The next morning, we wake up early, as in, 6AM early, which doesn't make me too happy when you consider how late we went to bed. We all get up and start getting ready to head to Kernville when the camp ranger comes by presumably to say hi (and also that we needed to pay for the second night). He gets out of his SUV, looks around, and starts acting like we're fucking crazy for camping in Red Rock in the summer. "So, what do you guys have planned for today?". "We're heading into Kernville for some beer and tubing." "Yeah...that's a good idea...". There's a pretty long pause, and we're all waiting for this guy to say something horrible like, "YEAH, THIS IS A STAGING AREA FOR THE NORTH KOREAN INVASION, MOVE ALONG". Turns out, it had been getting into the 100s with intense sunlight, not as dramatic, but still a good reason to get out.
An hour or son on the road, and we show up in Kernville. Now, being the beer geek that I am, I start giggling like a little girl about going to Kern River Brewing (you know, the makers of Citra DIPA, and Class V stout, and J.O. IPA). Unfortunately, the place is closed, so we head into the closest village looking area and sit down to some breakfast. So far, the only thing we've heard about the Kern river, is how horrendously dangerous it is, and how people die left and right. We're smarter than they are, right? Anyway, everything boiled down to "Drinking without a life vest on the river is a bad combination", simple enough. After we have breakfast, we wander around town, collecting supplies and gear for the rafting trip. The main problem that we have to overcome, is that we only have one car, in a small town, that has no taxi service. Typically, when you go rafting, you have a car at the river entry point, and a car at the end, so you can collect both cars at the end. We wrote it off as a trivial detail that we would figure out at the end, you know, after we had been drinking on a river all day.
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| Look, man, it's the only photo I have |
After a quick stop for a morning beer at KRBC, we started driving up the road to start rafting down. After several people giving us serious warning about the danger of the river, I really didn't get it. The river was calm enough, some rapids here and there, only a few deep spots. Us 1 - River - 0. Everything is going pretty well, we're towing all the necessities in quintuple bagged plastic and a dry bag where we're dragging drinks. Half-way down, Chad makes an announcement (that in retrospect, seemed to be more cheerful than it should have been), that the dry bag had split open...Drinks were gone, my lucky flask is gone, Chad's wallet, oh yeah, THE ONLY SET OF KEYS TO THE CAR. All of these were somewhere on the bottom of Kern River, and we now had no way to get into my car, or get home. Lovely. Now, I'm not really prone to freaking out, but I definitely let things like this ruin my day, my mood just gets completely shot. Oddly enough, I really didn't care. As soon as it happened, I though "You know, this happened, what can we do about it? Nothing. We're still halfway down this river, and I'm sure as hell going to enjoy myself." Right then and there, I just decided that I'd still enjoy my vacation and worry about the consequences later (when we could actually do something). Everyone pretty quickly gets over it and we float the rest of the way down the river.
When we reach the end (about two hours later), we realize that the first thing we should do is return our life vests. Honestly, I just think we needed a victory. We run across the road and find that the shop hours are over, but there are still people inside. They let us in to return the vests, and we start brainstorming about what we can do. We really don't have any choice but to start calling parents (who live in Simi, the only other place with a spare key to my car), and start begging them to come get us. My mentality was "Okay, I was a pretty good kid, I never did drugs, burned anything down, or got anyone pregnant, maybe this will be my long, overdue screw-up!" After a few calls, my parents, graciously agree to drive 3.5 goddamn hours to bring us extra keys in Kernville. Now we just have some time to kill. Chad had the only wallet on the trip, which was now floating around somewhere on the Kern River. Explaining our plight to the cashier at the vest rental company, she said "Well, I have an etching of your card from when you rented the vests, let me see what I can do". She grabs a pen and write "These kids lost everything on the river, please be nice to them". We appreciated the gesture, but didn't expect it to do much good.
After leaving the vest shop, naturally, we went to the brewery again to try our luck with the piece of paper, a sad story, and a promise that we'll pay back whatever we eat and drink. Our bartender was amazing, she accepted our paper, and started serving us whatever we wanted on good faith. We had three hours to kill, so we got to work. As one last credit to the awesome people in Kernville, our bartender said "You know, if you guys can't get out of here tonight, you're more than welcome to stay at our place, you guys remind me of my kid who's done the same thing more than once." You don't get that in LA. Parents eventually show up to rescue the day, and after a drink with them, we head out to get my car. We were all pretty done camping at that point, so we went back to the campground, grabbed our stuff, and stayed in a hotel at California City.
That was the first time I can think of a time where I quickly and correctly analyzed a potentially disastrous situation, and I didn't freak out, and I decided that it wasn't going to ruin my day. I finally learned and put into practice that you can only take care of a problem, when you can take care of it. Sitting in the middle of a river, with no way to contact anyone, and no way to find our things, wasn't a time to take care of our problem, but it was a time to enjoy the scenery and great company. Except for Chad, because he fucked us.
