Toobing the Guadalupe

This past weekend my husband and I took a trip to Austin to float on tubes down the Guadalupe River and attend a wedding. In that order. Had we known what had happened to the Guadalupe River, and to the tradition of tubing, in the ten or so years since we'd visited, we might have seen the folly in committing to show up good-humored and clean to an event the following day.

First of all, tubing has now become "toobing" in much the same way fruit can become "froot" or "real fruit flavoring" when bastardized into a more artificial, palatable, and profitable product meant to appeal to a larger and dumber populace.

Tubing was a cheap weekend activity involving the rental of big, black rubber inner tubes meant to convey people and coolers at a stately pace down a stretch of river. It was an activity for families as well as college students.

Toobing on the Guadalupe, however, costs about as much as a nice dinner for four with top shelf drinks, and involves the same black rubber inner tubes, whose flaws (the tendency to chafe your underarms and the backs of your knees with their blisteringly hot rubber, and to poke you in the ass with their six-inch metal air nozzles) become much more apparent when you have to pull out a credit card and start rearranging the month's budget.

Lemming-like you get to shuffle your way to the water's edge with droves, whole platoons, of young sport-drinkers, the kinds of people who can stretch a college career into one long spring break before taking a well-deserved "year off to find myself." They haul along coolers, radios, cigarettes, dip, and long, snaking beer bongs, and periodically test out the well-worn mating call, "Wooooooo!"

The river was low, its grayish watermarked banks receding to reveal faded beer cans wedged into tree roots, and the log jam of human limbs further slowed its movement. I looked down at one point, horrified to realize that my sunscreen (industrial strength, SPF Irish) was melting off of me in giant, oily rainbow rings, but then just as quickly realized that far more horrifying things were being secreted by the people around me-- one guy squirted brown dip juice from a swollen lip directly into the water behind him, and the girl next to me giggled darkly when her friend asked, "So what do ya'll do when you have to pee?"

Only once, during the entire three-hour trip, did I see one of the river's natural residents, a frisbee-sized turtle, a yellow-eared slider. My brother and I watched him poke his head out of the water and blink twice, slowly. In the throaty Spanish accent I use for all animals, I quipped, "Why does the water taste like sluts?"

The Guadalupe has three "take-out points," places where you can get out of the river and catch a shuttle back to the toob rental place, but the cost of the trip is the same no matter what point you make it to. I think this reflects a certain amount of cynicism on the part of the rental companies. There is no financial compensation for having better judgment kick in at the first take-out, which is what happened to us.

The take-outs are arguably the best part of a toobing trip because people who have been lying prone and pounding beers in the sun for hours on end now have to stand upright and negotiate steep banks with a beer in one hand and an inner tube in the other. Years ago, when it was still tubing, I witnessed two burly lesbians fail miserably at this feat, one toppling down the bank and taking out the other, and both yelling at each in slurred contraltos, "Summer! Sum-MERRRR! Get up!" "God, April, I'm TRYING!"

This time, I was reminded of that scene in the first Star Wars movie where Han, Luke, Leia, and Chewy end up in the trash compactor in the Death Star. The trash seems fluid, but it's so dense that you never see any water, or, for that matter, the creature that lives beneath it all and keeps yanking them all under the surface. We washed up at the take-out next to a guy completely passed out in the water, toobless, his head hooked face up over a tree root and his body swaying slack in the shallow, oily water around him. We paused on the bank to regroup and watch another extravagantly drunk guy crash through the underbrush on the opposite side of the river, his knees buckling underneath him like a rag doll's as he waved to the cheering strangers floating past.

It was with quiet solemnity that we watched him slam face first into the human tide-- we were watching the death dive of tubing.