The Epic Conclusion

Here it is, the rest of the tale.

The 7 men switched to the other side, and, with much heaving and ho-ing, were able to free it, and it floated downriver for us to catch (these boats, even when completely filled with water, will still “float” just under the surface – but good luck getting them over a shallow section. or turning them. or going at any speed). With people scattered on shore, and in or near boats that weren't theirs, and full of Dizzy & Dug's gear, we moved the boats downstream, past the ripples after the rapid, for a smoother section of water. Phlo and I both had to paddle canoes alone, which was kind of awesome because we totally pulled it off. Only for 20 yards or so, then we pulled ashore and everyone regrouped with a “what the %*^%&^ are we going to do now?” feeling very permeable in the air. Before anyone could even say anything, a dude on the other side of the river who was painting a sign on his property (“TimeShare $1,000”) yells over “Hey, how you guys doing?” and we all simultaneously yelled back “BAD!!” The Phlo jumped in the kayak and paddled across to see if the guy could let us crash on his property, which he did:) He also supplied us with a beer run (B double E double R U N, beerrun, beerrun), and we proceeded to not talk about what had happened or what we were going to do tomorrow (except for me giving Dizzy & Dug realllllly big hugs and having a momentary freak-out that we had almost killed them because of our fly-by-the-seat-of-our-pants wholly irrepressible way of conducting this adventure). Instead, we enjoyed our Fourth of July. Danger Muffin's boyfriend from the ‘regular world’ came for a visit, providing us with music via his car. We had some $7 Wal-Mart fireworks, and I do declare they were the best fireworks I've ever seen. And we had a fantastic evening.

And, somehow, the next morning, everyone woke up committed to continuing on the river. Chinese and The Phlo went with Muffin's b/f to Wal-Mart and got some epoxy to mend the boat, which had somehow come through with only 1 severe puncture wound from the rock it was being bent silly around. We were even able to do some mending on Fail Boat (persuading Jr. to stay on another day, who had been about to give up on the Fail Boat). It still leaked, but it was better. Even DizzyBat was determined to get back in a canoe, even though she was still pretty freaked. We thought the dogs would have no part in it, but Einstein jumped right in without a whimper. We didn't actually get on the river until 3 or 4, partly due to the drying epoxy, partly due to the rain and general dreariness of the day, partly due to the hangovers of near-death, emotional turmoil, and beer. I gave a small talk, including some of the finer points of canoe maneuvering (emphasizing that I am no expert, and taking advice from Floating Home and others), asked them all to wear their life jackets (no one did except DizzyBat – I would have, but there weren't enough to go around; Phlo and I went without), asked everyone to stick together, thanking everyone for not giving up, reminding them that if they didn't feel comfortable risking their lives with us that was completely understandable – and when everyone laughed, I breathed easier, because I knew they knew where we were coming from, and they knew I knew where they stood, and everyone knew, and we were all good. And so we paddled on, and the sun came out, and it was good.
A period of time later, it was a beautiful day, and we were paddling the river (a calm, wide, and deep river today) next to a large flock of geese, which was spread out down this long strait stretch of river. If we got to close to a group of them, they would take off, looking pretty and awesome as they went. So, naturally, we started to chase them. Well, some of us did. And some of us took it more seriously than others. Some of us got four boats to come at one group from all directions, surrounding them and herding them into a steep, muddy embankment. Some of them started throwing paddles in a weak attempt to kill one. Rusty, the dumbest and happiest dog you ever met, took his instinctual cue, lept from Fail Boat, landed in the midst of the gaggle and, with fleathers and birds flying all around him, locked his jaws around the head of one of them and fatally wounded it.
