This story starts with my friend Sarah approaching me at work, seeking my involvement in a River Days raft-building competition. Contestants were supposed to build a raft from milk jugs and race them down the river, meeting at this weird bridge-like structure that people in our city are obsessed with for some reason. I’ve always wondered why. I’m assuming that is where the race was supposed to end. We never actually got that far into our first annual watercraft competition because, naturally, Sarah was scheduled to work on the day of the race—another plan thwarted by the man.
We were bummed out about not being able to participate, but the notion of creating a monstrosity, the likes of which no one had ever seen, had already been planted in our minds. That was when I got a brilliant idea (spoiler alert: all my ideas are brilliant). I remembered a river we used to canoe down as a kid and figured we could build a raft with our specifications. Sarah agreed that this was a fabulous idea, and we arranged to have the following Wednesday off from work, with plans to create a magnificent water vessel and go down that very river.
But first, we needed to set some ground rules for ourselves. It had to be reasonably tricky because we were the only team entering the competition, and we didn’t want it to be an easy win:
Rule number one: No tools are allowed to prepare and construct the raft.
Rule number two: The budget for our raft must come in under $20.
Rule number three: We would have fun. Sarah and I are very laid-back people, and with all the stuff we’ve been through together since our friendship began in September of 1997, we have never argued once.
This journey would be the actual test of our friendship.
Rule number four: We both needed to survive the trip (this was the most important rule, but it was an afterthought to the guidelines because we thought only three rules seemed a little amateurish, and we considered ourselves professionals).
It wasn’t all spun sugar and orange drink. We needed to overcome a few hurdles in terms of creativity.
Due to the strict rules we had implemented (which we were complete sticklers about, by the way), but couple that with the fact that both Co-Captains to the ship and all building materials needed to fit into a Chevy Cobalt Coupe for the trip up North, and our dreams for building the coolest water vessel ever to sail across our state were starting to crack around the edges.
But, like all great adventurers before us, we persevered. It was a tight fit, and the backseat of that car would never be normal again, but we loaded everything up the car and to my Dad’s house to begin assembling our watercraft.
We first stopped at what was to be our “exit bridge” to check the water depth to make sure we weren’t wasting our time. It looked great, about four feet deep, with clear water and a steady current. We gave each other a high-five and set up the task at hand.
Since our allotted raft-building fund was $20, our entire budget went to purchase two rolls of duct tape and three 5-gallon buckets with lids. Including the buckets, we got for free from work, which gave us ten buckets with lids.
That needed to be more acreage for both of us to fit on. We scrounged in my Dad’s garage and found two more buckets (no lids) and two bungee straps.
Our material list now includes:
• 12-5-gallon buckets
• 10-bucket lids
• 1–5-foot board
• 1-4.5-foot board
• 3–4-foot boards
• 19-bungee straps
• two rolls of duct tape
Essentially, we ended up with a base of three boards (one long enough) and four buckets, each duct-taped parallel to them and bungee-strapped together to form a raft of 3×4 buckets. We also duct-taped the two buckets without lids. What would you do?
We were now ready for the maiden voyage of the Norwegian Cruise Liner Ashake (Ashake because it is a compilation of Ashanti and Burke, and Norwegian because I’m pretty sure I’m Irish, and I don’t know what Sarah is, so Norwegian was neutral). Fun fact: Ashake means “shaking or trembling, especially continuously.” You know, unstable. What an interesting foreshadow.
Once we finished producing our fantastic raft, which weighed approximately 80 pounds, it was determined that there was no possible way we were carrying this beast from my Dad’s house to the next road over where our “entry bridge” was located—about three miles away. Fortunately, my Dad’s wife was home, so we loaded the Ashake into her van and headed for the river I remembered from my youth.
It turns out that a lot can change in 25 years, and what I remembered as a beautiful flowing river was now a green, slimy trickle of a ‘crick’ about five inches deep and three feet across. That would not work, so we went where we knew the water was deep—to our “exit bridge.”
