Read part one here if you missed it.
Read part two here while you're at it.
"What?"
"I'm done. My butt hurts, I can't go any more."
"When Jeff finds out, I'm pretty sure you're going to die."
"I know."
I won't lie, Mike and I were really hoping Jeff would do the sensible thing and call it quits. We still had time to cancel the hotel reservations in St. Charles and get home to Kansas City in time for dinner. No more heat, no more boat ramps, a chance to sleep in my own bed. I could taste it. It was the only rational choice really. What was he going to do? Paddle a 27 foot boat by himself?
As it turns out, yes, he was going to do that. Rationality aside, Jeff did not see quitting as an option and Mike was too fraught with guilt to argue. So, against my better judgement, we put Jeff in the rear of the boat and shoved him off, agreeing to meet up again just downriver in Booneville. Mike and I assumed that a short jaunt would be sufficient for Jeff to come to his senses and realize that finishing solo would be impossible. With any luck, we could still cancel the hotel by 6 and be home by 9. It had to work. When he left, the entire front half of the boat was sticking up out of the water. He would be expending all his energy just trying to control the thing and lucky to make faster forward progress than a floating log. He wasn't even to the halfway point yet.
Mike, who's butt was already suffering, took a leap right back out of the car as soon as he sat down and did the most awkward dance I've seen in years. I'll always wonder if the bee had really just found it's way into his shorts at that moment or if he had been sitting on the stinger all day and it was the cause of his affliction in the first place. No matter, after 15 hours at that ramp, I was ready to get the hell out of Glasgow.
In Booneville we had brief instances of cell service and were able to follow Jeff's progress. As expected, it was slow. We took advantage of the free time to stock up at Snoddy's and then head into town for lunch. Neither of us had seen an A&W in ages and it was hard to resist. The food was just as terrible and the frosty mug root beer just as good as I remembered from childhood.
It's like the 70s threw up in here
If you think that looks tasty, click it and see it in high-res glory.
After a quick check of the SpotTracker we still had about 3 hours to kill and went looking for some frosty beers with a little less 'root' in them. By the time we were into our second round at the Main Street Pub the argument was well under way.
"No Mike."
"Why not?"
"You know why not. Our R&D budget is totally shot. Developing Patrick's robot arm nearly bankrupted Paddlephiles Skunkworks and it didn't even turn out to be a good investment! What was our return on that? Half a Freedom Race? That was a quarter billion well spent. He didn't even start the 340! Now you're asking me to sign off on your bionic butt? No way man. Besides, his arm was gone, like completely non-existant. Your butt just hurts and it'll heal."
"I'm sure we could pick up a couple contracts, the usual covert ops. The rest we can pay for by selling the tech when it's fully developed."
"Yeah, I'm sure it's a real boom time in the bionic butt market."
"Besides, it would be super cool. I bet my ass could take a real pounding!"
"You might want to watch the phrasing." I paused and sighed, tired of fighting it. "Fine, I'll run it by the board but I wouldn't get your hopes up." That should at least buy me some time until he figures out we don't actually have a board of directors.
"So this is groundcrew, huh?"
"Yep."
We were both too exhausted to risk a third beer so we finished up and headed to the ramp to wait for Jeff. Since we were fairly certain he would be ready to call it quits, we repacked the car to make room for him and got ready to strap the boat to the roof rack. We should have known better. When he arrived, two things were clear. One, something was going seriously wrong with the boat and he definitely needed to quit. Two, there was no way he was going to quit. The front end of the boat was riding farther above the water than when it left Glasgow and the rear, where Jeff sat, was barely afloat at all. When we lifted the front to pull him up on the ramp we made matters worse by submerging the rear hatch. This shouldn't even have been possible. That hatch, like the one in the front, is supposed to be full of air and water tight. Clearly it wasn't and since it was riding lower in the back without anyone sitting up front it was taking on water. Great, let's go home.
Or not. Jeff didn't seem too concerned about the leaky hatch and I got the impression that even if I pulled the boat up to the parking lot and ran over it several times he would just swim the rest of the way to St. Charles. That would only prolong the misery. The worst news as far as Jeff was concerned was that the radio and iPod were both goners, having spent several hours in the leaky compartment. The final garbled pleas of the radio sounded like a walrus drowning in jello. Mike pumped the water out of the hatch and we stuck a cooler full of ice in the front to compensate for the missing paddlers and sent him on to the next checkpoint at Katfish Katy's with instructions to keep an eye on it.
Speaking of compensating for something...
It was sunset when he got to Katy's and by that time Mike had been officially replaced by rocks. After working for weeks to remove as much unneccesary weight from the boat as possible, putting some back in was the solution to many problems. The bow was down so the boat was more maneuverable and it kept the stern far enough out of the water to at least slow the leak in the hatch. It was still unwieldy, but even Mike and I were beginning to think he might actually make it. Jeff made it from Glasgow to Katfish Katy's pretty much in spite of us, imagine what he could do if we actually started helping him.
