Get Out: Back on the tube

Wednesday, July 21, 2010

By Benjamin R. Bombard

Jackson Hole, Wyo.-I was so young the last time I went tubing that my memories of doing so are now oneiric, gauzed over by the intervening decades. The one clear memory I have of tubing down the Portneuf River when I was six is being tossed from the tube in a set of burly rapids – well, burly for a six-year-old. Luckily, I was wearing a lifejacket, and my father plucked me from the river moments after I fell in.

As I prepared for my first tube ride down Fish Creek in Wilson last week, I had none of the residual fear that childhood traumas can instill, unlike my very deep-seated fear and hatred of chow chow dogs. Well, OK, I was a little freaked out by how “fast” Fish Creek appeared to be running when my companion Fire Girl and I emerged from a stand of willows and found ourselves on the river’s bank. But the flipside of that fear was the excitement I felt earlier in the day as I walked through the Big O Tires parking lot with a newly inflated, charcoal black inner tube.

I christened the tube the “HMS Big Black Betty,” and she formally entered commission on Thursday, July 15, 2010 at 13:43 hours – though the commissioning wasn’t made official until I was nestled in Betty’s cozy cavity out on the river and drinking a 24-ounce frosty adult beverage, as much in her honor as to wet my own personal whistle.

After my rear end acclimated to the frigid waters, I quickly developed a few necessary steering maneuvers to manage the not-as-swift-as-I-had-imagined water while retaining my beverage. Fire Girl and I slid languidly down the river, laughing and hooting as we avoided minor hazards – the old Atari game Toobin’ came to mind – and inflated the perceived danger of stuff like low water, or water curling over big rocks, or the ripples that account for Fish Creek’s whitewater. “I’m taking these rapids,” I hollered back to Fire Girl as I prepared to brave a patch of churning water, unclassifiable as far as rapids go because they’re too wimpy to even rate.
In the end, the real danger came from bridge under-crossings.

The high level of the water relative to the bridges’ fixed height reduces clearance to like a foot and a half, meaning you could kiss the bridge with your chin if you weren’t paying attention. The young boy we saw - wearing a hoodie and a football helmet, clutching onto a tube that was tethered by a rope to his sister as she stood on the bank –  didn’t have to worry about the bridges, hopefully.

All went swimmingly (tubingly?) until just after we pulled out of the river and onto the bank before passing under Highway 22. And here’s where my inexperience as a tuber bit me. I was walking up towards the road to join Fire Girl when the HMS Big Black Betty got snagged on an overhanging stick that ripped a gash in her starboard hull. Within milliseconds, I was carrying a flap of limp rubber. I didn’t miss a step. I just kept on walking, resigned to the HMS BBB’s short call of duty. Another tubing adventure gone sour. Momentarily. Fire Girl broke out in boisterous laughter and I soon joined her, drunk as I was on the joy of my first Fish Creek tubing adventure. JHW

photo by BENJAMIN R. BOMBARD
Tubing on Fish Creek is an ideal way to while away a summer day.


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Get Out: Back on the tube | Planet JH News Article: Sports & Recreation

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