Your eyes aren't deceiving you. It's a home made raft. With their backs to us are seated two young lads on a dislocated car backseat. Others weren't so picky. They're seated on what look to be barrels.
Also, that smoke from the centre? Yeah, that's from a barbecue. Not visible (but, boy, you know it's there) is a cooler filled with generous and probably illegal quantities of booze.
The water level was a bit low, so there weren't too many places where they could just drift like that. They'd probably have to get out pretty often, hip waders and all, to drag the divine contraption past the shallows and back into the pools.
So where did I see this marvelous invention ... and hundreds of others just like it?
Read on.
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Regardez: The Pollett River Run.
It is a springtime event, where the good folks of Albert County and beyond celebrate the seasonal awakening by a public appreciation of nature and the wild rivers of the Maritimes.
It's also, like, a vortex of redneckery.
You'll notice the numerous canoes in the background. That's the exception to the rule. The vast majority of vessels on the Pollett River that morning were of a somewhat more haphazard type.
I don't even know what that is. But it floats, and it stores enough beer, so, what the hell, it's good enough.
These fine lads were even lazier than me and my buddy, just got themselves an inflatable raft.
For their laziness, the redneck gods punished them by having their cheap paddles snap. A cruel blow, made easier to bear by the redneck gods' granting the two lads enough beer to see them down to the other end.
Others (quite a few, actually) took the time and effort to build their boats from ... well, scrap.
And to lock the event very firmly into this rollercoaster of redneckery is this baffling image:
Guh. Stars and Bars. Not the first time I've seen it in New Brunswick, but just as baffling. What, is that like the redneck national flag or something? It just makes no sense. Curiously, I've also seen it on some First Nations reserves during festivals.
I wanted to post a whole cavalcade of pics like that, but we never got the chance ... thanks to the lower than usual water levels, we just zipped by in our flat-bottomed plastic canoe, leaving the clunky rafts to founder on the shoals. From what I heard, there were hundreds.
Here's my guide, Ryan, a buddy of mine from the paper. Growing up in Riverview, across the mudstream from Moncton, he often took the 40-minute drive to the dark depths of Albert County to join the throng on the bridges along the way, laughing as the silly rafters capsize or hit rocks in years where the river was more than a couple feet deep.
However, he never actually went on the run himself in the past. He had to wait a few years until he could con a certain perpetual tourist to come with him. And even then he had to sell it as a "cultural experience."
These pics are taken with his little point and shoot. No way I was bringing my SLR. Kudos to Monsieur Ross for taking the occasional shot of me.
Shame. I could have stayed there all day. At the other end was basically a giant, drunken party in the middle of nowhere. A couple grim-faced RCMP officers could be seen by the road, but their function was mainly to check people for drunk driving as they came in and out. If there's ever any problems, they're fucked. Hundreds of revellers vs. a dozen mounties wouldn't end well.
And where there's rednecks, there's mudpools:
That's one of the many trucks and other assorted vessels whose owners prove their manhood through the time honoured ritual of getting 'em stuck in the mud, to the great cheers and adulation of the assembled, plaid-clad multitude.
No fear, though. They got, like, the biggest truck in the place to hitch up a rope and haul 'im out.
Yep. A rope. You can imagine how that ended:
Yeah. Anyone standing near the thing when the rope finally snapped like a piece of string would have had their heads taken clean off.
*Sigh* It was so awesome. But I had to head back to Miramichi, so we bade farewell to the party and headed back to Riverview, but I'll never forget my first-hand introduction to the great voyageur traditions of the great and storied province of New Brunswick.
Also, we ran out of beer on the way down.
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