August 16, 1996

Yesterday, we went canoing. It was an IS off-site, a little treat for us all, and we went canoing in a river in France. I was somewhat iffy on this proposition; the river, the Loue, is one that Angel has been fishing in, and described as unbelievably cold. It was his opinion -- not *quite* expressed in so many words -- that I shouldn't go at all, and his advice that if I did go I should at all costs avoid falling in.

My last experience in a canoe was many many years ago, and involved a complete and utter lack of steering ability on my part, but then again it was a very long time ago, and it was on a lake; rivers kind of point you somewhere, which I supposed would probably help. (People have since pointed out the obvious flaw in my logic; this only helps if they point you where you want to go.)

The weather lately has been of the sort that prompts little conversations like this: "Mighty cold for summer today." "Summer? That's over now, buddy, hadn't you noticed?" Yesterday was forecast to be rather warmer, and as it turned out it eventually was, but when we left SGI at 7 am, it was still foggy although beautiful in the Jura.

We drove quite a long way into France, where things were puzzlingly still pretty much closed at 9am on a Thursday, left everything we weren't willing to plunge into a river on the bus, and went off to have a coffee. (The cafe was bemused by this sudden invasion of foreigners, but I was later really quite happy to have had that coffee, and the croissants I got for breakfast on the bus.)

We meandered back to the canoe place, got our pictures taken, put on life vests, and paired off into canoes and got in the river. At this point, we discovered that my canoe steering had not notably improved with age. I could generally turn the canoe in the desired direction, but rarely if ever by the desired amount. We also discovered that the Loue is a classic European river, running through small towns and people's back yards and absolutely chock-a-block full of little weirs we were going to have to go over. The trick to doing this is to put the canoe exactly where you're supposed to, since, in all that vertically falling water, there's one clear path left. Sort of like waterfalls, only infinitely less so, since they're manmade, and generally only a few feet high.

This has a certain tragic inevitability to it, doesn't it? We *all* know what's going to happen next in this little story, and by the time we had gotten in line for the first weir, my partner in the canoe, who doesn't know me as well as y'all, had nevertheless managed to get the picture and was resigning himself to his doom.

And indeed, we made it down the first half before it became clear that we were neither straight enough nor far enough to the left, and instead of sliding down the flat bit, we were going to go sideways off it into the vertical water, and at that point you can forget tragic dramatic inevitability, we were into true, inexorable laws-of-nature inevitably, and very shortly thereafter we were into the water. Angel is right, although too polite; the Loue is *fucking* *cold*. It is also very hard to stand up in fast-running water, and a life-vest does you no good when the water is only a foot deep. I bounced off a fair number of rocks, but falling into, out of, onto, and down things is rather one of my specialties, and I kept my grasp on the paddle, and eventually, with a good bit of help, came out of the water shivering, gasping for air, and bruised, but substantially intact. The guide who helped fished me out said hopefully "Ca va?" (Does it go, which means basically "You OK?"), to which I said, breathlessly but in French, that it did *not* go, but that nothing was broken, I just needed a moment.

I was removing my sweatshirt and trying to decide if the bluejeans had been a good idea (because I would have lost rather a lot of skin on my left knee in shorts) or a bad idea (because they were going to be very cold and wet for the next hour), when a paddle went floating past me, and my canoe companion, chivalrously watching the canoes upstream while I removed clothes, said "Oh shit, he broke it". The next canoe down had been slightly straighter than ours. Not enough straighter, but sufficiently straighter so that its occupants had not given themselves over to inevitability but had decided to fight it out (this is a really bad concept; when falling, aim to land on something unimportant, not to catch yourself!). Their steerer figured he could just step out of the canoe as it went over, put out a foot into the moving water and rocks, and broke it severely and instantaneously.

They took him off in our canoe, and after a bit of wrangling, his canoing partner climbed the bank and I got back in their canoe. This has been interpreted by some people as game spirit on my part, but was mostly just due to the fact that I didn't think I could climb the bank. We rejoined the other canoes; I am told that I was a rather dramatic color at that point. One of the other women, sensibly deciding that I was all too likely to do this again, lent me a retainer for my glasses, as those people who had seen me go into the water and roll around, multiple times, were utterly amazed that my glasses were still on my face.

We went over another little weir, upright this time, and I started to feel a little better, and then we got to a slightly larger one, went over it too straight and too far to the left, and I didn't even have time to realize that we were going over before I was in the river, again.

This was a good news, bad news situation. The good news was that the river was a lot deeper at that point, and I wasn't bouncing off rocks, which I deeply appreciated. The bad news was that I couldn't breathe; sudden immersion in cold water had set off the asthma. It wasn't, from my point of view, that bad a tradeoff, but it was going to take a while before I could be relied upon to get back in the canoe without knocking it over. My canoing partner kept saying anxiously that we should go while the other canoe that had stopped kept asking anxiously if I was going to be OK, leaving me to say on alternate breaths "No, I cannot get back in the canoe yet" and "C'est pas grave, il passera vite, un moment, c'est tout".

