Word: rafts
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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When revolutionaries win, it's hard to remember that they were once the minority: George Washington is a portrait on the dollar bill instead of a shoeless guerrilla on a raft. But Child was a rebel. She fought against everyone who believed in living correctly instead of well. She first fought against recipes that called for the culinary ease of prepackaged powdered soup and then the dietary benefits of defatted cheese. "Fake food--I mean those patented substances chemically flavored and mechanically bulked out to kill the appetite and deceive the gut--is unnatural, almost immoral, a bane to good...
...unison and in the same direction. "Easy forward," we quickly learn, is the command we will most enjoy; "Hard forward!" is the call that will exhaust our arms and propel us over rapids and submerged rocks. "Go left!" and "Go right!" involve two paddlers throwing themselves across the raft - and usually onto their fellow paddlers with varying degrees of injury - while I will become the first of the trip to obey the "Dive!' command, flinging myself flat to avoid being impaled on a black branch rearing out of the water. We spend the first night, as we will every night...
...next day swings between moments of rest, watching entranced as a platypus glides underwater alongside us, and the chaos that ensues when a branch catches one raft as we scoot over a short drop, pitching three of us head first into the churning current and ripping the raft's floor. But we're quickly succumbing to the river's magnificence; its sweet-tasting, clear waters, tinged brown by the tannin leaching off plants, surging and meandering between banks crowded with a jostling throng of trees, tall leatherwoods dropping white blossoms into the foam-covered eddies. Thick forest stretches away...
With long hours of paddling ahead, each morning in camp assumes a brisk urgency. Bags must be repacked and the rafts reloaded. Keeping our bags on the raft and out of the water is one thing; keeping the water out of our bags quite another, and much worried attention is paid to goosenecking them, an origami-style process that involves repeated twisting and tying. A dry night's sleep depends on such art. The campsite must also be kept as pristine as possible, which, as Pat explains to a shocked group on our first night, necessitates...
...rages for 10 km between steep slopes of impenetrable forest, and seeing it we realize why we were asked to sign such a staggeringly comprehensive insurance disclaimer. Most of the rapids in this treacherous gorge, where water levels surge rapidly after heavy rains, can't be done by raft. But while references to portaging in the trip notes conjured images of carrying the rafts down paths on the river bank, the reality in this boulder-strewn obstacle course is vastly different. It takes us two long days to traverse the gorge, from which we emerge bruised, tired and electrified...