The East side of the “exit bridge” is in Someone’s yard now, and they have flower gardens that we didn’t want to trample. The West side of the bridge is a rock wall with a three-foot diameter hole that is so deep you can’t see the bottom (I’m 97% sure a family of pythons lives in that hole), followed by a four-foot drop to a butt-load of rocks that you get to climb over before you reach the actual water. I felt cozy and safe while juggling our 80-pound bucket raft down this embankment.
But finally, we made it to the water. That was when we realized we weren’t even sure the Ashake would stay afloat on its own, never mind with us sitting on it.
So, in one of those surreal moments in my life, when everything goes slow-motion, nature is silenced, and I think to myself, “Oh, my gosh, what was I thinking? It’s too late to turn back; I will look like an idiot.
Oh, that’s right. I don’t know how to swim, so what will my obituary say if this doesn’t work out? It’s too late, too late…” I held my breath and jumped on. And it stayed afloat. Sarah jumped on next, and it still stayed afloat. We high-fived each other, picked up our four-foot deck board oars, and took off down the river. Slowly.
We waved goodbye to Dad’s wife, who was watching from the bridge to proudly photograph the historic beginning of our epic journey. She was undoubtedly happy to be in such proximity to the genius that is us, and off we went.
We made it about 60 yards before we hit the first barrier reef. I had never seen so much gravel in my life that was not part of a parking lot, and looking ahead of us in the river, all you could see were currents with large, jagged rocks protruding from the water. Still, we remained hopeful and proceeded down the river on foot, pulling our raft behind because the water was too shallow to ride it.
At last, we reached the end of the Great Barrier Reef and jumped back onto the raft. We high-fived each other again because our sparkling awesomeness would finally pay off, and we would cruise the river on our super-cool raft. About 27 feet later, we bottomed out on another gravel patch. Sigh.
Whatever.
It went on like this for quite some time, and then we reached our first beaver dam.
I don’t know why we were surprised.
The name of this river is Beaver River.
I don’t know why it surprised us that there would be beavers in this river or why it never occurred to either of us until that very moment that we might encounter at least one beaver dam.
But it didn’t. Not for a second, until that moment, when I’m sure we were both thinking the same thing, but neither of us voiced it aloud. This would be a long, arduous trip fraught with misfortune, and we were still determining where we were headed.
Toward a lake, maybe?
The last house we passed was who-knows-how-far back. I remember it fondly because it was the first deep part of the river we had come across since the beginning of our voyage. We didn’t know how deep the river was at the time, and it wasn’t until Sarah moved the wrong way on the raft and flipped off backward that we discovered we were finally, fortunately for her, floating on more than two feet of water.
But here we were, lifting our 150 (I could have sworn it was only 80 when we started) pound raft over this beaver dam, and scurrying after it so it wouldn’t get away without us. Then, the river went shallow again.
Me: Nice day for a walk, hahaha.
Sarah: <looking at me like she’s trying to explode my head with her mind>
Me: <hoping she doesn’t remember this was all my idea>
Me: If we see somebody, we should ask where the nearest bridge is.
Sarah: You can introduce us as Pocahontas and Sacagawea and tell them Lois and Clark abandoned us on the river.
Me: Lois and Clark? Do you mean “Lewis and Clark”?
Sarah: Oh, hahaha, yeah, Lois and Clark were Spiderman and his girlfriend.
Me: You mean Superman?
Sarah: You know what I mean. Idiot.
…Meanwhile, our raft is floating down the river, and we’re following behind when we come to an even more giant beaver dam. It was more of a beaver dam/waterfall/Mother Nature’s attempt to drown people.
We flipped the raft and watched it float away without us, and then I tried to climb after it. The funny thing about this dam is that the water on our side was about eight inches deep, but if you stepped over to the other side, it dropped off to four feet.
I didn’t know that, but I figured it out pretty quickly when I lost my footing and landed straddling a log. I rolled away from the log, tripped over another log, and almost tumbled backward into the river. It was only my cat-like reflexes that saved me. (Not really, Sarah grabbed my hand; I was trying to make myself sound much cooler than this story hints at.)
