#4 - kickapoo canoe cock-up

I am steadily losing the will to live. We are entering Week 7 of 8 of the program and a glint of insanity is starting to appear in everyone’s eyes. We have run out of things to say to each other, the drama of living in close quarters is mounting, and our resilience is flagging. Weekends offer little respite—one night of heavy drinking can only cure so much of the week’s ills and the field trips the next day are a fucking chore. Half the day is inevitably spent on a rickety yellow bus (no matter how close they claim the destination to be) and each week the trips get progressively worse. Last weekend we ate crappy food and saw a crappy cave way the fuck out in Minnesota which, we discovered, has even less to offer the world than Wisconsin. This weekend we went canoeing and the results were very nearly tragic—as in lawsuits-and-funerals.

Fourteen canoes departed and twelve landed at the designated area. One of the missing canoes continued down the river, having missed the unmarked landing site. The other, containing the program director no less, sank to the bottom of the Kickapoo river, no doubt in an attempt to escape the mind-numbing incompetence of its passengers. I hope it is in a better place now.

During the wait, some people milled about the river’s edge, some were driven to the restaurant where the group was supposed to have eaten hours before, and some jumped (despite protest) from the top of a bridge into the murky, branch-mined water.

But wait, things get better—I mean worse. Upon discovering that four people were missing (two ahead and two beyond the landing site), search parties were deployed. One search party consisted of the wife of the man who rented canoes to us out of his shack, and the other consisted of two men—one Navy, one drunk. The wife of canoe guy set off down the river to look for the overly-ambitious group, and the two guys jump into a canoe at the launch site to comb the river for the director’s canoe. In the dark. Without flashlights. Or working cell phones.

Oddly enough, this seemed to concern very few people. Most carried on quite normally through the late dinner while waiting for the others to be found, but my end of the table was fairly subdued. I’ve noticed that in times of trouble this is usually the case. It’s not like in the movies where everyone is running around, frantically screaming. Rather, the worried get very quiet.

I was certainly worried. This seemed just like the kind of thing you see on CNN over the weekend. In the summer it’s always one water tragedy after another—shark attacks and boating accidents, pool drowning and flooding. Fortunately, all returned alive and unharmed, but I still felt like strangling someone. I can’t help thinking that we’ve burned all of our luck on this one trip and something terrible will surely happen on the next. Right now I’m determined not to go. Yet, somehow I know that my mind will be swayed by mid-week. I just can’t drag myself away from every gory detail of this train wreck of a summer.

So stay tuned for further adventures. Next weekend we’re off to Minneapolis and whatever fresh hell it contains. I can’t fucking wait.