I should have known she was getting us in over our heads. The last time she asked me to take her on a wilderness trip, it was a ski trip to the primitive Tolovana hot springs north of Fairbanks. She told us it was eleven miles each way. She didn't tell us that eleven miles included first a thousand feet downhill, then a thousand feet uphill, and then another thousand feet downhill--and she had never skied with a pack.

Now we were canoeing the Delta river in interior Alaska from Tangle Lakes to the Richardson Highway, a twenty-nine-mile three-day trip involving a portage around a waterfall and the stretch of class II rapids now in front of us. "Boaters must have white-water experience to successfully float this section of shallow rocky rapids," the brochure describing the National Wild and Scenic River states. "Potential hazards [include] bears, sweepers, wrapped canoe fragments, cold, wet weather and high winds."

I scanned the river looking for canoe wreckage. Breadloaf-sized rocks broke the surface, peppering the right half of the river. Beyond them, the main current funnelled into a series of two-foot waves. Those look fun, I thought--just big enough to splash my mom in the front of the canoe, but not so big that we would swamp. But then, at the bottom of the dozen waves, the water pillowed up on three motorcycle-sized boulders, too closely spaced to risk weaving through. We would have to ferry back to river right before the last wave.

And once we got over, we would have to weave through an obstacle course of odd rocks, until the current recombined where the river went around the corner out of sight. Just around the corner, I glimpsed two car-sized boulders dividing the now vigorous current. We would have to choose the best channel when we got there.

I descended the pillar to find my mother and her friends Jean and Phil, just arriving with the last of the gear from the portage.