Squirrel Girl by Flying Frog Illustration and a Wild 4th of July Weekend

Back in March I wrote about attending the Salt Lake Comic Con FanX with my family. One of the booths we stopped at while we were there was run by Flying Frog Illustration, and my wife picked up a couple of prints from her. Then in May, there was an original art sale on the Flying Frog Illustration Facebook page, for small framed paintings that she calls Magical Minis.

I was kind of angling for a Nightcrawler painting that she had up, but it sold before I committed to buying a painting. I was able to snag this Squirrel Girl art, though, and I am very happy with it. Squirrel Girl is kind of a fringe hero in the Marvel comic universe, but she currently has her own book that is done quite well. This is an awesome painting, with lots of detail. Some of the leaves are flecked with gold metallic paint that doesn't show well in the photo. When it arrived in the mail, I opened it up and showed it to my wife. She said, "Mine?!" and took it from me, and now I only get to look at it from afar, as it is sitting on her desk. That's the second painting she has taken from me, along with a Wonder Woman painting by John Soukup that hangs above her computer monitor.

We had a pretty eventful 4th of July weekend. On the 3rd we went whitewater rafting with my dad and some of his extended family. The river we generally go to is the Payette River. The Upper Main run makes for a pretty good family run, and we took the kids on that one. It was a pretty good time for everyone. I think it takes about 3 hours for that run, with 6 decent-sized rapids and a few other bumpy spots. There is a rope swing off to the side in a slow section of river. My boys are too small to do it on their own, so I took them on the swing piggyback. I got through the first two all right, but with my third kid I slipped a little on the rope. I was able to hang on long enough to get us safely into the water, but in the process I got some ropeburn on my hands, sprained a finger on my left hand, and wrenched my shoulder pretty good. I still can't do a whole lot with my dominant arm.

Back Row: Me, My Wife, My Dad, My Dad's Uncle
Front Row: My Sons

After that, we dropped off the kids and went on The Staircase Run, which is a short run with much gnarlier rapids on the South Fork of the Payette. We were maybe a little overconfident on that stretch, but we've run it a few times and managed to get through it all right. The river is flowing pretty fast this year, though, and the two main rapids on the run (Staircase and Slalom) proved to be too much for our crew.

The American Whitewater (AW) description for Staircase says that "Staircase is a challenging rapid with a very long swim if things go wrong....From the top of the rapid to the run out is about 1/3 of a mile." Well, a wave early in the rapid swept my wife right out of the boat, and she got caught up in a current while the boat hung up for a bit. We had to fight the Class IV rapid while also trying to get close enough to throw a rescue bag or reach a paddle out to her, and it seemed like it took forever. She said she was praying the whole time, and I was doing a mixture of praying and profuse cursing that I hope the Lord will forgive me for. At one point I was certain that she was dead or injured badly, as she kind of limply folded . We finally got her out of the water and pulled over to the side, where she dry heaved for a while and collapsed into the bottom of the boat. Luckily she was still conscious and coherent, but there was still one more Class IV rapid to go before getting to the take-out point and the truck. After determining that she was stable and discussing the options, we pulled over and took her up the bank to sit down in some shade until we could get the truck and come back for her. It turned out to be a good decision.

The AW description for Slalom warns, "This rapid is more of a class IV- than a class IV, but it is a challenging rapid with unpleasant consequences if you end up in one of the holes." Well, guess where we ended up? We caught a sideways wave from the first hole, and the raft tilted almost vertically on its left side, with a big wave pouring over the edge. I saw that things had gone well wrong, and I grabbed onto a rope and rode through the wave. Once the raft cleared the wave, thankfully without flipping, I looked around and saw that I was the only one still in the boat. I saw one guy off to my left, so I pulled him in, and we saw another guy close by and helped him get in. Then I fell over the rack in the back and scraped up my leg, but I was able to recover and help my dad over the edge and back into the boat. It took a while to locate and catch up to the last man in the water. He had been swept a little further from the raft, but we pulled him in with a rope. We all wound up sitting in different spots than we'd started the run in, but there were just a few waves left before the takeout. Then we got things packed up and went back up the road to recover my wife. She was feeling a lot better by that point, but her legs were pretty beat up.

It was quite an ordeal, and I am glad that my wife survived her long swim through a very rough stretch of water. I've been rafting a fair number of times, and there have been times when I was concerned about someone, but I've never seen someone take a swim that bad before. I really thought we might lose her. She has one toe that is broken for sure, another toe that is probably broken, her feet and her knees are pretty scraped up, and she's got a nice big bruise on her hip, but given how it could have ended I am overjoyed just to have her upright and taking on air.

I think my wife has sworn off that part of the river for good, but I could probably be persuaded to do it again some day. I don't think I'd want to take her on it again, though, and it will be hard to convince me to take my boys on it when they're older. I guess I have a higher tolerance for risk to myself than I do for any of them. I do think that accepting a certain level of risk leads to a full and exciting life, but sometimes it's hard to balance my desire for my kids to have memorable experiences with my desire for them to be safe.

For the 4th we kept things pretty low-key. I bought a couple handfuls of fireworks and sparklers, and we went outside as it got dark to set them off. There were several other families up and down our road with fireworks, and we kind of got into a rhythm where we would light our fireworks in succession, so there was just one fountain going at a time. It extended the firework show for everyone, and every so often we'd see a big aerial shell go off somewhere around us. It was a nice evening, and the kids had a good time watching fireworks and playing with the neighbor kid in his yard after we ran out of sparklers.