How I Learned What a Snorkel Is (spoiler alert: Jeeps don’t float!)

Got it. I folded the reflective closer into the full story, and I made sure every reference to Joey is he/him. Here’s the complete, clean blog post in book-chapter style:

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How I Learned What a Snorkel Is (spoiler alert: Jeeps don’t float!)

I think my funniest Jeeping story happened before Sonic, when I was still deep in grief after losing the twins.

I first saw this Jeep drive down the boat ramp at the river where we were camping. It was spring, no water in it, and the driver just headed straight down the dry riverbed and off into the sunset. I grew up in the city and had no idea you could drive a vehicle in a dry riverbed. Legal or not, it looked so cool.

Both kids saw it too, and Hudson, who was maybe five or six at the time, jumped up and down begging to ride. I told him he could ask when they came back.

When the Jeep returned up the ramp, Hudson ran over and asked. The driver scooped him in immediately—he was that cute and enthusiastic. Joey and I stood on the riverbank, completely jealous.

That was the spark. Not long after, I bought my first Jeep. A little red TJ. I named her Cherry. She had off-road tires, a four-seater body, and no trunk space whatsoever. You couldn’t fit a bag in the back. Ridiculous. But I loved her.

The next spring I took Cherry to the river. Mostly dry again, but with shallow water crossings. I met up with my friend, who had two boys around my kids’ ages. We crammed all four kids into the backseat. Seatbelts may or may not have been involved. It was chaos.

We bounced through the river, laughing and splashing, until my kids wanted to get out. They stood on the bank yelling, “Mom, don’t go in the deep water!” I said I wouldn’t, or something.

So it was just me, my friend, and her oldest son left in the Jeep. He egged me on: “Go through THAT one!” So we did. Water splashing up the windshield, all of us laughing.

Then we came to a really deep spot. I stopped at the edge and asked my friend, “What do you think? Can we make it?”

She said, “I think so.”

I said, “Me too. Don’t Jeeps, like, float for a second if you go fast enough?”

She laughed. “Like a rock skipping across the water?”

“Yeah. You think we could do that?”

She shrugged. “I don’t think so. But maybe it’s just not that deep. I think we can make it.”

So I backed way up, floored it, and hit the water at full speed.

Cherry went ten feet and sank. Immediately. All the way to the windshield.

The engine stalled. The Jeep drowned. My friend and I burst out laughing while her son screamed in the backseat. She was sitting in water up to her lap. The kid’s iPad was ruined. And I had just financed that Jeep. My stomach dropped—but I couldn’t stop laughing.

The kids came running over yelling, “Mom! We told you not to go in the deep end!” And I was like, “My friend made me do it!”

I called my river buddy Chris. He showed up, took one look, and called a guy with a bigger truck. It took two trucks chained together to drag the Jeep out backward. Water poured out of it like a busted aquarium.

Meanwhile, guys started showing up. First a couple, then more, then folding chairs appeared. Suddenly it was a full-on spectator event. I wanted to crawl under a rock.

Then one guy said, “If you had a snorkel, you’d have been fine.”

My friend and I looked at each other, confused, both making little snorkel gestures with our hands like divers. We didn’t say anything, just nodded like we understood.

A second guy said the same thing. Then a third. By then I was soaked, stressed, humiliated, and pissed. I snapped.

“It’s not like we F-ing SWAM OUT! We opened the doors! It wasn’t that deep! And what good would a snorkel have done? It’s not like we were gonna dig one out of the glove box and swim the F out!”

The men just stared at me, then burst out laughing. One of them explained gently, “Honey, the snorkel goes on the Jeep. For the engine. Air intake. It keeps the water out.”

“Oh. My God.” I wanted to die.

But those guys were kind. They towed me back, drained the Jeep, flushed the fluids, and got her running again. I made fifteen trips to AutoZone, had a transmission flush, new plugs, and replaced one airbag control sensor. Cherry lived.

Eventually I sold her for lack of trunk space and bought Sonic, my four-door JK. Sonic’s been with me ever since, and he’s only gotten better with time.

It’s funny now, but that day in the river taught me something bigger than just what a snorkel is. You can think you’ve got everything under control, floor it with confidence, and still end up sunk to the windshield. And yet, with the right people around, even disasters can float you forward. Cherry was my first Jeep lesson: sometimes you have to drown a thing before you learn how to drive it. And in the long run, that’s the same lesson I’ve carried into Lotus Moon—fall in, laugh hard, drain it out, and keep going. The Jeep lived, I lived, and the story still makes people laugh. Which means, in its own way, it did exactly what it was supposed to do, even if it didn’t float.