I had left it until late in the day to plan any activities with the kids for the summer hols, so when my sister suggested we come along on a four-day river raft in Wermland, I jumped at the opportunity. It didn’t start well.

We had driven deep into the forests the previous day and late afternoon we found the rafting outfit. We got our equipment in large, no-nonsense wooden chests, and pitched our tents by the shore in a meadow. Then we got the debriefing: a rundown of the logging history of the region (long and winding), the nature of the Klarälven river (ditto), the potential obstacles we might encounter (submerged sand banks, low-hanging trees, backwater maelstroms – all fun-sounding…) and a quick walkthrough of the knots we’d be using to tie logs together (Did we learn them well enough? We did knot.).

Then a harsh surprise: roll-call tomorrow at 0700 and a 0715 departure to the place up-river where we would build our rafts. That seemed uncalled for, until they finally divulged the reason why; constructing the rafts would take between six and nine hours! The web page made it sound like it was something you could do in an hour, tops…

Given that the seven of us were going to share a whopping three rafts, latched together into one mega-structure, there were no prices for guessing how long it would take us. The forecast for the next day? Nothing. But. Rain.

We woke to a steady drizzle, and drove for about an hour under incontinent skies before we arrived at the construction site, where piles of logs awaited us.

So there we are. It’s an intimidating sight. The stacks are as tall as I am, and the logs range in size from solid to massive, every one of them slick with rain. One 3x3m raft weighs about 1.5 tonnes, so we’ll be shifting the equivalent of three cars’ worth of timber into the river. Bonus: the heftier logs go into the bottom layer (of three), but the piles are a jumble of sizes, a real logjam, so getting them out is akin to a giant game of plockepinn, where every movement can make the logs shift and crush your hands.

We start lugging logs as best we can, dividing them into different sizes, rolling the heaviest ones into the water so we can latch them together. The rain keeps falling, and the kids are questioning our sanity. Did we really volunteer to do this? And pay money for the privilege? I am inclined to side with them, but we are committed to this now, so on we trudge.

The water temperature is a decidedly chilly 15 degrees, numbing our hands and feet; the current is just strong enough to make holding the logs together even more difficult. The clay of the river bottom retains an iron grip on our sandals, but the same clay makes the shore incredibly slippery, so once you wrench your foot free of the water you are likely to slip back down again – all while juggling 600-pound logs. Such fun.

No-one remembers any knots, but after half a raft we at least figure out that we can use the thinner logs to create impromptu rails, which makes getting the heavier ones into the water quite doable – the kids join in and roll tree trunks ten times their weight into the river, which they enjoy.

By lunchtime we have finished one raft, and the food dries our dampend spirits, but we’ve got two more to go, so into the river we slosh once again. Other, smaller groups finish their rafts. They load up their kit under the tarpaulin tents and get on board, only to find that the weight of the vessels is now so great that they are instantly stuck. So there they are, stood atop their beached whales, trying to push off with the help of barge poles, effectively trying to lift themselves. Our dreams of Huckleberrying it down a Swedish Mississippi seem shattered, replaced by a robinsonade – we are clearly doomed to be marooned on this beach!

It’s a measure of the general exhaustion level that it takes quite a while for anyone to figure out that the way to get afloat is to get off the raft and lever it free by wedging the barge poles underneath it. Once that is done it is child’s play to set it adrift, but the ordeal isn’t over; several rafts only make it fifty yards or so before settling on a submerged sand bank – we’d been warned about those, true, but so soon? It didn’t seem fair, somehow…

By the time all other groups had pushed off and sailed down the river at what seemed an impossibly slow speed, we were still building our last raft. All in all it took us just under nine hours of backbreaking work, and no-one felt like getting on it when we were done. Instead we pitched our tents and crawled into our sleeping bags, wrung out and cold to the core.

After a fitful night (I don’t think I’ve ever been so tired, or slept so badly), we woke to another dark grey sky, had breakfast in the rain, and finally set off, making sure we steered clear of the first sand bank. Behind us, a timber truck was already offloading the next stacks of logs.

The tempo takes some getting used to. It takes us three quarters of an hour to drift around the first bend in the river. Klarälven is wide and stately, and moves at a decidedly measured pace – rafting here is not for speed demons!

The meandering course is caused by silt deposits that build up on the inside of the main water flow, where the slower speed causes particles to sink to the bottom, which in turn reinforces outward pressure on the water, causing it to press even more against the outside of the next curve. If that all seems a bit technical, all you have to remember is that there is a reason why real estate is cheaper on the outside of any river bend – sooner or later the waters will take it.

This also means that the main flow of the water will always be tending towards the outside of any given curve, and you want your raft to steer clear of the inside, where silt deposits will make sand banks all but a certainty. That’s the general rule, but it ain’t always the case, as we soon discover.

