It's all fun and games until disaster looms...
It's all fun and games until disaster looms...
Colorado River rafting
Don’t you just love those adventure trips you see advertised in the airline flight magazines? That is back in the day when airlines had flight magazines in the pouch on the seatback in front of you. And for that matter back in the day when you did actually fly rather than sit in front of your laptop to take part in video conferences.
We’ve only taken one of those airline magazine adventure trips and that was more than a few years ago. Wife Annette spotted the ad as we were flying back from somewhere. It showed a raft bouncing over whitewater with a half-dozen beaming faces paddling through the spray.
“Wow! Doesn’t this look like fun!” she said to me, interrupting my focus on an airport bookstore novel. This was back in the day when I was in my “terrified of flying” phase. That is post-enlisted Air Force stint, when I thought nothing of catching a military hop and flying three thousand miles just to see an old friend for a long weekend. And pre-Army National Guard career where I got over my fear of flying via open-door Huey flights and C-130 hot drops. Interestingly enough, I’ve run into a few airborne qualified soldiers, who are terrified of flying in a civilian airliner, even though they successfully completed jump school (that’s paratrooper training to you civilians). It probably has more to do with fearing a lack of control more than anything else. The lack of control, the fact that they don’t have a parachute strapped on, nor a weapon in hand.
For some reason during that nine-year break in military service I developed a fear of flying that necessitated an intense focus on anything other than being thousands of feet above ground in an aluminum tube, thus the intense focus on the novel. While I no longer fear flying, I do loath flying civilian airlines for the same reasons that anyone who flies regularly does. Security lines. Full overhead bins. Cranky babies. Novice travelers who slow the process down. Etc. Etc. Ad nauseum.
At any rate, Annette shoves the glossy magazine in front of my book, stating, “I think we should take Jay on this.” Jay being my, then, thirteen-year-old son. Thirteen-year-old boys being exceeded in surliness only by thirteen-year-old girls and junk yard dogs, Annette was looking for something to develop a bond beyond the every other weekend visits which were usually occupied taking him to the roller skating rink, soccer games and pizza with his buddies.
“Sounds good to me,” I said, seeking to disengage my view to return to my novel. She ripped the page out and stuffed it in her purse. A few weeks later we solidified plans for summer visitation with Jay’s mom and reserved our spots on the three-day Colorado River rafting trip.
While not excited about the prospect, Jay grudgingly agreed to go so long as we stopped at Mile High Comics in Denver. Living in the Illinois suburb of St. Louis, Belleville, Mile High Comics represented the epitome of comic books and thus a worthy goal to a thirteen-year-old. We agreed to stop there on the way back from Western Colorado.
Now I need to tell you that in addition to my fear of flying, I didn’t have much confidence in the water. I’d never learned to swim as a child, which is one of my great regrets. My parents didn’t have the money for season passes to our small Midwestern town’s municipal swimming pool, so unlike many of my classmates and younger cousins, I didn’t spend my growing-up summers as a “pool rat”.
I made up for that mistake with Jay by ensuring that he passed his swimming test by the time he was six or seven and signing him up for the swim team at our local summer swim club. Annette likewise had grown up as “pool rat” at the Belleville city swimming pool. Her exercise of choice was hitting the YMCA pool for a half mile swim three mornings a week before heading to our law office.
Following a two-day drive from Belleville to Grand Junction, Colorado, we joined up with our fellow rafting tourists, who’d mostly flown in. We loaded in to an old school bus for the drive to the river. Once on the river bank, the half-dozen bright yellow inflatable rafts were loaded with food and beverage-stuffed ice chests, life jackets, paddles and dry bags overflowing with our gear.
A brief safety lecture and instructions to the rookie mariners followed on how to properly paddle and what to do if we overturned or were tossed from the boat. “Be sure to get on your back and put your feet down river, so you don’t hit your head on rocks,” came the advice from the lean, tanned head guide. He spent his summers guiding on the river with winters spent as a ski instructor. Thirtyish, he was recently married to our boat captain and tillerman, an early twenties short-haired blonde, who at 110 pounds didn’t look big enough to load an ice-filled chest into the raft, let alone the tiller of a fully loaded eight-person raft through white-water.
Not long after casting off, the surly thirteen-year-old face disappeared to be replaced by a smiling face, entranced by the canyon walls and delighted, as the youngest crew member, to be the center of attention of the attractive, young tiller person.
The next afternoon, after successfully negotiating white-water, whirlpools and jagged rocks, the flotilla entered a placid stretch of water with canyon wall to starboard and sandy beach to port. With the desert sun heating the air, several rafters jumped overboard to float alongside the raft, while cooling off in the murky water.
Jay floated to the starboard side (right to you landlubbers) adjacent to the raft when the raft was caught by a sudden swirl of the river pushing the laden craft towards the rock walls. With the boat only a few feet away from the canyon face, the boat captain realized the danger Jay faced in being crushed between the raft and the canyon wall. She screamed at him, “Down, down, get under the raft!”
With life jacket on, Jay managed to duck under the inflated tubes. We could see his body pushing up against the thick rubber of the raft’s floor. Seeing that his life jacket is pulling him up against the bottom of the raft, I scramble to find a knife to slash the bottom of the raft so we can pull him to safety. As I’m ransacking the dry bags for my knife, my panic-stricken mind is flashing how am I going to explain this to his mother! We take him on a great adventure and he drowns! As I look to the floor of the raft, I see his hands pushing up against the raft floor, walking himself under the raft. Meanwhile, Annette is readying herself to jump overboard in a rescue attempt.
After an interminable time, Jay pops up on the port side of the raft, short of breath, but far calmer than any of the adults who’d just witnessed him self-rescue. Even the imperturbable boat captain clearly shaken by the near disaster.
Four days later and a few dollars lighter, we walked out of Mile High Comics with Jay saying, “That wasn’t near as cool as I thought it would be.” Fifteen years later he was to say much the same thing upon moving back to Belleville from LA.
© William L. Enyart 2021
Email: bill@billenyart.com