Jamie, Casey, Cody and I all ended up in a stranger's truck, shivering in our bathing suits, our tubes lying in the back. He immediately knew who were as he stopped the vehicle in the middle of the path; "There are a lot of people looking for you right now," he said out his window, observing our half-naked and shoeless bodies shivering in the headlights.
Before this we were making a choice between two options: we could start a fire and try to warm ourselves and sleep on the stone floor of the monumental chapel by the riverside, or we could start a walk down the dirt path in the woods and hope we took the right turns and found someone to help us. The sun had finally finished setting just a few minutes after we pulled ourselves onto the tiny dock, quaking with cold, and lay our tubes against a tree.
I can't really recall ever being as relieved as when we spotted that dock. Turning another of perhaps hundreds of bends, the silent brown thing defined itself as we drew nearer. It was silent, still, and completely modest, jutting just a few feet into the water. Even though all four of us knew what we had come across, all of us began to announce it: "There's a dock right there! There's a dock!"
At that moment, I didn't even think that perhaps it had been extreme for me to slurp all that river-water out of my hands in the few hours preceding. But I didn't know when we would find a dock, or anything hopeful. Cody had begun saying things like, "Our parents will never see us again." I just responded with, "Keep going..." My arms were exhausted. For some reason, we all insisted on fiercely paddling ourselves downstream, and had been doing so for hours. As I looked to the darkening sky, I had a grave thought about how far back from here we would be if we hadn't been doing so.
The despair had set in at some point after a few hours of this, a couple dozen river-bends later, completely pure of anything human. I think it began its swell when Jamie, the most stubborn of us, finally gave up her certainty. "I don't know where we are," she said, smiling and shaking her head. "We're fucking lost."
I wished she had said that an hour earlier, when we actually came to a dock next to a little nature trail marked by a "you are here [on the river]" map. This was after a decent distance of wilderness, during which Jamie assumed the get-off point would be coming any time. Casey, Cody, and I ran out of the water up the path and read the sign, looked around, and wondered if we should go find someone to help. Jamie insisted we were to keep going; she was tired and wanted to get back. Still drunk, unlike the three of us, she kept floating carelessly down the river, and as she disappeared around the bend we figured we'd better catch up to her and ran back down to our tubes. I was already shivering and getting weak from hunger.
Until then we had just been apprehensive. Jamie would tell me later that I had been pissing her off with my constant worried questions of whether she was sure we didn't pass the get-off point. We had passed the blue bridge beside the road... Maybe that was it? There were no more houses on the riverbank like there had been for hours before. Just trees, and the river was getting wilder, with woody debris lying freely in the middle of it.
In fact, I remember the last house we passed. There was a lady in her backyard and Jamie asked her where the next bridge was (we knew the get-off point was a bridge). "Oh, not for miles..." The lady said, and watched, confused, as we continued downstream, until her little brown house disappeared from our view around another bend.
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