We needed to figure out what the river had in store for us next, as we watched the Ashake disappear behind the next bend in the river.
It had been quite some time since we worried about letting her out of our sight, as we were fairly certain a rocky ledge or a beaver dam would hold her until we caught up. But our experiences up to that point didn’t prepare us for what we saw when we turned that corner. (On foot, of course, because this whole rafting excursion wasn’t panning out like we had intended. Who needs to ride a raft when you can carry it down the river, right?)
Me: What is that?
It looks like the river dead-ended.
Sarah: It’s a massive beaver dam. It goes all the way across, and it’s too high to climb over.
Plus, there might be spiders.
We’re going to have to carry it ashore and go around.
Me: Right, let’s check out the path…
<I head ashore to see how clear the pathway is>
I’m heading ashore on the right bank, to see how easy it will be to haul the Ashake in and dry-dock her until we’re past this big-huge-astronomically-ridiculous beaver dam. I expected the sand on shore to be nice and stable; perhaps my feet would sink in a little for traction. Instead, I got the most deceptively slippery mucky slime we could have encountered.
I’m slipping and sliding in this muck, my arms flailing about, my legs kicking as though independent of my body, doing a weird sort of dance on the side of the river (which is probably how river-dancing started. Someone built a raft, and then boom! River-dance).
Somehow, with all the helpless kicking and flailing, I managed to make a 180-degree turn, so I was facing Sarah, who was laughing so hard she probably peed in the river. I caught myself from falling about 17 times, unable to free myself from the oily muck beneath my feet, when finally, I just gave up, fell on my butt, and rolled into the river. Sarah had her camera ready by the time I hit the ground and was able to capture the moment on film.
We then decided that since we were stopped cold, we might as well rebuild the raft for stability, since it had taken quite a beating by this point. Once the repairs were completed, we carried out 237-pound raft ashore and set her afloat again on the other side.
We continued for about 30 more yards, when…
Me: I wonder where we are.
Sarah: I’ll check the GPS on my phone…okay, we’re on Long Road…no, we’re on Peterson Road…no, we’re on River Road. Oh, never mind. It just gives us a general vicinity.
Me: That’s helpful. There’s a fence, we’re behind Someone’s farm. I will climb out and follow the river to see how long this dam is…
…7 minutes later…
Me: HEY SARAH, CAN YOU HEAR ME?
Sarah: YEA
Me: CAN YOU SEE ME?
Sarah: NO
Me: WELL, I CAN SEE YOU, YOU’RE ABOUT 30 YARDS AWAY. THIS DAM IS HUGE, I’M COMING BACK.
….7 minutes later…
Me: This dam is huge, Sarah. There’s no way through it, and we’ll have to go around it.
Sarah: You have got to be kidding me.
Me: …as funny as that is, I’m not. We’ll have to take the raft apart again and haul it downstream in pieces.
Sarah: Okay, but we’re not going up this side, there was a spider. We’ll go up to the other side, where those concrete chunks are.
As it turns out, our options for getting out of this river were a steep dirt slope or a steep slope covered in broken slabs of concrete, at the top of which stood a fence. We disassembled the Ashake again, throwing all the pieces to the top of the side with the concrete and trying to climb up after it. That didn’t work out and resulted in a miniature landslide of concrete that seems extremely dangerous now that I look back on it.
Jesus was with us on that river.
Deciding we would rather not drown in this river, crushed under concrete slabs, we clambered up the sandy riverbank instead, figuring we could cross over again once we got past the beaver dam. We would then come back to our raft pieces, carry them back downstream, and reassemble the Ashake again.
Easy-peasy.
When we got beyond the dam, we discovered that getting down into the river from this side would be no easy task. It was a five-foot drop onto a sandbar and then a quick walk to the river. I went first, preparing myself for the drop and praying that my knees and ankles didn’t give out on me. And 1…2…3…jump!
