When Vacations Attack

I am a little concerned about the new reality-type show being hyped all over television, "When Vacations Attack." The promos show a collection of horrifying scenes: A whale jumping into a small fishing boat; a jeep driven at too high an angle falling backwards down a cliff while a horrified woman looks on; a mountain biker running headlong into a small SUV, the dismounted biker hurtling toward the windshield; a climber losing her hold and plummeting down a steep and rocky embankment. And there are lots of testimonials from people we can only suppose to be survivors of these various mishaps: "Everything started moving in slow motion. . ."; "I saw my whole life flash before my eyes. . ."; "I knew I was dead. . .".

After shuddering through all of this I have been forced to admit that our vacations are pretty boring and pedestrian by comparison. I mean a whole episode about me getting food poisoning from some bad ceviche in Cabo San Lucas just doesn't stack up to getting jumped by a whale off the coast of Puerto Vallarta.

I have caught numbers of barracuda while on vacation and waded through choppy, fish-infested waters to wait for our guides to cook them up over a beach fire. There was always a risk that I might get a bone caught in my throat, but I figured that every once in a while you just have to take chances. Those barracuda were big, I hasten to add, and when Felipe held my first catch up I noticed the rows of sharp teeth. I remember being pretty proud of myself, but then just the other day there was a piece on the 4 o'clock news about a barracuda actually jumping into a couple's boat and piercing the woman's lungs. Her husband somehow managed to get her the medical help she needed in the nick of time. It'll be just my luck that we'll go fishing this summer in Belize and I'll get jumped by a barracuda but no one will have the camera going.

That's what happened when Katherine and I almost drowned in the freezing torrent of Cascade Creek as it fed into Jenny Lake. We were quietly paddling around the lake, a yearly tradition, when we decided it would be cool to paddle up the creek as far as we could go. The plan was to get upstream a bit, turn around, and "run the rapids" back to the lake. It was early in the morning; there was nary a ripple on the lake; and we had the whole place to ourselves, so there was no one to TALK US OUT OF IT. We made it maybe twenty-five yards upstream when the current got too strong (It wasn't called Cascade Creek for nothing, a fact that had somehow escaped us.), so we decided to turn around. Turning your kayak around in the middle of river cascading from 13,000 snow filled feet is a bad idea. The kayak hung up on a rock and "everything started going in slow motion" as the kayak slowly filled with water and flipped over, Katherine and I still aboard, into the stream.

We both, thank God, managed to get out from under the boat. Katherine scrambled to shore and I managed to stand in the chest high water clinging to the rock with one hand and to the front strap of the water-filled kayak with the other. After a few minutes we managed to get over our initial shock and somehow wrestled the kayak on shore where we dumped out the water, put it back in with it headed in the right direction, climbed aboard and shot back down to the lake where we managed to catch up to our paddles. All collected, we looked at each other, at the inlet in question, and laughed with a mixture of relief and pride. Hey, this was one of those wilderness moments for us, but like I said no one was on shore taking pictures and I don't want to go through it again.

There was also the time Katherine almost killed a trumpeter swan with a paddle. I will admit that this can't compare with capsizing jeeps and mountain bikers splashing through windshields, but it seemed life and deathish at the time. We were kayaking around Two Ocean Lake in the Tetons and were making a bee line for a family of trumpeter swans hanging out at the other end of the lake. We had seen them there every summer, so we were just intending to say hello. When we got close we noticed the baby swans swimming in formation behind their proud parents, so we just kind of coasted and watched.

Just when we noticed that we had somehow gotten between the adult swans and one of their offspring, the male swan got up on its legs, flapped his wings and started "running" across the water, clearly charging our boat. I was preparing myself for a feathery death when the swan skid to a halt, still flapping and honking, just a few feet from the boat. Immediately the female made the same charge. I noticed that Katherine had picked up her paddle, ready to do battle with the beasts.

They stopped their charge and we got the hell out of there. The swan family quickly reunited and I just remember being relieved we didn't have to explain a bludgeoned swan to a park ranger.

There were other moments that weren't so dramatic looked at in retrospect, but at the moment surely the stuff of reality television. I was sitting on the porch of Bluebell, our Jenny Lake cabin, drinking a gin and tonic when I noticed a line up of cars on the scenic drive around the lake. I got up to see what was happening and ran into a mama bear and two cubs walking up the side of our cabin just a couple of feet away. I backed up and told Katherine to grab the gin and tonics and get inside. I followed her in and we watched as the bears lumbered off in the direction of the main lodge. Katherine always gives me a hard time about wanting to SAVE THE GIN AND TONIC, but I figured gin came from juniper berries and bears liked berries. If we had left the gin and tonics out there is no telling how long the beasts would have stayed. Plus we were running low on dip,

There was also the no-good, terrible, very bad day when I skinned my knee on the way down Granite Canyon. We were walking around a forested bend that opened up to a view of the river below. As I made the turn, I saw a naked girl standing in the current cooling herself off. It was like a scene out of a movie where all of a sudden a pretty little fawn appears in a splash of light. I wrecked the moment by tripping on a rock and tearing a gash out of my knee. I still have a scar. The good news is that every year Katherine and I have a wild-life spotting contest to see who finds the most. We assign points to different breeds. The ubiquitous antelope is worth a point. Elk, almost as numerous, are worth two. A bear is worth five. I gave myself fifteen points for the girl, helping me win that year's contest.