Survivor: Imbeciles

Posted by John

I’ll tell you what you shouldn’t do – take the 6 AM flight through Orlando the day after Memorial Day. Inevitably the plane is going to be full of a bunch of goddamn snot-nosed kids on their way to Disney World who are so excited they’re about to puke, or in at least one case, shit themselves. When the kid in the row behind you stops kicking your seat just long enough to say, “Daddy, I tooted,” go ahead and get the barf bag ready to go as quickly as you can because “toot” is about as accurate a description as calling the Deep Horizon Oil Rig disaster a “boo-boo” as the smell of toxic kid-shit, so thick you can feel it in the back of your throat, emanates through the airplane like crude oil through the Gulf of Mexico. It’ll also become evident that the father of a kid who just shat its pants on an airplane in mid-flight is about as helpless at mitigating that disaster as a bunch of overly compensated oil engineers are at containing oil that’s spewing into the ocean.

Then inevitably the flight out of Orlando will be full of a bunch of goddamn snot-nosed kids with entertainment hangovers, still coming down from their week-long sugar highs, and smelling like they’ve spent the last few days bathing in kid-filth and bacteria with a bunch of parents who have long since lost their ability, their will, and their diving right to discipline their children.

In short, if you’re like me it will be an absolute living hell.

But that’s neither here not there.

We had some friends come to visit us this past weekend for the holiday so we took them kayaking west of Nashville on the Harpeth River. For those not familiar with the area, the Harpeth is one of the main waterways that flows into the Cumberland River, and one that flooded the worst a few weeks ago. Admittedly as we were heading to the kayak/canoe rental place the thought occurred to me that we’d be seeing some of the aftermath of the flood but I was entirely unprepared for what we actually saw. For beginners the rental place had been under 12’ of water, lost 5 of their transport vans, along with $10k worth of canoes and kayaks, and that was after they had already recovered 52 canoes somewhere downstream. You can’t help but think that some douchebag in west Tennessee had 200 canoes wash into his backyard and was like, “Well shit, this must be a message from God! I’m gonna open a canoe rental business. And you know what I’m gonna call it? Tip-A-Canoe! Look, it’s already written on the side of all the canoes!”

Once we got into the river and started paddling the damage was even more evident, and more jarring. It looked like someone had gone along both banks and just ripped all the trees out of the ground, roots and all, and laid them back down. Any tree that was able to hold on for dear life was still bowled over and stripped clean of its bark and leaves. Just as an example, there are mile markers all the way down the river so you know how long you’ve been paddling. I was keeping mental track of how long it took us to traverse each half mile just so I’d know if we were making good time or not. At one point we passed the 39 mile marker then a really long time lapsed before we finally passed the 38.5 marker. I couldn’t imagine that we had slowed down that much but then just another 200 yards away we passed the 38 mile marker. The river had actually ripped up the tree with the 38.5 marker on it and carried it 200 yards shy of a half-mile down the river. Unbelievable.

And it wasn’t just the destruction to the trees, it was the amount of debris everywhere. And I mean everywhere. There were cloths, tarps, boards, sheets of plywood clinging to the branches of the still standing trees, 30 or 40’ above the river. In some instances there were smaller trees stuck in the branches of larger trees 30’ above the river.

Towards the end of our trip we passed under an old steel railroad bridge where an entire section of it had been blown out by the surging river. No shit, an entire section of steel bridge was just ripped away like you’d peel the top off an aluminum can. They’d already gone in and repaired the bridge – with three massive steel i-beams.

Normally the Harpeth in that area is just a lazy Class 1 river, which is mainly just flat water with very little current to it. By and large it was like that on Saturday for us but there were a few spots where some downed trees had created a makeshift dam that forced the river to neck down into a narrow channel, and as all of you that passed your Fluid Dynamics class know, that can significantly affect the velocity of the water. At one point in particular there was a large sandy island in the middle of the river that split it in two. We chose to go the right only to find one such dam had narrowed the river to just wider than two kayak widths. Even then it wouldn’t have been that big of a deal except as we got closer we realized someone ahead of us hadn’t it made it through the gap and instead had run their canoe into the dam and capsized it. Then we realized it was a family of four – father, mother, and two small boys. The mother and boys had already made it to the island but the father was chest-deep in the water trying to wrestle the current to free the canoe from the tree branches. I maneuvered my kayak to shoot the gap between the dam and island and as I did I looked over to see the small boy, crouched in the fetal position, crying his eyes out saying, “I want to go home!” then I looked to the father who had the look of a deer in headlights and I just thought to myself, “Sweet Jesus, we have a Survivor Imbecile on our hands here!” I quickly paddled over to the island and jumped out of my kayak in time to see my buddy, who is an accomplished kayaker, approaching the dam to offer his assistance to the guy who, like an imbecile, reached out to cling to the side of my buddy’s kayak, instantly capsizing him and his kayak.

“Sweet Jesus, you fucking imbecile!” I screamed out loud in my head as I ran over. My buddy was able to collect his kayak and swim over to the island then turn back and jump in the river where we helped to dude free his canoe and get it over to the island, where the little boy was still in the fetal position crying, “I want to go home!!!” I looked over to the mother who was lamely trying to comfort him with this stupid look on her face and I could only think, “Dear God, you’re a fucking Survivor Imbecile too! What made you think you could take your kids canoeing on a river that had just flooded 4 fucking weeks ago???”

Once we got the Imbeciles straightened away we returned to our kayaks where my buddy pulled out the cooler that contained our Subway eat fresh sub sandwiches, turned it upside down, and watched the river water just pour out of it. I immediately started looking for the sharpest rock I could find to go murder that sonofabitch imbecile who had capsized my buddy’s kayak and ruined our Subway eat fresh sub sandwiches we’d packed for lunch. Four hours on the river without food? We were going to need to find some wire and fashion makeshift fishing poles to catch some fish, or set some traps along the banks to catch whatever frogs, snakes, or rabbits we could, then I’d need to gather some dry would to start a fire with the flint I’d brought along but in the meantime we’d need to scavenge for beetles, salamanders, or grubs – anything to hold us over and give us the vital protein and vitamins we needed to survive. It was going to be tough but by keeping our wits about us we’d be able to make it through alive.

Fortunately for the imbecile, my buddy pulled the subs out and remarkably they were not ruined, as they were safely contained in the plastic bag. “Thank God,” I thought, “I didn’t want to have to dig a bunch of shallow graves in this island to dispose of the imbecile’s body and the three imbecile witnesses.”

After we ate our Subway eat fresh sub sandwiches we set back out on the river and finished the trip without further incident. I have no idea what happened to the Imbecile family though. For all I know they’re still on the river somewhere. For fuck’s sake, who takes their family out on a river four weeks after the worst flood event in recorded history? Who does that? And who does that who hasn’t already extensively studied, contemplated, and written about survivalism? Who does that? Goddamn imbeciles!