It’s raining hard when we first see the river. We sit in the car and look over the scene from a muddy turnout at a fishing access. Windshield wipers slog away, and the heater blunts the spring chill.
This section of the upper Madison River is normally a pleasant, steady float, the kind of mild descent where you can recline with your legs stretched out on the gunwales, watching the Montana scenery coast past.
Today it’s a brawny flow just below flood stage, full of standing waves and river flotsam. The boat ramp is half under water. Every few minutes another big log comes bobbing downstream like a bumpy, slow-moving torpedo.
“This river is bookin’!” are my first words.
My river-running adrenaline immediately kicks in. The pedestrian float suddenly looks like it might be pretty exciting. This stretch is more float-fishing stream than whitewater run, no matter what the water level, but right now it looks like there are plenty of small riffles, strong eddies, and nice little rollicking wave trains.
We’ve been planning this outing for weeks. It’s to be our shakedown cruise for a summer of paddling with two little boys. Eli’s a year and a half and tough to restrain. Sawyer’s not quite three months, still a chubby infant. Another couple plans to join us with their year-old daughter. The idea was to do a docile float and concentrate on kid containment and diversion strategies.
Every weekend for a month we’ve made plans, only to have something come up and postpone them. Finally we’re here, loaded down with tiny life vests, harnesses, toy buckets and rubber ducks, crackers and dried bananas for those teething gums.
We have all afternoon before meeting our friends at the river campsite that will be our put-in, so we dawdle along upstream, pulling out at every access, every bridge, for another view of spring-swollen current.
“Look at that,” we keep saying. “This thing is goin’ like hell!”
Back there niggling away in whatever part of the brain the center of judgment occupies there are faint little questioning voices. “Don’t forget the kids,” they say. “Is this really what you had in mind?”
But the urge to run this fast river is powerful. Weeks of frustrated attempts to go paddling have steeled our resolve. There’s no question we can handle this water.
Once in a while a stubborn image of a mishap worms out of my subconscious. Capsize in snowmelt water, babies adrift in current that isn’t shy about its captives. But I lock these images back up, conceal them under a lust for fun and the simple, ponderous inertia that has built up behind this jaunt.
Our buddies pull in to camp around dinnertime. The weather has cleared and warmed; looks good for the morning. Within minutes they stroll down to look at the Madison. They’re gone a long time.
“What do you think?” Scott asks, when they come back.
“Looks like fun,” Marypat says. “It’s higher than we’ve ever seen it, but it still is pretty mild whitewater.”
“Yeah,” Sue agrees. “It does look like fun, but what about the kids?”
Nobody says anything for a bit. “Still seems doable,” I venture, finally.
We have a nice little fire in camp, share a bottle of wine. The kids all go down. Distant thunderheads bump over the Madison Range, far-off lightning stitches the night sky. The hurrying river is clearly audible several hundred yards off.
I don’t sleep all that well. The sound of the river is always there, intruding, and the small voices are more insistent in the dark, the visions more vivid. I hear Marypat stirring too. And I listen for minutes at a time to the soft, quick breathing of our two little boys.
I’m first up in the clear morning, working on coffee. By the time it’s ready Marypat is getting dressed, primed for her first cup.
“I think Scott and Sue are pretty concerned,” I say, when I hand her coffee to her. “Actually, I’m kind of concerned too.”
“Let’s not do it, then.” Her words are abrupt, out of the blue. “Why don’t we go do that stretch lower down, the one we said we’d never do again?”
“Perfect,” I agree. “I’ll go ask those guys.”
Scott and Sue leap at the new option. “We were thinking of plan B, too,” they say.
The mood in our camp is suddenly lighthearted and energized; relief is palpable. The new objective is a bit of river always crowded with those silly yellow rafts, peopled by beer-drinking floaters who wouldn’t know an eddy from a hot dog. Even at high water the current is barely thigh deep, with hardly a riffle. Normally it’s a float we’d disdain, the last place we’d ever go. But this morning it’s exactly right, just the kind of thing we were thinking of for the kids. All it took was for one of us to say it out loud.
There’s a truism in the world of risk sports that goes something like this: “Never let desire overwhelm your better judgment” (see this page-this page). Whenever someone recites it everyone else automatically nods in agreement. We’ve all heard the tragedies of folks who ignored that advice. Some of us have had friends who died ignoring it.
STAY FLEXIBLE
Flexibility is a condition of parenthood. Kids force us to become adaptable. Without some give, family life is a very long lesson in frustration.
On the water with a family, flexibility is pretty close to a survival necessity. Children don’t have the same agenda as parents most of the time, and travel together is a fairly constant exercise in compromise and negotiation. Being open to suggestion, and to the needs of offspring, is a major part of succeeding in the watery wilds.
Flexibility in the overall plan is also critical. If conditions change, water comes up, weather goes to hell, a child gets sick, it’s time to reconsider. It helps to have a few other options if things don’t go as planned. Another piece of river, going for a walk instead, visiting some friends, finding a beach and never getting on the water. Kids don’t know they should be disappointed. Likely they’ll be just as happy playing in the mud on the riverbank as in the canoe—maybe happier.
It’s one thing to inflict misery on yourself or on a few adult companions, but kids are a different matter. More than once we’ve called off a trip and headed home because the weather turned awful or conditions weren’t what we thought they’d be. There’s nothing shameful in saying no, and there’s too much to lose by taking chances.
Trust your intuition. If those little voices are sounding the alarm, listen up. Chances are other people in the group are hearing the same doubting chorus and will be tremendously relieved when someone has the courage to bring it up.
We all nod automatically, but in those moments of adventure lust, when all the effort of preparation, built-up desire, expense, and resolve is bunched up behind you with the momentum of a freight train, the toughest thing of all is to turn away and go home, even when it’s only a weekend float on a neighborhood stream.