by Valerie Williams

Created on: March 04, 2009

Whitewater rafting is one of those extreme, adventurous recreational activities that was always right up there with bungie-jumping. I mean, who doesn't want to jump off the side of a cliff with only your ankles tied to a cord, free-falling hundreds of feet until you're unceremoniously yanked back up and left to bounce up and down upside-down until someone decides to cut you down? I actually thought I wanted to try bungie-jumping, and was totally gung-ho about signing up for it after I went on my first river-rafting trip, which turned out to be terrific fun and gave me a boost of confidence that I could do anything I wanted.

So when the chance to go river-rafting came up a second time several years after the first trip, I signed up without hesitation. I even asked a friend of mine, who had never done anything like it, but was completely up for the challenge. We drove from Seattle through the North Cascades to the tiny town of Skykomish, where we came face-to-face with the Skykomish River, and as we piloted our way down the two-lane highway, we caught glimpses of the raging river with its foaming whiteheads crashing against rocks, rocks, by the way, that looked jagged and sharp and dangerous. I felt a tiny shiver of trepidation run down my spine, which I bravely swept away. After all, how could I ever try bungie-jumping if I was afraid of a river with some rocks (ok, boulders), in it?

We barely made it to our meeting place with the rafting company, and as we sat there among the thirty or so other people, I halfway listened to the twenty-minute speech on safety. Who ever really listens to that stuff? It's like listening to the safety demonstration stewardesses give you on airplanes. Most people are reading magazines, listening to their iPods, or sleeping, because, really, who truly thinks their airplane is going to be the one that crashes? And if it does, who really believes that sticking your head between your knees will be the difference between life and death if a 400,000 pound plane plummets into the ground? So, yeah, I was in denial. I'd been river-rafting before, after all, and what did I need to learn that I hadn't heard before? Nothing they'd warned about had even occurred on my first trip, so I allowed my mind to drift as the instructor spoke of mundane things such as what to do if you fall out of the raft (not gonna happen to me), or if the raft overturns; a hundred what-ifs that I ignored. Denial, I'm telling you. Though when they stuck a disclaimer form

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