I’ve been whitewater rafting twice (the first time, in Gatlinburg when I was 11, was the more dramatic on its surface – people falling out of boats, people losing their swimsuits, etc – but the second, in the Tetons two years later, very clearly had much more force of nature behind it and beneath the rapids) and tubing once (on the Esopus Creek up in Phoenicia, NY). Last week I was in Boulder just 12 hours after “Tube to Work Day” ended. Such terrible timing! The creek that runs through Boulder is open for tubing all of the summer months (unless there’s extremely high water), but that was the final 98-degree day before a return to normal summer temperatures, and it was the only day that there were more than one or two people floating downstream over the course of the day. Alas.
I’m fairly certain but not positive that I’ve never been to Colorado until this trip. My family drove through a large number of states on our way to Yellowstone when I was a child – a memorable trip with my best friend’s family that included recreating my dad’s childhood road trip to the corn palace and other tourist attractions, my friend’s little sister having a tantrum that involved shouting, “I HATE the Saturn! It’s a STUPID CAR!” which led a passerby to interject, “You know, you really should consult the child before purchasing a vehicle,” and a state trooper looking at my parents as if they’d failed my friend and I drastically after we exclaimed, “Livestock – YAY!!” in response to his caution that there would be some loose livestock on the road ahead. The Tetons portion of the trip also involved our parents going out to dinner, leaving my friend and I in charge of her sister, a make-believe game in which bunk beds were a boat and my friend a hijacker who’d taken us hostage, and our parents returning home right at the moment her little sister burst into tears because my friend had clicked a mechanical pen dramatically and said, “I just shot your mom!”
I was so traumatized by the idea that we’d scarred a seven-year-old for life that I don’t even have the nerve to ask her, now, whether she’s scarred.
(Just kidding. She was way more scarred by having to ride in the Saturn.)
Anyway, now I’m recruiting for some upstate NY tubing before the weather runs out. I don’t think we rented helmets when we went on the Esopus, but the water wasn’t terribly high either. We did wear life jackets and sneakers. None of us fell out or were otherwise injury-adjacent (there were some fairly substantial rapids that crashed up against large rocks; I remember sticking my foot out to push off of it and briefly thinking “It this a terrible idea that’s going to lead to a broken leg?”), but the people who were ten minutes behind us emerged at the pickup point with abrasions and bruises. In Boulder helmets were required above a certain flow level. On our last two days there, I could have gone by myself, but that seemed logarithmically less fun. Moreover, I’ve seen enough people fall out of boats or lose their shorts and end up mooning the whole riverbed and all of its occupants. If that happened to me while tubing solo, no one would be there to fetch my bottoms. And that’s…bo(u)lder than I want to be.
