Need Texting Rehab?

My teenagers went through a brief stint in rehab this past weekend. It wasn’t long enough to cure their addiction to text messaging but it did show them they could survive without a keypad for short spurts.

The place was called Whitewater Challengers because it’s primarily an outfitters that runs rafting trips through the Lehigh River Gorge near White Haven. It turns out you can’t text while paddling a raft through rapids, and a cell phone would be ruined if you get wet – which is inevitable.

So the texting rehabilitation – while not listed on their brochure – was a side benefit. I wasn’t on the rafting trip and have no idea if my kids and their friends complained of itchy thumbs. But when I showed up at the Whitewater Challengers campground to grill hamburgers and chaperone, the group withdrawal seemed to be proceeding without too many obvious symptoms.

There was the occasional relapse, with a boy picking up his phone to check that ever-important link to a girlfriend or the outside world. But basically, the teens lived in the moment, playing basketball, volleyball and wiffle ball, setting up tents, making S’mores over a campfire, and talking about school, teachers and music – get this – face to face.

Complaining about teens constant texting no doubt puts me officially in with the “Back in MY day crowd” -- my father’s generation who walked six miles to school barefoot in the snow uphill both ways.  In my defense, let me say it’s not so much the act of texting, as the fact that they do it when they’re supposed to BE with other people or studying, say, chemistry. 

I’m not talking about taking a quick text or phone call to straighten out what time you’re meeting at the movies or messaging your parental units to see if you can sleep over someone’s house. I’m  talking about inanities of:

 “What r u doing?”

“Watching a movie”

“What movie?”

A few minutes of that and you’re not really watching a movie. You’re writing about watching a movie.

So the problem first is the basic rudeness of ignoring the people you’re with to chat with those elsewhere. And second is never having your head and body in the same place at the same time. Your brain, your attention is always somewhere else.

Anyway, if someone you know could use a short stint of texting rehab, you could do worse than rafting in the Lehigh River Gorge.

Saturday’s raft trip cost $58.95 plus tax per person because it was on a dam release day when the river runs faster and the rapids are more exciting than on other days. But Whitewater Challengers runs raft trips all summer and into the fall, some of which take children as young as 5 years old. At the campground, you could pay to play paintball or go zip lining, neither of which our group did. 

Camping in their mostly shady campground was $7.50 per person and they had hot showers. The place also has a snack bar, camp store, a pavilion, two volleyball nets and two basketball hoops. On Saturday, the campground showed a movie at night and featured a band that played classic rock into the evening. 

There are other rafting outfitters that take trips down the Lehigh River Gorge, including Jim Thorpe River Adventures at jtraft.com and Pocono Whitewater at poconowhitewater.com.

Texting, of course, is a modern proclivity but Saturday was also a reminder that some things – like 16-year-old boys’ appetites – never change.  I put a carton of chocolate cookies down on a picnic table and it was picked clean within seconds, leaving only a carcass of plastic wrapping. Turns out living in the moment takes energy.