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 whitewater
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So a few people, despite me saying that Hubris stays family friendly, have asked about cuter pictures (my term) of Kara. This is probably not what they have in mind, but it’s all you’re likely to get. Unless I finally start acting like a businessman and put a paywall in for less-children-friendly content.
It’s a sketch, obviously. I’m not practiced in cheesecake. It doesn’t come up in The Buckets. It rarely comes up in advertising cartoons. It occasionally comes up in caricatures, and it’s always a crowd-pleaser. “Aunt Beula in burlesque outfit sitting in a giant martini glass! Woooooo!”
Whatever the case, here’s a quick doodle of Kara pouring the water out of her kayak. Let me know by way of the comment section if this is a crowd-pleaser, or if you’re concerned that some impressionable kid will wander down the page and go “Huh. How about that. She’s nearly as sexy as the stuff on the average Cartoon Network show.”
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.
I mentioned before that I might be invited along on this Grand Canyon trip because, it being a desert, there’s no TV there. I’m good for a laugh now and again. I mean, I’m a cartoonist. I write humor for a living. I tell stories. I’d like to think that kind of thing has value. I can be counted on to bring out a totally unexpected quip from time to time, and thus add some humor into what might otherwise be a simple drowning.
My father makes regular motorcycle trips with a rotating roster of best buddies. He earned the title ‘A Veritable Outhouse of Information’ early in one of his first long trips. On such long trips, I imagine the other old guys are, at first, happy to have someone along that can offer up anecdotes, aphorisms and at least one interesting fact about whatever’s at hand. I fulfill a similar role when in crowds of people my own age.
Lacking the sort of filters that the normal person has, and having filled my days reading or listening to the sort of stuff that normal people skip over, I can now play a wicked game of Trivial Pursuit, or, returning to the point at last, take the place of a television set. True, I’m a TV tuned to that station that most Nielson Families lie about preferring when recording their preferences, and my on/off knob was torn off and rolled under a sofa years ago. After a week in the canyon, though, I figure I’ll be as welcome as any three random TV commercials.
So now you know why I’m being packed along, we can return to what I’m gonna pack myownself.
I have three kayaks. One of them is for paddling down creeks, one is a tricky little boat for playing in holes and waves, and the other is a more extreme version of the play boat. And they’re all old. Really old. If they were cars, they’d be old enough to kiss goodbye and hand over to your sixteen year old who just earned her driver’s license.
Now, I had to figure out which one of these old boats to take. The idea is that you need a boat that is swift enough that you don’t struggle when trying to paddle flatter water, and big enough that the rapids won’t treat it like a tub toy. Let’s say, for instance, that you’re paddling a kayak with a low, flat stern. That’ll be fine for rivers in the Southeast, where you want to slew around and let that stern slice into a wave. The wave will force the boat to stand on its stern, and you get an entertainingly daring ride out of it. That same stern, if it suddenly has some Western water poured onto it, might leave you staring at the sky at just the time when you’d rather be getting a good look at the crashing, surging, pounding rapid in front of you. Clearly, which boat I was going to carry to the Canyon would take some thought.
Firstly, I went to CreekWeek. CreekWeek is a function of the non-club we paddled with. Once a year, the non-club (there are no officers, no dues, and no weird power structures, just the normal organic societal power structures you get when a BUNCH of alpha personalities hang out together.) meets at a particular state park that’s reasonably close to several rivers and creeks. Recall, also, that we’re mostly from Memphis, where ‘reasonably close’ is measured in hours of drive time.
We set up in ‘the group camp’- a large central building with an industrial kitchen and dining hall en suite surrounded by eight bunkhouses that’ll sleep three dozen people each in a pinch. Groups of people sort of form and disperse, coagulate and shift- like the goop in a lava lamp, or ants in a panic. Finally, these groups decide who they are in a sort of last minute mob rule and head out to paddle rivers and creeks. This year, I spent my Saturday with a group on Clear Creek in a kayak called an RPM (‘Revolutions Per Minute’… the boat is built to spin around on waves.) made by Dagger Boats. In its day, it was a radical design and much praised. Its day has gone by, and I was worried that mine has too.
