I didn’t die in the tornado. I finished the grilling at 9:30 at night… in the dark. Even though I couldn’t see them, the burgers won raves at the department potluck and gave me the Self-Sacrifice Award.
I have this entire fantasy where I go on a food game show like “Iron Chef”, only it’s called “Martyr Chef” and I’m up against Joan of Arc, who makes a holy cr’me brulee with God igniting her blow torch with the flame of the burning bush. I’ll trump her with my margarita chicken, stating during my interview that I added saltiness to the dish by crying about my dysfunctional childhood and adding tears to the sauce.
But it made me think of other times in my life when I’ve almost died. If you think about it, everyone comes relatively close to death on a monthly, if not weekly basis. Certainly, the statisticians will pipe up and say that every time you get into a car, you face death. A drunk driver could be coming the other way. That semi-driver might not be paying attention. The gas station might get robbed while you’re there buying your Diet Coke and lottery tickets (we here at Dumber Than A Box Of Rocks do not condone the purchasing of lottery tickets, as that is a tax on stupid people. Just so you know.) But that’s not really what I’m talking about. I’m talking about the moments in your life when you have come face to face with your own mortality, those seconds in which you clearly see a fork in the road, one way leading to the rest of your life, the other leading to a barricade and a sign saying Road closed. No detour.. While I’ve had a few such incidences, one clearly stands out in my mind, one time when I feel as though I had pressed a finger to that road block, tracing the outline of the lettered sign.
It was a few weeks before or after my 18th birthday. I don’t recall but I know that we had just graduated high school and the weather was finally nice after a very long snowy winter and rainy spring. My best friend Fern invited me to go white water rafting with her. A dozen of us, including Fern’s nearly identical younger brothers, John and Jules, differentiated only by the fact that Jules was a sweetheart but somewhat dorky and annoying and John was a sarcastic ass most of the time who delighted in teasing and berating us. We caravanned up to the Wolf River to a place called Shotgun Eddie’s. We were given the choice of the “short trip” or the “long trip” and were advised that the “long trip” was a better deal. We took the veteran’s advice and each paid $14 ( a rather exorbitant price in 1989, especially since I hadn’t procured a summer job yet) to a man wearing a Rolling Stones 1974 t-shirt, sitting in a leaning wood shack, the outer walls covered in biting horseflies the size of grapes. They could give us no guarantee as to how long the trip would take, as it was variable by how fast you paddled, how deep the water was and how fast the water was running that day, but, Rolling Stone Guy assured us, the water was pretty fast today.
They put us and four rafts into a rusty retired school bus and we began the journey to the starting point, roughly ten miles away. The bus driver then informed us that most people were taking three to four hours on this “long trip”, warning us that the water was low in some parts, but very fast. We should have been apprehensive at this point. We had no water with us, no food, no anything. I was the only person to bring sunscreen, as I crisp like fried streaky bacon in the sun. We were each given a life preserver and a paddle.
I was fairly confident, as I had done some class 1 and 2 rapids when I was training to be a camp counselor. I am also a strong swimmer and had lifeguard training, so I regarded the life preserver more as a nuisance than anything. Fern was a bit more nervous, as she did not have experience swimming in deep water, so I was very certain to make sure she was well belted into her preserver.
The rafts were 5-person rafts, but the driver recommended that we have between 3-4 people in a raft. Some of the rafts filled up with four and five people. Fern and I jumped in our own raft and pushed away from the shore quickly before we “got stuck” with her annoying brothers. John had been a jerk the entire drive up. At one point, he had lit my hair on fire in the car. Yeah, he was a riot and we were absolutely sick of him.
The raft was a little big for just two people, but I was feeling rather full of rafting hubris in that I was the pro-rafter of the crew. After all, I had done some pretty hard core rapids on a CANOE, which everyone knows is much harder to deal with than a big flat stable rubber raft. No sweat.
After rowing for a bit and swatting flies, I discarded my life preserver because it was in my way. I wouldn’t let Fern take hers off. We began a long sordid journey, needing to get out of the raft and carry it for several yards over shallow parts of the river. It was a boring first two hours, with many portages and only mild tiny flashes what cannot even be considered “whitewater”, more like “bumpy water”. We opted to sit on the walls of the raft rather than the bottom because if you came close to a rock, it would gouge your butt pretty hard. It was hot. We were thirsty. If we had wet skin, the flies would bite us, so anytime that we had to portage, we would pay for it in blood immediately afterwards. I eventually had to pee and just went in the river. Fern had to pee and I urged her to go in the river, but she refused, citing the fact that there were fish in the river and apparently, fish are attracted to teenage girl urine. Or something. Crazy Fern logic.