Obligatory MR 340 sunset photo.
We headed on to Cooper's. There we ate some Thai food and enjoyed the excruciatingly shrill caterwaulling of hippy-jam open-mic night before making camp. Jeff got in around 1am and after eating half of his Thai, (too spicy) we all got some much needed sleep. We got Jeff up at the crack of dawn and put him in the water with instructions to check himself in at Jefferson City and meet us at Mokane. This bought us the extra time we needed to go back to bed for another 4 hours.
Even with the extra sleep we must have been getting delirious becase we backtracked almost half an hour to Columbia to have breakfast at Waffle House before turning around and heading on to Jefferson City to pick up lunch for Jeff on our way to Mokane. In retrospect, I'm pretty sure there's a Waffle House in Jefferson City somewhere and that would have saved a lot of time and gas. I won't even bother explaining the crazy circles we went around in looking for stuff in Jeff city. Even on ground crew, by the third day of the 340, you just can't think clearly.
In Mokane, Mike distracted Jeff with a warm rueben so I could shoot him with a tranquilizer dart. We let him nap for about an hour in the cozy camping area there. The weather was a lot cooler that day and for a brief period we almost enjoyed sitting there quietly watching the other boats go by. The beer helped. While he was napping we looked over the maps and came up with a plan for the rest of the race. For some reason I never learn the lesson that this is a waste of time. It never works out the way you want it to. Since we weren't far from Hermann we didn't see a need to stop there so we would let him check himself through there and meet us in New Haven, then Klondike and it's a short run to the finish. This sort of threw a wrench in our plans to meet up with Julie and the girls who intended to join us in Hermann and follow along to St Charles. The wrench got bigger when we sent them on to St Charles, then ended up stopping in Hermann anyway because Jeff was moving slower than expected. Mike would have some 'splaining to do but that's just how it goes out there.
The delirium was taking over by the time Jeff got to Hermann at 8:20 that night. One of the rocks had moved from the floor of the boat into Mike's seat and now had a crudely drawn face on it.
"Rocky needs a Gatorade and more water."
"Oooookaaaay..."
If Rocky reminds you of Wilson from Cast Away just keep it to yourself. I don't want to get sued.
Superfluous MR 340 sunset photo.
The ramp at Mokane was the darkest I've seen, even with the full moon. If you want to get the full ground crew experience of waiting for a paddler to show up in the middle of the night, just take a camping chair to the most mosquito infested place you can find and stare at this picture for 3 hours. There is also a lesson here if you ever want to do any night paddling. If you see two moons, you are still on the water. If you only see one, you screwed up. If the moon is making a very loud noise, it's a train.
Good luck staying awake.
"Jeff? Where's Rocky?"
"We got in a fight, that guy was a jerk."
"Umm... do you know where you are?"
"Tuesday?"
"This is your last stop until the finish, you just have to check in at Klondike and we'll see you in St. Charles. Can you make it?"
"Are you angels? Where's Rocky? ROCKY! I'M SORRY! PLEASE COME BACK!"
"We stocked the boat with food and water, stop and sleep if you need to."
"Oh no, I think I killed Rocky, I threw him out of the boat and I think he drowned."
"He never was a good swimmer. It's not your fault if he wasn't wearing his vest. Now get going, we'll see you tomorrow!"
"Thank you angels."
The remains of replacement Mike. We never saw Rocky again.
We made our own bleary eyed trip to the hotel in St Charles. Mike went to find the room Julie had already checked into and I opted to get one of my own. After two nights sleeping on the ground, one with 3 guys in the tent, I was ready for some 'me' time. I took the world's greatest shower and passed out around 3. The alarm went off at 7:00 and I opened one eye to check the SpotTracker. It wasn't updating so It looked like Jeff was stuck somewhere around Klondike. I sent him a text to make sure he was still in one piece and asked him to reboot the tracker. I was relieved to get a response and was soon getting a fresh tracker update. He was moving, but slower than ever and had probably stopped to sleep along the way. We wouldn't see him at the finish until early afternoon and that was all the encouragement I needed to sleep through breakfast.
It must have been right around the time I joined Mike and the girls for lunch that Jeff caught sight of the bridges near the finish. Just when we thought we had plenty of time to eat he put the last of the coal on the fire and cut a full hour off of his expected finish time, forcing Mike and I to abandon our disappointing meals and stick Julie with the tab so we could rush down to the finish line and watch him come in. Word of his triumphant deed had spread to some of the other racers and at 1:04 pm he brought the boat in to cheers. Jeff had accomplished a miracle. He had done something that most of us thought was impossible and everyone thought was dangerously insane. 100 boats had dropped out of that race along the way and with a total race time of 77 hours and 4 minutes, he had not only finished it, by himself in a 27 foot 3 man canoe, he finished 31st in the tandem division, 104th over all and actually beat 80 more boats that finished after him. So if you see him, shake his hand and buy him a beer. He earned it.
He still doesn't really know where he is or what is going on.
The End?
