Landlubbers

“So, Kate, how could we suck so bad at something so simple as rafting down a river?”

Kate, you see, was the only one among us with any nautical experience to speak of, having rowed varsity for Delaware’s crew team for a month or so last spring, before the 6 a.m. weight training sessions made it a job more than anything.

“Well, we had the crazy old man who thought he knew what he was jabbering about but didn’t know a thing, and he wouldn’t listen to me. His wife was basically dead weight. She didn’t touch an oar. So their side of the raft unbalanced us. Mom, ummm, she kind of got confused.

We were a tired, beat-up squad coming home from a bruising encounter. Heading south on the northeast extension of the PA turnpike, returning from “one of those awesome days we all dream about,” according to the Whitewater Challengers rafting brochure.

“I don’t think we ever once rowed in the same direction at the same time,” said mom. “Back stroke, forward stroke, back stroke, forward, I had trouble with that.”

“I think we were trying too hard,” said Kate. “And in rowing you have a coxswain telling you what to do. Dad, you didn’t even know port from starboard.”

What defense did I have? “I wasn’t going to tell Elva (the dead weight) to row if she didn’t feel like it, and she didn’t feel like it. And Josef, how can you push a little 67-year-old Hungarian refugee with that heavy accent?”

“He was a pisser,” laughed mom. “Telling every raft that we were racing for a case of beer. Calling that grim old guide with the bushy mustache wearing the silver metal helmet one of Hitler’s guards. Before he threw the buckets of water at the raft with the Japanese he told us, ‘Time to get ‘em back for Pearl Harbor’.”

“All I know is the picture they took of us from the trees or wherever they hid that camera, if you look nobody has their oar in the water except me. Did you notice?” I complained. “Not one oar in the water. Everyone’s holding on for life. I was doing all the work. Josef said, ‘Someone take out a life insurance policy on that man’. Steve, you look like a rangy young sophomore surfer dude with your shaggy blond hair and baggy trucks. I expected more out of you. Where’s your beaded necklace?”

“That picture was when we were going through the rapids,” said Steve. “You don’t need your oars in the water.”

“Dad, you looked like you’re falling out the back of the raft,” said Kate. “Mom, you looked like you’re trying to climb out.”

“I did fall out a couple of times,” I said. “Almost got slammed by the damn raft on the rocks ten minutes into the trip. See this knot on my shin?”

“I got run over too,” said Steve. “Couldn’t climb back in the boat.”

“The only time we went in a straight line was when I got out and pushed us,” I said.

“There were too many rafts out there,” said Steve. He was right. The only whitewater rafting in the entire Poconos seemed to be along a short stretch of the Lehigh River south of the town of Jim Thorpe. On this brilliant August Sunday when we were on the river, 400 rafts, red, blue, gray, green, from different adventure outfits, skittered about like absent-minded waterbugs. Every half mile or so we’d collide with another outfit’s party, gridlocked and blocking the river. The procession down the Lehigh was as disorderly and slow as a Mummer’s Parade; everyone dressed in blue life vests instead of feathers.

“I’ll never do it again,” declared Steve. “We’d start and stop. Start and stop. Then the guides made us wait. Who told us the whole thing would only take three or four hours?”

“It wasn’t exactly relaxing,” said Kate.

“The woman at Whitewater Challengers told us that,” said mom. “If she told the truth and said you’d leave at nine in the morning and get back at six at night, half the people wouldn’t go.”

“Yeah, not exactly what I wanted to do the day before soccer practice two-a-days begin,” frowned Steve.

“My ass was really starting to hurt, wasn’t yours?” asked mom. “I didn’t think we’d ever get out of those rafts.”

“Josef said he was going to hang Elva by her ankles from their hotel balcony for suggesting the trip,” I said. “And we were on the supposedly ‘Easier Whitewater Rafting’ trip. Imagine the ‘Exhilarating’ trip. They’d still be searching for us. We really screwed up those last rapids. Went around the rocks totally ass-backwards. The young guide just smirked as we bounced by. Suburban flatlanders.”

“We went through all the rapids backwards,” noted Steve.

“The only thing we perfected was that spin move, you know, where we’d hit a rock dead on, then bounce around it sliding backwards and do a 360 to get turned around. Didn’t see anyone on the river spin out like we did,” I said.

“They didn’t have to,” said Kate. “Even the little kids, you know, the ones from some camp with that lazy, fat counselor who never stopped yakking, unless she was napping, she was so annoying, but even they rowed straighter than we did.”

“I think we tried too hard,” said mom.

“You’ll never get me back there,” said Steve.

“Come on, Steve, it was family bonding,” said mom.

And who ever said family bonding comes easy? No pain, no gain.