Here. I made you a little checklist for this weekend. And I saved you some time. Marked that last one for ya.
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Posts Tagged River
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I never made it to the Ocoee with the ancient boat. The Ocoee was a river I was perfectly happy in. Even on a bad day, I knew what to watch out for and where I could fudge the run. I’ve been nearly drowned there, and I’ve done some of my most controlled paddling there, and everything…EVERYTHING… in between.
So, I wasn’t going to learn anything there about paddling unfamiliar water in my long, obsolete creekboat. I’ll say now that it was a Savage Gravity. Savage was the brand name- and it wasn’t the only Savage boat I ever owned, just my least favorite. The model was called ‘Gravity’. It was a pumped-up version of their whitewater playboat, the Scorpion.
I don’t recall how I got it, to tell you the truth. I did a couple of deals here and there over the years for boats- some Dagger work in trade for one of their canoes, for instance; and I recall having worked on some Tshirt designs for Savage, though I don’t remember how the deals came about, and I don’t remember any of the shirts ever being produced. Also, there may have been some logo work done with Mike that went haywire. Anyhow, back then I was young, the economy was booming for advertising illustrators like me, and I didn’t yet have kids… so I had the time AND money to collect boats and weird stories about how they’d been got.
To get on unfamiliar water, I went to a river called the Cheoah with Mike, taking only the old creekboat so that I’d have no choice but to paddle it. I should have taken my reluctance to paddle the thing as a subconscious prompting that I just wasn’t happy with it. It nagged at the back of my mind all the way to the river. The Cheoah is one of Mike’s favorite rivers now. It was opened to recreational kayakers only a couple of years ago after its bed had been dry for decades. Mike was very complimentary about the run, and got me excited at the idea too, finally.
So. The Cheoah. It’s not the smooth, wide run of the Ocoee. The rocks in it are sharp and formidable. There’s a waterfall. It’s not Western Whitewater, like the Grand Canyon would be, but it wasn’t what I was used to, so it would serve a good purpose. Before we go farther, I should point out that the purpose it would serve would be to unman me, make me worry that I’d die either on the Cheoah, or in the Grand Canyon, and lead me to do something that would make Mike really, really mad at me. Looking back, I can’t decide how bad an idea it was; whether it was a truly horrible idea, or just a crappy idea that was just what I needed anyhow.
Fred and Kathy joined us for the run, and so did Drew Armstrong, one of the most amazingly competent men I ever hope to meet. He once pronounced that he knew of a dozen or so ways to start a fire without matches or a lighter, then went on to demonstrate six or seven, even allowing the rest of us to give it an unsuccessful shot. You’d think that the fun and camaraderie would calm my nerves about my old creekboat. Nah.
This old boat was long and straight, tippy side to side, and made to keep your knees low for a sleek profile. It was awful. It was so old, and the intervening years had seen boats with higher knee placement, much more volume, and shorter length come into style. The new boats were much more stable and yet easy to turn.
For a forty two year old like me, the low knees placements were murderous. In fact, I suppose they turned out slightly less than murderous, because I lived.
The run was a cramped, uncomfortable, unstable mess from the beginning. This thing was fast in a straight run, but there’s very little room for that on the Cheoah. What there is room for is ducking and dodging between things and sprints to nearby eddies where the length of the boat worked against me badly. I brought the boat to see if it was the sort of thing I could sit in for sixteen straight days out West. I discovered that I couldn’t sit comfortably in it for a single run down a new river.
The discomfort of the boat and my estrangement from kayaking resulted in panic upstream of the waterfall. The waterfall has a tricky lead-up to it, too. That didn’t help. Nor did the fact that I had to be lead down some sneak routes coming into the waterfall area. When I finally worked and sweated my way to the set up point, I guess I felt I had a handle on things. You were supposed to run toward the fall, aiming at a jutting rock. The water rushed across the rock and would sweep you to the right as you dropped over. That’s not as tricky as it sounds, and I could visualize it. Of course, I can visualize flapping my arms and flying around, too. I ran at the rock and instead of shooting nearly straight over it, pushed only slightly to the right by the force of water, I shot sideways to the right and plunged down where I didn’t want to be. I landed badly, fought for control, and lost it. I’d flipped the boat, panicked, bailed out, and swam for shore before good sense kicked in.