Well, we couldn't just let it lie and die. Wheels bashed it a few times over the head with his paddle, and, if that wasn't enough, (it wasn’t) Phlo slit its throat. Word passed along from boat to boat up the river that a goose was actually dead, which angered some, amused others, but all were agreed: We killed it. We have to eat it. Except the vegetarian of course. Phlo proceeded to cut off its head and drain it, pull out all its feathers (finding out much later that this would have been easier if he had dunked it in boiling water first), and gut it (i.e.: slice open the belly lengthwise and widthwise and let the stomach, liver, and intestines spill out into the river). We made camp not far from there, and Ninja (assisted mostly by Jr., Rusty's owner, and everyone else to one extent or another) roasted it on a spit over a fire stuffed with onions and garlic and covered in a honey-orange glaze. It was delicious. It was a little tough, but, for the first time, I really felt like I was eating an animal – something that had lived and breathed and moved and used its muscles once or twice in its life. It had an impact on me, something that I can't really define – that I saw something alive and, though I had no direct part in it, I then saw it dead and ate it. Crazy I know. Except isn't the world crazy, for eating meat that doesn't move when we've never actually witnessed the death that is necessary for the betterment of our own lives? Should there be a coming-of-age ritual or something, where we kill something and eat it so we understand the true cost of the meat we hold so dear? (The PHLO thinks so)

Day 6 dawned sunny and optimistic. We had our first “portage” - where we must take the boats out of the river and carry them around a dam – coming up in 10 or so miles, and we were confident that this would surely be a 20 mile day. If it wasn't, we would have no longer have any hope of making it to Harpers Ferry by the 12th. We made great time... a few more of the boats had sprung some leaks, but as all boats were, by now, equipped with at least 2 gallon-sized bailers, we made quick work of the troublesome water. People had pretty much given up on keeping their stuff dry (turns out, Wal-mart dry bags don't keep things dry if they're floating down a river), or else had sequestered the important stuff in our coleman dry bag. People were starting to get the hang of the whole canoeing thing. People were having a good time. We got to the portage, and we pulled the boats ashore and paused for lunch. I happened to finish eating first, unusual because I eat slowly, and I happened to wander over to the dam to see just how long this portage was, and there happened to be a canoe outfitter who rents canoes and kayaks to people hanging out with a bus and a 10-boat trailer, and he happened to be a nice guy who immediately threw all his boats off the trailer to come help us move ours. We lifted the boats onto the rack without bothering to empty them of our gear, and as we did so, we got a good look at the bottoms of all our boats for the first time....and the Aqua Blaze was over. Again.
When he dropped us off, he left to pick up some rentees and said he'd be back soon if we needed advice or help. In the meantime, we emptied the boats and flipped them all to inspect. The epoxy, less than 1.5 days old, was all gone (turns out fiberglass bends and pops off the unbendable epoxy). Bendy Boat wasn't leaking because the rock had punctured it so badly that the hole was raised up above the bottom of the boat. Fail Boat had returned to its previous rate of failure. But it got worse. Of our four remaining canoes, one had slashes all along its length (but only through the outermost of 3 hulls), two had one severe gash each that went through all 3 hulls in places, and one seemed reasonably o.k. The kayak was still fine. Though we hardy hikers could carry on in this condition, it seemed entirely possible that we would completely total these boats along the way, a situation we did not want to pass along to our darling BSA council that rented/loaned us these boats in the first place. The outfitter guy owned the land on this side of the portage and allowed us to stay the night. He inspected the damage, said we could probably gorilla tape and move on, but that at this point we were looking at a $210 repair job: the boat with slashes all along the outer hull was totaled before we got it due to UV damage thinning the fiberglass outer hull as a result of it being left sitting in the sun, and he estimated that 1 patch for each of the other 3 wounded boats would cost $70 each. In a sad state, Phlo called Manner, the Man of the Hour, the one who this would come back to bite in the butt if it all went badly. He called his council compadres (i.e.: his boss), and was happy to inform us that the council would pay for damage incurred and that, as long as we stuck around to fix them once we got them back, we could continue on. Hooray! Aqua Blaze On! We bought a ton of gorilla tape (think duct tape, but better), patched the boats as best we could, Danger Muffin rented a kayak from outfitter dude, and we paddled on the next day.

Though full of happiness because we were still on the water, it was by now abundantly clear that we would not be getting to Harpers Ferry by the 12th. Most of us still wanted to make as much progress as possible, but some didn't really care anymore - wasn't all that different from other days, really, because some of our number stopped believing that we would make it to Harper's by the 12th, or at all, from day 1, and didn't seem to have quite the drive to get “as far as we could” as some of the others. Didn't seem to get that the group only goes as fast as the slowest boat. No matter, because the quicker ones took full advantage of the extra time this afforded them to do nothing... or go cliff diving.
