Canoeing on the Buffalo River
In August of '96, Elizabeth, CJ, and I went on a canoe trip, with a church group, on the Buffalo River in Tennessee. Meg made the trip with us but chose to stay safely on shore. There were lots of people on the river, kind of like driving down a freeway where nobody knows how to drive. Elizabeth paddled in front first, CJ in the middle and me in back, and we didn't work together real well because Liz thought she ought to be able to steer, and she didn't approve of the way I was steering. Next we put CJ in front and Liz in the middle, and Liz liked that because she could tell us both what to do. I told her it was too bad she forgot her drum. CJ did ok except he would get tired and quit paddling about the time we were approaching the tree branches or were about to crash into the bank. We finally put Liz in back, and found out about how much expertise she really had. We tacked downstream, hitting both riverbanks and every canoe in the vicinity at least once, and got entirely turned around once. She says it wasn't her fault.
The night before, someone asked if we would take the whole family in one canoe or was that too many people. I said it was too many strong minds.
It wasn't without hazards. The current was really strong, and the water was high because it had rained more or less constantly for two weeks, so a lot of the tree branches and rocks that are normally visible were submerged. One of our group got their canoe wedged into a submerged tree so badly they couldn't get it out. When the rental company went to get their canoe, they cut the tree and found two other canoes underneath theirs. We got ourselves tangled in a tree once and ended up with me on my back with a branch pinning my chest down, and the current was too strong for the kids to push us upstream, but I lifted that branch off like those olympic weightlifters and got us free.
So we almost died but otherwise it was uneventful, and a good time was had by all.