The Professor did a whitewater raft trip 20 or 30 years ago. I did one last August. D-Man and Jess had never done one, so what else would we do but skip the Class I - II beginner's trip in favor of the Class III - IV expert trip. Experience is for wimps, right? The water was certainly warmer than the 38 degree river I encountered last summer. But last summer there were long stretches of relatively calm water, a few patches of not too rough whitewater, and two scare-you-half-to-death-and-try-to-drown-you rapids. This trip was constant whitewater, most of it rough, and a lot of it trying to throw us out of the raft. We barely had time to do a high-five with our paddles after a treacherous rapid before we were paddling for our lives again.

But we loved it! Look at this picture. See the three happy faces as they paddle their way through. See the back of the guide as he stands in the raft, holding out his paddle to ... oh wait, that's the fourth happy face. Is that the Professor in the water? Only the guide, who is paid to notice little details like passengers falling out of the raft, even knew he was gone. This was our first rapid, immediately after we left shore, and we were giving a new meaning to concentration. You could have put an alligator in the raft with us and I don't think we would have noticed.



These operators are equipped with cameras that take four pictures a second, and there are many, many more pictures of the happy paddlers looking more and more determined, some closeups of the Professor bobbing through the rapids, and finally him being hauled in and all the rest of us noticing for the first time that he had not been aboard the raft.