Look. I get it. You drove four hours from Atlanta with three of your fraternity brothers, you parked in the Cool River lot, you handed me $26.50 and you signed the waiver, and now you are standing on the bank in your swim trunks holding an inflatable tube and you are ready to launch. You have been ready for several minutes. You are, in your view, prepared.

You are not prepared.

You think the Chattahoochee is, in your phrase, “a lazy river.” It is not a lazy river. A lazy river is, by definition, the engineered concrete trough behind the Wyndham Garden Hotel in Pigeon Forge. The Chattahoochee is a working southeastern Appalachian-headwaters waterway with a cumulative two-mile elevation drop between the Cool River put-in and the Old Sautee Store take-out, an average current speed of two-point-one miles per hour, three named technical rapids of varying difficulty, and a distinct possibility of black bears at the bank.

You are about to be in this river for ninety minutes.

Most of you will be fine. Statistically, ninety-eight percent of the eleven thousand of you I have watched go down this river over the past four summers have not required any of the safety interventions for which I am the operationally responsible employee. Most of you will hit the put-in, drift through the easy first quarter, hit Rapid 1 (Class I-plus, which is the easy one, the one your bachelor party can absolutely handle), drift through the slow middle stretch, hit Rapids 2 and 3 (both Class II, which is the part where some of you are, frankly, going to spin out), and then drift the long final stretch into the take-out. You will be fine. You will get out. You will go to the Bodensee for an early dinner. You will go home.

The two percent, however.

The two percent are the reason I exist. The two percent are the reason Cool River Tubing carries the binder it carries, the reason the dispatch booth has a direct line to Helen PD, the reason the take-out at the Old Sautee Store has a marine first-aid kit that I personally restock every Tuesday. The two percent are the reason the dispatcher counts you off the river by tube number when you arrive at the take-out, and the reason that, when the count does not match, my Saturday plans change.

I do not know which of you, this morning, are the two percent. I never know in advance. I have, over the four summers, developed a set of intuitions — the bachelor party that has clearly already been drinking before the put-in is, statistically, more likely; the family with the small child who is too small for the standard 48-inch tube and is, instead, riding on a parent’s lap is, statistically, more likely; the lone middle-aged man who has driven up from Atlanta in a rental car and who is, in some way I cannot quite articulate, performing Adventure for an audience of one is, statistically, more likely. But I do not know.

So I do the safety briefing. I do the same safety briefing I have done eleven thousand times. I tell you about the three rapids. I tell you about the bear protocol (do not feed the bears; if a bear is in the water, calmly paddle to the opposite bank; do not try to outpace the bear, the bear is in his element, you are not). I tell you about the deflation protocol (if your tube deflates, swim to the bank, walk along the bank to the next downstream put-in, do not try to swim the river without flotation). I tell you about the lost-shoe protocol (if your shoe comes off, your shoe is gone, your shoe is now a Chattahoochee shoe). I tell you about the cell-phone protocol (your phone is not waterproof, the dry bag is also not waterproof, leave the phone in the car).

I tell you all of this in seven minutes. I have refined the briefing. I do not waste a sentence. The briefing covers ninety-four percent of the situations I have personally observed in four summers of safety work.

You are not, however, listening.

You are looking at the river. You are looking at your friend’s GoPro, which they have already started recording, and which is now, before you have even put in, capturing the seven-minute safety briefing for the recap reel. You are looking at the bachelorette party two slots ahead of you. You are not, in any meaningful cognitive sense, retaining the bear protocol.

That is fine. That is, in some sense, the standing condition of recreational-water safety briefings everywhere. The two percent of you who will need the bear protocol will, in the moment that you need it, look at the bear, and you will look at me, and I will be standing on the bank yelling the bear protocol at you, and you will recognize the bear protocol because you heard it seven minutes ago, even though you were not, in that moment, paying attention.

This is, in some sense, the entire model.

The Chattahoochee is, I want to repeat for the people in the back, not the Chatta-Who-Cares-About-Safety. It is the Chattahoochee. The river is older than the State of Georgia. The river is older than the United States. The river is older, by approximately one hundred and twelve million years, than your concept of Saturday-morning recreation. The river does not know that you are on a bachelor party. The river does not know that you have a Cool River Tubing wristband. The river does not know that you have signed the waiver.

The river is just doing what it does, which is moving downhill from the Brasstown Bald watershed at two-point-one miles per hour through the constriction at Edelweiss Strasse and out toward the Sautee bend, and you are, this Saturday, briefly, on it.

Be respectful.

— Chad