Tubing on the Guadalupe

I grew up on the Mississippi. Well, that’s not entirely accurate. I grew up in southeastern Minnesota, in a college town, past which the Mississippi swiftly ran. Living so near it, I could spell "Mississippi" by the time I was 6. I remember my older brother, Dick, impatiently saying to me, "Jude, it’s so easy, just memorize this!
M...
I...
crooked letter,
crooked letter,
I:
crooked letter,
crooked letter,
I:
humpback,
humpback:
I".

We never referred to it as the Mississippi, though, and I didn’t know anyone who did. We always just called it The River, as in: "Don’t go down to The River!" or "They were out on The River" or "Do you want to go swimming at The Lake or The River?"

Even though we didn’t live on it, to me, The River was a big part of my life the entire time I was growing up. It was spanned by a long interstate bridge, linking Minnesota to Wisconsin. Each year, in the first days of spring, when most of the snow had melted and the first buds were bursting forth, my Dad would invite me to accompany him on a walk across the interstate, across The River. 6th of 7 kids, I loved the attention, the one-on-one-time aspect of it, and I can still remember how it felt, the way he gripped my hand with his own big, hard, calloused hand. He’d helped sandbag the levee during the Flood of ‘53, and when he’d had too much to drink, that was one of the stories he liked to tell. It sounded thrilling and almost heroic to me, and as a result, every April, the mind-numbing monotony of living in a small college town in Minnesota in the 1960's was broken by the exciting possibility that The River, swollen with runoff from melting snow and spring rains, might once again FLOOD. That happened only once during the time that I lived there. I was in high school then, and although we were excused from classes to help sandbag and/or distribute coffee and donuts to the workers, the reality of The River flooding was much more frightening, and not nearly so thrilling, as I’d imagined.

The River was cold and muddy, but each summer a part of it was roped off for swimming, and as a kid of 8 or 9, sometimes I’d get on my bike and pedal across the interstate by myself, to the beach house on Latch Island, where I’d change into my suit and go swim in The River. There were places that the current was so strong that even sitting in the shallows, near shore, if I lifted my feet off the sandy bottom just a little, I’d be pulled along by the current.

When I was 9, I became friends with a girl, Chris W., whose family owned a houseboat. Each summer for the next several years, I spent many weekends on The River with Chris and her family. Her father would pilot the houseboat to a sandbar, and as soon as it was anchored, as Chris’ parents settled onto deck chairs with gin and tonics in their hands, Chris and I would lower the dinghy into the water and paddle off into a slough, looking for adventure, the sun warm on our shoulders. Sometimes we’d spend the night on The River, an experience I always loved. When I left Minnesota, although I was entirely ready to move on to new experiences and new places, I knew that a part of me would always miss The River.

Eventually, I moved to Texas. I love the heat, and the huge blue sky, and the stark beauty of the desert southwest, and yet I feel landlocked, and although I’ve lived here for 23 years, until this past weekend, I’d never been tubing on the Guadalupe.

A couple of months ago, somewhere on the web, I found a list of things recommended to enjoy tubing on the Guadalupe. It was a short list, of mostly obvious items: hat, sunblock, water, sunblock, sunglasses, sunblock, and sunblock. The only thing that I might not have thought of was the recommendation to wear tennis shoes, river shoes, or sandals rather than flip flops "‘cause the river’ll suck ‘em offaya". Uh-huh. I searched my closet for my TIVA river shoes, from a week-long white water rafting trip I took on the Salmon river in Idaho a couple of years ago. As soon as I found them, I knew I was good to go.

At a little after 2:00 on Friday afternoon, we left Dallas. There were 8 of us, and we drove down in two cars. On our way to Austin, we stopped at Lockhart, Texas, where we ate mouthwatering barbecue at Black’s, and took photos of the beautifully restored county courthouse before driving into Austin, where we spent Friday night in a cheap hotel, talking over each other, arguing, playing Cranium, and having a great time.

Saturday morning we woke to weather I can’t remember experiencing in July in the 23 years I’ve lived in Texas: rain and thunderstorms. We decided to drive to the river anyway. That was a good decision, because by the time we arrived at Canyon Lake to rent our tubes, the sun was shining and the day was Texas hot. At River Sports Tubes we signed up for a "medium", 4 hour float (as opposed to the short float of 2 hours or the long float of 7 hours). We rented 9 tubes: one for each of us and a "cooler tube" for our cooler, packed with an endless supply of water and a 6-pack of Shiner, so the 4 of us who are old enough to drink could have a ceremonial beer on the river. We put on gimme caps, t-shirts, and river shoes, slathered on sun block, picked up our tubes, and headed for the river.

The Guadalupe may be one of the most popular rivers in Texas, but it’s hardly the Mississippi. At approximately 250 miles long, it's roughly 1/10th the length of the Mississippi, and the section down which we were tubing was just a couple of miles long. Still, I was river-hungry and ready for a new adventure, so I stood eagerly on the banks of the Guadalupe, looking around me, at the place where we'd put in.

The water looked lazy and slow, and the moment I put a foot in, I discovered the spring-fed Guadalupe was surprisingly cool. It was also surprisingly crowded. There must have been at least a couple thousand people on the Guadalupe, from college students to other families to what Stephanie politely referred to as "country" people. In case you don’t know what that means...for the record, I saw more tattoos on Saturday than I’ve ever seen in my life, and probably more piercings, too, as well as some real river stupidity. Still, overall it was a mellow crowd, and I liked that.














Stephanie & Chris, chillin' on the Guadalupe

The Guadalupe is at an all-time low, due to the drought, and much of the section we traveled was just a couple of feet deep. However, it was beautiful. There were two small "rapids", where flips flops might well have been lost had any of us worn them, but of course we hadn’t. Floating in tubes, our feet snug in our river shoes, we drifted down the Guadalupe, between limestone bluffs and tall cedar, pecan, cottonwood, oak, elm and sycamore trees . We saw baby ducks swimming, and a blue heron walking along the shore. The four of us who are old enough to drink opened the Shiners, and consumed those. Mike, Chris, Sara and Stephanie drank bottled water and gatorade. We got sunburned, and it felt good. There’s something about a river...