Because there has been a lot of rain lately the risk of running aground on sand banks isn’t great, they told us. Well, two hours into our river run we beat the odds and get firmly stuck. The water is shallow enough that we can stand on the bottom and lever the raft off, but then because we haven’t really gotten used to the (lack of) speed with which we are traveling we make a mistake – ahead of us is an island, and we had been warned not to try and get past an island on the inside, as that would see us marooned, so we pushed on into a narrow canal on the outside.

Of course, it turns out that this wasn’t the island in question (that one we will pass just fine – much, much later), and we have just forced 27 unwieldy square meters of timber plus a canoe into a very tight backwater squeeze. It takes us the better part of an hour to round this islet, using nothing but our stakes, and after that we paid better attention to the map and the flow of the current.

After this, things run a lot more smoothly. The rain stays with us, and we hide out under the tarps as best we can for the most part, only venturing out to push away from the shore line when we get too close, or when a fallen tree juts out into our path. There’s a learning curve to this, too, but gradually we pick up how, when and how hard to push to achieve the desired result. You want to angle the pole right or you won’t be able to push at all, and you want to time it so that there is no risk of the raft catching up with the pole, in which case it might very well snap it in two, something that my sister discovered first hand (mass and momentum are powerful things even at low speeds). Finally you don’t want to push too hard, because that will make the whole raft pivot, and cause the aft end to get raked by the very obstacle the front just managed to avoid. We don’t always get it right, and a couple of times we plow through trees that whip the length of the raft, but we come away more or less unscathed.

My nephew has brought fly fishing equipment and keeps casting in the rain, but to no avail. Luckily we have stocked up on lots of food, because there is not a fish to be seen. The guy at the base camp spoke of all manner of species that could be caught, but although we cover nearly 60km of the river in total there is not the slightest indication that there is anything fishy going on – apart from selling us fishing permits in the first place.

Thankfully the landscape is very pretty. The river runs (well, saunters) through deep forests, and it’s easy to imagine them full of moose, bears and lynx (all of which do exist here, even though they don’t show up on our radar). We spot a couple of beaver huts along the way, but otherwise there is little going on, possibly because the riverbanks are very steep, and there are virtually no spots where you could land, let alone pitch a couple of tents, so it’s a good thing we didn’t try to move out on the first evening.

As it is, it isn’t until late afternoon that we find a suitable meadow on a promontory, but as we realise it quite late, my brother-in-law and I have to jump in the canoe and pull the raft inwards. What we should have done, of course, was to paddle ashore with a long tethering rope that we could latch to a tree and let the raft be pulled to shore by the current, like a pendulum, but instead we paddle like mad and fight the stream all the way, scramble up and secure the taunt line to a grassy knoll; it’s touch and go – as we touch land we see the raft go past us – but in the end we manage: a near impossible task that ensures that our muscles ache just as much the following night.

The next morning couldn’t be more different. The sun is out and it’s warm. It feels luxurious. Even the kids thaw a little. We lounge on deck, reading, snacking, snapping pictures and doing small excursions in the canoe – sandbar islands being a favorite, not least in order to avoid having to use the toilet bucket. We’ve learnt to anticipate the movements of the river and the raft, and there are no incidents to speak of. I feel like all that is missing is a straw hat and a corncob pipe and I would’ve achieved rafting level: Huckleberry.

We even catch something while fishing: a tree. The lure snaps off when caught in a branch, but we have a bit of luck; in what must be said to be an act of desperation, the fisherman had used an enormous, neon-yellow fish lookalike – it’s easily visible in the shallows, so I manage to retrieve it with a quick rescue operation in the canoe.

The last day we feel like old hands, regular log jockeys. The weather is still lovely, if a tad too windy, but we raise our tarpaulins and manage to move on unperturbed. We pass several moored rafts, amongst them one with five nubile Danish women skinny-dipping next to it, and for a fleeting moment I feel like Ulysses when he encountered the sirens.

Alas, that kinship is reinforced a mere hour before we are to arrive at our destination, when we run the gauntlet of another homeric challenge; a long stretch of open water provides the headwind with enough run-up to push us into a bend where a backwater maelstrom awaits us. We push back like mad, but the waters are deep and the barge poles make little difference – except when mine gets stuck at the wrong moment and vaults me into the river! Even paddling with the canoe is futile – but at least it enables us to make land. In the end we have to resort to pulling the raft along the shore using ropes to get out of the ordeal, but at least the Scyllic breath doesn’t blow us into the Charybdis-like whirlpool, like it does another raft that’s right behind us. When we finally do get out, they are still turning helplessly in the backdraft.

With this Odyssey-like rite of passage finally behind us, we are quite relieved when we come upon the disassembly area. It’s hard work, too, of course, taking apart the whole craft, but it seems like nothing compared to putting it together. And it’s quite fitting – logs have always been sent down the river this way. Once freed of their shackles they will be collected downriver and used anew. If that’s not sustainable tourism, I don’t know what is.