I get so MAD!

August 29th, 2005 at 08:17am Posted by Bill

Everyone has a list, right? Some people’s list contains the things they want to do before they die, and they check each one off as they do it. Skydiving, bungee jumping, running with the bulls, whatever. I don’t have a list like that. I’ve always thought that if I did manage to do everything on my list, what else would I have to live for? So my list isn’t titled “Fun things I must do before I die”, but instead “Fun things I’ve done while alive.” That way, my list can grow and grow, and I never feel I have to stop adding to the list, and I won’t be disappointed if I leave this life before my list is complete.

So I added “floating” to my list yesterday. The rivers here in Missouri are very different from the rivers in Oregon, at least the rivers I’m familiar with. Oregon rivers are deep, fast, and they seem to claim the lives of about a swimmer a week during summer. Here, the rivers are shallow, slow, clear, and warm. Kathy’s cousin and his family took us to a place called Dawt Mill, where we rented two canoes and four tubes. We were then taken by converted school bus, with the canoes and tubes and our coolers on a trailer behind us, upriver about eight miles, and we got in the water about 12:30. We floated back downriver, and arrived back at Dawt Mill at about 6:30.

During those six hours, the water never got more than about four feet deep, and in some places the bottom of the canoes actually scraped along rocks and submerged logs. We stopped a few times along the way at little sandbars along the banks, to have lunch or to relax. It was a completely wonderful time.

Now for the bad news. If you’ve ever been in a canoe, like Kathy and I had not, you know that they can be really hard to keep balanced. Number of times we flipped? Two. Seconds after we got in the water that we first flipped? About 15. At some point along the way, Kathy switched with Matt, so he was in the canoe with me, and she was floating in the tube behind us. We went through a bit of a “rapids” section, and Matt and I got hung up on a submerged log. Kathy came barreling toward us, and flipped her tube. As she was trying to right herself, her glasses came off, and she dumped her beer. Tragedy. She had just opened that beer. We never did find her glasses or the beer.

So this morning, we’re all putting aloe on our sunburns, massaging the bruises we got from falling in the water and hitting the rocks on the bottom, and getting in touch with a local optometrist to get Kathy replacement glasses. We leave Missouri tomorrow morning for a long slow drive back home through several points of interest none of us have ever seen.

Entry Filed under: Memories, Family, Friends, Fun