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Rafting Is Not A Spectator Sport
by Lisa
Hofmann
photos by Allison Waltz
7:30 a.m.: Is this the hour of adventure?
Kent State's Adventure Center seems to think so because that is when their white water rafting trip departs from the Student Recreation and Wellness
 To keep a strong pace, the rafters try to keep their paddles synchronous. |
Center. When I arrive with sleep riding my eyelashes, the van is already packed with camping gear and rafting apparel we might need to keep us warm, like wetsuits and spray jackets.
"You don't have to wear any of these things," says Becky Baldwin, a graduate assistant at the Adventure Center.
"You have to wear clothes, though," interjects the trip leader Rich Bebb.
It's a small group of us going, only five, which translates nicely to me: Only four people to see me embarrass myself. But everyone else seems more fitted than I to the sport of white water rafting. Rich, a junior marketing major and former Marine, has been rafting a dozen times. Becky is a graduate student in sports and recreation administration. Adventure trips and sports are what she is building into a career. And freshman journalism major Lauren Kropar has gone white water rafting a couple of times out West. Mike Phillips, a junior criminal justice major, is the only other rafting novice, but he looks athletic and works at the climbing wall at the Rec Center.
But I am assured my lack of experience won't negatively affect the trip, and I become more excited about this new experience.
It's a three-hour drive to the Youghiogheny, or "Yach," as people refer to it. Our fatigue seems to overwhelm any excitement, but Rich talks about his last trip on the Yach. It was his first rafting experience, and it was his 18th birthday.
"They pulled a dead body out of the river that day," he says. "I was really scared."
I'm sure my expression betrays me because Rich quickly explains, "The guy had been stupid and drunk. He did things you aren't supposed to do."
He ended up having a great time and says, "It was the greatest thing since sliced bread after that."
Rich's reminiscing wanes as he ponders what the greatest thing before sliced bread was, and I am left a victim to my overactive imagination. Well, I certainly won't be drunk. But what if I do something dumb today, and I become a casualty of the river, too?