down river.”
Hold on. SINK?! Hold my breath for 35 FEET?!?!!?
“Most importantly, make friends with pandemonium! Defeat fear or it will defeat you! There will be carnage! But this will be the most exciting thing you’ll ever do! Is everyone psyched?!”
At this point, I looked at Chad. His face was a study in “concern”. He looked at me and gripped my hand. I leaned over and whispered, “Should I tell the guide that we can’t swim?”
“I think so.”
Meanwhile Adam was cheering louder than anyone. He had obviously made friends with pandemonium. When they asked for a group of four, his hand shot up. We were told to head down to the river to meet our guide, Justin, in the smallest boat, a boat surely too small to be safe.
“Are we ready to ride that river?!” he roared.
“I want to surf!!” Adam yelled back. This did not sound like fun to me.
“We’re gonna surf!!!! We’re gonna take some meaty lines!”
At this point, since the language had just switched to something I couldn’t understand, I leaned over and told Justin that neither Chad nor I could swim.
“Don’t worry! You have these gargantuan orange things on.” Justin walked away. Chad looked at me and said, “We’re in trouble.” I was seriously reconsidering this trip. In my head I was weighing the cost of the trip against my life and you know…my life is worth a bit more. But then I thought of what my mom always told me. You can die sitting in your living room. Of course, you wouldn’t be crushed by boulders or drowned in a torrent of water, but still…
Justin put us in the raft, showed us the basics of paddling and we were off. Twenty seconds later we were hitting our first Class 3. It was awesome! It was us and the river. We hit our first Class 4 and nailed it. At this point, we were cheering. We were excited! We were thinking we rock.
And then Adam said, “We’re so freakin’ good! We can’t be tipped. We’re going to make this whole ride without falling in.”
Never tempt the River Gods. They don’t have a great sense of humor.
Less than five minutes later, we tried to surf. We paddled for all we were worth and then the world tilted, tipped and we were in the water. I sank and popped up searching for Chad. I saw Danielle downriver and then I hit one of the other rafts. They hauled me in and I sat in the raft, shaking and gasping.
I finally saw Chad in our raft with Justin, his hands trembling. He grabbed me and kissed me. Danielle looked like she’d swallowed half the river. Adam was laughing and whooping. I asked Justin if we really needed a fourth person or if I could hit him with the paddle.
Everyone thought I was joking.
Off we went - a little more comfortable and with a lot more respect for the river. We hit the rest of our morning Class 3’s and 4’s with no mishaps, finally stopping in a calm section of the river to beach our rafts and eat an amazing lunch.
No comments:
Post a Comment