I’m not sure what I landed in, but sand it most certainly was not. I sank shin-deep into some sloppy, soupy, pudding-like concoction Mother Nature spewed up from the bottom of the creek bed. I wriggled my way out of it (surprisingly without losing a shoe) and turned around to see Sarah sink shin-deep in the same glop. I understood then why she found it so funny when I had fallen earlier.
Walking back upstream to pick up the pieces of our broken dreams…I mean raft…I glanced over at the fence and noticed the bottom two cables were wire, but the top one looked like a clothesline. And in a momentary lapse of good judgment:
Me: Hey, this one isn’t electric; it’s just a rope…
<I reached out and squeezed it between my thumb and two fingers. Just as I did this, I looked over at the fencepost and saw the connectors, realizing my mistake too late. Time stopped.
I noticed Sarah out of the corner of my eye, running toward me in slow-motion, screaming…
Sarah: NNOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!!!!!!!! DON’T TOUCH THAT, IT’S…
I didn’t hear the rest of what she was saying because I was being electrocuted. Later, I would find out that Sarah was telling me the fence was, in fact, electric.
Me: OW!
That went through my whole body; it felt like Someone punched me in the ass!
Sarah: Are you okay?
Me: Yea, but that’s not like any electric fence I’ve ever seen. Good thing my hands were wet. Don’t touch that, it’s hot.
Back to our chores, we once more recreated the Ashake Liner and were on our way, following her down the river. And once more, we encountered a beaver dam.
And once more, we pulled our 517-pound raft over, trying not to disturb the dams.
Trekking onward, we see another dam just 50 feet ahead.
This is when we realize this was not so much a ‘river’ as it was a ‘beaver habitat’; so we pulled the Ashake on-shore and dragged her through the underbrush, abandoning the river, as the river had so cruelly abandoned us.
We’re dragging the Ashake, all the while being eaten alive by horseflies and mosquitoes. Razor grass and stinging nettles are cutting at our bare legs. When we come to brush so thick we can’t drag the raft through, we decide to drag her back down to the river and continue, hoping to find a bridge or a road so we can just go back home.
We trudge through the river for about 1/4 mile and once again come to beaver dams so plentiful that we’re forced to drag our 976-pound raft from the water.
Onward we went, in and out of the water, through the brush and over the dams, our legs burning from the stinging nettles, our arms bleeding from insect bites, when we reached a part of the river that we thought may have beaten us.
A 60-foot tree had fallen backward, causing a huge roadblock, and right above it, another 60-foot tree had fallen across the river. That was when we saw a spider, approximately the size of a squirrel, watching us from a bush. He introduced himself as Ted and asked if we wanted to get high. We declined and continued trying to find our way out of the forest.
Me: Time to go.
Sarah: Uhhh, yea.
Me: What do we do? Climb over the tree? It’s going to be hard dragging this 1,342-pound raft.
Sarah: I want my Mommy.
Me: Let’s go around. It’ll take a little longer, but it’s safer.
Sarah: Okay.
Me: If I had this day to do over again, you know what I would do differently?
Sarah: Not come on this trip.
Me: Nah, I still would have done this. But I would have quit when we saw the electric fence. I would have just followed that fence around to a road.
How long have we been at this?
Sarah: I have no idea—a long time.
Me: I’m ready to be done. Whoever said “quitters never win” was a moron. As a matter of fact, if it weren’t for quitters, no one would start anything.
On we went again, around the huge tree, our legs being cut to shreds. All the while, I’m hoping she doesn’t remember this was all my idea. We pivot around when we reach the “top” of the tree, and head back toward the river so we don’t get more lost. I am praying to God to help us out of the woods at this point.
Me: I hear a helicopter; I hope my Dad didn’t call ‘search and rescue’. I wonder where we are.
Sarah: How about if, from this point forward, I assume you wonder where we are?
Me: That would be awesome. That way, I wouldn’t have to keep saying it. Is that a fire extinguisher over there?
