Wild Ride on Raging Goose Creek
~Dave Waldo

One day when I was a junior in high school, my friend Jay and I got this brilliant idea that we would float down the creek that runs through our little town in Eastern Washington.  The water was high and swift because it was spring and snow was melting off the fields.

Jay had something that we probably mistook for a boat.  It had two metal pontoons joined by a piece of metal.  As I recall we had an old broom and a small paddle.  We each got into a pontoon and immediately were on our wild ride.  Our greatest challenge was going under bridges.  The water was running high.  I remember Jay yelling “watch your head.”  As I ducked, my head just missed a part of the first bridge.  The water was rushing us toward the next bridge, and if I hadn’t stuck my broom out to slow us down, we would have crashed into it full force.  We developed a problem though, a result of that last maneuver with the broom.  My pontoon took on a considerable amount of water.  Somehow, we were able to make it under that bridge.  However, our small vessel was badly listing.  By then I was sitting in a lot more water than Jay was.  We were spinning around as we went under the next bridge, but our fate was sealed.  We sank.  I remember struggling to hold onto the limbs of a bush on shore and grabbing Jay.  He didn’t know how to swim.  The water was extremely cold, and it was fast and powerful.  Dragging ourselves out of the creek was difficult.

We were muddy, wet, and cold, but that didn’t matter to us.  We were excited, we were pumped, and we told all about our adventure to everyone who would listen.  Later, we heard that we had drawn quite a crowd who watched us as we bravely fought that raging creek.  It wasn’t very smart, but it was high adventure, a memory that has stuck with me all these years.