Raymond Eckles has been at Cool River Tubing for 31 years.

He does not, in conversation, volunteer things.

He agreed to this interview because I bought him breakfast at the Hofbräu Riverside Restaurant on Tuesday morning, and because his wife, Darla, told him that this reporter had been sitting in the Cool River parking lot for two consecutive mornings, and that one of those mornings had been a Sunday, and that a journalist sitting in a parking lot on a Sunday was, in her judgment, someone Raymond should talk to.

Raymond talked to me on Wednesday.

We sat in his pickup truck in the Cool River lot. The roll-up door of the main storage building was closed. Raymond was holding the key. The building, by his count, contained 19,800 commercial tubes, stored at end-of-season pressure, unventilated since November 3, 2025.

The roll-up door had not been opened in 162 days.

I asked Raymond to describe the smell.

He did not answer for 43 seconds. I timed it on my phone.

Then he said the following, which I am reproducing verbatim with his permission:

"It smells like — and I want to be precise about this, because I know you're going to print it — it smells like the inside of a riverbank. It smells like the riverbank in July but inside of a metal building in March. It smells like algae, mostly. It smells like algae and old rubber and, I am not going to say sewage, because it is not sewage, I am going to say: it smells like the way a thing smells when it has been wet and then it has been cold and then it has been in a metal building for a hundred sixty-two days."

He paused.

"It also smells like sunblock."

He paused again.

"The sunblock does not wear off. The sunblock is the one that surprises people."

The Opening

Raymond opens the roll-up door, every year, on the Thursday before Memorial Day. This is Cool River's Prep Day. On Prep Day, Raymond and a rotating crew of three to five seasonal hires perform what Raymond calls, with no apparent irony, "the First Inventory."

The First Inventory is the count. Raymond walks through the building with a clipboard and a mechanical counter, and he checks each tube against the November 3 final-inventory tally.

The First Inventory is always off.

It is always off in the same direction. There are always fewer tubes than the November tally recorded.

"We lose, on average, between 14 and 22 tubes over the winter," Raymond said. He tapped the clipboard that was, on Wednesday morning, already sitting on his dashboard, pre-labeled Prep Day 2026. "I have opinions about where they go. I am not going to share them on the record."

Asked to share them off the record, Raymond said: "Off the record. The tubes do not walk away by themselves. I will leave it there."

The Ventilation

Prep Day's second task, after the First Inventory, is the Ventilation. The Ventilation consists of the following sequence, performed by Raymond personally, in a routine that has not changed since 2004:

1. The two main roll-up doors are opened fully.
2. The four industrial floor fans are run, at full speed, for 90 minutes.
3. A box of industrial-grade HVAC sachets — approximately the size of a hotel room-service pillow each, labeled "Odor Neutralizing, Commercial Rubber" — is distributed, one per every approximately 400 tubes, on shelving above eye level.
4. The roll-up doors are closed to two-thirds.
5. Raymond sits in his pickup in the lot, with the truck's windows down, for 45 minutes.

Asked what the 45 minutes in the truck are for, Raymond said: "I am monitoring."

Asked what he is monitoring for, Raymond said: "I will know when I smell it."

The Tube That Came Back

In 2017, Raymond reported in his Prep Day logbook — obtained by Bavarian Brainrot via a standing records request arrangement with Cool River's corporate office — a tube that had, in his assessment, "improved" over the winter.

The tube was a Yellow #3472. It had been in the November inventory. Raymond wrote the following in the Prep Day 2017 logbook, dated May 25, 2017, at 11:40 a.m.:

Yellow 3472 appears markedly improved over the winter. Cleaner than November. Drier. No algae residue on valve stem. No sunblock residue on outer surface. Looks, frankly, new.

When asked, Wednesday, what he thought had happened to Yellow #3472, Raymond looked at the dashboard for approximately twelve seconds before responding.

"I don't think about Yellow 3472," he said. "I have chosen not to."

He added: "The tube is, as of today, still in the active inventory. It has been rented out every season since. Nobody has said anything. I have not looked up its current valve-stem number. I would rather not know."

The Day

Cool River Tubing opens to the public, 2026 season, on Friday, May 15. The first commercial float of the season is scheduled for 10:00 a.m. The first float will depart from the Cool River launch ramp. The first float will be, if Cool River's internal forecasts hold, approximately 185 tubes.

Raymond will not be on the launch ramp that morning. Raymond will, in all likelihood, be in the main storage building, performing what he calls the Second Inventory.

The Second Inventory is a reconciliation of the Prep Day count against the actual count of tubes deployed to the launch ramp. The Second Inventory, like the First, is always off.

It is, Raymond said, always off in the same direction.

The tubes do not walk away by themselves.

The Smell, Revisited

I asked Raymond, at the end of the interview, to describe the smell one more time. I told him the smell was going to be the nut graf of the piece. He nodded.

He said: "The smell is the river's memory of the summer."

He paused.

"I would not put that in print," he added. "It sounds stupid."

I told him I was going to put it in print anyway. He shrugged.

He rolled up the door a quarter of the way. A fan switched on inside. The smell came out.

I would not describe it as stupid. I would describe it as exactly what he said.

— Buck Pendergrass, Outdoors Correspondent