I had to quit working on this story today when I got to laughing so hard I couldn’t see to type or read the computer screen. I love this story so much, I’m going to publish my raw notes below for you to see for yourself. It’s not polished at all yet, but it’s still hysterical (in my opinion). It’s a true story told to me by a retired country doctor.
Some rites of passage are harder than others.
(This is a true, comic parallel to Deliverance.)
A man wanted to float the “Little T” River before the Tellico Dam was completed and ruined the river by flooding it under a reservoir.
Right before the dam was finished this was the big thing to do for men who lived in the area. Judges, lawyers, doctors, would get a ranger to take them on a float down down the Little T and they’d fish. Then they’d camp out. The ranger’d fry up the fish for them and they’d eat ‘em.
All the local big shots did this and talked about it all the time.
One of my patients wanted to make a quick trip at the last minute, so he had to do it alone. He knew nothing whatsoever about canoes, but one Sunday he borrowed the judge’s canoe anyway and took it to Ocoee Springs, a powerful tributary that would take him quickly out to the Little T. [this is near where the Olympics held whitewater kyaking medal competitions]
He was a big man, 250 pounds, mostly above the waist. He got the canoe out of the back of his pickup and put it into the water, but then he couldn’t figure out how to get into it. He tried all sorts of things.
He tried to throw himself into the pointy end and the canoe stood on end, flipped over, and hit him in the head, knocking him loopy. When he let go of it, the boat raced off out into the river without him. This panicked him. He dared not lose the judge’s canoe.
He ran back to his truck intending to chase the runaway canoe in his pickup, racing down a gravel road that ran along the river, but he had a wreck at the first intersection. He T-boned another car. He quickly exchanged insurance information with the fellow he hit and raced off again, still trying to keep up with the canoe, but he’d lost it.
He got an idea about how to get out into the river to recover the canoe, so he went to K-Mart and bought a child’s soft bottom wading pool. He inflated the small round pool by blowing it up by mouth.
Then he decided he better check it out before taking it out into the river.
He raced over to the house of a friend who had a swimming pool to test it. It worked. It held his weight and still floated without swamping.
He took it to the river and launched it near where he figured the canoe might have drifted and it worked there too, but his butt was taking a terrible beating against the rocks that line the bottom of the river.
Then the fog came up that was common in the area. There was a two or three foot layer right over the top of the river. He couldn’t see his hand in front of his face and because of it, he ran aground on an island in the middle of the river and got stranded.
After an hour or so, the fog lifted and as it did, he spied the canoe which had run aground nearby.
He made his way over to it by paddling with his hands in his K-Mart wading pool and rigged a rope to tow the canoe because he knew better than to try to get into it again.
He held the end of the rope between his teeth the whole time it took him to float to a launching ramp two miles downriver. When he finally made it to shore, he tried to hitch a ride back up to his car, but the locals didn’t know him and figured he was drunk or nuts.
Apparently he presented quite a picture as he floated up to the boat ramp in a child’s wading pool, all splayed out in an X to keep the draft of his river-craft as shallow as possible because his butt was a mass of bruises from contact with all the rocks. And it didn’t help that he was towing a canoe by gripping the towrope in his mouth like a flamenco dancer holding a rose.
He was forced to pay someone to transport him and his two boats back to his wrecked truck so he could get home.
His wife said it served him right for missing church.