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tubing on the James, 2005
Saturday, August 6 2005
setting: Hogwaller Neighborhood, Charlottesville, Virginia
The reason I'd decided to come to Charlottesville this particular weekend as opposed to some other was that Jessika had told me she and some friends would be going tubing down the James River today. Tubing on a river is a hell of a lot of fun, but it's something I haven't done in nine years. Gretchen and I sometimes talk about tubing down the Esopus, but it's much smaller than the James.
Over at Jessika's house I found a couple additional familiar faces from the fairly distant past. One belonged to Shonin, whom I hadn't seen since a previous trip to Charlottesville about four years ago. The other was that of Wacky Jen, whom I hadn't seen since July, 1998 in Ann Arbor, Michigan.
[REDACTED]
These days both Shonin and Wacky Jen live in the greater Washington, DC area. Shonin has some sort of bullshit office job and Wacky Jen teaches Astronomy part time. The Northern Virginia public school system is rolling in so much dough these days that they can spring for planetaria. (I used the plural form, though I only know of the one that Wacky Jen uses as a teaching tool.) At some point I should mention that Wacky Jen has a tattoo on one of her shoulders reading "Shonin Rocks." I'd heard of this tattoo before, but today (since we were all in swimming attire) it was on rather prominent display.
Evidently Jessica from next door had been vascillating on whether or not to go tubing but, having last night gotten a sense of one of the previously unknown people who would be going, decided it wouldn't be such a drag after all.
Given its carefree, relaxing qualities, a tube ride down the James takes a frightful set of logistics to arrange. Such logistics are best not attempted by a hungover brain, which pretty much counted me and the Jessixas out. But Shonin and particularly Wacky Jen seemed to be in top mental form. I went out with them to a local tire establishment to buy inner tubes and it was about the best thing I could have done for my hangover. The conversation was one of those special kinds one has with old friends where every line is a punchline, the best prism through which to view an increasingly absurd world. The six inner tubes (one each for us humans and then one of the all-important cooler) cost $60 total.
Later the three of us went to the Food Lion at Pantops Shopping Center to buy the beer we'd be drinking on the river. Wacky Jen set off to use the restroom, which to Shonin seemed like a dubious "vision quest" at a supermarket as ghetto as this one. When she returned, she gave us a perfect example encapsulating the difference between a ghetto Food Lion and, say, an upscale DC-area grocery store. She'd seen a sign in the Food Lion bathroom warning customers that if they failed to keep the place tidy it would soon have to be made unavailable for shoppers. By contrast, a bathroom at an Alexandria Whole Foods is likely to have a sign reading, "If this restroom should in any way be out of order or otherwise unsatisfactory, please alert an associate immediately so we can continue providing our customers an award-winning shopping experience."
We bought a shitload of beer, most of it of the cheap unadvertised variety. But for kicks I also got a box of Budweiser's foray into the alcoholic energy-drink market, a concoction in a ten ounce can called "B to the E," a name seeming designed to give it credit simultaneously in the hip hop, raver, and geek demographics.
The inner tubes came inflated, and transporting them 20 miles down to the James River provided its own subset of logistical problems. Luckily, though, it was possible to stack four fully-inflated inner tubes in the tall hatch back of Jessika's PT Cruiser. The others managed to fit in the trunk and backseat of Jen and Shonin's car, a rental that came with an anemic "Support the Troops" decal on the window. Evidently neither Shonin nor Wakcy Jen has any need for a car where they live.
There was a phase of my hangover this morning when I felt I might throw up, and this continued until breakfast, when we all ate at Riverside Lunch (which occupies a building that looks like it might have once been a bank). Something about that BLT, though, seemed to completely erase my upper gastrointestinal complaint.
For logistical reasons, we had to take two cars down to the James River. One would have to be left at Hatton Ferry, where we'd be ending up. But since we'd commence our tubing at Warren Ferry, one of our cars would have to be there too. I rode with Shonin and Wacky Jen for the twenty five mile ride to Warren Ferry. Conversation was mostly political, centering on the subject of why the great intellectual middle in this country keeps making ill-considered political decisions that further isolate them economically and politically from the people running the government.
Warren Ferry is a popular point of departure for tubers participating in all the organized tubing adventures, particularly those arranged by James River Runners. Big green James River Runner schoolbuses (some with an alarming tendency to backfire) constitute most of the traffic on the road connecting Warren Ferry to Hatton Ferry. They're the most cost effective way to move either a large group of people or a big pile of inflated inner tubes. Last time I'd gone tubing nine years ago, Deya's father had handled all the logistics and conducted all the backend movement of supplies using a schoolbus supposedly owned by an absentee Swedish family. This time we had to execute a series of drives back and forth between the ferries.
