out in the Styx

Yesterday we paid a river outfitter $130 to let us float down the River Styx for 4 hours. The only thing missing was Charron, the boatman, but we did meet Trace, the guy who drove the rickety old blue schoolbus from hell down the narrow, bumpy road to the river. (Being from New England as I am, I didn't know there were real people named Trace.)

We had just signed our lives away in the air-conditioned office, never bothering to read the fine print in the contract. If we had paid attention we might have seen the warning signs, recognized the oracles like the shirtless guy at the concrete block grocery store who hopped out of his ancient car long enough to shout, "Hey" to us. "Hot, in' it?" he chuckled before he roared off the down the road. We blindly followed.

After handing over our money we were sent out on the porch to wait for Trace who arrived soon. A small, sinewy character in his mid-fifties, he was sweating as much as the rest of us as he climbed out of the bus. He wore wrap-around extreme sport sunglasses with purple/blue reflective lenses so we could not see his eyes. His knee-high athletic socks were rolled down many times to make thick, neat cuffs around his ankles, just above his white, high-top Reeboks.

Before we even started down the road to perdition he began making his hackneyed jokes, the first about "Type A personalities." The whole outfit, in fact, seemed to have a personal animus against "Type-A personalities," as if the innermost circle of hell was reserved for them. Signs everywhere warned them and ridiculed them. I think he mistook my engineer husband for a "Type A" because he asked an innocent question about where the tubes were (there were none on the bus), so we got off to a bad start with Trace.

As we jerked and rattled down the narrow, washed out road to the river our conductor continued his practiced, mildly caustic humor. Jokes about dyslexics ("your other left hand, if you're dyslexic"), about cows who wander into the river ("Shenandoah river hippos"), about the perils of thunderstorms on the river. It's been a long time since I heard a grown man use the word "tush" that many times in five minutes, but he worked it in. To his credit, he warned us to use lots of sunscreen on the river lest we burn to a crisp, but he did not warn us to repent of our sins before it was too late. Somehow I missed the "Abandon hope all ye who enter here" sign on the outside of the bus.

After the bus jerked to a stop Trace dropped us off at what was, we would learn, the only shady spot along the river bank, waited only long enough to make sure everyone had a tube and clattered away in the old blue box, presumably to pick up more unsuspecting mortals.

The first half-mile or so was deceptive. While it was nothing like our last family river trip in North Carolina, on a chilly, rushing river which was over far too soon, it was pleasant enough. The current moved along at a moderate pace if you found the right spot and the water felt cool next to the 102 degree air. But that all changed.

The water moved more and more slowly and grew uncomfortably warm. Dragonflies, most of them in curiously conjoined pairs (were they really doing what first comes to mind?) kept landing on our knees and arms. Soon we were floating so slowly we could only detect movement by watching the river bottom; staring at the shore we couldn't tell if we were moving at all.

The sun grew hotter and hotter but there was no shade near either bank. I began to long for the trip to be over, but there was no way to hurry things along. At one point we actually got out of the tubes and trudged through the knee deep, tepid water, since walking was faster than floating. When we finally saw the old barn and silo Trace has told us to look for as the final mile marker our journey had become like some bad dream that never ends. It took us 15 minutes to float past the barn; every time I opened my eyes to check our progress, it was still there. Mute, white-faced cows standing in the warm water stared at us as we floated past to oblivion.

Finally we spied the bridge which was the end-point of our journey. At that point I didn't care what waited on the other side; I just wanted to get off the river. Anything would have been a relief.

We crawled out of the river and dragged our tubes up the hill to the same office building from which we had begun our odyssey. It was still hot as hell, but our own purple Dodge oven looked heavenly after that river. We never saw Trace again. Perhaps in this life we never will.