Wonder Bitch

One summer morning, my two best friends and I finally had time to spend together, just the three of us, and were thus searching for something fantastic to do. Not the typical pool and tanning thing, you know, something exciting, maybe even a little dangerous. Of course dangerous. We all made sure to get in contact once we were all awake from a long prior night, and once we were all coherent, we began to plan our day. For almost the past two summers, the subject of rafting the Platte had come up an abundance of times, and this year we though, what the hell? Let’s do it.
Friendship is sometimes a hard thing to attain, or even to hold on to. Over my life, I’ve gone through numerous “best friends” and have gone through even more “circles” of friends. All of them I owe many memorable and happy moments to, but only two can I saw I’ve had almost my whole life and can attribute almost every predominant memory to. Hannah and Julia. Oh God.
After about the fifth round of phone tag, I finally got a hold of Julia to start planning exactly from where we would get our raft and exactly how we would get it to the Platte. I, being the only one who usually tries to plan ahead, was obviously starting to piss Julia off after the third call or so desperately trying to figure our plans out to a T.
“What the hell do you want?” Julia would say after I’d just hung up with her and then quickly hit redial.
“I already called like ten places and all of their rafts are sold out.”
“Well, frikking call somewhere else!”
Of course, it was all up to me. Finally after waking Hannah up, and her commiserating with me over Julia’s uselessness, we found an army surplus store that sounded like it might have something. Being already the afternoon, I decided I would just go to the store myself since waiting for those two, or even just one of them, would take an additional hour, give or take. Having made my way to the back of the store, through an assortment of “hail Bush” shirts and extra large camouflage shorts, I finally found what I was looking for. Our very own S.S. Minnow, or in our case, P.O.S. From the picture on the outside, the little raft looked as if it could kind of comfortably hold three of us without sitting rock solid on the bottom. I quickly lugged the thing to the front of the store and bought it, then made my way home.
Real river rafts are obviously a hard thing to find, and once at home, I was lucky enough to see that the pool raft I had just bought had a max weight of, oh, say maybe two of us. Great. Having decided that limitations didn’t really matter, the first of what would be say seven fights over the period of one day began. Julia, deciding it would be best to just “go-with-the-flow,” would have nothing to do with any of my plans of how to get ourselves, and the pool toy to the start of the river, and then how to leave from where we got off. Sure, my plans may have involved two or three too many cars and one too many headaches, but Julia’s plan of let’s just go didn’t seem to work too well either. After a few subtly hostile calls between Julia and I, we finally decided on a way to get to where we needed to be, although I was admittedly quite upset at the plan being of Julia’s making.
Getting the “raft” finally out of the too-small box it was packed in and starting to blow it up, I was pleased to see Julia making her way down the street in what I guessed was her ideal river rafting outfit- bikini and butt shorts. Of course. Julia, seeing our little boat came with a flimsy, plastic gear pouch, decided that it must be put to use and quickly made her way into my house to find whatever food she could that would be suitable for carrying down the Platte- Diet Dr. Pepper’s. Hannah finally made her way to my house and we were ready to go. Thank God.
Probably the most stressful part of our escapade came on the way to the start of the river. As we were driving in Julia’s truck, we were lucky enough to look in the rearview mirror just in time to see the blown up raft fly out of the truck bed on onto Santa Fe. Shit. We quickly pulled the car to the side of the road and held each other up from laughter as we made our way back to the traffic jam our petite raft had caused.
God we’re lucky we made it this far.
With sunscreen on our shoulders and the right cars in the right places, we made our way down to the river from the rocky slope that managed to cause us problems before we even touched the water. We decided it would be best to skip probably the smallest set of rapids we would see that day, thinking they would be the biggest. And thus our journey began.
Lucky for me, I was in the back and therefore had one of the two tiny paddles we had. Having gone down rivers like this before, and being pretty much “professional” when it comes to outdoorsy adventures we may go on, I was on Hannah and Julia’s backs the whole time.
“Would you please paddle, Hannah?! Jesus!”
“Maggie! We don’t need to paddle right now! We are going like two miles an hour down the middle of the Platte River without a rapid in sight!”
By God, they were going to paddle.
We hit our first set of rapids and luckily made it through them without tipping, and not too much water coming into our already deflating raft. It was the second set we had to worry about.
I don’t know if you have ever driven over the Platte on Mineral, but the rapids that you see to the side of that bridge are actually much larger than they look when you come face-to-face with them in a pool toy. My dad, standing on the side of the river with video camera in hand, had seen people come down before us and therefore saw the smartest way to go down the rock strewn rapids. Of course, we three had been fighting the whole way down and did not hear which way was best to go. We went the wrong way. As we started to go down, with me yelling at Hannah, all I felt was my body thrown into Hannah and Julia, and the raft flipping over us. It was awesome. Thankfully, we caught the dry bag that housed our keys and cell phones before it was lost down the river. We quickly dragged the boat out of the river and made our way up to a good starting point to do the rapids again.
The rest of the river was pretty much how it started but instead of Hannah and I fighting, like at the beginning of the river, it ended with Julia and I fighting, then Hannah and Julia. Oh, best friends.
It’s hard to come by people that you can be calling a “Wonder Bitch” one hour and then the next laughing like nothing happened while watching your fights on camera. Providentially, I found two of them. Sure, four Diet Dr. Pepper’s may be useless on an overflowing river, but two best friends to be with is more than I could ask for.