The Idiot Girl and the Flaming Tantrum of Death (26 page)

By this time, I was almost hoping that we would actually strike an iceberg or at least a sharp rock, because the opportunity to puncture her life vest with a toothpick stained with barbecue sauce, accidentally knock her out of my lifeboat with an oar, or deny her access aboard my floating door was simply too delightful not to imagine. “No,” I would say as I pushed her back into the frigid, inky water after she scrambled onto my float like a wet jackal. “This spot is saved for Jack Dawson, but I do believe I just saw a twisted, knotted ginger root float by that you could gnaw on until hypothermia sets in. Look on the bright side, though! You finally got to see the ocean!”

That fantasy went into four-wheel-drive mode when their dinners eventually arrived and I took a gander at her table manners, which included taking a long, overly involved sniff of every forkful before she dared put it in her puckery, picky mouth.

Another irregular, most likely windowless person I saw in the dining room was a man who carried a separate little satchel especially for the condiments he brought from home, including spices and exotic salts, all shelved seperately in secure little compartments within their condiment travel case. Not only did he have a wider variety of salad dressings than the chefs on the ship, he possessed every flavor of salad dressing known to Wishbone and Paul Newman, including a bottle of sesame ginger, which would have been enough to drive another windowless passenger on the ship simply wild with fascination.

Still, even with the sniffing episode, meat questions, and Purse of Flavors in the dining room, I was not even close to scurrying back to the Bacteria Buffet, where all the windowless finger-food passengers chowed down and spewed body fluids all over one another while wearing swimsuits and displaying copious amounts of body hair. There were, however, times when you could not escape the Buffeteria because you were sitting right next to them or telling them outwardly what cowards they were in several days’ time (which honestly should have brought me dizzying joy in itself, but instead made me furious during my rampage as they continuously chewed on the pickings from the buffet that they’d rendered portable by wrapping them in paper napkins and stuffing them into purses or pockets, lest fifteen minutes pass without the opportunity to feed or consume something).

“D
idn’t you hear
the man?” I found myself, days after our journey had begun, yelling to a group of buffet people as I stood on the banks of a glacial river near Juneau, dressed from head to toe in pliable yellow rubber like a weathered, salty old sea dog trying to hawk frozen fish sticks. “The guide just said that if we don’t get one more volunteer to sit in the front row, we’re not going on the river float! Now I don’t want to be in the front row either, but my best friend volunteered, so I had to volunteer, and that means we need one more volunteer to equally distribute the weight in the raft, so someone in this group has to stop being afraid and lazy and raise a hand!”

Everyone had heard the guide, including me. That was precisely the problem. As soon as we were assigned a raft and had gathered at the river, our guide informed us that it had been raining every day in Juneau for the past three weeks, and that meant that the current was stronger than usual. Much stronger, he added. Much, much stronger, he tacked on after the add. So strong, in fact, that what was typically a nice, casual waft down the river had now developed into Class III rapids, which, to an outdoorsy, challenge-seeking person might seem like a piece of cake, but to someone like me, who has an anxiety attack when a fat kid cannonballs into a six-foot-deep pool, it could pose a possibility of an issue. Plus Jamie had volunteered for the front row after our guide made that disclosure and said that he needed volunteers for the front because that was the especially wet part of the raft, then stared at Jamie, saying nothing for an uncomfortably long period of time until she relented and I was forced to follow. True, we were the two youngest people in our group, but I had no idea that kind of pressure was so effective on my best friend. Had I been aware of this Achilles’ heel, I would have been using it on her like a swami during every lunch period in high school, saying, “I know you love Wendy’s, but we ate there yesterday and the day before that and the day before that and the day before that. Today feels like an Arby’s day, and so does tomorrow, and the day after that, and the day after that,” and then looked her square in the eyes until the spell was cast and I was scarfing on a Beef ’n Cheddar and laying the foundation for getting my gall bladder ripped out in twenty years.

“If no one else volunteers,” the guide said after staring at every other person to no avail, “we’re just not going, and that means no gourmet sausage and cheese snack at the end.”

So, as a reward for our involuntary volunteerism, our guide generously suited us up like greenhorns getting ready to wrangle crab pots in yellow slicker wear and life jackets so we wouldn’t get
“very”
wet. By the time we got back to the bank of the river, a little middle-aged barrel of a man named Denny had been sacrificed by his beehived Texan wife, who was taking the last bite of a cheese danish when we arrived, to round out the front-row occupancy. He looked scared to death, and scrambled in between Jamie and me for the middle seat, stating that his chances of falling overboard were far less if he had a lady cushion on either side of him.

The guide instructed us to grip the wooden board we were sitting on with both our hands, with our “outside” hands at the end of the board and our “inside” hands between our legs, although with the amount of gear we were wearing and the mass of the slickers, I couldn’t even reach the board with my “inside” hand. It’s all right, I thought to myself, don’t panic. It’s not that big of a deal, he’s an adventure guide, he’s paid to make this little river-rafting excursion seem much more exciting than it is so we all think we’re getting our money’s worth. This isn’t going to be any bigger of a deal than Splash Mountain, I tried to convince myself. Still, I looked over at Jamie and she looked over at me, not saying anything but letting me know she was scared shitless, too. Then the guide explained several times what we should do in case we got knocked out of the raft, and that we needed to try our best to get back in as quickly as possible because the water of the river had just melted off of the glacier and was only a couple of degrees above freezing.

Oh, sure, I thought, put on the big act. Get us all nice and frightened.

Then, with a push of the oar, we were away from the bank and floating down the river. Several other rafts filled with cruise passengers dotted the water ahead of us, bobbing along and drifting with the current. They didn’t seem to be going too fast, I noted as I watched them for clues as to what was going to happen to our raft next. And then,
bink!
—just like that, I heard some short, pierced screams and one of the rafts was just gone as if it had simply slipped off the horizon.

