no pretty finishes

The day to white water raft arrived. 

I'd donned my wet suit; good grief, this suit was SNUG. The river temp stayed a crisp 39 degrees Fahrenheit this time of year. Above freezing, but still ... quite cold, so the wet suit for sure helped. Completely covered my body, except for my head. 

My rafting partner Carrie and I carried our tandem kayak to the river shoreline to put in. I was with a group of friends, somewhere near where Tennessee meets North Carolina. The rafting company assured us the river was a serene ride ... for the first 95 percent of the journey. We had the option to skip the last tenth of a mile, if we wanted. Or, we could choose to negotiate the brief yet tricky rapids that concluded the rafting experience, to give it our best shot.

Carrie and I chose to see this experience all the way through. Besides, those rapids were at least two hours away. So we coasted along the river. We admired the cliffs on both sides, the mid-spring foliage along the banks. I took the front spot on the boat. 

Serenity abounded.

It was the noise I heard first. A dull, foamy roar from downriver, reaching upstream to tickle our ears.

"Is that the rapids?" Carrie asked me.

The sound emanated from around the river bend. It sounded like what I imagined rapids would sound like. My grip tightened on my double-oar rafting paddle. Carrie let out a squeak/scream behind me. We were getting close.

The boat a ways ahead of us seemed to pause for a moment before disappearing from view. That must be the drop, I thought to myself. "I think we're here!!" I shouted to Carrie behind me. Sure enough.

We hit the drop, lurched forward, and that's all I recall before the end of the ride. The three photos taken by the rafting company that I later viewed provided the context I missed (I am forever dismayed that I chose to not purchase these photos, because they were beauties).

In the first pic: Carrie and I ride atop the rapids in our raft, like riders on a bull. We look beautiful, elegant, assured. And in control. Also too closely behind us was another raft, larger than ours with about six people in it. I didn't notice that raft when on the river.

The second pic: a gnarled mess of our arms, legs, foamy water, oars, our overturned raft. We bit it and succumbed to the rapids. To add insult, the raft behind ours had plowed through on top of us! I do remember a briefly terrifying moment of being stuck under something in the water.

The third pic: it's the raft that overtook us. They do look content, so good for them. But just beside their raft is my head. In the water. Just my head. I had my sunglasses on still. No sign of our raft, our oars, or of Carrie.

When my memory comes back: I'm gasping for air, coughing up river water. I'm laying face-down on the bank. No sign of my sunglasses. Carrie is a few feet away, slowly crawling up the river bank, trying to regain her senses. Some stranger gathers our oars and drags our boat, and gently sets them near us on the bank. With shortened breath, she and I try to piece together what just happened. She doesn't remember much either. We'd wiped out, our raft tipped, we went under, and in no time at all, the river spat us out onto its side.

Yet in the confusion of wiping out in the rapids -- we'd finished the course. 

We did it.

Was it a picture-perfect completion? Far from it. 

Did it get us over the finish line? Absolutely. 

Maybe you can relate to this reality: sometimes when you finish a giant task, or project, or season of life, it feels like it almost finished you too. That's how it tends to be. If we hadn't absolutely wiped out in the rapids, I doubt I'd still remember this story, all these years later. 

Who cares how pretty you look, or how fulfilled you feel when you cross a finish line. 

You're over the line.