Summer of 2008: Bellevue, WA
I was home after spending the last nine months traveling around the United States and Canada and working in an office full of my fellow 20-something travelers, booking next year’s adventures. We were a restless bunch. Constantly inventing games and contests to alleviate the boredom of spending eight hours in neighboring cubicles.
One day, our ringleader suggested we all go tubing after work one afternoon. A day, in high summer, in the the Seattle-area, goes on until about 10pm, so there’s plenty of time in the evening for adventures.
Over the next week, we voted on locations. None of us were particularly outdoorsy or had any experience traversing the many major and minor waterways within a 30 minute drive from the comfortable suburb of Bellevue, but debate we did. We settled on the Tolt River, a tributary of the Snoqualmie River, about a forty minute drive into the foothills of the neighboring Cascade mountains. A couple days before the trip, three of us took a trip to a sporting goods store to procure inner tubes. Imagining that this would be a leisurely trip, down a lazy river, our purchases were geared more for style than durability or practicality. One friend, the weakest swimmer of the bunch, bought a flying saucer tube that came complete with built in water gun.
The day of our adventure was a rare, hot day in the Northwest and we were all excited to hit the river. We escaped en masse a bit early and headed east. Our caravan stopped in a tiny one stoplight town just before the turn off for the mountain road, to pick up an obscene amount of beer and cigarettes for spliffs. The dirty looks were plentiful. Rural Washingtonians don’t like city kids using their towns as rec rooms.
The drive up the hill should have tipped us off that this wasn’t going to be a lazy, warm trip down a calm water way. We could see brief glimpses of white water out of our windows and it was a fairly steep incline. But dumb people are dumb and once we arrived at what someone in the lead car randomly determined to be a good distance from where we left our base car, we all bounced out, eager to get going.
The water was cold. Not just cold but, “Fuck, this may be an incredibly terrible idea, oh jesus… FUCK” cold. Later research turned up that the Tolt was fed almost exclusively by glacier run-off. We slowly made our way in, no one wanting to be the one who cried reasonableness. You could tell from the rocky, steep bank, that made a terrible entrance point, the water was moving swiftly. My best friend Joe* was the first in and the water promptly took him with his t-shirt wrapped chicly around his head, expensive sunglasses perched on his nose, cigarette behind his ear, and his fancy tube filled with beer and flipped him ass over head and tangled hi tube in branches lining the far bank. I’ve never laughed so hard. He lost everything to the river and basically had to gnaw his tube free. By time he made his bedraggled way back into his tube, the rest of us were on our way.
It got real around the first bend.
None of us thought about packing life jackets or helmet and I was incredibly aware that at least one of us was an incredibly weak swimmer, and that person also had the flotation devise that was least equipped to deal with even slightly rough water and we were facing what looked like possibly a class two rapid directly ahead.
Though my raft was comically not suited for the task ahead, it was at least small enough that I could get enough of my arms in the water to paddle and steer. My girlfriends who had purchased bigger, fancier tubes were not so lucky. There was a lot of screaming and shouting. A lot of “Use your legs!” “Fuck!” when someone would slam into a submerged part of a boulder they thought they had avoided.
We all made it to the other side. Luckily our weak swimmer had somehow ended up flush against the far bank had had missed the worst of it. Everyone who wore flip flops into the water was now barefoot. The water was plaid now. We managed to scrounge up a beer for everyone and we all guzzled, relieved and a bit giddy. If only we knew what lay ahead in two bends.
This set of rapids was definitely a two. A tough two. A ton of boulders, lots of churn spots. And it came on quickly. I got caught on a boulder early and was bounced out of my tube. I was wearing Keens which had a thick rubber toe and as I quickly got sucked down the rapids away from my tube they actually provided a useful buffer, until I got stuck in a spot of churning water and my thick, rubber covered toe got caught in between two rocks. I’m a strong swimmer and I don’t panic in water, but I remember very clearly thinking that I was going to die. Then, of course, I managed to kick my foot free and somehow made it to the end and found my tube that someone had freed from the boulder.
There was no more beer to celebrate with or really any will to celebrate. Our weak swimmer was doubled up with one of the guys and everyone looked like they had also had their own moment with death and we still had one major hurdle to go. Our exit point was right at the point where the Tolt fed into the Snoqualmie. The water was fast and you had to bail and swim for the sandy bank fairly quickly or end up in the Snoqualmie which fed the eponymous fall not too far away. We lost some rafts, but everyone made it out safely.
While driving down the hill towards home, exhausted and shaken, we saw several emergency vehicles heading the opposite direction, sirens blaring.
……
Later that night, while recovering with soup, I saw an ad for the local news that made me stay awake for the broadcast. The second story was about a drowning. Three guys had decided to go tubing on the Tolt River just like us that day. They must have only been an hour or so ahead of us. One of them didn’t make it out of the rapids.
*Names changed to protect my fellow idiots.
Image: Wikimedia
