Roasted by Rafting

an excerpt from my memoir about a camping trip I took right before I started college

The week before my freshman year of college, I got to participate in Wilderness Based Orientation, which was a week-long rafting and camping trip for incoming freshmen and led by upperclassmen. This was a great way to meet people before school even started.

 

The first day, we drove out to Moab, Utah. The drive out there was in 15-passenger vans, and I spent the entire 4-hour drive trying to hide my terror from the other students. I avoided 15-passenger vans as much as possible, but occasionally they were a necessary evil. I breathed such a sigh of relief when we finally arrived in Moab, and I would have kissed the ground if I wasn’t so self-conscious about the other students thinking I was strange.

 

When we arrived, we slept that night on a red sandy beach under the stars. We weren’t expecting rain, and the temperature was reasonable, so we didn’t set up our tarp tents. Laying on the ground as the sun went down, I started hearing strange sounds and seeing dark shapes flit across my vision. The high pitched chirps bounced around my skull like a soccer match. It was a very strange sensation to feel a sound as I was hearing it. It was bats that were flying only a foot of two above me, and it was their echolocation that rattled around my skull. It was scary at first, but once I realized they had no interest in hurting me, I ignored the strange sensation and got some sleep.

 

The next morning, we loaded up our rafts and started down the Colorado River. A week later, we would arrive at Lake Tahoe. Throughout the week, we would experience a little bit of rain from time to time, but luckily only once did it cause serious problems.

 

It was the fourth day, and the rain started shortly after we had stopped for the day and started setting up camp. It was starting to rain as I went and helped myself to a hot dog after helping set up our tarp tent. All of a sudden it started pouring and our camp site became a flood zone. I dashed back to my tarp tent and sat crouched under the tarp for several hours with my two tent-mates. We couldn’t sit because water and mud were rushing through our “tent,” and the tarp wasn’t tall enough for us to stand, so all we could do was crouch and huddle together for warmth and hope the few inches of flooding wouldn’t turn into a several-foot tall flash flood. We were in a canyon at that point, and a flash flood was certainly a possibility.

 

Eventually, as night began to fall, the rain stopped. Unfortunately there was no way for the mud to dry up before bedtime, so we partnered with three guys to share tarps; one tarp went on the ground and one went overhead. It was a tight squeeze trying to get six people under one tarp, but we just managed, and everybody got a little sleep and stayed somewhat dry.

 

The next day, as we floated through the canyon, somebody on my raft started singing “Bohemian Rhapsody.” Everybody on our raft joined in, and the other rafts in earshot took it up as well. You haven’t heard “Bohemian Rhapsody” until you’ve heard it sung a capella, in a round, floating through a canyon, with the words bouncing into eternity. “Nothing really matters, anyone can seeeeeee, nothing really matters, nothing really matters, to meeeeeeeeeeee” may still echo through that canyon for generations to come.

 

The second-to-the-last day of the trip, I was wearing my usual short shorts over my swimsuit. I spent some time in the water that morning and forgot to reapply sunscreen. I’m normally a very pale person, so forgetting sunscreen is an unforgiving mistake. By the time we got to our final campsite of the trip, my legs were beyond lobster red; they were starting to blister.

 

I wound up with two huge blisters on my right lower leg and one on my left lower leg. I do not exaggerate when I say that each blister was the size of a baseball cut in half. Somebody gave me ibuprofen for the pain, but it still felt like my legs were being roasted on a spit over a bonfire in purgatory. There was no practical way to get me out of there, however, as the vans would be waiting for us at Lake Tahoe. So I spent a restless night trying not to cry as my legs flamed on all night.

 

In the morning, I discovered that I had popped one of the blisters some time in the middle of the night. My legs and sleeping bag were covered in the fluid that had come out. I either didn’t have pants or it was decided they would be too tight, so one of the guys in the group who was larger than me lent me his pants so my legs would be covered that day.

 

We floated down the river, and when we reached Lake Tahoe, it was breathtakingly beautiful. The water was such a clear blue compared to the red muddy water of the Colorado River. Almost everybody hopped out of the rafts to swim in the pretty water, but all I could do was watch wistfully. My legs didn’t hurt quite as bad that day, but any amount of sun would have been agonizing.

 

Once we reached the vans, I was in too much pain to be afraid.

 

When we finally arrived back in Gunnison, I was taken directly to the hospital to have my legs checked. I had a second-degree sunburn from nearly my hips to down past my ankles. The doctor lanced my other two blisters, applied and gave me an industrial-strength antibiotic, and wrapped my lower legs tightly in large ace bandages.

 

Regular shoes hurt my feet too much, especially since the ace bandages made my ankles larger than usual, so I was stuck limping around campus wearing long pants, ace bandages, and shower flip flops for the entire first week of school. It was horrifying, but I survived and still managed to make friends.

 

It took well over a year for the pinkness to fade from my legs enough that I couldn’t tell exactly where my shorts stopped and the sunburn began. Ever since then, I avoid the sun as much as I can and apply plenty of sunscreen when I do go out. I’ve been roasted on a spit once before, and I am not inclined to go through that again.