Tom Sawyer Day
My river-rafting adventure started on a bicycle. The small
daypack I wore carried a hatchet, a saw, some scraps of rope,
food, water, a garbage bag bivy sack, a hat, and odds and ends.
It weighed less than fifteen pounds total.
It was late May, so Id stay warm in my homemade bivy, without a
sleeping bag. I might wear my hat, and pile up some leaves to
sleep on. If the mosquitos were bad, I'd use my headnet, which,
I had learned, would also trap warm air around my head, keeping
me warmer. I had matches and a lighter, in case I needed a fire
in an emergency.
Thirty miles of pedaling had brought me from my home in Traverse
City, Michigan, down the backroads to the Baxter Bridge, on the
Manistee River. It was almost 10 a.m. I pushed the bicycle into
the woods, and rolled it along, lifting it over logs, until I
was a mile upstream. Looking around at the trees, I knew this
was the place to start the river rafting part of the trip.
Sometimes Adventure Involves A Lot Of Work
The first tree was the biggest, and I almost couldn't drag the
ten-foot sections to the river after cutting them. They were
perfect, however. Dead, dry-rotted Poplar was always good,
because it was like styrofoam inside. It cut easy, and floated
well. White Cedar was the best quality, but it was more
difficult to find, and to cut.
When I had hauled enough logs to the river, I got into the water
and pulled the first two pieces in after me. I tied them
together, then tied two long thin poles to them perpendicularly
near either end. The other logs were guided, one by one, under
these two rails, and tied in place.
By early afternoon I was finished. With the last piece of rope,
I tied the raft to shore. I cut a good rafting pole to guide me.
I was ready.
Tom Sawyer Day
My first river rafting adventure had involved four of us. I
advertised it to my friends as an adventure-disaster, sure to
get them wet and cold. Three took the bait. Apart from snacks
and water, we took only a hatchet, a small saw, and whatever
scraps of rope we could find. It all fit into a small backpack.
We parked near the river and hiked a trail upstream until we
were a few miles from the car. The plan was to build a raft,
using only dead trees and our scraps of rope. We would then get
on it and go rafting back to the car.
It was dubbed "Tom Sawyer Day," and became a much anticipated
event among an ever-changing group of participants. Since it
was, in equal parts, fun and dangerous, we didn't usually bring
beer. Even sober, it was enough of a challenge to keep a
thousand-pound pile of logs, with four people on it, from going
where it wanted to go. Where it wanted to go inevitably involved
pain and cold water, but with each trip I managed to learn a
little. Sometimes we even stayed dry.
Sometimes Adventure Involves Math
The first trip, Roland and I were cutting and hauling logs to
the river, while Cathy and Leslie cooked hotdogs over a fire. We
began to do geometry on a piece of birchbark, trying to figure
out how many logs were needed, allowing for the dishonesty of
the women's stated weights.
"Cedar weighs 37 pounds per cubic foot," I told Roland, "leaving
a lifting capacity of about 27 pounds, given that water is 64
pounds per cubic foot." The girls were laughing at me. "The
volume of a cylindrical object is pi times the radius squared,
times the length, right?"
Roland agreed. We counted out the logs and began to build the
raft. When finished, we had a floating pile of old rotten logs
and two frightened women.
Sometimes Adventure Involves Getting Wet
Leslie and Cathy sat on a stump in the middle of the raft.
Roland and I stood with our poles, ready to fend off the banks
of the river and the overhanging trees. We did this successfully
for at least fifteen minutes.
Then, when a low, horizontal tree refused to move, Roland pushed
us all off in order to regain his balance. We quickly gave up
trying to find the bottom of the river, and swam after the raft.
Sputtering and cursing at Roland, the three of us climbed back
on.
This first rafting trip was in late April, when the water is
still like ice. The sun warmed us, but our feet were almost
always in the water. It was bad enough that the raft didn't
float very high off the water, but then it began to change shape
before our eyes and under our feet. "It's a square. No wait!
It's a parallelagram... Now it's a square again." The girls
decided that there was too much geometry in river rafting, so a
few minutes later we let the raft drift close to the shore,
where they stepped off into the shallow water.
The water, however, wasn't shallow. Once the girls had
resurfaced, and climbed up the sandy bank of the river, we waved
goodbye. The trail took them to and from the river on their way
to the car.
The next time we saw them, Leslie was hiking in her wet bra and
panties. This part of the adventure story was crucial to
recruiting other young males in the future. The trail went into
the forest again, and the girls didn't see us for thirty
minutes.
Sometimes Adventure Involves Running
Actually, they saw the raft first, floating quietly down the
river by itself. Soon they saw Roland and I, running along the
opposite side, trying to catch up. This was because of a tree
that stuck out from the bank, low to the water.
We were unable to avoid it, despite our excellent rafting
skills, but we thought we could jump over it as the raft passed
underneath. It seemed like a reasonable plan at the time. It
didn't seem so reasonable when Roland was pushing my face into
the sicks in the tree while climbing over me to get to shore.
The raft went on, not noticing our absence. We ran through swamp
and woods, pretending this was part of the plan when the girls
saw us. The raft came near the riverbank just as we caught up to
it. We leapt for it, and we were back in control. More or less.
"How do we get off?" Roland asked, when we were near the car. We
decided that we just had to get close to shore and jump. It
seemed like a good idea. Roland was still hanging over the river
from a tree when I started up the big hill to the car. Tom
Sawyer Days went a little smoother after this first one.
Sometimes Adventure Involves Being Pointed At
After pedaling thirty miles and hauling logs for hours, I was
tired, but satisfied. It was the best raft yet, and I was soon
rafting down the river, under Baxter Bridge, and into the
National Forest. I noticed immediately that these rafts float
better with only one person on them. There was just one small
group of houses to pass before a long uninhabited stretch. My
bicycle stood proudly in the center of the raft, tied in place,
with the backpack on the handlebars. The first guy to see me
yelled hello, and pointed me out to his wife. The second didn't
know what to say. The Manistee is not a well-traveled river,
especially not by bicyclists. A few minutes later I was past the
houses. Around the next bend, a whitetail deer saw me and backed
off through the cattails.
I floated for hours. Apparently my previous river rafting
experience was paying off, because I managed to miss the trees,
rocks, riverbanks, and to stay dry. I was even able to sit down
and soak up the sun for a minute or two at a time. The latter
was always interrupted, of course, by the necessity to jump up
and use the pole to avoid something.
In the evening, I stopped, disassembled the raft, and began
pushing my bicycle through the woods. A mile later I found a
trail, and started pedalling. A mile after that I met two guys
on a two-track, with there truck. The ice-cold beer they gave me
made them instant friends, so I told them that, no, I wasn't out
bicycling. I was river rafting. Then they weren't sure they
wanted a new friend, so I traveled on.
Sixty miles of bicycling, miles of pushing the bike through the
woods, three hours of log-hauling, and five hours of rafting,
all in one day, seemed like a worthy goal, so I decided to just
head for home. And the mosquitos were worse than I had
anticipated.
Sometime after dark I rolled into the driveway, dropped the
bike, and stumbled into the house. I took a shower and answered
the phone. It was time to go dancing.