Hubris Comics

Drain, Drain, drive away…

Oct16

by Greg Cravens on October 16, 2011 at 11:48 am

You ever get off the river, strip off your soaking gear and wonder what to do with it? Everyone has their system- from “Set it out flat on the ground and let it dry before we load up” to “Throw it all into the trunk and we’ll air out the car and the gear when we get back” to “Place it all neatly into the cage under the boat rack and the wind will dry it while we drive, then we can scrape the bugs off when we get home.” Yes, there are many ways to deal with stinking, wet pfds and shorts and kayak skirts and dry tops and all the rest. Bottom line is that you DON’T EVER want someone’s wet polypro underwear going manky under the back seat of your Murano. There’s some serious biology that goes on in river-soaked, sweaty gear, and you don’t want it happening in places that can’t be neatly picked up and thrown out if worse comes to worst.

Here’s the trick I learned and stuck with at most opportunities:

The DrainBox- go get two of those stackable plastic containers, of a size that’s large enough to hold as much gear as possible and still fit into your vehicle (or someone else’s vehicle if they’re kind enough to let you bring your big fat box with you.) Drill some holes in one of the plastic boxes. Put the box with holes in it in the box without holes in it. There’s an inch or two of space between the bottoms of the two boxes that’ll hold the water that drips off your gear. There you go.

I drive a Chevy Suburban, so I got a nice big box. Lots of gear fits in it. So when mine is the takeout vehicle for a kayak trip, I have the box ready- in fact, it’s usually pretty easy to just use the box as my gear bag on the way to the river, so my stuff comes out of it to begin with. At the takeout, we all slime ourselves out of our sweaty stinky soaking gear (adore the alliterative approach, don’t you agree?) we pitch it all into the box, drive to the campground and empty the box onto clotheslines. The bottom box can then be tipped over, draining away the river water that’s dripped off all the gear while we drove. Nice.

It works pretty good for kids’ pool party toys, water balloon storage, laundry issues, or any number of other “this wet stuff has to be moved from here to there” applications. Make you one and see.

Another useful use is this: You get home from your river trip, you take the box out of your truck, you dribble some OdoBan over the whole pile of stuff, turn the hose on it and use a paddle to mash it all around for a good twenty minutes. Then lift the drain box out, dump the washwater from the other box, set it all somewhere that it can drain well, and hose the whole mess down until you can’t smell OdoBan any more. Let the drainbox sit and drain for an hour or two, then hang all the gear in your storage building or over the spare tub or on your mom’s clothesline. Once dry, you pile it all back into the drainbox for the next big adventure. Rock and repeat.

└ Tags: camp, camping, cravens, drainbox, drainbucket, dripbox, greg, Greg Cravens, kayak, outdoor, outdoors, outside, paddle, park, PFD, pool, pooltoy, River, rock, water, wet, whitewater

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Skate Date

Oct15

by Greg Cravens on October 15, 2011 at 12:35 pm

Posted In: Dirty Pictures

The West edge- along the parking lot- there's a serpentine that looks really nice.

The new skatepark is almost done!

I’ve never watched one being built before. And the only convenient one to my neighborhood before now was an indoor place in a warehouse district. It was the sort of thing that was already well mulched down before I got there. The couches in the front and the skate/bike area in the back had the saggy, grimy, homey feel that you expect from the sort of place where young people do a lot of their growing up.

Now we have this nice new place that’s a little soulless at the moment. That’s fine. It’ll grow some character in use. Of course, the local families who were behind its construction and the folks at the dog park next door aren’t looking forward to the time when the character of the place isn’t in the little nicks and stains and cracks, but begins to be in the transgressions visited upon it by aggressive youngsters with no better outlet than defacement. Hopefully, we can work together as a community to hold off that time for many years. My kids and I expect to be only one of the families that will doubtless be pitching in to keep it a clean place to come play.

That aside, here’s props for the Zellner folks who apparently oversaw the construction. Well done!

Zellner's sign, being held by a really attractive rail. That rail will probably see some nice traffic soon.

This is the shallower stuff along the North edge of the park. I imagine I can break a bone here very effectively.

So, we’re told that the last touches are to prep the concrete with finish or stain or something, and put up a sight screen between the skatepark and a dog park that shares the fence. Nobody wants the dogs to be upset by skaters nor skaters to be frightened by dogs, so screening the fence sounds pretty smart. The park benches and the sod are brand new, as is the permanent fence circling the park. It has real gates now, not just gaps for the workmen to use.

So, get your favorite board all tuned up. The park opens at the end of the month!

click to enlarge- this is the big bowl on the northeast edge

└ Tags: Memphis, sk8, sk8er, skate, skateboard, skatepark, skater, TN, Tobey

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More Lord Lionel

Oct13

by Greg Cravens on October 13, 2011 at 11:05 am

Posted In: Non-Hubris comics

Here’s some more Lord Lionel from way back. It was probably the first real attempt I made at creating a viable, syndicatable feature. If the third one down looks familiar, then you can scroll back through the old ‘other cartoons‘ section until you spot the more artsy-looking version I showed off earlier.

