River Rat Chapter 7
| River Rat | |
|---|---|
| Chapter 7 of 63 | |
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| Time frame | May 6–14, 1999 |
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Location
Characters
Summary
Scooter and Crystal spend most of the three day break sorting things out for the next trip, buying groceries with the rest of the crew, banking their paychecks, and drinking with other raft guides. Scooter spends some time chatting with Jim who's working for GCR, another rafting company. Louise switches Scooter round some more, but she and Crystal have two new swampers - Norma and Barbie - to train. Louise mentions to Scooter that until she qualifies as a boatman, there must be a boatman on the raft with her. Jerry notes that the boatman doesn't need to be awake, and Louise tells the story of Randy's Rock (not Randy Clark):
"Usually, if a rapids gets named after you when you're still alive, it's because of something that you'd really rather not remember. In this case, several years ago the boatman, Randy, decided to take a nap while he let the swamper run the boat through an otherwise easy stretch down about mile 126 below Fossil. The swamper was pretty new to the river and decided to head down through a narrow but inviting passage behind a rock on river left, just to see what was there," she continued. "Unfortunately, the passage is a lot narrower at the exit than at the entrance; it's pretty fast through there, and the swamper hit the passage hard enough that the raft was torn up and the frame got stuck in the rocks."
"Not a good afternoon," Al remembered with a grin. "Fortunately, it wasn't one of ours."
"The thing you have to remember," Louise said, "It wasn't the swamper who got his name on the rock, it was the boatman."
Louise isn't feeling well and takes the chance to relax as much as possible, asking Scooter and Crystal to help ride herd on the young boatmen and swampers.
Andrea and Debby get off by themselves one evening, missing supper, and were up on a slope as darkness was falling. Crystal and Scooter get flashlights and go to bring them down so that they don't fall. They were taking advantage of the sunset light for nude photos; they plan to pay for their trip by selling them. They end up convincing Scooter and Crystal to model for them later.
