White Water Rafting with Hannibal Lecter

Saturday dawned clear and cloudless, promising a day full of sunshine and warmth.  I would have preferred a toxic mushroom cloud, or at least a thunderstorm, so that I could continue sleeping.  Andy and I were slightly hungover, and it was 6 a.m.

After some cereal and coffee, I was feeling a little more human and a little less like a rabid wolverine, so we packed some lunch and headed over to the apartment of Andy's friend, "Kenny".  We were going to drive two hours down to the Snake River to go white water rafting.  At this point I should probably explain that I was completely Shanghaied into this activity, because Andy took my response of "I'll think about it" to mean yes, and told Kenny that we would, in fact, like to spend the day on a river in a small, inflatable vessel with him.

We arrived around 7:15, and Kenny was nowhere in sight and unresponsive to phone calls.  We didn't know which apartment was his, so we just sat and waited.  After five minutes or so, he emerged.  He slithered up to the car and asked, in his Stephen Hawking voice, "Are you guys ready to have some fun today?"  I would later come to question his definition of fun, as it turned out to be entirely too broad.

By 7:30, his truck was loaded and we were ready to go, except for one detail.  Kenny had borrowed this raft for free from his job.  He had all the necessary equipment - steering paddles, pumps, repair kit, dry bags...but no paddles for me or Andy.  Not because he forgot.  He just...didn't know we needed them.  I don't know how he came to the realization, but as he stoically informed us that we would have to stop somewhere and rent more paddles, my already-limited confidence in his plan and his rafting abilities began to plummet.

Thankfully, due to the logistics of rafting and the fact that Kenny's truck seats only two people comfortably, we drove separately.  He asked us to take the lead, which I thought meant he didn't really know the way, even though the trip was his idea.  It turns out the truth was much more annoying.  Kenny consistently drives at roughly 80% of the amount of any posted speed limit.  In a 65, he does about 50.  In a 25?  20 mph. 

After we had been driving for a few minutes, and been passed several times as we drove exactly the speed limit in the hope that Kenny would catch up, Andy made a confession to me.  "So, we're not actually going to the Snake, we're going down to Riggins to raft on the Salmon."  Oh.  well that's not so bad, a river's a river, I suppose.  I was kind of looking forward to seeing more of Hell's Canyon, but whatever.  "There's more.  Kenny has never been rafting before."

Hold on.  WHAT?  I thought he invited us because he...knew what he was doing?  Isn't that how things like that work?  Would I use my connections to borrow a free airplane and say 'Hey guys, wanna come fly in this plane I just borrowed?  Oh, by the way, I don't know how to fly so I figured we could all learn together?"  NO.  Actually, what Kenny did was worse, because he never actually admitted his inexperience to Andy.  Andy gleaned this information second hand from one of Kenny's coworkers the day before the trip.

So I resigned myself to the shit-show that I already suspected this day would become.  I resolved to just enjoy the ride, because it was a nice day and my hangover was uncharacteristically mild and already beginning to ebb.  Little did I know, it would be much longer than a two hour ride.

I'm still not that familiar with Idaho geography, so when Andy told me we were going to Riggins, it didn't really phase me.  However, once we were several miles south of Lewiston, which is, itself, a solid half hour from Moscow, I spied a billboard for a hotel in Riggins.  Only 102 miles ahead!  In a normal place, like the East Coast, you would see such a sign and be able to assume that 102 miles of highway driving would take an hour and a half or less.  Idaho is not normal in that sense (or many others, but hey, I like it enough).  Winding mountain roads, logging trucks, and tractors make it difficult to drive 65 or faster even where that is the posted speed limit.  Idaho's major north-south thoroughfare is 95, but unlike the I-95 of East Coast infamy, most of it is one lane in either direction, with occasional traffic lights and speed reductions where the road passes through a town.

At this point, I whipped out our trusty road atlas and flipped to the Idaho page.  Riggins, it turns out, is about halfway between Moscow and Boise.  Boise is a solid six hour drive away.  I was starting to get frustrated with Kenny's inability to grasp numbers, be it speed limits or driving times.  It was too late to turn around at this point, so we drove on.  Actually, it wasn't too late, but we both agreed it would have been really shitty to just ditch the poor guy, and we suspected a hilariously harrowing tale would probably emerge by the end of the day.  So we soldiered on.

An hour and 45 minutes into the drive, we had pulled over at least two times to wait for Kenny to catch up.  Patience was wearing thin, but comic relief was, literally, just around the bend.  We approached the town of Cottonwood and spied a strange roadside erection.  A building, shaped like a giant beagle, bore a sign that proudly declared "I'm a B&B!"

Dog Bark Park Inn - Cottonwood, ID

Before the guffaws over this absurdity subsided, we passed a road sign for a town called Keuterville.  Oh Idaho, if loving you is wrong, I don't want to be right.

Finally, after pulling over and waiting for Kenny AT LEAST four times (a conservative estimate) we arrived at the boat ramp that would be our exit point.  We left our car there, and took with us everything we would need on the raft:  sunscreen, food, car keys, water.  Then we crammed awkwardly into the undersized cab of Kenny's truck and began the slow crawl down the remaining 10-mile stretch of road.  

What should have been a brief drive felt interminably long.  Kenny  lectured us on the many merits of an orchard and fruit stand we passed on the roadside, and how he thought it would be "a lot of fun" to go there and buy fruit after we finished rafting.  I thought back to the rhetorical question he had asked earlier, and hoped his overly expansive definition of fun wasn't a foreshadowing of the events to come.