I was very nervous. After a rapid or two, I realized that I was being too uptight and so I tried to relax. It helped. Old skills reappeared, and I paddled the entire river without injury or unintended exit from the boat. Still, it was a familiar old creek without the hazards that the Colorado River and its unknown perils would throw at me. So I figured that I should, if possible, try to get in another run on Sunday before I headed home. Maybe something totally unexpected.
Feeling like I knew enough to survive, I joined David, Fred, Kathy, and Elmore Holmes (A very extensively paddled boater. This is not, as far as I know, a commentary on his personal life.) on the Little Clear Creek (Not to be mistaken for the Clear Creek, as this one has the word ‘Little’ in its name.) on Sunday.
Supposedly, it was on the way home and supposedly would take us maybe an hour and a half. The guy who recommended the run was the same guy from whom we’d all taken swiftwater rescue classes. We should have known. He was probably looking for anecdotes to use in the next class. He threw us some useful information about the Little Clear rapids. We read the guidebook, and we set off.
Fred… can’t be trusted with GPS equipment, just so you know. We didn’t know, because we were less familiar with GPS use than he is. But it turns out that if you bookmark the wrong place as the ‘Put-in for the Little Clear Creek’ on Saturday, it’s still wrong on Sunday. Who knew?
The guidebook said that we should be able to do this run in 45 minutes with an expert guide along. We didn’t have an expert guide and (don’t try this at home, say the lawyers) we didn’t actually have anyone along who’d been on the creek before. Honestly, I can hardly stand to admit it. It sounds like we must have been brain damaged. We all knew Elmore to be a hugely accomplished paddler, and I suppose our own performances the day before, taken with the beauty of the day, the fresh air, and the large amounts of meat we’d had at dinner the night before combined like some kind of John Denver-grade natural high to make us think that we could make this run without consequence. And therein lies the problem. We did make the run without consequence.
It was wonderful. There were a couple of short falls at that level of water, and some sections that were dangerously overgrown with grasses and overhung with trees. We had some minor trouble in a couple of places. One place in particular stand out in memory. It was a hairpin bend in the creek, with a dropoff in the middle of it. Boats, once abandoned by their paddlers, tended to imitate swizzle sticks against the bank opposite the dropoff. That was a plus, as one alternate thing for the boats to do was to shoot off down the creek without their paddlers. Elmore and Fred negotiated those particular troubles, while David, Kathy and I risked twisted ankles by portaging our boats along the bank instead. There was much cussin’.
There was a LOT more to the run than the useful information our swiftwater rescue teacher had given us. In fact, I’d like to point out here that his quick recon of the run left off about halfway, at the bottom of the largest drop. Having spent an hour and a half getting to that drop, we naturally assumed that we were nearly done. When, an hour and a half after that, we finally rejoined the Clear Creek and, consequently, the take-out, it occurred to me that Swiftwater Teacher Jim had, in the broader scheme of things, lost the last seat on the Grand Canyon trip to… me.
Ah. He was, after all, trying merely to get me injured or killed so that the space would open up. I can’t blame him, but I can resent it like hell.
CreekWeek’s success allowed me to get very complacent about the big upcoming trip. I slacked on research and I slacked on getting a decent boat to paddle. I didn’t think I could spend all sixteen days in my RPM- it was a little uncomfortable for the two days of Creekweek. I had taken my ancient creekboat along to CreekWeek but hadn’t paddled it. I thought, since we’d all promised ourselves that we’d get to the Ocoee and put ourselves through some more paces, that I’d take my ancient creekboat THERE and try it out. I remembered, dimly, thinking it had, years earlier, gotten me down the Ocoee, not to mention the Gauley and the New River.
I supposed it’d be just the thing. It WOULDN’T be just the thing. And therein lies the next chapter.
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.
