I'm on a Raft

Sometimes bad things happen.

And sometimes there's nothing you can do about it.

Hahahahahahaha okay, so THAT'S just a giant load of CRAP. No matter what happens, you can fight for what you want.

Like when one of the most terrible tragedies in the entire history of the whole universe happened to me.

Alice moved away.

But maybe, since you don't know Alice, you can't quite comprehend why this is so horrible. You see, Alice, like a lot of my friends, is very special. She's only lived in the U.S. for 5 years; she used to live in Korea. Now this in itself made her kind of special: sometimes she'd say things like "a whole cup of smoothie" or eat Korean yogurt (which is very yummy). But she was also very funny and nice and social and literally everyone loved her.

This is Alice. She's camera shy.

And then she freaking moved all the way back to South Korea!

Well a big party was thrown for her and we all said our good-byes and about a week after summer '09 started, Alice went back to Asia.

Do you have a best friend? Ignore my awkward and seemingly random transition and answer the question. Do you have a best friend?

I'm glad to say that I do. Her name is Alyssa and, like all best friends, we sometimes say things that are supposed to be jokes and then become one of the best days ever.

Like when we promised Alice that we would save her and decided to ride a camel to the West Coast and then raft across the Pacific where we would rescue Alice and bring her back to where she belongs.

Maybe we were crazy, or just crazy in love (with Alice), but I'm pretty sure we did this because, dude, it was Summer '09 and we were going to seize the day and try to build awesome crap like our idols, Phineas and Ferb, and a raft was an easy place to start.

So one day I went to Alyssa's house with only our mission on my mind.

"First," she said after I arrived, "we need to make a map so we don't get lost."

"Then don't we need Alice's address?" I asked.

"Oh, yeah. Crap..."

Luckily, Alice was on Facebook even though it was somewhere around 2 in the morning in South Korea.

"Oh, good, now we can find out where she lives," I said, relieved, "But don't let her know we're building the raft."

"Got it. I'll be subtle."

Alyssa: alice :)

Alice: alyssa.

Alyssa: DKW [this is our nickname for Alice], i have a question.

Alice: yes, IAW [this is Alice's nickname for Alyssa]?

Alyssa: where do you live? like whats your address?

So much for subtlety.

Alice: ...why?

Alyssa: no reason

Alice: [Weird Korean words]. I'm scared.

Alyssa: thank you!

"Okay," she said, "now we just gotta plug this into a translator..."

And obviously that didn't work so we figured we'd write it down, make our map anyways, and just ask for directions when we got to Korea. We got off of Facebook and instead went to the best mapping site ever: MapMyRun.com.

"Okay, we're here," Alyssa said, locating our town on the map, "and we wanna go all the way over...here!" She clicked on Korea.

A notice came up saying something about only going ten miles at a time.

"Wow. Really? That's gonna take forever," I grumbled.

"Korea is north of us right?" Alyssa asked, ignoring me.

"Sort of," I replied. She began making ten mile marks in a northwesterly direction. And eventually, it became fun.

"Oh, we should go through this town. It sounds exotic."

"I wanna go to Canada. Not that part of Canada, that part of Canada!"

"Oh, too far. We'll loop around here..."

(This is how long the journey would be. Over 6,000 miles.)

"Um, Sam?"

"Yeah?"

"I think we're lost in the middle of the Pacific Ocean."

"Well, stop and look for Korea!"

"Found it! So we just go in this direction. We're good."

...

"Never mind, we're lost again."

"You know what? We'll finish this later," I decided. "Let's go build the raft."

"Yes! The boxes are in my backyard."

We grabbed some paint and duct tape and a few other supplies and headed out back where the boxes sat, waiting to be put to use.

Our first order of business was locating the biggest boxes and flattening them out, since that's basically all a raft is. Once that was done we had to tape them together so it was big enough for me, Alyssa, Alice, and the camel. The tricky part of the operation was getting the edges of the cardboard perpendicular to the ground to keep water off our raft, but we eventually got it.

I scrutinized our raft and said, "We need a flag."

"Hold on!" Alyssa ran inside and returned a minute later with a pink pillowcase. "We'll use this." She placed it on a table and grabbed some puffy paint. "What should it say?"

"The Squad of People Dedicated to the Capture and Rescue of DKW Team," I replied as if it was the most obvious thing in the world.

Only that wasn't fancy enough for my best friend so she changed "Rescue" to "Resqué" but that worked for me.

"We should sign it," I said when she finished.

"No, we'll handprint it."

So we got as many colors of paint as we could and covered our hands with them. When that was done we pressed them onto the flag. And then we washed our hands 'cause that junk was gross.

"Now we need like a big stick so everyone knows we mean business," I continued. A quick search yielded a decent-sized branch that we could use to proudly wave our flag.

The next twenty minutes was spent struggling to duct tape the giant stick onto our raft without anything getting ruined. But thanks to our awesomeness we somehow managed to accomplish our task.

"What about those?" Alyssa indicated the smaller, unused boxes.

"We need life jackets," I replied, "since our raft is made out of cardboard and everything."

She nodded, opened up a box, stepped into it, and hiked it up so it rested around her abdomen and looked almost like a flotation device.

"It needs decoration," she stated, so I grabbed some paint and scribbled "[Heart] DKW" on it.

And by this time we were feeling pretty artsy so we decided to decorate our raft too. Or maybe that happened earlier. I mean seriously, I don't remember what I had for breakfast three days ago, so me actually writing this is kind of a miracle, let alone in order. But either way, we grabbed some Sharpies and drew some of our friends on it so they felt less left out. Exhausted, we finally headed back inside.

I ended up going home without completing the raft (by which I mean without Saran wrapping it so the cardboard wouldn't sink and get wet), but that didn't matter since Alyssa's mom threw it away about a week later.

But it turned out that that didn't matter either because by some miracle Alice came back and graced America with her presence. And she recently told me that she's planning on staying in America this summer instead of going back to her homeland. And I think that's a good choice because I'll probably never build another raft ever again.

So I guess that means we lived happily ever after.