After stopping at a rental place where Kenny knew a guy who lent us some paddles free of charge, we continued down the road.  It was 10:30, and Kenny proclaimed that we would probably be in the river by 11.  Then the conversation somehow shifted to hunting, and I had the blood-chilling experience of listening to Kenny describe how he had "chopped up a deer before" and how to disembowel an elk.  I was half expecting him to mention fava beans and a nice Chianti.  Great, I thought, I'm spending the day in a small watercraft with Hannibal Lecter.  Any normal person would probably have found the conversation a bit gruesome, but as a hungover vegetarian, I threw up a little in my mouth.

Finally, at long last, we arrived at the starting point for our super extreme fun-time rafting adventure.  It was 10:45.  The raft needed to be unloaded, inflated, and assembled, and there was no way we were getting in the water by 11.  The sun was getting hotter, and I was getting hungry and irritated.  It took forever for the three of us to manually pump up the raft, and Andy had broken a sweat so he took off his jeans and threw them in the cab of the truck, realizing it was hot enough for his mega-short Euro-trash swim trunks.

Once the raft was inflated, Kenny set to work attaching the frame.  He clearly had no idea what he was doing, and spent an embarrassing length of time trying to ascertain the proper placement of the frame, and even longer trying to figure out how to strap it to the raft.  Andy kept suggesting (probably correct) ways to tackle the problem, but Kenny dismissed them all, insisting that he knew what he was doing, even though we knew his filthy secret.  I have never been more grateful for life jackets and childhood swim lessons.  The fact that Andy is a former lifeguard and accomplished swimmer didn't hurt either.

By 11:30, we were actually ready to put the raft in the water, except we had to CARRY this thing down the boat ramp because, unlike every single other group we saw that day, we didn't have a boat trailer to drive down the ramp, and those bitches are HEAVY.  Fortunately, two nice people saw us struggling and helped us the rest of the way down, at which point Kenny gave us an impromptu safety lesson about how not to get your legs snapped in half by the rocks in the current should you fall out of the raft.  Great.  Let's get this over with.

We had taken no more than four strokes on the water when Kenny exclaimed (if a monotone voice can ever exclaim anything), "Isn't this FUN?"  Not yet, guy, we JUST got in the water.  Let's hit a couple rapids without capsizing and dying before you ask that question.

Once we got into the current and began leisurely paddling downstream in the sun, it actually WAS quite pleasant.  Our first brush with a Class II rapid shattered all that tranquility, though.  We hit the rapids sideways and got tossed around violently, which would have been embarrassing if I, myself, had ever been rafting before.  But, you know, I had kind of expected to go rafting with an experienced individual who would tell me what to do.  The thing was, Kenny had nearly encyclopedic knowledge ABOUT rafting but no experience putting that knowledge into practice.

We soon hit another Class II with a bit more finesse than our first go, so I decided the day might actually be fun and injury-free.  The river flattened out again and we were drifting along at a pleasant pace when a nagging question arose in my mind.  "Andy, you put the car keys in the dry bag, right?  ...Right?"  After a long pause, he admitted that they were in his jeans...in the truck...which we would be 10 miles up river from our exit point.  Awesome.

The rest of the day, minus the often awkward conversations, was actually fun.  I would totally go rafting again, just not with that guy.  Towards the end of our run, Kenny suggested that we would be back in Moscow by 5, after he had already told us it would take at least 4 hours on the river to get to our exit point.  I don't know what it is with this guy not understanding how time works.  Dude, we got in at 11:30, you now have to hitchhike back to your truck which is 20 minutes away, you have to drive back to the exit point, load up the raft, and drive THREE HOURS to get home.  FOUR PLUS THREE IS SEVEN.  WE WILL NOT GET HOME UNTIL AT LEAST SEVEN.  PLEASE LEARN HOW TO UNDERSTAND TIME.  I'm sorry.  I'm judgmental, what do you want from me?

As the sun began to dip behind the picturesque, towering cliffs alongside the river, we approached the boat ramp at our exit point.  It was getting chilly and I was wet and hungry.  We dragged the raft onto the sand beside the base of the boat ramp and watched Kenny beg some guy for a ride back to his truck.  It was 3:45.

While we waited for Kenny to get back, Andy and I carried the raft and all our gear, bit by bit, up to the top of the hill.  We deflated the raft and waited.  And waited.  Andy went up to the parking lot to use the bathroom, and returned with news that our car wasn't there.  We were at the wrong exit point.

We had no cell phones, no car, no car keys; I had my wallet but no money.  So we waited.  And waited.  Waited some more.  After almost an hour, Kenny finally showed up.  Instead of being observant and returning to the place where he had left us, he drove to our abandoned car, got out of his truck, and yelled our names.  Clearly, we were not going to answer him, because we weren't there, because he told us to get out of the water AT THE WRONG FUCKING PLACE.  I don't know how long it took him to realize that no amount of calling our names like we were lost puppies was going to make us appear, but he eventually got back in his truck and found us at the next boat ramp down the road.

We loaded Kenny's truck, piled in, and, at long last, rode back to our car.  Our sweet, sweet car that I have never been so happy to see.  After some hemming and hawing in which Kenny tried to convince us to go buy fruit with him, we parted ways.  Some might call it a shit show, or a comedy of errors, but I consider it just another day in Idaho.