Eventually one of the guides arrived, and we all decided that I'd be happier at the base, and I limped off with him, assuring him there was nothing really wrong with me and my asthma medication was in my pocket and being told to shut up and breathe. I showed up in time to see my colleague of the broken foot about to be loaded into an ambulance, surrounded by people who speak only French. He's Swedish, his English is excellent, and his French is up to the occasional sentence, but not much more, so I volunteered to go with him, a proposition accepted with delight by everybody, mostly for his sake but also I think because it involved putting a blanket around me and surrounding me with emergency personnel, which got another worry off everybody's hands.

This has also been somewhat misinterpreted, as a generous and self-sacrificing act. I suppose that if at that point someone had explained to me that my choices were a) sit down in the sun, take my asthma medication, get dry clothes and lunch within half an hour and b) stand up in a moving ambulance for nearly an hour, get no lunch, no asthma medication, and no dry clothes for 4 hours, I probably would still have done it, because it needed to be done, and that would have been brave and self-sacrificing, but actually it didn't occur to me for about 10K that I was just going to have to wait for the asthma to subside due to natural adrenalin, since I needed both hands to keep standing up, and it didn't occur to me until the end of the ambulance ride that I was now dripping wet and stranded in a strange French city with nothing on me but 8.50 Swiss Francs, my asthma inhaler, and my house keys.

In fact, it didn't occur to me until the hospital started demanding to know who we were and where Carl's papers were that I didn't know where I had come from. (I was one up on Carl to start with, since I knew the name of the river I fell in, and I turned out to be able to do better than that, and remember the name of the company that rented the canoes, which one of the nurses managed to identify and find a phone number for.)

It does turn out to have been extremely useful that I was there; Andrea, the secretary and organizer, was actively looking for us, and would have succeeded in straightening things out without me, but not until after they'd operated on his foot and stuck him with at least an overnight in Besancon. My main role, aside from the emotional assistance of making small talk and telling him what was going on, was to emote to the hospital staff about his wife and small children waiting for him in Switzerland, until they called Switzerland for me, so that I could get SGI's HR people to arrange an ambulance transfer to the hospital in Neuchatel. (It took me several tries to hit up the wife and small children; the French hospital staff were completely unswayed by the fact that he was miserable and alone and wanted to go home, possibly due to their unshakeable assumption that I was going to stay with him and that I must be all the company he could want. As soon as I started calling on the image of his wife and children, they decided that it was eminently logical that he go home, and settled down to the question of who was going to pay for it.)

Within a few hours, I had successfully consigned our fates to Andrea, in France, and Simone, in Neuchatel, and we had reached the calm point where neither of us had anything to do. This was a relatively immense improvement, particularly over the ambulance ride, which was grim in the extreme, being very long and unrelieved by pain-killers. Carl was still managing to laugh at about 1 in 4 of my jokes, which was relatively impressive on both our parts, but there were fairly long periods where mere badinage was not really sufficient distraction. It was bad enough that the pain medication, when he eventually got it, made him vastly more clear-headed and attached to the real world.

The ambulance personnel were faced with a signficant temperature problem; I was soaked to the bone and wheezing, and although I was wrapped in a blanket and didn't feel particularly cold, I clearly needed to be kept warm. Carl was in his bathing suit, and complaining of being too warm. They were badly overheated, but then again they were fully dressed, uninjured, and hadn't been submerged in a river, and besides keeping Carl warm was about all they could do for him. So they kept asking if he was cold, and he kept saying no, as did I, and they kept looking skeptical. At one point they were getting insistent about his being cold, and I told them he was burning up, I could tell, I had a hand on him.

The female ambulance attendant gave me The Look. It's a look I'm familiar with; from friends, it combines fondness, exasperation, some admiration for my stubbornness, and some pity for my inherent denseness. From strangers there's less fondness and more wonderment. In any case, she gave me The Look, and said admonishingly "But Madame, that's not him; your hands are white with cold". Adrenalin is a lovely, lovely thing, and by that point I felt warm as toast, wasn't hungry in the least, and had entirely stopped coughing.

I then stepped out of the ambulance into the cold wind and discovered that it must have been a good 85 in the ambulance; it was just as shockingly cold as plunging back into the river, and I shivered violently for so long that by the time I stopped Carl was coherent enough not only notice that I was shaking but also to be unhappy about it. Fortunately I warmed up again round about then.

He is, relatively speaking, fine, although he broke the ends of both the bones in the bottom of his leg and they'll have to be realigned under general anaesthesia when the swelling goes down on Monday or Tuesday or so. I'm mildly black-and-blue and limping, but it's nothing that won't wear off. Neither of us has any intention of getting back into a canoe any time real soon. He says the ambulance ride from Besancon back to Neuchatel was much better, but very, very, boring. I'm told that the rest of the canoing was actually much easier. It may just have seemed that way without me...

Postscript, May 26, 1997: I turn out to have been wrong about "nothing that won't wear off". At this point I'm betting that the numb patch on my left kneecap is permanent. However, compared to the amount of titanium holding Carl's ankle together, which is enough to finance a small country, it's nothing. I still have no intention of getting back into a canoe