Sarah: No, it’s a red bucket.
Me: Look on top of that hill, above the bucket, that’s page-wire fencing. Let’s cross the river, climb to the top of the hill and see if it’s Someone’s yard. If it is, we can cut through to the road and call my Dad.
Sarah: Sounds good to me, let’s go.
We headed across to the other side, falling into another unexpectedly deep pool one more time for good measure. Truth be told, it felt amazing on my raw arms and legs, even though I was concerned about river amoeba getting into my bloodstream through all my wounds.
When we were on the other side of the river, we left our 2,978-pound raft at the bottom and climbed up, just in case it wasn’t what we had hoped for. It was exactly what we had hoped for, so we went back, drug the Ashake up the bluff, and started walking through the yard toward the road, which was about half a mile away. Driveways in the country are very long.
Sarah: Look at the van behind the garage, it is so creepy here.
Me: I know, I hope we didn’t go all this way to end up in a serial killer’s yard accidentally.
Sarah: If it is a killer, we should run back to the river. In movies, people always stop just before the river and the killer gets them, but we should just jump in and go upstream.
Me: We’ll do that. If it’s a killer. I saw a movie once where these two girls were in the wrong place at the wrong time, and this guy who was just evil chose them at random and had them get on their knees like he was going to execute them.
Sarah: Oh, no…
Me: Yeah, then he threw a hunting knife on the ground and said, “Whichever one of you kills your friend, I’ll let live.” It was totally messed up, and one girl picked up the knife.
Sarah: <gasp>
Me: I know, right? And her friend was all, “What are you doing?!” So she put the knife down.
But the other friend picked up the knife and stabbed her, and the bad guy was all “finish it!”, so she did.
And then he shot her anyway.
Sarah: That isn’t very pleasant.
Me: I know, I would never stab you.
Sarah: I would just hold your hand, say a prayer, and tell him to kill us both.
Me: True, but after we prayed, we could just run at the guy.
Sarah: But he has a gun.
Me: Yeah, but there are two of us. I saw on a movie once where a guy was in a similar situation, but he just threw sand in the bad guy’s face, and the bad guy was like “AAHHHH” and threw his hands up in the air….
Sarah: ….but that was just a movie.
Me: No.
Well, I know, but so is the girl with the knife, and we’re talking about that like it’s real.
Anyway. By the time we finished debating what to do if a serial killer lived in the house of the yard we were cutting through, we made it to the road. No one was home at the killer’s house. We made it to the stop sign and were shocked to find we were on the road we had started on…after seven hours of flipping that raft over beaver dams, dragging it through the woods, hundreds of cuts and insect bites, poison ivy and dehydration…we had made it less than a mile down the road.
We turned and started walking toward the house, dragging the war-torn Ashake behind us. We made it about halfway when my Dad picked us up on the side of the road.
It was over.
After all was said and done, our operation was deemed a successful failure. Successful in that we:
-Used no tools to create/recreate the Ashake
-Used only $19.71 of our $20 budget to create the Ashake
-We not only had fun, but our over-the-top awesomeness pulled us through more than we imagined would happen on that day
-Most importantly, we both survived
It was a failure in that we spent less than 10 minutes of seven hours sitting on the raft. It was more like we just took a long walk through the river, carrying a really heavy burden. But we challenged ourselves and won; you must challenge yourself to know what you can accomplish.
There will be people who read this story and say we are stupid for trying such a thing. Well. Haters are going to hate; I can’t change that, and I won’t waste my time trying. But I will say this…
People who do ‘stupid’ or ‘crazy’ things are usually the ones people want to talk to or about with their friends. Nobody is EVER going to say, “You would love hanging out with those two; they’re so much fun. They bake cookies sometimes, work full-time jobs, and try to make sure their bills are paid.” No, they won’t say that. We’re women who built a raft out of buckets and duct tape and went down a river alone.
Did it work out perfectly?
No. Do we regret doing it? No.
We did it because we could. Would we do it again? Not on that river.