We came upon some locals jumping off some cliffs into the river, and Chinese, Ezra, Jr., and Wheels got out and tried for themselves. Everyone escaped from this insanity unharmed except for a copperhead snake. As I later learned, copperheads are poisonous (not to the death, but it'll hurt. a lot.) and supposedly an overpopulated nuisance, and the locals probably would have killed it anyway. But I still don't really get it, and certainly didn't at the time. After everyone had jumped, the locals discovered a copperhead in the trail, which everyone had apparently been walking past the whole time to get to the top of the cliff from the water without getting bit. Upon hearing this, Chinese jumped back on shore to look at it, then picked up a stick to poke it, at which point Phlo calmly pointed out that most poisonous snake bites occur because an idiot person pokes them with a stick, at which point Chinese walked into the woods and got a bigger stick. I thought he intended to poke it from a distance, but then I realized it wasn't longer than the old stick – just fatter. Think caveman's club, cuz that's exactly what this thing was. I didn't understand until he test swung it into a rock, to see how it would hold up under pressure, at which point I said “You're not going to kill it, are you?” He didn't answer, but calmly approached the snake. “Wait, a minute, don't kill it, Don't Kill IT!” Regardless of his motivation or his reasoning, he didn't answer, and he killed it. Caveman style. Bashed it five or six times. And when it was still alive, Phlo put it out of its misery and gutted it, as if we could find a use for a 1.5 ft long copperhead snake. He cut off its head and gave it to Chinese. Phlo dumped the body in the river a short time later, after not coming up with a use for it. I made a few testy comments to him about how unnecessary that abuse of life was, but I think Phlo's silent and clearly displeased processing of its body had a much greater impact on him than anything I said. At any rate, Chinese (in the kayak, having traded with DugOut), paddled up to the front of the line of boats and stayed there (we stayed near the back generally, to keep track of everyone).
Meanwhile, Fail Boat was failing, and Wheels, sick of bailing all the time, decided to get drunk to make the time pass easier, to the amusement of all. The rest of Fail Navy was doing o.k. - only 1 seemed to be actively leaking, but it still wasn't sinking, and the others only needed bailed every once in a while. So while the drunkards and the... uh... lackadaisical... members of the crew made their way slowly through some easy rapids and ripples, the motivated ones pulled ahead and arrived at our next portage, not too far ahead, but far enough that there was no communication between groups. Myself and The Phlo, having guide books in our possession, knew that the guidebook said there was no camping at the portage itself, and it was getting to be that time. Also, Wheels, totally fed up with his bailer, had begun pulling over to every person he saw and asking if we could camp on their land. We got a tip that there was a landowner who might let us stay on the left side of the river, although the portage was on the right side. I tried yelling this information to the group in the lead, but they were too far ahead and couldn't hear. I tried gesturing for them to stop where they were so we could send the two kayaks to check the situation on both sides without beaching the canoes, and one started heading to the left side. Images of shotguns flashed through my head and I frantically gestured and yelled for them to go right or stop, so they went right. So we went left, figuring we could send Muffin over in her kayak after we had scoped it out to find out what the deal was on the other side. No one was home, and the house looked too perfect, and we all thought it might be a summer home, so we figured if no one was home by 9 (it being a weeknight and all), we could probably camp on their river-side, very plush lawn complete with picnic tables and fire pits which was quite a distance from the house. When we got back from the house, Chinese was on his way over in the other kayak. What exactly he actually said or didn't say was later debated by many, but at the very least, when asked if we had a permission to camp on the other side of the river, he would say “yea, we're solid” or other, possibly more or less convincing and more or less “solid” phrases than that. At any rate, he gave most of us the distinct impression that Magma had found a good place and obtained permission to camp on the other side. When we got there, DugOut (who, to his credit, still doubted Chinese's words of solidness) asked Magma if we had permission, Chinese said “yea, we're solid” and Magma blinked a few times and said “yea, sure, if that's what you wanna call it”. At which point I chose to walk away and see how long the portage was and see this camping area for myself. It was totally craptastic and not big enough for all 8 tents by a long shot. Unfortunately, when I turned around Chinese was right behind me, also checking the area out, and I, being pretty pissed off and feeling lied to, started yelling. Don't appreciate it. You lied. This is a democracy, we all need all the info. At which point he said something about making progress, at least he got us to the right side of the river, it wouldn't have made sense to camp on the left and pack up just to immediately unpack and repack on the other side. All good points, we could have easily made that decision together... Demanded an apology, which I think we all know will, at best, get an angry, totally fake apology and, at worst, create an enemy out of a friend. Well, I don't know if it was fake, but it was certainly angry, he said it and stormed away. I recognized the hostility, I recognized my mistake, but I still couldn't hang, so I walked the other way, crying in frustration the way I do. The dogs followed me and cheered me up, and I rejoined the crew, who had begun moving the boats across the portage in a fairly tense manner.
