Even now as I am safe at home, under a pile of blankets, I still find it difficult to breathe. This last adventure that my family has brought me on has quite literally brought me to the end of my composure like nothing ever has before.
On the drive out to the meeting point our jeep was filled with nervous anticipation and excitement. The kids were happy to be going class five white water rafting at six mile creek for the second year in a row and even happier that their mother (me) was going to accompany them. We joked and sang the entire drive; truly, this was going to be a fun family adventure.
We arrived early to our destination and were met by several guides relaxing and waiting for their prey…I mean customers. One of the cute tall men was eating a can of split pea soup as he was resting between rafting trips. When he caught site of our family of five making our way towards their camp he promptly dropped the soup on his lap. Now, I ask you, was it because we had three beautiful daughters with us? Or was it just nature’s way of giving a warning that one of us might not return? I do not know but in retrospect I should have listened to Mother Nature.
The guides were efficient and good natured as they instructed us on how to get into the dry suits. All of them were obvious adventure and fitness gurus as not one of them had an ounce of fat on them. I sighed as I remembered days gone by when I could make that claim but now the only claim I can make is that of a middle aged woman who has eaten one too many donuts and spent too much time sitting at her desk writing about family adventures.
It begins…………
We have all gotten into our dry suits which, by the way, make us look like pregnant sumo wrestlers. We are given instruction on how to ‘self-rescue’ should we fall in to the sub-zero glacier fed rapidly moving water and it is now time to swim across the current to the boats. My first thought is…”wait…what? I have to swim across these rapids? Why didn’t the boats just load us all in before they left?” I know, I know, there is a reason for everything and the reason for swimming to the boats is to get us used to what it will feel like should we fall in and so forth but I really have issues with getting my face in the water, especially fast moving water that will most certainly carry me to my final resting place.
This is no big deal I tell myself, I have swam across lakes before just to prove I could do it, this will be no different. I was hoping to just doggy paddle across so that I could keep my face out of the water but I soon realize that that is just not going to happen. As soon as my feet leave the surface the current starts pulling me down stream, faster than I had anticipated. I reach out as far as I can to pull myself through the water to the other side, only I am not moving in any sort of forward motion, it’s all sideways down the river. “I can do this.” I tell myself, while trying to keep calm. About halfway across an invisible hand grips my lungs and squeezes all the air out of them, I try to breathe in but no air will come, only glacier water. My heart is picking up speed as it has gotten the memo that I am surely going to drown before my brain has even had time to register the situation.
An angel in a boat hollers at me to “grab the rope!” and as I do he paddles his boat backwards towards the safety of the bank. As I grasp the rocks that are sticking out of the ground and kneel on all fours contemplating how the heck I got talked into this situation, another angel quietly talks to me…”take your time…its ok.” Only I know that it’s not all ok for me…I still cannot breathe and that hand I told you about is still squeezing the life out of my lungs but somewhere from deep within me I know that I must not embarrass my family, I must get a hold of myself, stand tall and make my way over to the boats that are waiting…and I do.
I can only imagine the thoughts going through the mind of our guide as I made my way to his boat. I just know he was thinking “great, I get stuck with the one that is best friends with hysteria.” But you would have never known it by the way he smiled a genuinely warm greeting and welcomed us all into the raft.
The first rapids weren’t so bad; it reminded me of riding a galloping horse, bare back. The guide was always calm and pleasant giving us instruction on how to row and in what direction in order to keep us from capsizing or otherwise running into the jagged rocks of doom that littered our path. In between the rapids I was able to make pleasant conversation with him and take my mind off of the names of the different canyons like ‘The Anvil, Jaws, The suck hole and the skeleton narrows of death, etc.’ (I may have made that last name up but that’s the name that came to mind when my oldest daughter got sucked out of the boat into class 4 rapids).
You heard me correct, during the second canyon my 24 year old daughter became what is known in the rafting world as a ‘swimmer’. One second she was there, the next second she was gone. Once again that hand starting squeezing my lungs only this time it was tearing my heart out of my chest at the same time. A mother’s worst nightmare is to lose one of her kids and now I was living it. My husband yelled to the youngest daughter to “GRAB HER” as she went by but she was about a foot underwater and daughter number 3 could not see her. The water was carrying daughter number one farther away with each passing second and she was moving at a pace slightly faster than the speed of a mothers scream. Luckily my husband managed to get the oar out to her so she could grab it and be dragged back into the boat. Tears stung my eyes as relief flooded over me but there was no time for celebration as the next rapids were coming up all too fast and they were class five – the deadliest of them all.
As we are heading into the rapids my family is laughing and smiling and having a grand time…except me, I am wondering what pact I can make with the devil to keep all the kids and the husband in the boat during these white water rapids from hell.
We made it, all of us, alive and unscathed (mostly) and did I mention alive? I have no doubts that if the river rafting guides see me coming ever again in their direction they will close up shop and move to Antarctica but at least I can proudly say that I did it…I conquered terror and came out (semi) smiling.
