I went river rafting on the South Fork of the American River over the weekend and had a little adventure. And it goes something like this....

We hit this rapid called Satan's Cesspool, one of the rougher rapids on the river, maybe the roughest of them. So much so, the guides all talked about it before-hand as if it was a major challenge and something we absolutely, positively, had to nail just right or bad things would happen.

Whatever. I wasn't really that scared or worried because I've done that particular rapid about five times before and haven't had any problems with it. The only time I've fallen out, "gone swimming" as they say, was at another rapid and I don't particularly remember it being that scary. Scary to my dad and the river guide, but not me.

Anyways, I'm on a boat with seven rowers and one guide. I'm on the back of the boat, on the right side. We hit the main part of the rapid and pretty much make it free and clear and as we pass the rock in which the photographer is stationed, I silently give a "phew" and relax a bit, knowing the worst part of it was over and it was just a matter of bouncing off a few waves from here on out. Later, everyone tells me they thought the same thing.

We were wrong. I'm not exactly sure what happened next or what caused it all-- nobody on the boat could figure it out and everyone has different recollections of what happened-- but I remember we came off a wave while a bit on our side-- nothing too terribly off-- when it felt like we just stopped and the right side of the boat began to rise up out of the water.

What we think happened was that we hit an eddy on the way down and it was like being stopped in mid motion. Picture a skier sailing down a hill only to hit a branch or a root or something that makes them come to a complete standstill and figure out the physics of it all. So our boat started to rise on up to the right side as the left side started to get lower and lower into the water. People behind us said that it looked like just, out of nowhere, we just popped out of the boat.

Now I'm on the back side of the boat and on the side that's rising up out of the water. And I see all of this happening in slo mo as it were. As we go up, the first thought in my head is "huh, this is kind of weird. We shouldn’t be flipping.” My second thought, which comes to me as the boat is now almost on it's side, is that it was like in "Titanic" where the boat starts sinking and everything starts flying towards the water because at this point I start seeing things fly from my side of the boat into the water. Including the guy sitting in front of me and a few people on my left. I mean, I literally did see the guy who was sitting in front of me just fly out of his seat and land in the water.

It is at this point where I realized that I'm about to go in myself.

Boom, I go, into the water, and go under.

Now I have a life vest on and I'm not in that deep, but once I try to begin my ascent back up, at this point completely calm, I realize I can't necessarily go back up. I try to push myself up a few times but get nowhere. The eddy is holding me down.

Huh.

My thoughts when I realized I wasn't going to be able to go back up? "Huh, shouldn’t I be able to swim back up?"

After what felt like a few seconds and was probably a lot less, I finally manage to come up and try to get my first big breath after being under the water. But as I start to take a breath in, a huge wave came and slams into me so that I wind up swallowing as much water as air. I try and gain my bearings only to realize that I'm pretty much still in the shit as it were and all I could see coming at me was wave after wave after wave. I can't really see anything other than the waves-- no boat, no shore, no nothing-- and I can only really hear the rush of the rapids. To make matters worse, I'm starting to realize that it's going to be hard to breathe in all of this because water is flying everywhere and the one thing I don't want to do is swallow a wave. Now I start to feel a bit panicky.

I flutter around a bit in the rapids, trying to get into position (on your back, feet first) but not being really successful at it as the current is pushing me everywhere. And I'm having catching my breath not just because the water is splashing everywhere, but because the water is also butt cold-- we were given wet suits before starting in fact. I am not a happy camper.

Then I see it, a kayak. One of the rescue kayaks in fact, used by the rafting company to fish people out of the water in case people need to be fished out. Holding onto one side of the kayak is one of the guys on my boat, the person on the center left. Either he calls to me or the kayak dude does but once I see it, I start swimming for it, knowing that this is pretty much my rescue.

I approach the kayak only to get a little confused as what to do next. The kayak isn't that big and one guy is already on one side so I start to go to the other side. The kayaker, however, sees this, and starts yelling at me to go to the back. I don't. It's a friggin' kayak, what is the front and what is the back? I swim to the wrong side and the kayaker pretty much grabs me and shoves me to the other side where I see a rope attached to the back and hold on. That makes two people hanging on.

Somebody else from the boat floats by, a tiny Chinese woman who looks kind of like the famous Scream figure from the Munch painting, all shock and freezing cold. The other guy who is holding on reaches out and grabs onto her. So there are now three people holding onto the kayak.

I am not sure the kayak is supposed to have three people holding onto it. There is no room for the three of us. I find myself drifting away from the back towards the side, something I am told not to do by the kayaker, but I can't help it. As this is going on, however, a huge wave hits the kayak, followed quickly by another, bigger wave. The wave lifts up the kayak and starts pushing it onto it's side and I hear the kayaker yell out "I'm going to flip!"

Now I was a little scared up til this point. Now I am really scared. After all, if the person who is coming to rescue you suddenly finds themself needing to be rescued, what does that do the people who needed rescuing in the first place? If the kayaker goes over, I'm thinking not necessarily that I'm fucked, but more like it's now up to Plan B and I have no friggin clue what Plan B would be.

But somehow, the kayak steadies. He doesn't get flipped. And as we all breath a sigh of relief, the kayaker finally feels steady enough to push out and he starts paddling us out of the rapids. At the end of them, he sees another one of our boats and heads over to them. As we get close, I let go of the kayak and swim up to the raft where a group of hands reach out to pull me in. I want to help them, to try and push myself up, to be strong, but I can't. I have nothing left. I surrender to what's going on and let them pull me up.

I am safe.

The raft quickly heads to shore and a bunch of concerned faces look over me asking me if I'm allright. One of the guys on the raft later tells me the look on my face was somewhere along the lines of "had just seen God." I also see the Chinese woman on the other side of the raft, still in shock, pale white and wide-open mouth. The people on the raft not taking care of me are holding onto her, hugging her, trying to get her to snap out of it. I finally sit up as we approach the shore and catch my breath. The second we hit sand, I fly off the boat, take off my helmet, and plop myself in the sun, trying to dry myself.

Now, I know "swimming" while rafting isn't that uncommon. Out of six boats that went down the rapids at the point, three of them lost people. Carnage, they call it. One boat lost everyone but one rower, the poor lady finding herself the only person on a raft still shooting through the rapids with the guide still in the water trying to get back to the boat. And some people, even on my boat, had a fairly easy time of it. They quickly found another raft and hopped on in. But not me. I went under, lost my breath, got rescued by a kayak, almost lost the kayak, and then was lifted into another raft.

Pretty hairball, as they say.

Now this is what you call a Hemingway moment, a moment to show the biggest thing of them all, Grace Under Pressure. I would like to say that in my Hemingway moment, I exuded nothing but Grace Under Pressure. But I did not. I didn't get into proper swimming position. I got grabbed by the kayaker because I went to the wrong side. And I was partially responsible for the almost losing of the kayak. All this in comparison to another guy on my raft, the one who grabbed the Chinese woman and helped steady the kayak. I showed no Grace Under Pressure.

But on the other hand, I am here, typing this now. And isn't grace under pressure, when it comes down to it, merely surviving? I mean, I lived, so whatever I did, I must have done something right because I made it through.

And not only that, the next morning I got up and rafted again. Scared shitless enough to seriously think about bailing and going home. But I did it. And after a few bits of white knuckling through white water, somewhere around the time we hit the hole we shouldn't have hit and almost got thrown again if it weren't for emergency measures we had to take and which made it so we got through the rapids, I got my mojo back. I want to do it again. Except hopefully this time, there will be no swimming.