Finally, the water began to smooth out and get deeper. In the distance, we could hear a rumbling. Rapids! I got excited and loosely threw my lifejacket back over my neck. Gradually, the rumbling got louder and louder. Finally, we rounded a bend and saw the source of the rumbling… it wasn’t so much whitewater but rather a drop off. The water just stopped at one point and continued ten feet lower. It was a miniature waterfall.
Fern almost crapped her pants. She started to panic. I told her that she’d be fine, just remember to hold the paddle. As we were approaching the drop-off point, she shouted over the rumbling “I don’t want to!” and I shouted back “Too late!!!”
The next thing I remember was flying. Flying through the air in a standing position as the raft fell out from under me. It was one of the oddest experiences I’d ever felt. Fern had crouched down into the bottom of the raft, so she was thrown across the raft as she landed. I had been sitting up on the wall of the raft and was left with nothing beneath me. Amazingly, I landed flat on my stomach on the wall of the raft, with Fern across the bottom.
I was screaming.
Fern was screaming and shouting “Oh my god! I’m peeing!!!!”
I started screaming louder. “AAaahhhhhggghhhhh!”
The raft was full of water and Fern pee. I jumped out of the raft and pulled it to the shore, making her clean it out. I was really hard on her for not peeing in the river earlier. She, of course, was still panicking about the presence of fish in the river but I was being a bitch and telling her to live with it. I’m not a friendly person if you pee on me. That’s a general FYI.
With a clean raft, we hopped back in and proceeded to go down the river. We began to encounter more rapids but thankfully none were of the “falling off the end of the earth” variety that we had just experienced. We had fun. We tooled around with the others in our rafting party. We didn’t have their paddling muscle, so we were paddling continually, while they would take long breaks and let the river pull them along. We bemoaned the lack of beer or any potable liquid whatsoever. The soundtrack to all of this was the thunder of approaching or receding rapids. It was a glorious time.
Until…
We began to hear a powerful rumbling. On every turn, we expected to see whitewater but it was always even further ahead. After awhile, it was so loud, it was as though we were right on top of it, even though the water all around us, while moving quickly, was unbroken by rocks.
Then we turned a corner and saw a deceptively small shoot. We were near some fellow rafters with a fuller raft, so we let them take the less rocky approach while we gunned it over a large boulder.
What we did not realize was that this small shoot was the beginning of a gradual 75 foot descend, where the river had cut itself out of solid rock cliffs. Imagine a series of 6 smaller twisting waterfalls, boulders the size of SUV’s jutting out of the water.
When we attempted to go over the boulder, the raft flipped. I don’t remember what happened. Chris, one of the riders in the other raft, told me today that she just looked back at us and saw an upside-down raft. Fern was apparently thrown to the slow side of the falls, the outer curve. I, on the other hand, only remember the sudden shock of icy cold water, the strange green quality of the light, and how the thundering sounds of the falls were muffled and so distant, like someone had clicked the mute button. I didn’t know which way was up. My life preserver, which I had been wearing loosely so that I could paddle easier, immediately went up over my head, trapping my arms in the ties. I realized that my life preserver was floating upward, so I kicked upward toward it, but the daylight there was blocked by something. I tried going around it, but the something moved. Something hard hit my arm, something else hit my leg, something solid and immobile. I kicked upwards again, fighting against the urge to sink downwards with the current. I felt the cold water beginning to seep into my throat and could feel it in my lungs. This was it. And that old clich’ of having your life flash before your eyes really happened. There was finality there in that green filtered light with cold water in my burning lungs.
Then I saw daylight above me. Clean unblocked daylight. I kicked once more and came up directly next to the raft, which had been blocking me, back into the air, back to the sounds of thundering water. Whoever had their finger on the grand remote control had flipped the mute button back off and hit the fast forward. I was still going down the rapids. I fought to get behind the raft but then hit a rock and ended up far behind the raft. I couldn’t see Fern but I also couldn’t catch my breath enough to yell for her. I panicked that the raft would float ahead without me. I instinctively floated to the surface, away from the rocks which were battering me below the waterline, and the water carried me faster until I caught up with the raft on the other side.
“Fern!” I shouted.
Nothing.
“FERN!” I screamed with all of my breath, still coughing up water, clinging to the raft.
“Yeah! OW!” Fern finally answered, still coughing, from nowhere.
