A River Runs Through It

Remember that Saturday Night Live skit, The Whiners? Now would be the time I would mention Joe Piscopo, and you would say who, and then you would realize you don’t remember that skit. Well, it’s about this couple who whines a lot and eats nothing but mac and cheese due to their digestive problems. My youngest daughter, S, could be their offspring. She too is an aficionado of macaroni and cheese, but good luck if you try dressing it up with, say, gruyere or smoked Gouda. And while most of the time she is sweet and funny and helpful and a joy to have around, every once in a while she can show her ass in a way that is suspiciously dramatic, as if she is peri-menopausal or possessed by demons. That was the version of S we had on a recent family outing in North Carolina.

We joined my friend JH and her family for a day of river tubing near Asheville on the French Broad River, which I refer to as the Old French Whore River, also an obscure SNL reference from a skit that wasn’t all that funny. We have never been river tubing before, but it was the end of summer and we wanted to try something new while enjoying some quality family time. If this all sounds like a recipe for disaster, well, you’re mostly wrong.

River tubing is what the lazy river at a water park aspires to be. Each person gets a fancy tube, what used to be an inner tube before tubing became a commercial enterprise, and floats downstream on the river from one location to another. If done right, river tubing can be relaxing and kind of fun. There is the possibility of a small rapid or two, and with a cooler and some beer, you can have yourself a pleasant little Saturday afternoon. This particular river is barely more than a backyard stream. At almost any point along the way, we were never more than knee deep in water, and never more than a mile away from a major road. I was more concerned about finding a bloated corpse than capsizing my tube.

JH and her husband had planned well for the day. A bag full of snacks, a cooler full of drinks, each family member in their waterproof Keens, and they were good to go. My less adventurous family donned dirty old sneakers and ill-fitting clothing over our bathing suits, garments that could easily be thrown away rather than cleaned if it came to that.  We paid our money and all boarded the van to the drop off point on the river, which was oddly in the middle of a tomato field which I am pretty sure was a cover for a meth lab. We were each given our inner tubes and our ill-fitting life jackets and a paddle, and lumbered down to the river. The trick was to squat and sort of fall into the tube, then adjust before using the paddle to help move along on the water, since there was no breeze and therefore no current. We had straps to link our tubes together, creating a massive family tube island, not unlike refugees fleeing Haiti.

Sounds like the potential for fun exists, huh? Well, back to S. My child was recovering from an elbow contusion from a fall over a month ago, and she wasn’t looking forward to new experiences, the logic being that one can’t reinjure an elbow if safely seated on a couch in front of the television. Plus she had never been river tubing. She has been tubing on a lake, when you get dragged behind a boat, and figured if it was anything like that, it would hurt her arm. My husband and I tried to explain to her, over and over, that it was more lazy river than speedboat, and that she liked lazy rivers, and they were called lazy for a reason. But never mind, once she was convinced that it was an avenue to pain, she was not going to cooperate.

She acted like she couldn’t climb in and out of the van. She pretended like she didn’t know how to use a life jacket. She refused to carry her own inner tube. Forget about the part where she had to drop her ass in it and push off from the bank. If I could have left her there I would have, but I couldn’t do that, nor than I could push her in. Instead, I had to try to remain positive and upbeat because if she is one of those moods and I lost my temper with her, she would bypass whining and go straight to tantrum of catastrophic proportions.  I suspect that would have been even more unpleasant.
The minute we all hooked up our rafts, S decided she was ready for a snack, which meant we had to rearrange ourselves to get her closer to some food. We took turns tossing goldfish crackers and tiny little cheesy rice cakes at each other, hoping she would see the fun of a food fight on the river. Instead, she chastised us for being wasteful and held onto any snack bag that made its way into her hands.

We continued our slow path down the water. First she was so cold she couldn’t put her feet in the water. Then the sun warmed her and she was burning up. JH and I split a beer while trying to encourage her to look for birds or study the trees. We hit our first rapid, which isn’t so rapid with 8 inner tubes connected together. One of the tubes got stuck on a rock and we just sat there trying to push ourselves off and back along the current.

When the beer ran out and the whining ramped up, JH and I unhooked our tubes, linked them back together, and took off with our paddles on our own. Neither of us could stand listening to the sighing and complaining. I didn’t want to get into it, and she was too polite to say anything, so we just sort of floated away.  By and by, the older kids joined us, hooking up their tubes, leaving the dads to deal with the aftermath, which worked out well, since they had more beer in them, plus everyone knows men don’t hear whining.

We enjoyed a brief respite in whining, which was replaced by thunder. Now, normally when you hear thunder, you seek shelter, you know, away from water. What do you do on a river in a tube? My tween, who had caught up with us by that point, says, “Start paddling. I hear banjos.”

“You can’t make that reference. You don’t even know what it means,” I said to her.

We paddled quickly, until we saw the American flag hanging over the river, the only sign of where the car was parked.  We had made it back alive, with all the members of our family, after two and a half hours of floating downstream.

As my husband was helping S out of her tube, she told him quite proudly that she had urinated in her tube several times because, and I quote, “The fish do it too so who cares?”

He pointed out to her that her tube had no hole in the bottom and thus no drainage. She finished her day knowing that she spent over two hours marinating in her own urine.

After we got home and ready for bed, S confessed to me that the reason she was so cranky was that she was scared of tubing, since she had never been before. I reminded her that I have invested quite a bit of time in keeping her alive and have yet to change my mind about that, unless she acts like that again on an outing, at which point I might reconsider. Then I gave her a kiss and a smile.

Sweet dreams, you whiner.