└ Tags: adventure, archaeology, cartoon, comic, comic strip, cravens, dig, dog, Doug, Egypt, greg, Greg Cravens, Jenkins, Lord Lionel, outdoors, outside, Pharoah, Ramose

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Grand Canyon Diary- part 1

Oct11

by Greg Cravens on October 11, 2011 at 6:02 am

Posted In: Lies Around The Campfire

Part 1-

Here’s the background. Somewhere in the early nineties (all the younguns amongst us just sucked in their breaths and muttered something about being born around then. Shut up. One day, you’ll meet a kid that was born in 2010, and he’s going to think you’re a fossil. You think you believe that now, but just wait. It still hits you like a truck. I told a cub scout the other day that I was born in 1965. He looked at me funny and said that didn’t sound like a year to him. Years, you see, start with a ‘2’)

ahem. So. Somewhere in the early nineties, my buddy Mike called up and said that he was going to take a kayaking class at the local university and did I want to go, too.

Hell yeah.

I had canoed with the family as a kid, and my younger brother had stowed his kayak in my apartment for a time. I wanted to get back on a river or two and that kayak had been an attractive nuisance, to borrow a legal term. I’d promised not to take it out and wreck it (It was an old fiberglass Phoenix I think.) but it was a close thing.

So Mike and I took the class. It was once a week, I guess, but as we progressed, the teachers (Hey, Tony! Hey, Jim!) told us about the Bluff City Canoe Club and Roll Practice. The one was a group of paddlers with group trips to various and sundry rivers and the latter was the group’s time at the YMCA (sing!) to practice and perfect our boat rolls. For any non-kayaker reading- when a kayak or canoe flips over in whitewater, you don’t want to have to get out and swim around and dump out the boat and all that. More efficient to roll the boat back over while sitting in it. It’s a lovely skill to have. If you have ever referred to a kayak as “Them boats that roll themselves back up”, then don’t do it again. They don’t.

The upshot is, Mike and I immersed ourselves in kayaking. We were in boats, or meetings about boats, three and maybe four times a week. It was great.

Then, of course, we started going to rivers. As is usual and wise we started small and worked our way up to big. The Spring river outside Hardy Arkansas to begin with, and the Gauley in West Virginia later on with lots of stuff in between. The Ocoee River in the Southeast corner of Tennessee was a distinct favorite.

I’m putting all this in past tense because after ten years or so, I was able to make less and less time to paddle. Raising kids and doing family stuff and career choices moved me steadily away from all that lovely, exciting, time-consuming whitewater kayaking and all the people I loved being with who kayaked.

And then, one day, I became the luckiest person I know.

When you hear what happened, you might think that David LeMay would be the luckiest, but I beg to differ. It was me.

You see, private trips down the Grand Canyon are very limited. They can’t hand one over to anyone who wants one. The river would be clogged with people. I think it would literally be clogged with people and their boats, and were that the case, the people who had wanted to be on the Grand Canyon would no longer want to, and that’d be a shame. Anyhow, with demand so high, the park service limits the number of people they allow. It used to be a waiting list, the length of which was legendary and ridiculous. Another friend, Sonny Salomon, got on the list figuring that when his name finally came up, his grandson- who had not yet been born at the time- would be old enough to go with him. Sound funny? Not so much. The list had gotten to be about fourteen years long, if I understand right.

So the Park Service changed the way they do things. “From now on” they decreed, “we will have a lottery drawing. Those who have been on our list will have more chances than those who have not already been on the list. This is fair.” And there was much talk about it. I’m sure there were many people outraged and many very pleased and some of you never heard a damned thing about it. Sonny was irritated, I believe. He was finally getting close to the top of the list. Sonny has a generous spirit, though, and hoped things would work out well. They did, but not so much for Sonny as for David LeMay.

David, a warm-hearted, good person, about whom I’ve never heard a bad word, had never put himself on the Grand Canyon list. But some nice people who’d had him along on an Idaho raft/kayak trip called up and explained about the Grand Canyon Lottery. There are many rivers in Idaho that are on the same lottery system. You should put your name in. David, then, got online and put his name down in the Grand Canyon Lottery. About two hours before it closed for the season. He put down his first choice of trip dates on a prime couple of weeks, for the maximum number of people, and promptly forgot about it. Until he was notified that he got his first pick.

No kidding. Last minute. First time. New Lottery. Bam.

And that’s why you might call David LeMay the luckiest guy ever.

Except for this: There were sixteen slots open on the trip. Most of them were taken by David, the kayakers that’d introduced him to the Idaho raft group, the Idaho raft group itself, Jason Salomon (Son of Sonny) and Mike who was mentioned earlier. They offered the last spot to me. I’m not fooling myself that I was the only one they asked, but I was asked, and I accepted.

So, you see. I was the luckiest person I know.