Gossip Boys Beaten by Wolf

Having been asked to help with Camp St Raphael, Second Session, next week — and, more specifically, to head down river in rafts with teens for an all day outing, I remembered …

My last experience of all-day river rafting was 30 years ago.

Well, it was supposed to be all day. But, for me, it was only a few hours; for my rafting buddies it was 8 hours longer.

It was the summer of 1980. I was a college kid selling books door-to-door in Wisconsin for the Southwestern Book Company. I had two fellow book-selling roommates, whom we’ll call Bill and Jack. Bill, who’d done the job the previous summer, was our sales manager; Jack and I were first time book salesmen.

So, after a month of demo-ing our books for the proverbial Mrs Jones, the three of us decided to have a little fun …

Our river rafting excursion down the Wolf River, the week of July 4th in 1980, was to be an 8-hour tour. The man with the truck and the rafts dropped us off at our launch point at 10:00 AM. Yes, I said RAFTS …

What can I say? Although there were only 3 of us, we had one raft for us and one for the, uh, cooler.

Anyway. Mr So-n-so let us out, got us in the water at 10 am, and we were expected back at the raft rental place by 6:00 that evening.

Bill and I were in the lead raft and Jack (who really was a hard person to like, if you get my drift) was in the rear raft with the cooler, which was tied to ours by a rope …

AND,

Whoa!

Jack’s raft suddenly swung ‘round toward shore and hit a low lying tree limb and — psssssshhhhhh ... a hole was punctured in the side!

Mr So-n-so’s truck could still be heard heading down the gravel road, but it was too late (and too early in history for cell phones!).

There we were, with 8 hours of river rafting ahead of us: three college kids, with one sinking rental raft (complete with cooler) tied to one healthy raft …

And, we soon found out …

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