We had cleared the majority of the waterfalls, but were battling lower grade rapids. Where the shore should have been were two rock walls, going straight up 50 feet. We were coming up upon a fairly large boulder. Below the waterline, something hit my hip very hard. (It would be eight months before I could lay on my right side again) I refused to allow myself to get hit again so I put my feet out to stop myself for just a second and was flipped upward and forward by the force of the water. I gave up fighting the water and simply clung to the side of the raft, talking encouragingly to Fern, who was worried about losing her contact lens and had her eyes closed. High above us, a group of backpackers were watching us from the cliff with worried expressions on their faces, shouting “Are you ok?” I gave them a thumbs up sign, unwilling to exert myself shouting again. Finally, the number of rocks decreased and we were in a slow flowage, too weak to pull ourselves over the sides of the raft. The entire course of events probably took only 60 seconds, but it felt like two hours.
The cliffs gave way to a large lake area. We continued to float downstream but could not get into the boat. John, Fern’s brother, kept yelling at us to get into the boat, but Fern responded that we were too tired and couldn’t. He gave his glasses to someone in his boat and then jumped out and swam over to our raft. He pulled himself into the raft (which apparently had righted itself at some point, going down the rapids empty) and then pulled us into the raft by the waistband of our shorts, giving us massive wedgies. We didn’t care. We were so happy to be on something solid that we could only lie prone in the bottom of the raft.
We had lost both our paddles. John asked his boat mate to throw him his glasses, for whatever reason. The other guy said “Dude, they’ll fall in.” “No, I’ll catch them.” He replied. I was having one of those moments where the smallest details become imprinted in your mind after a traumatic experience. I lifted my head to watch as the guy threw John’s glasses through the air and they glinted in the sunlight, like elusive jewels, and fell three inches short of John’s outreached fingers and plopped into the water.
John hung there, suspended and leaning out over the water and did one of the funniest things I have ever seen. He tried to part the water with his hands to get his glasses, as you would grass or possibly a clearance rack at Nordstrom’s. What is more, he did it frantically, three or four times before letting out an anguished cry. No good deed goes unpunished, it seemed, and Fern’s father was a hard-ass who would have direly punished his kids for losing such an expensive commodity as their eyewear (which is why Fern was so upset about possibly losing her contacts after her near death experience, knowing that she would not be able to get a replacement as a punishment for losing them). He jumped out of the raft and began diving and scouring the five foot deep water for his glasses. Fern and I merely laid there in the raft, allowing the current to take us. Someone gave us one paddle to replace our two missing ones, but we didn’t have the energy to even sit up. I remember thinking to myself “Fighting for your life takes a lot out of you.”
Yeah. I was a philosopher even then.
After about ten minutes, we had banked ourselves about 300 feet down stream from where John was furiously searching. I was sitting up at that point, trying to gather enough energy to resume our journey. A jubilant cry erupted from upstream as John waded toward us, glasses held aloft, a well-earned trophy.
We eventually managed to get up and get ourselves down the river. During the very next set of rapids, we hunkered down in the bottom of the boat, determined to not get thrown out, which was laughable because the rapids barely even classified as whitewater.
We were considerably slower at that point, having only one paddle to maneuver a heavy 5-person raft. Our fellow rafters abandoned us to continue at a comfortable pace. I had lost my sunglasses in the spill, but in some strange UV-karmic event, my sunscreen was hiding in the inside of my turned-out pocket (inside my shorts). When we heard the rumbling of the final series of rapids, we trembled and whimpered with fear. It was the Great Smokey Falls coming up and we had to go over that to get to the car. We braced ourselves and went over the rapids, getting stuck only once and needing to push off. Fern reported that I had come perilously close to getting my head shucked by a low hanging rock, but I was oblivious. Finally, we went over a fifteen foot drop, managing to stay in the raft, and then put our raft ashore.
The world was a different place from that point forward. I no longer cared about the black flies biting my legs. I no longer cared about riding in the car with Fern’s brothers. It didn’t matter.
Fern’s brother John (Chief Parting Waters) had already left in another car, relegating Jules to wait for us to finish our excursion. Wet, fly-bitten and exhausted, we collapsed into the car, making Jules retrieve us numerous Mountain Dews from an over-priced soda machine. Money meant nothing anymore. It was just paper. We drove back to Green Bay in relative silence, listening to music on the radio, our senses heightened. Phil Collin’s “Groovy Kind Of Love” sounded like a mofo symphony.
Then, we went to Rocky Rococo’s for pizza. Sometimes, the only thing you can do when you’re slapped in the face with your own mortality is order a sausage superslice and breadsticks.
Wisconsin: It’s not for pansy-assed wimps.
This is a way honking entry. I had more but Chauffi has sent out an APB on my curvy round butt, so I figured I’d betta represent.
Whatever that means.
