14:36
Where I am from there is this big river that runs through the middle of the town called the Todd River. Except there is no fucking water in it. None. It’s totally just a dried up riverbed. It’s the desert, man. What do you expect? Though it’s not always dry. After it has rained a lot (and I mean A LOT. Like constantly and hard. For days and days) it flows like crazy. There are only two bridges that go across the river so when it flows it’s like half of the town gets cut off. Nobody ever really goes into it when it is dirty, because the creek bed is generally full of beer cans and broken glass, so no motherfuckers really want to get cut and have shitty water give them beer AIDS or something. It also tends to flow pretty fast, and it isn’t uncommon that people get swept away. But when you are a group of restless (and reckless) kids stranded in the centre of giant continent far from any naturally flowing water a shitty glass river is the best thing that can happen to you.
This was a few years ago, I think we were nineteen or twenty, and it had been raining like fuck for over a week. And I hated rain, man, because I rode my bike everywhere. So it had been a week of my just being constantly frustrated and permanently soaked. It was a Sunday and we were all pretty hungover from three days of having nothing else to do but drink everything that looked mildly alcoholic. There were four of us, me, Smitty, Kingy and Nathanael and we were all feeling rough. There was no possible way that we could pass the time by poisoning our bodies with $19 vodka that tasted like spraying a can of deodorant on your tongue (either that or we were too broke). And why would we, anyway? The rain was clearing, we had a car, an inflatable raft and no thought for our physical well being. Actually, we didn’t have an inflatable raft. My roommate had a raft, but she didn’t really need it and we had important business to conduct. Way too important to wait around and ask permission to borrow it.
We loaded that plastic boat into Smitty’s car and we drove out of town. The river runs for a long way and there were some awesome rocky drops and whatever further from where we lived. The place we found was perfect; there were giant rocks on the inside of the river bed that made it a lot more narrow, making the water flow crazy fast to push through the small gap, and it all led to a drop of about a meter into the shallow riverbed below. We unloaded the raft and let Smitty do all of the hard work inflating it while we spray painted out names and rank on the sides. We thought we could each have a rank like pirate dudes on a boat or whatever would have, but we’re all pretty dumb and it eventually amounted to either being captain, first mate, second mate and third, not quite as good, mate. I’m pretty sure that’s how shit gets done in the Navy.
Because there were four of us and only one raft no one wanted to take turns. We were a crew, man. Either we all sail to our death or none of us do. This raft was not built for four people, though. It was, like, one of those shitty plastic two person rafts that you are meant to float around on a lake with some babe on a beautiful afternoon. But not this afternoon. We were going to war with the ocean this afternoon. Ocean, shitty river. Same thing. It took, like, five minutes every time to get everyone on the raft. Because we all had to fit on this small plastic thing without capsizing it and without letting the boat fly away down the river. The first time we all finally road down the river of death we flew between these two giant rocks and flipped our shit and all got swept under the water. The riverbed was full of rocks and I smashed my head and my foot on them and I could hardly walk for the rest of the day.
We went again and again, continually falling victim to this super mean river. We just wanted to make it to the waterfall and ride over like heroes, but it kept throwing us around and smashing our bodies against sharp and jagged rock daggers. But eventually we made it. We were going over the waterfall. We were going to fall gracefully and land in the water below, finally conquering this river and stupid nature as a whole. King of men, animals, plants and earth. Kings of stupid water. But instead our raft slowed down rapidly as it hit the rock leading over the edge and we all got spat out into the water below.
Now I should kind of point out that I am not a very strong swimmer. I’m a man, not a stupid dolphin. I don’t need to swim everywhere. As soon as we hit the water I swam straight to the riverbank, but stupid Nathanael behind me was, like, “TJ blaraghagah HELP ME blarghhhala”. I didn’t save him, though. I was too busy concentrating on saving myself. I know that doesn’t sound very heroic, but if this story was a Die Hard movie Nathanael would be from, like, Croatia or something and he would be trying to install a virus into everyone’s Xbox. He swam back to the thing, though, so I guess that’s kind of a happy ending.
The best part of the story, though, was when we were collecting our raft and going back to the start to do it again. We passed this old lady who was there walking her dog. As we walked by her was all said hello and whatever, and she turned and looked at us and said “When I was a girl my friend died out here” and then she walked away. She might have been a ghost maybe trying to warn us, but we were having too much fun to take any notice.
When we got home, covered in mud and blood and cuts and scrapes, I took my roommate’s newly spray painted and destroyed raft and hid it around the side of the house. It stayed there for about six months before anyone even noticed what had happened.
