It Was Never the Same, After the Accident

On Saturday, my fraternity took a float trip on a river which I think was the Illinois. It ran next to Tahlequah and was deceptively deep at the slow parts. Though initially I put on a life jacket for laughs (it was a bright orange block of foam with a toilet seat hole at the top for a head), I eventually wore it for actual safety. Treading water is exhausting.

Our float trips always end up as enormous pirate fights, so this year we decided to skip the calm before the storm and jump directly into Thunderstruck. At the very first bend, the occupants of a raft that had disappeared early on came running out of the woods, flipped a raft and its riders, and stole all the paddles. By the end of the trip, no one was using the original oar they started with. Two guys who were Lewis and Clarking it in their own raft, didn't even finish with a raft - it was stolen about a mile away from our ending point. They had to hitchhike the river back to camp.

This whole ordeal reminded me of a very bad first date I had during the spring semester of my freshman year. Two couples who I was friends with skipped class to go canoeing; I was invited, and in turn invited a girl I didn't know very well. It was an invitation I didn't expect her to accept, but she did.

I'm not very good on the river. I sat in the back, and was in charge of steering. At one dangerously fast (for me) portion, I miscalculated and steered the canoe directly into a fallen tree. The canoe turned sideways, and water began flowing rapidly into it. Katelyn, this girl, screamed - more so because the water was cold than anything else - but I, in a state of confusion and embarrassment, shouted, "DON'T WORRY - I WILL SAVE YOU!" in all seriousness. As it turned out, the river was only two feet deep.

We beached the canoes and got into the car at sundown, wet and cold. Then, on the way home, we blew a tire in an area with no cell phone coverage. Then the car battery died. We sat in an old Jeep Cherokee with no light for five hours while we waited for someone to find us.'

Shortly thereafter, Katelyn joined the ROTC and got a colorful tattoo that spanned both her shoulderblades. We don't see each other much anymore.