Family Float/Survival Trip Down the Provo

Usually, floating the Provo River is mild, cool, and somewhat boring. Not this Pioneer Day, 2009. Due to a much wetter than usual spring, the river was running fast and cold. We've done it before, we said. How dangerous can it be? The girls and the bishop wore flip flops. The geologist/hiker in the group brought water shoes and bandaids and a spare pair for me. The bishop lost his flip flops purchased in Hawaii 20 years ago on the first curve (they had fluorescent lizards on them.) We are glad we didn't lose anything more important, like one of our children.

It was my idea. It will be relaxing, I said. It will cool us off. The bishop said, "Didn't two people drown in the Provo this year?" We came out of the water with contusions, bleeding shins, and lacerated feet. While in the water, we were too numb to feel the pain.

Instead of paying for a $10 rental and shuttle, we picked our own spot, purchased 3 tires at Discount Tire for $6.95 and took a leaky raft.

One day I will learn to listen to the bishop.

Anthills, and Antelope, and Arid Desert, Oh My!

Not a tree in sight! There were ant hills, the size of a miniature pyramid, and antelope and some type of weed that left scratchy stickers (about 50 in my long pioneer skirt alone) but no trees. Hot, dusty, and bone-jarring. Pioneer bonnets and hats were not optional, you had to put it on to get away from the sun. But while you were lying on the cold, hard dirt at night, your thighs throbbing from the eight mile trek in, you couldn't possibly sleep so you had plenty of time to see a sensational star-studded sky, uninterrupted in its beauty by city lights and structures. And the rise of a crescent moon so diaphanous and ethereal, you felt God must have placed it there himself.

Why do we dress as dead people and walk miles to nowhere and turn around and go back again? This is what one of the youth asked at the testimony meeting. I began to understand by watching the faces of the young people pulling the handcarts. They were assigned a new "family" without the comfort of friends and without the baggage of who they might have been. Instead, they must learn to work together and work hard to get their handcart to camp and back. It is physically demanding, and the boys seem to become more mature, more sensitive to how hard it is for girls, more undestanding of what they can do. They realize that they are children of God and they can do hard things, just like the pioneers. After all, their lives will be tougher in spiritual ways than the pioneers.

In fact, as I walked with a wife of the stake presidency she said the pioneers had it easy in some ways. "They had all their children together every night for dinner around the campfire. No distractions like TV, cell phones, Internet, never ending schedules."

Preparing for Pioneer Trekking

What does motivate us to don ankle-length dresses, unflattering aprons and bonnets, with tennis shoes of all things, and go pulling a handcart for miles in the sun and heat? I'm going on Thursday to Woodruff, Utah, best known for extreme heat in summer and extreme cold in winter, to walk for three days in a location barren of trees but rife with ticks and mosquitoes. This will probably be my vacation with the bishop this summer. He can hardly wait. I hope I don't faint with joy before we go.