Keeping Up With The Nonericks: Work is tough!

Every year, my office goes on a river trip for a few days. For me, it's a chance to relive my days as a whitewater guide and get some incredible therapy. I know it sounds cliche, but when I get on a river, I'm reminded that I can't control everything and sometimes I have to "go with the flow" (pun intended). In my day to day life, I try to control everything. Ryan will gladly attest to this, and in fact, he deserves a lot of credit for putting up with my incessant questions about the basement remodel, his job, his bowel movements. Actually, I don't need to ask Ryan questions about his bowels, I'm all to aware of the health of Ryan's digestive system.

Anyway, when I get on the river, I immediately switch to a mode where I try to work with the river and not against it. For example, we were running Wapinitia Rapid, a class III rapid that has large waves and a couple of large boulders in the middle of the river that you have to get around or risk flipping or wrapping your boat, when I got pushed off my line going into the rapid. Usually, I like to scout class III rapids if I haven't seen them before, but that didn't happen in this case.

The river pushed our boat farther left than I wanted, and unfortunately, that put our boat in the perfect position to hit a massive boulder. I screamed a command to go left and quickly realized the river did not want me to go that way and we were seconds from hitting the threatening boulder. After I shouted an expletive that rhymes with "duck", I quickly realized what the river was doing and commanded my boat to work with the river instead of against it. It was an ugly run, but we made it and the river didn't punish me for trying to tell it what to do.

To see a few pictures of our boat in Wapintia Rapid, click here and look for photos 17-19. In case you are wondering what I'm wearing, we had a costume night and I'm borrowing a colleague's "Aunt Edna" costume from National Lampoon's Vacation with Chevy Chase. I'm wearing a housecoat over my life jacket and a pink curler in my hair. Classy!

Here's a link to another picture of us running Boxcar Rapid, another class III drop with a big juicy hole (the whitewater you see me hitting in the photo).

I love our annual trips on the river. Not only are they fun, but they are a great reminder that you can have the most rewarding experiences in life can happen when you aren't in control.