I’m not a big fan of nature. Mountains are a colossal waste of real estate, oceans aren’t even potable, and with the exception of Europeans, trees have got to be the laziest creatures on Earth. Sorry, God, but I’m just not impressed.

So it should come as no surprise that whenever I’m afforded an opportunity to kick nature’s proverbial ass, I capitalize. I fish. I hunt. I mine nonrenewable resources. I box kangaroos. And I manufacture horse glue in the back of my apartment.

But every once in a while nature takes a cue from Siegfried and Roy’s tiger and pummels me to the brink of oblivion just to remind me that in the grand scheme of things, I’m a 66-inch primate in a universe full of savagery and cataclysm and dying suns and antimatter.

Yeah, Mother Earth is a ruthless, vindictive bitch. She’s generally sadistic, frequently expensive, and occasionally fatal. But I’m okay with all that. Because you know what the best part is about getting trounced by the old hag?

Retaliating.

Don’t get me wrong: I’m no MacGyver. I’ve never been marooned on a desert island, forced to purify seawater using just a pencil, a conch shell, and two socks. Nor am I a mountain climber or a trench diver or an eagle scout. Nevertheless, there are very few things in life that I’ve enjoyed more than leveraging human ingenuity and sheer tenacity to defy calamity.

Case in point: the following (somewhat lengthy) true story.

A few weeks ago an old friend and I drove up to Eminence, Missouri for a canoe expedition in the Ozarks. Mind you, there’s nothing eminent about Eminence. it’s a river outpost populated by hillbillies who rent tubes and canoes to white, middle-class weekend warriors who’ve read Walden one too many times. Not exactly known for its nightlife, this place. So rather than chum it up with the locals that evening, we drove directly to our outfitter and asked them to haul us as far upriver as possible. Their reply went something like this:

“Don’t reckon that’s a good idea, fellers. River’s real high tonight, see. Mighty dangerous, see. There’s a whole boatload of rapids out there. Uh’d feel much more comfortable puttin’ you boys in tomorrow mornin’.”

Now, for the record, there is no better way to sell two brash twenty-four-year-olds on a bad idea than to advertise danger that’s available for a limited time only. In the immortal words of Phillip Marlowe, we don’t scare easy. We’re too dumb.

So about an hour later we found ourselves flanked by towers of rock, paddling down a halcyon stretch of wilderness while we sipped canned beer and gazed spellbound into the gloaming.

Our euphoria was short-lived.

We came across a fork in the river. To the left: liquid bedlam. Charbydis. Rapids the likes of which neither of us had ever seen. To the right: placid waters. The path of least resistance.

Brash we may have been, but suicidal we were not. We steered right. And then, as we turned into a river bend, we realized why the water had appeared so flat: it was piled up against a string of trees protruding like stalagmites from the river. There, against this wall of foliage, the current consolidated itself and rushed violently into a vacuum that had formed in a gap between two of the trees. A gap about as wide as our canoe.

Neither of us feigned confidence; we both chuckled uneasily and aimed our vessel best we could toward the mouth of the gap, then crossed our fingers.

An FSU field goal kicker couldn’t have been farther off. We struck wide right.

Before we could uncross our fingers the current had driven our canoe side-to against the wall of trees. Pushing off was futile. Torrents of river pinioned us in place, splashing aboard and soaking our gear. We continued to chuckle nervously. The gravity of the situation had not yet dawned on us.

Then, slowly, our canoe began to sink.

Soon enough we were steeped in river, shivering, frowning, and watching drop-jawed as our bags floated out of the canoe and into the flow, where they were funneled through the gap and sling-shot downstream. Sam (that’s my buddy) and I eventually managed to free our canoe, but the current quickly snatched it from our grip and sent it careening down the river in the wake of our bags.

We paused for a moment to take stock of our situation. We were wetter than Genesis. And cold. The river had claimed nearly all of our gear – our clothes, our food, our supplies, and our only means of transportation. Sam had lost his shoes. Steep gorges on either side of the river prevented our climbing ashore. There were twenty miles separating us from the closest civilization. And less than an hour of daylight remained.

Nature: one. Us: zero.

We let go of the trees we were hanging onto and surrendered ourselves to the vacuum, towing our half-frozen legs across the rocks carpeting the riverbed. In the distance we could discern a pair of encouraging shapes: our canoe and our (miraculously unopened) cooler, which had drifted onto a beach some hundred yards ahead.