A single Albemarle County sheriff's deputy patrolled Warren Ferry keeping the peace. It wasn't such a difficult job, because relatively little alcohol has been drunk by tubers when they're just commencing their adventure. Still, it's always possible that someone will bring a little wacky tabacky along for a smoke out in the unpatroled river or one of its uninhabited islands, and that, I think, accounted for the presence of an unassuming though somewhat inquisitive Chocolate Labrador. He was a male and remained in possession of both of his balls.
Once you're in the river, you're in river time. Conversations don't have to be about anything to be marvelously entertaining. You put a little river grass on your head and you're suddenly a mermonster. When you're done with the beer you're drinking you immediately crack open another one. If there's a B to the E left you want one of those, unless of course you've already had one and discovered how nasty they taste.
We spent a long time (fifteen minutes? two hours?) on the drunk of a huge sycamore that had snagged in the middle of the river. Jessica had brought a non-waterproof camera which we used to take pictures of our drunken faces. It inevitably ended up submerged in the melted ice in the cooler but only the pictures taken after it was drenched were affected.
Tubing on the James seemed to have become much more popular in the past nine years. Part of the reason we spent so much time at that sycamore was to find a space for ourselves between the massive flotillas of drunken jar heads and giggling sorority sisters. To impress all of the latter, the former made big macho shows of jumping from the heights of the Coors-Lite-can-strewn rocky island halfway between the ferries (you can see it in this ærial photo). This was all wonderfully funny and repulsive to Shonin and me, since we're both unusually sensitive guys who never risk our necks for such dubious rewards, not even when we're really drunk. Jessika, though, made up for both of us girlie men when she jumped in feet first and hit some unseen rock deep beneath the surface. But as she has been so many times before, she was lucky. The gash in her knee was deep but surprisingly untroublesome.
As we approached Hatton Ferry, we decided to extend the fun and head upstream on the north side of an island. There we sampled the sand for its exfoliating properties and, when it seemed we'd run out of beer, we made a few drunken stabs at piracy. Various small contingents of people on tubes would float by and we'd charge up and investigate what they had in their coolers. Based on what we'd find, it seems that we were up against a hard rule of James River tubing: as one approaches Hatton Ferry, beer supplies approach zero.
There was, however, a rather well-populated camping area just upstream from Hatton Ferry. Our vantage point down in the river allowed us to see the relatively unsupervised back side of several camps, and this gave Wacky Jen and Shonin the idea of conducting a little basic campground burglary. They cautiously scaled the bank and managed to open a cooler to find a single beer, which we all shared in triumph. But Jen had missed the whiskey for the cooler. There was a big bottle of it nearby, but her focus had been so intent she'd overlooked it. We tried going back for this prize but by now there were just too many people around. We would have had to have found a way to look more like clumps of Jewelweed.
About this time I was striding down a three or four-foot deep side channel when suddenly I slipped and my left hand dove beneath the surface. The current was so strong I felt it rip my wedding ring right off. Just like that it was completely gone, a $750 platinum artifact on the bottom of the James, maybe halfway to Richmond already. The water was too deep to see to the bottom and when I went to feel the bottom, the current was so strong I couldn't stay in position. I called over the others and they helped hold my feet, but it was a lost cause. I kept saying, "I am so fucked!"
Then Wacky Jen decided to go up to the campground she'd just been trying to burgle and see if any of its residents had goggles. Within five minutes she had a pair and I put them on, certain it was a waste of time. But when I put my head beneath the surface I could see my ring lying on the bottom, exactly beneath where it had come off. Platinum is a heavy metal, and it lay secure in a little crevasse between two pebbles. With my friends holding my feet again, this time I was able to snag it and have it again. My luck with that ring is proving to be a little like Jessika's luck with accidents.
There was a terrible downpour on the drive back to Charlottesville and Shonin was still pretty drunk. But he drove okay, all things considered.
Wacky Jen headed back to Washington immediately, leaving me with Shonin and the Jessixas in Jessika's living room. We were drinking beers and carrying on and Shonin was drunk in that fun, benign way that he gets. But the sun and the alcohol had taken their toll. We'd all avoided sunburn somehow, but Jessika was beat and made us go next door to Jessica's house so she could get some sleep.
Jessica with the last Sparks (from last night) at Warren Ferry today. Notice that the can has plus and minus signs as if it is some sort of battery.
Jessika and Shonin at Warren Ferry. That unexplained look of disgust is a very common one on Shonin's face.
From left: Wacky Jen, me, Jessica, Shonin, Jessika. Click to enlarge.
Jessica, me, and Shonin.
Jen, goddess of the sycamore. Note her "Shonin Rocks" tattoo.
Jessika and her injured knee.
Me and Jessika exfoliating with sand. This picture is faded because the camera was wet by this point.
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