Everyone gets up early, the guides cook, we eat, pack, leave, float, land on wide, sandy beaches and make camp again. They talk seriously about politics, and at night they read semiliterary fiction, and nobody gets drunk or acts like an asshole. Several are trying, with varying degrees of success, to bond with their kids. Between the two groups are the guides, in their 20s and 30s and committed neo-counterculturalists, who have arranged their lives and ambitions around being able to spend three months a year on the water. As we move downstream, the geography and light change in subtle ways.
Otters swim by, and bighorn sheep graze at the water s edge.
One dawn, after the heat has driven us all to sleep outside our tents, I m startled awake and into sheer terror by what turns out to be a tree frog dropping on my head. As we sweat, swim, dry and grow ever filthier, the adults loosen up, sharing confidences and wine. Civilization is there, in the obnoxious jet boats that roar by several times a day and the other commercial rafting groups that regularly pass by. We watch with contemptuous remove, then soak the bandannas we ve tied around our dirty hair and keep on moving. It feels like forever, and it ends too soon.