Life on the White Water

When Tara asked me to go white water rafting, I quickly jumped on the opportunity. It’s the kind of thing that is cool enough that I wanted to do eventually, but would have never tried to initiate myself. Back when I was a wee little freshman, I had nothing to do on the second day of classes so I took a ride up to New Paltz and jumped out of a plane from 40,000 feet.

As the days drew near, I started to have Piccinich-like thoughts that this wasn’t going to happen, but Tara and Karen stood tall and I handed over the $20 for the trip. Strangely the twenty bucks was fully refundable once you showed up for the trip, I’m still not too sure of its purpose. But I was still reluctantly stoked over the entire thing.

A few days before the trip we were filling out waivers and permission slips and I looked at the list of things you should and should not bring and in nice bold letters at the top was: No T-Shirts, No Jeans, No Sweatshirts. Now, if you were to take a look at my closet at the present time it is made up of 70% T-Shirts, 30% Jeans and 30% Sweatshirts. That’s right 130% of my non-unmentionable clothing is precisely what not to wear when going white water rafting. F.

I spent the day before in Boston with Sara, her canuck and her family leaving me with zero time to prepare. However, I returned to campus to find some spare Under Armor waiting for me along with a PB & J for lunch on the river; all courtesy of Tara. I’m such a lucky guy. Things were starting to look up!

The next morning we woke up to the sound of rain against the window pane. My water absorbent clothing was looking very forward to the chance to give me hypothermia. Thankfully there was only one Piccinich on this trip and when we got to East Campus we found a room filled with white water rafting equipment. After a 30 minute session eerily reminiscent of Alfred fitting Bruce Wayne for the batsuit, I was feeling relatively confident about my upcoming battle with the elements.

The overlying theme of the entire ride to the Berkshires was rain. It didn’t stop and it didn’t taper at all. We pulled off the highway at 10:20 three quarters of the way to our destination and stopped at a gas station. I gazed out the window and saw one of my five favorite signs in the world: Pizza Hut. I jumped out of the car and ran through the rain, opened the pearly gates and right to the cash register. The woman behind the counter looked surprised to see me at such an hour but that did not deter me from ordering the #3: a cheese pizza, breadsticks, and a soda. I spent the rest of the ride buried in the flavor.

After getting to Zoor (the place of rafting) we changed and prepared for the upcoming voyage. We hopped in the car and drove another 20 minutes to the launching basin.

It never occurred to me until we got there that this was going to be 10 mile rafting trip. At 12:00 the bell began to toll and the water for the river was released.

We were on the river for almost five hours and I’m not going to lie most of it was definitely not blog worthy, not to say that it wasn’t fun, I had a great time, but to spare your brain, I’ll run through the highlights:

A few hundred feet down river we came upon our first rapid of the day and for some reason our guide wanted us to paddle up river for 10 minutes in the middle of it. I immediately became extremely winded. For the record there was still 9.9 miles to go.

At some point we reached the first swimming area of the trip. I took the opportunity to push Tara into the water. This started Raft War I, which featured Tara going in four times (twice on her own), Karen went in four times and Dan went in twice. Notice I never touched the water. Point.

The river mostly had smaller rapids (Class ones and twos I was told), however there was one class three rapid. When we got there Meryl Streep and Kevin Bacon (fully clothed) were watching over the proceedings. Granted it only took 15 seconds to make it through the rapid, it was pretty cool. After the rapid we tied the boats to a nearby tree and the guide s asked us if anyone wanted to jump off some overhanging rocks. Of course I raised my hand. So I climb on top of this rock with the guide and he goes over the plan with me:

“You see that, it’s a rock.
(Points down stream 5 feet)
You see that, it’s another rock. Land in between them”

Mind you I am over 6 feet tall so this gives me a negative one foot margin of error. By this point I was feeling understandably reluctant. So I jumped off the rock and got sucked under water, after that I’m not sure what happened. I just know I came up and saw the raft and grabbed it. I got out of the water and climbed back up to the rock. Everyone else asked me how it was and I literally had nothing to tell them because I didn’t even know what happened. Of course after everyone went once, I decided to jump again, but thankfully it went much better the second time. After floating down river a little longer the guides turned to me and said that after I jumped in, I stayed underwater longer than anyone should and they almost decided it was a bad idea to let anyone else jump.

After the whole jumping in to the rapid thing, Tara and I became extremely winded, but for the record, we weren’t cold at all, even with the pouring rain and the pushing into the water. Oh wait, I was never pushed in, just everyone else.

When we finally found out that there was only half a mile left, Tara and I jumped up and paddled at full strength. It was already 4:15 and we just wanted to watch football. Fortunately we got back in time for the fourth quarter of the games. The entire day was awesome especially since it was rather easy to stave off hypothermia. But that’s not saying the hot chocolate at the end wasn’t phenomenal.