Sep 12, 2014 3 min read

I’m back. I survived my whitewater rafting trip to Ohiopyle. It was a great adventure. We gathered at 10 a.m. in the parking lot of the raft rental place. There were 20 of us and five rafts.

My friend Matt organized the trip, and I didn’t know everyone. I did know all the people in my raft. I was lucky to get a raft with five of my closest friends. We were supposed to have five to a raft.

Math majors may have already guessed that if I was with five of my closest friends, there were actually six of us in the raft. There were two Mikes, two Chrises, a Jason and a Josh in one boat. We had to use last names and nicknames. I was Buzz, which is both a nickname and, at least, part of my last name.

A few miles down the river, we had to give one of our guys over to the boat that had four people in it. Connecting to the other boat in the river reminded me of spaceships docking. I wanted to say, “Docking procedure initiated,” in my HAL voice. One Chris hopped into the other raft. The captain of the other raft was named Wesley (there was only one Wesley on the trip). We waved to our former raftmate, and he and his new friends went down the river out of sight.

We had to do a lot of paddling. My arms were getting sore. I didn’t complain. Frankly, I was too terrified to complain. So, I pretended I was enjoying it. Ironically, I pretended to enjoy it long enough that I actually started enjoying it.

Then, my friend Chris went overboard. The other one. We lost half our crew at Dimple Rock, a notoriously dangerous set of rapids. Josh and Michael managed to get back in the boat. Not Chris. We reached out for him, but the current was too strong, and he floated away.

We tried to find a spot to pull over. Jason stuck his paddle out to a group of people parked along the shore, but the current was too strong and the people on shore ended up with Jason’s paddle. Now, we were down a man and two paddles. Suddenly, it was like a horror movie. We started with six guys and six paddles, now we had four guys and three paddles.

Further down the river, we found calm waters and pulled ashore. After a few minutes, Wesley’s raft came by. They rescued Chris and his paddle (technically, they now had both of our Chrises in their raft). They also managed to get Jason’s paddle back. We got our man and paddles back and set off downriver toward our next adventure.

We got much better at navigating the rapids. It started to become fun (for real this time). After a few hours on the river, we made it to the end. When we got ashore, we did a quick head count. All 20 of us made it to the endpoint. That’s a win in my book.