(Written by Laurel, edited and snarkily commented on by John)
So John and I went rafting down the American river yesterday with Michelle, Brenden, Chris, Torie and a bunch of people from Chris’ huge never-ending family.
I covered myself with two complete coats of SPF 48 (Sweater in a Bottle) eschewed a bathing suit for shorts and a t-shirt and we headed out to the raft place. Where, once you finally found parking, you played “find your huge teeming group of people.” Then once you managed that, stood around while the men rounded up enough rafts for your group (10 people to a raft so we needed FIVE). And when they finally procured them, everyone helped carry them down to the river where they were all lashed together into a giant flotilla with a smaller, cooler laden raft, floating in the back.
So, once we got all organized and made sure each raft had at least one cooler in it for easy drink access, we all hopped in, pushed off into the river and spent a wonderful afternoon lazily drifting down the river occasionally having a drink passed up as we lolled in the sun.
NOT.
Not even a little freaking BIT actually.
Actually it was FIVE hours of FULL out water WAR! Some genius (may he rot in a special hell with the guy who invented the Piccolo Pete) invented a water gun that is basically a three foot plastic tube with a plunger so you just suck up, oh, a couple GALLONS of water and then shoot it at people. Mostly at people on other rafts (of which there were many) who then shoot back because ALL the boys and men on ALL the rafts had these damn things. But, when there were no outside targets, they were used on family members ON the raft.
So you got to hear things yelled across the raft like, “Knock it off I’m mixing the vodka punch dammit” and “Hold up everyone, Pops is TRYING to smoke!”
So my first injury of the day I probably brought upon myself, I tried to push John into the river and he did this damn flip turn move that not only knocked MY ass into the water but also caught me upside the mouth with the end of his paddle. (She should have considered her timing a little better: ed). So I decided as long as I was IN the water I’d swim around from raft to raft looking for the orange Smirnoff drinks and then once I located which cooler they were in someone pulled me back in.
A bit later we weren’t really paying attention to steering and ended up rubbing along the bank which was COVERED with bushes (It was a small group of trees, leaning and/or almost fallen into the river, some with branches as big as two inches in diameter – they hung so low that it was impossible to avoid them, even if some people [like the women] dove headfirst into the bottom of the boat. The main problem, though, was that we hit them in a fast part of the river, and we were probably doing about 15 mph – try jogging into a tree: ed). I merely ended up with a scratched arm but John caught a branch to the funny bone and lost ALL feeling to his arm for about 20 minutes.
And so the fun continued as the hours passed. Seresa and I (who, as newbies, had actually FALLEN for the “you just get to drift down the river and relax” B.S.) had decided early on that the BEST way to cope with all this was to get DRUNK. This actually worked really well until I ended up in the back of the boat somehow, the WAR float, and a bunch of people had been knocked in, one at a time (you know, one guy catches somebody off-guard and pushes that person in, and doesn’t realize that HE is a target now…and so on) and Chris (miracle of miracles) was the first person dumped in. But before he could haul himself back into the raft, Chris threw his water gun, MARINE STYLE, back into the boat where it HIT ME ON THE TOP OF MY HEAD. Apparently it looked pretty impressive because the moment they saw it happen Michelle and Torie started knocking people out of the way to get to me. So I said “OW”, and reached up to touch the place where I got winged and I pulled my hand away and it was COVERED (well, not exactly “covered”, but there was more than you might think in just a few seconds: ed) in blood so I held it up for everyone to see, assuming someone would know what to do. I then put my OTHER hand up to my head, and it came back with just as much blood. And then everything went a bit hazy and then Michelle and Torie were there patting me and cleaning the wound (not very deep but an inch long and apparently head wounds always bleed like the dickens even when you haven’t been drinking alcohol [aka BLOOD THINNER] all afternoon) and holding someone’s ice soaked t-shirt hard against it until the bleeding stopped.
And then they valiantly tried to wash the blood off the rest of me and off my SHIRT. And my head was just THROBBING. So I took a Vicodin (which I had brought in case of pain emergency, just didn’t know it would be MY pain emergency) which would have been fine if I hadn’t been DRINKING for the last three hours. Walking suddenly became very complicated and people kept saying, “Laurel just sit your ass down in the damn boat”. So I got some food, switched to water and, when they finally stopped the raft at the official “mud wrestling pit”, I took a bit of a nap sprawled out in the sun on the raft and John was even nice enough to come over and spray me with sunscreen since I was starting to burn.
Luckily, by the time the mud wrestling was over, I was feeling a lot better, the Vicodin had kicked in, some of the alcohol had worn off, my head was no longer throbbing and I was able to sit up and enjoy the last hour of the ride which was, comparatively, pretty mellow. Michelle dozed in my lap and I just sat in the middle of the raft and, well, sat.
So we FINALLY made it to the end (marked by a tiny red flag [uh, that was an upended 10-foot canoe – I guess you were still a little out of it: ed]) where there was much pulling out of rafts and sorting out of stuff and yelling of, “Whose cooler is this? Who’s missing a brown shoe? Etc.” and I just stood there on the bank watching because, well, I had a head injury and a swollen jaw and felt rather entitled. And then we got to ride the bus BACK! By this point John and I were both so exhausted we just kind of sat in our seat with our foreheads resting on the seatback in front of us and John would go, “Home?” and I’d say, “McDonalds” and he’d say “and then HOME?” and I’d say yes and then he’d say, “Wendy’s?” and we went through that about three times before I caved and said, “fine, Wendy’s then home.”
Meanwhile in the BUS OF CHAOS Chris and Michelle were organizing a big jaunt for everyone to go to sushi afterwards in Elk Grove and drink Sake bombs but we used my GAPING HEAD WOUND (man, Chris felt so bad about that) to beg off (we’d just been there Thursday night anyway and I had enough Sake Bombs then to last me a while) hugged everyone goodbye, I told Chris he looked like a genial old washer woman in his hat (he did) and we trudged off to our car, got Wendy’s, ate, stared at the TV for a while, cleaned and dressed each other’s wounds with aloe vera and Neosporin and advil all around and passed OUT.
And now it is morning. We are tired and we are SORE. John has a swollen elbow and a sunburn and I have a hole in my head, many scratches and a bruised chin. But we survived our first trip as “newbies” and I think I earned lots of points for not crying like a little girl (or at all) when I got my head split open.
And I did, OF COURSE, take pictures of all this but I did it with a couple of waterproof disposable cameras so I just need to find a development place that gives you one of those photo CDs and you can ALL enjoy it for yourselves!