A lot of other people worked very hard to retrieve my boat for me. I lost a new water bottle, lost my pride and lost every bit of self-confidence I had. That was probably a good thing. I had become pretty complacent about the Grand Canyon run. Old memories of competence on unfamiliar water led me to think I could weather whatever I needed to. Not so. I vowed not to take my old creek boat, even though the cost of a new boat was out of my reach and I was so out of touch with kayaking that I had no idea what boat might suit me anyway.
Mike, as usual, came to the rescue. He loaned me a wonderful Dagger brand boat called a Mamba. I wanted to get back on the Cheoah and shake the fear I had of it now. So the next day I ran it in the Mamba, not entirely upright, but always in the boat. Rolling the Mamba the next day above a narrow run, I felt some control return. I was thinking while I was upside down, not just panicking. I rolled the boat and went on. That was what I needed: to learn that I could panic, and to learn that I could keep from panicking. My choice. I wasn’t ready to run off to the Grand Canyon, but it was as close as I was going to get.
Mike wanted to borrow the Savage Scorpion for a race during Memphis In May. I was glad to agree. In a fit of pique at the miserable, awful boat, though, I went ahead and listed it on Craigslist. I figured it would take a month or two to sell and by that time Mike would have raced it and that’d be that. It sold within hours. And another boat I had. Mike was rightly ticked off. I’d agreed to loan him the boat and then sold it. In my defense, I can’t think that Mike would have done very well with it. It was a wretched thing altogether. After letting me know I’d been a thoughtless (insert favorite rude name here) Mike forgave me, and I gave him the money from my two boat sales for the Dagger Mamba he’d loaned me on the Cheoah. I should have charged more for the boats… obviously they sold too quickly to be priced well, and if I’d gotten more money for them I could have afforded a camera to take on the trip with me. But I was now out of discretionary funds and it was time to pack.
Holiday photos are great, am I right? There you are, looking at your past self and recalling the good times and thinking “Who the hell is about to jump through that waterfall and tackle me into the freezing water?” Lovely.
This was taken on a kayak/raft trip down the Grand Canyon. I’m above Lava.
It was Mike, by the way. Splash!
The original of this had Hubris with a CD and player. CDs. Ha. Sooooo twentieth century.
In fact, I did buy a CD called ‘Sounds Of Whitewater’. It was supposed to keep me calm and happy while I worked on weekends that I couldn’t go kayaking.
It was a five or so minute loop of the sound of shusshing water repeated to make a 60 minute CD. The water wasn’t necessarily a river rapid. Coulda been in someone’s tub. I’d like to think I could imagine hearing the voices of rafters or kayakers in the distance, but that was just the same way you think you can make out something when looking at TV static or see images in the holes of acoustic ceiling tiles, or in clouds. Your brain fills in the details you really want.
I finally used the CD, played on loop, to keep my kids asleep.
Oh, well. Vote Hubris and all, willya? Google+? StumbleUpon, Pinterest? All that? Thanks! You’re good to me, and I won’t forget it.
The days when your scoutmaster told you to dig a trench toilet are OVER. There are many places now where you are expected to pack in your food and pack out your… not-food-any-more. There are good reasons to do this- mostly having to do with courtesy for the next people who will be camping where you’re camping now. That sort of reasoning seems to be losing traction these days, so let me re-phrase the situation as- YOU are the next people camping after someone else. You don’t want coyotes or rats or ants or other creatures waiting around the campsite when you get there, knowing there’ll be poo buried in a shallow grave when you wander off again. So unless YOU want to be the chimp that messes up the deal for everyone else (including yourself if you have plans to return to that campsite) you’ll play Good Camper and do what you oughtta.
Hm. That intro got out of hand.
But that’s part of the issue here! Everyone, especially small children, knows that the funniest thing on the planet is poop. Second funniest is other people making poop and third is other people dealing with poop. Actually, I may have that list reversed. Doesn’t matter. The subject causes giggles, then outright laughter and general hilarity. I have a good scuba story dealing with poop underwater, for example. Conversations about poop get out of hand and tend to go on a while.
