Rafting has never been the best escape

I’m someone who feels at home in the water. I have been a skin

diver for most of my life, a board and bodysurfer and, as long as my

vessel is no bigger than a surfboard, I seem to do all right. But put

me on anything bigger and disaster strikes.

Long before the forces of progress decided to pave all our

riverbeds, thus destroying any possible vestige of personality in

those riverbeds, they were the playgrounds for us urchins. I lived in

Maywood, and Maywood bordered on the Los Angeles River. As most of

the time the Los Angeles River was little more than a dry gulch, we

played cowboys and Indians and cops and robbers, dodging the

occasional patches of quicksand, which was the only peril unless

there was a storm. When there was a storm, the dry gulch was

transformed into a roaring, gushing river.

A fan of Mark Twain, I decided that a trip by raft down the

Mississippi River was the closest thing to heaven on earth, but as I

was light years away from the Mississippi, I decided the Los Angeles

River would make a good substitute.

With Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn as my inspiration, I scoured the

neighborhood for scraps of wood and built myself a raft, a sturdy

raft that Mark Twain would have been proud of -- at least that’s what

I thought looking at my creation. I waited patiently through the dry

months and then, when the snows of the Sierra Madre Mountains melted

and the river changed from a slice of the Sahara Desert to a patch of

the Mississippi, I launched my raft.

If you lived in Maywood, the next town, almost spitting distance,

was Bell. Well, my raft made it almost to Bell. Almost, but not

quite. I floated by Bell hanging on to a 2-by-4, which was all that

was left of my Mark Twain Mississippi River raft. Somehow, reading

“The Adventures of Tom Sawyer” and “The Adventures of Huckleberry

Finn” was not adequate preparation for raft building. It was about

that time I decided that river rafting was not my cup of tea, a sound

determination as it turned out.

Years later, I was river rafting on a Canadian river. It was a

rather large party in the raft, and everything went along swimmingly

until the raft buckled in the middle, sending me butt over teakettle

into the water, where I floated along for what seemed like most of

the river until finally another raft picked me up. It didn’t seem to

matter whether I built the raft or not, I still ended up in the

water.

And it’s not just rafts. I have rented houseboats twice, seemingly

innocuous vessels, but ran aground with the first and into a

hurricane with the second when we ended up tethered to a palm tree in

the Florida Keys for several days.

Even just putting around Newport Harbor in an electric boat, I

have managed to fall overboard. The ferry seems all right. I have

taken innumerable trips over the years without mishap, even liberated

it one night to get back to Balboa Peninsula after the ferry closed,

but if I have to go someplace on the water other than Balboa, don’t

send a boat -- just a pair of swim fins.

It’s safer.

* ROBERT GARDNER is a Corona del Mar resident and a former judge.

His column runs Tuesdays.