Kate Takes her Favorite Suit Tubing

My favorite suit in the Discard Pile was a royal purple halter-tie bandeau with a lightly shimmery band across the top where the halter straps attach.  I've had this suit for so long, and yet it has remained in the drawer summer after summer, quietly serving when needed and deteriorating in the interim.

This suit has a particularly fond memory.

Summer 2006: My dear friend Elaine has returned from their mission posting in West Africa for a short vacation in the states.  A girls' weekend to the North Georgia mountains is organized.  I'm remembering the crew as me, Elaine, Leigh Anne, Carol & Shellie; maybe others joined us later, but these are the primary guilty parties.

We've decided we are going to be more active than usual and plan to go tubing on a large creek/small river in the area, the Coosawattee.  Saturday morning arrives and we load up the trucks with semi-inflated and just plain flat inner tubes from the rental cabin.   They seem a little small, but we'll worry about that later. 


Now to get them filled and then we can go freeze our butts off in  the river.

The nearest place for air is a large Shell station at the corner of a busy intersection that leads into town.  This is the variety of southern convenience store that offers gas, ice, bait, ammo, sandwiches, lottery tickets, cigarettes -- everything you need at 10 a.m. on a sunny early summer Saturday.

We manage to get the tubes in a pile near the air hose and begin the process of filling them, discovering as we proceed that several are flat for a reason.  But we seem to have enough that may leak air slowly enough to get us down the few miles of Coosawattee that we plan to navigate. Enough small tubes.

It's hot work and I take my shirt off, leaving my shorts and the top half of my oldie but goodie purple bathing suit.  Now you have to understand, while I'm no swim suit model, this particular suit seems to highlight certain aspects of my physique.  And apparently the good ol' boys in the North Georgia mountains don't mind a "traditionally built woman" (anyone else read Alexander McCall Smith?)  So while every local in a truck at that intersection was overly interested in my assets, I was blithely giving them quite the show.  Nice to be appreciated in a little redneck corner of the world.

The fun really starts when we try to tube.  Not only was the mountain water a few degrees above freezing, Georgia was under drought conditions and the water in the river was just a trickle in several areas.  With rocks for that water to trickle over.  Hard, bumpy rocks.

 As the tubes slowly deflate, we float and pick our way down the creek.  Every shallow patch requires a "bottoms up" approach, followed by rolling off the tube and gingerly maneuvering among the slippery rocks until clear.  It takes us two hours to go barely a mile, but we reach the trucks with frozen feet, bruised bums and warm hearts.

And I will always be wearing the purple suit  in this story.