One day midweek a few of us decided to kayak the Salmon River in Pulaski at an amazing level of 4500cfs, which is almost unheard of in the summer. This was brought on by rains and miscalculations at the dam, and resulted in a call from me to hit the river on a moments notice. Rob, Harry, Jen, and I set out do do the standard run from the Trash Compactor to the Black Hole on a beautiful, sunny, warm day. Perfect!

We were having fun boating the rage colored (brown) water, screaming down the rapids, playing in every wave we could try to catch. About halfway done with the trip we came to a rest in the eddy at Fireman's Field, which is just above the "In Town" section and what I have sometimes called the "Low Bridge", which is a good Class III, but a little pushy today.

In the eddy, we were descended upon by 3 somewhat overweight teenagers and a older dude, all equiped, not with truck tire tubes, but with tubes that could only be classified as "pool toys". The conversation ensues:

"Is it really rough out there?", the biggest teenager asked, looking terribly excited.

"It's flooding" I said in a dead pan, disgusted voice.

Rob piped up, "You guys should really be wearing life jackets."

Harry started in, "Stay away from the trees, stay in the middle of the river, backpaddle...", and some sort of other technical direction mumbo jumbo.

I looked the big teenager directly in the eye and said, "You might live....to raise stupid children." He responded with a puzzled look.

"Are you their father?" I yelled over at the older dude. His gestures confirmed that he was the father of at least one of these children.

"See what I mean?"

One teenager jumps into the water and he can't even stay on top of his pool tube and flips over repeatedly, and the same for them all. Holding on to their tubes, they made it down through Town, thankfully avoiding all the strainers that line both sides of the river there. They passed us under the Low Bridge. Out of sight, out of mind, we basically forgot about them, continued down, playing at Suzy's hole for a while.

When we got to the Black Hole takeout, 2 teenagers and the older dude were on the shore scanning the water back and forth. They had not seen the fat teenager for 15 minutes or so and were still looking. I surfed up to the top of the eddy to take a look upstream that they could not. We got out, hurried the boats back up into my truck and started heading up to Railroad Eddy to get back in and look. Driving there, we got reports from some neighborhood kids that he got caught by a tree somewhere after Town and decided to get out there and not continue on. Although we didn't see him, we assumed he was safe.

There will be more stupid children.