rafting at night

Mistake number one.

I picked up Joshua last night and he and I and Ryan went downtown for the opening ceremonies of ARTOWN, Reno’s annual month-long art festival. Despite getting there early it was crowded already, and finding a good place to lay out the blanket on the slope was proving impossible. We ended up back quite a way, out by the river bridge. It was a nice spot, but it was too hard to see, so we eventually gave up and I took Ryan home and put him to bed. Joshua and I mulled over whether we wanted to see a movie or go rafting. Why rafting was an option at that hour is still a mystery, but rafting won despite the cool air and building wind.

We shoved the three-man raft, the oars and the air pump in the back of the jeep, left all our valuables at home and drive over to the lake. Aside from a few loners dotted along various points on the shoreline, fishing, we had the lake mostly to ourselves.

We inflated the raft and threw our shoes in the back of the jeep and locked it up, and carried the raft to the boat launch on the northwest edge of the lake. The water was nice, a little cooler than usual, but at least not cold and we put the raft in. I jumped in and then Joshua, who, I’ll note, had never been rafting a day in his life, attempted to get in. It didn’t go well.

He couldn’t get his balance and ended up falling out, filling the raft with an inch of water and nearly dumping me out over the side. I, laughing, got out and had him get in first. He did and then I did and then we were fine.

It was dark, but the beach area was well lit and at the time visibility was good. I took the oars and we planned to hug the shoreline so that, just in case something should happen, we wouldn’t have too far to swim. And it was a nice float. The stars were out, the breeze was light. The water was calm but moving in the direction we had aimed ourselves for, making things easier, and us more complacent about what we were doing.

I rowed for awhile, by then only about 50 feet offshore. We wove in and out of the coves and inlets and then Joshua decided to try his hand at rowing, too, so I leaned my head back on the raft and watched the sky move, relaxed with the undulation of the raft on the water, choppier now, until he was tired of rowing and I took over again.

By the time we were about halfway around the circumference of the lake, it was about 10 o’clock. The few fishermen that had been along the shoreline earlier were packing up and starting to leave, and the cool, night wind was picking up. I noticed we had been drifting closer to the shoreline, and I didn’t want to beach the raft and tear it, so we made a hefty rowing effort to push ourselves further out toward the middle of the lake.

Twenty minutes or so went by and I noticed how fast the wind, now cold, was pushing us toward the sharp rocks on the eastern edge. This definitely wasn’t a heavy-duty raft and wouldn’t survive a tangle with them, and it was a very long walk around in bare feet if we should find ourselves stranged, so I nudged Joshua to look behind him and we both grabbed an oar.

I hadn’t yet realized how difficult it would be to keep ourselves away from those rocks. The wind was blowing hard, now, and we were in shorts and t-shirts being pummeled by waves as they rocking us back and forth, making rowing with enough synchronicity to move us against that wind even harder.

But we pointed ourselves away from the rocks and in the direction of the beach where we had started out. We could barely see the lights defining the shoreline this far out, and aiming for that stretch of beach meant crossing the middle of the deepest and darkest part of the lake.

By now we’re shivering. It was tempting to curl up in the bottom of the boat to get warm, but we knew if we weren’t rowing now as hard as we could that we’d be in trouble, and there was nobody around to notice.

So we worked our oars, one after the other as hard as we could to the northwest against a wind blowing due east. We alternated between making progress forward and getting tossed backward again. This went on for about an hour, while the waves got rougher and water starting to come into the raft. My bare feet, I can’t believe I lacked so much foresight, are nearly frozen.

By then Joshua had started getting nervous, and frankly, so was I. We were sure we’d run out of steam before the wind did. But we kept on.

Finally we reached a spot farther away from the rocks than we’d been able to get up to that point, and, motivating by that, we pushed ourselves even harder. Shortly after, our luck turned around, finally, and the wind died down enough to enable us to gain some distance away from the rocks and toward the beach. I remember wondering what time it was and if my family was worried that we hadn’t come back yet.

We finally reached shore about midnight, nearly three full hours after we’d started out, and collapsed on the beach without a word. I vaguely remember a little while later getting up and quietly pulling the raft toward the Jeep, still inflated, and shoving it into the back, not caring about holes, and slammed the door.

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