During our slog toward the beach we recovered a few items: the backpack containing our (largely ruined) electronics, a floating jar of peanut butter, a paddle, my fishing bow, a single arrow, and our tent. As soon as we got to the canoe we jumped in and searched our immediate vicinity for the rest of our belongings. We found the second paddle and one of our sleeping bags, but the river had transformed the latter item into a fifty-pound sponge.

Nightfall was imminent. We grounded the canoe on the beach where we’d found it. We still lacked the lighters and hatchet we needed to start a fire. We had no usable sleeping bags or dry clothes. We didn’t talk much, because when we tried our teeth chattered so furiously that we could only eke out a few jumbled syllables at a time. Since Sam was barefoot, he stayed with the canoe while I walked along the river bank and scanned the water for floating gear. But almost as soon as I’d begun, Cimmerian night fell, snuffing out the sun and leaving only a mess of aesthetically pleasing but wholly impractical stars as our source of light. Defeated, I turned around and staggered back through the brush toward Sam.

At some point I happened to glance up into the woods. And there, atop a hill, burning brighter than Moses’ bush, I spotted a campfire.

Suppressing the images of Deliverance cascading through my mind, I strode up the hill, equally prepared to beg or fight for a seat by that fire.

I found three people – a middle-aged couple and their twenty-something year-old daughter – seated at an old picnic table. They were understandably alarmed; I can only imagine what they must have been thinking when, after selecting as remote a spot as possible to sip some booze and bask by the fire, some wide-eyed waterlogged man emerges from the river below and starts wheezing at them unintelligibly.

After I’d summarized our plight as concisely as possible, the two women thrust me toward the fire then scurried off to retrieve Sam. The man, who’d remained speechless and seated, held out a bottle of cheap tequila in lieu of his hand. On most days I’d sooner drink curdled milk than tequila, but on that particular night the stuff tasted like ambrosia.

It turns out that these people had driven down to the river from Mountain View (another poorly named town – there weren’t any mountains for miles) to throw back a few drinks, smoke some pot, and admire the stars. They had been preparing to leave when we’d arrived. Fortunately Amy-Joe, the daughter, had some spare clothes in her trunk that she offered to lend us.

We accepted, lavishing gratitude upon Amy-Joe and her parents. A few moments later, Sam had donned a tiny pair of borderline-indecent women’s shorts and I was wiggling into a denim skirt. Above the waist, at least, we were dressed conservatively in University of Missouri t-shirts. I mumbled a prayer of thanksgiving for the fact that our camera hadn’t survived its swim.

Amy-Joe’s parents eventually left, wisely taking the tequila and the pot with them. That left the kids: Sam, Amy-Joe, and myself.

We had a blast.

I’m not sure how it happened, really. Just an hour earlier, Sam and I had been in a state of unqualified panic, fearing seriously for our lives. But at some point during our time by the fire we’d decided to party like rock stars.

There were four redfish filets marinating in our cooler from a fishing trip we’d taken a few days earlier. We grilled them all that night and, lacking utensils, used a combination of my arrow and our hands to shovel the tender, flaky meat into our mouths. We’d also brought some unhusked corn, which we roasted on the open fire and devoured along with Amy-Joe’s Cheeze Whiz. It was one the best meals I’ve ever eaten.

We’d brought a bottle of wine, too. Plus we had about ten beers left. After contemplating our lack of a sleeping bag, we decided to get as hammered as possible for the sake of keeping warm that night. We sucked down the wine and beer like we were mosquitoes in a blood bank.

We talked. We joked. We sprawled out by the water and stared at the sky. By the end of the night we’d coined a term for our unique vacationing strategy: survival in style.

At some point Amy-Joe left. Then Sam and I made a critical choice: we promised ourselves that in the morning, we were going to make Mother Nature our bitch. We would exact our revenge upon her river. We would not capitulate.

We knew that most of our gear was gone forever, and that the next night we weren’t likely to stumble across another family of magnanimous nomadic hillbillies. A second night in the woods simply wasn’t an option. We’d planned a three-day trip, and we’d only completed a few hours of it. We’d have to finish more than two days worth of paddling – over 30 miles total – before five o’clock PM the following day. A herculean task, some would say, but our resolve was ironclad. There would be no stopping early or calling for help. The river would not beat us twice. All thirty miles. All before five-o’clock.

And in the morning, that’s exactly what we did.

To this day, one of my fondest memories is of lying on a beach somewhere in the Ozarks, wearing a skirt, beside my old buddy Sam and our new friend Amy-Joe, pretending to appreciate the stars.