A (Very) Quick Dip

The next obstacle was kind of like the way Pittman described the whole program. It wasn’t that complicated. All we had to do was take our new rafts and bring them down a path to the river. But it wasn’t easy either. That trail was S-T-E-E-P. And those rafts were H-E-A-V-Y. By the time we carried them all the way down to the mighty Arkansas, I’d sweated a whole river of my own.

But at least I got another tag out of it. That, and the one I got for digging latrines, put me at five—halfway to the ten I needed before sunset the next day. Not too shabby. It finally felt like things were looking up.

For about a minute, anyway.

The place we came to was called a put-in, because that’s where people PUT their rafts IN the water. (I guess raft people don’t have much imagination.) There was a parking lot with a couple of trucks, some trailers with kayaks on them, and a big storage locker with life vests, wet suits, paddles, and I don’t know what else.

Even though you could see some rapids way downstream, the water by the put-in was calm, like a swimming hole. “Can we jump in?” I asked Pittman.

“If you want to,” she said. “But that river’s pretty cold.”

“Sounds good to me,” Arnie said. We already had our shoes off, and everyone headed right for the water. “Last one in is a rotten—”

In case you were wondering, that was the sound of eight kids screaming all at the same time.

When Pittman said the water was cold, I thought she meant it was just regular cold. Like coming-out-of-your-faucet cold or nice-cool-drink-of-water cold.

How was I supposed to know she meant eighty-below-zero, turn-you-into-an-ice-cube, hurts-just-to-touch-it, deadly-freezing-frozen cold? That water was chillier than Mrs. Stricker’s heart sitting on top of the North Pole on a cloudy day. Another half degree colder, and we would have been there for skating instead of rafting.

Let’s just say it was the world’s shortest swim.

By the time we got back on dry land, all you could hear was chattering teeth.

“We’re s-s-s-supposed to go r-r-r-RAFTING in th-th-that?” Diego said.

“Technically speaking, you’ll be rafting on the river, not in it,” Pittman said. “Besides, that’s what the wet suits are for.”

“How about dry suits? You got any of those?” Burp said.