So, how come there isn’t more literature on poop? Is it because of the indelicacy of the subject? The difficulty in using good and proper language when dealing with the subject?
Nuh-uh. For example, this review is for this here book:
See there? No trouble dealing with indelicate language, even in the title.
The book doesn’t even deal with generalized poop. No underwater scuba poop, no doggie doo, no daylight bombing raids around the chimp enclosure at the zoo. No, this book is entirely devoted to poop along a river, and more specifically, what happens when it’s been taken away from the river and has to be dealt with.
There are twelve chapters. Twelve. About Poop. Making it, carrying it in a boat, disposing of it properly, accidentally disposing of it horribly, horribly wrong and who had to pay the price. There are probably some countries where doody is not the secret shame of every man, woman and child. A buddy of mine has lived in India, where there are neighborhoods within which a far more cavalier attitude toward bodily function prevails. Apparently it makes for some sidewalk art that no one in the states is going to fund. No one.
The best chapter, and one that was repeated while I was on a Grand Canyon trip is ‘Mirage Of Poo’. Turns out that if you spill a river toilet out of the back of a truck across a steaming hot highway, it takes on the glassy appearance of a water mirage- at least to the bicyclists that are approaching. It also turns out that applying caliper brakes on your bike while in the middle of a large hot puddle of dookie, the brakes don’t work the way you’d like them to, and you… ahem… go down. at speed. I don’t say this as a spoiler to the book, and I can’t bring myself to say that I’m trying to ‘whet your appetite’ for the book. That’s nasty. I’m just saying… it’s a book about poo and it’s as funny as… a book about poo. River poo.
Plus! Plus! There’s a GLOSSARY in the back… in case you’re not a rafter (I’m not) and it has definitions to all the rafter-specific words used in the book. PLUS, there’s a whole page of EUPHEMISMS FOR POOP! Both words AND phrases! I note with dismay that my children’s favorite ‘Pop a squat’ (not that they are redneck trash, thank you) is not on there, but I’m sure you have a pencil for when you get a copy of the book for yourself. You can add it to the list. Freebie!
I bought a stack of copies of this book years ago, just to give to other paddlers as Christmas gifts. I can recommend you doing the same. It’s cool. I don’t have a trademark on the idea.
I’ll make it easy. You can shop the book HERE.
Good night and good poo.
I used to tell my parents what I was doing on weekends. I quit. It makes them nervous. When you fork over that much money to get a kid raised, you hate to think he’s going to wind up stuffed under a rock on some nameless river. Seems like bad investing or something.
So… when you’re out on your adventure trips, funny things are said, right? And then repeated, and they finally become sort of a running gag for the week or the weekend or whatever.
Once upon a time, buddy Dennis Rhodes heard the phrase “Let’s go boating” enough times while trying to get everyone up and moving one morning that he realized that we were no longer saying “Let’s go boating.”
We’d done what people have always done to language. We’d shortened it the same way “Worchestershire” is supposed to be pronounced “Wooster”, at least if you have an English accent.
Our whole crowd now said ” ‘Skoboten”. One word instead of the usual two words and a contraction of two more. Once the magical ‘Skoboten was said, people got up from their breakfasts or from the campfire or whatever, and put on their wet gear (I’m assuming it was cold, wet gear. Otherwise, we wouldn’t have to be badgered into getting up and going boating, right?) and headed to the river with their whitewater boats.
And Dennis pointed out that it was a new word. Not only that, but it was a new word the way that Volkswagen ads used “Fahrfergnugen” or whatever the heck THAT word was. There were a few spoof Tshirts going around, of course, that made something less bizarre and usually more obscene out of “Farfehgnugen” or whatever the heck.
I still had some contacts within the screen printing community, so stickers were made. And, I think we did a number of hats. I sold a couple of hundred stickers to a couple of retailers, but that sort of thing fizzled when the original Volkswagen ads became ancient history. I probably still have a few of the hats. I never broke even on them, but that wasn’t the point. It was mighty fun.
We saw the stickers all over the place. We wore our hats. There were some even younger people that ripped off our sticker design but theirs was so bad no one cared. We were even spotted in one retail shop where the employees said, “Hey, you’re those Skoboaters!” I doubt the girl got the joke, but she knew we were the ones shouting “SKOBOTEN” at the put-ins, so we were Skoboaters. Cooooool.