I caught my breath and tightened my grip on the board with my outside hand. I held my breath and watched the water. It was getting foamy. It was getting fast. It was starting to rush.

I heard another cluster of screams, and I looked up just in time to see that the second raft had dropped off, too.

Then, right before me, the water began to swirl and dip, and suddenly it was far below us, as if we were perched high up in a cliff of water.

And then we began falling, and as everything in my body seemingly stopped—my heartbeat, my breathing, everything but my now electric sense of fear—I knew this had been a stupid, stupid mistake.
This is bad,
my instincts flashed at me, as if I could do anything about it, as if I could do anything but wait for one more fraction of a second before that gray, pearly, freezing water hit me. And in one enormous gulp it had me, it had us, it had the whole raft. As we plunged in headfirst—“we” meaning me, Jamie, and Denny—it smacked us with a wave of breath-sucking cold water that drenched us as if we weren’t wearing any gear at all. When we emerged from the wave with a collective gasp, I was amazed that I was not in the water but still in the raft, clinging to the board as the current bounced us along and we headed toward another deep-water canyon ready to suck us in. Then I realized my new super-cute cat-eye glasses were not only wet but barely clinging to my head, and without thinking, I reached up with my inside hand and ripped them off, afraid of losing them in the next drop because there was no way insurance was going to cover something I had lost in the wilds of Alaska. But once I had them in my hand, I had nowhere to put them—I had no pockets in the slicker, and there was no time to undo the rubber jacket to get to my own sweater underneath. We were getting closer to the next set of rapids, and as the rushing of the water grew louder, I put my glasses in my mouth just as the raft turned diagonal and shot us down into another valley of turbulent water, and I hung on to the board as best I could, carrying my eyewear like a little dog would carry a stick.

I grunted as another wave swallowed us, and I grunted as the river tossed us all over, and I grunted some more as we fell into another dip. I couldn’t do anything but squall like a terrified hominid as everyone else who possessed the gift of language beyond primal sounds screamed as the waves of the river hit us again and again. My mind raced. This wasn’t the way this day was supposed to happen. We were supposed to float down the river, not tumble. I wanted to serenely glide past the scenery, not cling to a piece of plywood, grunting like a silverback with my glasses clenched between my teeth. As I was catching my breath but still too afraid to let go of the wood, we were finally pushed into a wider part of the river, which, though still swirling, was much calmer. The guide paddled us over toward a landing, where the two rafts I had watched disappear were already docked and were emptying of tourists.

My hands were frozen and still gripping the board when we docked, and I was finally able to look over at Jamie. She was drenched, with droplets of water clinging to her face. Denny, of course, was the first one out of the raft, and he leaped up and clambered over Jamie like a bow-legged squirrel, not even bothering to look back for his wife, whom I’m sure was probably too busy checking the dryness of whatever food supply she had tucked in her eighteen-hour bra anyway.

Jamie offered me her dripping wet hand and helped me out of the raft, and I followed her into the boathouse, where we removed our fisherman outfits and rubber boots, so traumatized we couldn’t even say a word to each other. Under her yellow slicker and life jacket, Jamie looked like she had just stepped out of a pool entirely clothed. I looked like someone had dumped buckets of water over my head. Someone handed each of us a napkin with a loose assembly of a Hickory Farms summer sausage chunk, a slice of cheddar cheese, and a Ritz cracker. Someone else gave us paper cups with warm apple cider in them, which we gulped down.

That was enough warmth to enable my mouth to begin to form words again and release the frozen clench my jaw had been locked in to keep my glasses from flying out of my mouth when I was hit with the g-force of a river tsunami.

“That wasn’t a serene float, that wasn’t even Splash Mountain,” I was finally able to say. “I feel like I just got waterboarded. I would have confessed to dating Carrot Top after one more wave!”

The sun was setting. We were freezing as we walked over to several large display boards with photos of people in rafts plastered all over them.

“Oh my god,” Jamie finally said as she raised a soaked, puckery finger up to one of them in which a woman in the first row looked bravely ahead, her teeth clenched, her expression steadfast; the next person had his gray, middle-aged head barely peeking out of his raincoat like a turtle; and the next one, hair plastered to her head in a wet helmet, eyes wide and googly, fleshy face bisected horizontally by what looked like a twig, was about to encounter one of the many waves that was rising up to smack her in the face like a mother’s impatient hand. Two additional outstanding features in this photo were the delight of the river guide, who was looking directly into the camera and grinning, and the possibility that a beehived someone in the last row appeared to be enjoying a bite of some sort of pastry.

“Oh, I get it,” I sighed, looking up at a sign stating that each photo of us teetering on the brink of a watery death was ten bucks. “I need undeniable proof that we did this, otherwise people are going to say we got drunk and made the whole thing up. I’m going to get one, are you?”

Jamie nodded. “I’ll put it in a frame next to my picture with Dolphin Man,” she said as she took the final bite of her meager sausage slice. “But this is the last damn time I pick an activity based on the snacks.”

To be honest, we were still feeling cheated about the lack of post-river-rafting/near-death selection of eatables, so as we were perusing the menu selection in the Italian restaurant on the ship that night, we decided it was only fair that we compensated ourselves for the ordeal. “I’m ordering everything I want,” I announced to my friend. “I’m getting the chicken, the gnocchi, the salad, the cheese plate, the soup and I am asking for
two
desserts. I am eating like a buffet person tonight! Don’t try to stop me. You cannot. I have the appetite of a beast and the manners of a windowless passenger. I am insatiable.”