A ride on the river and a small-town celebration are a perfect way to spend a summer Sunday.
“Dave, let’s go rafting.”
It was my friend Ujae (pronounced You-jay), one of those fabulous immigrants (he’s Korean) who love America passionately and understand that it is both still a place of opportunity for one who hustles and also a wonderland of natural beauty. He works one job and has started his own investment company. When he’s not hustling, he, like Ratty in The Wind and the Willows, thinks there is nothing better than to be messing about in boats with his wife, Sarah, a piano teacher and his partner in investments, and their four boys.
Last year he told me, “Let’s go sailing,” and so we did on a Minneapolis lake. Sailing on a lake is fun, but regular readers of The Imaginative Conservative will know that the body of water for me is the river. Ujae didn’t have to ask twice for this trip.
I did quite a bit of rafting on rivers in West Virginia when I was a camp counselor at Pine Springs, a Presbyterian church camp, in the Laurel Highlands southeast of Pittsburgh. One of the trips was something of a disaster for me as I had some junior high campers who were not experienced paddlers and did not listen very well. We were doing class III and IV rapids, and one group got trapped against some rocks in a difficult spot and was unable to get going. I ended up stopping my raft, swimming to the group that was trapped against the rocks, and pushing their raft out. Unfortunately, this was a repeat event. I was so exhausted from the trip (and probably had inhaled a bit of river water in the excitement) that I got sick for about two weeks afterward. No good deed goes unpunished, but I must say that was the most memorable of my rafting trips. It certainly didn’t put me off rivers or rafts.
We were scheduled to get our raft from the Cannon Falls Canoe and Bike Rental at 11 AM on a Sunday. Cannon Falls is a beautiful little town 45 minutes southeast of St. Paul (where I live) on Route 52. The little town of 4,000 boasts of Pachyderm Studios, where some famous bands including Soul Asylum, the Jayhawks, and Nirvana have recorded albums. More interesting to the historian is that Calvin Coolidge once visited to attend the erection of a memorial to Colonel William J. Colville, a hero of the battle of Gettysburg. Barack Obama also visited to host a town-hall event in 2011, but into the life of every town a little rain must fall.
Cannon Falls is named for the falls along the Cannon River, a tributary of the Mississippi that joins up with the big river a little further south in Red Wing, Minnesota. While not as dangerous as some of those West Virginia rivers, it does boast some class II rapids. There were reports that rain earlier in the week had raised the level of the river a bit, thus raising the possibility of a bit more adventure. After Mass on Sunday morning, we were eating breakfast and trying to decide whether the dark clouds overhead were going to erupt. When we called the rental place to ask, they said that there was a fifty-fifty chance of rain between 11 AM and 2 PM, the times we were scheduled to make the 8-mile trip down to Miesville Ravine Park. Ujae and Sarah were up for it, so we all met down in Cannon Falls and got our rafts and orders.
“Don’t follow the small rivulets on the side of the river; they don’t all join up again with the main river. Some of them also have downed trees that might puncture your raft. Oh, and stay out of the woods on the side of the river,” the tall young woman from the rental place told us. “There are tree spiders in there.” That’s the kind of advice that is pretty counterproductive when dealing with young boys. One time while visiting some friends who had a pond with a zip-line in back, several of our boys delightedly gathered up water snakes in a bucket to show us. When a barn cat sidled up, however, one of them refused to pet the furry newcomer because it was “creepy.” Snips, snails, and puppy dog tails is not just a rhyme; it’s topnotch biology—or at least sociology.
The crustier old guy added, “And don’t let the kids go in the water!” After showing us a picture of the rock painted pink at the end of the journey and warning us to get to the left when we saw it lest we be carried down the river and have to get out and carry our rafts to the pick-up spot, the young guys who do all the cleaning and servicing of the craft put us in the water and bid adieu.
Despite what I’ve said about the young woman’s advice, there was little going up to the woods. Only our fourteen-year-old got up on the side of the river, and that only to jump off a little hill on the banks. We noticed a couple of ropes hanging over the river at one spot—clearly designed for swinging out and jumping in—but were too late in seeing them to stop and engage in that fun. The crusty old man’s words, however, were almost immediately disregarded. As soon as we were out of sight of the crew, Ujae and three of his boys were in the water floating along. Pretty soon both rafts were populated by skeleton crews of one or two people while the rest of us floated along in the crisp, cool water as the sun warmed us from above.
Sun? What about that rain? When we did stop on a sandbar in the river to jump into a particularly fast current and skip rocks on the river, I proclaimed my gladness that we had taken our chances. Ujae responded by telling me his theory of meteorology. Because most people are more disappointed at rain, those who report on the weather add twenty-five percent to their forecasts of inclement weather so that people will experience a greater sense of relief and gratitude for sunshine. If you say there’s a twenty-five percent chance of rain and then it does so, people will curse you. If you say there’s a seventy-five percent chance and then it doesn’t rain, happiness will abound, and good feelings will accrue to the messenger. It sounds right to me.
I spent most of my time floating along behind our raft with my kids. For the kids, there were no injuries, but for adults, bobbing along the surface involves a bit more bashing on the bottom. I hit a rock with my right thigh that gave me a six-day charley horse.
Such an injury has a value, however, since it increases the likelihood I’ll remember the trip just as I remember that crazed junior high trip in West Virginia. I rubbed it as I rode on the bus that picked us up. We had made it to the left in time to land by the big pink rock and loaded our soaking selves into the bus driven by a late-middle-aged woman who drives a school bus during the week and for the Canoe Rental Company on the weekend. She spends her weekends driving back and forth from the rental company to the pick-up spot and back. Some people might be rendered grumpy by such a job, but she was preternaturally cheerful.
Business had not been good for the last few years, and she was glad to be driving. A few years ago, sewage had been dumped into the river, necessitating a two-week closure. Flooding periodically closed it as well. And then last year was Covid. She told us we were lucky to have made it on to the river that day when we did, because the Cannon had gotten high enough that they had canceled further trips shortly after we launched.
Such a trip—especially one that might not have been—deserves a celebration. Ujae told me there was a little pizza place in town, so we headed over. Like any good Midwestern pizza joint, Dudley’s offered pitchers of pop and flat pizzas cut in squares. On the wall were pictures of countless wrestlers in action. Three of them posed in “Dudley’s” shirts in front of Olympic signs: one in Beijing, on in Rio, and one in London. One of the waitresses told me that Dudley has been the wrestling coach in Cannon Falls for years. A former collegiate wrestler at the perfectly named Pillsbury Bible Baptist College in Owatonna, Minnesota, he had ended up settling in Cannon Falls and took up coaching wrestling when his own boys were in school. He couldn’t quit when they graduated. He coached all three of the Olympians, and, she added, there are a couple more of his young charges who stand a good chance of going to future Olympic games.
God bless ’em, I say. As for my family, though there are no Olympics on the horizon, the prospect of a return to Cannon Falls and a ride down the river is tantalizing. Maggie, my five-year-old, has been asking when we can go back pretty much every day since we left. I’m happy to go back. A ride on the river and a small-town celebration are a perfect way to spend a summer Sunday.
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The featured image is courtesy of Pixabay.
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