You can always tell when it’s been raining up in the mountains by what’s happening in the little river beside the house. This morning it was, for this time of year, a mere trickle. In the middle of the afternoon you could hear the sound level rise and a glance out the kitchen window confirmed that the river had risen considerably though no rain had fallen here yet. By late afternoon we were getting a decent soaking and three teens came down with inner tubes.
“Why don’t you go up higher?” I said in my broken Spanish. “You’ll get a longer and faster ride. They agreed. It took them a while to make their way up stream a few hundred yards and then you could hear them yelling with delight.
I didn’t see them after that. Who knows? The could have gone all the way down to the Pacific Ocean.
One More Good Adventure 
Tubing. It’s a primo Texas summer amusement. The Guadalupe, the Frio and the Sabinal are cool (or even cold), shallow, and in years with any rain, relatively fast. Folks who really get into it lash coolers filled with libations to their tubes, and away they go.
Love the videos. Those boys are having a whee of a time, for sure. It was pretty nice being reminded of what rain is like, too. No, we still haven’t gotten any real rain. The last three weeks we’ve gotten .5″, 1.04″ and .76″ – enough to keep the grass from dying, but not much more. Maybe this weekend, they say.
Ah, yes, the joy and exuberance of youth and its simple pleasures. It was really great to capture their pure joy of living. The next day, Monday, we had some really heavy rain in the area, especially in the higher elevations. I could hear the intensity of the river rising with the water even here inside the house. And it was scary. If the rain that caused the river to rise out of the banks and flood this house was a 100 year rain storm then Monday’s was probably a 96-year rain. It coursed over the field on the other side of the river which I hadn’t seen before and then down below it came screaming through the trees down there in a veritable cataract that threatened to topple some of them. The boys came down and stood looking at the river. I talked to them briefly in my fractured Spanish and told them “don’t do it today.” “Esta demasiado peligroso.” “Too dangerous.” They looked at the brown surging waters for a few moment, nodded their heads and turned for home. Discretion, valor, that sort of thing.
Growing up on the eastern edge of the United States as children we frolicked in the surf of the Atlantic Ocean. There were no rivers to speak of out on the Cape. When I was living in New Orleans, though, one of the joys of the hot muggy summers was to go over to the north shore of lake Pontchartrain to Madisonville and rent tubes for a day drifting down the Tchefuncte River. Of course you always rented an extra tube so you could carry a cooler filled with chilled, long-neck Dixie beers.