Defying Death by Ryan Kowilcik

"Gunny out of the hole!" Yelled my cousin. It was a warm and sunny afternoon at my cousin's pond. My brother, cousin, and I were doing our normal afternoon routine by going out tubing on my cousin Sean's pond. Just this time we decided to switch things up a bit; considering our normal tubing routine was beginning to get ancient, or sub par as I would call it. This time, I came up with the brilliant, yet idiotic plan to ride one person behind another, instead of riding side by side. On the boat, my uncle ranted in confusion from the steering wheel, "What are you guys doing?" My cousin replied, "Nothing much.....just whatever you do please don't kill us." I heard my uncle murmur something then slowly start shaking his head back and forth with a smirk on his face. That is when I caught the message that today was the day that I would die. Before I even had time to contemplate what I wanted my will to say, my cousin, who obviously did not catch the message that we were about to be violently massacred, yelled the famous phrase, "Gunny out of the hole!" This phrase meant, "open the throttle up, and punch it as fast as you can out of the stationary position the tube was floating in." Within a split second our graceful, peaceful, no harm guaranteed tube was jerked so hard that I could have sworn that my hands separated from my arms. As we were sent rocketing across the water at a speed of 60 mph my initial thought of, "Yo... This is gonna be off the hook!" quickly turned to, "Oh crap, I am really in for a world of hurt." As I choked on the musky thick exhaust that the boat was spitting out after our aquatic drag start, we made our second risky turn, and our tube nearly turned head over heels due to the unevenness of our weight. " Jamie! Sean!" I yelled over the roaring motor. "If Sean sits in front, and Jamie sits in the middle, and you both and lean to the same side as we are turning there will be just enough weight in the back from me leaning to the opposite side that we were turning." " You sure this is gonna work?" Yelled Jamie. "No!" I yelled, "but we're about to find out on this next turn." " We lived!" yelled Sean after we survived the turn, "this riding style may actually work!" In a matter of minutes we were riding like pros. We managed to successfully take every turn with our newly developed tactic. After about ten minutes of riding, my uncle started to get frazzled because he could not shake us. This time we all caught the same message that my uncle way getting annoyed because we all felt it. My uncle soon started to take quick, sharp, and thrashing turns, that forced us to all hold on with all our might. At some points one of us would be sent flying and the others would struggle to pull him up onto the tube before we would be sent into another forceful turn. Although my uncle's ideas for dumping us into the water were very clever, our boss riding tactic was unbeatable. We all noticed that my uncle began to look like he was defeated, by the way he kept slamming his fist on the side of the boat after a failed attempt at dumping us. Then, to all of our amazement my uncle put the boat in neutral and turned around to face us. "You win." He said in a defeated tone. Following my uncle's white flag, a burst of laughter and high fives arose from our tube as we stood up on it and began to parade around. But then, as we were parading around on the tube, my uncle pulled a bit of some reverse psychiatry on us. He soon slowly started to pick up speed as we were dancing on the tube. I looked at my uncle, and once again a shot me a devious smirk. "IT WAS ALL A TRICK!!!" I yelled. "Quick sit down!" It was true my uncle had planned it all along, he made it look like he was defeated but was pretending the whole time. Before I was able to tell him at how good he was at acting, and he might want to consider an acting career, our leisure float that was filled with laughs, and thoughts of " this ended well," turned into a ride full of screams and thoughts of how bad it is going to hurt when our bodies, doing 60 mph, hit the concrete water. The boat kept accelerating to a point where we could barely see in front of us because the water from the motor was now spewing up and into our faces; every time we survived a set of waves our uncle seemed to run into another set, forcing a massive wave up and over the tube, and then violently crashing down on us like a big, wet, cold blanket. After the second gut-wrenching turn, my cousin, barely audible over the boat's engine yelled, "Ok so on the next straight away we bail! If we don't we all die!" Jamie and I agreed with Sean, but just as we subsisted the turn and was about to hit the straight away where we were going to bail, my uncle had a bit of a treat in store for us. Immediately after finishing a turn my uncle quickly jerked the wheel to the other side forcing another turn, yet this time the turn would be generously bundled with twice as much force than the last turn. This was made possible because as we slowly came to a stop on the tube after the turn, the boat started to turn the other way, therefore leaving no tension in the rope so that the tube slowed down. This was done because my uncle knew that when he started to accelerate, and the boat finally hit top speed, the tube would be sent flying around the turn at unimaginable speeds. So, as we slowly watched the tension in the rope become greater, we all shared the same feeling of anticipation. "crack!" The rope tightened, and we catapulted around the turn. The force and speed inflicted on our little tube was was ridiculously outrageous, and it was impossible to hold on. As we quickly looked at each other sharing the expression of " this is the end", and "it has been a good life" all three of us were sent hurdling into the water with outrageous force. The last thing I remembered was me slamming into something rock solid, which turned out to be Jamie's back, before I went head first into the cold, wavy, white water that was being churned up by the boat. I surfaced to the top of the water in pain that was easily able to be laughed off, but not enough to give me the energy to climb back into the boat. I looked around at Jamie and Sean and they both gave me the thumbs up that they were ok, and I gave them one back. As my uncle's boat slowly glided over to us he asked, "anyone want to go again?" All three of us groaned and said, "I'm good." Considering none of us had enough energy to get back into the boat, we began our slow and sore swim to shore.