Emi, Cool as a Cucumber — Joy Cunningham

You might not know it looking at Emi, but she likes adventure. And she’s the type you want to have along on an adventure because she is cool as a cucumber in a tight situation.

One summer Emi and I went camping at one of my favorite places in the world, Garner State Park, which sadly is now the favorite place of thousands of other people and their extended families. When I first started going there, you could consistently find a good camping place in Pecan Grove (old Garner) if you moved in on a Tuesday and were out by Friday. No longer. I can honestly say the difficulty of getting in there is on a par with getting an appointment for a COVID vaccine.

First thing that happened while we were setting up the tent, Emi reported in her calm, matter-of-fact way that she’d been stung by a bee. There was nothing in her manner that would indicate that anything alarming had happened. If it had been her older sister, the entire campground would’ve witnessed a loud, oh-my-god-I’m-gonna-die freakout about a bee sting. I was pretty sure I could deal with the situation, though, because in my handy dandy first aid kit, I expected to find a bottle of apis mellifica, a homeopathic for insect bites and whatnot, but, hmmm…it had been quite a while since our last camping trip, and well, there wasn’t any. Yikes. There were band aids and alcohol wipes, so I utilized just so I would look like I was doing something. I did hope she wasn’t going to have an allergic reaction because Garner State Park is a long way from anything, and the roads from there to anywhere are very windy. Plus the cell service was spotty. I let my mind wonder if there were medevac services available….

But there was no allergic reaction and we moved on to one of the main adventures we had planned, tubing down the Frio. There had been more rain than usual that summer, so the river was running fairly well. We pumped up our tubes and took the van to the drop off place, with a crowd of our fellow Garner State lovers, and discovered that, really, the flow ran the gamut from rapids to so sluggish we had to carry our tubes across sand bars.

On the whole, the run was a blast. We stopped along a bank and Emi climbed up it and used the rope swing to jump into the Frio. We swam in deep swimming holes along the river. I let Emi go first in her tube, always, so I could keep an eye on her.

In one particularly swift part of the river, I watched Emi go around a bend and somehow get caught up in an eddy. I guided my tube up onto a large rock—with quite a lurch, I felt as though I might have whiplash—as close to her as I could get to try to coach her out of there. I couldn’t reach her, and the water was making quite a noise as it rushed by me on my rock so I yelled out instructions.

“Paddle on the right side!”

She did. Round she went.

“Paddle harder!”

She tried. Round she went.

“Paddle right, then left! That way you won’t go in a circle!”

She paddled right, then left. Round she went.

“Okay, can you use your paddle to push away from the bank?”

“Sure, I can try.”

Round she went.

There was no way I could reach her, because she was upstream of me, stranded, going round and round in this little eddy. It didn’t matter what she did, though, she didn’t seem able to paddle her way out of there. I began to feel a little helpless.

Emi, though, was as calm as she could be. She kept her head about her. She followed directions, but nothing seemed to work. Finally, I saw a guy walking on the other side of the river and I asked if he could wade across, grab Emi’s tube, and put it back into the rapids. He did so, I watched as Emi swirled downstream again, and put in after her.

Whew. That came close to being a bit much for my old bones. But Emi was fine.

A couple of days ago, a solicitation came in the mail to Emi from the Marines. JK looked at it, laughed, and said something like Emi wouldn’t last five seconds in the Marines. Gretchen said, actually, she could see Emi making a hell of a Marine.

I agree.