Ever since I moved to Lawrence, I've been very conscious not to use the phrase "Back home..." and then launch into some story from my North Dakota days. Sometimes it's inevitable, since we've got plenty of good stories, and my friends are generally better than yours, but for the most part I've stayed away from that phrasing. I remembered how much I disliked it when I heard other people do it in college and I was meeting people from other parts of the country.
However, one instance where I've never been afraid to play the "back home" card was in regards to tubing. It's one of the things I miss most about North Dakota/Minnesota. Some of the greatest drinking shitshows of our lives came while we lounged on cheap inner tubes, floating down that glorious little stretch of river. Down here they have "float trips", but there are plenty of differences. Being skeptical about how much fun it would actually be, during the leadup to the trip last week, I did what I do best: openly bitched and tried to find excuses to bail on the trip, before finally going and enjoying myself. A breakdown between Northern Tubing and Kinda Southern But Mostly Still The Midwest Depending On How You Look At It Float Trips:
Distance traveled: Something I definitely took for granted with tubing. It was only a 45-minute drive to Red Lake Falls from Grand Forks. Plus the drive was always filled with booze and let's-get-fucked-up music, so it felt like about ten minutes. For the float trip, we drove for almost four hours into Southern Missouri to arrive at our campsite (although the drive was still filled with booze and good music-- nothing like pregaming with 40 oz. Mickey's and 90's jams to get me rocking and rolling. Without a doubt, the greatest thing about Missouri is that it's legal to drink in the car as long as you're a passenger.) Advantage: Tubing.
Time spent on river: Tubing varied, depending on the depth of the water. Sometimes you flowed along crisply, banging it out in just over an hour; sometimes, when the water was lower, it was a three or four hour trip. About the perfect length, really. Canoeing, however, was an eight-hour marathon. Definitely a couple hours too long, especially when you're abusing alcohol at the rate that we all were. The last couple hours were a battle to finish. Advantage: Tubing.
In-flight shenanigans: For tubing, there was The Island. Located at roughly the halfway point, it made for a nice little break to climb off your tubes, stretch your legs a little bit, bong some beers, and try to get girls to show their boobies. There was also the bridge towards the end, at which point the bravest (read: drunkest) of us would jump off into the water, unless the cops happened to be watching that day. One time, in a particularly stupid move, even for tubing, Jennifer and I took an empty six-pack holder, each hooked an arm into a hole, and jumped off at the same time. That none of our friends were ever seriously hurt was a small miracle. I've heard stories of people getting maimed (or even killed? I can't remember) by jumping off that bridge....but it was never anybody I knew, so screw them, right?
For canoeing, there were dozens of smaller islands scattered throughout the river, with plenty of people at each one (there were TONS of people on the river. There were at least 75-100 people in your line of vision at any time while floating down. Sometimes you'd get jammed up against them, but for the most part it flowed pretty smooth.) Also, some people just periodically pulled their canoes over to the banks or shallower water and stopped to chitchat with randoms there. This is where I won my $50 bet from Shaun and Nelle. I had five chances to smell a random girl's hair- the only rules being that I couldn't get caught, and both of my feet had to be in the water. I went 0 for my first 2 (my first at-bat being a pitiful attempt to wade up to a moving raft, grab the back of it and launch myself up to hair level to get a whiff. I got busted immediately, fell off the raft and got buried underwater, losing my sunglasses and quite a bit of dignity in the process.) I realized it would be much easier to just stand in the shallow part of the river, wait for people to pass by, and grab a noseful of Pantene Pro-V while I pretended to help steer them back out to the deep water. Resourceful. I still can't believe they offered me $50...I would've done it for $3 and a coldcut sandwich out of their cooler.
Also, I think there was a large tree that hung over the river that people were jumping out of....but that was towards the end of the run, I was hammered, and I'm not 100% sure that I actually saw that. Might be a drunk hallucination.
Advantage: Draw. I don't know if anything can beat The Island during tubing; just too many good memories. However, just the sheer number of different people you can bullshit with at various points during canoeing makes it even. It would be interesting to know how many thousands of people floated down that river last Saturday.
Potential for disaster: Pretty minimal during tubing (assuming you don't kill yourself while jumping off a bridge while being constrained in a six-pack holder like a trapped duck.) You're probably gonna get your tube stuck on a rock at some point, and it might cause you to flip or have a few seconds of inconvenience while you get sorted out and untwisted...but nothing too crazy.
Canoeing, however....holy hell. People are dumping left and right; it's like a friggin' war zone out there. People flailing in the water, yelling and screaming and pandemonium like the scene in Saving Private Ryan where they're storming the beach in Normandy. Of our seven-canoe entourage, only two didn't flip (myself being one of the lucky few, only because we were on the inside of our homemade barge, so it was pretty much impossible to completely overturn.) I still ended up in the water a million times though, as I made it my personal mission to head up the alcohol search and rescue squad after a cooler would empty its contents into the river.
Favorite random moment of the trip: after Jud and CK violently tipped and lost their entire cooler, apparently I yelled "Jillian, hold my shit, I'm going in!" threw my beer at her, launched into the water like David Hasselhoff, and ended up 50 yards downstream, collecting as many beers as I could hold. The reason it was my favorite moment is because of the sense of community out there. There were countless strangers helping us scoop up beer and vodka and swimming back up against the current to return it to us. People helping people, it's powerful stuff.
Also, I was wearing Wes' super-douchey white sunglasses, since mine were lost in the aforementioned hair-smelling incident, and while I was swimming around saving beers, some huge muscular guy with a shaved head grabbed me, all super-serious, and told me I looked just like Jeremy Renner while the rest of their group all yelled "Holy shit, he TOTALLY does!" Even with how drunk I was, I knew it was really weird as it was happening. Big, big advantage: canoeing.
So overall, tubing is still my preferred method of traversing down a river while pouring beer down your throat and hollering at girls to show their boobies. However, canoeing was much more fun than I thought it would be, and I'm a solid "yes" for next time.
Happy Friday.
