everything i know in life i learned from a $12 black rubber tube bought at a conoco gas station in boulder

i need to sleep soon, as we have to wake up at 5 am to drive from boulder to memphis tomorrow on our last real day of the road trip, but i wanted to talk about tubing for a minute.

when chris told me yesterday that we would be tubing in the boulder creek, i was ecstatic. the only times i've been in a proper tube i was either being pulled by a pontoon boat in lake martin, or i was floating around in a deep river near lake hiawassee, georgia. basically i had no idea what to expect as we pulled up to a conoco gas station in boulder, colorado in the heat of the day, paid a bitter old woman with silver teeth twelve bucks per tube and then listened to her lecture about how to use the tire pump to fill them up correctly. she was incredulous about people like us coming in for tubes ("since nine thirty this morning!")- "they just get in, go down the creek, get out, and walk em back up. i just don't understand it." and honestly i didn't really either, until i was positioning my bottom in the center of this big black rubber tube in a little river which was approximately no degrees and chris was giving me a push and telling me to keep my butt up.

the creek wasn't that deep, and as i was about to be swept down one of the first little waterfalls i noticed a guy in front of me, an extremely skinny guy with big black glasses on, wince in a look of surprised pain. so i tried to keep my butt up and it didn't work, and then it worked for a little while, and then in between waterfalls i would gain momentum and start being swept backwards. how strange it is not to be able to see what disaster lies before you! and why is it so much easier it is to be toppled over when you aren't facing it?

so i did get toppled over, on one of the last and biggest cascades, and i got flustered and scared and mad at chris for a minute for coming up with this scheme in the first place. and then i wanted to try it all over again, so we got out and walked em back up and we did it again. and by looking at other people and by taking chris's advice (how and where did he learn these things?) i developed some very handy practices, namely keeping my butt up, and holding onto the tube for dear life, and being able to turn yourself around using whatever means possible before you do go down backwards. and by doing it over and over and watching other people- smaller people, fatter people, drunk people, germans- do it and survive, i became less and less scared and after each whoosh i would get the most euphoric sense of accomplishment, and it became so fun.

once these two bratty kids were standing on a big rock watching people go down the waterfall that was split in two- one side of it was the one that ruined me the first go round, and the second part looked much rockier but not as steep. as i was being carried away into it i decided to go down the rocky part and i could hear one of them say to the other "watch her! watch her!" and then i was literally sucked into a seemingly bottomless vortex and i hit my head against something very hard and i thought to myself, still underwater "this is how concussions happen." i finally managed to find the right way up and i assumed the kids would be either laughing or concerned but they were already watching someone else make the same mistake.

i now have a little sore bump on my head, and we have two huge black rubber tubes sitting in the corner of our hotel room. i guess i can see why the woman in the gas station was confused.