City Girl Gets Out of Town

This weekend I packed up and left town with my friend Jenn and some of her man’s people. We camped and canoed in Wisconsin on the Namekagon River. I haven’t tried to canoe since I was a Brownie Scout and back then it was a traumatic experience because we kept tipping over. Hubby’s been trying to get me out canoeing for, oh, FOUR years but I was scared to go. Silly me…

There were a couple of challenges, of course. The first and most formidable was TANYA. I was going to change her name, but I couldn't think of a clever nickname, so whatever, she made me crazy. It was nonstop yammering and interrupting to change the subject while others were trying to have a conversation, and she got completely hammered on her Ice House beer and smoked cigarettes all night. If I had to pick one word to describe her it would probably be TIRESOME.

I had never met her before so I tried to dismiss her general rude self-centeredness, but the conversations she was trying to force onto people were just stupidly controversial without any sophisticated nuance—like abortion and assisted suicide, and her opinions bordered on fascist eugenics. When she wasn’t trying to play devil’s advocate and pissing people off, she was just plain inappropriate—like when she announced that we were going to play Truth or Dare and tried calling people out on what kinky places they’ve had sex, gross! We all stood frozen looking wide-eyed at each other and no one answered. I thwarted her efforts by taking a different angle on the “dirty secrets” she wanted people to tell and changed the subject to poop stories. She happily obliged in telling everyone one of her poop stories in gory detail, but I think everyone was just relieved to be out of the Truth or Dare hot seat.

This woman was incapable of not talking. Seriously, no listening skills and the attention span of a gnat. She wouldn’t even shut it when we actually shushed her to try and hear the pack of coyotes that were howling and yapping down the river, but she just kept talking! “Do you think those are coyotes or wolves? Maybe they’re just dogs… I don’t think there’s anything to worry about though…cluck-cluck… bok-bok…” Gawd! I could hardly hear them!

The next day, though, all of this was gratefully set aside once we got packed up and set out for the canoe rental place. While he was getting us signed in, Jenn’s husband was double checking our route and got feedback from the clerk that the route he’d planned was only 2 ½ to 3 hours long, so he changed the route to the 3 ½ to 4 hour trip. We were not informed that the river was low until we were in transit, and this came from the bus driver.

It was somewhere around ninety degrees and clear as a bell, so we all slathered ourselves in sunscreen with an spf 30 and piled into the canoes. The river we paddled down was a protected area and was absolutely beautiful! We learned from the campground volunteers that this river was home to some dragonflies that can’t be found anywhere else in the world. I couldn’t tell you which ones, but I saw plenty of all different sizes and colors—and they were getting BUSY! They were just flying around stuck together crashing into everything. The whole route we were also in the company of great blue herons, bald eagles, trout galore, and even one beaver and a muskrat.

The second challenge came along when we stopped for a rest after four hours and we didn’t realize something was very wrong until the guys looked at the map. We had only covered eight of our thirteen miles! The river was SO low that we kept bottoming out in ankle-deep water every ten minutes and having to get out and drag the canoes to deeper water. This made our trip twice as long.

Then when someone discovered that one of the rental oars was missing in action, we were pretty much ready to give up. Jenn’s hubby and brother-in-law considered hitchhiking on the road to get back to the rental place, but decided that there was no guarantee that it would result in us getting back to the cars and on the road any sooner than just finishing the course.

Since there was one paddle missing, I volunteered to be a duffer since I was getting some heat exhaustion and feeling woozy. So we started out on the last stretch of this treacherous puddle-deep river, and lo-and-behold several yards down river the damned rental oar was seen floating near the bank. Someone paddled over to grab it, but I just kept on duffing. I wasn’t about to paddle yet.

I thought of Tanya over there paddling away in her canoe all hung over and dehydrated on no sleep and burned to a crisp, and I almost felt bad about sitting there in the middle of my canoe doing nothing. But then I realized that she’s a grown woman and if she hasn’t noticed that she’s in bad shape, there’s not much I can do. So I duffed some more.

But only for a while because as a result of the new seating arrangement, Jenn’s man was paddling alone in the small canoe, but he got tuckered out after an hour or so. When he asked if I felt good enough to paddle, I was, so it was Jenn to the rescue for her hubby and I got back in the driver seat and paddled my ass off until we reached our landing. Whew!

Despite last weekend’s challenges, I will absolutely be doing this activity again! I had a great time even though it wiped me out—you should have seen me Monday, what a disaster! Tanya or no Tanya, I’m totally there.