So there you go. Hats off to Dennis Rhodes, who probably got a dozen stickers for his brilliant idea. I got a pile of stickers and went a little money in the hole, but we had us some fun.
Wonder what the kids are yelling now at the put-in. Probably something less bizarre and more obscene.
“It’s difficult to know what to bung in when beginning a story”
P.G. Wodehouse
When packing, you naturally come up with some questions, especially when packing for something people keep wanting to call “Once In A Lifetime”. For one thing, how much personal grooming equipment should you bring? For men, the answer might be “Not much.” If, however, there is even one woman on the trip, though, the dynamics take on an altogether more hygienic tone. You might not be in such a hurry to start a ‘whose nose hairs can become the most unruly in two weeks’ competition. Things like that just aren’t as amusing if one person “just doesn’t get it.” or “Throws up in her mouth when looking at you”. You might think that women could be included in the competition by letting them substitute her armpit hair or leg hair or whatever in place of nose hair.
If you are the sort of person who thinks this might work, you are likely also the sort of person who is baffled by his own serial divorces.
Packing for an extended river trip is tricky. Packing for an extended river trip in the Grand Canyon is made trickier by several details: You’re paddling on heart-stoppingly cold water. You’re paddling in the middle of one burning hot sonofabitch of a desert. That doesn’t even make sense, and yet you have to give it a shot.
In fact, you have no idea what you’re packing for. I, for one, had never done anything like this before, and what was necessary and what was frivolous was anyone’s guess. I try to personalize the generic list by guessing where my own failings will rise up to bite me… I should pack my vitamins, my glucosamine, lots and lots of antacids, more sunscreen than others might want. Heart medicine. That might grow in importance the three weeks I’m out of town.
Then I have to decide WHERE these things get packed. Where do they have to be for the drive there? Where will they have to be in camps? Where on the river? I have no idea, and therefore, must make guesses and pack with a broad latitude for moving things around, or as is a regular thing on my short trips- doing without at the most awkward times.
Fred's truck, Mike, Jason, Me, and a lot of stuff.
I can’t say that I was completely in the dark about what to pack. Along with the timetable for payments, we made lists based on Fred and Kathy’s advice. The list was the sorts of things that we needed- big floppy edged hats, sunblock, waterproof liquid bandage (superglue), aspirin, waterproof duffle bags… you get the idea. We’d gotten all that info at the meeting wherein we discussed the trip and handed off the first of three checks each to David LeMay- the totally lucky guy to whom we all now owe serious Karmic debt. The trip wasn’t going to be horrifically expensive, as far as the fees and food were concerned, but the total was broken down into three payments. We all quietly feared that someone would miss a payment somewhere, a deadline wouldn’t be met and the whole thing would fall apart.
There would be a second meeting, we were told, where we would have to carefully watch a 36 minute Park Service video about how to behave on the river, and we’d need to deliver another check. And we’d need to start packing.
Speaking of packing, this might be a good time to reinforce an important idea: The reason that I was brought along. Entertainment. I’m not kidding. You pack what you need. It will be pointed out, rather indelicately, that if some of us were smarter we would have packed along a member of the opposite sex. In fact, the way it was put was: “You want a woman, you gotta bring ‘er with ya.”
I’m not saying I was brought along to be someone’s party partner. I wasn’t brought for any vulgar reason.
I think I was brought along because there was no television in the canyon.
#3 in the visit to his origins- Hubris does what is probably a really old gag to Fly Fishermen. I’m sorry. I bought a book about Fly Fishing. I even know a guy who was a fly-fishing guide. Did I avail myself of the good references? Nah. I was cranking out stuff to show the syndicate how versatile Hubris could be. Look! Look! It’s not all about skateboards and kayaks! Sometimes it’s about the kind of sports that newspaper readers fancy for themselves, too!
Bah.
Anyhow, at least I skipped over doing gags about fishing FOR flies, or some of the other truly rudimentary things that other beginners might toss in. I like the fact that Doug the Dog is busy tying flies. I’ve always liked to have little gags within gags like that, when possible.