And so, the lying Chinese, the wasted Wheels, and myself, the PHLO, took the walk to ask the local land-owner if we could crash in his back yard. The place was strewn with a variety of eclectic nonsense, little of which belonged in a person’s yard. We knocked on the door, but there was no answer. There were voices inside that could have been a television. Of more concern to us was the chainsaw sitting next to the door and the chaos we could see within the home. I don’t know if our readers are familiar with the original Texas Chainsaw Massacre, but the setting was very similar and guys never survive in those movies. So we walked around the house and found an elderly couple farming out back. We breathed a sigh of relief and explained our position. The gentleman just looked at us with an even expression throughout the tale, nodded that we could stay and muttered his only words. “Don’t tell anyone I let you camp.” Easy enough.
We rejoined the group and Graveyard apologized to Chinese, who said it was a jerk move on his part. She said it was cool and that she over-reacted because she was still pissed about the snake. Which is exactly what I had said earlier when I had chastised him for his deception. But we had a place to camp and were too tired to care about how much info had tweaked. So we all crashed early and awoke the next day, once again full of hope that was destined to be shattered. Again.
We set sail for a convenience store down the river to grab sandwiches and, you guessed it, more cheap beer. But we did not even manage to put a dent in the first frosty refreshment when we came upon a long system of rapids. Much beer was lost, but the rapid was relatively easy to negotiate. We rallied on the other side and waited for the rest of our group. We could see Dugout and Danger Muffin out of their boat, presumably trying to drag it over a low point. We could hear Dugout yelling but it wasn’t till he started gesturing emphatically and colorful metaphors drifted downstream like so much flotsam that we realized there was trouble. Magma and I were in a boat together that day, and paddled at full tilt towards the floundering vessel. Team Magma PHLO reached them with the quickness and ran face first into the scorching language of a distressed Dugout. We dragged the boat to the shallows and drained it by way of our top of the line bailers. I.e. cut up gallon jugs. We found that the weakened boat had hit a rock and there was a hole large enough to put my hand through. We emptied the boat into ours and surrendered it to team DangerDug. We started to walk the boat to a bridge, which was just in sight about 500 yards away. But in our adrenaline jacked state from yet another crisis, Magma and I hopped in the wounded boat and paddled or tails off in a desperate bid to reach the bridge before we were navigating the river in a submarine. We made good time in our empty boat with just ourselves and our beers, but as we reached the bridge, things took a turn. The water had been pouring in at about the rate of a school water fountain, and in a similar arc. By this time, we were over half full and moving rapidly to our destination. As we turned into the landing, the boat listed badly ot the side and Magma bailed in order to avoid spilling his beer. Without his weight in the back, the water rushed forward and I found myself in a rapid nosedive into the current mere feet from the landing. So there I stood, knee deep in broken canoe and waist deep in water, beer in one hand and paddle in the other, surrounded by my fellow lunatic aquablazers. There was a brief moment of eye contact and realization. “Hooray! Good Aquablaze everyone!” And there was much cheering to celebrate the end of the journey, because this time it really was the end. And not a single casualty.
We were now in Luray, well short of our destination, but we had a fantastic time and shared a unique experience that I will treasure for a lifetime. Jr. knew a guy who’s cousin’s family lived in Luray, and by a stroke of good fortune, his friend was visiting. Danger Muffin’s mother was also there and took us to pick up Ezra’s car. Much later, our nomad village was established around a roaring bonfire and there was much rejoicing. The canoes were chained under a bridge and were destined to remain there for some time. I don’t know if there is a god, or what form it takes, but if it is sentient, it must find great amusement in our antics, otherwise we would have all been smote long ago.
My family was nice enough to pick us up the following day and take us all back to Frostburg. There we were nourished and relaxed in style at the luxurious Casa de Rumburg. We even had time for a trip to my favorite place, Flying Dog Brewery, where we got two private tours. Why? Cause sometimes one just isn’t enough. We also got to stop off at my cousin’s home and pay a visit. Over the next couple of days our crew departed with great sadness and promises to reunite soon. And the Aqua Folly was over.
Graveyard and I went to the beach with my family, had a great time, and wrote part of the blog. The rest was written in Duncannon at the Doyle, but that is a story for another time…