It is summertime in the Midwest. This means my facebook wall is inevitably littered with people bitching about the heat, talking shit about baseball, or posting disastrous pictures of the Great Drunken American Tradition we here in the Middle States like to call The Float Trip.
This should be good...
For those of you who don't know, The Float Trip is like a cousin of White Water Rafting - the lazy, overweight, jobless cousin who eats all the candy on Easter and always asks you to join his World Of Warcraft clan. The principles are basically the same in both activities; you sit in a boat and float down a river. However, in White Water Rafting there are rapids and speed and danger and you have to wear helmets and you could die!...while on the Float Tripping there is binge drinking and sunburns and beer guts and country sing-alongs and there is also a good chance that you could die.
In fact, my friend Cole almost did once. And here is the story:
I don't remember why, exactly, we were on this particular float trip. It was probably someone's birthday, or a bachelor party, or maybe one of my frequently-thrown "Going Away Parties" (which I have about every two years, considering I can't stay in one place for longer than this without wanting to throw myself off a bridge for fear that I'm missing out on something much cooler anywhere else than where I happen to be). There were only a handful of us; my friends from high school, their significant others...about seven of us total. A small Float Trip contingent relatively speaking, but we felt confident that what we lacked in numbers we would make up for in gusto...and alcohol consumption.
The float trip started early, as is customary. See, most pre-planned trips are only a few miles long, and if one were to float continuously, without stopping, the trip could be completed in one or two hours. This type of "speed-floating", however, if extremely frowned upon and violates one of the Five Major Rules of Float Tripping (which I just made up). There are as follows:
1. Dress like an idiot. (My friend Cole once wore Daisy Dukes, ski goggles, and ONE BOOT he found in the river along the way.) The dumber you look, the more it detracts from all the dumb stuff you will inevitably be doing...wait...that's not right...
2. At every sandbar, cave, rope swing, or shallow part of the river, you MUST stop for no less than 45 minutes and drink from a multitude of bottles being passed around. You WILL cut the shit out of your feet, probably. There will be blood...
3. Sunscreen is discouraged. Talking like a schizophrenic hick river-dweller with a fourth-grade education is not only encouraged, it is mandatory.
4. You will lose everything you bring with you - your sunglasses, your wallet, your shoes, your hat, the entire content of your cooler, and possibly even your bathing suit. Do not bring ANYTHING to the river that you do not wish to donate to the river.
5. Don't die.
So, in strict observation of Rule #2, our small party proceeded to intentionally run our fleet of metal canoes aground every quarter mile or so, gratuitously drinking, making fun of overweight families that passed in tubes, soaking up the summer and enjoying our youth. As you can imagine, in about three hours, the combination of sun and booze had done its damage to our synapses. People were having trouble forming sentences. Bad decisions were about to be made.
Me: Hey, look, a rope swing.
Casey: Where?
Me (pointing): Like, 15 feet up in that tree.
Cole and Casey: Yeah, that's not too high at all.
So off we bounded, splashing, swimming, clamoring up the rocky bank to the base of the tree which truck extended out over a deep part of the river. Casey went up first, warning us as he climbed up the crudely fashioned steps (made by who?), "Be careful, this shit is really slippery. Then grip, swing, "YAWWW!", SPLASH! We were Huckleberry Finn, runaways from the world. Nothing could touch us.
I was next. Shit, he was right...the tree was extremely slippery. But, despite my shaky equilibrium, I made it up. Grip, swing, "YEEEEEEE", SPLASH! The perfect feeling of flying and falling and then the cold rushing around you.
Cole was after me. I swam back to the bank next to the tree to watch him swing past me, to see him let go of the rope at end of the arc for maximum height and distance, to see his arms wave before he disappeared under the water. But there was no grip, no swing, no "YAHOOO", no SPLASH! Instead, the was a loud CRACK! and THUD!
Cole had fallen fifteen feet out of the tree. On to his face.
As soon as I heard it I knew. I spun around, expecting to see him twitching on the sharp river rocks, eyes going dim, bones sticking out of shredded skin. Instead, he had righted himself almost instantly, and was staring straight ahead confusedly while blood gushed out of a giant cut in his forehead and from his hand.
I almost laughed. Only to Cole, would this happen.
Suddenly, there was a guy there. Where had he come from? "It's all right, I'm an EMT" he said. Or maybe he said, "It's all right, I'm in the Army." Either way, he had somehow gotten to Cole in seconds, ripped off his shirt, fashioned a head bandage with it, and was talking in soothing tones while we watched stupidly from a few feet away, in awe that anyone could have the presence of mind to act so quickly in the event of something so unexpected. This guy was like a NASCAR pit crew team member. It was amazing.
Of course, being the good friends we were, we decided to cut the floating short...you know, seeing as how Cole probably had a concussion and had already started bleeding through his "bandages". We hustled through the rest of the river, then packed our things quickly and quietly at the campsite while Cole played the victim in the backseat of the car. Soon we were on our way back to Farmington and to the E.R.
Epilogue
Almost back to civilization, Casey turns to me and says "Man, I'm starving. I could really go for some wings right now." After minutes of deliberation, we decided that if Cole were to die, he would have done so by now, and what will it hurt putting off the E.R. a couple more hours, right?
The day finally ended sitting in a bar, drinking pitchers of cheap beer and eating hot wings, Cole wrapped in bandages, the summer's kiss on our cheeks and foreheads, laughing about how lucky we all were to be alive. How did we survive this long? we asked ourselves. We must be destined for Great Things.
Cole did not die, but the way.
We are awesome friends.
We are awesome friends.
No comments:
Post a Comment