The first weekend I got home, the weather was still thinking about being nice. Thinking about, is all.

The Classic Tubing Trip, to be perfect, must take place when the temperature is approaching at least a hundred and you're so plastic hot on the black tar stretched rubber of your tire, that you have to tip yourself off into glacial water simply to think about discovering normal body temperature. Your teeth must chatter, but the second you climb back on, you feel hear your skin sizzle, your blood fetch, a fridge woosh to the tip of your tongue, and thirty seconds later, you're too hot, goddamn, you're far far too hot.

This trip was near-perfect, but cool enough outside that one kinda had to perch on the top of the tube outa fear that one's butt might get wet. I.e. my butt. My butt that wasn't quite warm enough to commit to falling in. Or being splashed by the sis, etc. The second hindrance to achieving perfection was that I brought a young cousin, and while he's very cool, I had to promise his mother I'd stay sober and look after her kid. Which I did. Stayed sober.


I have to say, it's pretty odd to hit the end of a tubing trip and not realize that if I fell off, I'd drown, and that I would be perfectly okay about dying at that momement, having achieved maximum spin temperature content happy glory boyohboyohboy tube-nirvana. This is part of the deal: realize possibility of death, feel joyful - a ritual of excessive touch.


However, if you look at the picture directly above, you might realize that my bro-law achieved my mission for me. At one point he was balancing a can of beer on one of his breasts, and a whiskey flask on the other. Plus he was cackling, and thought my idea for waterproof drums was a good one.

All said, the day was good, the sky bluewhite, the birds and family twitterpated, and I saw a woman on the banks who looked exactly like a toad buried in the mud, except she was throwing sand at her own children. She looked exactly like a toad other than that. Ah, true wildlife sightings.